skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wouldn't go as far as to say the average American doesn't care,

I would. Or, rather, considering only Americans who are upset about this sort of thing, they don't care enough to spend time on this, and expose themselves to risk.

For a given action (say, protesting), you have to measure the cost and the benefit.

We are incredibly rich compared to the people who protested in large numbers in the past, in the sense that we have more to lose, so the cost is higher than it has been in the past.

I believe that there's also an element of "what could I do?", in that there's no path to making a difference. Maybe I speak only for myself, but it's not at all clear what action I could take that would have a significant effect on political things I care about: the times when something went the way I would prefer, I clearly had nothing to do with it, and the times when I acted, nothing came of it (except mild or moderate cost to me personally), so I need to see or create a realistic plan before I work at it again. So, considering the likelihood of making a difference combined with the worth of the difference, the benefit side is similarly lacking.

A kind of exhaustion results from the constant drumbeat of scandals and horror stories and outrage porn, and I believe modern media consumers and internet readers are numb. There are so many terrible things happening at every level that it's just not clear where to begin, and adding the NSA revelations to it doesn't help simplify. Were so many terrible things happening in the 1950s? I think they were, but since the average citizen didn't hear about the vast majority of them, when they did hear, there was a clear call to action about it, and some answered that call. At this point, any action I take has to include a justification about why I didn't act yesterday -- what makes this time different; why is this problem worth spending money and time and potentially risking my freedom or health?
When I was in school, I remember several websites would submit their password as a query string. (Meaning the URL would have &password in it somewhere.)

These sites were blocked because pASSword was a "bad word."
The filter would also catch most queries that would tell you how to circumvent the filters. (Back then, just using HTTPS versions of sites was usually enough to get past them.)

The best part was: while searching about proxies / changing proxy settings was disallowed -- the computers themselves were dumb terminals that could connect to a remote server using VNC, RDP, and some proprietary Citrix protocol.

If you knew how to switch TTYs on Linux (Ctrl+Alt+1-7) you could get to a debug menu where you could enter any IP and protocol combination you wanted. (TTY2 had a root shell running busybox... the machines were imaged each time you booted though.)

For my last two years I simply connected to my home machine running VNC and browsed the Internet completely unfettered. (Plus I could remotely control my machine: so many times I would start long running downloads at the beginning of the school day.)

---

Back then, though, these filters were laughably naive. I'm amazed that it was deemed acceptable to use a system that has to be _overridden_ for students to research for their science classes.
Wow - sounds like deliberate arming. But even if it doesn't cost the local department, it costs us in aggregate. (What's rational for the local government may still not be rational for the taxpayer)
What's the best alternative for Android users?
CSS implementations are better, and have already been discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182772
It's a matter of official policy to include legal loopholes that enable the Federal government to assert its power rather than comply with the law.
I don't like the idea/law because all it's doing is protecting bad employees from getting fired quickly. I'm going to hate myself for using him as an example, but Steve Jobs was famous for firing people in elevator rides if they couldn't clearly explain what they did at the company. I agree not because it's steve jobs, but because it is important to get bad employees out as quickly as possible. Negative employees tend to make the people around them more negative, lazy employees tend the make the people around them lazier. If you're not firing them for being lazy, you're implicitly telling other employees that it's somewhat okay to be lazy. The longer you keep them around, the longer you're letting your team absorb the negative behavior. I'll let the employees go have their second and third chances at competitors, who will be weighed down wasting time and energy rehabilitating bad employees.
> Mr Obama said there had been more anti-American rhetoric since President Vladimir Putin returned to Russian presidency.

I like how this implies the anti-American rhetoric is because of Putin becoming president, rather than America doing things that it actually deserves to be criticized for.

"We're sick of people criticizing us, but we're going to keep doing all the stuff that caused that criticism".
There is a different between artsy and creative. Artsy (roughly) refers to things that appeal to the senses. Creative is a much more general notion of creating. In math, you defiantly create things. And you arguably create beautiful thing. But the beauty is not in the senses, it is in the mind. The senses are involved only as a form of communication.
There's probably some fighting going on about what exactly should be redacted or preserved.
Getting whole teams involved in the process has been standard practice for UX designers for over a decade. For the most part, the problem has been getting non-UX folks to care at all.

What you describe sounds like a scenario where everyone wants to participate, but for some reason the UX designer refuses to collaborate? I've never heard of that happening, and it runs counter to my personal experience and pretty much every UX designer I've ever talked to, so my gut feeling is that you're reacting to a unique situation.
I agree with your comment, although I'd replace "toddler" with "college kid".

That said, I found it refreshing and pleasant to watch and charming in its innocence and the depth of its ambition.
Cute, but I'm afraid that's from "'a charter of negative liberties,' which 'says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf'" (http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/09/23/w...).
That is part of the problem. A legal framework, relying in part on secret rulings re-interpreting the Fourth Amendment, have has been constructed for these programs to give them 'legality'. Secret courts, secret laws and secret rulings are blatantly antithetical to a democracy and do give the sheen of a police state, but at the same time politicians and talking heads can refer to these programs as 'legal'.

What amazes me is that Clapper can baldly lie to Congress and not even have to resign, let alone be prosecuted. Lying to Congress is a federal crime! Yet the government spends $40 million prosecuting Roger Clemens for lying to Congress about steroids, and they couldn't even get a conviction.

Also, Clapper has been wrong about many things, including Libya and Egypt. I believe the US government wants total spying because their intelligence agencies are so incompetent at identifying threats. 9/11 proves this as the CIA had identified two of the hijackers as Al Qaeda members, determined they had US visas and then did not tell the FBI or State Department. The NSA had phone transcriptions of terrorists and refused to share them with the FBI. The FBI actually started building listening stations in Africa and the east at great expense due to NSA intransigence.

Before 9/11, they were very vigilant about respecting laws on intelligence gathering. After 9/11 it all went out the window, laws were broadened and oversight has been strangled.
Heh, some friends and I joked about doing this a few years ago when one of us got a nice CNC machine. :)

I don't think that you should worry about the NSA getting your door key from the cloud; anyone who'd be able to use that access could stroll in to your house more easily with a bump key or a battering ram.
> People really do just assume that everything to do with computers is directly related, and that they can ask anyone to fix it for free because "it'll only take a second".

I totally get your point, but to be honest they're not completely wrong about that most of the time: Even if you're usually working in an entirely different area, you probably still have more general knowledge on computing than most people. This will often be enough for everday problems.
I like the "You work with computers, lease fix mine" requests as little as you do, but in reality we are able to help most of the time.
It's really unfortunate that secret courts aren't unconstitutional. You would think that one should have been obvious.
Martin Luther King: the story behind his 'I have a dream' speech
C was trivial to learn, don't listen to them. I learnt that first, and it made learning other languages easy (most popular languages are modeled after C). Mobile is a hot market, so it'd be good to learn Objective C. Also, Javascript is another popular one. Then I hear talk of learning Haskell and Lisp "just because," but I don't do anything "just because."
They're probably carefully going over the specific legal interpretation of every word, phrase, and sentence being released in order to cover their own asses legally and politically.
If this was implemented correctly, it would keep non-German governments from being able to snoop on German emails. If Germany does not snoop on Germans without a warrant, this would actually be a good thing for Germans. If European has data protection laws that prohibit snooping on foreign people without a warrant, this would actually be a good thing for everyone.

A lot of ifs that need to be answered. But this could be a good thing.
In some jurisdictions it's illegal for the police to seize property like this for their own use, and all proceeds have to go to local schools or such. Thankfully for local police the FBI is happy to officially take custody of the seized money and then pass most of it back to the police, letting them bypass those laws.
Something to reflect upon: With this deployment, Google will -- frequency licensing agreements and such aside -- own the physical layer. Presuming encryption keeps it opaque to outside scrutiny.
Hi, founder of Circle here.

Our focus is on developer productivity. That means we try to make things fast, reliable and low overhead.

As far as differentiators, we're pretty fast. We can automatically parallelize your test suite across N VMs. We automatically inspect your source tree, and figure out how to run the tests, without configuration. It's not perfect, but a substantial percentage of customers get a working build on their first try.

We have some pretty cool features in the pipeline that haven't been in generally available products, we hope to blow peoples' minds with them when they're released :-)

Let me know if there's anything else I can answer.
> " For security reasons, from the beginning of 2014 the initiative partners will only transport SSL-encrypted e-mails to ensure that data traffic over all of their transmission paths is secure."

That's the most significant part of this announcement-- it means there's finally a push to phase out plaintext email transport, which allows passive surveillance to intercept mail.
What they claim to do is basically what everybody is already doing. SSL between email servers can be considered standard, as well as SSL or at least StartTLS between client and server.

De-Mail is another thing which was introduced some years ago now. In short: Messages are encrypted on the client side, then decrypted on the server, then again encrypted and sent to the recipient where it is decrypted again...Imagine your post-office opening you mail before forwarding it to the recipient.
Along with some other things no sane person would ever suggest to do with email, De-Mail is a complete farce...

TL;DR: I'm from Germany, and my opinion is that this is the most brutal kind of PR bullshit you can get...
Incompetence explains more things than conspiracy theories. I agree with your points. Incompetent cops are more likely to shoot people than a random cabal.
This seems kind of like privacy theatre to me. What's to stop someone from just cloning your repos and deriving your email from the commit attributes?
Github Down: Taking to long to load.
Hmm, that makes sense.

Not really knowing what sort of thing information is in court decisions, what is likely the sort of thing that will be redacted? Names of example programs/agents/terrorists I guess? I don't know if it would make sense for that sort of thing to be in the decision. Or are they likely going to redact more than just supporting information?
GitHub is down.
"That promise I made a few years ago and then did the exact opposite? Would you believe me if I made that same promise again, this time with even less incentive to follow through on it?"
While we're at it, let's remove HTTP headers and request bodies, and just stuff everything into the URL. I've written tons of shitty webapps that do exactly that, so it logically follows that we should force everyone to do it.
Thanks! It's great to hear people say nice things about my baby :-)
Shut up. Is it necessary to bash every single new feature because it can be done another way?
I just don't get it. Why not create and store the encryption keys client side? That way, even Lavabit would not have any keys to hand over. Just like Mega does.
Buy stock in whatever company the DoJ buys their black markers from.
Not going to help. Cloning some public repo will expose all emails you commited with anyway.
I agree that it is important to reform the system, not just scapegoating. However, I think you minimize the importance of holding individuals accountable and the effect that has on the system.

For example, suppose Clapper is imprisoned for 6 months and looses his job for contempt of congress (he is the one who falsely told congress that the NSA was not spying on millions of Americans). I imagine it will be awhile before the next NSA leader decides to tell congress a porkie. Done properly, individual accountability has a systemic effect.
the US can always pass a new amendment. (I mean, if you can persuade the legislature.)
How Happier treats its interns
Google's push towards Google+ reminds me of Microsoft's arrogance in forcing their vision of Windows 8. An established company trying to get another piece of the pie that is not their core competency. It's too bad Google is trying to get into the social game. I wish they would stick to the "serious" endeavors that started out with, more Wolfram Alpha, less Facebook. They don't have to own the entire internet, just do things that they can do better than anyone else...
A litany of red flags.

- "he'd stolen a few clients, some data"

- "he took on his former girlfriends brother"

- "within a year me and Ian moved to Bulgaria...John wanted to keep costs down"

- "Ians sister, had an abortion at Johns request." (I'm pro-choice, but this is still messed up)

- "I want you to fire Ian"

- "I think John wanted it all swept under the carpet."

- "Then how about my shares?" - if you ever find yourself saying this, you are sunk.

John sounds like the worst guy ever.

I'm about as trusting and naive as they come. I probably would have fallen for John's smarminess initially as well - some people are excellent manipulators - and probably kept going for a long time. But you were working for somebody who does not have a conscience. John is a classic sociopath. Be glad you got out of there - being rich under his command is not worth it.
It was the media, although of course there were the usual "wingnuts" and "moonbats", there always are.

Just look at Jim Geraghty of the National Review and his "All Barack Obama Statements Come With an Expiration Date. All Of Them." meme. In fact, you can find just mention of just about everything there was known before the 2008 election at that one mainstream establishment conservative publication.
"Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" is excellent. Anyone who hasn't read it should do so immediately.

I want some expansion of verbs, counterbalanced with the elimination of some of the less useful verbs.

The focus should be towards forcing webbrowsers away from GET and POST.

OPTIONS should be made mandatory.
Anyone seriously worried about privacy should also ensure that their gravatar doesn't point to their real email address, especially if there's a simple relationship between the email addresss and GitHub username.

Edit: Apparently, this doesn't re-write the actual repo so anyone seriously interested in e-mail addresses will be unaffected. It was already easier to get e-mails via cloning rather than through scraping or the API.
Is that better than worse than the Google model?
Judge denies Apple's request to suspend e-book antitrust ruling
It's difficult to illustrate the harm of NSA spying. In principle mass surveillance is wrong. But in practice it the effect on the average citizen is minimal to non-existent. The vast majority of surveilled people continue on normally, they work, play and live the same - i.e., the consequences of government spying on the individual level are not immediate and apparent.

Unfortunately I don't think we'll see mass popular opposition until a clear misuse of these spy powers occurs. Something similar to Watergate where a high-ranking government official uses their surveillance powers to further a personal political agenda. Unfortunately by the time it gets that bad it may be too late for reform. The next generation of mass surveillance tools will undoubtably be far more intrusive and effective. Which is why we need to agitate now against these surveillance programs.
If, because of the replacement cost model, you don't spend time and some effort to get and keep well integrated employees, the business misses out on deeper value the employees could bring. Further, those deep-value employees can handle more issues, freeing higher level management to focus on bigger, higher value issues. I think that has a lot of relevance, but then I think a lot of companies miss out on expanding value when they're focused on squeezing costs.
Employees are expensive, there is often little sense in throwing them away before seeing if you can fix them. Furthermore most bosses are, contrary to popular belief, decent people.
WebKit did fine before Google ever joined the project, and I'm sure it will do fine with them gone.
Lies[1].

[1] H.R. 6304 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ) Obama (D-IL), Yea: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...
Snake oil. Election day is coming, the conservative idiots in charge want some good press. The german interpretation of e-Mail (de-Mail) is utter bullshit. Encrypted e-Mail that is decrypted multiple times on its way, of course that will prevent the Government from reading my mail. NOT.

It seems that there are enough idiots in the world who are willing to reelect that treacherous pile of smelly shit impersonating a federal government at the moment.
If momentum builds behind an internet blackout a-la the SOPA protest, that'd be a clever way to do it.. write some js/css that black-marker-redacts the page contents.
It's probably not even right to say "...they're reliant on, and credulous of, advisers..." when it comes to organizations like the NSA. Many of the executive bureaucracies are probably well-equipped to act on their own initiative, and evade attempts from the White House to exercise direct control over their operations, regardless of whether the president is informed by advisors or acting on his own initiative.

Ironically, an overly-centralized executive branch is actually less adapt at ensuring accountability and transparency in its subordinate organizations, especially ones that have grown as large and complex as the modern federal bureaucracy has.

If we're not going to rein in the power and reduce the scale of the federal government, we're going to need to do something along the lines of making the department secretaries constitutional offices, elected independently, or implement some sort of collegial executive, like Switzerland's. Otherwise, we're going to wind up with a situation where the government is too complex to itself be governed by its constitutional officers (if it isn't already).
And SPACEJUMP has never been part of the HTTP spec.

Nor (unlike <BLINK> in HTML) has it been part of HTTP implementations, AFAICT, at least, as an HTTP verb.

The "SPACEJUMP" and "TEXTSEARCH" methods appear to be patterns for use of the GET verb.
> But I believe the Office of the President changes people

Looking at what some former presidents (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton come to mind) say after they left, it seems that this change is not permanent. It's almost like moving into the White House makes folks automatons void of any previously held principles. And moving out makes them decent people again.
It's a trap! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex
Seems fine to me right now. Status has more information: https://status.github.com
Ah, so the problem we have here is defining what "bad" is. You don't know an employee is bad without talking to them about the problem first to make sure they're aware of the problem and giving them at least 1 chance to correct it. Even in jobs where lives are directly at risk, like an air-traffic-controller, get 1 warning. No company is so important that you're justified on firing people for performance issues without at least 1 warning.

Also, I'm going to put some of the blame on the employer. The employer needs to improve their interview process if they really have such a problem with bad performers, not make firing easier.
I don't get this complaint. All of these services have a social component built in, so why not just put them all under one umbrella? It's not like Google+ does anything remarkably bad.
Anti-disruption.

Intuit 1
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I detect a lot of resentment in your post that could all be avoided by just saying "No, sorry, I can't fix your computer."

So I should lie to them? Because that's what I would be doing. The truth is that I can fix their computer. To make that a truthful statement it would have to be, "No, sorry, I won't fix your computer." Has a bit of a different ring to it, doesn't it?
I have only read the TL:DR.

If you're going to be a condescending jerk, why should I read anything you have to say? You know what makes it obvious that an article is too long for me to read? I start reading it and notice it is too long for me. No condescending presupposition about how I use my free-time is necessary.

I infer you are trying to get a point across. I recommend you cut out anything that both has no chance of improving your chance of reaching people with that point and also reasonable chance of increasing the amount of people who will ignore your article. Focus on the point.
In the case of Web standards in particular, you can usually see the checkins in our public source tree well before we ship it. But per policy we will rarely publicly commit to shipping something or not ahead of time.
I'm the oldest as well and the most computer literate of my siblings. Have you considered that because we were there to fix their computer problems when they were young we eliminated the need for them to develop the skills (and comfort) we have with computers?
One's an exceptional outlier, the other's an everyday occurrence.
Good read, plus I'd never read the email that introduced the bike-shedding metaphor: http://white.bikeshed.com
Yeah, that's the one that totally clearly crosses the line for me. It's not a Hoovering thing, it's not a "this will almost certainly be abused some day" issue, it's a "fruit of the poisoned tree" abuse of due process, no matter what sophistry is used to justify it. And amply confirmed, e.g. by a paragraph in an IRS document (saying to never mention it or the like).
How Procrastination Cost Me 72,800 Email Subscribers