skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right... It's like asking, "what's the difference between Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and a for-profit company that improves the well-being of people?" ...nothing, they are all figments of our collective imaginations. (no offense to those HN readers who still believe ;-) )

I think many of the companies get started with good intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with, right? What can be done to fix this?
You sir understood my point of view perfectly. I am not opposed to Github or any tool for that matter, only the misuse of that tool.
The problem with encryption in this case when it comes to US companies is that the US can compel US companies to install custom backdoors while pretending they are still secure and not notify their customers that this happened.
$11 million from sales of goods

In related news the EFF should definitly clean up their merch offerings. Especially their fashion section looks like crap. I would definitely leave more money there for apparel that appeals beyond a DefCon crowd. With a single blog post "submit t-shirt designs" and a followup with a bit of voting would fix that problem. Or just having one getting design by somebody like Fairey.
Here's RT for you: take the most banal imaginable observation ("disgruntled employees pose security threat") and try to make a front page story out of it.
Prohibition succeeded because they formed an alliance with the Women's Suffrage movement.
Some of these aren't single issue, but still relevant IMO. Please reply with other groups. Maybe we can decide which is the most suitable. Some groups may need vetting, and I can't think of a better place than HN for critical commentary regarding the activities of any particular group. I personally give to the EFF, and EPIC.

https://www.EFF.org

https://www.EPIC.org

https://www.PrivacyCoalition.org

https://www.privacyinternational.org/

https://www.ccc.de

PS I second rayiner's rec' of the PBS series. I was surprised to learn that the Federal gov't had funded itself almost entirely with alcohol tax proceeds prior to Prohibition.
Why Bitcoins are more expensive in Argentina than in the US
What happened when Google left China?
Proof that he sold information please?
The connection between key and identity doesn't have to be public.

The point is that the headers of an email aren't encrypted (otherwise it couldn't be delivered). In the headers is who the message is to, who it's from, the subject, the time, and if you're lucky, the ip of the sender. All of that isn't encrypted and free for the taking and has nothing to do with the id attached to the key used to encrypt the content.
Alcohol is a drug which has measurable health impacts on children if they drink at a young age. I have yet to see a non-biased scientific study which deems porn (not just the rapey kind) as physically and psychologically damaging to children.

If porn was found to be - without a doubt - bad for a certain age group, then yes I would get behind something where the government would limit its access to minors. This law, however, further stigmatizes porn instead of embracing it as just another weird thing humans do for entertainment.

(I want to make it clear that I'm not referring to illegal pornography. "Porn" where people get raped or that deal with minors is illegal)
>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.

Math is math and it's relatively easy to implement decent encryption -- it is possible to pass data securely from end to end.

The larger issue with these projects is that they're usually proposed by someone that can sling a bit of Ruby and fashions him/herself a cyber revolutionary, not someone that understands that the real power of the US Government in the tech sphere is its ability to apply pressure away from a keyboard - whether it be a subpoena for raw data from a hosting provider, legal fuckery, or sending armed soldiers to your doorstep.
I wonder if there is a performance component to this, or if it's based solely on him sticking around for the long haul.

I just finished up an earn out with performance goals on both revenue and margin, and found it to be very challenging. We ended up making product decisions with only the near-term implications in mind, and I feel it actually stunted our growth in both the near and long-term.

Given my experience, I strongly feel companies should base earn outs on length of time, while giving founders the autonomy to try new things while they are there. I heard Google shifted toward that model over time, but can't confirm. Hopefully Tumblr's founder got similar terms...
True enough, but we strive for consistent practice - coding in one way for project X, another for project Y, is error prone and doesn't scale. That handy dandy defrobolizer you wrote for WebKit? You can't really reuse it in another project without rewriting it to be exception safe. You should vary from good practices only when it makes sense, not use them only if you can make a case for using them in this specific instance. Anyone can come along later, eyeball your code, and understand your intent and see the potential problems. Magically code for a very specific environment? Good luck. Also, good luck when your next project requires exceptions or what have you, because you will be deeply out of practice coding for them.

Obviously the above can be taken too far, but programming for const correctness, mutability, and safety in the face of exceptions should be in everyone's toolkit, and the default way they program in C++ (IMO, naturally).
So close! Try for 100% next time!
But if you have a const reference to a non-const object, it's legal to use a const_cast to remove the const part. This is the more likely scenario, since most objects aren't const.
Cryptographers understand this fact more than most; what we know of crypto is often rediscoveries of secret stuff, years late, kind of like how open-source "big data" software is a clone of whatever Google was doing 5-10 years ago.
At the state level we have many examples of this actually happening.

California passed an "assault weapons" ban 1989, and in an act of amazing bureaucratic/political gymnastics first said a particular obsolete WWII rifle design, the SKS which has an integral 10 round magazine and a medium power round, was OK but you've got to register it, then reversed and decided they were illegal, and for anyone who registered one....

Keeping with the old gun designs issue, let's say you live in NY state and own a "Keep Off My Lawn" WWII era M1 Garand rifle, which has an integral magazine and is fed with an 8 round "en-bloc" clip. Well, now, outside of certain types of competitions you can no longer use those clips, you'd have to carefully bend sheet metal to reduce them to 7 rounds and likely suffer reliability problems. I carry a pre-WWI M1911 design handgun, with modern 8 round magazines; if I lived in NY state, I'd be a felon if I missed unloading one of them by one round.

There are many many other examples of these state and local "flypaper" laws and their enforcement.
That's an interesting question.

My guess is that the original/semi-original stuff they will be inspired by are games like Halo, Mass Effect, Portal, StarCraft, Bioshock, movies like Avatar as mentioned, District 9 and Inception.

Anecdotally, I don't see young people reading much and when they are it's wizards or vampires, not science fiction. As best I can recall, there haven't been many strong or particularly popular books, movies or television series in the genre for a good decade now.
A good portion of the populace is indeed crazy. And unfortunately they are the ones that get all the press.

However, there are a lot of people that are normal and decent but they don't get much play in the media.
Virtualization solves a lot of these problems, but a lot of my milspec friends have been expressing concerns about APTs that jailbreak the virtual environment to attack the underlying physical host.

It will be interesting to see how the human element of networks evolves over time.
> so I guess he must be very driven and passionate about blogging

Or he just wants to retire in 4 years $80 million richer
How would their friends know you you are working for the NSA? Shurly you sign the official secrets act (the US version of it) at the interview stage and have an agreed cover story for your referees.
I know it's cool to hate Microsoft and .NET here on [Y], but .NET framework actually comes with a ton of encryption classes & methods - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryp...
It certainly fits the profile of GC stutter. I'm told it makes some bad decisions about handling objects, triggering pathological behaviour in the collector but that's second-hand info at best.
Try putting this in an .h file that you include in several places:

void hi()
{
int x = 3;
}

without the inline and you will get a complaint that hi() is multiply defined at link time. So, one use case.
The problem I see with the ACLU and EFF is exactly what you mention - you've got to get older people involved. Fairly or unfairly (generally unfairly, in my opinion), both of those organizations have pretty negative connotations with the church going grandmother you reference. The ACLU's sometimes mindless pursuit of "civil rights" (which I think they do a good job of generally, but it does grate when everything is compared to the plight of African Americans, something that is almost becoming the Goodwin's Law of civil rights). The EFF trying to save "hackers" and "pirates" - which is completely unfair, but it's what the small town older people without computers hear and fear. A new organization that could start from scratch would make a huge difference, and could focus on educating people that this is seriously the equivalent of the government reading snail mail.
If you had unlimited budget, and disgruntled ex-employees were a greater risk than current employees, what is your short term strategy?
I'd like to know too. Zappos? Just the first thought that came to mind. I don't know that much about them but I have heard good things.
yeah right if your Bruce it is :-)
Exactly, he's living in hiding. Osama Bin Laden had to do the same, but for actually committing terrible crimes. Hardly the same magnitude and hardly living the life of a celebrity.
That's probably inaccurate. It is likely that the problem Lavabit faced was being required to transmit malware to their customers.
I'm expecting, one day, for half the moon to be covered in antenna gear and us using it as one large phased array software-defined radio. Like arecibo observatory, but HUGE.
I love how tech activists behave as if they're just now discovering that NSA has far-reaching technical capabilities. As I recall, something like 1/5th of Applied Cryptography is dedicated to teaching people how powerful NSA is. When NIST standardized DSA, they had to try to document the process by which the groups were generated, because half the cryptography world just basically assumed as an article of faith that anything NIST standardized must be backdoored.

Hell, fundamental understanding of NSA's superior technological capabilities is as old as DES.
Heh.

http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cryp...
I would love to see an ARM port of Docker (LXC supports ARM).
That's completely not the intent of the quoted text and you know it. There's certain implications with that phrase. Blindly sending data != talk about your letter to its friends.
RT is a hilariously (& obviously) biased news source, and yet seems to pop up on HN quite frequently. Come on guys, let's have some standards in our news providers.
tptacek what is your sourcing on this? I have spoken with people at engineering schools-- including those with close ties with the NSA, where NSA goes for hiring-- and they say the NSA is hurting. A recently retired (as in that month) fed at DefCon said straight up we are seriously behind you guys and cant keep up because of bureaucracy.
The tech may not have been there at the time.
Who is Ann, and what have you done with Alice :)
My experience - even with close friends and family - is that if the favour involves money, -expect- to get fucked over.
Armstrong Confirms “Hundreds” Of Layoffs At Patch, 400 Sites Shuttered...
Jabber is just a protocol. They only did half the job. Non-hackers need something more accessible that they can simply put on their devices without having to run their own server. I don't have the answers, but the only thing I see being truly viable in this environment is decentralized point to point communication. The only reason the NSA can easily collect all this data is that it is all bottlenecked through corporate datacenters.
Agreed, most of the tutorials I've seen so far have been along the lines of frio's answer -- ie you pull someone else's pre-build docker image (or docker file) and use that.
Well, we know that a lot of the work has been automated, as they have on-demand access to the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.

Once this setup work has been done, they can make do with fewer admins.
I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for expressing a dissenting opinion, but citing "/r/nofap" as sole reference does not really help your argument.

Anyway, we all know that if kids want access to porn they'll find a way or an other, what we need is to educate the parents and explain that you can't leave a kid alone on the web any more than you can leave them alone in the streets.
I'll have to pick it up. I've always considered Oppenheimer one of the most interesting people to have lived. He was very charismatic, winning over scientist and bureaucrat alike and a compromiser when necessary, but yet would not compromise when it came to the issue of the hydrogen bomb at the height of "McCarthyism". Too bad he's mostly forgotten in present day history.
I'm so tired of this viewpoint. You may not realize it, or value this revelation, but the issues we are discussing regarding the NSA, Snowden and the electronic spying is of critical importance. We are seeing the shaping of the present and the future of the Internet and thus all human communications.

I am beyond happy and proud of HN for keeping such a discourse about these issues! I have so much more respect for the HN community for keeping these issues on the front page and having such a sober view of their implications!

It's exceptionally naive to think that these issues are not related to what HN is all about: technology startups; what if your going to build "the next google" - clearly then you will come face to face with some MIB demanding access to your users data. If you don't pay attention to what's going on now, and develop an understanding of how grave this situation is, you'd never be in a position to build the future without furthering an actual police state.

The world is being steamrollered by the interests of the .001% and there is no reason why it has to be that way.

Edit: minor grammatical changes
By engaging in a line of comments that is so far from reality, the quality of discussion is lowered because it is off in the weeds instead of confronting the real issues.

One of the reasons I generally like HN so much is because there is so much expertise around that the comments often get right to the actual heart of an issue.

A great example is something like the P ≠ NP attempted proof from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850 The top comment is extremely informative, nearly the best commentary you could find about the issue anywhere.

Imagine if the top comment was instead from one of the numerous people who believed they had already proved P = NP or P ≠ NP, and they went off about their own theories and disparaged all of the mathematical community for ignoring them. A mathematical quack, basically.

The people who actually understand math could spend their time refuting this guy, but by doing so the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the site would go down, and with it the overall comment quality. And besides, the quack has probably heard it all before and it didn't change his mind. So instead people vote stuff like this down so that the top comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.

The problem with stories like this is that the equivalent of these mathematical quacks get voted up to the top. The natural hacker distrust for authority, which on one hand motivates good and productive work on privacy/anonymizing technologies, in this case motivates people to post comments that involve low-quality grandstanding and statements about the political situation that are objectively false. Sure it is possible to refute them, but S/N ratio is still lowered and no one's mind gets changed anyway.

By the way, I'm not someone who is downplaying the significance of Snowden's revelations. I just want to read a discussion that really cuts to the heart of the issues, instead of generic outrage, vague calls to action, and outright inaccurate statements like calling the US a police state.
Because machines don't care what you do, or who you are. Humans potentially do. They can gossip about you, they can read, and understand, all your private emails and use that information against you.
People take disproportionate risks out of anger all the time.

Furthermore, a lot of people in these types of positions (sysadmin work etc; and I say that as someone who does this type of work myself, though not at a three letter agency) get a feeling that they're good enough to get away with it - whether or not it's actually true.

Making an announcement like that just seems exceptionally stupid.
So a discussion in 4 parts then:

1. What attributes constitute a condition we call a "Police State"? (a list of which you already provided)

2. Does America (or some part of it) have those attributes?

3. Assuming the above is "Yes", what can we do to make it not have those attributes? (e.g. call currently elected representatives, elect representatives based on their historical opposition to those attributes, avoid certain companies or products, etc...)

4. How do we track if these actions are being performed and how effective they are?

Actually, we probably don't need to do categorize negative attributes so much. We can probably just focus on reversing the attributes we think are making our country worse.

Also, enacting political change is a skill as old as civilization I'm sure. There is probably lots of material around on how to do it effectively. We can start by reading and trying some of that stuff in place of arguing in circles about what is and isn't a police state.

(edit: formatting)
"Hey Matt, let's setup a company of our own and ditch this place - you can own 50%"

With regards to the salesmen and their business propositions, it doesn't sound like stolen data. Sounds like he played the role of company-man and threw people under the bus for the good of the company, believing that he would benefit in the long-run.

One of the first things I learned from the old engineers at Lockheed was to identify and actively avoid the company man. You interacted with the company man at your peril. It was basically like this: in dealing with a company man, anything you say can be used against you, but nothing you say can help you.
Yes to play devils advocate working for Google on say algo updates means you are responsible for people losing their jobs.

And I wont go into two faced nature of removing organic search terms from Google analytics but allowing the PPC customers access to that data.

if I where Matt Cutts id sleep happier working for the NSA than Google at the moment
Ask HN: Are we complicit in the NSA dragnet?
In Day After Trinity there's a scene where one researcher describes the scientists' reaction to the Hiroshima bomb. "Our first thought," he says, "was thank god it wasn't a dud." Only later did they consider the moral implications brought on by technology that kills 80,000 people in one fell swoop (which, to this day, consumes much of the energy of global diplomacy).

My question is: to what degree are programmers like us complicit in the NSA dragnet? What can we do to be more wary of making technology work second and understanding implications first?
These people could be seen as Trojan horses secretly collecting some extra dough while working at some big cloud service.
Math is math

Physics is physics. We all know time is fixed, the universe has been around forever, and atoms are the smallest indivisible component of matter.

The world, under the guise of "everybody is created equal," has fallen under the spell of "everybody has the same intellectual capacity" (which is clearly wrong). Yahoo isn't paying a high school dropout $100 million + $80 million because of his snazzy FU-my-mom-dresses-me haircut — they're paying him that because he's different. He's better. He's done more in five years than you've done in 20. You can't train that. People just are.

The government tries to grab all the clearly better-than-everybody-else undergrads through their sneaky alliances with CS departments and professors. They usually win.

Programs are programs and it's relatively easy to implement a program. But, some programs are worth billions of dollars and others aren't worth half a farthing. It's the people who make a difference.
Historians pull their information from sources of all kinds. For example, a piece of propaganda from WW2 (which is likely to be almost completely untrue) could be an invaluable insight into determining a collective mindset of the time. Similarly, a diary of someone on the street, who's been taken in by that propaganda is also useful.

Adam Curtis exists in the outskirts of a behemoth of a broadcaster, so his interpretation of these events will be useful - especially given that they are broadcast so widely.
Data, Visibility, and Abstraction
Note that you rarely see the NRA coming to the defense of hardened inner-city thugs getting railroaded with felon-in-possession type charges. It's careful to craft an image, and that image is centered on one set of people who use guns and not the other sets of people who use guns.
Porn is a escape from people's sexual frustration. UK is just going to increase the number of rapes by banning porn.
We already have the EFF.
This is exactly what the NSA wants you to think! Encryption is only a tiny part of the problem space, and yet still gets broken in fun ways (padding oracles, bad RNGs, etc). The more difficult mart is key management and distribution. This is where crypto rubs up against the human. Humans suck.
Talk about sensationalized headlines...
The comparison to alcohol is actually very useful: in the US where the drinking age is high (and fairly strictly enforced), binge drinking and alcohol abuse is extremely common in the teenaged population.

Compare with other countries where alcohol usage is not taboo, where the drinking age is low (and/or unenforced), where teen alcohol abuse is a far, far lesser problem.

It turns out that making something taboo and setting up some rudimentary roadblocks to its acquisition does not have the effect on consumption that you think it does...

Speaking anecdotally, growing up in Canada there was no one under the drinking age who couldn't get alcohol if they wanted it. Hell, half of us didn't even like drinking, and we did it for the taboo-ness of it all.
I'm not convinced. People are very good at cognitive dissonance.

If you're passionate about tech, then there are some very interesting projects to work on in government.

Rocket scientists want to build rockets. Roboticists want to build robots. Hackers want to hack. They've gotten good at what they do by subordinating other concerns to their driving interests. So, why would they be put off by something that doesn't seem to directly affect them or their loved-ones?

EDIT> Regarding the furor over heavy-handed prosecution of tech-assisted offences: that only matter if you choose the wrong side. I.e. Work on this cool stuff, stay in line, and you'll never have a problem with the law. Not a hard sell.
We need to tweet deeper!
How My Email Address Was LeakedIn
I don't see how you've demonstrated any harm whatsoever.