skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are no secret courts that can issue indictments

You are 100% correct. The US government now thinks it's a court all unto itself and is now above the law.

It's got to the point where it doesn't even try to hide these indiscretions.

Rendition of prisoners to foreign countries by US personnel is now OK as long as no US personnel are involved in the subsequent torture.

It’s a well known fact the US government does not participate in torture, they don’t condone torture and as a government they do everything in their power to stop it. But rendition is OK. Out of sight, out of mind.

So that does not mean they can't assist in the process of rendition.

Also water boarding is not considered a form of torture by the US government. We the government consider it a form of intelligence gathering.

Unlawful detention? There is no such thing. We can hold any one for any length of time as long as it is in the national interest.

Is this the new US democracy?

The big disappointment for me is Obama.

I actually thought he was different, but I now know that was just foolish of me.

In many ways he is turning out to be much worse than the alternative :(
I am from Brazil.

Although I am not much for left-wing politics, I really wish that Russia had more influence here than the US.

And I still keep meeting people that are still looking for people that got "disappeared" by CIA.
I doubt if someone makes good money in a small market/niche, they would come out and say it.
I guess sysadmins will be put on the "Persons who requested porn be unblocked" list.

Dirty, filthy sysadmins :)
My Child Will Face a Hatred That I Have Never Known
B.ritish O.nline L.imiting L.ude O.bjectionable C.ontent S.ystem:

B.O.L.L.O.C.S
What don't you like about Juju's approach, and what do you think the right way would be?
The Government is hopeless at buying IT, and there are many many expensive hopeless government IT projects.

This project is hopeless, and it's going to be reasonably expensive for someone, but as understand it the government isn't paying for the filters.

Thus, it's not going to cost the government anything.
> Worst of all, PIH is probably not trying to make the world a better place through technology. He's basically exploiting a narrow arbitrage opportunity and is probably either unethical or lazy.

Not to say this is sustainable but if there's a way to make money via arbitrage that nobody else has picked up on yet it can be very profitable. And potentially low-effort too.
Don't Let Lean Startup Be a Crutch
"He realizes that Passive Income Hacker (PIH) is not a hustler, he's not funded or seeking funding, he doesn't go to the networking events and hasn't been through an accelerator."

This article rubs me wrong. This paragraph really rubs me wrong. If you're good at hustling for customers, you're a hustler where it matters. Funding (non-customer funding i.e), networking events and accelerators are secondary - lots of America's biggest businesses have been built without them.

The "passive income guy" described in the article reminds me of the Plenty of Fish founder by the way. Most "startup guys" would probably kill to be in his position...
To put it more generally, it would be for an American spy in Russia for any reason and under their control, for any similar Russian spy in America. Doesn't matter whether the "spies" want to go or not, nor how they got there. The spy exchange would be just window dressing for accomplishing some thing that either or both powers want.
For the subreddit thing, I made it before their new system (and tried to keep it simple) but yes, it might be a nice feature. Got to think about the UX a little though.
I intend to add a "settings" page in the future where you can change color style, organise subreddits and have the NSFW overlay removed by default. Thanks for your feedback btw!
> Sure, do cool stuff that requires features which some browsers miss, use feature detection to flag that.

To be fair, graceful degradation is still a ton of work. It's fine if you're using neat-o features for superficial things (round ALL the corners!). However when you decide to rely on newer tech for more core site features, it means you wind up having to code, and test, twice. Once for the real features in the preferred environment, and once for the degraded features in the non-preferred environment.

If you don't have the resources but you still want to use the stuff with limited support, I think it's polite to include a "hey, we don't test for your configuration so feel free to give us a try, but we apologize if things don't work correctly" banner. I think it's also polite to warn your users where you know things are just painfully broken. "The experience is bad here for users with your configuration."
About SQL Query Hints: Not all hints are born equally
Scrum but…. what an annoying phrase
Not a bad idea. Might help to keep the list in alphabetical order too, so that people can check for duplicates more easily.
You can in fact only select each pad once.
> It's important to remember that a 'high overhead' though,
> does correlate to bad performance.

Dan Pallota's entire point is that this line of thinking is wrong.
I learned that pretty much every corner has crash potential. :)

We ran into a similar problem at my last job. I mapped crash locations in our game to the map in which they took place. When viewed in aggregate it ended up turning into more of a map of where people tend to congregate in the game then where problem spots actually exist.
The author of the post runs Followgen by himself
The Cloud-Based Business Model: A Guide for Entrepreneurs
So everyone working in J or F# has a dead-end job?
I'd think that for such a high profile person no matter when he dies there will be something that he was going to present.
"But what about dev, marketing, customer service etc?"

"I've automated 95% of the non-dev. The other 5% of non-dev I deal with in about 20 minutes a day. Every few weeks I'll have a big dev day."

Any books/resources with a lot of real world case studies? I'd be very interested to hear many different accounts of such businesses. Here and there you see it on HN, but is there one that has many together?
Yep, and the fact that the above calculation doesn't even allow for combinations greater than four...
Overall not a reliable number :)
Here's a few discussions that I've bookmarked and go back to, time-to-time for inspiration:

Small Product, Single Founder Success Stories
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771

How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487

Anyone making a living from just 1 app?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772199

Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764682
Show HN: Super Simple Overlay
Well it just so happens that the IETF is working on the http 2.0 spec now. See https://github.com/http2/http2-spec
Throwaway account just to post this.
Of course the Feds will have access to whatever they deem necessary even if it takes them time to get the pieces in place. It's the users who ultimately lose the most.

I'm learning the hard way just how much the user is the one ultimately screwed when it comes to account access. My father just recently died very unexpectedly and tragically. He was generally retired but still doing a dozen or so small tech consulting projects here and there and using his personal accounts on Gmail/Facebook/etc. for everything.

Facebook simply will not give any family member access to a deceased person's account. Google will consider it after you fill out a form and send them a bunch of documentation. Then they will consider and may possibly end up sending you off to get a court order and the like, but you're entirely subject to their own decision about whether you can get access to your deceased family member's main form of personal and business communication. You do not own your Gmail account, regardless of the shit they spout about you being able to download your data using takeout. If your estate can't get "your" data, you didn't really own it.

Yes, I know there are steps that could have been taken to have given access to others on the event of one's death, but realistically what percentage of Gmail/Facebook users have taken those steps? And why should those accounts be different from normal digital accounts like bank accounts where a standard court estate document is enough?
The problem is it is not about your freedom and safety. It's about the freedom and safety of others. Herd-Immunity is essential for protecting those who can't be vacinated because of allergies or age. By refusing vaccinating you aren't just giving up your ability to be protected from these life-threatening diseases, you're also endangering others. The government has these laws for the same reason we have laws against drunk driving. You have the right to endanger yourself however you want; however, you have zero right to endanger another human.
Wait, is there already a government-imposed web filter on mobile phones in the UK? And you can't opt out? When did this happen? What were the justifications given when it was put into place? Does it also apply to GSM tablets and devices tethered to your mobile?
This number is really easy to pull of if you know how to sell yourself and be social/on the offensive.

$150/month product that saves businesses $4,000/mo (one less programmer). Hard part: Find 70 clients.

Working in industry, we demo products all the time. We pay outrageous amounts of money for an online time tracker which is basically an online spreadsheet. We have considered obtaining systems for managing accounting, supply, etc.

Focusing on our core business, policies, we never get tied up in 2-3 month/year adventures in uncomfortable territory. There is no innovation, just maintenance. We use a 20 year old 4GL language assisted by native Python/C.

I could crank out Android apps in niches, write web content and advertise, build a few cloud based web products (CAN IT EXPORT TO EXCEL!?!?!!!111), and easily live off of 15-20k a month with huge fluctuations (both directions). I choose the simple life of industry.

Not to mention, it is so hard to motivate yourself to go from start to end on a product. Most of that energy was used in my late teens.

Right now, I could be cranking out that turn based strategy Google Glass native app, because native apps with delays in turn taking are going to be the key to Glass (it gets hot!). Instead, I'll just build another fixed width extract with this day. It will run in 1/16th of the time of the original. People will not notice or care until it breaks again. Ad absurdum.

I suppose its worth mentioning, I know a few who pull in 4-6k a month solely on advertising/affiliates. Completely passive, they have months worth of posts automated to go out every 2nd or 4th week. I've pulled off 1-2k using the same method, but I always had a hard time finding microniches that were available for me to dominate. Writing about en pointe ballet, dremels, silver polishing, simms fishing gear etc. is not my ideal goal. It did make money though.
This question fascinates me.

Everyone seems to hate politicians, yet we rely on them.

And in theory, they're acting as our proxies.

Why does this seemingly good situation turn out so badly?

(I don't know, per se. I know a number of theories. I'm mulling them over, like a fine wine or whisky or whatever it is that one mulls.)
Here are a few of the bugs prevented us from migrating to OO. Note that the bug tracker DB has migrated from OOs servers to Apache.

https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121429
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=15379
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=95039
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=119268
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121430
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=69633

Note the last one was fixed in AOO 4.0. Yay :) After 5 years, but better late than never! Unfortunately they only fixed the .doc import filter and it still exists in the .docx import filter. Asked them if I should post a new report.
Please see video for full story.
> Clearly they're not going to block games and dating sites which this service does so it's not clear why we should assume that it's any sort of useful template for what's proposed.

Why won't they block games or dating sites?

That Talk-Talk product was put in place in response to earlier requests by MPs to "protect children", which is why mobile content tends to have filters now.

It seems that filter is as good a model as anything else for what the filter will be.
How does one become a passive income hacker?
This is awesome. My girlfriend and I were just talking yesterday about our 2-year-old and how I want to write games with him once he's old enough.

I begged my parents for LEGO Mindstorms when I was a kid but we couldn't afford it. I'm hoping that he'll be as interested in learning to code as I was when I was young.
Google working to secure programming deals for upcoming Internet TV service
Android Bug Superior to Master Key
That was cool of you to write this. Most people let that word just go by.
Robin Hood Hashing should be your default Hash Table implementation
The browser is already a thick client with local storage and lots of local logic. The difference is that the entire client is shipped to the browser on demand.
I'm not sure if it affects all carriers or not. But you can opt-out, you just have to go through an age-verification process - usually providing a credit card number to confirm you are over 18.
My Galaxy S4 seems to only allow one direction for each node.
My favorite founders are the ones that are in it for the journey. You have to look hard to find them but they're out there.
I'd love to hear from the HN community on this topic. Thanks.
I run an insurance blog at http://www.insurancedodo.com and earn from google adsense. Low four figure income every month and almost passive
Exactly. If I disable all all those filters, I can credibly argue that I'm against filtering on principle, not necessarily because I want to view any of those things.

I just wonder how long until they start using this infrastructure to compute a profile that determins things like your social security contributions or security clearance. They could also threaten to take the children away from people who disable the filters or force them into some kind of "re-education" program.
Sounds like jealousy. If you can automate the way you get money, you have 23 hrs and 40 minutes a day to do something without any profit motive for true good. Startups, business, and making money don't have to be a religion.

Bill Gates will do more good with the money he made than he did by creating software.
> People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once, if, we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so.

Jesus fucking christ you people should go look at what happens in real dictatorships sometime.

A voluntary filter is not tyranny and it's fucking disgusting to compare optional filtering of semi-random webcontent with governments who murder and torture their citizens.
Nah, it's not government imposed and you can opt out. I think all the operators have one though.

Opting out usually requires you to call the operator, though sometimes you can do it through their web portal if you have a credit card (they'll charge and then refund it). I assume it blocks stuff through tethered devices too. Dunno really.

Justifications? Most likely "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!".

On which subject - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTeENEQkBKE
This work is intuitive and
heuristic. But with some meager
assumptions, it's also possible
to make a real 'statistical hypothesis
test' out of such things.

So, with
a hypothesis test we get not just
a heuristic 'local outlier factor'
but a probability of Type I error.

And we can have some other advantages
that tell us some good things about
the probability of Type II error.

Of course, with more data, we know what
to do, use the classic most powerful
Neyman-Pearson result. There all
those seemingly important intuitive
consideration in the OP
of 'A is a friend of
B but B has lots of friends much
closer than A so that B is not a
friend of A' don't get involved
and, thus, look suspicious.

There is, of course,

David J. Marchette,
'Computer Intrusion Detection:
A Statistical Viewpoint',
ISBN 0-387-95281-0,
Springer-Verlag,
New York,
2001.
They released v0.10.15 shortly afterwards http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/07/25/node-v0-10-15-stable/
So, PIH has a profitable business. "Startup guy" is a bullshit artist.
You become community organizer to advance in the Chicago political machine duh..
There is filtering on most mobile phone data contracts in the UK.

YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO.

Justifications: "Children have too easy access to very hard core porn. Provide filtering, or we'll regulate you".
That's quite nice.

Escalating to a stronger password after 5 failed attempts seems like a good measure which would got a long way to nullifying this sort of brute force attack.

How does logging into the Google account work if the phone is in Airplane mode or whatever where there will be no data connection?
http://www.scala-lang.org/
Totally possible. These days, with the right forms of identification and a good enough cover story, anybody can be anyone anywhere to almost anybody.
I think you're missing the sarcasm here... This is written from PIH point of view making fun of what startup guy thinks of him. PIH agrees with you that funding and accelerators aren't needed to be successful.
I could crank out Android apps in niches

I hear this a lot, but are there numbers on how many people are managing it? I.e. if you exclude apps put out by large companies, how many people are earning $5k+/mo off Android apps? I don't even have a ballpark guess; is it 10 people? 10,000 people?
The thing that amazes me about this is that people don't realise that this comes from BSD 4.2 rsh released in 1983.
For what it's worth, it's actually as easy on Linux and Mac as well. There is a prevailing myth that Tor has this enormous learning curve and is only for neckbearded hacker masterminds, and it could not be any more wrong. This is by design - The Tor Project wants anonymity to be for everyone who desires it.
I can never decide how I want to set this. Most sites recommend 180 seconds or so, but with the default ServerAliveCountMax set to 3, this is 9 minutes before a dead terminal is actually disconnected.

I've started to set it really really low personally - like, 5 seconds, so the connection drops after 15 seconds. I'm tempted to go down to 1, but I have a lot of long running sessions and I start to worry about the traffic counts.

But, after all this there's still a problem: none of it seems to work with any of the connection mux'ing options - once the background session dies, I still have to manually kill it to get anything working again.
I am one. I work roughly ~70 hours a week (if you count research and studying), but I can go months (or longer) without needing to touch the passive side of things (or work at all, if I so choose). Usually I am studying to push the bounds of what is available to the consumers (ML, NLP, OCR, etc), studying interesting business models, or just generally improving my craft. Not all of us are lazy, and I have a feeling the approach mentioned in that article won't stand the test of time.

In short, passive hackers who are bootstrapped and make a tidy some exist all over. I know several. However, it typically isn't treated as a "vacation" but rather having the flexibility to breathe and do things right.
perl -le 'print shift=~s<(\w{8})>;"".reverse$1=~y/nwcdsha/azpz/dr;er' "Sudo i'll make him a sandwich."

(Just some production sysadmin code...)
Exactly, nothing like that could ever happen here.
Work on the assumption that PRISM has spam filters at least as good as GMail, so it wouldn't be trivial to overload it with automatically generated content.
What's the difference between a flea and a banker? One is an irritating parasite that feeds off humans. The other is a flea ;)
It was philosophy that saved the world from (classical) infinitesimals, and spurred the development of modern analysis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analyst

(No, classical infinitesimals bear no resemblance to the infinitesimals of nonstandard analysis.)
I was not aware that the new analytics would track users. One interpretation of section 7 of the Google Analytics Terms of Service is that tracking individuals is not allowed:

http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html

> You will not [...] use the Service to track, collect or
> upload any data that personally identifies an individual

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/tTaq...

> you cannot store names or ip addresses in a custom var,
> but you can store ids that need your backend to resolve
> into a person identification
No, you actually do according to some other sources I looked up. If you don't set up your gmail to use alternate SMTP, the headers end up slightly different and your actual gmail account shows up in the headers.

By switching it to send via SMTP and then plugging in the SMTP details for my apps account, the gmail account was replaced in the headers by the apps account.
This perfectly illustrates my point. Of course this is not full on tyranny. It's just baby steps toward something which could represent a diminution in individual liberty every bit as severe and oppressive as full-on tyranny. As I said, maybe when that day comes people will have come up with a better name for it. For now we either call it tyranny and risk people dismissing it, as you have done, or we dare not call it tyranny and risk people not seeing it as a serious threat.

P.S. At what level of infringement of individual liberty between "just a little" and "full on raging tyranny" is it acceptable to take notice and be seriously pissed off?
Yes, that is what my response was in response to. In fact I believe I link to it (not the github version but on the ietf site).

However, I felt that some of the points I brought up in what I'd like to see were relevant to this discussion, even if the entire blog post isn't. This is why I highlight the points that are relevant in my comment.
You shouldn't compare your situation with people on the other side of the fence because theirs is always worse than yours.

You should just shut your mouth until yours is as bad as theirs.

This is basicly what you are saying.

And no surprise, I disagree with you!
Do you think Europe is being turned into Afghanistan and what's the relevance of being engaged to an Israeli?
And some Americans dismiss their constitution as out of date. It seems more relevant than ever.
Yes, you're right. I'll re-arrange it soon! :)

Thanks!
Elite hacker Barnaby Jack dies ahead of Black Hat event
That's... actually pretty good.
Russia and US security services 'in talks' over Snowden
Does AT&T have a new early upgrade plan for smart phones?
What is the most catastrophic error made by an intern at a tech-company
Well, since this in HN, maybe we could throw out a few. In particular, which ones qualify in NYC?
This is like not knowing the return or exit function, and is also used for telnet or serial console connections. If knowledge is so shallow on a particular tool, it should not count as being part of the toolset. There's nothing more basic or essential to SSH than connecting and disconnecting. And it's right there on the man page, not exactly a hidden feature. This is more beginner level knowledge, maybe novice if being very very generous, but nowhere near expert level.
If you're really a trained psychologist; in what diagnostic system do these categories even exist? Surely not ICD or DSM?