skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
90% of Europeans, even technically illiterate, have a mobile phone, which is even worse for privacy than the iternet.
Wait, you're really gonna call BS on someone who doesn't pin their hopes on the fine line between 'can make a copy' and 'makes a copy?'

You realize the agencies have been using a bizarro definition of surveillance where they can capture everything and it's only surveillance once an agent listens to it? ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... )

Snowden says they can do it. ISP sources confirm the government is trying to do it, but they are forbidden from disclosing the exact nature of what is done. You're really going to believe the people who have been busted lying about it and say anyone who doesn't is not concerned with 'accuracy?'

And what does metadata mean, anyway? If the government stores everybody you've been in a picture with, or who's looked at your pictures, but doesn't store the picture, is that really supposed to make us feel better?
These are vastly different issues

The funny thing is that they aren't. They're all about power. Power given to the few to control the many. Social programs just have that sugary coating that voters like to swallow, but the rotten corruption of power is at the center of all and its effects inevitably dominate.
Fascinating! We use Clojure heavily, but the JVM is sometimes a bit of a headache-inducer in our environment (especially w.r.t. its eager gobbling of memory), so I'm always excited to see new potential runtimes/backends for Clojure.
One more proof that Amazon is a retail company and not a technology company (only technology is allowed is for the retail sake).
Because there is an inherent mismatch in privacy concerns and law enforcement / defense concerns.

Office of Censorship was created to counter the German / Japanese threat of spies during World War 2. It was seen as a necessary measure to help unite the country. The successful use of the Atomic Bomb is credited to the Office of Censorship, who helped keep the project secret. Quite possibly... the Atomic Bomb's details would have been leaked in WW2 if it weren't for the Office of Censorship.

COINTELPRO was then created in the 50s to counter the Soviet threat. In the 70s it was revealed it was being used for more than just that, and the project dismantled. In fact, FISA protections were supposed to prevent any large-scale domestic spying. The entire point of FISA was to stop future projects as they rose up.

As PRISM came up, despite FISA protections. Its important to realize how it happened. If you've been paying attention to Congress, FISA has in fact worked: Senator Wyden and Senator Udall have been criticizing these programs for a very long time. No one seemed to care in 2007 however, so the programs continued. I guess Edward Snowden has made things far more dramatic, and easier for the Press to talk about... but these are facts that have been discussed for some time now.

If there is a fault in FISA, its because Americans don't like listening to Senators. So no matter how many Senators you put in charge of watching the Intelligence Agencies, apparently no one will care unless a giant controversy is brought up by a non-politician.

Every few decades, peacetime makes us forget that the world is willing to attack us. Eventually, we as the citizenry work to dismantle the annoying and invasive defensive measures we give to law enforcement. (see Clinton Era in the 90s, where he reduced the size of Intelligence Agencies by half)

Then, an attack happens. The US returns to "war mode", and everyone is willing to trade privacy for security... at least for a few years. And that is when these new programs find their way into the system once again. The creation of Patriot Act led to the authorization of PRISM.

The important issue to see here, is that these programs are 100% legal. These agencies are always willing to follow the letter of the law. So... all we have to do is petition Congress to change the law. Section 215 of the Patriot Act: "Business Records Provision" is the law that legalizes the collection of Metadata. If it dies, the program dies with it.
the article specifically mentions 747s. 777s and 787s are regularly commuting trans-pacific these days; and have two- or three- tiered class seating; Presumably A340s and A380s, fit the bill as well.

I think long-haul flights more or less refer to flights that take longer than the ~11 hour flight crew shift.

Edit: apparently a long haul flight is any flight > 6h
Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is all about this. He would say that the visual impressions are "System 1" and the fine musicological distinctions are "System 2".
It seems like they're making it more about the site than the content. There have been a lot of absolutely vapid medium posts that have ridden to the front-page of HN, as Medium currently exists in the "it is somehow illuminating and academic" halo period.
Happy people :)
Apparently Groklaw runs on private email messages between her and her readers. If people cannot be assured of the privacy of their messages, then what they say is necessarily constrained. Given the nature of the topics on Groklaw, having privacy to discuss and subsequently post on it, is essential to the running of it.
The iPhone 5C Isn’t For The US; It’s The iPhone For The Rest Of The World
>Do you have expectation of security if you don't lock your house, then?

Of course. And if that expectation is violated, if the culprit, if caught, will very much go to jail. And in some places you can have a go at him yourself.

>I'll rephrase it this way - do you expect that no burglar will enter the premises just because there's a law that says that it's illegal to do so?

No, but I don't care about that much.

I care about governments or corporations (e.g legal entities) going through our stuff, regularly, massively and legally. I want them to not be able to do it legally (and I want the law to try to enforce penalties if they try to bypass that).

As for random hackers and such, those are not a systematic threat.

That is, I'd like the same protections for my email that one has (or used to have) for his house: e.g no search without a warrant issued for a specific detailed reason. As for protection from burglars, I know how to lock my door, and even if I forget that, those people will be breaking the law and be held responsible by it.
You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back...

What a bunch of goons. The files we've heard about have all been NSA's stuff, not GCHQ's, so even if the wacky, anachronistic idea of "giving back" a digital file were coherent, the complete demand still wouldn't be.
Remember "trust, but verify"?

Well, I don't trust these agencies. Worse, I have no way to verify that they are doing what they claim and that they are not doing things that they aren't claiming. We need to fix a lot more than just "issuing blanket warrants". We need to fix other things before we can even attempt to fix that.
Yes but the reason for SUV's being the most profitable vehicles for automakers (actually, big trucks are if you make them) is not applicable here. It has to do with basically making them off your existing car platform (scale/leverage) but charging more. I do agree with mercuryrising though that this is the next extension in the original vision.
Top Ways to Destroy Earth
By choosing the government we want to have.
Should we all automatically forward all our incoming email to Obama
In fact the opposite, Google's value is providing relevant search results for everyone, not tech savy users who already know how to navigate the net and use adblock.
That's too generic and blanket a statement. And historically false -- not "every leader" has done those things.

But even if he did, not "every leader" has done those things to the same extent, to the same kind of people, and for the same reasons.
Think you can fance(face dance)?
Go to www.sonofander.com and stand a chance to win a HP Envy UltraBook!
In the US, Magnuson-Moss is often referred to as "the lemon law" (a defective product that can't be repaired is colloquially called a "lemon"). Specifically, "the lemon law" refers commonly to cars that have issues the dealer didn't specify before the sale and will not/can not fix.

Problem is, the FTC requires you to have a lawyer file a lawsuit and coordinate your legal costs and representation with the FTC, generally requiring a lawyer specifically dealing in lemon law cases. I've been down this path with a defective cell phone (HTC Touch Pro) and trying to get my carrier to replace it, and it's impossible to find a lemon law lawyer that deals in anything besides used car sales.

As always, the law is well intentioned but enforcement is next to impossible, just like you said.
The delivery infrastructure they build for grocery delivery can be used to deliver other things later.
One of them did, I know, unsure on the other. I'll inquire to see if they're interested in providing that information or joining this discussion.
Another incident demonstrating that "the system" (more than just the criminal justice system, as it extends to subsequent civil and commercial life) is neither about justice nor about rehabilitation.

A further corruption: I've read that, even when there is a will to "take a chance" (aka employ and treat as a member of society) people with a criminal record, businesses can face obstacles -- sometimes insurmountable, for a smaller business -- to do so. One particular one: Insurance companies audit for such employees, and either cancel insurance or raise it to unaffordable rates.

America: Land of hypocrisy.
It's interesting to see that the Google employees commenting in this thread are OK with people being treated this way. It reveals a lot about the culture. No wonder you fail so badly at customer service.

Maybe you have been at Google so long that you don't realise it, but this is not a normal or decent way to treat somebody. I can't think of anybody I know who would want to work there after going through that interview process even if they did get a job offer.
It also looks like, in an accident, the lights on the Tesla start to flash.
"I would like to be able to enable even more restric­tive sub­sets of lan­guages and restrict pro­gram­mers even more because we make mis­takes con­stantly."

I like this very much. For all the talk of power in languages, we make lots of mistakes. One underlooked decision factor in choosing languages should be, "How hard is to make accidental mistakes?" and "How easy is it to find and fix mistakes?"
I agree that HR is often a scourge. . .however, in my previous job I was elated with the way HR improved the hiring process in my department. First, they looked at the incredibly high - and quick - turnover in our department. They actually paid attention to the exit interviews/surveys. They told the management that people were leaving in droves because the jobs/roles/responsibilities/autonomy described during the interviews were radically different from what employees actually experienced - and employees were not happy about that. HR forced more "truth-in-advertising" and "truth-in-recruiting". HR forced them to include more SMEs in the process and to require that all of the interviewers - especially the non-SMEs and managers - to know best - or at least better - practices for interviewing. . .
Go to www.sonofander.com and stand a chance to win a HP Envy UltraBook!
The fact that Rakudo on the JVM can take advantage of the JIT to optimize simple math in tight loops fails to impress me, but I suppose it's one more half-implemented feature you can tick off the back of the box, so hooray.
It suggests that regular exercisers are better students, not that better athletes are. In particular, just because some exercise is good, it doesn't necessarily mean more is better.
It didn't cost Apple any revenues though. iPhones were still sold, the Apple Store was unaffected and iTunes was unaffected.
Typography and legibility sandbox
ABU : Always Be Upgrading
What he's described is pretty trivially done in most modern languages/frameworks. I can write the same in C#, Scala or C++11--swapping greenlets for standard threads, which honestly is unlikely to be a perf concern--pretty trivially.

The hardest of the above would be C++, because boost::threadpool isn't officially part of Boost--though it works fine--and otherwise you'd have to get a little creative with boost::thread_group (but in doing so it'd probably be only slightly more complex than the Go version).

I mean, it's a nice feature, albeit bolted to a language with a lot of issues. But unless you have pressing reasons to look at Go, something like that sounding easy probably won't really trip your trigger. =)
I can pick 300 random real world friends and guarantee that 99% of them never use Google+, even the ones in tech. I have an account and in 1 year I have posted 2 things to an audience of practically no one.

Compared to other social metric's (facebook, twitter, etc), it's empty.
Sort of like how ordering a pizza is not "making dinner", though obviously it is operating in the same space on the same thing (hunger in the evening). The approaches are related through shared objective, but have substantially different methodologies.
The reason why I need something like Mailpile (and the problem they will hopefully solve) is to have a client-side app with a user-friendly system for managing S/MIME certificates.

I can set up the CA and generate user (employee) certificates on my own, there's no way the end-user should have to do that. But what's frustrating right now is that the current tools for configuring S/MIME signing and encryption for email either (a) don't exist, or (b) are heinously complicated to use.

Have you ever tried getting S/MIME certificate auth set up in Mac Mail? It's doable but I had difficulty walking my tech-savvy brother through the process over the phone.

If Mailpile has a simple method of selecting a certificate file for an email account then the hard part is done IMO. The process just becomes IT issuing new certificates every year to employees, and employees uploading said certificates through their (web) mail app.

The biggest value here is having a web mail client, hosted locally, that can support PGP/SMIME in a user friendly way. Then signed/encrypted emails are that much easier to configure for the masses.
Trello asks for your friend's emails so you can recommend the service, even going so far as to have a friendly little puppy you can 'feed' the emails to.

Facebook is well-documented in scraping your address book on your phone if you use their app, and many other games will do the same. I get LinkedIn spam all the time from friends who gave them my email account so I could join.

This is really common, least of all because of the push for high viral coefficients in startups.

The reason I find it so repugnant is that I want to trust my friends and family, and I want to be able to enjoy my privacy (such as it is). That these companies go out of their way to make it so so easy for my friends to betray that trust is unforgivable.
You drastically overestimate the government. The US gov can be taken down from the inside if the people want to. They don't want to. Every human alive today has more power at their fingertips than a King a hundred years ago, but go ahead and believe that this is the worst it has ever been, it is a popular fantasy.
Yes I agree that this data is better to have than to not have. A savvy investor can use this as a starting point for their own research, I was just worried at the framing of the posts ranking companies (in the past based off of alexa mostly and now off of other metrics such as likes, follows, tweets).

A couple examples to play devil's advocate even when discussing consumer startups against other consumer startups:
1) The social media startup that relies on spammy incentives to retweet or like something.
2) The ecommerce startup that relies on free giveaways or hefty price cuts to get people to tweet or post deals that are not sustainable from a business perspective.

Unless there are other signals that you can combine with this data, in many instances it can be deceiving. Like I said, the data can still be a great starting point because you at least see the data ranked with the names of the startups and then can investigate those startups closer from other perspectives.
GoDaddy acquires local search startup Locu for $70M
Ask PG: Why is there a title box on the submit page?
There seems to be a meta discussion every day from people getting annoyed at mods changing titles, or asking for a title to be changed etc. It seems clear that HN doesn't want the title to be editorialised, and it says as much in the guidelines. Why not get rid of the bickering by simply removing the option of submitting a title? Just get it from the page itself.

Also, it gets really annoying when you click on a link only to find out you already read it under a different title.
That sounds like the sort of thing that could get someone in hot water under the CFAA these days.
Elmore Leonard Dies at 87
> I don't consider other attempts to influence governments to be inherently political acts, like civil disobedience, participating in black markets, and other forms of counter-economics.

Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others. By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities. Even if we take that definition, whatever system theoretical (or in some parallel universe, practical) society you envision there are going to be small pockets of political governance that sets rules and enforces them. It could be as small as a family or a pack of 15 travelers, or as large as a village. There will be pack leaders who will enforce the minimal rules that you have set up, probably using physical force and there will be rules to avoid physical force unless necessary. There will be clashes between packs, which is just going to be a decentralized version of current international politics and there is going to be protection money taken from the physically weak likes of me, so that I don't get killed in such clashes.

I prefer better politics (your definition of politics) than no politics.
> If I'm having trouble financing the development new features for my SaaS application, should I just create a funding project for it?

Sure, why not? No one is stopping you.

> I wish someone could explain this phenomenon to me.

Many people invest small amounts of money in a person or group of people. There are risks, like any investment, and the payoff is a product which the investors will find useful or entertaining.
Jones has shut down Groklaw before, in 2011. IT's her choice to make but I don't buy her reasoning, and I certainly don't think it supports your claim of blackmail.

Again, at what stage can we describe the US and UK, and their co-conspirators as fascist, police state, oppressive, and so on?

Well, don't let me stop you since you're obviously aching to do so to bring some excitement into your life. I stand by my opposing view that people today generally enjoy far more freedom than in the past, even as recently as in the cold war.
I just thought I'd drop by and say fuck you Matt Cutts. Hope you get fired for your payday loans spam.
Yeah, I have been talking about this with people for some time - and while the idea of a box is great - and needed for the long term, a VM is ideal to begin with because it can be widely, swiftly and freely distributed.

Further, I was thinking of the following scenario for message validation - (this is just a thought experiment, so it really needs some critical examination I am not sure this even gains one anything):

You run two instances of your VM. One is run locally to you - another is hosted. When a message is sent to you from another peer - it must reach both the hosted and the local one to be opened. When both instances are online at the same time - a hash is shared of the message between both instances and the local master can trust and open the message.

When you're locally off line and a message is sent - Thus, if your locally offline - your hosted instance receives the message. When you come online - your local instance will receive the message from your hosted instance AND a hash from the senders hosted instance. If the hash from the sender matches the message hash from your hosted instance - the message is trusted and can be opened. Else it is dropped.

The problem is that all these p2p secure connections can still always be slurped.

The addresses are only within the system and one would never know which hosted instance belongs to what actual address.... (This area needs a lot more thought)
Okay, that just makes a ton of sense. I've never worked for a big company like that, and hadn't considered the latency issue that can be worked around by general interviewing.

With that said, it doesn't change my opinion of it being a time waste for me. I have a career, I know, more or less, what I want to work on next, and I have no interest in devoting a month (seriously, Google recommended taking that long to come up to speed on interview questions) of study to interview for who knows what position, especially when the whole system is gamed towards rejecting false negatives.
Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1
Jacob Appelbaum likes to call this to the attention of people by comparing it to safe sex practices.

When you engage someone online, you'd like to know a few things about how that person with handle your personal data. If you know someone to be incapable/unwilling to secure your data (analogous to someone indulging in risky sexual behaviour), then you can refrain from interacting with that person on a deeper level (i.e. don't have sex with them).

Pretty hard to do in practice, but if everyone understood this concept it'd be easier to make it work.
Wow, that takes me back. That was _exactly_ how the original Java Virtual Machine did threading. I ported it to the new model used by Solaris (from its SunOS 4.x roots) and that begat the term 'hello hello hello world world world' which is, as you might imagine, getting the threaded version of helloworld.c running :-)
Why Ambient Noise Makes You More Productive
Since you genuinely don't seem to understand, here's the deal: that story was about someone's personal experience of sexual harassment, and you posted a flippant analogy comparing it to invasion of online privacy. NSA surveillance is a big deal, but nothing to do with sexual harassment.
> most of the changes go unnoticed like a frog slowly being boiled in water.

Believe me, I notice. GMail and GMaps get slower and slower every day. I can't actually use GMail anymore; clicking anything takes several seconds. Wasn't this way in 2005, and I had a crappier computer then.
You're right, there aren't automatic upgrades on most international flights for those with status. But a lot of people who fly international 1st / business are doing so on redemptions.
It's for processing the typesetting of mathematical expressions. See MathJax.
Over the past few years we've also been working on a HTTP based API for SQL databases -- http://htsql.org; it has insert/update/delete features in a plugin.
He has removed himself and any reporter not based in New York. He knows the strength of the first amendment in US courts, National Security letters or not.

No UK reporter will do any work on surveillance any more, simply because the UK has too much power over the press when it really wants to. Going to court in the US gives him a near certain win, going to court in the UK a near certain loss.

To paraphrase Napoleon: I would rather have a clever editor than a brave one, and a lucky editor than a clever one. He got lucky with the UK destroying the disks in a heavy handed manner.
Standalone DSL sounds great, but I suspect that won't exist in UK because of the local loop belonging to OpenReach and them charging providers for access. Will look around though.