skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The number of random people who ask me about NSA spying now vs. 6 months ago is huge.

The DEA partnership basically won over minorities, drug people, young people.

You could probably find ways to make this an anti-immigrant issue in general (spying on foreigners; obviously if you're Muslim or brown, but maybe it could somehow extend to Chinese immigrants too?)

Tech people hate it naturally. Business people (other than defense contractors) hate it because it makes doing business harder, particularly if you're doing business with Europe or other international business.

This abuse of Greenwald's lover might win over gay people.

Gun people were already super suspicious of the government since Sandy Hook w.r.t. registry and confiscation (honestly for the entire Obama administration, and even during Bush, and definitely during Clinton, too, but more so now)

Right wing people are suspicious due to IRS and general hatred of Obama. "NSA shares records with IRS" would be a great extension to the story, but even lawful IRS subpoena of electronic records supports the case for strong crypto under the control of the end user.

All we need is for NSA records to be used against Christians (pro life groups? I'm finding it hard to find ways NSA spying is specifically anti mainstream Christians) to essentially have 80% of people on the side of freedom, each for his own reason and maybe totally different from the others.

The only people left on the other side are die-hard militarists, defense contractors, and the political class, or people who are irrationally putting hypothetical safety over even their own liberty (I'd expect people to sacrifice unused liberty or the liberty of other people for their own hypothetical safety, always).
Even that's not correct though. Port 80 is just the default port. Not to mention the number of web servers only doing HTTPS on port 443 and not 80.

More correct would be "A scan of world wide web servers running on the default port 80"
I don't see anything worth preserving in those photos. Maybe the triangle building. The homes are just like the rest from that period you'll find in the northeast, nothing particularly noteworthy.

I don't understand why people think they should be able to tell owners what to do with their property. Don't like it? Buy it yourself.
India had always been rich in languages. And I observe that from one side it is loosing few forest tribes dialects, many people in India are gaining solid knowledge of C++ and alike languages from the other side. Although I must admit, both tendences are very regional by nature.
Is the world becoming poorer for that? I do not know.
The structure of the internet is largely controlled by geography, demography, history, and economics. And, politics: see the cables in the Caribbean, eg Puerto Rico vs Republica Dominica vs Cuba.
What if Perl Had a Specification
As an off the cuff engineering estimate an AM crystal radio is pretty efficient internally and just barely converts a multi kilowatt transmitter output into barely audible sound inside an earphone, given a substantial antenna and grounding system. So for multiple closer antennas, and something much more electrically demanding than a crystal radio, like a smartphone, its believable.

The biggest problem is going to be PR. So wifi milliwatts of microwave power tens of feet away make hypochondriacs and conspiracy theorists think the government is controlling their thoughts using radio waves... I'm guessing "tens of watts in a ISM diathermy band" is going to substantially encourage them.
Sure, http://play.golang.org/p/dAQ01dus9Y
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Details.j...

And there is plenty of other reading material to review regarding Google's history with the NSA (see my other links posted in the nested comment below).

Perhaps I should not have said "directly, deeply, and intricately involved in said scandal" in the tone of 'matter of fact' - because it is indeed an opinion, but I'm just drawing what I feel are logical conclusions. IMO Google is the NSA's primary Trojan Horse into the free market. I am in no means declaring this as fact, like I said originally - just wanted to drop my '2 cents' if that's OK.
Not ambitious enough. Let's have English as the one-and-only language for the entire world. All your arguments are applicable for this too.

/sarcasm

Edit: Also note that one of the major causes of the 1971 breakup of Pakistan was that they tried enforcing use of Urdu in east pakistan against the very popular Bangla language.
I think that that wow you mentioned is the point. They are trying to make you remember/shock you instead of engaging in a rational debate.
From Fredric Brown's "Knock", 1948: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...".
I didn't think of it that way either, and I agree that it's a good point.

I think the difference is that the drone is more of a mass-surveillance device where the individual cameras aren't (quite as much).

A good analogue might be a police dash camera versus car-mounted license plate readers. They are similar but meant for very different uses.
And one of the foot soldiers of the Powers That Be weighs in:

"Glenn, Glenn - did you really think there'd be zero consequences for you and those close to you? I expected Ed to believe WL lies, but you?"

- John Schindler (@20committee) August 18, 2013

https://twitter.com/20committee/statuses/369169570298208257
5 PR mistakes that startups make
Fastest way to create a new element in jquery
Actually, I was presently surprised that the answer was not the resounding "no" I expected, but instead a "kind of (for a layman's definition of cure, for a certain kind of cancer)".
Hi there!

We plan to charge a users in a variety of ways. it will be a freemium service so some users who have a minimal number of accounts or bills will never pay anything, but we'll have tiers depending on what the user wants, for instance the move me service for setting up your utilities, cable, etc could be an a la carte charge.

We think the average user (3 bank accounts about 12 bills per month) will probably pay about $5 per month for the service and with the grey charge removal alone we're confident we can save you that fee :)

There is also quite a bit of interest for the biller to pay us since it will ensure their users pay their bills on time and from the studies we've seen so far having this as an option even improves users' opinions of their bill providers.

So never fear there are definitely ways of making money outside of shady practices or selling your financial info(which we will NEVER do under any circumstance)

Hope that helps :)
Useful test for Greenwald and the Guardian too, no?

Useful to run this partner through an airport with some clean electronics to see what the reaction would be and to perhaps see how far the British are prepared to go to please our Us masters.

That test of public reaction, it can go two ways.
I think he was referring to "archive and extinguish policy".
I don't want police officers in my home. However if police officers do come into my home then I absolutely want them to have a body camera so they can be held responsible for any actions they take.
But which English??????
Often, anticipation is what ruins a movie. All of the best movies I've seen (The Matrix, Fifth Element spring to mind) had such obtuse trailers that I had no idea what was going on before I got in there.
For the past ~68 days or so, this is literally the only thing you've talked about here. PRISM NSA PRISM PRISM NSA. Whatever floats your boat, but please stop trying to inject politics onto programming threads.
"its poor efficiency is obvious"

Train everyone in a discipline that everything must be green. This idea of turning perhaps 99 watts into heat and 1 watt into battery charge is terribly non-green. "Everything must be green" is the cognitive filter which had to be overcome.

In cold climates, especially if you have electric heating, turning electricity mostly into heat is not as much of a loss as you'd think, anyway. In areas of Canada with cheap hydro and electric baseboard heating, its probably a great idea.
The quote only serves to show that the person in question knows little to nothing about actual mafias. Or - more likely - was understandably caught up in the heat of the moment and didn't research what he was writing. He's wrong, but I'd certainly cut him some slack.
So how could one who's not already a product designer learn to design new, workable designs for this type of furniture?
Good point man. Probably it's always unnecessary to feel frustrated - I guess just with political type stuff it is more easy to succumb to it.
You must realize you're posting on "I could build that in a weekend" central. When viewed through HN goggles, a train that goes 80% of the distance between sf and la is identical to a train that connects downtown.

Facts, like tweets, have a size limit. "Hyperloop will connect areas relatively near to sf and la" is too long. "Hyperloop will connect sf and la" is a shorter, and therefore better, fact.
Upgrade to chrome canary. It has that feature.

And what does that have to do with linking to a auto playing video? Do you automatically switch tabs after loading it and then get confused which tab has your video?
Generate Hollywood-grade technical jargon
Yeah, the Isaacson book is almost unreadable. Obviously rushed to coincide as closely as possible with his death, and just not a good book by any standard. The lack of even cursory editing is telling.
Berlusconi is pretty deep in bed with the Mafia and would not be where he is without them.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/03/25/uk-italy-mafia-tria...
Web-based browse/search frontend for Amazon S3?
Is anybody aware of any self-hosted web-frontends for Amazon S3 (or similar storage services)?<p>I'm looking for something similar to Dropbox's web interface, but backing onto your own Amazon S3 store.<p>Basically, the ability to browse files through a web interface, and search them. I suppose you'd need to deploy this onto your own EC2 instance or other VPS?<p>Support for orchestrating backups, or Amazon Glacier would also be a plus.
I don't know about you, but I had to void my warranty in order to be able to use adblocking, proxy servers and run a ssh server on my phone. I would hardly call that "not locked down".
GATES: Official Movie Trailer [video]
In addition to the others mentioned, regulatory issues come to mind. The company I work for hosts applications we are not allowed to host on servers we do not control.
In this case, privacy could be a concern. If an officer is wearing a body camera during a search, suddenly there's a permanent record of the inside of your home and plenty more opportunity to spot unrelated crimes to hold against you.
It really isn't going "mainstream" any time in the foreseeable future. More often than not companies announcing that they accept Bitcoin only get one or two token purchases through it, so other than the free advertising, there's not much in it for them to start using the unwieldy beast.

It's unfortunate that their community is based around squabbling on bitcointalk.org rather than creating truly great, usable software and services.
Capitalism :p
Here's the thing:

You can learn multiple languages. You can even learn multiple dialects. One of the things I'm proud of my grandfather for was that he learned 22 different dialects of Chinese for the purposes of doing business on a fairly wide scale.

Imperialism is sort of not a thing these days.
Forget about Jobs...It's all about Gates!
3 Quick User Interface Wins
It also encourages you to write scalable applications - no in-request long operations, queues, eventual consistency, no filesystem access dependencies, planning for failure on every level etc. Using App Engine is a course on best practices in web development.
"Supervised Accounts" is apparently going to be some kind of parental control, but the article lacks any details on what it actually will do. My assumption is it that it will include some kind of content filter, possible based on keywords?
"It's complicated". He's a fairly rotten guy in many ways; in all likelihood he's made deals with them, but isn't at all involved in their actual operations.
I recently converted http://selectorgadget.com from a Bookmarklet into a Chrome extension. The process was quite simple.
The typical reaction I've seen is snark. The most memorable one was a Facebook post:

"I don't care if Obama reads my text messages. All he'll learn is how to sext."

Most of the "smart" people I know, both in and out of the tech industry, are more interested in Egypt, Syria, and the large drop in US stock market indices last week.

How sad is it that Orwell's dire portrayal of Big Brother is no longer as relevant to most people as following reality TV's Big Brother...
Not to mention the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
She lets him talk more than most interviewers I've seen.
Which is great because I could listen to a guy like Woz talk all day.
I would imagine the doppler effects of beaming a couple watts at a low freq thru a ceiling fan would be humorous.

Another interesting one is phase noise and distortion and crossover distortion (if you use a simple class-B amp) means you can send a sine wave into a high power amp, but the amplified noise level at audible range might be icky. As a personal anecdote I've noticed this with commercial ultrasonic cleaners. Sure... noise level might be 30 dB down at audible range, but pump a 100 watts at 40 KHz into it and I'm listening to 0.1 watts of noise at audible freqs which is quite loud indeed. Theoretically ultrasonic cleaners should be inaudible, but high powered ones are not. Much as intermod distortion is hilarious with high power RF, noisy/corroded/semi-faulty ultrasound could be loud as heck acoustically thru no fault of the generator, amp, or transducer.
> Learning Hindi would mean learning a totally new language for the majority of Indians. Many would rather learn English as a second language.

For most North Indians (speakers of Indo-Aryan languages), Hindi would probably be a lot easier to pick up than English. On top of that, they get to interact with a large population of fluent Hindi speakers, and get really good at it, to the point of it (potentially) being a language spoken at home.

I've been in Bangalore, and the English of the majority of programmers I've met here is utterly atrocious. They butcher sentences and are incapable of constructing a single grammatical sentence. Personally, I wouldn't criticize them if this hadn't been coupled with appallingly bad coding skills.

One solid reason to promote Hindi is this. They can actually get good at the language. Hindi is also much more likely to transition into becoming their home language than English.
Brad schell and Joe esch. a quick Google confirms ex autodesk
SSDs Make a Lot of Difference
It's true, but I love the threads that make me go look things up. I could really give a rat's ass about the Hyperbloop, but what other than a Hyperbloop thread could motivate me to go read up on the per-mile cost of mountain tunneling, or the amount of traffic in Sylmar?
Germany recognizes Bitcoin as ‘private money’
Fox news has it now: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/18/partner-nsa-leaks-jo...
The history of Unix is as much about collaboration as technology (1994)
You're attacking a strawman, since he made it quite clear that he wasn't calling for swift and violent revolution: "Obviously this is not an option I would advocate or consider. Nor is it an option that's even possible."
I think you're wrong. A lot of very smart people in the Bitcoin community are working on some really clever ideas. Zerocoin, colored coins implementations, stock exchanges, distribution of shares to name a few. A friend of mine, for example, is working on a wallet that would allow people to create contracts without trust or a third party: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-...
Another possible pre-meditated outcome:

4) Highlight the fact that Greenwald is in an openly gay relationship in an attempt to discredit him / colour what he's saying in a personal light. Sadly, a large part of the conservative base will cling to this I think.
I'm kind of confused by what you consider the "general public" here.

Right now, in addition to this being the top story on HN, it is is on the default reddit front page at #9 and rising. It's also on the front page of the New York times website, and also in the top three headlines at news.google.com. Google reports 25 articles most being published in the last hour.

By these measures, it seems to me that a lot of people are rather interested in the story.

Now, I understand that you may not consider "the population that consumes its news on the internet" to be equivalent to the "general public". But any argument about that question is a much larger one than an argument about the public's interest in this particular story.

The fact is, even amongst all of the tabloid trash real news stories do matter to people, and people who consume cotton candy celebrity media for entertainment can also be consumers of hard news. The existence of one doesn't preclude interest in the other.
I'd hardly be surprised. The first N articles of policy of any government agency are "In case of trouble, cover your ass."

Everyone involved in this blatant attempt at covering up, not only this error, but all future errors, should immediately lose their job, including ALL (bloated) pension benefits.
Partner of NSA leaks journalist held for 9 hours
For others: note that that's only because Queue29 assigned 0 to a variable before using it as the denominator, so there's no way for Go to catch that at compile-time.

If you divide by a literal 0, this is a compile-time error, so there's no panic (and no need to recover()): http://play.golang.org/p/E0jSDAHwtg
Also note that this wasn't the US government; it was the British state, which for the past decade seems to have based its foreign policy obsessively on playing Mini-Me to the USA's Dr. Evil.

Quite possibly the idea of detaining Mr. Miranda originated from an overzealous busy-body relatively low in the hierarchy. Or perhaps it's merely meant to look like that.

(I discount the gay smear argument. It might play in the US, but here in the UK there are/have been out-of-the-closet gay Conservative cabinet ministers.)
I went out and saw Pirates of Silicon Valley after Bill Gates said in his Reddit IAMA that his portrayal was more or less accurate.
I'd also ask them if they know when to use and when not to use these concepts.
I've never understood the concept of multiple users in a browser. Isn't that what accounts on my computer are for?

Isn't this already a long solved problem?
That's not quite what Eliot said either. From elsewhere in this thread, 'foolrush points to this:

http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...
I haven't seen the movie, but wasn't Jobs' personality pretty much the same throughout his life?

I've read a few different articles where they claimed that when he worked at Atari, they created a shift just for him because no one could stand to work around him. Supposedly it was because he was an unwashed hippie, but I'm inclined to think that Atari's entire staff was made up of unwashed hippies during this time period, so it must have been his personality.
I appreciate your feedback.

In all fairness, before today my last comment was 46 days ago. And before that there are only handful of comments regarding this issue - looks like all within the same week of the NSA news breaking.

Anyway, next time perhaps I can simply write an article and submit it as a separate thread; rather than speaking out in the thread itself. Thanks again.
Two bucks says #2 was auto-correct. Hack is a proper English word, heck is not.
Did not consider this. Intermodulation and other distortion by-products are going to be difficult to control although I have no experience with the performance of modern amps for sub-MHz frequency ranges.

Building a working prototype that can beam ~1W (or even 100mW) a few feet would be very interesting and would do a lot to lessen my skepticism.
This works until one of that "stable selection of apps" tells the user that the version of their OS is not supported anymore, and that they would have to update. If the device is locked, your update paths are limited. Just because not everyone uses all functionality doesn't mean I have to condone removing that functionality entirely. And it does not mean that it might not burn a user at some point in the future.

As an anecdote: we have an iPhone 3G in our household, a phone that became progressively worse with certain updates after the release of both the 3GS and 4, to the point that it is nearly unusable for surfing now. This leaves me with exactly two options: stop using it as it was meant to be used, or buy a new phone. And for the other camp: in order to get an inofficial version of Android that is newer than Gingerbread on my phone, I would have to reformat its internal storage, which I can only do since it is unlocked by now. However, even that is not entirely without risk, and it is not supported.
One the subject of "I can't believe it's not satire". I have always found the "If You See Something, Say Something"[1] videos both humorous and terrifying.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jAV1dbGPB4
The other thing is that this is probably still transmitting sound when there is nothing to charge? Which would be probably even more of a waste than any transmission efficiency
It would seem so. Unfortunately, I've given it a try every other year and have been disgusted every time. The technology is nice, but it feels like it was designed by 90's IT guy. Clutter and programmer-art is not what I am looking for either.
With a little luck time will tell. It would be too much to hope for a leak.
It can only throw a compiler error if you use a 0 literal (or constant), because it cannot determine the runtime value of a variable denominator at compile-time (obviously).

It does not force you to check, but if you wanted to "catch" the "exception" (really, "recover from the panic"), here's how you would do that. Note that this is admittedly a somewhat unidiomatic use of recover(): http://play.golang.org/p/dAQ01dus9Y
I'd be very surprised to learn that this argument was never brought forward before this case.

I'd be even more surprised to learn that any judge ever went along with it as presented. You do business in the UK, you better obey UK laws. Google is not (yet) a State entity granted diplomatic immunity or enjoying some other special arrangement, so the judge will likely laugh in their face.

This said, I can see why Google would try to pull a fast one: there is now a real risk that they'll be sued in every single country with a half-decent privacy law, and some of them won't have a £500K penalty limit. As much as they can, they have to try and claim that the US settlement covers all users, including non-US ones. It's the only alternative to a long list of expensive settlements across Europe.
> I was feeling really bad about myself, but then I realized: without such skepticism the surprise and delight of proving others wrong (not to mention being proved wrong) would be lessened, and so my skepticism does serve a useful purpose, and I could go on living with myself again. This is one skeptic who's hoping that he's wrong and that the inventor is right!

/song

The world needs people like you and me
who've been knocked around by fate.
'Cuz when people see us, they don't want to be us,
And that makes them feel great!
We provide a vital service to society
You and me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8Q4...
I agree on the first claim, but to the second, it is a two-edged sword. If the police are in your home, they may or may not see anything interesting. If they have video to play back, they may get a second chance to look for something that they wouldn't have had.

I don't deny the benefit we seek, but there are risks, as well.