skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see how disgruntled ex-employees would be a risk if the correct policies are put into place like, you know, the whole confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements.
> NSA, which has been ~10 years ahead of private industry for the last couple decades, before which time they were even further ahead.

Do you have anything to back this up other than the old rumor that NSA (specifically their crypto) was ahead of private industry by 10 years, something even Bill Binney said is probably not accurate any more. And mind you, this old "10 year ahead" phrase was always specific about crypto, nothing else.

> In fact, I think it's likely that they're significantly smarter than any of us. Bear that in mind when you design your NSA-proof email applications.

I wouldn't bet on it. NSA and many other government agencies are full of incompetent or barely adequate people. Just look at our intelligence failures regarding terrorism and in both wars the last 10 years. NSA has a huge budget with billions of dollars to throw at their problems, so they get stuff done, sure, but smarter than private industry? Nah.
For beating animals you might be right. I don't think so, but maybe you are right. For the rest you are not.

Also you somehow see to confuse moral and ethical. Moral is "Eww, that's itchy." For example sodomy. Ethics are a reflection and systematization of the first. The latter is abstract.

There are no universal ethics. But several sound systems. Kant's Categorical imperative, several utilitarianism. Hell even Hedonism is ethics and IMO a way better than morals.

But all these have in common they do give explanations and justifications, unlike morals. Morals is just "that's nothing one should do" or "We never did that." And I can't see a ethics that would demand the criminalization of public nudity. However it is very easy to reduce to criminalization of killing and theft to a sound first principle. And IMO only these first principles are important enough to force them upon others.
Bear that in mind when you design your NSA-proof email applications.

Oh the patrony!
IBM's New Programming Language Works Like a Human Brain
Hushmail - Lavabit - Where does the madness end?
Tech Exile Feed
We can't expect such association when the biggest internet companies in America (Google, Facebook, Yahoo...) clearly don't care about privacy. It's all about money.

Google don't be evil? FAIL
Walmart employees are HEAVILY subsidized by welfare programs; to my knowledge, Costco employees are paid well and do not need these programs.
I agree with you regarding defense. I do not think any part of the USG is truly competent at defending their own systems.

I agree with you that the USG is contractorizing infosec --- though note that this makes it even easier for them to recruit --- and that contractorization degrades their capabilities.

I disagree with you on offensive security. I also think you should be aware that the contractor resources the offensive side has don't entirely overlap the defensive stuff; there are better contractors available for the offensive stuff.

And all this goes out the window when it comes to pure signals intelligence and cryptography, where we're not even close.
Heston was an amazing spokesperson. Love that speech. The perfect emotional appeal combined with giving a higher purpose and sending for the audience.

Just wish privacy advocates would stop fumbling on their Macbooks and instead find that universal appeal in their speeches. Imagine getting JPB's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" presentend in the Heston's kind of way.
HN killed it? "Could not launch the application"
Ask HN: Bootstrap alternatives?
Is this the latest round of "No Shit" headlines?

"News at 11: Happy and content employees considered lower-risk for insider threat than unhappy employees. Stay tuned for the weather!"
In the glory days of AOL I ran into non-tech savvy users who thought that it was the internet. I was met with blank stares when I opened another IE instance.

In many cases, companies that develop software for non-tech-savvy users go the extra mile to make things easy to use. For me, it's been easy to believe that it was somewhat predatory to make your "thing" a complete portal, but I can see now that it is really a consequence of trying to approach users at their level. What irks me is when it seems like a conscious lock-in strategy.
I don't worship Snowden at all or see him as celebrity. If anything I wish there was 100% more attention on the information he brought to light instead of him.

I merely recognize his extreme sacrifice and thank him for it.

If we are supposed to thank the people who ran and signed up for the military to invade Iraq and empowered the insanity of the last administration, we most certainly can thank Snowden for showing us that not only has the insanity not stopped, it may have gotten far worse.
Google May Have Tapped Motorola For A New Nexus Phone
Sysadmins never get laid off in Europe?
Remember when Stevey "accidentally" posted his SOA rant on G+ in October 2011? (Rehosted on Gist: https://gist.github.com/kgrz/2880883 )

A large number of these ideas are still very much alive in his head.
At some point, it becomes a pointless semantic game. It's clearly not Stalin-bad, but it's still pretty damn bad. There are solid reasons both to support and dispute the label of "police state".

To strive for accuracy, I'd go with "unaccountable oligarchy" or "faux-democratic tyrannical beauracracy". Not as punchy, admittedly. You could also call it "soft fascism".

Ultimately, we live in a new and unprecedented form of state power run wild, and while there are echoes of history, it's probably going to continue to unfold in a mostly unique way. There's no reason to forcibly apply the old labels any more than there is to call an airplane a "winged tank".
Thanks for the honest responses. I will not lie: you easily shredded most of my reservations. Not sure if I will donate just yet, but I will definitely consider it in the future.

And I did look at the code. It looks Pythonic and clean, so I am impressed. Definitely above my capabilities.
It was an example. Replace deviceScaleFactor with some other function that modifies, say, m_foo, and you have the same problem. And no, const+mutable is not an answer(in my example), because the function does in fact modify the class in a way important to the caller.
Perhaps programming alone can't give you 100% happiness. How about looking at other areas of your life such as improving your relationship/social life, or learning other new skills?
Yes, I do have things to back it up. No, I'm not simply referring to cryptography. NSA is a very large organization; Bill Binney's say-so doesn't mean a whole lot to me. Look at the kinds of people that "graduate" from NSA TAO, and note that that's the program they let us know about.

If you want to be wishful about this point, I won't stop you.
I think the car is the primary point of discussion, because it is currently the only thing that can be questioned on technical merits. I already share your observation, as with most people I have actually spoken to, about the future prospects of Tesla, and I am patiently waiting for charing stations near me before I buy one. But, most Tesla supporters don't need to comment on a forum, because they have already shown their support by actually investing in the company, either through purchasing a car, buying stock, or both. But, for the rest of the world, being pedantic is an easy way to be heard, and everyone wants to be heard.

Also, they did not create the electric car market, they only revived it. (See previous point.)
Words matter. What Obama said was: 'We Don't Have a Domestic Spying Program'.

So maybe it's a global spying program that just happens to include domestic data.
You've just given me an idea for a project.
Costco needs their customers to love their products in aggregate, but not any one product in particular. They're good about quality, so I don't really have to care about brands. If I want detergent or paper towels or whatever, I just pick whatever looks good. If they pull one in favor of another, I don't care. If you want to buy specific brands on any given trip, Costco isn't for you, but if you just want something decent and don't care who made it, it works out well. You don't have to love the specific brands, just the stuff they carry in general.

I'm sure Amazon could cause a lot of trouble for Costco if they can match their prices or come close, but I don't see that happening. I basically buy three categories of products at Costco: frozen food, fruit, and non-perishable bulk items like paper towels or toilet paper. I can't see Amazon ever coming close on the first two, simply because the inherent costs of delivering perishable items to the house are too high. They can pull off Prime because they're delivering items that have no problem being in transit for two days, but I can't see how they could deliver e.g. strawberries for a reasonable price ever. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't see it happening.
It is strange to pretend that the only valid drug to use for pain or insomnia is THC. What does that have to do with pharma sales reps?
Social networks are suffocating the Internet
"At some point, this increasing bunker mentality of walling off users and their data will inevitably begin to impede real progress--the kind of exciting advancements that have made the web such a fascinating, growing and, yes, profitable space over the last decade. The question we have to ask ourselves is, are we sabotaging the real potential of the web in the name of short-term profits and a better user experience?"
There's a Reason It's Called "Venture" Capital
Years ago, a local pizza restaurant named Sweet Tomatoes opened to rave reviews. The owner hired a recent college grad named Josh, and over the new few months, she mentored Josh, introduced him to her business contacts, and shared her plans for expansion.

Josh took the recipes, the business contacts, and even the expansion plans, and started a rival pizza chain. Within a short time he had 21 locations that were doing quite well.

But it all started with a big red flag. How do you think the story goes?

The restaurant began hiring illegal immigrants from the small town of Marilac in Brazil. These employees worked up to 80 hours a week, while the restaurant violated minimum wage laws and failed to pay overtime. Employees risked deportation if they spoke out. In less than a two year period, the owners failed to pay employees $425,000 in wages.

When the owners were ordered to pay these wages, they devised a scheme to recoup the money by slashing wages, resulting in a class-action lawsuit and a follow-up labor investigation.

Meanwhile, Josh bought himself a yacht, a vacation home, and a small airplane, allegedly purchased illegally with company funds.

The company eventually went bankrupt and last year its locations were sold at auction (though the original owner, with the help of some financiers, was able to buy back four locations).

When you see huge red flags, tread very carefully.

Along the same lines, when somebody starts cheating on their significant other to be with you, don't be surprised when they cheat on you to be with someone else. You're not special. You won't get special treatment.

Now I want pizza.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/12/05/a_driven_...
Criley, have you lived in a police state? I did. I don't offend easily but my advice to you is that unless you had a dog in this race by living in a police state yourself, please think harder about saying what I will or will not be insulted by.
I've done that! I did that with Slashdot, and Reddit, and a few other places besides. You guys seem to follow me into whatever new place I end up, and start the politics conversation back up again. Why can't it be you guys who leave for once? :c
Does anyone else find it crazy that the absolute size of WebCore is 38 MB? That's larger than the Linux kernel which includes a bunch of drivers.

If I understand Webkit's architecture correctly, that doesn't even include chrome (the visible UI, not Google's browser), JavaScriptCore, platform specific glue, and especially no auxilliary files (certificates, icons, the "broken image" sign, ...).

Sometimes I long for the good old days where a browser used to fit on a floppy disc (Opera).

I wonder if someone has done analysis on what features make browsers so complicated. I could imagine that 20% of the code could handle 80% of the features (as so often). You could have a 'lite' HTML subset that's targeted on rich documents, rather than rich client webapps. Something like that would be great for older computers or mobile computers.

Going a bit further, I know there is a lot of crazy stuff in WebKit... e.g. neural networks try to predict which links you'll click on, based on previous behavior, mouse movements, etc, and then the browser prefetches likely pages. There are runtimes for NaCL, pNaCL, Flash, there's a PDF browser (some of these are plugins), there is a VNC client, support for a bunch of different rendering models (layered HTML elements, Canvas, 3D), media support (codecs), support for webcams and microphones, and peer-to-peer communication, and much more. phew

I guess a large chunk of this stuff should be in the OS, so that other apps could benefit from it. And another large part of it should be in plugins, so the browser can benefit from all the codecs on the system, for example.
I don't think "fabricated iPhones" means fake iPhones at all. It might be awkward, but that doesn't mean that it means 'fake'.
The primary effect of the inline keyword is to tell the compiler that a function is not to be exported from the current object. e.g.

foo.h:

int bar(int i) { return i; /* awesome function! */

foo.cpp:
#include "foo.h"
…
bar(5)
…

At this point everything is fine, but lets say there's also:

wiffle.cpp:
#include "foo.h"
…
bar(6)
…

now both foo.o and bar.o will contain a function named bar - because they picked up the definition in foo.h and c/c++ don't (technically) see any difference between a function that has been written inline, or a function that was included from a header.

By slapping the inline keyword on the function bar, the link flags for the function change so that the bar won't be exported from any object file that includes it, and so the name collision will no longer occur at link time.

There are a bunch of other benefits, mostly along the lines of "there function doesn't need to be exported therefore if it's not used i don't need to include it in the object"
Don't copy and paste commands into your shell, kids.
Surely people calling the US a police state is largely down to recent events.

I don't think that it is largely speaking that people who always thought that the US is a police state have suddenly appeared on HN, but more that people on HN who didn't previously think that the US was a police state are changing their minds.

The US has the worlds highest incarceration rate per capita than any other country and has just been caught running a global surveillance network that would make even the Stasi blink. To not use the term police state when discussing all of this would be weirder.
I would check on that. As far as I know, the US no longer stocks any "high yield" nukes, and the same for Russia, or at least a very small fraction of their previous arsenal. Not that a "small" nuke would be any picnic.
yeh right in reality there was a concerted effort by N the German navel intelligence to recruit and run spies in the UK.

A number of them where caught bang to rights both pre and during ww1.

hes right that Quex caused more harm than good but hey its the daily mail see the recent hysteria about opt in to porn which is David Cameron jumping the the DM's tune
We've been using Selenium to test a large enterprise ASP.Net webforms application and it's been kind of a hassle. Configuration was horrible but once that's out of the way it's sort of straightforward.

What benefits does TestCafe bring against Selenium? What's the elevator pitch?
I am beyond happy and proud if HN for keeping such a discourse about these issues! I have so much more respect for the HN community for keeping these issues in the front page and having such a sober view of their implications!

Sober views like calling the U.S. a police state? The train where hn had a high-quality discussion about U.S. surveillance and national security policy left the station long, long ago. It was about the time we were getting minute-by-minute postings on the exact position of an airplane seat that didn't contain Edward Snowden.
Higher frequency radiation tends to give you a more focused beam for a given lens size. Here's a run related tool for figuring out how much damage a laser beam will do given frequency, energy, lens size, etc.

http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/laser.php
Bootstrap Made Accessible
Put this in historical context: I'd say we're in the early '70s period, after the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 but before the BATF a bit later starting to abusively enforcing it and word of that got out; critically we don't have specific examples of national security privacy violations, let alone atrocities.

How politically powerful was the NRA back then?

Not very; in fact, a few years later it proposed to close their D.C. HQ, get out of politics altogether and return to its original marksmanship etc. role. Only a member revolt at the 1977 annual meeting in Cincinnati reversed that and e.g. established a formal 503(c)(4) lobbying and political arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, which rates politicians, sends out those orange postcards with scores before elections, etc. etc.
A good question.

The reason I expect a good designer know something about the media they are working in is because this is been very traditionally part of the job. Designers have been expected know what inks can and can't be reproduced on which materials. Or which printing process will be most economical etc.

As you point out only the truly bad ones don’t know the baseline capabilities of their platform be it app or web design...

But for as for the good ones, that do know their media, - well, I don't find it odd that some would find the best way that they could learn the constraints of their media was to play around with HTML and CSS directly (or Interface Builder). And I do think that people who have of done that are actually a bigger asset that's than people who have just read up. I assume this is because they have a more visceral feel for the costs of their designs.

This does not mean that I expect my designers to code, or do production work. It just means that those designers who are capable of hacking out a toy system seem to be more capable of designing things that implement easily. And that saves me money.
The Great Student Loan Repayment Program That No One's Using
Of course, they are the ones determining if you're fighting for the other side.

Let's say I'm an American living in a foreign country and I read the Koran, or attend a Mosque, or even actually hang out with some known Al Qaeda guys because they are hilarious (not because I in any way want to do anything they do).... I'm labeled guilty and murdered without a court case to determine what I was even doing.
I recommend doubling-down and focusing on Java. It'll help you get fundamental programming concepts down and will give you a strong foundation in object-oriented programming.

I recommend learning C after Java. It's much more difficult to learn, but your prior Java experience will help you pull through.

Note: this all depends on what you mean by "some" programming experience.
Absolutely on the sigint/elint/etc and traffic analysis side, they are probably decades ahead (mainly because no one else actually cares. Pretty much the closest competition is people trying to meet FCC B regulations and amateur radio people. It's not even a race. There's CR and maybe a couple others beating the drum on side channel emissions and the commercial market seems to not care.)

I assume offensive is focused almost exclusively within NSA and maybe a few elements of DOE/DHS (I'd be utterly terrified if every random OIG office within the government had an offensive security team, like they do have SWAT teams now...) It's also probably a case where they can have a huge lead because (for legal reasons, as well as market reasons) there's limited demand in the commercial world for "full contact" offensive security -- just pentesters and the like, or actual criminal activity, or for the lulz.

The other thing is resources other than ideas. Even I could come up with ideas like "oh, so we need to intercept all the traffic? Let's put fiber splitters at the MAEs and IXes and such.", but having the resources to subsidize facilities, work with carriers, etc. is entirely different.
> Yes, I do have things to back it up.

Such as? Bill Binney, having actually been one of the top mathematicians at NSA for 30 years, carries more weight than you do, unless you want to share specifics that back up the regurgitation of the "10 year ahead" phrase.
No humour allowed!
Reminds me of the time I called the police to report an attempted break-in. An hour later they showed up and immediately ran my ID for warrants, I assume. Now I'm on the defensive because even if I wanted to call the police I probably won't.
This blew up more than I expected. It is the front page story now of Spiegel Online (one of the top German newspapers).
So, at the end if, now, intelligence agencies are spying retrieve information from Google et al and analyzing it with algorithms that are already in the public domain why they need a large budget or a budget at all?
[ot] Curious from other posts: are you Brazilian/Portuguese (your nick)?
Interesting paragraph from the Reuters article:

"Some security experts remain supportive of the government. NSA Director Keith Alexander's talk at the Black Hat conference was well received on Wednesday, despite a few hecklers.

"...Alexander took a conciliatory tone during his Black Hat speech, defending the NSA but saying he looked forward to a discussion about how it could do things better."

The article portrays Black Hat as the more "professional" conference, as opposed to Def Con.
http://ia600900.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.246...
That makes a lot of sense, thank you :)
How is the defendant an email account and not a person or party of some kind?
Stop looking for nonexistent hyperbole - There is nothing in the post which suggests people are being killed.

There is a bit of hyberbole about the "automation of tasks" and the "small severance/bureaucratic manner", both of which are (get this craziness): funny.
I think I agree with both you and the commenter to whom you're replying. My general purchasing process involves:

1. Go to Costco and purchase as many huge things in bulk as I can. People like to equate 'buying in bulk' with 'pricing', but honestly for me its just as much about the convenience: I don't care about saving $.50 on toilet paper so much as I care about having to buy toilet paper only once a year. I'm picky with some things (like hand soap), but like you said I know Kirkland products are going to be good enough.

2. For everything else, buy off Amazon/Target/TJ's.

One of the cues I'm surprised Costco hasn't taken is subscription-based shopping (as in, I set up a list of X items that I can schedule for a pickup every few months) that would make this process even better. Given the decidedly non-marketing-oriented layout of their stores, I don't think they'd miss the opportunity for up-selling.
Get Your iOS App Under 50 MB to Increase Your Downloads
You are correct and my remark was a bit crass. I agree with you completely: instead of sidestepping the Constitution and fending off claims of Constitutional violations with secrecy, we should be amending it.
Looks good - can you explain the color coding?
It's a nice idea, maybe the QR code could contain a link with the key itself, relevant information and links to pgp software.

I wouldn't count on Zuck though, he kind of lives from facebook being unencrypted.
I agree. And I would also prefer my data to fall in the hands of a random government with less resources than the US government.