skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is my experience that even when informed, most people cannot or will not do due diligence to understand the potential risks or long-term consequences of these things, nor will they make the connection to how it could affect them. When it affects them personally and individually, only then they will take notice.

I have a friend who works for a medical marijuana dispensary. It is legal in our state, but under federal law he is committing a serious crime multiple times a day. They organize their deliveries by gmail. I have warned him that they are listening, and his opinion is "they won't come for me." The fact that even today in California the federal government does in fact go after these people does not even register to him as a concern.

He will not care until he is sitting in a jail cell. Many, many people cannot be reached. This is a fact that has to be taken into consideration when trying to reach people, that _many_ people will simply _never_ be receptive.
Response from Greenwald in the comments:

Q: Thanks for reporting this. I have to ask though, why is it that you are doling out this information now after the recent congressional inquiry into NSA spying and not earlier?

A: We've published almost two dozen exclusive articles about NSA spying in the last 7 weeks, in multiple different countries around the world. Is that pace not fast enough?

There are thousands upon thousands of documents and they take time to read, process, vet, and report. These are very complex matters. On top of everything else that has to be done with these articles, from explaining, debating and defending them in the media to dealing with the aftermath.

People can accuse us of many things. Not publishing enough or fast enough is hardly one of them.

That House vote was about one specific topic - bulk collection of phone records - that this newest article has nothing to do with. That House vote isn't the be all and end all: it's just one small battle in what I can assure you will be a sustained and ongoing discussion/controversy.

There is a lot more to report still. Accuracy is the number one priority. That takes time.
"...But the classification barrier may not be as watertight as committee members make it out to be. Senate Resolution 400, which established the intelligence committee in 1976, has a section specifically devoted to committee oversight of the classification system, which is directed by the executive branch. If a member of the committee feels that classified information is of valid public interest, he or she can ask that it be declassified.

“The Select Committee may, subject to provisions of this section, disclose publicly any information in the possession of such committee after a determination by such committee that the public interest would be served by such a disclosure,” the resolution reads..."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/30/198097/for-congress-it...
I'm not sure having a synchronous 1Gbps connection really counts as "usually" in most of the world, but I guess in that case you'd want to avoid wifi to get the best out of it.

You must be American. :)

Seriously, most of Europe has had gigabit fiber, flying cars, and robot maids for nearly a decade now and in South Korea they're slowly phasing out the government in favor of a benevolent AI.
Looks like it's essentially a Bus Pirate for RF... Which is awesome!
They allow dynamically typed methods when you need them. Why does that make you sad?
Exposing ASP.NET Development Server Remotely
a hasty generalization does not need refutation. it is false in its essence.
Bring Revolution 60 to PC and Mac
> The thing programmers do...

The thing that programmers do is the exact same thing that your post says "normal people" do. Programmers build buggy systems that lose data because someone's name has a ç in it and fail 5% of the time (or more) and rarely do they understand algorithms (and especially not the complexity characteristics) and very often they build the wrong thing, even if they get it done and few have a formal education in anything resembling engineering and very often programmers are indeed getting shit done, but it just turns out that what they got done was just shit.

We have to stop putting programmers on a pedestal. There are great programmers and there are bad programmers. Just because someone slings some code doesn't make them a bastion of clear engineering practice. Many programmers that I've met would benefit greatly from the kinds of systems that Victor describes.
Well, there are reasons to put on our tinfoil hats now... heck, last I heard, MIT students had managed to inject memories into mice.
Same problem on my Galaxy Nexus, I tried all combinations of placing a belt, and it just wouldn't work.
Turn it off in Location Services. Background Refresh is not the place to turn it off.
First they laugh at you, then they sue you, then you win.

BWF is a funny name, leverages the WWF name more than a little, and is going to get great press from the legal fight.

Congratulations to BWF for getting sued; you're getting traction. If the BWF network gets large enough, it could be renamed almost anything and it will still work.
I think you're in denial.
> Even the correct version is not that good. The multiple checks on nil is an obvious pattern and as such should be abstracted away.

From a pedagogical point of view, showing the first transition from the anti-pattern is a good practice, because once you learn that, those first transitions are composable. So, while I agree that the correction for this isn't the best end-state, its an appropriate way to show how to correct the nested-conditionals-with-error-returns anti-pattern.
"How often do motions get denied? Do they ever get denied? How many years go between two denials?
"

This is, as I (and the article) pointed out, completely and totally irrelevant to whether something is a rubber stamp, because the real question is "how many times do bad surveillance orders get through" not "how many times do things get denied".

No regular court would deny motions either if every judge or staff attorney had time to talk to you about your motions ahead of time.

You have not shown how the denial rate has any relation to anything. As i've argued, what actually matters is "how many illegal orders are getting approved".
The senate hearings are with regard to phone metadata. This is a totally different show.
Show HN: Bitcast.io – A marketplace for web development tutorials
He has a conspiracy theory about Ebay's purchase of Skype.
Top 5 Tech Office Spaces in SF
Community Marketing: Starting A Movement For Your Product
Most Haskell programmers should be familiar with right-to-left point-free style, and should be able to infer that symbols stand in for names.

Of course, understanding the individual symbols is a different matter, but hardly requiring a conceptual leap.
> "If someone's willing to buy X and X came out in the 80's, shouldn't the creator of X get a share?"

Maybe? For what reason?

I get where you're coming from - but the whole notion that the "creator should get a share" comes only because of our current understanding of IP ownership. It hasn't always been this way, and odds are it won't always be this way. It may be the norm now, but is there an objectively good reason why it ought to remain the norm?

If I wrote a smash hit song when I was 20, should I get "a share" every time someone plays it 30 years from now? 50? Should my children get a share? There certainly isn't any notion of morality, in our society and most others, that this should be the case.

Which leaves copyright as economic policy. At that point the notion of whether or not we "should" do something is entirely based on the economic benefits it generates for society. Would I create more work for the public to enjoy if the copyright term was 10 years? 20? 30?

To take this example in a different direction - should the artist of a painting get a cut when you sell the painting to someone else? They did create it after all. People are still deriving value off of it, and even willing to pay for it, so why should the creator not get a share? The notion of whether or not someone should get a cut of anything is incredibly subjective, and is more related to the mores and standards of the time rather than any objective (or even subjective) notions of fairness/justice.
Part of being intelligent and shrewd is listening to the words that people say, and judging arguments based on their merit. The idea that Stallman should go fuck himself for not dumbing down or tarting up the message enough for you to pay attention to him makes you the asshole, not him.
Tindie Launches Open Designs and Kickbacks for Open Source Hardware
how much do you want to sell it for?
US declassifies phone-snooping order
I hope I am not responding to too many people and seeming spammy, but here goes.

I agree completely that we do not necessarily need to posit and organized "Illuminati-like conspiracy" to have cause for concern. There are plenty of studies showing increasing likely-hood of sociopaths rising to the top of power structures, and is often just due to how to system as an autonomous entity functions.

What I do posit though, is that, in fact, there is, borrowing your own term for lack of a better one, an "illuminati-like conspiracy". I have been considering an attempt at scholarly paper on the matter for some time now, but let me try to be terse and possibly just point you in the right direction, because I don't think I'm quite prepared to defend the full assertion in public yet.

I will start with your question about power feedback loops. Here is a paper regarding the global network of corporate control that anyone interested in the global power structure should read. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.5728v2.pdf

I even contacted one of the researchers (Glattfelder) during the Libor scandal, wondering if we could use some of the new information to analyze the scandal better. He said it would be extremely difficult due to how good the companies are at obfuscating their dealings.

Now, as far as the conspiracy, I would like to point out one thing. I do not claim that there is but a single conspiracy (a trap assertion many fall into making), and instead would say there there are but a small number of very powerful ones operating at any one time, sometimes in competition and sometimes cooperatively. Regarding the "illuminati-like conspiracy" itself, I have one primary reading source for you, if you are genuinely interested in the subject. It should be enough to get you started on the more serious analysis of what I am talking about.
http://www.amazon.com/Anglo-American-Establishment-Quigley-C...
Forget the ring. Its a thing. Take the extra money and take a pre-wedding trip to Central America! Memories dont get lost down kitchen drains (at least until the alzheimer's kicks in).

If my BF wasted thousands of dollars on something I might lose and something that will probably prevent me from easily sliding my hands into the pockets of my somewhat tight jeans (rings with stones are super annoying that way), I would second guess becoming financially united with him, but thats just me.

Dont get gobbled up by the consumerism surrounding weddings and marriage. Your GF doesnt want a fancy wedding and expects a cheap ring. So, thats good, she sounds cool. Dont tempt her to become a bridezilla. This is how that starts.
i agree - the only time i see an issue with other travelers is when they are being assholes and then the TSA does seem to go on a power trip. its hilarious people still dont know what to take off in those lines, i dont blame them for getting pissed.

disclaimer: i do think the TSA is useless
"It is not however an effective rebuttal to the points brought up in a more general case."

Where is this general case? I clicked thru the presentation and it boils down to here are some obscure yet interesting and trendy corners of the computational world where Perl doesn't work well, therefore we have to change everything.

We could have had the same presentation 20 years ago, just the trendy weird corners would have to change to match the times. Doesn't mean those trendy corners are useless, just not required to write 'good code'.

Not that the goals are inherently awful. I don't do anything requiring UTF-8 at work. Someday I probably will, and it'll probably be a PITA.

I tend to see this kind of presentation as rabble rousing. "Here's some stuff that other languages care about, although you don't care, but it obviously doesn't prevent any of you from being profitable and gainfully employed writing good code so its obviously not required, which is why Perl doesn't have it. If I can convince you to care about it, Perl would gain it or more likely you'd just leave Perl. Hope you feel uplifted, here's some internet meme pictures, k thx bye" I'm not sure other languages consider it "insightful" when they get a cut and paste rephrasing of the same presentation, which is possibly the most interesting part of the whole story.
SFO Says It's Arresting Ride-share Drivers
So, it's literally a piece of hardware allowing me to take any radio signal from 30MHz to 6GHz, transfer them into digital data and read them out with my Computer? (Or other device)
Presumably the hope is that it will make their job more uncomfortable for them.

Its a small gesture that has the potential to lower their job satisfaction. If it became a trend for passengers to do anything reasonably within their power to make the lives of TSA agents more uncomfortable, we could hopefully influence the TSAs retention rates.

It's a long shot, but in the individual case at least you get the momentary satisfaction of making them squirm. (And they do.)
Pointing to any benefits of this program is the equivalent of an ad hominem attack. Undoubtedly there are many efficient yet illegal ways to counter terrorism. No one claims this program can not be beneficial, but that the cost is too high (abandoning the rule of law, obliterating personal privacy). It's like committing suicide to foil a murder attack.
Oops, the order didn't match up.
> If you assume everybody on HN is an American, maybe.

I also attended a French school, where it was covered, and I've had at least one conversation with my Norwegian family in which it came up.
It's also the source of an unbelievable amount of time-wasting and poor decision-making (due to questionable modeling.) I used to be 100-hr-per-week Excel driver and I do not miss that program, having not used Office in about 3 years.
> In contrast, works published since 1923 may still be under copyright protection, so publishers have to do legal research to find the copyright owner (if any) and negotiate a license. That’s a hassle, so works published after 1923 are much less likely to be republished once they’ve gone out of print.

This is about the weakest hand waving excuse for an argument relating to why copyright is bad that I've seen in a while.
OldSQL, NoSQL and NewSQL, Huh?
Your checked luggage is handled by a lot of non-TSA employees, too.
dr Sbaitso!
Forget amusing, that would have been a perfect action trigger: people are OK with privacy infringement on others, but when it happens to them, they are more likely to be upset.

I suspect, or maybe just hope, that politicians are protected in some way from this. While it is unfair, at least it would mean less opportunities to extort or threaten lawmakers. Though, obviously, it would be best if we ALL were safe from that kind of crud.
The app is available in the UK store, but Apple's search indices may not have been updated. Try buying it using the direct iTunes link on Quip's website, instead of searching the UK store.
I think you're falling in to the trap of supporting the OP's point by overreacting.

Do you really believe that it _should_ be impossible for an average person who desires a sudoku solver to get one without any engineering knowledge?

The spirit of Bret's talk, and even this response, is of thinking broadly. The question is not "is this possible", but "should this be possible".
I got to read it in Swedish upper secondary school.
Have they? If anything, I think they have improved. It might not please everyone (I miss the old WoW), but it seems to me that Blizzard is making informed game design decisions based on what the users want. I wouldn't surprised me to hear they invested a lot in big data analytics.

Their big screw-up is perhaps the Diablo III auction house. The idea is good, but it has spiraled out of control. The auction house is now the only viable way to acquire gear. Playing only serves to rack money, but reselling is as good a way to make money. Gear serves to play, to rack more money, to buy better gear. The auction house is now the game. You can do very well at the game without ever playing the "real" game. Not to mention that shelling a few euros on the real money auction house will save tens of hours of farming, and real money continues to appreciate wrt in-game currency.
It is relevant because the parent poster implied that in other/his/her countries, they wouldn't put up with it:

"It's amazing the kind of shit people put up with in the US."

My problem is whenever we have any issues with our government here in the states, you see all of these comments from other countries about how we are such pussies and that it would never fly in their countries. Yet whenever those same countries follow in the USs steps or the US totally shits on another countries rights (grounding planes, imposing their own laws, etc...) all they can do is bitch and moan about it on the internet.

It doesn't make any of us pussies, the people wanted security, and they got security. We let these NSA/TSA beasts grow to such ridiculous sizes. Now if we don't like it, we have to start taking steps to defund/remove all of these privacy invading programs. And from what I have seen in the last couple years, it really seems like we are slowly starting to get somewhere. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is the beginning of the Brave New World.
Absolutely not. The government is not one unitary piece. The NSA is not the ATF is not the FBI. These capabilities were likely kept secret from other governmental agencies as much as the public.

Furthermore intelligence agencies are well aware that every action communicates information back to their adversaries. It's a no-brainer to let Silk Road exist if you think doing so gives you the edge on terrorism, or otherwise furthers the national interest.
Why do you say so? Sales are good, games are good, korean cybersport is finally transitioning to SC2, diablo is fine, wow is probably holding record for the most living / profitable mmo.
did you read the description? not so secular isn't it? so if the description is not secular, how am i desperately injecting religion? what kind of filtering did you use when you read the description? im very curious.
Well, that's not something the OP can expect. After all, that's not the way HTTP and associated technologies work. Regardless, it's a shame. Not that it changes what I said (at least, within the context of my understanding).

Anyways, I'm preaching to the choir.
Maybe. See letter to shareholders by Jeff Bezos. If the business can handle it, and the leadership is capable, I don't see why they would avoid the benefits of being public either. When public, among other things, you have access to a huge amount of capital if you want it (if you can handle the effects of the increased dilution).

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-letter-to-shareholder...
Maybe he enjoys being manhandled. Some people appreciate physical contact anywhere they can get it.
> The NSA is but a cog in a greater machine

Indeed. I always follow The Money because that's who owns the government.

America, including the NSA, is owned by the same small cartel that have the monopoly on the issuing of our currency and credit. Coincidentally, they're the same cartel we're "indebted" to.

Most people have never heard of the four largest banks in the world:

http://www.northerntrust.com/documents/white-papers/asset-ma...
Well what do you know. All these years I had you pegged as Egyptian. Not sure why.

Do you ever visit Hargeisa?
Being protected by a union lets TSA workers conduct their job however they want. Every complaint you have stems from this.
I'm confused, isn't "indie" an abbreviation for "independant"?
So maybe just give him the $100M and leave him alone to do whatever he feels like doing. I'm pretty sure something good could come out of it.
Then they can bid for them.
Your latter point applies. Now. Copyright doesn't factor into the planned obsolescence textbook industry to avoid used copies. Interestingly, that imitatates the game industries attempts to circumvent used games sales.

That highlights a deeper problem, there is a psychological divide between the IP and the plastic discs or dead tree they are placed upon. The authors wouldn't care if you shared their book if whenever anyone but you (the purchaser of a license to the work) saw blank pages, but you can redistribute their information via traditional economic goods exchange and they don't like that because in modern times copyright lets them lockdown distribution (for most people) all the time.

To answer your first question, here is the opposite perspective:

Throwing away copyright, why not let people freely exchange the information they have? You answer with "the creator needs incentives to create and a means to eat" but you could just switch to the patreon model - have per-work payments by your consumers directly. Then release your work, and let anyone else redistribute as if it were public domain.

Because inherently copyright says you don't have rights to do what you want with the things you possess, if the thing is information, be it encoded in neurons in your brain, etched upon dead tree, engraved in a plastic platter, or stored in a large transistor grid. The codification that some intangible concept that can transcend medium is not yours to do what you want with - for every single copyrighted IP concept or work - is a limiter on the possessor for the benefit of the rights holder.

It is also important to differentiate the rights holder from the creator - since the vast majority of IP created today is not under the license of its creator but under the license of their employer. Which is why the life of author + 70 mess comes in, because huge corporations want never ending money for some work they spent finite time and effort making.

I'm a copyright abolitionist - I think the world would all around be a much better place if content creators pursued their own fans to pay their bills so they can create more. Given a sufficiently good earpiece to get the word out about new creators, and an easy way to discover them, it would be effectively a meritocracy of creative talent.

I'm not advocating theft - and it is important to remember what copyright means - this isn't taking something from a content creator and passing it around nonchalantly. It is that when a content creator voluntarily gives you a copy of their work, that you can do whatever you want with it, including redistribute it yourself. If you break into someones house and steal their work in progress book they never finished, that is robbery. You are stealing their physical property containing their IP, and since that wasn't a voluntary exchange of the initial information that is theft.
> It has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine recently to see self-aggrandizing comments from users around the net about how "we should have known" and "none of this is new."

I agree that "know" is a bit too glorifying. I propose "suspected".

I don't find this surprising at all. Practically 99.99% of a normal user's Internet activity is centered on Facebook, Google (including Gmail) and a handful of other sites. The amount of data everyone is requiring in order to provide a service also includes pretty much anything you need in order to track someone.

It's not news you need to pay attention to but some of the more theoretical aspects of networking in a second-year course.
That seems like a bad quote to base your point on, as he wasn't claiming that nobody would ever be harmed in a similar scenario, just that nobody was harmed in this one.