skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But who will manage the systems that are managing the systems? I'm sure this will work out brilliantly for them when systems crash, or hackers start exfiltrating their data, and there's no one left to analyze the logs and discover and fix the holes.

The problem at the NSA isn't that there are too many sysadmins, although apparently that plays well with tech illiterate politicians. The problem is too many morally unconscionable programs which lead to a growing revulsion in the ranks.

Mr. Alexander defends his agency's conduct and claims the press is distorting the facts. "No one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacies," he said. "There were no mistakes like that at all." Except we know that even FISA says that's not true, in a report so damning apparently even elected members of congress can't read it.

I have news for you Keith, blanket collection of the "meta-data" of every call on Verizon's network is ex vi termini, invasion of privacy and civil liberty. DEA's SOD (Special Operations Division) handing off your clandestine intercepts to civilian law enforcement is just the latest, but not the last, sickening revelation. The leaks won't stop until you stop, and I hope your hubris continues to blind you to how close the political tides are to turning against you.
It seems to me that your 'ends justify the means' mentality conflicts with your sworn oath to uphold the Constitution, and I can only hope history will look back on this whole endeavor as a dark stain in American history, and view you like a McCarthy of our time. Machiavelli would be proud of you, sir.
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=sean
{"sean":"male"}

Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
Well, there are lots of people whose threat model doesn't include the police.

Say for instance you are a psychiatrist who wants to offer patients a fairly secure method of talking to you. Or you are a small business doing work in China.
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joe

{"joe":"male"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jo

{"jo":"female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jamie

{"jamie":"mostly_female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jaime

{"jaime":"andy"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joan

{"joan":"female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=kelly

{"kelly":"mostly_female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=lucy

{"lucy":"female"}

BONUS:
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jaime&country=ireland

{"jaime":"male"}

Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
By similar logic then, you're saying that what Weev did should be punished under CFAA. The AT&T site was "open" in terms of access but it was "private" because AT&T said it was. Picking and choosing what you think is "public" or "private" on an unsecured, open access server/network is a slippery slope...See Weev's prosecution.

Running a Tor node means you're running a public service. Full stop.
> Java is now owned by Oracle, which has always been and will always be evil.

> But there are multiple JavaScript implementations available

These are posed as if they are a contrast, but they are not. There are multiple Java implementations available, as well.
1. Increase efficiency.

2. Reduce leak surface area.

3. Would-be whistleblowers might be more tempted to exchange information for money, ie become spies, at which point you could nail them and nobody bats an eyelid.

4. At least spies sell their information in secret instead of blurting it out all over the place.

5. Dead people/prisoners don't count in unemployment statistics.

It's a win-win-win-win-win situation. Brilliant move.
I seriously hope the NSA actually means to eliminate 90% of sysadmin rights by reducing the access rights of most of the people to minimal necessary, not 90% of actual sysadmin positions. Because either NSA is grossly, unbelievably overstaffed (and for some weird reason with, from all possible positions, sysadmins) or, if they staffed like any normal organization, firing 90% of sysadmins would cause unbelievable chaos in all IT systems. Something sounds very weird here.
Alternate interpretation: Hey guys, let's try this DevOps thing I read about in InfoWorld; it says you can reduce the number of sysadmins by 90%.
This anti-Putin gay propaganda has to stop. If he seriously wanted gays exterminated, there wouldn't be a single one left alive in Russia today. All he's doing is try to fight the gay agenda, which even as a non-Russian, I'm thankful for.
'The fabricated iPhones came from this factory', where 'fabricated' means 'produced', is a tautology and hence an ungainly way to present such a sentence ('unfabricated iPhones' wouldn't 'come from' anywhere). As presented, I feel it's more likely for 'fabricated' to mean 'fake', given the context.
Public nudity is mere morals. IMO nothing law should deal with. Tyranny is a strong word, but it seems unreasonable interference.
I tend to agree with you, even if I am no expert.
Tech is the New Black: Decoded Fashion at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week
Show HN: Goldfish.io - Carfax for startups
Interesting 'collision' of aquatic themed names.
> Well, there are lots of people whose threat model doesn't include the police.

> Say for instance you are a psychiatrist who wants to offer patients a fairly secure method of talking to you.

If you are a psychiatrist, your threat model ought to include the police.
"You must master is now."
Most certainly true. If not for production, you will at least use if d for communication of your work on the Internet.

"JavaScript is making all other languages irrelevant"
Hogwash. Many many languages out there have something to offer you intellectually and professionally. Saying they are all now irrelevant is naïve and the path to mediocrity.
Maybe this is all just a big ploy set up by Ubuntu and Paypal. Set up a $32M campaign, sure to fail, split the fees!
Weak, myopic leadership which has consistently led to a lack of innovation or even (IMO) basic competence. Their profit mostly comes from windows and office, both products that are extremely old, vulnerable, and in a state of decline.

Microsoft has some other sources of revenue but nothing really innovative or capable of huge amounts of growth.
For what it's worth, I'm starting a new project to do just that. The project aims to enable secure mail & file sharing.

There isn't much code ATM, and the protocol hasn't been spec'd out, but I have an idea. If you want to talk more & contribute in the early protocol design phase you can find me on #gourami on freenode.
Shout a mate through new app
Thanks, added to my list on amazon.
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jackie
{"jackie":"andy"}

Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
LocomotiveCMS – a modern, MIT-licensed Rails CMS
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Erin
{"Erin":"mostly_female"}

Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
I haven't seen Soylent Green in a long time and all I remember is "Soylent Green is people". I'd guess that many people who haven't seen the movie know that line and nothing else.
"...taking something without paying at Wholefoods Market; but when two security guards came after her and she thought they were attacking her, she fought back. This led to a felony charge for robbery."

I'm very curious about Melissa's case now. Shoplifting ain't felony robbery, obviously, and over-aggressive security staff have been known to injure or kill people[1][2], so "thought they were attacking her" is a legitimate concern.

[1] - http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/ex-guard-convicted-sho...
[2] - http://jezebel.com/5967072/woman-shot-dead-by-walmart-securi...
The most concrete version of my point is that I don't think the most powerful AI we'll create will have, for instance, a human-coded algorithm for detecting faces. Instead, it'll have the ability to read electrical signals from a camera and understand the changing patterns in them, including the presence of faces. This ability to understand changing patterns would be due to "simpler" rules than the rules specifically designed to understand faces.

So yes, a general purpose learning algorithm, using the correct paradigm, would learn to think in a way as powerful as we do. And it'll do so in a way that its programmers would never be able to predict.

In the same vein, I would say that Google search results is an emerging phenomena, albeit not quite as interesting as general purpose intelligence. This is because it's intractable to predict what Google will return for certain queries, even if we know all of its rules. Keep in mind that there are degrees of emergence, it's not black and white. (On the other hand, I don't think Google's algorithm is as "simple" as it originally was, but that's for another discussion.)
Paris is "andy" androgynous

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Paris

Source: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
>I propose that public nudity and refusing to give your name to police when they have no cause to ask it are both fundamental rights of man and that any society which denies these rights is tyrannical and any person who denies these rights is an enemy of humanity.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.... whoa. I like to think of myself as open-minded but I'm not ready for that just yet. That being said, San Francisco apparently has no punishment for being nude in public and yet I've only seen nudity in public twice in the 6 years of having a full-time job there. So maybe it should be removed from the law and most people will continue to cover-up out of personal modesty.
Switched to runbox: https://runbox.com/
Thanks for pointing that out. I was relying on a source that said otherwise, so for the future I will not trust it as much.

> can be forced to build backdoor,

It seems like they have the option of shutting down as an alternative to implementing a backdoor and lying to their customers about the level of security. If you know of examples of business forced to stay open and the owners forced to continue to work at a company for the purpose of government investigation I would be interested in learning more.
Except that their pot will suck like McDonald's hamburgers, since they'll make it out of Green Slime.
How 3D Printers Could Feed Astronauts & Mine Asteroids
Anything that makes driving less convenient is fine by me!
It would be interesting if people were able to get the full digital copies, because many times edits will leave evidence behind. If you have EXIF or other data on the camera, you might know what size the photos are supposed to be and can then prove that they've been cropped because they're some oddball size. Also, software like Adobe Photoshop may leave behind things like a thumbnail of the original picture in the metadata. I seem to remember a few people being embarrassed by that one.
Your home has the best legal protections in the United States.
You might as well try to shame J. Edgar Hoover.
Agreed, the rogue suicide in the wild is a problem.

and...with theguardian.com currently:

Breaking news:
US orders non-essential staff to leave consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, citing terrorist threat. More details to follow ...

you suppose whatever intercepted intel causing all these embassy closures are `tainted' with `barium' so the threat
is scanning NSA's global surveillance to see what activates a hwall alert and what does not? Eg, peaking traffic volume, how to do this with a machine generated sustained random crypto-noise spike?
Exactly. A lot of the fallout from this seems to be revolving around the idea of getting a service in 'not the USA'. Never mind the fact that:
a) The US has been shown to actively compromise targets in their ally's jurisdictions and then share that information. We can assume allies are doing similar.
b) Countries not allied to the US are not necessarily your friends either.

Odd times, when the data havens proposed by Neal Stephenson in his sci-fi books start to look more and more important... to the citizens of (supposedly) the most freedom-loving country in the world.
What's wrong with e.g. #ddd on #222?
Can't they just changes jurisdictions? It's not like the US is the only place to incorporate and host servers.

It's be awesome if we could invent the legal equivalent of a vagrant box for corporate personhood. How cool would it be if you could easily transfer your company between countries, choosing the jurisdiction most convenient for the moment.
I'd honestly take blinking text over overt Flash ads any day...
Macy's with 5 shoppers is nothing. If you want to see how bad it can get, check out DeadMalls[0], where they classify and document malls that are already dead or otherwise dying.

Rackspace just moved their HQ into one of these dead malls[1], which is highly interesting.

[0] http://deadmalls.com/
[1] http://www.planetizen.com/node/59071
What do Amazon (consumer goods), Berkshire (investments, many in "boring" companies), and Exxon (energy) have in common? They're all massive businesses with no product cycle (and mostly no recognizable "product" at all). They are unlikely to be quickly undone because not only does their business planning go on for decades, their customers do too. This is not a sufficient condition for corporate longevity (see: Hostess, Lehman, Enron), but it might be a necessary one.
1. Why the popup window?

2. Are developers permitted to strip the Persona branding - to make the login process seem to flow with the current website - not a bolt on?

3. Would you consider including tiny profile icon links next to the button itself, to facilitate single-click profile sign-on/switch?
Automating SaltyBet - My Live and Ongoing Adventure
But how many people actually use non-Oracle Java VMs as the default Java VM in a web browser? Or even as a non-default Java VM?
Well, DC is the special case in the area. Over a third of residents don't own a car and just a hair under half (49.5%) walk or use public transit to get to work. Contrast that with MD or VA where the numbers are 11% and 6.6% respectively. In MD/VA 83%/87% drive or carpool to work. (http://factfinder2.census.gov/)

I expect the majority of people ticketed in DC are those commuters coming from the surrounding suburbs. It's logical that people who aren't negatively affected by the cameras have a better opinion of them. Even then, the survey linked in that thread shows a fairly narrow majority (55%) approval.

There's more cheering for red light cameras and requests for box block cameras than traffic cameras in general. Anecdotally, most find red light cameras more acceptable than speed cameras.

Personally, I commute into DC every day, but rarely by car. I don't mind the cameras outside of the uncharacteristically low-speed ones posted along empty stretches on the main arteries in and out of town. They're automated toll collectors targeting tourists and first-timers.

Also, what a typical Reddit thread. Every comment that's remotely critical of the cameras has been downvoted negative despite some perfectly valid points.
Malls have made a huge comeback among the young people in my city, after the central city was decimated by a large earthquake.

One of the statistics that kinda blows me away, on Boxing Day, the largest mall in the city (which is still tiny by American standards) is visited by over 25% (>100000 people) of the population of the city.
CSS 3D Image Flip Gallery With Dynamic Shadows
If an admin could update the URL to point to http://www.rfk.id.au/blog/entry/pypy-js-poc-jit/ (w/o the anchor) that would be awesome!
Awesome work! I love the deploy to github pages feature!
> That leaves the Scandinavian countries, I suppose, but I have a hard time seeing a lot of libertarian-minded people fleeing the U.S. for that collectivist utopia.

As a pragmatic libertarian, I am willing to pay many more dollars in taxes to provide services I don't agree with so long as little to none of my tax dollars go towards bombing brown people and spying on citizens.

Some things are worth compromising over.
It seems like he deleted my comment from his site's disqus (it's his right) but I rewrote the exact same API in a couple of lines using sexmachine and ruby (I had been meaning to try Sinatra anyway). The source is here:
https://github.com/rajington/genderizer

Hosted on heroku's free tier here are some more interesting examples:

Basic:
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=peter

{"peter":"male"}

"Mostly" Response:
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie

{"Jamie":"mostly_female"}

Country (helps with guesses, default USA):
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie&country=great_br...

{"Jamie":"mostly_male"}
A comment on the idea by John Preskill:
http://quantumfrontiers.com/2013/06/07/entanglement-wormhole...
The Pirate Bay: BitTorrent site sails to its 10th birthday
It's probably served the same way subpeona's are, in person.
The humor of this joke is in how many people (perhaps including its author!) take it seriously.
Startups are becoming the porn of the business world
Having laws is the least of the issues.
The feds wanted to install a prism device on his network, not sure if he shut everything down to prevent that from happening or if there are other factors at play.

The guy who runs the service is one of my best friends. He's the kind of guy who would burn the server farm to the ground before he did something that violated the terms dictated in his privacy policy.
That reminds me of the universities that I went to that tried to rename the Graphic Design departments to "Communication Design" or "Graphic Communications" or anything but the image of a lowly pixel pusher. Graphic Design has been greatly devalued by the prevalence of the adobe suite of software- it used to be about solving large organisational problems. now people just think "The way it looks" and that perception has become impossible to shake. It's a real problem.

I don't think it's solved by coming up with new airy fairy words that nobody understands, and are never clearly defined. It gives the strong impression that it's not a real job. Like "social media consultant".
It's actually blinking just 1/4 of the time
IANAL, but a reasonable guess tells me that while shutting down the service wouldn't be illegal, you would still be on the hook for the requested data. You don't pony up, the Feds would, at a minimum, charge you with obstruction of justice and consequences would follow.
Acer to downplay Windows in favor of Android, Chrome OS
Didn't Weev have a legitimate AT&T account? Isn't that how he discovered the vulnerability in the first place? Seems to me that would make him part of the "AT&T community" to whom the site was open to.

But ignoring all that, the definition of what is open to the general citizenry and what is open to the people representing the government are two distinct things.

This is a very recent example where the law is pretty explicit about what the cops can do versus what the public at large can do:

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15419/exclusive_activi...
I believe encryption is a very reasonable goal, but if anything the fact that encryption including stenography is highly detectable and is now known as reasons for suspicion and analysis, I do not agree with it being "the only recourse."

This is a technical oriented community so I do feel the need to highlight the problem with focusing on technical solutions, let alone touting them as the only recourse. The writing so to speak was on the wall when recent exposed wrong-doings were made legal, immunity rendered with payments processed to the collaborators. Attempts at technical solutions have brought drone missiles upon Yemenis and others, Australians trapped in diplomatic buildings, valiant whistle-blowers imprisoned/deposed to Russia, data researchers jailed for gazing upon contractor information[1].

There is no technical solution to this. Technical solutions are getting people killed, renditioned, deposed, hunted, prosecuted, tracked, analyzed. Enough with the technical solutions already.

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-doj-is-suing-barrett-br...
Ask HN: Do you prefer a world without IP laws?
That's exactly what happened. He can't afford to continue fighting the feds in court, so he's shutting everything down. His lawyer is expensive and he will go bankrupt if he stays the course.

If anyone can recommend someone who can provide counsel pro-bono let me know and I'll forward the message along.
Yeah, a few people have been looking at how to do things like this too (I've been talking to them); the idea being mix-net vs. onion routing, which is the big win of being async, and sensible defaults. It's a lot easier to do confidentiality/integrity/etc. on messages vs. traffic analysis resistance vs. strong adversaries, though.
Fast, lovely, and amazing.

But it tries so hard to hide Safari that it makes a few very common use cases impossible.

1. You can't back up if you visit a web page

2. You can't share/email an article as you can in safari.

I will be using this daily, but NOT pinned as a web app in ios7
it means antivirus industry will never be "complete"
Well, I wish you would add more. You'd surely have more of value and experience to say than almost anybody here. But I hope that doesn't sound demanding--I really appreciate your comment.
I think that completely killing the blink tag is a bit extreme given that its core implementation could simply have been replaced by a CSS polyfill.
Wow. Evidently they destroyed all the data preemptively as well. No notice, just poof. You have to wonder if they thought the situation was dire enough to not give people any warning that their emails were being lost. I understand the decision from a security standpoint, but there must have been some fear up in that decision room. Applaud them for the tough decision.

"Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview late Thursday that his company had destroyed its server. “Gone. Can’t get it back. Nobody can,” he said. “We thought it was better to take flak from customers than be forced to turn it over.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/two-providers-of-en...
Omigosh, I love exploring dead malls. They're so eerie and surreal. The one I recently went to was ornate - huge tile floors, brass highlights, gigantic hallways, and giant fountains. Yet there were drips in the ceiling, a thin layer of dust on the floors, and half the lights were off. There were maybe a dozen people in the mall. Half the store fronts were filled with fake placeholder things. It was like uncovering a zombie Pompeii.

I encourage everyone to check out their local dead mall, especially one that you visited when you were a kid. Lots of strange nostalgia to be had for sure. Bring rollerblades or a skateboard if you want to get adventurous.
That's ETOPS vs. 3/4 engine aircraft, I believe, but I don't think the maintenance and reliability standards are appreciably different for civilian 1 vs. 2. Mainly because no scheduled service is done using a single engine, so it doesn't even come up.

I'm pretty sure military maintenance standards are so entirely different that their extensive experience with single engine aircraft isn't meaningful -- plus, their singles are mainly either very military specific (F-16 and other light fighters) or historical. Most of their transport aircraft have something in common with commercial, now, except maybe C-130s. And the USN has generally favored twin vs. single for "reliability over water" anyway.