skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is just as bad or worse. You have to move the data in/out of the country. It definitely isn't protected when it leaves the country. The only advantage I see is that it punishes US businesses for failing to protest.
So you're assuming you'll get <em>nothing</em> from Social Security?
Yeah, there are definitely some problems. But then G+ has problems too. I've had marginally better luck with Flickr's uploader fwiw (faster, fewer fatal errors for no reason), and the browsing experience is slower.

But if you're uploading lots of photos there are lots of tools out there for only Flickr that put both web UIs to shame, automatically retry, etc. The Picasa application is... surprisingly decent, but I've had worlds of pain with its buggy syncing, and it gives off a feeling of almost-abandonware.
The political is one (valid) way to look at experiences like that. Although there really wasn't anything as conscious as political scheming going on.

For me, it was mostly a lack of mindfulness, both from me and from my manager, about what was going on as the dynamics changed. I'm sure that if I had said "hey, it's important that you don't take this kind of work away from me" before it was too late, it would have worked out much better.
Why is notepad.exe connecting to the internet?
Then the most obvious answer to me seems to use technology to affect the political landscape.

How that actually manifests itself, depends on how desperate people become to retain some sovereignty over their livelihoods… which begs the question, where are we now and who could provide the resources/environment to foster the type of change that is needed?
Server-side Software Developer
At Forio we create software products that enable simulations, data explorations, and predictive analytics. We’re currently developing a cloud-based platform for numerical and statistical computing – think high performance computing, big data, cutting edge technologies. Our platform allows for distributed computation in Julia, a powerful new mathematical programming language.

As a Server-side Software Developer at Forio, your primary responsibility will be development in Julia (we recognize it’s a pretty new language – no previous Julia experience is necessary). Depending on your skills and interest, your additional responsibilities could include project management, system architecture, or server-side development (Java and/or Lua) for some of our other projects.

About you:
You’re a software developer with professional experience in at least one modern programming language. But you also have a passion for some of the back-end stuff, so you have significant experience in httpd, niginx, Tomcat, or another web/app server, and experience with a database system (whether SQL or noSQL). You’re comfortable in Linux, including bash. Your background might be in statistical or scientific computing, or in network computing. Ideally you also have some experience with a scripting language (Ruby, Python, or JavaScript), with Java development, with Lua, or with Julia itself.

Local applicants or those looking to move to the San Francisco Bay Area are welcome. We reimburse for relocation expenses.

Our benefits package includes health care, dental care, 401(k), and vacation/personal time. Our office is located in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco, near BART and Muni lines.

Interested?
Send a resume to jobs@forio.com. Include a short email note telling us what appeals to you about the position and how you think you might contribute.

Key Words (tags): Linux, Julia, server, high performance computing, big data
How about a local cloud? I understand that this may seem pointless, as you're owning and paying for all the hardware, but it would really help in deployment, scaling and maintenance just like a "classic" cloud service can.
I use this: http://e.ggtimer.com/5%20minutes

Simple, clean, uncluttered, and functional.
Yeah, I very luckily had my account still logged in on one browser, and was able to save it :|
The goal is not necessarily security (I have nothing to hide (I still do hide as much as possible))-- the goal is political change. That's the only real way out of this mess. By not using US companies, you incentivize those to lobby for better laws.
If you're so easily intimidated why do you still post comments about the NSA on the internet?
From a thing I said two years ago:

"Exporting games down to stats per millisecond. Stats I'd want: all the obvious stuff, like gold, KDAs, minion kills, items: but possibly more interesting would be HP per millisecond, and any secondary stats as well. Ability cooldowns. Ward expenditure.

"Could possibly do something interesting for positioning, but I'm not sure how to express that. X,Y coords? That would be enough; it'd be hard to consume, but that's what data processing is for. Clicks and pings would also be worth dumping."

I think you could get a lot of coarse-grained positioning data from the minimap, and possibly coarse-grained HP snapshots from spectator mode. You could definitely get ultimate/summoner spell expenditures from snapshots, too.

I really do expect interesting data to come out of analyzing the spatial layout of the teams.
Ask HN: How can a Software Engineer find design inspiration? 
I am a Junior Software Engineer building personal projects for experience; mostly web applications. I have been trying to design attributes with photoshop for my projects but fail to find real inspiration that works. I have followed the hackdesign.org course a little but yet to find my "creative design side".

Has any developers or engineers run into this as well?
ASK.FM is losing Advertisers in the UK
There's not even the time factor. Western countries at least might theoretically not spy on their own citizens but the exchange data with partners intelligence services. And the US is by far not the only country that mandates surveillance cooperation for providers etc.

Encryption is OK but doesn't solve the problem. There's always metadata and whom can your trust with your encryption? You have to assume that hardware and software you use has backdoors. Mobile phones for example has even official backdoors, your SIM card can be remotely changed and so on …
On Dancing Chickens
Interesting thread from Email Discussions:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=66968

If you're a SAAS provider, be aware if you need to shutdown that many users are not prepared for this. Several posters in the linked thread rely on a recover password feature sent to e-mail for access to other accounts. Not a prudent practice but this is common for many.
With that logic people shouldn't be allowed to eat ice-cream in public because it makes others want to eat sweets leading to obesity. Pure BS.
Shutting down of Lavabit makes us more safe from suicide bombers!
Your Address Book Automagically Updated
American jurisprudence has never been free of bias or prejudice, especially the Federal government. It's a matter of official policy to arrange for arbitrary assertion of power.
The standard way to get the story out is via "leaks". Someone could, gasp, hack into his email, get the story, and publish it.
Not knowing the actual crime, you cannot answer any of those questions.

See, this is why "secret laws" are so bad: you cannot legally counteract because you don't know what's legal anymore.
This also applies to some Critical Mass riders in the Bay Area.
1 is configurable – when you configure Watchsend you can pick whether you want to record everything or only record certain screens.

2, 3, 4, and 5 are in the works :)
Version Number 0: A New Way to Do Software Versions
That's reasonable. And while you can get already in trouble for not having stored user data in the past, you cannot really refuse to store user data from now on. Ergo probably this surprise shutdown now … :(
Eastern Europe/Russia/HK with a .su or .ch domain. Of course encrypt it.

The alphabet gangs are really getting out of hand.
Tell me more!

Do you want Persona authentication on your website or do you want a deamon that is an identity provider for your personal domain?

What language or platform would be ideal?
This is infuriating, and the worst part is that a clear solution isn't in sight.

Sure, we can fight this in the courts, and a few secret programs might get shut down, but operations will just continue under a different name. We can encrypt our data, move our services and data offshore, but that just paints a big target on our heads - doesn't actually address the fundamental issue. This is supposed to be a democracy, but I don't see any democratic way of addressing this.

What do we do?
And, snail mail.
That may be a good strategy for the individual, but a community as a whole should be sure that the entire foundation is solid, even if a single individual can't comprehend the entire foundation.
The Sensor/FitBit clone project by Upverter.
Is it fear-mongering? Sites actually do get hacked and defaced all the time for political advocacy (e.g. LulzSec). I've long been more afraid, in general, of computer hackers than government.
It'd be nice to see Obama pardon Snowden, too.
My point was more about justifications on paper for things you want to do for other reasons rather than being butthurt about a bad manager in ancient history.

And I see your points. I'm just taking issue with the fact that business culture seems to value protecting shareholders as a moral imperative to the extent that you're obligated to be a sociopath towards your employees, customers and society at large. It seems to me that this moral imperative goes beyond legal issues and into the actual ethical system of the business community.
Martin is a KDE developer. It is not surprising that his approach would include a method supporting a central configuration utility. Nonetheless, I think it's a good idea, and the definition of the fifth freedom ("The freedom to decide which data is sent to which service") is brilliant.
Yes, unfortunately; I'm a student of that period of history and it's getting pretty bad by its standards. No proscriptions yet, though ... perhaps because that doesn't work so well with a well armed populace.
So we've hear stories of the big companies being targeted. Now a smaller company has been included. How small will this go for monitoring?

Should we assume that any browser plugins are potential trojan horses for desktop targeting?
It'll be interesting to see whether companies start to shift to using encrypted email over the next few decades - it's not that hard to set up if you know the counterparty will be using encryption of the same kind, and if it's not a service bought in from an external company you can fairly sure it is secure.

Companies could at least insist that intra-company email is encrypted, which would be a huge amount of their normal communications, and then extend that outside their boundaries with partners who also accept (say) S/MIME.

At present I sign my mails but like you have no clients who use encryption.
Ask HN: When to look for VC
I Founded a niche news site roughly a year ago. My traffic is growing at a very healthy rate, half a million uniques in the first year. My revenue is growing as well. I have an absolute passion for this and plan on continuing until I physically can't anymore.

My day job pays for all the costs of the site so money isn't an issue.

At this point should I be looking for VC to help pay my bills and take it to the next level or should I continue to plug away and see what happens?

I'd like to make this my full time job, but don't know if it's to that point yet.

Thank you for listening.
http://foaas.com/
It would be really unfortunate if people started getting polarized into encryption / social / legal camps. All these things are necessary.
Hi AgentSaran, thanks for commenting!

• Without giving away our 'secret sauce,' the ViralRank is calculated based on a users actions on the original article. As an example: If you click on a link from SwarmSports and then Like the article on Facebook, we take the action into our calculations.

• That's a good idea about the upvoting/downvoting! For right now, we're simply trying to make sure the content is relevant and the ViralRank is calculating correctly. Eventually we'll add more stuff like upvoting/downvoting directly on our site. Thanks for the idea!

• We're trying to stay super simple right now since we're still MVP/Beta. Eventually we'll add more stuff. BleacherReport is a very good site and we give them kudos for their huge exit to Turner.

• We actually come from an ad-tech background. We're avoided ads so far since we're still MVP. Once we get enough traffic, we'll probably ad advertising... or go the Wikipedia route and survive off of donations.

Thanks again for the awesome feedback! :-)
The internet is serious business.
1. The link doesn't work.

2. As a non-Lavabit user, who are they and why should I give them money?
China, Russia, or North Korea, pretty sure. You have your pick of which governmental spy agency gets to snoop through your data!
An order to appear is a positive action where you can be punished for not doing something.
Loren, if you're interested in some projects, I've got a nonprofit science foundation. If I have money (or better yet, if you're interested in doing the fundraising), I'd like to develop some much-needed open-source scientific management software. It would be great to have a project lead for such a thing. In my wildest dreams, I'd like to see it spun off as a for-profit that delivers the software in an enterprise edition (with the main software tree maintained by the nonprofit).

I think there are a lot of unsolved ideas - like zero-friction data upload from instrumentation - possibly running on different platforms, wiki-like annotation and record keeping, setting up protocols with timers, and a uniform notification scheme that can be pushed out to a mobile device, etc....
One big question I have for the legal beagles: It's understood (if not well-liked) that Fourth Amendment protections don't apply to data given to a third-party...

What if, instead, you host server space within the U.S. and run your own software (email, listserv, whatever) and data on the leased hardware? I would think there's a good argument that Fourth Amendment protections then resume, and the domestic-ness of the server would also mean the NSA is not legally allowed to look at it, at least without a real Article III warrant.

Do similar rights apply IRL, e.g. if you rent a storage closet, can law enforcement just open the door when they wish or do they need to get a warrant?
In a world where journalists had unlimited research budgets and the time to run facts to ground, this sort of campaign to link Myhrvold's "good" name to his patent-trolling deeds would be unnecessary. But since we don't live in that world, I suppose the next best thing is to make sure to SEO Myhrvold's name so that it always turns up "scum", "patent troll", and "extortionist". Who knew you could do so much for journalism by priming the Google pump for future journalists?
"And Germany has also laws which force every mail provider to install an access point to the German authorities and intelligence agencies. I am not sure if also a generic saas platform would have to do it, but it is quite possible."

Thanks for the heads up - as I said in the OP, it really is a difficult task. Those kind of laws are exactly what need to be avoided when choosing a country to host in. I don't believe that this kind of thing can be carried out in absolute silence though, so if a country is actively modifying and silencing hosts it's fairly likely that word of it will leak somewhere.

If I get a chance, I might try to put together a red/orange/green overview of known laws and practices in different countries that would affect hosting services there. Unless someone is already working on that and needs a hand?
TW CEO: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Setting Piracy Records Is ‘Better Than An Emmy’
Host in Russia. You all saw how the Snowden issue was handled.

Just don't do anything that would attract FSB's attention.
RDIO sets out to understand fans.
I only used webmail on Lavabit; not IMAP.

All of my e-mail is gone.

I was a paying user. WTF.
As callahad said, there are some issues and it isn't a core priority for the team.

That said... here is one of the building blocks
https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2932

Get involved and implement this as a NodeJS module.
Privacy-protecting email service shuts down vs cave to feds
How many hours is $200k of defense? (roughly)
I'm not talking about your initial post—I enjoy a good PHP-bashing session :)

However, most of the people who join in the party with nothing either (a) humorous or (b) insightful are annoying, and don't contribute anything to the discussion.
Okay well, no legal protection.
I think you misunderstand, I do not think any end-users should be running beta iOS releases. It is just obvious from this problem that many are, and Apple needs to deal with the problem.
I too would ask - "et tu, tptacek?"
It won't be long before companies start introducing non-USA-affiliated as a feature.
Thank you both for your fantastic answers. I now have a roadmap.
So...that means instead of someone knowing my password to get into xyz website, they can easily just use persona which in a few clicks will let them into my account?
You're not understanding me. (This isn't too important, but I'll explain.)

dmix asked why the company was renamed. ics referred dmix to a post. I pointed out that the post ics pointed to doesn't answer dmix's question. wycats had written this in the past and shouldn't be accountable to ics linking to it for this purpose.
Our Student Loan System Is Broken
Any Indian village.

Come over sometime ;)
So if they say that they are addicted to weed, they skip jail and instead go to rehab? Makes you wonder.
That guy lost his touch with reality living in that Drupal land.

"...Different languages come with more than just a different syntax, they also come with their own way of thinking...". This is of course bad, because naturally we don't need Erlangs, Scalas, F#s, SQLs, Haskells, X(*)MLs, telling us there is a different way to approach a problem. Just give us the good ol' Hammer.JS! It's perfect for any task!

Required reading for author: asm.js, LLVM, TypeScript.

PS: if the world goes mad and he turns out right we will have a _really_ good reason to leave for start ups.
Nope. Inflation and unemployment are built in. Hyperinflation and big unemployment are tumors. They should be kept in a goldilocks range preferably around 3-4%.

If you have labor shortage the economy cannot grow as fast as possible. If you have big surplus - then you have big demand slump that moves you to a deflation spiral.
I don't blame the companies; they're about as much a victim of USgov as we are IMHO. That being said, if all the online-storage/cloud-server/email-providers/social-whatever companies in US start going out of business because nobody trusts them I strongly suspect something will have to change. It's just too bad we have to do a "scorched earth"[1] to bring about change.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth
At first I read your comment as "rather brilliant way" and I agreed with it more than your actual comment :)
Google, Twitter, Netflix, Salesforce, others to speak at RICON West
Customers and law may demand that the data is stored in the EU. For businesses with demands hosting in the US is simply not an option.

This was a concern earlier but my guess is that this will only increase in the near future.
Sure, if they're logged into your Gmail account at the same time. At which point it's already game over. :)
Another possibly relevant fact in this matter is that the Android/Java lawsuit certainly didn't help the Oracle/Google relationship...
As a human, you are more able to handle hallucinations than you think. If you see a bear off in the distance, in real life do you freak out and drive off the road? No. You just remark at it. "Holy shit a bear in the distance!"

When you're on acid, you don't change as a person, your reactions don't change. If you see something weird you say "woah, that's weird" but, unless you're deep in a trip and forget you are on a substance, you can usually handle it like a normal person.
IOS7 only resizes controls built with the new iOS7 SDK. Apps build with the iOS6 sdk continue to look and work just line normal, and my guess is a lot of the crashes people are seeing are regression bugs for Apple. The latest Beta 5 fixed a ton of crashes on some apps I've been using.
Can you talk more about your stack? Are you running ZFS on Linux? If so, what's your experience with that combination?
You seem pretty intent on drawing a negative picture of people who can do both design and code, labeling them the worst designers you've ever worked with or a jack of all trades whose ultimate route is some idiot manager role.

There's nothing but benefit for a designer to also pick up some coding skills or a developer gaining an appreciation of design and interaction. And I see no reason someone can't excel at both if they truly desire.

Perhaps the worst designers you've worked with did both, but don't let bad logic lead you to think that the best designers do not.
Hybrids Better for Climate than Leaf, Tesla in Most States
When I read the Lavabit statement, I felt like this was "The Strike" Ayn Rand predicted. Guy took his marbles and left. Tough to be optimistic about our future after seeing this happen for realsies.
I already donated when I paid for a service that I now can't use. How do I go about getting a reverse donation -- i.e., a refund?
I don't understand what you're objecting to. Do you object to something called "PHP Weekly" containing an article that talks about the problems with PHP? Do you object to commenting on such an article in the comments for a link to a PHP Weekly issue that contains it?
I noticed that his wikipedia page's FIRST citation references exactly that.
The "judge is not impressed" means they would probably view it as the same as just warning the public directly, with equivalent penalties.

And thus the canary is legally useless--if you're going to have the penalties of violating a national security order, might as well just do it in a straightforward manner.
I see some excuses on the fundraiser page, e.g., "it's a journal", but that's about it. They don't say anything about what CPU (because they want the fastest), they don't say anything about the thermal engineering, and they don't say anything about the battery life (they say they want to use some bleeding edge battery technology, but they don't say anything at all about what this means vis-a-vis battery life.)
I like your analysis of how pitching a solution depends on who you're talking to. If your service is a CRM system, you should probably be simultaneously be pitching it as leadgen to the sales and marketing directors and efficiency improvement to the COO and CFO.
The topline vs cost-cutting pitch also depends on the product. If your service is designed to cut legal bills, like one YC company featured on here yesterday, then pitching it as driving growth would be just stupid.

I also flatly disagree with the OP, in that I think in most industries "Our solution will cut your spend on X by 10%" is a much stronger claim than "Our solution could potentially increase your revenue by 10%"; even though the latter will usually represent a higher potential ROI. Rational purchasers are more confident of the savings generated by substituting for a product/process with known costs than they are of achieving theoretical revenue gains.
Here's (https://github.com/frio/cloud9-dockerfile) something vaguely along those lines -- a basic popup IDE using Cloud9. It's not a complete solution (and probably never will be) but it made me happy :).

You can run it with:

git clone https://github.com/frio/cloud9-dockerfile
cd cloud9-dockerfile
docker build -t "yourname/cloud9" ./
docker run yourname/cloud9 -e PROJECT=git@github.com:your/project

... and then opening your-ip:3131 :).
Refunds for anyone? I can't believe this guy asks for a donation to his legal defense fund. I already donated when I paid for a service that I now can't use. How do I go about getting a reverse donation -- i.e., a refund?