skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All the other UK papers (and the BBC) have barely even REPORTED on any of these issues, exclusives or not.

To look at those papers you wouldn't suspect something of this magnitude is even going on.
Monthly numbers have been published by the press. This article lists the number of Iraqis killed by attacks in July 2013 at 1057 according to the United Nations. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/world/middleeast/car-bombi...
I am starting to seriously despair at the state of the UK.
> Otherwise one of these days we'll have to resort to underground presses like in the days of communism in Poland [...]

It's probably appropriate that the UK is swarming with polish immigrants. Older ones might remember how it's done.
Bitcoin fulfils easily the definition of "electronic money" found in the European directive 2009/110/EC, art. 2 def. 1:

> 2. "electronic money" means electronically, including magnetically, stored monetary value as represented by a claim on the issuer which is issued on receipt of funds for the purpose of making payment transactions as defined in point 5 of Article 4 of Directive 2007/64/EC, and which is accepted by a natural or legal person other than the electronic money issuer;

Germany is doing nothing strange, all the EU state will have to do similar things in the future. Bitcoin may be a distributed currency without a politically backed central bank, but it is still a currency, so it is treated as such by any competent tax office.
Clever solution. You should go work at faacebook.
weirdly enough, I think the public would have forgotten about it, but establishment leaders seem bent on doing everything they can to keep the story alive (lying to Congress, grounding Morales' plane, forcing Snowden to defect to Russia, harassing journalists, now even attacking their families...).
Its a more fundamental problem. Like "Wouldn't it be cool to be able to multiply. At least for reasonable small integers, if you could add, which you can't at this time, then you could multiply simply by repeated addition. But, of course, you can't add, so ...".
>> "Personally I think that if terrorists want to destroy our way of life then they're going to need to do it themselves"

They've already done it. The point of terrorism is to case terror/fear. Between highly visible armed police in large cities and airports, invasions of privacy through spying, and attacks against the press and whistleblowers they've already forced us to change our way of live and give up freedoms.
How is that different to the web of trust between friends that the parent referred to?
There's no evidence the blueprints of PRISM were leaked, just training slides for analysts. There's also no evidence that actual surveillance data was leaked.

This particular slippery slope argument seems weaker because one would expect the government to place tighter controls on the data or the blueprints.
The longest key in the world won't protect you from a FISA warrent.
> The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex

Yeah that'll happen
Since Assange I guess...
> If the US could shut down The Guardian they would.

That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together.

The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in their domain.

Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.
not necessarily. If i buy a collectable trading card or spiderman comic and keep it for 3 years then decide to sell it, it usually will not attract capital gains tax. I am not equating bitcoin to collectables but the precedent is there. Additionally they (German govt/tax authorities) recently advised that you would be liable for capital gains tax on bitcoin profits if you held the bitcoins for less than 12 months, held for over 12 months and you do not have to pay tax on any gains. This appears to be in line with that earlier announcement.
Creating a custom user model in Django 1.5 that plays nicely with Django admin
We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.
I can't believe this is not a top comment anymore.

I don't have enough experience with Ruby to comment about it, but as far as Java is concerned, people (myself included) are still complaining it is slooooooooo... <let me pause a bit to collect garbage>... ooow. Don't get me wrong, Java is an excellent language which has plenty of other benefits (as I guess Ruby does too), but raw performance is not one of them.
Aliens!

"there are live ETs on Earth at this present time, and at least two of them are working with the United States government."

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/06/05/paul-hellyer-aliens-...
Inspector Jay: graphical object inspector for Clojure / Java
I'd say crossroads IO is dead, and would start porting my stuff to nanomsg (or ZMQ).
Technically he is a fugitive and whistleblower.

Fugitive: A person who has escaped from a place or is in hiding, esp. to avoid arrest or persecution.

However I understand your point. The word makes it sound like he has done something wrong.
People behind big corporations, with plenty of money. They control a huge portion of economy and can invest huge amounts of money with lobby in the government. For these people, an independent country with lots of oil is a nuisance, something that lows profit. It's better to have a country with lots of oil with a corrupt government or something that we can control. A government that in exchange of our help will sell cheap oil to us.
>Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion

That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.
Amazon PR's suggestions to journalists covering outage
Sweet. I had to jump off last night, but I did some criminal appointments in both federal and state court to get some courtroom experience while fresh out of law school. Certainly not an expert, but capable of having a fairly deep discussion on search & seizure.

I completely agree with what you wrote above about how just because folks like you or I say "oh, this is/isn't legal" doesn't mean we agree with it.
No they are not.

There is no official stance on bitcoin by the UK government, or tax authorities. VAT is not chargeable on bitcoin transactions. There was one gy who was advised by his accontants that he should be charging VAT but that was not a legal requirement, more his accoutnants taking a very risk averse position, that way if VAT was ever brought in on bitcoin he would not get an unexpected VAT bill.

There are There are also some goods and services that are 2 types of 'exemption' to VAT:

* exempt - so no VAT is charged on them

* outside the scope of the UK VAT system altogether

Bitcoin is outside the scope of VAT entirely and it would require the tax man/govt making a declaration on bitcoin as to how it is treated under VAT rules. This has not happened, therefore VAT is not applicable to bitcoin.
Thanks,

I don't want to go to the effort of cleaning up the code unless there's significant interest.

Is there an "ashamed" open source license, which forbids anyone from associating some code with your name, as a condition of use?

Also, I intend building a usable piece of (open source) software from it first - that's why I'm appealing for ideas.
That is discouraging further reports... You should get paid Khalil. Hope it all works out.
It's unfortunate Guardian didn't force the government go to court over this. It would increase publicity.
Great article! FYI, I'm an engineer at Braintree. We'll be eliminating our monthly minimum very soon - stay tuned.
12-year-old kid learned to code on Codecademy, speaking at SXSW!
That is true to some extent, but for UK local news they still do dogged investigating. The biggest example being the phone hacking scandal at Murdoch newspapers[1] . That police investigation would never have been reopened if not for the Guardian's reporting (they did make errors there too, but some of those I'd attribute to the unwise idea of allowing the showbiz gossip columnist to write about politics and police investigations…[2])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_phone_hackin... The whole story goes far beyond what is mentioned in that article: huge corruption in the Met, an axe murder in a london car park and of course a government communications director, his prior involvement in the hacking and his affair with a certain newspaper executive

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Hyde
The "Digital Edition" is browser-based:

http://subscribe.theguardian.com/
Bounty programs do not attempt to compete with black hat markets or outbid black market rates.

The purpose of bounty is to encourage white hat hackers to challenge one specific application instead of millions of other applications out there that the white hat hacker could spend his/her time on.

So it's saying "Hey...instead of working on that random application why don't you try to hack us because hey you could earn some money too".

It's assumed that the person is a white hat hacker who would not sell the bug in black market anyways, even if there was no bounty.
I don't know whether accepted is the word. It has certainly been common knowledge in the US for 20 years or more. I think that one of the principals on the US side may have included it in his autobiography, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, this is true.

What I feel is particularly strange is how a number of persons involved with medium have at some point or other done some of that feminist complaining along the 'tech only serves the interests of WHITE MEN/we don't need more instagram clones'... yet they threw in with the world's 1000th blogging platform, hmmm?
Steve Kangas was ex military intel that became a journalist. In 1999, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in a billionaire's building in Pittsburgh.

He was an education for me some 20 years ago when I began learning about the depredations of the National Security Corporate State that now has us in thrall.

--

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

By Steve Kangas

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html
Does that have more to do with the G. pushing it as a "unique selling point"? I dont know what the press landscape would look like if the indie/etc. had been given the exclusives, but I suspect it would be the same in reverse.

Journalists are particularly cynical people constantly chasing after anything that will get their by-lines in front of faces.. i dont think we're looking at a paper which has suddenly found its 21st C. political morals, but rather a paper that has suddenly found whistle-blowers queuing up at their door.
Now that they basically consider journalism to be terrorism, if I subscribe to The Guardian am I "funding terrorism"?

I've gone from angry, to completely and utterly 'defeated'. I think I agree with Groklaw where the only way to win, is not to play. Get off the net and go bush. Take up golf (I hate golf). No idea. It's like being back in school being beaten up by the bullies for being a geek, no words can make it stop, nothing I say or do will make a difference.
Nitpicking, I know, but releasing 400 volts means nothing. Current kills, tension does not. It all hinges on the internal resistance of the power source.
Wow, you're getting downvoted for this? Hacker News really has changed. Goodbye Hacker News. I learned a lot from you, but it's time to go our separate ways.
What.

A FISA warrant doesn't magically render RSA invalid. If all your comms are encrypted, they can get whatever warrants they want, and they still won't be able to read your information unless you surrender your passphrase and key.
Governments are inherently prone to corruption and abuse of power. It is stupid to grant the single entity the right to proctect you, your life and your well-being.

What we need is multiple court systems, multiple police systems, etc. And what's more important -- the ability to freely choose between them. Just like you're able to choose Pepsi over Coke or to choose Google over Bing, or to choose one bank over another.

This isn't easy system to achieve, but mostly because a lot of people are skeptical.

More on this topic: http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp
Extropy: a complementary dual of entropy
They were 'requested' not to report it by the government: http://order-order.com/2013/06/08/d-notice-june-7-2013/
That has to do with HTML, not pure HTTP. Every server I'm aware of that does that also supports the actual verb as well.
I wonder what will happen when everyone calls themselves a programmer. Will it be like what is happening now with the photography industry?
Dupe of recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242908

More comments there; BBC changed title of story.
I think that the average US cit is fundamentally good, but so poorly informed as to the world around them due to the media, educational and, frankly, thought control in the state in which they reside that they end up playing straight into the hands of those who would do both them and other nations harm.
I was obviously exaggerating to illustrate the point, but I think we agree that, if one's conduct is breaking civil law in a country, a contract clause alone won't be enough to get him out of trouble.
BuiltWith - Find out the technology behind websites
When I travelled Indua with my wife she would not be touched but it constantly happend to all single women we met. I believe the men just saw her as my property thus expecting me to retaliate. What they did not understand was how a women could not be tied to a man.
Yes there have been various attempts at proof-of-work algorithms to fight e.g. spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system.

However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.
What would CIA confirm 50 years from now?
Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipe...

Take a look at the "depth" column. Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias). It usually becomes more extreme when there's some sort of milestone ahead. There's even worse offenders, for example Waray-Waray.

I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia.
Open Source on Github: Your First Contribution
One of the Internet's very best :(
At this point I hope more follow. If anything that's one way to make a stand.
We just need one country/countries to make a stand and allow security friendly regulation and start-ups will flock. Unfortunately it seems no country at this point could guarantee it and be strong enough to not succumb to pressure.
I disagree. This is a political fight. Technical means can drag the resistance longer, which is helpful, but the political system needs to be put in checks and balances against becoming a police state. There is no substitute of "taking roads and doing peaceful protests" as out of comfort zone they might be.

We sometimes fall in love with our methods because that is what _we_ are good at, not what is necessarily the best course of action.

Again, I am not discounting the importance of improving technical measures, I am just cautioning against losing the sight of the forest for a tree.

I repeat, This is a political fight!

Edit - Added explanation.
On hiring
I think that The Power of the Powerless, essay written about this topic in 1978 by Vaclav Havel, might be interesting even these days. I am not sure it can resonate with western people. Nevertheless, I am going to give it a try: http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_e...
What if: the random person has a matching name and a photo? :D
It might be worth checking out the killed journalist meter by Reporters without Borders.

https://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-barometer-journalists-kille...

They may not even provide the most throughout look on these things, but they seem to cover most incidents regarding persecution of journalists.
Thank you for taking the time to provide these links, sir.
Indies can develop for XBox One, but no newcomers allowed
Ask HN: Hacker News for Computer Engineering?
Hi HN, I enjoy this community, and I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar community for computer engineering. Digital hardware design, FPGAs, Verilog/VHDL, C, microcontrollers, etc.
Would Walter White be a Great Startup Founder?
Even better, would be to have them report favourably or obtusely instead of shutting them down. I fail to see the hyperbole here... just a difference of method.
All "terrorism" is "blowback". Terrorists aren't just crazy folk who come out of the blue and go "I know, I'll blow some shit up just because" - they're politically motivated and use fear as a weapon.

They're politically motivated due to actual or perceived past injustices perpetrated by their targeted nation or organisation.

On the note of using fear as a weapon however, our own governments have become absolutely expert, and media reports can now almost have the same impact as an actual terrorist attack in terms of controlling patterns of thought through fear.

So, by the definition of a terrorist as being someone who controls a population through fear, or in fact the fear of fear... you can see where I'm going.
This doesn't make sense to me. There's a simple technical solution: stop using email for tips and setup a secure web form on the site. Can someone explain why this wouldn't solve the problem?
Not in the same way that you can use email though. It is unsafe to use GnuPG on a computer you do not own or trust like a computer at a public library or an Internet cafe. It is, however, possible to register an email address on such a computer and send unencrypted email on that same computer with some precautions and still be fairly sure that the contents will not be connected to you.
I didn't really mean legislation--just strong grassroots demand. These are corporations, and they'll build the features their customers want, after all.

Maybe we just need a a Kickstarter to pay for the engineering time required to get this coded into Firefox and Chromium. If Mozilla or Google don't like it, call the result a fork and start a campaign for people to switch, as happened with OpenOffice+LibreOffice, or with MariaDB. Of course, I think both Google and Mozilla are smart enough that they'd see what was happening there, and just adopt the open blacklists.

As browser-users, I believe that we really do have the ability to affect the decisions of these companies, if we have something we can all get behind. :)

(...at least, if it doesn't directly interfere with their bottom line, like including an ad-blocker in Chrome would for Google. Can't have everything.)
Corporations can't put me in jail.
The domain that was blacklisted was not demos.shapingrain.com (I checked), shapingrain.com itself was blacklisted as you can see from the Google Safe Browsing report here: http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...

The theme currently in use on http://wp-abtesting.com/ has a main stylesheet called style.css which contains the URL http://www.shapingrain.com in its comments in the header.

It looks like shapingrain.com itself was infected on 2013-08-19 but cleaned by 2013-08-20. It was likely infected with a JavaScript injection vulnerability linking to the site lartedio.com which served the actual payload (likely something trying to self-install, break out of the box, etc.).

After shapingrain.com was infected and flagged by Google Safe Browsing, wp-abtesting.com would then have been flagged when Google analyzed the CSS file and saw what appeared to be a resource link to an infected site. This would appear to be a limitation via the scanner which is scanning CSS comments and treating them as valid code, though this is not without precedent and certain browsers will evaluate what is contained in comments under certain circumstances (see IE conditional comments).

So, in the end, it looks like shapingrain.com was infected yesterday and Google blacklisted that site as well as any sites pulling resources from the infected site, erring on the side of caution (possibly) and interpreting URLs within comments in CSS as possible resource links.
> Can't get the stupid comments and hate get to you.

I'm getting there on my own websites. Feedback is an essential part of the process of publishing, if the feedback is mostly negative in nature then that gets interpreted as 'we don't value this, go away'. Small wonder that in the end that is the result.

Just like people get pestered away from neighbourhoods people can get pestered away from running websites, I can very easily relate to this.
Apple USB Mouse, MobileMe, and Apple TV were all under Jobs after his return.

So, do you agree with me that your statement "Apple never failed to exceed expectations" is incorrect?

If so, then if Apple can have failures under Jobs' leadership then surely Musk can fail, even with great leadership.

If not, how did Apple exceed expectations?
Google pushes Glass release date back to 2014
The Internet does no such thing. It just makes it harder to keep those abuses secret, and it makes it harder for the government to prevent people from talking about it.
The purpose of elections is to give the populace the false idea that they have a choice. If they could actually change anything, they'd be outlawed.
I truly hope so, but who for and what are they likely to be?
When many people in the UK read what the tabloid media writes, without questioning it or taking biases into account, if the events are even reported at all. An uninformed electorate is a dangerous thing.
What interested me is the discussion about naming (re-use of callback, "errback", "Failure" etc.).

That sort of discussion quite often smacks of bike-shedding, but Guido's points here made me release how clear and simple a lot of the naming in Python is, and how much that adds to readability and ease of understanding of code. Clearly a lot of thought along the lines of "this should be a verb" has gone into the standard library and choice of language keywords, and this has spread to code built on top. Without realising it, this is one of the things that has drawn me to Python.

I'll stop taking it for granted now, pay attention to how it's done, and maybe my own code will benefit.
Where there's a will, there's a way. They'll be able to get him the money - it just might not be through Paypal.
I don't really know why do you say it has not really worked. Has anybody been killed ? There is a reason they call it dead man's switch.
Nobody. Create any sufficiently complicated system and it'll do random crap that nobody expects or desires.

The sad truth is that there's no "man behind the curtain", just a gaggle of idiots and processes that make no sense, and the rest is butterflies and hurricanes.

This is a far scarier reality than there being some mysterious illuminati-like sect running the show, as it means there is no enemy to fight but our own nature.
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Not to mention the terrorists that planned 9/11 were, decades earlier, "freedom fighters" to the State Department as they were denying control of Afghanistan to the Soviet Union.

Funny how quickly the prevailing winds can change.
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting