skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NSA recruits from engineering universities. They are quite good at it. The idea that he needs to troll Black Hat for talent dignifies the audience at Black Hat and misses the truth of what was happening there.
Given that the President is in charge of the Executive branch, of which the Department of Justice is a part, it's hard for me to believe that pronouncements of "opinion" from The President don't carry a lot of weight.

And fer cryin out loud, Obama has admitted to executing US citizens without a trial. Fixing Snowden's trial would hold little more fear of ethical missteps than drone strikes.

Given what's come out about "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation", I think the fear of torture is completely justified.
The authors sentiments about why he disliked Medium are the exact reasons I've not moved over there yet. My concerns center around building an audience and being able to stay in contact with them. How am I supposed to give away an email course with in post marketing through drip campaigns in Medium? I can't. I cant customize the sidebar to let someone know about a related post that may also have some effect on their life. Just doesn't work. Medium sounds cool but it just feels half baked to me at this point. I dunno ... maybe that will change.
Is there any reason why you couldn't do this non-visually? That is, using PhantomJS to determine that a DOM element is within certain bounds for a position using if statements?
The most powerful thing we could have done would have been to boo him off the stage.

Exactly this. I was hoping that when I clicked through on this story, that I would read about that happening. Sadly, twas not to be.

Even if it was a niche hacker conference that most "regular" people have never heard of, if he'd been booed off of the stage and the media had given it any attention at all, it would have been a symbolically meaningful moment and a powerful message.
For the vim -> Sumblime switchers out there on HN, what caused you to switch?

I use vim exclusively but I'm not a religious zealot about technology. I've noticed all my students are using Sublime these days. Is it just the latest TextMate (i.e., the best GUI option if you don't like command-line editors) or are there truly features that will convert command-line folks to the GUI?

I'm really hoping for an editor like Brackets (Adobe) to take off, which has really good support for cross editor-browser communication for web development.
I don't use social networks (unless you consider HN & reddit) but I think this article is way off the mark. This is especially obvious in immigrant communities where families in different countries exchange photos through facebook. My mom grew up in a small village in India and now talks to her elementary school friend online... thats pretty cool!

The author's argument seems to be "facebook is not a substitute for real social interaction", to which I can only say "duh!". I don't know a single person making that claim.

There's a lot of potential gripes with facebook, but I think the author got started with a clunky analogy and tried to make the article fit it.
None of my comments were edited at any point near any of yours.
I think he went to Blackhat because the feds were 'banned' from Defcon.
A person standing up in the middle of the audience, and turning their back to him, and standing there for the entire presentation would have been much more powerful.
That's COMINT, or Communications Intelligence, basically the type of intelligence that XKeyscore is part of. It might say HUMINT if the intelligence was collected from human sources.

REL TO likely means release to.

As I've said before, the realisation that most countries do this sort of thing comes as no surprise.
Django adopts a Code of Conduct
Might want to give us a way to contact you.
When I was doing real estate investing I ran into a kangaroo "court" that the local corrupt city set up to handle property code violations. They would have a cop set up at the front and an appointed "judge" (they had some other name for him to not offend the law too mightily) who wore robes and asked everyone to stand up and sit down. The person in the robes would arbitrarily make up fines for the offenses according to their whims and moods. I know because there was a $4500 "judgement" on one of the houses I bought for having a driveway that needed to be repaired.

Anyway, it turns out that this "court" is a complete fabrication that the city put up as a way to put up the appearance of being fair. But cities are corporations, they aren't allowed to establish courts like this, and it was a complete sham. That's why you have to have a real judge hear traffic cases.

This is a sham traffic court too. This is not part of the judicial branch of government any more than the "property code violations court" presided over by a clown in black robes. There's a reason we have a separation of powers. A paid employee wielding a rubber stamp is not justice.
"Ninety-eight percent of society has issues with this"

"The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago, when 48% approved and 47% disapproved."

http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi...
The Final Moments of Karl Brant
If you don't want to answer it, don't answer it. Leave it to motivated people.

The question wasn't just a request for raw data. It was also an expression of frustration and an invitation to debate.
I think he went to Black Hat because unlike Defcon, Black Hat is run by a large multinational media company with a PR department trained and motivated to secure keynote speakers who will attract the most press attention to the conference.
Docker at eBay
Given what we know about the NSA, the heckler was probably a plant.
> the unrealistic ideal that all judges would be guaranteed to be truly impartial.

Even this isn't necessarily a good thing. Part of the value of a judge is having an empathetic element in the position of final arbiter. Decisions aren't always "GUILTY / NOT GUILTY"; they're often long-form essays discussing the merits of the case, the factors under consideration, the logic and reasoning behind the ultimate conclusion and so on.

Math is nice because it can be reduced to a symbolic language. We're not at the point where we can reduce human beings to symbols yet.
Standing up and turning your back to him, and remaining in that position would have been a classy way to let the general know you disagree.
That probably would be a better approach, you're right.
They could even still render the DOM-based diffs.

They even mention anti-aliasing rendering issues, and applying of a 20% fuzz factor to work around it...
Yup, legal code isn't that different from computer code where a judge is the interpreter and evidence is fed as input.

If we could invent a computer interpreter that acts as a judge, laws and contracts being its code might make it obvious to lawyers why it doesn't make sense to allow code to be patented.

Every time lawyers would write laws or contracts they would have to avoid using legal ideas that have already been patented subjecting them to the same legal difficulties software developers face every time they write code.

I guess I should patent that invention.
For automatic syntax highlighting http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/ is excellent.
How to never use a password with WordPress again
We’re Being Enslaved by Free Information
I can transfer money from my bank account to my paypal account with no fee.

Why is there a fee to transfer money to Dwolla then?
Is the easy solution to the NSA simply to use unpopular services which have SSL?

Thus far, only established, large corporations seem to have been targeted by the NSA, with a few exceptions. Twitter in particular has apparently been quite resistant, but I think compliance becomes inevitable. Supposedly Qwest's CEO was jailed for refusing call detail records, for instance: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-a...

I realize this wouldn't protect from individual attention.
Can you enlighten me on the truth of what was happening there? (Serious request)

Your write-up of Alexander is spot on. He has been referred to both the most powerful and the most feared man in the world.
Aaron Swartz' Father Responds to MIT Report
I find particularly hard to believe the "6,000 NSA cryptologists who have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq" part. Why would anyone want to deploy cryptologists into a war zone?

I also found disheartening the applause given to the general for his clever answers. "I have. So should you"?! I expected more from the Black Hat crowd.

And, finally, I applaud Jon McCoy for his sacrifice. His willingness to endure all the cavity searches he'll be subjected to before and after every flight inspires us all.
I would love to see this integrated with something like GitHub's image diff presenter.

Example: https://github.com/cameronmcefee/Image-Diff-View-Modes/commi...

Information: https://github.com/blog/817-behold-image-view-modes
I'm much more optimistic about it. To be connected to every corner of the globe in near real time, not to mention connected to people and robots in outer space. I'm connecting with fascinating people in my local community as well, talking about an ever diverse set of topics.

My biggest concern about connectivity is in the school system. Kids get a connection to the world through the internet but we cut them off from their local communities by placing them in a bubble--the physical school building.
I just suggested this, and then scrolled down to find this.

Someone needs to take the plunge and start writing the program; throw it on Github and tell us all about it. I know people who are looking for such a tool.
OP asked "why". OP didn't ask, "Here are the facts I've researched and understand, do you agree/disagree?"

The former is lazy and relatively useless, the latter is an opportunity for enticing discussion.
One suggestion I would like to see is a public permissions mode where anyone I share a link with can create an account and then be able to edit the doc.
Looks great, very clean UI. I have been waiting for something like this!
How is that relevant to the NSA story exactly? Are you saying that the Government vacuuming up any and all data it can, and granting internal and external analysts easy access to that data, is comparable to the owner of a private server analyzing the network traffic of their servers and networks? If you want to hold private server and network operators to a standard that restricts them from doing that you're going to have a bad time.

And the purpose of Tor might be different than you imagine:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhatIsTor

Or are you just trying to discredit Appelbaum, Assange, and/or Wikileaks?

Also, is that your article? Should you disclose that? And is there any reason you linked to it rather than the original New Yorker article here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...
Yes packages are built in a fresh container every time. It's has a lot of functionality in common with pbuilder.

Of course, building packages is just one of many use cases. You also want to test the installation of the new package, run integration tests...
I agree with the sentiment. I think that most people in that crowd were probably thinking that they can't possibly believe what he's going to tell them. Why is he on stage? However, I also agree that people yelling things like this from a crowd while he was on stage plays directly into their hand. It makes people sympathize and makes the General look more reasonable. In a perfect world, everyone would have walked out and not listened to him at all.
Interesting, well there we go, another thing I had to know about the Ruby ecosystem in order to use Octopress properly. :)
If the OP was facing jail for insulting gay people or "females" (I "love" the implicit denigration of women as lesser you're performing here) in in the US, there would be a _huge_ fund out to defend them, outpoor of money and support, and organizations like ACLU coming to his aid. There would be a bi-partisan outrage against this. We would all say that we disagree with what he said and consider it stupid/immature/offensive but that he had every legal right to say it. To use a real example, see the case of weev: his personality and actions were extremely offensive and poisonous but currently he is in prison on trumped charge of computer trespass due to a stupid law (CFAA). Yet, most are rallying behind him despite having been very familiar with results of his denigration of others (e.g., Kathy Sierra).

Here's a new word for you: liberty. It doesn't mean "only liberty to do things that _I_ like", it means tolerating when others do things I don't like, as long these don't constitute (in words of US Supreme Court) a "clear and present danger" to me or others. I don't have a right to post a list of mosques in my area and encourage others to attack their members (if I do so I should very much be arrested, thrown in jail, and forced to pay restitution if any vandalism, property damage, or violence has occurred); I do have a right to say that prohibition of pork both in Islam and my religion (Judaism) is outdated and silly (it made sense when there was no refrigeration and eating pork in a hot climate meant a risk of trichinosis, but it makes no sense now), you have a right to disagree and continue to not eat pork.

There is nothing inherently Western about this idea too. If you don't treat the concept as binary but as a continuum, it's clear that during the Middle Ages parts of Islamic world were more free than most parts of the Western world. There are many Western detractors of the idea of liberty, there are many Eastern (including Islamic) defenders of the concept (see http://www.nocompulsioninislam.com/nocompulsion.html for examples from your own culture, see Mencious and Laozi for examples from Chinese culture).

Being offended does not constitute "clear and present danger". I personally find the literal text of Torah, New Testament, and Koran to be extremely offensive -- but I understand that they are not meant to be taken literally (but frequently are with disastrous results), were written a in different time and in different circumstances, and will do all I can to prevent those texts from being censored.
I agree with you, but I do want to point out one thing: there exists a happy medium between unsafe, no-overhead manual memory management (C++) and safe, GC'd managed memory (Java). For example, unique pointers in Rust enforce compile-time memory safety, without imposing any runtime overhead whatsoever and without forcing the programmer to manually allocate and free. In other words, there does exist such a thing as safe, no-overhead, automatic memory management, if you're willing to accept the single-ownership restriction of linear types (which in practice doesn't seem very onerous at all).
I feel like we could do with some ugly right about now.
I'm under the impression there was for SpiderMonkey, but I haven't followed it very closely. [0]

[0] http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2011/11/01/spidermonkey-...
There's nothing civilized about being polite to people that are actively undermining our rights.

Politeness is reserved for society, not for antisocial personalities.
Credit Card iPhone Stand
They weren't applauding Alexander, they were applauding for the conference goers who were shouting out loud at him (and their messages).
> Alexander also noted the 6,000 NSA cryptologists who have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, 20 of whom were killed in the line of duty according to Alexander. “Think about people willing to go forward to Iraq and Afghanistan, to make sure our soldiers, airmen and marines get the intelligence they need,” he said. “I believe these are the most noble people we have in this country.”

Having lost a brother who deployed as a signals operator in Afghanistan (to an IED), it always makes me cringe whenever they use forward-deployed soldiers as a defense of the higher-level states "nobility". There is nothing noble about mass surveillance or the invasion of privacy of non-enemy combatant nations/citizens.

The fact citizens signed up to risk their lives in combat-zones at the bottom end of the chain does not legitimize the actions of those at the top.
XKeyscore: NSA tool collects http traffic
Is there any aspect of that book that motivates that price?
NZ laws on github: https://github.com/Br3nda/legislation/tree/master/act/public
Good call, added.
Neil: Shelf Stacker to Software Engineer
I'm still unclear on what the dataflow is... is w set to the value of the qq_mult call and the rest just executed for side effects?

Regardless, please defend how that is not just an improvement over, but better than, say:

my $W = qq_mult $ConjugateQ, qv_mult $RotationQ, $Vector;

w = qq_mult(qv_mult(CondugateQ, Vector))

or whatever the precedence and dataflow semantics are
But so has the volume of data that NSA would have to retain.
The niche-ness of the conference could be part of the media strategy. If you want to portray your critics as part of a fringe, you find a place on the fringe and get yourself photographed there, dodging thrown beer bottles.
I have no idea why anyone outside of the DoD would fear him.

Again, the truth is simple: it was a press op. The event was corporate enough that nobody was going to throw pies at him, but just countercultural enough that he could be assured that someone would make him look better by heckling.
Of all the code in there this part confused me. What exactly is being switched on? It looks like v is being reassigned to the type of v, then the type of v is written out (instead of the value).
it would probably weaken the prosecution's case at the very least

I can see one thing that would have weakened the prosecution's case: if MIT had been able to say definitely that Swartz's access to the MIT network was authorized. However, I'm not sure MIT could have said that definitely.
I don't think you understand what is going on then.

The article is about the Justice Department (NSA is under the DoD). IE: This is about the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Eric Holder. NSA is an entirely different agency in a very different section of government.
I wholeheartedly agree, and I made a similar point in another comment.

But no matter what you do, it's totally futile. The NSA knows what you think, and they don't care.
You can, but the difference is that those are all private companies, so if they have to find new funding, its their own responsibility to do so or fail. Airports are part of our public transportation infrastructure, and any new source of funding they find will result in higher costs for everyone except FlightCar users, because all the costs from rental companies will get spread out elsewhere. A public company like that has much different pressures (for example, they likely would not be allowed to fail if they have trouble finding a revenue source people like, and can always fall back to taxes) than a private company which is on its own.
Alexander actually spoke at Defcon last year and garnered quite a bit of attention regardless, so I don't quite think this is the case.
Can we get Mame running on city billboards please ? :-)
Wow, I am really, really surprised.
Especially as Gen. Alexander gave the keynote speech to DEFCON last year, and explicitly said, when asked after his speech:

Q: "[..]Does the NSA really keep a file on anyone? [...]"

A: "[..] Frist, no, we don't [...]"

Absolutely astonishing!

listen/watch here:
http://youtu.be/tz0ejKersnM?t=33m2s
One of the reasons I never started blogged seriously is something like this. It's a very silly reason, I dev alot, I have ideas for blogposts.. but I just never could decide on a platform.

I don't like the idea of a hosted blogplatform, for some of the reasons Kenneth didn't.

I refuse to run Wordpress due to it's security history and upgrade hell. I know, there's security issues with everything.. except for maybe a static site with jekyll or something :). It's just that ages ago I thought that Wordpress was a silver bullet making various sites and I got bitten by it.

I never found a polished ruby/rails blog app. I've searched, maybe not lately. Has this changed?

A static site generator writing blog posts with git never excited me much, I like a kickass RTE.

The idea of doing my own blog comes up now and then but I haven't acted on it yet.

What options are there out there besides PHP? Preferable ruby/sinatra/rails over django.
YAML is unused outside of the Ruby community?

Wacky. I guess all my YAML configuration files in C++ and Java and .NET aren't a thing.
Welcome Class of 2013
More feedback for you then; Narragansett Bay (Rhode Island) near Wickford has similar issues, made even more obvious by the fact that there is an inset placed just outside the harbor.

[edit]
Also, and the farthest out zoom level that shows the detail, it's impossible to find the "See Note X" stuff. I panned around a while on a 1920x1200 monitor unable to find some of these.
I'd love to know this too, but the author doesn't seem interested in explaining it: https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous/issues/267

I installed it, and it works exactly the same, as far as I can tell.
In what sense? I don't play the single player, but I think Heart of the Swarm dramatically improved the multiplayer.
Update: Since the Mozilla pledge came through, JS-Git has seen some last minute support. If you believe in the project, you have 10 hours left to pledge!
> NSA recruits from engineering universities. They are quite good at it.

Given the nature of the technical problems they face, they would have to be pretty incompetent to not be good at recruiting from engineering universities.

"Would you rather build yet another CRUD app, or build systems that trawl through 20+ TB of data every day?"

Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.
Dear Moubarak, thank you for expressing your opinion. THIS is the beauty of something called freedom of speech: I don't like what you're saying, I think it's even offending to me, however, you have the right to say this. You don't get jailed and you don't get outcasted.
> 500 MHz isn't quite enough for voice

Thats what I thought. We had a few teams look at ways to carry human voice with less BW in a sensory communications course. The winning team did it with 500Hz. I remember it clearly. There was a stunned murmur during their project presentation when they announced their results.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but the gist of it was, they applied 2 bandpass filters, one on a lower frequency range and the other on a higher frequency range. Both passbands were 250Hz wide. They combined the two signals together as a 500Hz signal. The pass bands were seperated by 500Hz or 1kHz IIRC. So pretty much they kept the lower and higher frequencies and threw away the rest. The result was pretty good. Human languages have a lot of redundancy in information and the quality was good enough for general conversation. It was comparable to what you have on a cell phone.
Mayer’s acquistion spree starts to solve core problems
> I'm not clear on why undermining compile time type safety is an feature.

More safety usually requires a more complex type system. Such a type system is usually more expressive and can make more guarantees about your program, which is a pro. But of course, it is also more complex, which is a con.
"Would you trade your Chrome/Firefox browser for something 20-50% slower?"
IE?

I'm just kidding. I found after I upgraded from IE 7/8 (only had for testing) that 9 was pretty usable (haven't used past that).

Just out of curiosity though...depending on where it slowed down would people notice?
If it still displayed as quickly but was slower to startup (or other examples).

I admit I don't know much about how browsers actually work (I am assuming it is more than just displaying html).