skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What value can be placed on Obama's pledges? He promised transparency in 2008. He promised again in 2012. He failed to follow through. Why would anyone think he will follow through this time around?
I'm sorry- perhaps I misunderstood. I thought you were suggesting that anyone who works for these companies MUST somehow be complicit in these encroachments by the government.

If that's not the case, I think you're cool on not eating your brussel sprouts.
It wasn't really hyperbole, it was just wrong.
Being able to mine anonymous income is attractive to many groups of people. If you kidnap a Google employee, there will be a record tied to names etc.
The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their own special sort of group of countries.

I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s
According to the document they've had to involve some senior people in deciding what to redact and there are only a few people in government with the expertise in the relevant issues. My guess is that the redaction involves at least two agencies (DOJ and NSA) and there's communication overhead.
> This makes it a useless word that plays to emotion and lowers the level of discourse dramatically.

Those outside the United States have known this for a long time with regards to more words in common use in the US, and we are dumbfounded when, for example, Bush Jr. would repeatedly use similar words such as; Liberty, Freedom, Justice, Tyranny
Exactly. REST screws with our internal matrix of "things allowed on methods." Instead of idempotent GET and mutating POST, what does PUT do? Can DELETE be run twice? I'm sure the RFC says, but it just adds additional complexity on our heads (which we may want to override on a per-case basis anyway).
Alright, that's a fair point. I'm in the group that silently ignores and tries to foil them, although I will chime in if people minimize the problem.
You're being social on the web right now.

The Google+/Facebook version of being social on the web ought to have the word "social" in quotation marks.
I don't personally care about Latitude, but it does seem recently that Google have been on a crusade to ruin Google Maps on mobile devices. The two most noteworthy instances: (1) screwing up the offline-maps feature (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZ... -- but they've slightly walked this back: see https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076) and (2) adding advertisements to the Android version of Maps: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-... (I don't mind this at all on the web version of Maps, where I'm usually on a display with plenty of pixels, but on a mobile device that's a whole lot of space being taken up by advertisements instead of actually useful information).
> [Lack of] Confidence is [the problem].

Funny, the federal reserve uses the exact same strategy.

They must not grasp that confidence is an outcome of a process, and you can't target outcomes.. you have to target processes.
Let me guess: Java exploit? Flash exploit?
It would be cool if that guy managed to use a kernel exploit, then I had another reason to use the hardened kernel sources next time. Can somebody knowing the details of the exploit tell us how it infiltrates systems?

I remember 2006 when I worked for a BOFH who blamed me for playing with the Monitor settings, altough I didn't. He just managed to install a weird trojan onto his main linux server, I had to excuse and go out, then lough my ass of for ten minutes.
Later he found out that it came form the tutorial he followed that he found on the internet... This guy was hell, glad I don't work for him anymore.
$99 is ~ half the price of the cheapest leica that I can find on Amazon. For me, thats a great deal. Not to mention the fact that it can theoretically plug right into a drafting application automatically. Count me in.
Adding un-necessary VERBS adds complexity that imposes additional knowledge and burden that increases the surface area that web servers, server software, intermediaries, HTTP Clients, client libraries, browsers, etc need to know in order to support it.

What are the call-semantics of the new VERB? Will it be widely used correctly and can we even rely on the spec'ed definition? There's no value adding new VERBs that have the same semantics as POST but just has additional metadata to indicate what the action is. Lessons from WS-* should be not to try add specifications and written unified/concepts for everything but to keep a simple and minimal but flexible specification, that most APIs can operate within.
What saddens me is that while in the 2012 elections it seems most Obama voters were effectively choosing the lesser of two evils, in 2008 they were voting for Obama. They believed in what he was supposed to represent.

In retrospect, maybe they were voting against Bush. In the next election maybe a majority will vote against Obama, and the game will keep going.
That implies that an individual person has the same resources as a Company. If you just quit, it's assumed you know what you're doing. And I'm guessing you're probably assuming a certain privilege that others may not have. If you're on HN, you probably are among the people who are paid well, have savings and can get another job in no more than 6 weeks. There are a lot of people out there who aren't as fortunate; who will be stricken with horrible-hardship if they're job just disappears.

You quitting without warning won't harm a big corporation as a whole, but a bigcorp firing a person without warning has a chance of nearly destroying that person depending on what job and situation we're talking about. Especially in USA where health-insurance is connected to employment. A sudden dismissal can really cause someone to die.
DELETE session probably has the wrong semantics for the way most systems implement sessions and logins. PATCHing it to closed is a better match. POSTing with the user id to a URL for closing sessions is the best fit for how we usually do things. There's a reason why most systems are implementing this with POST instead of PATCH.
Are they seriously talking about enforcing TLS on all SMTP? That would break deliverability to a lot of servers, but would be pretty awesome. I assume it wouldn't actually check certs in any meaningful way, though, so only protecting from passive eavesdropping, but it's a big positive step.

I'm increasingly tempted to throw that switch myself, or at least start filtering all my non-TLS'd mail into a special mailbox of "figure out if I actually care if these people become unreachable in 6mo when I actually enforce TLS." Arguably it would be worse to accept the message and then bounce it, since you'd have received the text in the clear, but maybe log and send an informative-to-end-user rejection notice based on envelope, and to me?
Problem is, in a lot of circumstances, you still have to rely on GET and POST with a header like X-REQUEST-METHOD set to tell the server what you really meant.
Netflix works with US based listings third parties, but not in the UK
sure we have. have you read through the developer docs for most API's? here's twitters:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1

its all GET and POST. this is typical.
Sure, plenty of people do that, but it's a horrible way to design a web API in my view, and it's definitely not a pattern anybody else should be encouraged to follow.
Shopventory co-founder here - Royce has been amazing to work with this summer, great job!
There's no baseball lobby, at least not one that would care about an individual player, and I'm sure a couple of Europeans dropping Gmail is not going to make any lobbyists upset at these politicians for trying to defend their special interests (through lying or otherwise)
is there any way bugs can be reported in a structured way? would be really helpful to further push this plugin, as the idea is awesome!
I wrote this a couple days ago in response to another HN comment but it's relevant here too; the first paragraph is the one I responded to:

>The question is then; in a two party system where both offer the blue pill, who the hell do you vote for?

Greens or libertarians, which I have been doing for a long time. Real change starts at the ballot box.
Interesting, thanks for the link. There are very likely some hometown bias effects as well, but my speculation is that Congress as a whole is judged by different standards than a person's congressional representative. The former, I would imagine, would tend to be judged by its actions (and how they are portrayed by others), while an individual congressman can be judged based on how well a person identifies with him or her (something not possible to do with a large heterogeneous group of people).

Whatever the cause, it's a fascinating dissonance.
It's not like Google+ does anything remarkably bad.

You've inadvertently summed up everything wrong with google and google+. Somewhere google lowered the bar for its products to "don't do something too bad" instead of "build remarkable things."

Google+ may not be bad per se, but it's far from exceptional. When you take something that isn't exceptional and begin forcing it on your users for the sake of strategy, I'll make a bet that it hurts your company long term. Of course, when you build something exceptional(such as gmail), you don't have to shove it onto your users because you've crazy inbound demand.
Actually lets hope someone in Congress that actually wants real reform delivers something concrete first instead of the transparency theatre that Obama is likely to deliver to us.
"I think Hushmail are pretty up front about being no protection if the person who wants access has a court order"

It is not just about having a court order. The court order is not some kind of secret key that decrypts messages, it is just a way to compel Hushmail to decrypt those messages. Pointing a gun at a sysadmin would work just as well. Paying a sysadmin would also work. Getting a spy to work for Hushmail would also work.

Let's say you are trying to protect the names of activists in China. There is no reason to think that the Chinese government could not find a sympathetic Chinese immigrant / national with an IT background who is willing to pass on some messages every so often. You can imagine other scenarios -- maybe you have highly valuable business secrets, maybe you are running a political campaign, etc.

Snake oil is the right term for Hushmail, because that is what they deliver. The only term that is more polite than snake oil is "key escrow," but why should we be polite here?
"Bernard, the Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets, it is to protect officials."[1]

[1] Sir Humphrey Appleby, Jobs for the Boys (e/o "Yes Minister"), Jay A and Lynn J, BBC; first broadcast April 7, 1980.
Haha you mean me? Maybe someday.. (you can find my blog among my submissions if you were really expressing interest in more writing from me)
They assume that you write your email on their web interface, to which you connect over https. and when they send your mail to anotjer server, they do so over a ssl encryption.

of course, if you use an email application, you can enable/disble ssl/tls if you wish to do so.
> Anyone voted in to replace her would not have the seniority she has, and wouldn't be in charge of important subcommittees.

That is actually a fairly good reason to vote her out. She can do some real damage.
The server can do whatever processing it likes to a PUT's request body. If you upload a PNG it can convert it to a JPEG or an SVG or OCR it or invert the colors, etc. It's perfectly valid to turn application/x-www-form-urlencoded into something else.
With Snowden as Backdrop, U.S. and Russian Officials Meet
How so? At most he required they get explicit legislative authorization, which they did, rather than potentially being more easily struck down by the courts. Pretty much continued doing the same things as far as I can tell.
Shocking. </sarcasm>

I saw this a mile away. Anyone who didn't call this should work on improving their judge of character.

Snowden is a patriot.
I strongly disagree with placing Minecraft as the #1 Rift experience. In Half-Life 2, aiming and looking are entirely discrete but in Minecrift (Rift extension for Minecraft), looking and aiming are bound together and you can't even aim upwards (mouse/hydra control is limited to horizontal movement only) to mine tree blocks directly above you without looking 90° straight up and having your headphones fall off.

It's not game-breakingly-bad, but it surely is bad enough that I wouldn't even mention Minecraft in the top 5.
I have an app 'locacha' that lets you share your location with friends in a chat room.
My 2 cents:

The bitcoin protocol is solid on crypto-side, not so sure about the economics-side. Key word: liquidity trap.

One thing that makes bitcoin a huge deal to me, is to be able to transfer (small amount of) money from China to US easily, at a good exchange rate. Another thing is that right now whenever some new protocol, i.e. alt-coins and alike comes out, people measure its price not in US dollars, but in terms of bitcoins. There are lots of stuff which are easier to buy with bitcoin. Accepting bitcoin is also easier compare with accepting dollars.

Honestly speaking, US Dollar in an exchange/bank that is incredibly hard to withdraw is more "virtual" than bitcoin. E.g. Mt.Gox USD, is really a "virtual" currency.
I agree with the direction of the industry, and your abbreviated rant, except I think they are trying to get attention with... anything at their disposal.

For me what is interesting is how magnetically opposed developers can be to a perceived outsider. And how that works against the recruiter, etc. in question. E.g. We're really lucky with our outside recruiter and she has a lot of credibility, but when she hung out at our booth at OSCON with her lovely female assistant, they clearly stood out and attendees cut a wide swath. Same thing at a different con with one of our investors: extremely technical guy, but you can spot his BD/VC uniform from across the room. I shuffle their conversations away from my booth.

Conversely, I had an interesting conversation in a booth at a different con, where after 20 minutes of talking to me (messy ponytail, company tshirt, jeans, tigers) about our stack, a guy said to me, "Wait a sec, you smell like marketing." By which he meant that I was coming across as non-technical as we got deeper into the technical details (totally fair - I am not a professional developer). I think he felt bamboozled by my lack of shininess.

The shiny girl probably like being shiny, and don't care for the tshirt/jeans/ponytail uniform. There's actually a lot of cool ways technical women subvert the uniform without freaking anyone out (I have hot pink lipstick). I would venture they feel uncomfortable about standing out more than they are plotting to lure you.
It's great to see a positive working experience on HN. There's lots of "why I quit" and "help, I'm drowning" experiences, but this one has made me a lot ... Happier?

Good job, and thank you. I'm downloading your app now.
> make all HTTP methods just CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE

No, because resources are not necessarily mapped to database records, nor even behaving like so.

Being able to implement various behaviors in terms of the generic but very well defined HTTP verbs is important, notably PUT being idempotent is extremely useful.
> DELETE session probably has the wrong semantics for the way most systems implement sessions and logins.

I prefer to view HTTP method selection based on the logic from the "user side" rather than the implementation from the "system side".

Obviously, though, there are different ways of looking at this, and no One True Way.
Barring a constitutional amendment that implements a multiparty, proportional-representation parliament, your choices in Murka are either Kang or Kodos.
Not to mention it's been here on HN at least 8 times, probably 10 or more. I've stopped bothering to direct people to previous conversations - they just say the same things over and over again anyway.
Grouper (YC W12) seeks Senior Engineer
Hey HN,
We're looking for social hackers to join our engineering team.

Who are we?

We're a tiny team working to engineer the perfect night out with friends. What goes into that? So far we've built out matching algorithms, customer service AI, and a real-time collaborative email client that's better than Gmail.

Last month we shipped an iOS app that’s like Uber for your night out.

Then we open sourced the framework we used for it:
https://github.com/Grouper/FlatUIKit

Who are you?

You're a world-class developer with a track record of shipping excellent products. You're comfortable hosting a brown bag tech talk. You're a fearless explorer - If there's something you don't know how to do, you'll figure out the lowest cost path to understanding it.

I'd love to chat, just email me at tom@joingrouper.com

You can learn more at http://joingrouper.com/jobs

Cheers,
-Tom
As the author repeats several times, they are not a hosting platform. They're more of a cache. They're like a network through which web sites hosted on other platforms can travel.
I think it's time someone makes a new Obama Shephard Fairey shirt with the word "Lies" instead of "Hope"
Any user should be able to opt out of per-site analytics. I don't use Google Analytics or gaug.es or any of that junk because my users deserve better, so tying analytics to your service is a good way to make me not use your service.
I think humans rationalize quite a bit to please both sides. Spend enough time with people who are smart and promote issue X strongly, and you will soon bend whatever 'principle' you had. The idea of balance is very tempting.
Also see "Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany" http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts...

hattip: Moldbug
Good point on CONNECT; not something I work with directly, but I'm still embarrassed that I spaced that out.
I'm a huge fan of their work and John's

Don't be a fan of me; I'm just a guy doing stuff some of it total crap.
WOWSOME!!

How did he make it? How is that even possible?
Demand Progress calls for sacking of Aaron Swartz prosecution
Foreign leaders woke up one day to find that the US now has deep spy penetration into their local populace.

Oops. Huge national security fail.

They haven’t said much publicly, but behind closed doors they're scrambling to figure out how to get their pants back up.

This is only the very beginning of a huge shift that most of the US is blind to or in denial about.

All around the world, in government offices and in business board rooms, leaders are trying to figure out how to get off the US cloud.

The US cloud has been compromised and that trust just isn't coming back.

The barrier now is not political will, but a lack of local tech talent that can build viable alternatives to the US cloud services.

Many countries are kicking themselves now for not growing/poaching tech talent more aggressively.

Interesting times when having good web developers is a big national security asset.

You'll see the more tech rich countries move first. It's no surprise Germany's a first mover here.

Of course, with any big disruption there will be winners and losers.

Who the losers will be is obvious - US cloud companies.

Sure, they'll still have the US market (which is huge), but international markets will start drying up.

Skeptical? Google is hearing a huge sucking sound of money evaporating from Germany right now. Google's so big, they may not notice a few million yet, but I assure you, they will notice eventually. Karmic justice for short-sightedness in not out-lobbying the big defense contractors in Congress.

What's comical is how cheap it would be to out-lobby the defense contractors: http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?Ind=D

The top contributing defense contractor (Northrop Grumman) only gave about $3 million last year. I'm sure they paid more than that for actual lobbyists, etc, but it's still not even petty cash at Google.

Of course, I don't mean to pick only on Google. There are many multi-multi-billion dollar cloud companies in the US that have been easily out-lobbied by the defense industry.

It would have been pennies compared to what they'll ultimately lose in the drying-up international markets.

So, who will be the winners? While security companies will see a boon, it's the open source companies that I think will see the biggest win.

With open, auditable code, countries can set up their own services. Of course, they'll need support and training and that's where the open source companies really shine.

It's important to remember that the goal for these countries will rarely be fool-proof privacy for each individual citizen. Instead, the goal is to prevent a foreign power from having deep intimate access to every detail of your populace.

Granted, many of these countries will use this transition to just spy on their own citizens. However, other countries will have a good functioning democracy and a citizenry that values privacy and will avoid those abuses.

For those countries that have robust protections and engender international trust, they'll have a big business advantage when it comes to foreign consumers.
Awesome! Let us know what you think.

Are we crazy? Yes, but hopefully crazy enough to change the industry. We initially set out with the plan to charge a fee, but there is a long list of industry-specific reasons as to why we got a little more creative. Like any startup, we're experimenting with our business model.

Could we make more by charging a fee? Maybe. At the end of the day, we're happy building the best product we can and making it available to as many people as possible.
I had the same Fisher Price toy!!
And the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6143604
No, sorry. We started in 2012 and the CRA doesn't do retroactive certifications.
Don't forget that from one day to the next they also killed terrain mode for maps on Android. That one made me very grumpy.
Usually, this is not the server not supporting it, its a workaround that the server provides so that you can consume the API without AJAX from HTML forms, which are restricted to GET and POST.

EDIT: Although in some cases there is an issue that people choose not to configure it on the web server, and instead use headers or other mechanisms to tunnel the "real" method to the application. But most servers do support it, this seems to be a mechanism for routing around administrative issues in organizations.
Hard to tell since the details have been kept secret, but the FOIA request is for any order or opinion of the court on whether any 702 minimization was done unreasonably or whether any any 702 authorities have been used to circumvent the "spirit of the" law, and also for any briefings supplied to congress.

Since we now know that there is at least one such opinion, this will at least shine some sunlight on it so we can see
the extent of the "circumventions" and how strongly the court dealt with it. If anything, it may show how firmly the court pursues its oversight responsibilities.
My current theory is that this is a simple extortion ploy: After getting me to depend on Android Google Maps, they have replaced it with something unusable. Shortly they will release Google Maps Classic for $49.95/year. I will happily pay that; it's cheaper than the blood pressure medication I'd need to counteract all the rage-inducing misfeatures they've put in the latest version.
It's in the blog post, location sharing has moved to Google+.

Here's the link from the post:
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2998354?p=plus_locati...
He's not only bashing java but writes a lot of java. Are you as comfortable with that?