skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My e-mail to Congressman Mike Rogers about XKeyscore
If anybody wants to use this template to send a similar message, this is the URL (zipcode 48915 is in his district and will get you past the submission filter): http://mikerogers.house.gov/contact/

(Here's the Guardian article I refer to: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data)

*

Congressman Rogers,

I apologize for misrepresenting my zipcode to get to this page to send you an e-mail, I live in Brooklyn and am not in your district.

However, as an American, I feel that you owe me and the rest of the American people an explanation for your statement in reference to Edward Snowden and his claims about low-level analysts being able to spy on ordinary Americans with little oversight. You said of Snowden and his statement: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

In light of today's article in the Guardian on the NSA's XKeyscore program, it is clear that your statement is clearly misleading, if not outright meant to mislead.

As an American, I sincerely hope you can justify this choice to misrepresent the NSA's programs to me. Seeking to undermine the credibility of a whistleblower that has acted on his conscience and to stifle public discussion about the constitutionality of the actions of federal agencies are serious violations of the trust of all Americans place in their public servants. If there is some explanation you can provide that would show that you have upheld your oath of office and the good faith I and your constituents have placed in you to defend the interests and the values of our country, I would love to hear what you have to say.

I await your reply.

Sincerely,
Michael Carroll
There should be lots of counter-examples of countries that have a Muslim majority and respect freedom of speech. Just point out one of those many countries to refute him.
I believe they use this template:

https://code.google.com/p/html5slides/

But it's outdated. And the new version claims to support mobile.

https://code.google.com/p/io-2012-slides/
A GPS compass that simply points
AngularJS site down
The price depends on the specific model (last I checked there where three). The one you linked is the dual HDMI, i3 one. I purchased a 1xHDMI Celeron one for $150. There are also bare motherboard versions.
As much as you would like to think otherwise, Bank employees are just as incompetent as anyone else.
Not surprised, but where is this statement in the article / screenshots? I am not seeing it.
I think it's important to note that there is an implication in his question of the code of the alternative being as easy to read and write as Perl. One could of course write a much faster text processing tool in Assembler, but well ...
429 million sounds about right. 439 million skews the numbers way too much.
Awesome OmniGraffle Stencils
Hope it's less flaky than the Google-provided wifi in Mountain View
Google yet to explain YouTube block: Press TV
AFAIK, you should not be discussing iOS 7 beta stuff, bugs or otherwise, in a public forum.

Have you tried filing a radar ticket for this issue?
The opportunity to work on a cutting-edge technical problem at scale most would never get to touch. That's a very tempting proposal. The secrecy itself probably also appeals to some folks.

I'd also imagine that a lot of folks only work on one small part of this, that in and of itself, is not objectionable. Where it becomes scary is when you expand the scope to cover every US citizen regardless of wrongdoing.
First of all: keep the staggering to a minimum.

Second: realizing that "we should have known" and "none of this is new" isn't so much about reading news articles and being "plugged in", but rather having an understanding of how the Internet works. To oversimplify greatly, you're essentially playing a very precise game of telephone between around 10-20 different people, and usually about 1-3 different publicly-owned corporations. To be surprised at the possibility of storing packets is somewhat naive considering how simple it is to do.
My workplace barely shares workplace related news (server outages, scheduled maintenance, etc.) so we certainly don't share general news. I don't think we'd ever adopt a solution like this either, for the above mentioned reason.
I'd also really like to see a good intro. The answers so far have not helped me.
I normally see a form of it from people that don't like early returns. But if you try to do that with code that explicitly passes pack errors, you end up having to twist the code to avoid early returns. I guess this form pushes all the returns into a list at the bottom, which makes them more comfortable?
99% of the hinting I've seen people "need" was not needed at all, it was just the lazy way to temporarily work around a bad query plan. Other than actual bugs in the query planner, I can't even invent a hypothetical scenario where the tools postgresql already gives you to influence the query planner couldn't solve a problem.
Stop using the term "Single Page Application"
Wouldn't having the private cert allow you to decrypt all communications encrypted using that cert?
I asked this in a deeper thread, but i would like to reask anyone that can explain. If the NSA is tapping pipelines as it seems they are, wouldn't the sources such as facebook and google all come online at the same time? if they were in fact referring to the pipeline access as their way into facebook and company, why did they all have different onboarding times? wouldn't they have all come on at the same time: the time when they tapped the pipelines? Maybe i misunderstand the process. I get that maybe they had to write some interface that interpreted the packets and sorted them as such, but that wouldn't take years.
>I'm talking about things like actively losing track of customers because they were saved to a separate file that got saved over on a network share. I'm talking about billing people two or three times because there isn't a single place to check to see if they've already been billed. I'm talking about being on the phone with a customer service representative who can't authorize anything because your account is in an indeterminate state, and they have to check with management

Ah, those things weren't done by the kind of Excel-wielding people the article talks about.

Those mistakes were done by programmers proper. With CS degress and everything.

It's not the small mom & pop or mid-sized company that usually bills people two or three times -- those knew how to bill even before excel.

More often than not, it's the multi-million enterprise crap large corporations use, with 400 options and convoluted procedures. I mean I've been double billed by the utility (electricity) company, and that's surely not due to the bill being in any Excel file.
"Here's something I learned in the last week I didn't know: the Senate Intelligence Committee that Wyden sits on has explicit authority to de-classify anything it sees fit. All it takes is a majority vote."

Source?
I think you took a karma hit not for saying unpopular things, but for assuming bad faith. One of the lead developers of the Rust language pointed out some gaps or mistakes in your comment about Rust. Instead of appearing eager to correct yourself, you appeared eager to defend your original statements and all but accused him of lying. I'm certain you could have made the same substantive points with a more reasonable/humble tone and not been downvoted.

For example, when you learn new information like "there's a tracing GC in progress" and you want to look at the source code, you could choose to say "Oh, cool! I didn't know that. Could you give a link with more information or source?" instead of lecturing the other commenter about how they are Doing Open Source Wrong.
No. I'm not afraid at all. Indeed I have accounts with most of the projects that are being shown off here. Some paid, some just trials. Some I still use, some I don't. However, I'm very cautious with entrusting my phone number or authentication related applications to a startup.

That's all I said. I'm not saying nobody should trust them. I'm not saying they aren't trustworthy in general.

I just said that I don't trust them with my phone number (or gmail HOTP secret for that matter).

Especially in matters of authentication services that require more private information than what's strictly needed leave a bad taste in my mouth.
> Hmm. If he is being prosecuted for teasing fasting Muslims with food, it is just idiotic and with absolutely no legal precedence from authentic Islamic history. (Yes, I am a fasting Muslim too)

Shouldn't teasing be part of the challenge of fasting? If fasting was easy, why even do it?
If every police officer had access to these tools, the news would leak much sooner.

So I would think these tools are available only to a select few, and those are more interested in more high-profile tasks like catching extremists or going after political opponents.

I, frankly, don't think SR is that high on government list. Not yet.
Postgres 9.3 feature highlight: Materialized views
I'm currently working on a social network that helps groups of people make decisions and build consensus. In most organizations, decisions are made from the top down and then implemented by small groups within the organization. The goal will be to enable large groups to make decisions involving broad-based goals and provide a mechanism to form working groups to carryout the actions necessary to implement those goals. What does HN think?
I am stereotyping abusive nature of Muslim states in a thread about someone going to jail for speaking in a Muslim state?
You're both right. If you read the PATRIOT Act, it's easy to look backwards and see that the things we're becoming aware of now are logical extensions of what was being asked for way back then.

It is, however, VERY easy not to have been able to have that foresight, and I think that the insights people were expecting the government to have been constrained by the fact that all the information of value is collected by neutral third parties. Google, Yahoo, Twitter, etc., aren't likely colluders with the government.

Plus, at the time of the PATRIOT Act's passage, there wasn't quite as much information being put on social media, or out to the public in general. Not as much was online, digital, or otherwise easily indexable.

There were those predicting this sort of possibility before the PATRIOT Act's enactment, and since, to be sure, but you shouldn't feel responsible for not having seen the signs yourself, or for having heeded the words of what probably seemed like kooky overreactionaries from back in the day.

The funniest part about this, to me, is that somewhere, very quietly, Richard Stallman is quietly telling us all the he told us so, and he's absolutely right, and always has been. Neverminding that, he's largely seen as a crazy old paranoiac who we should respect for his IT knowledge, while having to forgive the rest of his eccentricities.
Germany used NSA's XKeyScore spying software: magazine report http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germa...
Offensive? No. Ill-conceived and not at all funny? Yes.

Grounds for calling someone an idiot/jerk? Sure. Grounds for jail-time? Absolutely not.
> I'm a practically addicted news junkie ...

More like a news sheep. The mass market news is and has always been 49% fluff and 49% lies.

Comments from people who already knew what the NSA does are not "self aggrandizing". The are other-insulting. You should rightly be ashamed that you walk through life in a news fog of up-to-the-minute minutiae. Read books by retired insiders, talk to current insiders and contractors. That's the only way you will learn anything about anything. To wait for the newsmen to do it for you is to sign your mind over to tampon salesmen.

The NSA story is staggeringly unimportant. Every government, many companies, and rather a lot of organized criminals run intel and counterintel operations. It is just a fact of life, like antibiotics and highway construction. It is inevitable that there must be a national American signals intelligence organization.

What os staggetingly important is why the NSA alone, out of all the spy organizations, is being singled out for a comprehensive media war. The most likely explanation is that the Democratic Party needed something to distract from its pecadillos. The next most likely explanation is that a foreign government is getting themselves some payback. In any event, if you care about this non-news, you are just another mindless pawn.
You've got a lot of nerve impugning tinfoil these days.
no it isn't. thanks i missed that point.

EDIT: for those who up voted, i was being sarcastic.
Microsoft forced to rename SkyDrive following trademark case with broadcaster
.. because I understand the context of living in Malaysia, religious and race relations within the country, and the prevailing laws. As I said, I do not think it is just. This guy has to live there, deal with the reality of living there, not just discuss it on HN. I don't know, maybe you do live there and disagree, but for any Malaysians I know this outcome of his actions are completely expected and obvious. Even in the Chinese community this he has very little support.

The OP clearly did not do this to be a martyr or stand up for freedom and now he's got himself in a tough spot.
http://www.bigboardlist.com/ (note that this is my project)

Cubieboard and Wandboard Quad both have SATA.
> Why would Google (or anyone) link to them directly? with fiber no less!

"They have no direct access to our servers"

I wonder what a beam splitter consists of. Oh. A PRISM.
Angularjs.org down server downish :(
server reboot?
Maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111370
Transmit and spoof things (i.e. pretend to be other devices)?
Seeding a new generation of startups in Santa Cruz (part 2 of 3)
Your own GSM network for one. http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Introduct...
Where Stallman breaks from admirable principle and dives into untenable crackpottery, IMO, is where he calls proprietary software evil.
>I thought this was part of a standard HS education? That is at least where I first encountered it.

If you assume everybody on HN is an American, maybe.
I think it's just a demonstration of complacency more than any actual knowledge on the subject. I've noticed it's invariably my non technical acquaintances who are the first to pontificate on how this is all somehow boring old hat.
> In 2013 nearly every problem has a language more appropriate than Perl.

Citation needed. Seriously, please stop making such broad statements based on your feelings and opinions and instead please make an earnest effort to separate objective facts from your subjective perception.

And just to address another point: Perl has multiple real object systems that are inter-compatible (with one small exception), and are considerably more powerful than the OO of Ruby or Python. The only real complaint you can level against Perl is that they need to be installed from CPAN; which is not a very useful complaint since all the useful bits in Perl need to be installed from CPAN anyway.
New Mobile-First Word Processor From Ex-Facebook CTO Bret Taylor
I wrote an e-mail to Congressman Mike Rogers about his misleading quote in this article. I encourage others to reuse my template and also ask him to justify his misleading remarks about Snowden's statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134672

We should start hold our public servant to task for lying to the American people about these programs.
So if a person has an over draft, they repay the fees and interest, yet it is still a reason to disqualify them? That seems a bit to harsh to me. Yet being the NY Times is also likely that they left out other details of those they profiled, such as bad credit history or other things that would preclude them from getting a checking account.

It seems that businesses, and our society in general, are moving to a state where all sins are held against you into perpetuity.
Around about the time when people started rolling out SSL as standard. That'd make sense, as they'd need to move their beam-splitters (prisms!) to behind the SSL endpoints.

I think PRISM is just the public-private partnership aspect of this, where they have to go to service providers and install kit, as they can't tap SSL traffic.
I agree, and defense in depth is a core tenet of security after all!
"Deploy one-off utility types for simpler code" can be called a monad or Optional. I wonder if the language developers will add more formal support for that; it looks impossible to add Optional as a library due to lack of user-configurable generics.
Does that mean their hotspots won't go to shit the second there are more than two people in a given Starbucks location?

If so, way to go Google.
Yeah, DNT is kind of silly. It's like someone read the evil bit RFC (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt), thought it was a good idea, and implemented it at the level of HTTP.
802.11u and Passpoint (the WiFi Alliance's implementation of 802.11u) do this.
I honestly never thought "It's like [x], for dogs" would be a real thing. That this is even getting off the ground amazes me.
This is not really a fair comparison. It would be more like posting a picture during the Xmas holidays of doing something sinful/forbidden by Christianity with the baby Jesus. The context of this being during Ramadan is extremely important, as it's the holiest time of the year for Muslims.

I'm a former Muslim. I'm not offended by the OP's action, I just think it's a dumb joke that shows a lack of sensibility and respect.

The key is, in the West, if you did what I described above, you would probably receive a lot of flack, but you definitely wouldn't go to jail!
Excellent, thank you.

FWIW also, comparing that $200 pricepoint, Newegg recently had a Lenovo server Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GH Dual-Core; 4GB RAM; DVD ROM, no-disk, no-os, for $250. (reputed backdoor at no extra cost!)

Update: I just went to techbargains and searched "server", that one was recently expired. When I'm in shopping mode I just keep an eye on a couple such shopping sites to see what comes by.
'cp' above apparently means child porn.

I read it wondering 'If at first they come for cp, what about mv? rm?'
What makes this even scarier is to see IE in the screenshots. :)
US education is inconsistent. At my school, we never had to read Swift, or many of the other books that seem to be considered canonical "high school" literature.
Not very ironic. He doesn't decry cleverness per se, just using cleverness as a barrier from "the multitudes".

(If I'm allowed the hacker cult of pedantry).
You know, probably one of the best things that could happen is for someone to pour out nsa data indiscriminately and en masse in order to just outright humiliate hundreds of millions of people.

THAT certainly wouldn't risk an apathetic response.
No cowards = no rulers. Move on, citizens, this was an non-existent unauthorized thought that you haven't seen.
im sure minority pockets and individual muslims are humbled by your assessment. I assume you are an adventurer who has travelled many countries, right?
Devils advocate here: If in fact all of this is being collected, is it actually illegal to search without a warrant? If all of the above items are being siphoned off the internet via taps in concentrated NAPs around the USA and the world, and everything is in plaintext, this doesn't seem to be technically against the law.
> are we still being lied to?

The answer will always be "yes".
It doesn't really matter whether constitution provides for basic human rights or not. In either case, human race is faced with the question of what to do when basic human rights of people are violated. In general i despise neocons, yet i completely understand their logic of interventionism (note: i don't mean in narrow military sense of Bush doctrine that it was dumbed down to)
Also completely useless on mobile. It's so frustrating when sites that are basically just text try to get fancy, mess it up, and don't provide a fallback.
Then return an error when requests with the DNT header are made. You can't expect people to magically know ahead of time that your website is being used to spy on them.
It's more like posting a photo of someone ordering a hamburger instead of a filet o fish during lent. Nobody would care.
> Because my personal level of interest in what exactly you're selling may have little/nothing to do with my ability to deliver and passion to improve the infrastructure you use.

I agree. The problem with our industry is that people want it both ways. They still have the old model of thinking of a servant who is "asking for a job". They also want someone who is a collaborative partner who might actually extend your product in cool, different ways. Now, I am going to go ahead and point fingers at an exec (CTO, VP, Products etc) who goes in, hasn't used that product. However, an engineer, really? He needs that level of abstraction in order to be competent at the job? If I am making the pipes faster, I think abstractions at the stage of an interview for me to talk about pipes without having to worry about the color of your house are fine. After all, it is not like the stuff that I am interested in: how ugly your codebase looks comes up by me perusing your shiny site which was probably outsourced.

Side Digression on the phrase "asking for a job". I always find it amusing when I get on the phone with a company after they contact me. Then they ask me the phrase: "Why do you want to work for us?". Rarely, if ever, is the unanswered question addressed: 'Why do you want to work with me, the candidate?'
I suppose the idea was "we need some sort of social network that a) does not collaborate with the NSA, and b) offers real privacy". Networks like http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ seem like a good start to me.
> There's a balancing point here.

Precisely!

So what's your number and your justification for it?

I don't think there's a clean, perfect answer.
Even the correct version is not that good. The multiple checks on nil is an obvious pattern and as such should be abstracted away. Haskell does it with Maybe but as long as you have function as first class object, it should be doable. Like in Python, Ruby, etc.
You meant to reply to test-it, but instead it looks like you're teaching a member of the Go team how Go works.
From the screenshots it's obvious that the captured data is an HTTP form submission in facebook.

So they didn't have access to private messages, they just intercepted internet traffic and relied on it being unencrypted. Facebook didn't always enforce https by default like it does now
I just do cmd+shft+p > Install Package

That gives you instant search.
Announcing Season of KDE 2013
How is it a negative comment about religion? Do Muslims assume the rest of the world fasts because they fast?

This overreaction seems like more of a negative comment about Islam then anything anyone could possibly say.
By captured, I'm sure they mean captured via droning.
> Didn't read, because mouse scroll wheel doesn't work.

You don't need the scroll wheel to navigate the presentation. Click on the right side of the slide to go forward, on the left side to go back.

> Honestly, who thinks this stuff is a good idea?

People who are making presentations to deliver in an in-person setting where putting them on the web for everyone is a secondary use, not the primary use? I mean, looking at that, it would be a lot better as the visual component of an in-person presentation than it is on its own (though its not without value on its own.)
10 ways to make your video go viral
If Richard Stallman is quietly berating us somewhere, he can go fuck himself. Part of educating the masses is being a person who people want to listen to. If he failed at that, he's no better than anyone else, and perhaps far worse, because of all the lost potential.