skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And that, folks, is why we as engineers and hackers have a moral duty to be very selective in the types of work we take on and for whom.

Thank you. I was going to make the same point, you've done it well.

Moreover: this is why the Snowden, PRISM, NSA/FBI, surveillance, privacy, and other stories matter on HN.

Many of those working for startups are contributing directly (and occasionally indirectly) to the datastreams which are being harvested. I've never felt comfortable with Facebook and the ethics of its leadership, and I've been increasingly concerned about Google (I consider it to have lost rather than sold its soul). Both are far too actively carrying the NSA's water (as I've pointedly told Google multiple times).

How to answer the challenge ... I really don't know, I'm at a loss here.
Fixed this I think!
Sounds like a good plan then, eh? ;-)
I'm talking about the time period before security screening started at most airports... when hijackings were common. Look at the 50s-70s.

An attack on an airplane is simply too challenging for the vast majority of people to execute.

It is currently difficult to execute. It won't be if we had no security.

Search for "Security screening" on this wiki article:

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

You will notice that they were rolled out in the 70s as security screening started at airports. It was proven effective and unless you can make an argument why people wouldn't pose security threats now with no security checkpoints you won't convince any actual decision maker anywhere.
Glad you liked it, I'll try and do that at some point.
grellas (who posted in this thread) comes highly respected in the startup community and from what I've heard works on flexible terms. I don't think he actually works for "free" though.
So this[1] is absurd to you? 0% chance of being true?

http://www.naturalnews.com/042323_brain_cancer_risk_cell_pho...

EDIT: ouch, those downvotes...
I think it's up to you to get people within your own sphere of influence to care, rather than shift that duty to someone else.
Yes, it can't handle all date formats, so it defaults to 0 which is Jan 1st 1970.

It's easily fixable but I haven't got around to it yet.
It's way more ambiguous.

PRISM people thought they were doing right. All NSA - based on all the official and unofficial responses - think they are doing right. That they help building a safer America. That they have to sacrifice privacy for safety. Etc, etc.

I don't think NSA people are evil. They believe that the things they do are for good.
I used Lynx once.
I completely agree. I am really tired of that Brin story being constantly cited by people without thinking through the consequences - of which there are many.

One of the biggest is the destruction of creativity. When people know that their actions are under constant surveillance it creates an enormous cognitive load. They have to constantly evaluate everything they do as to how it might appear to a critical observer. The end result is that people will simply stop doing anything that might have a social risk associated with it.

A panopticon society will be a dull, stagnant and repressed society. Think of every little backwards town where everybody knows everybody's business and anyone who steps out of line is ostracized. That is what our entire society will turn into with total surveillance.
Apparently not. I think just wait until Google, Facebook, or Twitter reset your password.
I know many anime fans who have rows of shrinkwrapped DVDs on their walls - they'll buy them to support the creators, but the fansub quality is much better.
Yet there is no shortage of doctors willing to assist in torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, assist in executions of prisoners, or conduct non-consensual and medically unnecessary procedures (inserting catheters, rectal examinations, etc.) upon demand of the police. The problem isn't lack of ethics courses but a fundamental flaw in human nature, which is that people easily forget all their personal ethics when someone in authority (whether their boss or the police) tells them to do something.
Looks like I was caught in Adobe breach as well. Luckily I use one off passwords for each site I log into. Damn.
> Whenever someone talks about how smart we are genetically, ask yourself if this is the kind of smart we were 10,000+ years ago.

You want a more shocking thought?

Imagine how much knowledge spanning the 400,000 years since this specimen is forever lost to us because it was limited to oral tradition.

These people didn't had a wealth knowledge available one click-away to build upon, but I see no reason to believe they dramatically less intellectually capable than us because of genetics. They certainly possessed a lot of empirical knowledge about the things around them, necessary for survival.

Considering how some tribes knew for eons about the uses of medicinal herbs which are today used on our modern drugs, it's fascinating to think about what we might be missing. If even relatively recent knowledge (300 BC) gets lost [1], imagine how much science will "rediscover" things our descendants might have already known.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
onceburnt: This does not constitute legal advice, I am not representing you, and you are advised to consult a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction regarding this matter.

However, as a matter of general experience, I can tell you that, generally speaking, a company cannot rid itself of its obligations (liabilities) simply by selling itself to another company. Things like the type of entity of the debtor company (was it a corporation? a partnership? a sole proprietorship?) may determine who ultimately has to foot the bill, as well as the structure of the sale (e.g. the acquiror may have merged the target company into itself, which generally means it assumes the target company's liabilities; or the acquiror may have purchased only the target company's assets, leaving the liabilities behind with the company). These are questions your lawyer can help you figure out.

Independently of the question of liability, however, when a creditor has sufficient evidence to establish that it is owed a debt by someone, the burden generally shifts to that someone (to the alleged debtor) to show that he's free and clear of debt.

Bottomline: I would consult an attorney, and show him your correspondences with the company, including the correspondences with the purported acquiror. He will then decide against whom you should pursue your claim.
I found out , problem is our submission rights have been taken , it might be due to reposting and deleting stories, or might be due to posting irrelevant material which is of no relevance to HN community .
Why should those in power continue to not be punished, yet law abiding citizens get the full force of the law if they do something wrong?
Further semantic hairsplitting, perhaps:

Not Google nor any other person is granted rights under the Constitution. Given the Natural Rights philosophy subscribed to by many of the founders, as described by John Locke and others, the rights of the people pre-exist, simply by virtue of their being people.

The Constitution comes later. It describes a set of enumerated powers that the people have decided to cede to the government that they're creating. The way you describe it is the other way around from this.
I wonder how many times people at DHS have put their ex-s on the no-fly and gotten away with it because of zero oversight.
The most charitable explanation for the no-fly-listing in the first place is that the DHS confused "Jamaah Islah Malaysia", a professional/meetup group, with "Jamaah Islamiyah Malaysia", a supposed terrorist organization, and is now furiously trying to conceal their incompetence in this case and how often they screw the pooch in general.

Rather like conflating the Tamil Tigers and the Lions Club.
I wouldn't want to use a webservice to look at my passwords. I want to open my password safe locally. Less likely to be snooped upon (though still possible, obviously).
Unless, you know, the money is too good.
It's interesting how lack of understanding turns into a declaration of misunderstanding.
To the extent to which I believe these are interesting arguments to have, I think that this should be discussed only after the intrinsic motivation has failed; as it stands, it is my understanding that a jailbreak is coming from evad3rs in the near future: planetbeing has already stated that they have what they need, and they are just working on integration and support for all devices (which is a lot of busywork). As for getting paid, they actually do get a good number of after-the-fact donations, but that is a drastically different kind of expectation from the users giving the donations, as well as a drastically different kind of mentality that goes behind the developer (as even if all you cared about was money, you aren't shopping for large sums ahead-of-time).
Rough estimate from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo... suggests that about 2/3 of americans live in a state bordering the ocean, so about 100 million americans further away from the shore.

What that has to do with anything, god only knows, unless you meant something like '100 miles away from the border', and even then I'm at a loss.

Go visit a flyover state sometime. Most of the country's very different than SV/the northeast corridor/other modern urbanized area, and I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I had something similar happen to one of my Windows Live accounts. Someone somehow broke into it and, although I did not have any credit card information, they decided to continue to use it. They added a stolen credit card to the account. I received an email in japanese from Xbox Live (! I have never owned an Xbox, someone converted my account, nor do I speak japanese) at one point which prompted me to call their support and figure all of this out.

But the point I'm trying to get across is, if I were unlucky that could have turned into a HUGE mess where I was accused of stealing said credit card. Luckily that did not occur (probably because they could trace it to a separate IP address.. and I don't own an Xbox). I no longer use passwords as insecure as I did for that account - I had to deal with this headache while at my family's Christmas party as well (because that is when I received the email), which made it even more irritating.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/26..., Marissa Mayer has made several statements about not having enough clip inventory for all of the ad inventory they have. User generated content is cheap... I have no idea if it's that, technology, acqui-hired, or what, though.
I use a yubikey that outputs half of the password used to unlock my keypass database, the other half is in my head (so even if they steal my yubi they can't do much).
The database is backed on my own owncloud which is hosted on my own vps and replicated on other 3-4 servers (all mine). My little personal cloud setup.

Call me paranoid but it took me half an hour to set it up and the monthly fees for the servers are very very low.
I've always felt that Reddit is Usenet 2.0. Calling it "the frontpage of the Internet" is a way better slogan, though. (Alexis said Paul Graham used that term on the WTP book tour during his lecture.)
> Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place...

Yes they would, but were out of money.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-ja...

"Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade."
Not as safe as other solutions, but I can remember all my passwords by choosing passwords by website category (6 for example):
one low-security sites,
one for sites that have your CC #,
one for social networking,
one for email,
one for work,
and one for your banking sites. keep a copy in your wallet. Sleep better.
How much does it cost to get placement like this? Is it done through a PR firm?
Recent releases sure; shows from the '80s or even 2004 not so much.
CIA does directly run ops and targeting.

"The CIA's Silent War in Pakistan"

http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1900248,00.html

"CIA drone attacks in Pakistan are responsible for unlawful killings, some of which could amount to war crimes, Amnesty International says."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24618701

"CIA Drone Strike Kills Pakistan Taliban Head Before Talks"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-03/cia-drone-strike-ki...

The division between "intelligence" and "operations" has been breached.
This site is BS, I put in a BS email still say I was part of a adobe password breach!!!
You can just torrent users.tar.gz (the leaked list of encrypted passwords) and then grep the file for your email address, which will give you the encrypted version of your password.
How to Have Great Ideas More Often, According to Science
Perhaps they will outperform (current!) mid range GPUs at some point, but from what I understand only the most expensive processors come with beefy integrated graphics.

That means, that even if they manage to beef up their CPUs, buying a cheap i5 with a mid range GPU will cost less. Plus, you can upgrade the GPU separately etc.

Frankly, I don't see the point of APUs but it seems AMD is going in this direction as well. Rumors say they're actually discontinuing their enthusiast CPUs[1].

[1] http://www.techpowerup.com/195355/vishera-end-of-the-line-fo...
Yeah this article is actually quite good, better than most science articles I've read from most major media outlets. I wasn't meaning to belittle this specific article, but I thought I'd point an actual interview with author Svante Pääbo.

Also, again, I think the Nature podcast is by far the best podcast for general science, so if "[people] fucking love science", I'd recommend listening to it weekly over liking a facebook page, especially as they cover their weekly publication on a slightly more accessible level. Also, Science (the periodical) has a pretty okay podcast too.
> Google Groups has the 90s, but it's locked behind a 'Googlewall'.

And I believe that is a crime against humanity.
I'm not sure what the re-sub policy is, but do keep trying.

I like this.
Only somebody completely ignorant of executive roles would make a claim like that.
He's got a lot more effect on the country than a senator, who arguably has a lot of effect on this country.
While it's a great case to bring attention to this kind of abuse, it seems very likely the DHS will just say "Due to a classified terrorist threat..." blah, blah, it's all kosher.
That seems like a lot of overhead to manage. Also, you're going to have a bad day if a spam bot decides to spam thousands of <common_user_name>@yourdomain.com. Maybe that's fallen out of practice, but I've seen it happen before.
The defendant was Terrance Brown, the gvt responded and said they did not have location data for him. Filed two different responses, one public with a ton of [REDACTED] and a private one.
Isn't that effectively sbrk()?
"Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly." -Heinlein
Okay that's seriously metal.
How I learned to develop Android apps in less than a year
> you live in one of the most powerful and richest countries that ever was, a beacon of hope and freedom to the rest of the world.

Genuine question, do you actually believe this, or are you referring to it as fiction in the same way the Matrix is fictional?
What's the first rule of usenet?
After reading your comment, I agree that most of the post is a practice in guilt by association without actually getting to much actual analysis or argument.

I'm curious what you think, guilt by association arguments aside, would be "devastating" to cyber-libertarian ideas.
Same for OSX. Personally I'm a Windows refugee and I've been bouncing around Mint, *buntus, Deb n Arch to find my favourite and TBH I love what I see. Valve has done great work on their Linux Steam client.

I foresee a few blockbuster games being ported for Linux and Valve using some great marketing for it to win PC gamers over. Eventually it will become the preferred platform. Unlike OSX, Linux isn't hardware locked and CAN spread like wildfire.
This will only accelerate the development of Dart by Google and push it onto the Android platform.
God damn it Adobe!
That's probably a great life outlook to deal with individuals and probably helps your personal relationships. But it seems incredibly naive to give corporations the same treatment.

Read the actual promise[1].

The promise only covers patent claims from Microsoft on those technologies, and only if you're not engaged in any patent lawsuit with them. So, if you're some random company that happens to encroach on Microsoft's territory in another area, but you happened to use Mono, they can strike at your usage of Mono due to your work in another area.

Automotive? Health? Entertainment? "Social"? Telecommunications? Advertising? Resource planning? Imaging/mapping? Security? Aeronautics? Anything related to computing?

All those and more are areas that Microsoft works on. I can't imagine any legal team being able to assert that their company will _never_ use Microsoft IP in any area - it's just too vast.

Example: You use Mono to implement some coordination software for networking gear - that sounds "safe". Microsoft then publishes research and obtains patents on their own work on networking (already done) from Azure and MSR (or they buy some large dead company's portfolio). Microsoft now has IP all over your area of choice, and as soon as there's any fight, you lose your Promise over Mono and now have a ton more claims to defend. Oops.

This isn't really even cynicism - it's spelled out very clearly in the promise.

Edit: In the Google Android .NET issue: Yes, Google can go use .NET for Android, no problem. Until Google gets in a fight over a plethora of other patents (say, advertising or other phone related patents). At that point, Google loses its promise for Mono and MS has a lucrative ground to gain.

Also, copyright issues are NOT included in the Community Promise. So MS still wins by making APIs copyrightable. They might extend the CP to cover copyright, but those copyright issues are still there as soon as someone fights MS over anything else. Totally strengthens MS's position.

As far as .NET on Android - OF COURSE, MS won't "stop" that. That'd be a major win for MS and hurt Oracle/Java. The .NET port would fall under the agreement, but I've already demonstrated how quickly that agreement can roll back. Google adopting .NET is a good technical move, but gives MS a massive advantage.

That said, app developers using MonoDroid are probably reasonably safe so long the apps they make are of relatively low strategic value to MS. If all of Google Play's apps were made on MonoDroid, Google would be in a terrible position.

1: http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/c...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=usenet
If you reuse passwords, separate throw-away accounts (like Adobe or pretty much anything that's not your email, your bank or PayPal), from the important stuff.

Sites that need to be secure, hopefully really are secure. Sites that don't really need to be secure because they don't deal in anything of value, probably don't invest quite as much in security. Reusing passwords across those different kinds of sites means the extra security of the secure sites is wasted.

Of course it's way better not to reuse at all, but remembering two or three passwords is a lot easier than dozens, and still a lot safer than just one.
Microsoft working on a smart bra to stop stress-related overeating
Where are you getting the newer Usenet archive from?

Thanks for turning me on to the Archive.org's 'UTZoo archive', sadly it is only 1981-1991 and incomplete. What a shame. :(
RISD President John Maeda Leaves, Accepts Position as Design Partner
The reason I keep mentioning it as not being a loss to stackexchange is because in the justification you say

> users who browse but never vote or post just aren't really that valuable, relatively speaking – except to encourage cross site discovery which we intend to incentivize in other ways.

and for the behaviour I desire I fit exactly the mould of a user who isn't looking to vote or post. Okay, I might vote on the excellent responses, but on the sites that I just want ?tab=week or ?tab=month behaviour from, I don't want to ask questions.
Medium 1.0: Beautiful Stories
I get a very icky feeling when I read academic papers that explore how to mine network traffic for information on how to discover terrorists. And sure enough, when reading the funding information, the money for the projects came straight from the DHS. This icky feeling was there long before I heard about Prism.

You don't need an ethical guidebook to consider the implications of the work you're doing. I don't think lack of explicit instructions is an excuse. I don't want to invoke Godwin just yet...but suffice to say, a lot of bad things have been done in the name of good. And there were people in the loop who had the ability to see what was going on.
Huh? No. First of all, most of "the economy" doesn't know anything about anything unless they're informed. So they're implementing a new testing process to better inform them.

Let me remind you of a similar situation - 50 years ago, it wasn't common knowledge that smoking was harmful. Many people smoked. Then, overwhelming evidence showed that it was harmful. Then, there were widespread campaigns telling people just that. Today, not as many people smoke, and not to the same degree. Success! Should we have given up on teaching people sense?

Second, what makes you think - assuming that cell phone emissions are indeed significant enough to be harmful - we can't have tech that works as it does now, but is less harmful?
So I just spent half an hour trying to illustrate a simple counter-example, but for each of the half-dozen apps I have considered I see how it could be organized into a unified structure differentiating machine/human API by the requested content type. I'm not sure if I would prefer that in practice, but I think I am going to have to try it. The idea of having a single structure for the API is too elegant not to try.
It's precrime.
Yeah, 100%. There are (at least) two incorrect things the original commenter took for granted. First, that the infinite binary tree as he created it is equinumerous with the natural numbers and therefore can stand in for the "list" in Cantor's diagonalization argument. Second, that a depth-first traversal of this tree makes sense.

Your argument does a good job of showing why the first is a mistake. Assuming we can traverse it at all, it shouldn't matter whether we do so depth or breadth first. By traversing it breadth first we see clearly that we can always find a path through the three which does not correspond to any natural number, proving that the tree is not equinumerous with the naturals and, moreover, proving that there is an infinity which is "larger" than the infinity of the naturals.
The article isn't loading for me, but there was the anon.penet.fi anonymizer, at least until it got shut down by, IIRC, the scientologists.
Perhaps because many of them are friends and family of said polite company who may have been persuaded to join with incomplete information, or lacked the economic resources to refuse to join when recruiters came calling.
Was this not obvious from the various news stories of drone strikes targeted at cell phone locations of suspected terrorists?
Obviously this is a point of obsession for you and nothing I am going to say is going to change your mind, but here you go, have fun: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cellphones

Regardless, Alsup's decision in this case did not assume that there is no chance that cellphones cause cancer. He left himself open to that possibility. Hence more than reasonable.