skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What "bad things" did he do?

He leaked classified diplomatic cables that, however interesting, did not reveal war crimes or really crimes of any sort.

This isn't just a theoretical point: Would you allow the IT staff at your company to post "interesting" emails by management to your competitors, or the public at large?

Even the very public organization I develop for still has private mailing lists.
Checklist for Evaluating Existing Django Projects
Samsung denies Galaxy S4 is designed to trick tests
A lot of countries have dogmatic laws many people in them disagree with. For instance, in the US, you can go to jail for selling cannabis, and a lot of people disagree with that.

If an American friend told you he was about to go to jail for a year for selling drugs, and you felt it was unfair, would you tell him to flee?

As such, you can comply with unfair laws, or not and take the consequences, or go somewhere with different laws. Separately, you might campaign to change them, but while those laws are in place the above choices are all you have. Which you do is really a cost benefit thing.
>> I have a right to track how people use my site.

> But you don't have a right to say what runs on my computer, or make it tell you what I'm doing. This is where our perceived rights collide.

Exactly! But you also don't have the right to tell him not to send tracking info either. You do, however, have the right not to execute it. For instance NoScript, Ghostery,and AdBlock+ will prevent the requests for this content from being made and executed.

> No, my computer, my browser, my roof, my rules.

I think OP meant that once you make a request to his server, his server is free to do what it wants with that request. I agree with this line of thought because most if not all others are silly.

> No, people get offended when you try to turn their computer into a device that spies on them. And we get more offended that this sort of stuff happens without most people even being aware its going on. They may or may not object to it, but right now they don't even know.

Again, you have the ability to not let your computer send these types of requests for special analytics packages &c. You can't possibly believe that his storing access logs is wrong.

> This is about the only thing we agree on. It's pointless and it was never going to achieve anything.

Hear! Hear!
Avid volunteer here, and I would say that it is one of the best gifts you can get yourself. Seriously. Get out of the echo-chamber(s) that make up life, help your community, and observe real issues/hardship.

My staples are a food bank, nursing home, and a local NPR station. The first two are by far much more eye opening and rewarding. Lots of "one-off" volunteering as well, though these are not as good IMO. Hospital health drives, community bike races, libraries, eco-related stuff.

The more personal and reoccurring volunteering is what will likely impact you (and others) most. I find a couple times a month helps to keep me centered and remind me of how silly some problems are in life.
I'm what you would consider a "Knowledge Worker" and I haven't connected an ethernet cable to my laptop for Internet Access in 18+ months. With 802.11ac now available, the slowest part of a connection is almost always going to be the speed of your internet connection.

I just came back from Singapore, and, between our Corporate Office down in the PSA building, the WiFi at the St. Regis, the various hotspots I had to work with on a client site, tethering to my iPhone, and the 2 mbit/s proxy on the client site - I can tell you I would have paid upwards of $20/day to get a solid 20 mbit/s connection if I could have - I never once saw a sustained connection of > 10mbit/s - my WiFi was never close to being the slowest part of the connection.
Previous post discussion - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120548
This presentation is from 2008. According to the presentation on PRISM Facebook joined the program on 3 June 2009. That would indicate that the searches here are based, most likely, not on participation by Facebook but by passive sniffing of HTTP traffic and then session reconstruction.
Actually, with tail -f that could become a problem.
Great, so now you can get a NSA probe up the backside while you drink your coffee. No thanks, Google.
So? If his argument for why this is good is that it's "killer" and from "legendary engineers" then he deserves it.
Everybody is different, "you are an experiment of one"...

A lot of material about fasting says that if you skip meals, you "cannot" eat back the calories you missed. This might be true in some individuals, but not for me. I have always been able to eat large quantities in one sitting ; I have been kicked out of all-you-can-eat buffets in my early 20s.

When I tried to eat once every 24 hours, I ended up eating huge meals and put on weight.
Where am I using hyperbolic and grandiose language? You also twisted my argument and tossed in a jab about procrastination - that is completely unrelated to the dialog (an ad hominem?).

The argument in which I defended the idea that not all investors are out to get you and that maybe black and white thinking could be expanded to be less absolute.

You are still not telling me what you disagree with without sarcastically attacking me. That's being an internet bully.
Notice that the presentation is from 2008 - a lot changes in five years.
Exactly. It has been obvious and widely understood for years to anyone who has ever used a network analyzer that systems like this could be built. The question was always would they be built. Stallman, and others, bet correctly based on their better reading of history and human nature.
Not easy, but I know at LEAST 10 people who are in the U.S. based on asylum. The process takes a long time though.
I prefer it in French version: Sexe Entre Amis

1. It just sounds more sexy.
2. It avoids US Trademark issues.
3. Carlos Danger is an investor.
the Quran is nothing but paper. flushing it down the toilet however is not like flushing a piece of paper. flushing a holy book down the toilet is a message of enmity. why do you speak so illogically.
Banks forgot to renew domain registrations, knocking services offline
Aw, Fuck.
I've never seen more than ~5 Mbs at the Starbucks near my house even when it's empty. I don't think WiFi is the bottleneck there.
No, it does not sound like the parent doesn't know the difference between public and private IP addresses.

What it sounds like is that you expect Ford to take the time and energy to renumber their entire network just because they presumably don't need a /8. And while it's true that they probably don't need a whole /8, making them renumber is ridiculous.
I did CBT online on the advice of my doctor to learn coping strategies for my severe depression.

That was a year ago, and while I've had an episode since, I got help within days and was better within weeks. Sure beats the 6 months it usually takes!

Only an anecdote, but it worked well for me, and my ex girlfriend (severe anxiety). I think it's great for those who don't want to play Psychologist Roulette.
I can't post a long response, but there are many other student-driven reasons, including self-pacing, self-direction, accessibility, drastically reduced discrimination
This is the most terrifying thing i've ever seen. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.
It's comical not just because they're claiming a silly trademark infringement, but because the whole company was built off of copying existing games.
What kind of systems are you running where a few hundred kilobytes of allocation on a machine with gigabytes of memory can "bring the system to a standstill"?
Lurkers first post here.

I always said saying "I told you so." when stuff like this started getting revealed would feel like a hollow phrase. Some of us have spent quite a bit of time talking about these issues, and were mostly rejected as crackpot "conspiracy theorists". While there are plenty of those around, maybe I could use this slight moment of pseudo-clarity to propose something.

I could tell you where this is going (removal of ex post facto, and eventually algorithmic based pre-crime), and who is largely behind it, but once again most of you would probably perform the standard knee-jerk reaction against "conspiracy theory", only to wait around and repeat the same kind of stuff you are saying now, whenever the next steps are put into action.

We curious geeks have been too cocky, always thinking we could use our superior knowledge of technology to beat "the man". Well boys, the man is learning our tricks, and he's starting to get better at them than us...

The NSA is but a cog in a greater machine, and until we all realize that and start conversing on what/who that machine is, we will continue to spin our wheels uselessly.
> Unless you're expecting some sort of blind worship, I expect pointers to source code. I found libstd/gc.rs, so I'll assume that it's what you're talking about. Let's see what's "basically" done, shall we?

https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/gc-prefix

> Learn to treat people with respect

I don't really want to draw out this argument, but I called your reply FUD because you were claiming things that were not true, such as that we cannot implement tracing GC.
It's only been required in the last year or so, prior to that it was an optional extra in the security section.
I agree, the conclusion drawn is certainly plausible, but there are other possibilities. Does the use of the brain in somewhat complex tasks deplete blood sugar, in a way which the subconscious mind realizes cake would be a more suitable remedy (fast injection of sugar and/or caffeine)? I think various trials are necessary using different "healthy"/"unhealthy" snacks would be necessary to confirm the author's conclusion. For instance, are the results the same for veggies vs. Doritos?

That said, willpower is certainly limited, and effort must be rewarded or it will become harder and harder to press on. Yes, cognitive tasks can be draining, but they can also be rewarding and invigorating, so it's not as simple as drawing from a limited willpower/cognition well.

And yes, I wholeheartedly agree with her sentiment regarding valuing users' cognitive resources, and appreciated how she expressed it. If everyone had such good intentions and proper perspective, the world would be a far better place. Thanks for sharing yourself with us Kathy.
I got that it was a joke straight away, maybe the humour hasn't carried well across the medium.
I don't think I have been more conflicted about this. I've just been talking to my cofounders about the technical feasibilities of XKeyScore, and honestly, our back-of-napkin engineering configurations indicate this is really an awesome project to be working on.

On the other hand, this is categorically 'evil' by my and my cofounders' ethical standards, and really, no one is safe. And that bugs the hell out of me.

On the one hand: really fucking cool. On the other, I really do not like the idea that I am being spied on.

I'm not sure how to process this information.
What you don't get is #2 is a feature of credit cards. Consumers don't like irreversible spends.

Obviously, if you're a merchant, you want to reach the point of irreversibility sooner. But consumers want 30-day money back guarantees. The credit card companies provide that guarantee if stores do not (and will retract the money from the business's account).

Consumers do not have privileges with BTC, once spent, the money is gone. There is no 3-day window to contest the transaction, there isn't any 30-day money back guarantee.
Yep. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprint...
Is that really the most important question you should be asking?
so you're saying a rude picture is not offensive? how can i argue with you?
Of course we have a form of Clipper through such agreements. Lotus Notes had a secret key escrow mechanism that was discovered in the '90s. It is very unlikely that Notes was the only supposedly secure product with secret arrangements with law enforcement and/or intelligence services, and it is even less likely that the pace and intensity of such arrangements has declined since then.

On the other hand, Edward Snowden thinks he can secure information effectively from attempts to crack it. He probably had practical knowledge of the day-to-day capabilities of the NSA when he worked there. There is no reason that most everything that you and I store and transmit can't be equally well-protected.
To be canonized you have to have performed a miracle, but If he somehow get's pardoned by the DoJ or the Obama administration we could probably consider that requirement met.
its interesting that you find this stupid, but not the fact that his religion is anti-relgious. you're really smart.
This sounds great if it's just a switch you can pull to turn off the garbage collector, but I wanted to pipe up to strongly recommend against this approach if you're working in an environment with manual memory management. It can be tempting to write code that calls malloc but never calls free, because you know that the process is short-lived and it's pointless. The problem comes when your requirements change or you reuse some code, and suddenly that memory needs to be cleaned up. It's far more painful to go back and insert the cleanup calls after the fact than it is to get them in the right place when you write the code. I did this once, and never again.
And be asked to join G+
Singapore will also jail you if you did what he did, but in Singapore people know the consequences and generally don't fight the Government Rules. He is in Malaysia and the only way for him is to get out of the country which may be easier if you have the right connections.

It is a very sad state of affairs if pranks by intelligent kids are used against them not because of the actual prank but as a scapegoat so that others don't do this and it is also sad that intelligent people don't understand the consequences of their action and pranks are not worth 8 years in prison.
Reading these slides, I'm trying to parse what these slides do or do not say. I'd like to leave aside the speculation about what the NSA is probably doing.

First of all, XKeyscore seems to be primarily about the frontend query interface rather than the backend data storage, at least as far as I can tell. It looks like you can basically query their database by email address and get a set of records (email, chat, http logs) back. It looks like there are separate tools for viewing specific records as well. I assume they're joining records on some combination of email address, IP address, timestamp, etc -- not unlike a modern ad server.

A few practical thoughts:
* It's worth noting what's not shown in these slides. Specifically, I don't see any ability to query the full text of emails. The more I see about this, the more I'm convinced the NSA is not collecting email body texts directly from corporate servers. Facebook messages I'm less sure of.
* How are they collecting HTTP data? I assume intercepting at network hubs?
* Given that it appears that individual records are HTTP requests, I'm shocked at how few requests are in the database. 41 billion seems an order of magnitude smaller than I'd expect. Could it be a record is something else?
* Interesting to note the "Miranda number" and "Foreign Factor" fields that look like ways of saying "yes, I have permission to do this." Might explain why a sysadmin could bypass these things but your everyday NSA analyst could not.
fyi, me and my 59836 friends believes that the computer keyboards are our gods. and our religion says that if a person from another religion touches a keyboard he should be outcasted.
your value of a bunch of people is amazing.
No javascript tracking. Very strange behaviour (therefore, less behaviour tracking). That's what I can think of.
The widespread availability of mass produced books should have taken teachers out of the lecturing business. I'm not sure if it's true that lecturing started because books were so expensive that one person read out the one chained to the lectern and everyone made their own copies, but it feels about right. It certainly makes much more sense than the modern spectacle of someone reading bad powerpoint slides badly. But books didn't supplant lecturers, nor did radio, television, VHS video tapes, computer aided-learning, nor the internet.

Yet they should have. Ask anyone who actually wants to learn stuff and you'll find they, naturally, use all these tools and reserve the precious time they spend with an actual expert to mentoring, hands-on skills, subjective evaluation, asking clarifying questions etc. Imagine how stupid you'd feel to hire a world class expert in something and get them to read you a summary of a chapter of their book.

But in Higher Education, having someone, who doesn't really want to teach, has no real aptitude for it and who probably isn't hired, paid or promoted on the basis of how good they are at it, stand in front of a large room of students is basically their equivalent of Homeopathy. A logically preposterous notion, contradicted by all available evidence of efficacy, that mind-bogglingly survives into the 21st century.

No matter how bad this stuff is, and any bit of software being sold to higher education is basically terrible for much the same reasons that nearly all enterprise software sucks, it can't really be any worse than the status quo.
"You need a prescription to get potassium supplements that actually meet the daily requirement."

Where do you live?

Google or Amazon for sodium free table salt. Find a potassium chloride based one. Don't pay more than a buck or two per ounce. Don't take more than a half/quarter teaspoon and drink lots of water. If you can taste it, you didn't add it to enough water. It tastes awful in high concentration. Chlorides are like that.

I get leg cramps if I work my legs too hard in hot sweaty weather and don't get enough potassium. A banana or two prevents that and is a great paleo-type breakfast. Sometimes it would be inconvenient so I eat a little sodium free salt. The "official" RDA for potassium is around a half to quarter teaspoon so eat that much sodium free pure KCl table salt. Use your brain a bit... you wouldn't dump a quarter cup of that stuff on a fried egg, so don't consume a quarter cup of that stuff. But millions of people daily dump a fraction of a teaspoon of it on their meals, so a fraction of a teaspoon a day probably is similarly likely to be OK.

The stuff in K pills is laughably small almost homeopathic dosage level. Like 99 mg in a pill. What you eat 20 of those per day? Just use the sodium free salt.

"constant medical supervision."

This is true, not just K level issues. Many people walking around with some level of blood sugar "issue" and suddenly stopping intake is asking for trouble. Of course, suddenly doing much of anything is usually a bad idea.

This is one of those things like drunk driving where the odds of anything bad happening are extremely low, but when something actually happens, its really super awful and best avoided.

This whole fasting topic is a poster child for moderation. Consuming precisely half your normal intake would result in the same exact benefits, at half speed, but probably only a hundredth the medical issues. So the average goofball goes all in, of course, like health is best modeled as an extreme sport.. Dumb idea.
These slides are from 2008... I'm sure their capabilities have increased significantly.
The few people I know who aren't on Google Apps use Citadel http://www.citadel.org/. I've only heard good things, but can't attest to it myself.
Brian Krebs does some awesome work stirring up the hacking underworld. He also does some good write ups on ATM hacking, bot nets, Russian crime syndicates, and anything else that the mass security media sometimes glosses over.
Raise awareness for starters.
You probably don't need to break the encryption because eventually all traffic has to exit the VPN's company's endpoint, and at that point it can be captured. Meta data such as the browser's fingerprint can be used to tie traffic to an individual, for example, if you see them log in to a regular HTTP site with an email or a username, this information could probably be used to figure out who they are. Armed with this information, all other traffic originating from that endpoint (or elsewhere) with the same browser fingerprint.[-1] can be monitored. Weak keys can also cause the encrypted tunnel to be compromised. Also, PPTP is considered a very insecure tunneling protocol[0] but still used.

You could also break into the VPN company's servers and do interesting things too. There's also the possibility of timing attacks to determine the real IP address of the VPN user, although that's fairly a sophisticated method and quite difficult to do.

Bear in mind that this presentation dates back to 2008, which is a long time in tech years. Who knows what they're capable of now. All that's known is that they're not capable of less.

VPNs are useful for three things: protecting yourself against relatively unsophisticated bad guys sniffing traffic on a local network (for example, an unsecured wireless network), bypassing geographic content restrictions (e.g. using Pandora in Sweden), and circumventing ISP traffic shaping (often they'll not shape VPN traffic because it's used for businesses, and businesses can be whale customers).

[-1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint

[0] http://blog.calyptix.com/2012/08/pptp-is-so-insecure-it-shou...
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)

Problem with "hurting the sentiments" style cases everywhere is that usually there is absolutely no guidelines or legal framework on what constitutes "hurting the sentiments" and it boils down to the men/women judging the case.
Exactly what I was thinking. They were in the press early on, and had a huge boost in users. Looks like things have been slowly dying since then, down more then 80% since peak. All the coverage should boost them right back, even if they are forced to change their name.
A lot of people think the Earth is 6000 years old. Of that a fan left running in a room with the windows shut can kill you.
Thanks. I have got a copy of a Stroustrup on my shelf (I think it's a standard library reference, not the language definition) and I've been developing in "C with classes" for a while, so I've discovered quite a few of the pitfalls. I prefer to let clang++ point out when I stumble across something insane, like:

vector<vector<T>> // wrong, uses a >> operator?!
vector<vector<T> > // compiles correctly.

In some ways I prefer what Objective C did, as a proper superset, and in others I'm drawn to projects like Cello[1]. I'm happy with using (and knowing only) a very small set of C++ features, especially where they're useful for defining simple algebras for objects! I'm sure I'll find another feature I like one day - this one (GGP) may be one of them.

There is one OSS project I know that I never want to emulate: the code literally fails to compile via the python installer until you have run the makefile at least once, by which time it's finished generating all the header files. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

[1] https://github.com/orangeduck/libCello
I don't know about forums, but I suspect that being Facebook friends with a non-US citizen is enough to subject a US citizen to unlimited collection.
As far as I know, DNT was designed to be a tri-state with { NoPreference, On, Off. NoPreference is the default. If it is turned on by default, what would NoPreference mean?
Make sense. But then one of the item on his table is an orthopaedic insole, an item that is custom made for one's foot. I can totally see orthopaedist, dentist etc... have a 3D printer in their office to manufacture one-of-a-kind insole, dental cap, or even prescription lenses.
I think it would be very easy for the NSA to obtain the private keys to SSL of popular sites, eg Facebook, Gmail. Either through coercion or hacking.