skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Schneier's last paragraph sums it up for me:

"I'm not sure he's thought this through, though. I would be more worried that someone would kill me in order to get the documents released than I would be that someone would kill me to prevent the documents from being released. Any real-world situation involves multiple adversaries, and it's important to keep all of them in mind when designing a security system."

Schneier's topic sentence for that paragraph could serve as my one-sentence evaluation of Snowden's deeds so far--he hasn't thought things through sufficiently. A longer commentary on Snowden

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/some-secrets-b...

is an Australian's words voicing some of my misgivings about Snowden's plan for revealing secrets and his aims and his methods.

I wish Snowden a long and healthy life (but I would like him back here in the United States to stand trial). I hope that the most sensitive secrets that he is in a position to disclose stay undisclosed, but I wouldn't bet that that will happen, whether Snowden is alive or dead. There are "multiple adversaries," for sure, and it's not clear that they all have the same incentives in this situation.
A positive dead man switch is too sensitive to rubber hose cryptanalysis (also known in Russia as thermorectal cryptanalysis, mediated by a soldering iron).
The poster updated the title. I would agree with you but article's title named 5 companies and the poster's title named 3. Either copy the title in it's entirety or don't name any companies.
Meanwhile, Chicago, a city that is at best barely maintaining population, is seeing the construction of thousands of units in highrises in downtown alone: http://www.domu.com/blog/apartment-projects-under-constructi.... I think from around my old apartment in Chicago right now, you can see three or four skyscrapers under construction just by looking around from the same spot.

There is clearly something massively dysfunctional in San Francisco. High prices should create the incentive for drastically increased supply. San Francisco should look like Toronto does, with dozens of high rises under construction trying to cash in on the high rents. See: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/what-toron....
That is not what I was saying. Read my comment again.
Let's say he has N friends who have agreed to help. He doesn't want to allow any single individual to have the power to act alone and release information. And, he doesn't want to require all N of them to act together. What if one dies, is arrested, etc.? Could he encrypt the documents with, say, all combinations of three friends' own public keys such that a quorum of three friends would have to cooperate in the release? He would end up publishing N choose 3 bundles.
It is so shocking to see places with such different views on morality and righteousness that seems unreal, incomprehensible. I wouldn't like to say that my moral view is superior or better than any other, but I truly cannot understand why places like these seem to have stopped their development as humans, forgoing any kind of compassion and solidarity towards the one who suffers, maintaining ridiculous differences and segregations at the core of their way of living.

I don't know what motivates people like this girl to go places like that, but I wouldn't go anywhere near it; I don't think there is a landscape nor an amount of money worth the risk of meeting people so depraved of any characteristic I deem human, reasonable, or even warmth. Let alone a whole society like that.
Oh wow, 30% is a great conversion rate. However, step #1 of "how to get 1000 signups" is "get 3000 views" :P
Panama detains former CIA station chief convicted in Milan kidnapping
To put it short, understand the limitations of what you're trying to achieve, and find out what you can afford to add and what you can skimp on a little without notice or, to add performance elsewhere.

Without limitations you're just coding, fiddling, dreaming..
Why would not paying an optional severance imply a lack of empathy, let alone sociopathy? You could just as easily call me a sociopath for not giving an optional donation to some charity.
Buy the book and find out!
Well, it's not hard to make things move with sound. I'll bet there was a good amount of wind being generated by the speakers at that concert, and indeed every concert. My home stereo system can blow papers around if I set those papers right in front of the subwoofer. The speakers in my car and blow papers around if they're laying on the floor.

Speakers move air. That's what they do. Making objects move is a simple as them being light enough to blow in the breeze or vibrations created.
If anyone is using snapchat for insider trading that is extremely careless, I don't have time to find the article but there was a post here on HN about how to recover all the old snapchat images on the phone.
Corporate IT guy here, and I think the general idea of the post is right, but maybe not the way of going about it.

He's right that IT consists of people too, and not automatons. It's not through sheer malice that we don't answer your support tickets, it's because there's 100 other support tickets also up in the air. There's very few IT people dedicated to projects, most of us have to mix our projects with the cries for help. The more interrupts we get, the harder it is to do productive work.

On the subject of tickets, the thing that will earn you IT gratitude is to file good tickets. The difference between "I'm getting X when I do Y" and "Is Y broken?" is immense. I explained it once to a user that if you went to the auto mechanic with "My car makes a noise", they'll be more than happy to find your noise, and they'll charge you for the time they spent finding it. If you add just a little bit more detail, they can get you on your way faster. The only difference is that you're not paying me out of pocket like you would the mechanic, so you can't tell how much time I spend tracking down nothing.

If you make it easy to work with IT, we'll make it easy to work with you. We want to work together, not against each other. If you're constantly demanding, not making clear requests, changing requirements, or dropping bureaucracy on us, then we'll concentrate our limited time on other projects with higher ROI unless there's been some kind of edict from above. With Marcus's Scott example, we want to work on his projects since they historically demonstrate high ROI. It's a win-win all around (Scott, the IT guy, and the business).
Another project with similar aims, which I worked on when I was employed by MySociety and which is used in several countries around the world is Alaveteli:
http://www.alaveteli.org/
https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli

Alaveteli is based on the code that has powered the British site http://www.WhatDoTheyKnow.com/ for several years.
10 tips to help you to achieve success in online business
Detroit files for Chapter 9 bankruptcy amid staggering debts
Show HN: Realtime Bitcoin Data, BitJoy
We suck at elisp. Every once in a while, we'd like to be able to pay someone to help us out for an hour or so in some very specific domain. Maybe one day we'll implement that feature.
Keep in mind - this is a PR move. None of these companies did anything before their backdoors were revealed. They are only writing this extremely-public press notice because they are getting called on their shenanigans.
Anon reminds me of the bomb-throwing-anarchists of the 20th century. Their bombings gave the government the exact reasons they needed for more government (the exact opposite of what they wanted).

Anon wants an internet free of surveillance. But they're doing exactly what they need to in order to justify that reality.

Idiots.
Because they don't get the money if they don't sign. It's not absolutely literal, but I can almost guarantee everyone will sign.
The source here is CEO of a company trying to sell content protection solutions for the web.
Right - so why not figure out how to spoof the Snowden-switch-update via MITM attacks thus preventing the release regardless of what happens to Snowden the human.
Actually before Snowden, the other big government story was the fact that the IRS was specifically targeting tea party groups, and there was circumstantial evidence leading to the possibility that Obama was involved. If true, that could be big. Impeach the president big. This country doesn't have tolerance for abuse of executive power to advantage your party in elections.

If anyone needs it, I'll be off in the corner selling tin foil hats. ;-)
they are fluff measurements, i'm a biomedical scientist i know what i'm talking about
Tech Firms Should Be Allowed To Publish More Data on U.S. Surveillance
How to Become Apple's Next CEO
The productivity does not depend alone on the worker.
Visa is the biggest hurdle I'd imagine.
More startups should move to low cost areas such as Austin Texas!
>I'm curious if anyone's had experience negotiating a severance package up front?

Nope, it isn't popular here in Texas. I tried to negotiate for severance when working with a company who had previously surprise-fired me. They were determined not to agree to any future severance or anything named severance. I ended up baking it into a higher hourly rate. In the end they paid my severance wishes many times over, in advance.
Libertarian Uses Ayn Rand's Crazy Philosophy to Drive Sears Into the Ground
I think empathy is reserved for people getting laid off (i.e. doing their jobs, but macro events forcing a headcount cut). Getting fired is usually tied up with poor performance or some unethical act, so it's harder to bring empathy into equation here.
Yeah as long as they collect personal data, we can't trust them. Government can always demand it from them. If not by PRISM then with something else.
I learn so much watching other people do things I want to do better. Floobits can make this possible in a new way.

twitch.tv does a nice job of notifications, and in providing the opportunity to observe how other people play.

(Instead of game channels; programming languages, problem spaces, ratings of team members...)
How do you know they don't "deserve" it?

There are many reasons an employee could be underperforming. It could just be a bad fit / poor communication prior to starting. If you're hired to do X and you end up doing Y (maybe the company changed directions), the employee may be "incompetent" (another loaded word) at that task, or might not be interested in that work.

I'm incompetent at lots of things. It doesn't mean I am incompetent.

If a business owner lets paying severance "burn [him] up inside", he's going to be pinching pennies to an early grave.
Working with Shadow DOM
It wasn't my question, I was just the answerer. Truth be told, it appears open again right now, something happened after the last time I checked it.

In any case, low quality questions should be downvoted and not closed as "Not a real question", at least in this case it was a legitimate question and it didn't fix with the "Not a real question" criteria.

If you are curious, this was the question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17024377/sorting-large-fi...
Plex is great. I'm on vacation with access to my full movie collection. Streams perfectly.
I've play around with it and like it, there's a few things which I think you could improve, if you want to email me and chat, my email is in my profile.
My question would be: what massive number of third party services could your company possibly be using to require password management for all users? Most companies I've worked for use enterprise versions of services that integrate with central authentication, making multiple logins unnecessary. I could see admins, web devs, and social media types needing a dedicated solution but not all 40 in your company. Keepass isn't perfect but its just as good as most other solutions I've seen. I believe lastpass offers an enterprise product you may want to check out.
That certainly was an option, to wait.

But since it is just the two of us, and I'm the only one who can work on backend code, Joelle has some open time. She is doing much of the early work on the book while I push product (currently focusing more on Minimalytics to get the first beta open).

As for waiting to see if the signups convert to users...I think that has more to do with the traffic sources versus the techniques being taught in the book. I wouldn't want to wait months when the inspiration has already struck and is fresh :-)
So what else, more real, are they doing? OTR and PGP for everyone? Yes?
I did, and I stand by what I said. Mostly because 'egregious' isn't actually a measurement of a government's performance. It's entirely subjective.
Zero Downtime Application Updates with Ansible
Your reset button doesn't bring back the stuff I clicked on. :(

The real Periodic Chart has some rough guidelines for why elements end up where they do--weight, and so on, and things in the same columns have similar behavior in some ways (charge generally, as I recall). You might want to consider doing something similar for this--have all the prototype languages next each other, the lispy ones next to each other, etc.

Cool project though!
My guess is that Snowden has quite an elaborate contingency system in place and has not actually revealed how it all works. Schneier seems to be speculating based on a Wired article, based on nontechnical explanations by Greenwald, based on (probably limited) information provided by Snowden.

Snowden noted Russia and China have an "open door" policy. Although they might like the raw data, I don't think that either would want to Snowden expire under their protection. That would make them look quite unappealing to anyone considering being a "walk in" informant in the future.

So for the time being, Snowden is the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs and for everyone involved is worth much more alive. But once he's in a small South American country, things might change.
Only if you like live music, a beautiful city, wonderful people, and an old guy who rides his bike around town in a thong, usually pink.
There was a time(early 2000's) when lots of fansub groups were experimenting with brand new codecs and package techniques(like mkv).

MPC's easily extensible plugin system was a great thing then, because fansub groups could create their own package and easily distribute it with the codecs they were using.

VLC wasn't nearly as optimized as today, so it tended to run like crap on a lot of systems. I remember MPC loading up almost instantly on my college machine, while VLC would take a while to load and run.

Today, this is less of an issue. Pretty much everyone's settled a few standard codecs, and VLC's performance is quite good.
I feel that with low enough risk rates, prevalence in new battery products will still increase to the point that Lithium Ion and similar high end batteries are currently at. When cell phones and laptops were making frequent news stories by exploding, it scared a lot of people, but advances in battery technology were made to make them safer and now they are ubiquitous.
Detroit emergency manager files largest municipal bankruptcy in US history
Who cares about AWS compatibility, and why?
Simon Wardley claims that OpenStack is doomed because of their inability to produce an AWS clone. The OpenStack community contends that AWS compatibility is unimportant -- and if it proves to be important, it's just footwork. Who's right?
The world's 'Quietest Room' is omitted:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/04/03/dail...
Getting an error
Unable to create workspace: <urlopen error unknown url type: https>

Have tried both the master branch and teh 0.17.5 tag. Same issue.

The package control install was not working so just copy pasted the directory into sublime packages. Could this be the issue?
How do you deal with patent issues? Do you really want the gov't involved in challenging patents?

A much simpler fix is simply make generic manufacturing more financially attractive.
He was even allowed to read his statement in public court.

But he wasn't accused of leaking any state secrets either.
C++ like Java for low latency
As indicated in the article cited above: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face...

superficial explanation for the outrageously high housing
prices in the Bay Area is that that there’s not much
developable land, especially on the peninsula between San
Francisco and San Jose. In fact, the major reason is
the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”)

I can attest to this rampant NIMBYism. Not too long ago in my grandparents' neighborhood, a small group of neighbors had the area rezoned so it could not be developed any further. Previously, it was mixed use, but now it could only be residential with small businesses such as nail salons. Also houses were now limited to two stories because they did not want their views blocked.

Not surprisingly, the existing people with 3 or more story houses have seen their property values shoot up since those large houses can no longer be built there.
Yeah, this is in the works but we need to smooth out our multi user support and clean up vim and emacs first.
Absolutely, some well-timed retweets can go a surprisingly long way. Especially if backed by the promise of a well-designed, potentially useful product that is relevant to someone/group of people. My Twitter is public, dig around :-)

It was much easier than we thought it would be.
IADNAL, but its a matter of risk. If one uses juju in operations scripts to implement proprietary services, do you have to make those scripts available to end users? At what point does your software become "derivative" of juju? This interpretation definitely borders on FUD, buts its easier not to take the risk when other options are available.
They generally pay you severance and ask you to sign an agreement not to poach people for 1 year.
Now that's interesting: the article doesn't mention Weev at all...where did that come from?
Detroit files for bankruptcy
heh -- thats exactly the model used at facebook - yet their talent pool keeps growing. They have the toys R us business model: Indoctrinate interns!
The comments on the source point out the same mechanism that aims to keep the US from killing him could also been seen as incentivizing the US protecting him from people who want everything released right away.
Introducing Virgil - 3D virtual GPU for qemu
Documents Show Undersea Cable Firms Provide Surveillance Access to US
Every Java implementation is compliant with the standard -- it is part of the "Java(TM)" trademark licensing.
That's a very polarizing view of the term "founder" you have going there... For example, my plumber is an entrepreneur and a very successful one. By the definition you've provided, he shouldn't have started his own company.

"But Scott - he has a product that sells itself." Not true - he has tons of competition in a narrow niche. Sure, we all need a plumber from time to time but we also may have as many as 1,000 options (depending on problem + geo location).

I like pithy sayings and nice, tight analogies as much as the next guy but this one - it just misses the mark.
I'll grant that there's a healthy amount of assumption in that statement, but I think it's pretty safe in the context of many of the more expensive channels.

The channels where someone just wants a channel qua channel tend not to be that expensive (Network channels, Cable non-premium channels). The more costly channels are the channels that offer premium content. I think it's safe to say that most users don't want an HBO subscription so that they can watch whatever HBO 2 happens to be playing this evening. They want some premium channel, or a couple particular movies.

There is definite merit to the concept of just flipping to a show and not having to buy it. For the people who are concerned about this, or concerned about watching episodes the moment they air in a given timezone - a bundle from the current implementation seems appropriate.
notalentassclown3

Its from office space right?
Just FYI, I've used and love Muckrock. Just putting my bromance out in public. Thanks for creating it.
I'm sure a summation of "he hasn't thought things through" is a bit unfair. I'm sure he thought long and hard about everything he did and I think we should be glad that he took the steps he did. Let's face it, there's no way of really protecting yourself if you openly take the action he's taken. You're a target for somebody, somewhere.
Slackware Turns 20
Even some people still use it, last release was five years ago, totally fear.
Yep. I paid for the membership, so Plex will also re-encode my stuff and sync it to the iPhone (or any other device). This prevents having to mess around with Handbrake for hours trying to get the iPhone to eat the video.
> Bonjour is easy to implement.

Indeed, but the first thing I did was crashing, and was not the biggest priority. I hope that we can bring it later on.

> But why a special desktop app? Isn't there VLC for desktop already?

We could do that, although I'm not a fan of such coupling, but maybe it's easier than I expected.

> I haven't used the original VLC for iOS. Do you run an HTTP server on the device for file uploading?

We do for this version :)

> Can't wait to start contributing!

Seriously? Can't wait for patches :)
The NSA issue is just beginning. I'm not prepared at this stage, less than 2 months in, to declare a defeat for democracy.

Watergate, Iran-Contra, Vietnam, and McCarthyism each took years to run their course to a good resolution. The U.S. federal government is not optimized for speed, it's optimized to achieve the best result...eventually.
I tweeted at Drew Wilson and Josh Long who wrote the Execute book. I had no prior relationship with them, and they were kind enough to retweet, after I let them know how the book inspired me. This triggered a lot of traffic from designers, and since some of those folks liked our design/product, it got posted to Designer News and some other galleries where it picked up more traffic.

We later got on BetaList which drove about 300 signups and a bunch of traffic to each product. That was easy, just submitted the site, and eventually got included.

I think all of that traffic converted better than usual thanks to solid design, and good communication of the core value of each product via showing, and not telling with a dry headline :-)
Is Google Glass marketed as a developer kit, or even as a prototype or "first run" device? All the FEM I've seen is very polished (leading me to believe the company wants me to think the product is polished) and seems to be catering to a mainstream audience.

Compare this to the Oculus Rift, which explicitly sells a "development kit" and even requires checking a box that says "I understand this hardware is intended for developers and it is not a consumer product." And, as an aside, the Oculus Rift development kit is a much more polished and functional product than the current generation of Google Glass.
Posted this in the comments section there, but I would love to hear your feedback as well.

I think the primary issue is constrained supply. As klochner said, barely any new housing is added and SF has a fixed land mass. But this problem is made much much worse by rent control.

If you have an apartment in SF with Rent Control and prices are rising, you don't move. This means fewer apartments are on the market, which further increases the price, leading to a price inflation cycle.

Of course, ironically now that I live in the city I would never want rent control taken away. Pretty much everyone else I've talked to, even those who agree with my assessment on its negative aspects, also find it very convenient once it's in their favor. So it's removal will likely never pass in a public vote situation.
Would it not also free them to stop caring about their job performance?
Photo: Bronx Prostitutes Use Giant Telescope To See Saturn
Detroit Bankruptcy Petition
Really? I get that there are multiple thriving startup communities elsewhere, but SF (and the greater bay area) is still the mecca[1] of startups.

[1] http://qz.com/94939/san-francisco-not-silicon-valley-is-the-...