skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to bike from SF to Berkeley when our office was there and I would always start my East Bay leg of the trip from the West Oakland Bart station. It really is a huge shame that that area is such a dump. It's so incredibly conveniently located and there is plenty of land and I expect rent to be very cheap relatively speaking. I imagine that it would be a great place to do hardware startups, especially around American Steel, where a lot of people into art welding work out of.
Surely at least some of the fired could've been retrained and given a second chance? I agree it would be more fair to include also the number of retrained people (ie. that were retrained and saved from being laid off). Unfortunately, the article also fails to mention the demanded immigration levels.
Retraining would possibly be more expensive than hiring from abroad speaking short-term, but probably more beneficial to the economy as a whole.
I'm probably the last person on HN who hadn't seen 'Indie Game: The Movie' but an entire third or fourth of it is about the development of Fez by Phil Fish.

That said, I wish Fish would make a second Fez and just not say a word about it until it's maybe a month out. He'd still get hype and sell a ton of game without people pissing him off.
You can give it a try at http://tryrethink.info
I'm in the same boat, and like you it never stops me from buying the next one. Like you, I'm trying to support the thing as a whole (Humble, the devs, and the charities), but the side benefit is that if I'm ever bored I have a whole cache of really awesome games I can download at a moment's notice.
SSD backed MongoDB now available on Heroku's Marketplace
Good. I'm sick of being bombarded with it.

I get it, I'm supposed to be scared about a single event that occurred 12 years ago and give up all my rights because of it. I don't need to have it screamed in my face all the time.
AFAIK the American Steel warehouse there is the center of a lot of the big metal art stuff in the Bay Area.
He sent the picture to his buddy at the NSA who performed an image search with facial recognition on all images ever transferred over the internet.
It was this line -
"On Thursday night, after exchanging texts all day, around 8:00pm local time the girl sent me a picture of her in order to convince me to meet her at an event she was going to."

Find the event Thursday night at 8:00pm in Austin and start tracking down from there.
As much as a mere mortal know about installing a linux distro.
In particular, a discussion of the technical aspects of each leak is something that can uniquely happen on Hacker News.
OMG! I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS LIBRARY SINCE YEARS!
this is more like volunteering to clean up broken glass from your local park than volunteering at a soup kitchen. the internet is a shared public space, and some of the inhabitants are better equipped to help improve it for everyone.
No, no, they do. Everybody is the enemy. We have always been at war with everybody.

See the defence budget. They're on the shitlist for cyberattack, along with Iran, China, and friends. In fact, see the article, which cites this too.
We are seeing the same thing at https://starthq.com. We've been getting a disproportionate amount of traffic from IE gallery as a result of being the most recently featured pinned site for the past 6 weeks in the US: http://www.iegallery.com/PinnedSites

There are a few other patterns we've spotted about IE users:

They're older - we can deduce this from the the fact that many include their year of birth in their email address.

They're less tech savvy, we see people typing in in all caps, using the search as it wasn't intended - and we've actually had a few get in touch via the feedback form asking for tech support.

Also the conversion rate from visitor to sign up user is consistently 3x that of Chrome.
or maybe not.
Keep in mind that a lot of the NSA coverage is highly correlated to topics that would naturally rank high here, and many of our colleagues are involved in one way or another. I'm as happy to read about applied cryptography, law & policy, cyberwar, data mining, and other IC goings-on, as much as I am about how they pertain to any other industry.
If American government is serious about protecting the interests of American workforce; implement the following simple rule.

1. Let H1B be independent of the employer. Current H1B rules are modern day equivalent of bonded labor. Let a person obtain H1B from the employer for the first time, after that make it independent of the employer. For example a person on H1B may resign on day 1 and simply join another American company.

Remove all the nonsense about salary limits and so on.
I wouldn't mind if NSA-related articles are restricted to those published by theguardian.com or sometimes nytimes.com & washingtonpost.com. Essentially, the primary source for newly leaked information.

What I hate seeing are articles from blogspam institutions like forbes and businessinsider, or others, that digest the primary source with a snazzier headline.

As far as frequency of NSA stories, this is obviously the strategy of the sources: leak bits and pieces over a long period of time. And, I don't mind that as long as there is just one copy of the information being voted up.
I love this explanation. But unfortunately there was no telephony hacking of any kind as this was just an ordinary personal cell phone.

I did have an idea that we could try to hack his Verizon account to look at his SMS log, figuring that Forgot Password questions might be easy or that we could intercept an email. But we didn't do this.
I sure do! Do you realize this forum is primarily full of white males that work in nothing but technology (some who have developed the privacy-eroding tools that the NSA now slurps)?

Discussion of NSA surveillance is certainly something 'that good hackers would find interesting' - hence the current thread being on the front page and the hundreds of tech stories submitted and upvoted here daily.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

We already know they are using intelligence data to tip off police to invent reasons to stop cars (i.e. 2mph speeding ticket) and find drugs.

This would be trickier for warrant affidavits because (I believe) those become available to defense counsel during discovery. They could hide the identity of a confidential informant from defense counsel, but I believe the judge is entitled to verify the legitimacy of CIs and might do so if the defense claimed that the probable cause came from the NSA.

Local LEOs have already been caught phoning in "anonymous tips" to themselves/their teams to create probable cause for surveillance already conducted. This was before and unrelated to the NSA revelations.
You could also use iostat. I monitor my servers' disk i/o using iostat -xNm 1 10. The metrics await* and avgqu* are normally what I am interested in. They give the disk wait timings for serving disk i/o requests.

You also have access to the dtrace probes.
The subject is vast. The subject is technical. The subject is on-topic.

Beyond all that, the subject rises to a level of fundamental importance to a degree few others do. Certainly more than 99% of topics that find their way to the front page of HN (feel free to quibble with that percentage).

I've said it before on here. I don't think the conversation on this issue has gotten loud enough, or lasted long enough, and HN is one of the few communities on the net where it is not only happening, but happening with a greater degree of insight, acumen, and creativity with regards to solutions and future actions.

I say carry on, upvote, comment, and ignore those unconcerned people with short attention spans.

Edit: And most importantly for the Americans here, call your representatives and tell them, in your own voice, exactly what you think. This has to happen at a minimum.
I think that what they actually have is probably access to the same systems (i.e. PRISM, Xkeyscore, etc.) as the NSA, with the same level of access.
"It is difficult to understand how these companies can feel justified in demanding the importation of cheap labor with a straight face at a time when tens of millions of Americans are unemployed," writes the Center for Immigration Studies

Maybe the Center for Immigration Studies should fire the person who finds this difficult to understand. If they have a hard time hiring a replacement who does understand it, they should be open to hiring someone on an H1B visa.
This reads more like a defensive rant than a legitimate argument. Nothing insightful here.
CreateDigitalMusic article on iPhone circuit bending
I would just be happy if NSA coverage wasn't brought up in the comment section of unrelated articles. Most of the conversation about the new iPhone 5 revolved around the NSA and I found that very disappointing.
"ininitialize"?
The problem is, like almost any other issue of our times, we are rapidly getting desensitized to it. Our society has been jaded to suffering and injustice for decades, even as our awareness have gone up. It's like in Hotel Rwanda where Joaquin Phoenix reporter goes, "I think if people see this footage, they'll say 'Oh, my God, that's horrible.' And then they'll go on eating their dinners."

So when do we stop being outraged yet complacent? We should try to promote stories that focus on some sort of activism, even meager ones, to try to address the problem. That doesn't just apply to NSA surveillance, but any challenge.
She checked in with Foursquare? Some people still use it.
More and less filtering. NSA is directly related to the future of tech and not just US startups.
>My Ask

Nails on a freaking chalkboard. What is so bad about the word "question"?
Ubuntu is non-FOSS so it isn't a valid answer anyway.
I've always assumed rape in general is severely under reported. People are rarely treated in a sensible way when they make an accusation that could end a person's ability to lead a normal life even if they're found innocent.
That's great to hear. Thanks :-)
What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go around the sun. If we went
around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.
-- Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet"

That's just how I feel about NSA. Don't wanna waste time even thinking about something I can't change.

So, less stories, I ignore them all, anyway.
The question is really, what is a government for? If it is not to look out for the best interests of citizens, why are they paying its taxes snd obeying its laws? It is not protectionism at all to level the playing field, America was built on immigration, but the H1B is indentured servitude.
> I just looked at real world photos on Ars of the new models and from my POV the 5C models look like they are designed for kids. (A matter of taste, of course.) If Apple cut the price by another $100 they might make sense as a pricepoint but at only $100 less than 5S it seems crazy to me.

I genuinely think this opinion might be the result of a filter bubble or its "real life" equivalent. I don't care for the bright colors personally, but I think the white 5c looks excellent (a black one would be even better). I still prefer the metal casing (plus the tech specs are important to me), so I'll choose the 5s if I decide to upgrade, but I can absolutely understand why a huge portion of potential buyers would prefer the plastic case, especially people who aren't particularly concerned with having the most blazing new chip or the fingerprint sensor. In fact, even among gadget geeks, I can see many choosing the plastic design specifically because it is plastic. I have heard a lot of disappointment about the fragility of metal iPhones since the debut of the iPhone 4.
Tau helps to simplify many formulas commonly employed when developing games and other graphical apps.

See The Tau Manifesto[1] for a better explanation.

[1] http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto
Ask HN: How did you get your first freelance project?
Trying to find different options in the freelance area on how to get the very first project to work on. Fellow HN'ers, please post your experiences.
For anyone who does not know what PXE (pixie) boot is, it is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices (like hard disks) or installed operating systems. [1] In the BIOS, rather than booting from CD, or Hard disk, you would select Network.

A very simplified explanation is that the PXE enabled network card (almost all modern network cards support PXE, desktop and servers), can make a DHCP request (outside of an operating system), download via TFTP, then boot a kernel/initial ram disk, say for example an OS installer, a LIVE CD, or CoreOS.

+-----> #1 PXE makes DHCP request,
| redirects to TFTP server,
| loads kernel/initial ram disk via TFTP
|
| +--+ #2 PXE boots kernel/initial ram disk
| |
+ v
+------------------+
| PXE Network Card |
|------------------|
| server |
| hardware/os |
+------------------+

So, with a little infrastructure (DHCP, TFTP, and elbow grease), you can boot many things over the network without even having a hard drive or cd-rom in a machine. I use this often for installing new desktops and servers. Just boot into the PXE menu and then select the installer that I want. Then you use something like puppet to configure the machine as needed. A typical RHEL install can take ~5 minutes.

In summary, it looks like CoreOS provides you with their kernel and initial ram disk [2], then you can just boot the machine over the network without actually installing anything. Basically running everything out of RAM, just like a LIVE CD, most likely with the option to install to disk for persistent storage of your images, etc.

ps. It is common to use NFS to mount persistent storage in these environments too, or if you are using a HPC environment, then Luster or something like that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment

[2] http://coreos.com/docs/pxe/
Phoronix is terrible and is _always_ the site that provokes me to install AdBlock.
I voted on both because I want to see less NSA stories which don't bring anything new (vast majority), but I would like increased visibility of those which contain new information.
Some good ones, but nope.
> I'll be honest and say that I'm a bit mentally exhausted from the NSA stories

This is my problem. It's fine to cover the NSA, but I'm tired of seeing 5 stories a day. Worse it's usually the same story discussed from 4 different outlets, so it's not even new information.

I'm also exhausted with NSA comments. I know they're out there, but I feel like the almost reactionary sounding 'but the NSA can see the cloud' or 'Apple may be working with the NSA' comments are drowning out real discussion on security issues.

'I've come up with a new way to manage bandwith'
You're probably helping the NSA
'New cryptography scheme is more secure than SSL'
Except it's probably backdoored by the NSA
'How to use Puppet to setup 1000 servers'
The NSA can watch for your master passwords!

At this point most of it doesn't feel like discussion, but simple noise. That's generally the sign that things have been over-discussed and need a little cool down time.

It's an important topic, but it shouldn't be only one. I would have liked to be able to read some nice analysis of Apple's new fingerprint sensor without 2/3rs of the discussion being about if they are stealing your fingerprints for the government. Maybe just 1/4.
Since I am apparently in the minority on this one here's my two cents.

First, there's a finite amount of actual news here. When there's a new revelation, I want to see it. "More NSA news" sounds to me like exactly what I don't want: every programmer's personal outrage, every major news outlet's take on the latest revelation, and so forth. I don't want to see every story's comments degenerate into NSA discussion. Having a story about the NSA on the front page in perpetuity puts it in the back of everyone's mind.

The level of discourse has, mostly, been high and valuable, but I worry that we're inviting in people who only want to talk about politics, and that's going to drive me and every other technically-minded person with limited energy away.
++++Keep 'em coming!!!++++

The validation of all those tinfoil-hats out there is big news and it should be continually covered as long as there are leaks & snowden isn't dead & the NSA hasn't changed their ways... even though I don't see how I'd believe them anyway, so...
Well, if the philosopher kings at The Cheesecake Factory say so, I guess we have no choice.

More workers and more customers both raise the price of assets. The same Walmart that served 25,000 people in an area will do even better serving 30,000. That's the basic thinking, though at some point it will break down and hurt (almost) everyone, not just workers and customers.
New browser for desktop is not a good idea in my opinion. You have to make it for mobile to make sense. Oh wait, there are many projects that are already doing that
I feel like the types of people more likely to do something about this are those who read hacker news. If we decide to stop talking about it, who is left?
> Will it reduce the number of incoming contractors? Probably. Will the contractors who'll still chime in be more likely reliable, after considering what they're agreeing with? Very likely.

Wouldn't it more likely select contractors that have good liability shields and get to charge a premium for working for an asshole company because there are less people willing to do the work? This is how patent trolls are set up with no assets to lose.
The big problem with this strategy is that disk I/O in a Linux VM under Win7 seems to be about 1/10th of the speed that it is under native Linux.
There is no "downvote" for submissions. Your options are: upvote, ignore & flag
But note that this still doesn't allow you and a friend to play a game with each other unless you both own a copy.
You should check node-webkit, similar but slightly different and definitely more specific to what you'd like to do I think!
I think we should keep them coming. Don't like them? Scroll down. Don't like them SO MUCH? Write a script to filter anything NSA out.

C'mon people, this is HUGE. One of the biggest scandals in the history of ever.

Poor you, are your rights getting in the way of browsing HN?
You can't downvote submissions (or at least, I can't. If you can it must require a certain karma threshold). So perhaps some see flagging as the only option for expressing disapproval of a given story.
iBeacons could solve indoor mapping, make shopping better
Can you or did you mention what it was that Justin didn't know you knew about her. Seems rather unfair, to him and us.
So we could all plow through every event that happened in Austin that she may have attended, but without knowing what part of town it starts looking rather boring. I have a real job. :)

So it seems you weren't even confident when you got your confirmation, a.k.a., it was an informed guess but could have just as easily been a girl that looked alike at an event at the time she was supposedly at an event?

Tricky ol' Phil.
And males in the West too. Heck, I like the white one.
I am personally for less NSA news. BUT I don't think they should be filtered out! HN is should be self regulating and not controlled by any 1 entity
I don't care so much about the articles.

I do get bored with the number of comments about NSA that are shoe-horned into comments on submissions that have zero connection to NSA / GCHQ spying. And it's frustrating to see those comments with upvotes or no downvotes.
This is obviously a shill post setup to advertise close.io and HN fell right for it.

Why would this post be hosted on the close.io blog and not on a personal blog? It has nothing to do with close.io.

Why would he mention close.io so many times?

Why would he ask about the quality of the "close.io engineers" instead of just his coworker or friend?

Smells fishy to me.
Too many from linkbait websites peddling clickthroughs and eyeballs on a controversial subject.

Not enough stories with real journalism, real technology discussion, and real political philosophy.
Without spending too much time on this, I thought of the same as well and knowing that:

Her dress, which was very unique had never been worn by her, because she bought it the day before

...should narrow down the events that this person wanted to attend. Here are the events that happened that day:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/calendar/2013-09-05/

...which, to me, only had one really unique event that evening:

http://www.facebook.com/events/1405498132998020

...which, possibly, would include a picture of that person either in the same outfit or include a profile picture of that person commenting or liking the event.

But this is just a guess...
I too love this bundle. Pretty awesome that the three charities are Watsi, Child's Play, and EFF.

The games are all very distinct from each other and top notch. My three favorites:

Fez: a perspective-altering puzzle platformer. It's cute, clever, and well designed.

FTL: a real-time starship crew management game, where you assign people to stations and target your opponent's systems. You fly through randomly generated galaxies and have random encounters. Super replayability.

Mark of the Ninja: a stealth-action ninja platformer with very high production values and multiple paths to victory.
I don't think it'd work that way around - the owner of the library can kick out friends who are borrowing their games, but not vice versa.
Or perhaps its a claim based on (perceived) statistical truths about the sorts of colors and designs various groups of people prefer.
Did you make a post on Reddit/4chan/Facebook/whatever asking, "Does anyone know this girl?"
Since the point of this article is probably to promote their company, having the answer be "our engineers looked at your private information for a prank" seems like a no go.
Can't there be a third option: Neutral. I want the news stories to get up/down voted naturally without ranking manipulation.

(Which doesn't mean I'd want more or less NSA stories per se).
Does that happen though? Is there deep analysis of the technical aspect of the leaks?
NSA broke the Internet. Our jobs are heavily Internet related. So there's no way this will go away until we find a way to make the web safe again.
Startups started in Seattle
I wish there was a more active discussion on the NSA being able to tap into any phone to access users data. That HuffingtonPost link also linked to a story with a bit more detail[1].

>"The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones....in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists."

This is news to me, I assume they could pull any data from an iPhone/Android/Blackberry, maybe even activate the camera if "need" be.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/08/nsa-smartphone-der-...
This is pretty neat. I didn't know the new Arduino would have WiFi and bundling with that service (Temboo) makes it look like it shouldn't take much to get a lot of common things working. It's a nice step in Arduino's evolution.
I have tried to be careful to only flag the NSA stories that are overtly and unhelpfully political, or rehash content on other stories, precisely for this reason.
Sure, but that's still not a significant departure from Apple's current tiered pricing model.
Ya. "Bringing up the NSA" is the new "bringing up Nazis".

Damn it... now I've done it. My bad.
It's a long running story and it's natural to develop a sense of fatigue about it. On the other hand the ramifications of the story could be immense to all of us who make a living directly or indirectly from the internet.
You are assuming that the industry can fill all such positions with immigrant workers. In reality, the supply of immigrant workers is no where near to satisfy that assumption especially if you consider the annual quote for H1B approvals (often than not such quote was exhausted the first couple of weeks when it became available).