skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.

Absolutely. Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand that "the cloud" is a scam.

(And that is doesn't make that much of a difference if they store their data with Google, Apple, or directly with the NSA. If the blueprints of PRISM can't be kept from leaking, then subsets of the actual data will leak as well. Five or ten years from know, you'll have a huge grey market of -- medium to low quality, outdated, etc. -- surveillance data.)
The internet is imploding.
> How does one even go about disagreeing with a comment like this? I guess I'll go for the obvious: If the U.S. wanted to "claim dominance" at any expense, we certainly would have felt much less constrained in the use of nuclear weapons in past conflicts.

You're the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons in anger. Next?

> What you are describing is a mythology. One no better, and probably less accurate, than the mythology that the U.S. is an angel of hope and freedom on the world stage.

It's an objective reality. Point at ONE positive thing the US has done on the world stage since 1945. It's all coups, black ops, war, more war, war, and war.

> hn is going downhill faster than I'd ever imagined possible.

HN is diversifying and taking a particular political bent because global politics and US foreign policy are suddenly at the core of what we all do. The Iranian coup is just another data-point in a big, long, ugly picture.

You can bury your head in the sand if you like, and just talk about the best sorting algos until the cows come home, but the very medium through which HN operates is being threatened, and if we don't discuss said threat, and the history and background surrounding it, we are doomed to succumb.
The very least we can all do is whitelist them on our adblockers.
Our governments now investigate people, not crimes. This turning point is undeniably catastrophic.
This title is confusing : "UK defends Miranda airport detention".

The article itself says "David Miranda in legal challenge over seized data". Also it seems to be a small blurb of an unofficial comment since there doesn't seem to be a link to an original, official, source.
one of the problems electric cars have had is that they have a reputation for being dorky

Why the gullwing doors then? That's about as dorky as you can get.
Dailybreak Decides to Grow Up and Its New Marketing Platform Explodes
...Can PJ not figure out GnuPG? Is she officially retiring from any and all digital correspondence contrary to her notice that "[her] email [addresses] still work"? She says she's getting off the internet to whatever extent possible, and then asks people to continue to send her mail. I also find it cute that people believe facilities based in other Western nations are outside of the NSA's reach.

I gotta say that stopping Groklaw, which is a public site anyway, because someone else might be reading it, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, despite the emotional ploys in this article. She can write and save drafts locally in a (GASP) local word processor and encrypt anything she chooses to upload to remote storage. The government will then not be able to read unfinished Groklaw articles. Does this resolve the issue?

This whole article should've just been a public key and a PO box address with this note: "I will not acknowledge plaintext mail. If you are uncomfortable transmitting encrypted data over the wire, please send a USB disk to this box."
David Miranda’s detention was entirely legitimate
On the plus side, so far as it goes, I don't think we could make a better case for "chilling effects"...
Funny that Yahoo is using Google Analytics :-)
> I guess I'll go for the obvious: If the U.S. wanted to "claim dominance" at any expense, we certainly would have felt much less constrained in the use of nuclear weapons in past conflicts.

Nuclear weapons are defensive devices. The assurance of mutual destruction in case of an open conflict drove the cold war, and secures Israel's border, for example (not really mutual in that case).

Using nukes offensively would completely alienate the US from the rest of the world. The US govt. needs sheepish allies to play along.

It would also be unpopular at home (even though that could be spun around).

> What you are describing is a mythology. One no better, and probably less accurate, than the mythology that the U.S. is an angel of hope and freedom on the world stage.

The US, as any hegemonic nation before it, has been as bullish as politically and diplomatically possible.

It doesn't mean that US citizen are bad people. Most of us are short-sighted when it comes to politics, and politicians and other policy makers take advantage of it.
The article is a 5 sentences "breaking news" piece not really worth reading. There is a single official quote which goes:

The Home Office has defended the detention, saying police must act if they think someone has "stolen information that would help terrorism".

I guess it's easier when you just have to phone the White House instead of having to write your own policies :(
There is also https://mykolab.com that PJ now uses:

If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US.
"Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time."

I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle.

Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...
Since like a beginning of the Future History kind of rule. Then good thing is, it will last for only a couple of the decades before people wake up and restore the freedom. At least it was like that in the book.
I'm not sure we want to start down the route of legislation. Could you imagine the end result of Google-as-regulated-utility? Spammer's dream!
Should be feasible with GNUnet [1] which has pretty generic foundations for implementing anonymous and secure peer-to-peer services. Think of an encrypted overlay network that uses addresses that cannot be linked to IP addresses and relaying transfer mechanisms that are hardened against traffic analysis attacks.

There seems to be research under way to get a messaging protocol built into GNUnet. Google turns up this pdf [2] for example.

[1] https://gnunet.org/

[2] http://rp.delaat.net/2012-2013/p88/presentation.pdf
>> If enough people move to services outside of the States

What service can we trust at this point?

After the Evo Morales flight debacle, it's pretty clear that their five dollar wrench works equally well on other nations as well.

The internet is broken, everywhere.
Here's what PJ said:

If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US.
From the article: "forcing a newspaper’s editor into exile over a report it doesn’t like sounds like a story from the 18th century reign of King George III, not of a supposed 21st century democracy."

Sadly, as an American, I have to point out that the main impetus seems to be coming from this side of the Atlantic this time and both places' governing bodies seem to be complicit and stepping on the gas.

Citizens overcame the tyranny last time. Let's hope we can do it again this time.

On another note: The government itself is showing either it has something to hide, in which case it's showing that it's lying to us, or they have nothing to hide, in which case here's your answer to "What's the problem if you have nothing to hide?"
I think we need to press hard on all the above (and below). Code, vote, protest, move money, organize people, &c.
I'm not sure I would pick the Troubles as an example of good behaviour by the UK government. Not that long ago we had within the UK:

- Large scale arrests and imprisonment without trial - "internment"

- Massacres of innocent civilians by British Army soldiers - Bloody Sunday

- Officially supported interrogation techniques that bordered on torture - the "Five techniques"

- Innocent people forced into admitting that they committed terrorist acts, convicted and given long jail sentences - the Guildford Four
The unfortunate thing is that more often than not some ad networks aren't punished but rather the downstream ad-space seller.

It comes down to browsers half of the time having bad security principles. Anything can change window.location in an any iframe (on any domain) and the new sandboxing for iframes is HORRIBLE (not to mention the support of sandboxing itself is barely there). Ad networks work by passing the user around between networks until an ad is found but this removes any chance of being able to find who is responsible for a given bad ad.

The entire thing is a security nightmare and the only "fix" Google can provide consists of blacklisting downstream websites that may indirectly link to a bad ad via ad networks. I don't disagree with Google's "fix" but I do think they should approach the problem on Chrome and show what good security means when it comes to ads for the other browser vendors.
Thanks! I guess you could still use it to compare between say minivans?
let's see....

News about the guardian's hard drives being destroyed, the Miranda detention, and Groklaw shutting down all at once today? It is not a good day.
Identity — the great enabler of what’s next
Fast accessible, shareable & mobile friendly dashboard in just 10 seconds.
Out of curiosity, was libuv ever considered as the underlying i/o library? Looks like some problems at a quick glance (named pipes for instance) are already solved there.
Nah, we behaved worse, but only to Irish people, so the privileged English public and press felt free to ignore it. What's new is that now the public (and the press) is "the enemy".
I have just launched a simple dashboard for GA - blik.io. I have used it for my own purpose several months ago and I decided to provide it publicly now. It is and will be free, so you can use it if it is valuable for you. I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks!
Good point. I don't have the knowledge to answer this but what is true beyond any doubt is that a false statement like this causes financial damage to the site
Flash needed. Unusable for me. Nice site design.
>How does one even go about disagreeing with a comment like this?

preferably by ignoring it and then moving on. Argument or refutation is merely encouragement. Best to give the impression they're nothing more than a mere annoyance to be ignored.
Similarly: "during validation of Model S roof crush protection at an independent commercial facility, the testing machine failed at just above 4 g's."
Needs an about page
Or send regards to Alan Rusbridger Twitter for standing up to them https://twitter.com/arusbridger
While Occupy DID make some demands; they were just made by the individual groups.

It would be more correct, though, to say that "demands" weren't really the point of Occupy. They changed the national dialogue, and made a LOT of traditional euphamisms and arguments obsolete and useless by putting the core issue of class warfare back up in front where it belongs.

"Cutting out decades of distraction an propaganda" may not have been an explicit "goal", but it was certainly a victory for the movement.
Pros and Cons of Doing Business on WeChat
> the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume

The comparison that some have made between the US Government and Stasi is more accurate than you think, with regards of Zersetzung:

> By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even its exact nature. Zersetzung was designed to side-track and "switch off" perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any "inappropriate" activities.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung

Data mining is a very interest challenge and represents a major step in large-scale computing technology, but it pales in comparison to data manipulation.

Imagine for a moment if the intelligence-surveillance apparatus were redirected outward: methods used for parsing human communication would be re-purposed for disseminating seemingly-human propaganda. Who you're responding to on Twitter, reddit, or HN may not be a person.

Imagine for a moment if spammers were quite a bit more convincing in their emails, and that their poor grammar and spelling were improved.
I checked this out last night and noticed a bug in the nav bar in the justified menu example (in Chrome, when you resize to sm and back to lrg, two of the menu items seem to drop down and unstyle themselves). If the issue is still up by the time I get to a computer, I'll submit an issue on Github.
In all honesty I think you guys are being extremely harsh with a man that has pointed a huge problem on your website. He has done Facebook a huge favour and instead of paying him, you have the nerve to refer to a TOS not written in his first language as an excuse.
This will lead to bad publicity for a multi million dollar company like yourselves. The man looks really poor and if he wanted to he could have made a lot of money selling that exploit to spammers. However he decided to do the ethically right thing, only to be stabbed in the back by Facebook. I cannot believe that a company of your size and magnitude would stoop so low, its pathetic!!!!
Just on that basis I will boycott Facebook as your organisation seems to have lost all of its good morals!!!!!
Taobao’s Online Education Market Launched
Which engine drives it? Looks clean and neat.
We're working on it to make it fully HTML5 compatible without the need to use flash. Thanks for the design comment.
Being 'bland' / non-triggering will make it more appealing to a general audience, larger audience.
Radle, perhaps more communication skills are needed to understand Facebook's response here:

I've reviewed our communication with this researcher, and I understand his frustration. He tried to report the bug responsibly, and we failed in our communication with him.

Facebook says Facebook failed communication. "He tried, we failed," is pretty cut and dried.
>Tell me. You're speaking with a friend in a public square or park in your town. You're not speaking in code with your friend. Judging by what you just said I expect you assume your every conversation is being monitored.

You should be aware of the possibility that someone may be eavesdropping in this situation, yes.

>We have certain expectations of privacy and basic human decency.

Our expectations of privacy are valid in private contexts, like a home or business. Public contexts, like a busy shopping center or the internet, do not contain inherent guarantees of privacy. Even though one can normally assume that no one dangerous is listening in, it's a risk you always take when you engage in any conversation or behavior in a visible location.

>Just because it's possible to wiretap and hoover up all unencrypted communications I wouldn't have concluded that the spooks are doing so because I would have thought they wouldn't stoop to this behaviour.

This is pretty naive. Whenever there is a large benefit:cost ratio in play, people should expect that someone at some point _will_ stoop to that level. The ability to record and filter huge portions of worldwide communication is obviously hugely beneficial to all nation-states, so they're obviously going to do it. There are even some who would argue that this is not fundamentally immoral, so it's an even less clear-cut case than things that are obviously fundamentally immoral, meaning it should've been even more expected.

These monitoring programs have been occurring for a long time, most likely since Snowden was a child.

>You don't have to show us all how smart you are, we know already -- so you can keep these types of comments to yourself.

I think just the opposite. We should be using this as an opportunity to educate everyone on the critical importance of encryption (analogous to placing your comms in a sealed envelope, instead of leaving them bare on a postcard), not express moral outrage that some people would "stoop so low". I guess if you're into that, you can do that too (I find it trite, personally), but it shouldn't be done at the expense of the resolution to this problem, which is widespread adoption of full client-side encryption.
Node.js: the good, the bad, the ugly - why the hell would you use it?
Own a business, starting up, or just want to convince your client, boss or the stakeholders why Node.js is the right way to go? Are you sure you are making the right choice, or need a supporting evidence? Lots has been written about Node.js, but people tell me they couldn't find it summarized in one place, so here it is - the good, the bad and the ugly of Node.js - if you fit in, just use it!
Not just bordering on torture, actually called torture by the ECHR in 1976 (although downgraded to "inhuman and degrading" on appeal in 1978.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Demetrius

Not our finest hour, really.
Can't imagine how this went down in person. Group of police turn up and tell you that they're going to destroy all your working media. How would you even go about authenticating such a ridiculous claim?

It's like they've never heard of off-site backups.
Its also hard to counter the oblivious. If your concern was efficiency, you would instead promote that everyone learn Lojban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban). Then at least you would have a regular, computationally parseable, culturally neutral language with unambiguous phonology and finely grained grammatical control. You would also have an established standard (English is not the same everywhere) and no need to appear to be an intolerant racist too since everyone has to learn a language. Plus it would be much much quicker to learn to fluency than English.
Finding Image Boundaries in Python
He was suspected of carrying sensitive material, which apparently couldn't be found. The search and interviews apparently lasted 9 hours to the minute according to reports and his detention wasn't extended.
In my book: if there would have been something, they would have made it stick. Now they couldn't and apparently out of spite they detained him for 9 hours to the minute while grilling him about the actions of his partner.

John Bull and Uncle Sam have got another blackish eye publicitywise from this affair. There may be a lot of frustration about this Snowden fall-out in Intel circles, but really, let it rest for a while. Sit still while you're being shorn, as any PR person can tell you.
UK freedoms, farewell. Detention of Miranda reveals police state
Why basketball players are tall and how tyranny emerges
Indeed, gull wings doors are dorky, that's why Tesla X has FALCON wings doors!
I am hoping for some kind of solution for the DoS problems present in ZeroMQ (and probably in nanomsg as well) when used in an Internet facing application. For example the possibility to subscribe to an unlimited number of prefixes in the PUBSUB model leads to memory explosion on the server side.
at the risk of encouraging brainless anger responses.

yes lets all bend over and take it up the ass...

because someone says what they learned makes them not want to use e-mail? this is precisely the opposite of how to stand up to oppression.

no matter what it is the response should not be "well i'm going to stop being free and let them oppress me" you may as well just lay down and die in my mind...

you are born free whether you like it or not and nobody can take that away but yourself.
haha, I'm seeing #blockedbypaul beginning to spread around the tweets. Apparently you're not the only one.
>Can PJ not figure out GnuPG?

I'm sure she can, but by doing so has reduced the set of people capable of sending her mail significantly by imposing the requirement that they figure out GnuPG before they send her an email.
How does the NES Zapper work?
So basically Dell sells computers to the government?
Don't repeat yourself in your Rails views
No, it is not. It's straight out delusional. You could be torturing puppies on a webcam and feel good about it by repeating a quote like that.

If you want to become a genuinely good person, you'll have to learn to differentiate between deserved and undeserved hate.

"In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."

-- John Stuart Mill
Medium Sucks
Never traversing the list. Removal every time a peer disconnects.

Removal with intrusive containers: flip two pointers.

Removal with std::vector<>: copy all the subsequent items in the vector one position backwards.
While IANAL, my understanding is that the laws under which he was detained were intended for stopping actual terrorist threats; espionage - even if that's what we want to call this - is not terrorism, and I don't think anyone has asserted that Miranda has any involvement with any such plots.

I agree that the "they're just doing this to hurt me" spin Greenwald put forward is likely inaccurate - if Miranda was indeed moving documents (or it looked sufficiently like that from the outside) then claims that the authorities are dragging him into this to hurt Greenwald are flat out wrong - but that isn't the same thing as the detention being "entirely legitimate."
Still wondering why we need a stateless media entity like WikiLeaks?
Facebook can't possibly pay him. Exploiting a bug on the live site is not something they can reward, even if they want to. It would set the wrong kind of precedent, signaling that it's OK to do whatever to demo an exploit on Facebook.

That said, facebook will surely find some deal so they end up with positive PR.