skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These two comments on theguadian.com sum it up rather aptly:

> > This is beyond farcical. Does any working at GCHQ or NSA actually have a fully functioning brain?

> Yes they do, and recognize a well paid cushy job when they see one.
This is absurd. It's hard to imagine a scenario where a major terrorist plot is uncovered by agents infiltrating an MMO. Are all international communications channels not already subverted by the spooks assumed to be potential breeding grounds for terrorists?
How to read code from Mars: A story of unmasking some Javascript code
> someone who thinks the NYT is a 'transcendental' organization

I didn't say "transcendental". And I'm not saying let's worship the NYT like a sparkly unicorn.

I said news organizations like the NYT exist to try to transcend us/them tribe/region primate thinking, and try to be objective. I admitted they don't always succeed, but said I think it's unfair to presume they don't even try.

p.s. My comments above got a few upvotes... then voted back down again. I thought HN is supposed to be different, and people aren't supposed to downvote solely because they disagree.

p.p.s. I'm not implying you downvoted me. I doubt that you did.
Write this article when you've succeeded and quit your day job.

When.
Anyone know if the "Programming with hand tools" Conj talk will be available somewhere?

Totally agree on Clojure's documentation problem (being used to Racket's amazing docs), but at the same time it's very easy to just read the source of the library you're trying to use. Especially with Emacs' quick source code navigation.
I'm also pleased to see an upload feature from terminal. Avoiding the interface YouTube has in place is great, I always seem to get bugs regarding upload times and it freezing.
This ought to finally get the script kiddies up in arms about government surveillance.
"the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate"

The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff.

What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.
Modern art
It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children.

exactly.
Government agents figured out how to get paid for playing WoW.
If you book on forehand, there are some sweet deals to be made. I can rent a subcompact for € 784.00 for an entire month, including all insurances, waivers, unlimited miles, etc.
For navigation: better to buy it secondhand on craigslist, or use your phone.

For renting apartments CL isn't very good IMHO. Most of it is >1yr lease, and/or they want credit reports. The sublets section has a little more to offer.
The idea that, at this point in every single reader's life they need "substance" along with ideas, is just a bit much. You, at this point in your life, would want/need more substance but you are just one person. There is a lot of value for other people in reading bullet point lists of these types of things. For example, if these are all things I've known and learned in my 42 years on the earth, a bullet point list serves as a nice, general reminder on a lot of levels. The "I've forgotten more about productivity hacking than most 20 year olds have learned" adage is true here for 40yos. Maybe you are at the point where some of these are recent topics for you - things you've recently learned in much longer format. So you reject it as "Everyone knows this - silly".

We all have biases - we just have to view things from others' perspectives sometimes to avoid those biases coloring our outlook.
You don't have to tell your boss in the first place.
Man, I just learned about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon the other day, and now it seems to be popping up everywhere.
$500k in only 2 weeks with 47 days to go! This promises to be one of the most successful projects on Kickstarter.
Why We’ll See The First Ad-Supported Phone In 2014
Ask HN: Do you know a good online tool for assessing developers
We are thinking about adding a test to our interviews when hiring developers. We hire mostly .NET and Java developers. Is there a site you have used and recommend?
How do you distinguish from the person you're hiring and some jackass with the same name when Googling? Not everyone has an unique name.
Ask HN: Why my SEO is still not working?
We are getting the same traffic from 150 to 200 from last 4 months. no improvements. any suggestion.

PS: http://www.waroze.com/
The system is working fine, it's just not to our benefit.
> A later memo noted that among the game's active subscribers were "telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies".

Perhaps these were the targets.
How big netcorps use nsa debate against your freedom
not true, I used to play on a 486DX, you did need a whopping 16mb of ram for it to run acceptably though.
I hadn't heard about anyone having naturally occurring fourth and fifth fingers without the linkage. I do remember reading a story about a piano player who devised a set of stretches intended to develop the independence of his ring fingers but it ended up damaging the (tendons|ligaments|<insert medical term here>) and he could no longer effectively play the piano.
AWS offers autoscaling for EC2 instances: http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/. Additionally, use their Cloudfront (or CloudFlare, which offers better value and is easier to set up) CDN.
Looking forward to your launch!
Seems like a list of things most startups do/should do. Doesn't seem to have anything specific to doing a startup in your spare time.
The Pentium 4 introduced prefix opcodes that hinted that the next branch would be likely or unlikely to be taken. These are still legal, but afaik post-NetBurst CPUs ignore them, and Intel's optimization manuals have dropped mention of them.
How to Motivate and Innovate Part 3 : Innovation
Apparently the article or service or whatever is visible only for those who have signed up for Google accounts. Is this so routinely expected now that no one considers it worth mentioning? Maybe it's just something about my browser settings that gets the login-wall.

I suppose Google is tracking me regardless, and lack of a Google account only prevents me from seeing the part of the data they choose to show. I'll still continue opting out tho, in case it makes surveillance a little harder.

Edit: found a short explanation, http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/05/27/google-latitude...
This is not the same "surveillance apparatus [that] saw America through the Cold War." It's simply not comparable to even just fifteen years ago. The changes in technology and the self-satisfied attitude of the spooks have changed the game entirely.

Half of the people in this country are deluding themselves just like you.
When I read this I just though of the Penguin Party scene from Four Lions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI.
Turns out these morons get there ideas from satirical black comedies.
You didn't miss much. It was an "inspirational" talk.
I have not used a site specifically, but when I interview developers, apart from the normal technical questioning on their CV, I get them to design a simple object diagram, and then lead them to a PC. I ask them to code it test first. We observe them doing it to see how comfortable they are with the tools and that they can even complete the code for the design.
How to Deploy A Server
Terrorists: we will Candy Crush you.
I feel a bit uneasy that the undersigned are all PRISM companies. All 8 of them. They seem to stick together and not mix with outsiders.

Note that there's already a similar initiative launched by Mozilla called Stop Watching Us [1]. None of the PRISM companies signed it.

Instead, they filed a petition (of little value, but with a big pomp) to allow for full FISA order statistics be published. Which was denied, incidentally.

[1] https://stopwatching.us/
You (Time Person of the Year)
It is not clear your cafe is free to join http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/4099/am8y.png
Well, when you basically have an unlimited budget you can afford to cover all the bases without prioritizing. This is starting to sound like that.
Asking if Google/Apple/Microsoft/Samsung are going to kill each other with their latest release is like asking if Ford/General Motors/Chrysler are going to kill each other by comparing their latest cars.

The answer is (thankfully) No. All can exist side by side. It is called competition. Competition is good.
Big Data and Social Media Insights are Bringing Telcos More Customers
Much more worthy set of questions. I quit my job a year ago, learn to code a little, build some projects, and for 3 months I've been a full-time founder. But now I have to pay the bills (and still no traction), so I will start a day-job. But before that, I founded a startup while at my last day-job. It was kind of unique, as my boss didn't have any problem at all with it, even allowing me to work on it during work hours (as long as I did my job, reach my goals). Well, what I think:

- Talk as little as possible. Even if you have a very transparent, honest relationship with you boss. If your boss might find detrimental you to have a startup, don't talk at all.

- Never use the company's computer to any kind of work on your startup. For emergencies (and you must really have a high treshold for emergencies) use your smartphone. But try to do everything out of work hour (before, after and during lunch).

- If you have a day-job you won't have an ideal startup management. Accept it. So forget about mentors, you won't be the co-founder doing the fundraise with investors (if all the co-founders have day-job, there would be no fundraising at all). You will try to prove the concept, maybe some traction. Only when you quit you start fundraise (if you need it).
Meeting with clients, only on lunch. Meeting with co-founder, only in the evenings and weekends (if your co-founders can't do it, than you have a deeper problem here).

- Urgent emails only through smartphone. And be criterious about "urgency".

- If you are founding a startup with a day-job you must have already decided that, at the first time possible, you will quit your job to work full-time. There is no "consideration", it must be inherent to found a startup.
And about the criteria to do it, I think the best one is enough revenue or funding to pay your own salary. But set a reasonable goal for your salary, don't expect to make the same as your day-job, calculate your minimum life cost possible and that's it.
Funding is good, but if all co-founders have day-jobs, it will be just a illusion, so don't consider it.

If you start to manage better your risk-aversion, you may use the traction criteria. When you discover that you have a product people want, do some math with your reservers, calculate how many months you can go without income, if it is more than 6 months, go for it
(2010) and looks like it hasn't got any updates in a couple years unfortunately.
FYI: Most of these are not free books. These are PDF copies of books are most likely illegal in U.S. I agree, books are a good investment, so support the authors and buy.
Prove it. Who do you work for?
I've been working on a web app for a small charity in my spare time, and when it came to server set up we had a debate about whether Chef or Puppet would be too much for what will likely be a single production server (currently EC2) for a long time.

Does anyone have experience running this kind of tool with a single server? Is it worth it? What if we added a staging server too?
Browser share that supports APNG: ~25%

Browser share that supports GIF: ~99.9%
Lemonade - A simple and effective grid system
Next in press: "The real life of Leeroy Jenkins"
Online games are interesting to infiltrate because they can be a conduit for downloaded code; a lot of the clients are native code with the capability for remote execution (e.g., for anti-cheat challenges).

I have no evidence that the NSA has done this.

To the NSA, your user base is just another set of people to monitor, just another set of machines to infiltrate. They don't care about your user's trust.
"run time is the only time (really) that the order of operations can be determined"

For perfect optimization, yes. Its possible that accepting 50% performance of the OO sked by changing to a precalculation at compile time or the OS doing some kind of pseudo-JIT compilation might save so much latency, thermal budget, and power that you can stuff in more cache or more "whatever" resulting in overall higher system thruput. Its not just the traditional tradeoffs, because you're making a major architectural change.

A FPGA might be unable to model the complete systemic tradeoffs or more specifically the designer might not model the tradeoff correctly. The point of the arch might be that real silicon might have space for twice the cache memory (or whatever) with the new arch, but a lazy comparison implementation might have a meg of cache for each to keep the implementation simple, which would miss the point.

Its an interesting idea to think about, regardless if it turns out to be correct or not.
From what little has been confirmed, the system we know about works "better" the more connections you feed into it.

I doubt they intended to find anyone directly using this information. Instead, what is more likely is that collecting data in these games might help identify "friends" of people considered suspicious via some other means.

Although now that I think of it, games like WoW and EVE Online do make for quite a milieu. I know that several of my colleagues play such games and with each other.

It certainly chills the spine a bit when you realize that there are people who've had this kind of data for quite some time, using it for who-knows-what...
See also Andrea Sharpton's notes on Linden Lab and its opposition to allowing users to chat over OTR: http://pastebay.net/1371265
World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games
Anything can be realised with off-the-shelf technology plus time. Your posited solution further down the page would also have involved work in setting up the pool configuration and switching, so let's not pretend that it comes at zero cost.
The UK government is a 19th Century 'filing cabinet bandwidth' information architecture. The IT systems as always reflect the organisation structure that produces them. The data redundancy and unnecessary domain separation is frustrating and archaic.

Uk.gov is just the cherry on the top of an old and creaky enterprise design that hasn't kept pace with changes to its mission or the world around it.
BBC launching more FTA HD channels on terrestrial
Microsoft's fault for letting user the possibility to brick their console. Does it void the warranty ?
Slightly OT, but the randomly generated names would make fantastic names for bands.
Dimensionamento de Estruturas de Aço no IST
What evidence if any is there that Dewey was a member of any Communist Party? (And why that of Russia rather than America?) Dewey and Sidney Hook said very intelligent things about the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, which did not please the fellow travelers.

By 1950, says Wikipedia, Dewey was an honorary chairman of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which as it happens was funded by the CIA. Why didn't an educational repentance follow the political one?
Me too ... I basically never turn on my GPS (too power hungry), but it managed to quite accurately record my wandering around today, including places where I never used the phone for anything.

I didn't realize cell-tracking was this accurate...

[It's not always accurate, some pretty weird locations from previous days, but a lot more than I thought it would be.]
BBC uses name of already existing npm package for their install instructions. And in issues one of the programmers I suppose suggests asking to madhums to rename original library :) Strange line of thought.
Quick History of Apple Mac OS X
MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? When a game goes to great lengths to simulate a world, the possibilities for covert communication are nearly limitless!

I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime!

Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!
In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police.

While that may be true, it's not really the same situation.

For one thing, it seems clear that the behaviour in question was illegal, and people are going to jail for it.

For another, guessing that someone won't have changed the default PIN to access their voicemail is not on the same technical level as, say, building backdoors into widely used hardware by being sneaky with state-of-the-art mathematics.
Next was great, revolutionary in UI technology & design.
It is always great when evil is incompetent. I dislike that the NSA, GCHQ, etc. are spying on everyone and violating everyone's basic dignities, but it's great that they waste time doing so in rather insane ways, e.g. by playing video games.

Basicly, I hate the NSA's spying, but if they want to spy on me in ridiculously convoluted ways... it's better than them being actually competent.
It is ahistorical and (perversely) wishful to suggest that communications surveillance in the 1950s was less onerous to the civilian population than it is today. During the heyday of the Cold War, no police force needed a court order to wiretap a phone; the notion of wiretap authorization dates back to, what, 1968?

Today, we have rumors and gossip about NSA analysts "training" on Obama's comms in the early '00s. During the Cold War, the FBI brazenly monitored and transcribed all calls to various public figures and then blackmailed them: see Martin Luther King.
Just donated some BTC fraction as well and I must say that bitcoin really does shine in the area of charitable donations: it's quick, you get the confirmation of your donation almost instantly, all of the money goes to the charity instead of having a % wasted at the credit card processor and they have the potential to get much more out of it than what I sent (this could go both ways of course).

I just hope that the btc donations get matched 3x as well, they don't say on the page.
If you have to monitor all online communication, then infiltrating private message boards by means of technology or human interaction is essential.
An in-game chat is just an additional communication protocol next to email, Skype, etc.

Leaving such communication channels unmonitored would pose a potential threat. This behavior is in line with the current state of affairs and should be expected.
Not the author but I've done something similar before, so here's what I can offer:

> What does your boss/supervisor think of your startup?

My boss had no reason to know, although she eventually found out through other means. It didn't affect my day job at all so it was a non-issue. I had no reason to bring it up and neither did she.

> How much do you talk about it at work?

Not at all. Work is for work.

> Are you worried that your full-time employer will think you're doing your work on their time?

They knew me well enough to know that I would never do that to them.

> Are you worried that you may be technically doing your work on their computers (even by logging into Asana or a similar site)?

Do not do anything on work hardware, ever. In many parts of the US this may actually entitle them to something (though IANAL and don't want to open that can of worms). Just don't do it. There's no reason to.

Ideally, you wouldn't even do startup-related things on your personal hardware (e.g. phone) during work hours or while at work.

> How do you juggle meeting clients, contacts, mentors, other cofounders, with your day job?

The job I had when I was doing this had an owner who was a butts-in-the-office type (part of why I left). Because of this, the simple answer was "I didn't," unless it was over lunch. If the folks your meeting with know you're working full-time - they probably should - then they'll know you can't meet for coffee at 10 AM. Most of the time they will be impressed that you respect your employer enough not to use their time to build your business.

The job I have now is not so stringent on time. I could go have coffee with someone at 10 AM if I had a really good reason (up to me to decide), and we all put in enough hours that nobody is counting how long you're away from the desk.

> How do you send urgent emails related to your startup in your day job?

As I said earlier, work is for work. It needs to be really bad to require attention from you when you're being paid by your employer to do what they want.

I obviously can't answer the last point, but I'd like to leave you with one thought. It would be great if everyone had the time, ability, and means to bootstrap a business on the side while getting paid full time, but the unfortunate truth is that some people don't. You may have a job that required you to sign something prohibiting it explicitly. You may just have a job that is too close to your passion such that any business would be a competitor. Or, you may just have an asshole boss who makes you work 60-80 hours a week for a 2% raise and a $300 Christmas bonus.
>The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players.

In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.
0 for me also, and I had a Nexus 4 for a while... they must ask a question about enabling this feature.
tl;dr, NSA analysts want to play WoW during working hours. Can't blame 'em.
The results for searching for "fucking" are hilarious .
Even if this was a legitimate concern to the NSA, if you don't cover every game you wouldn't catch any possible terrorist. If I were a smart terrorist, I'd just simply use a fairly obscure game unlikely to be targeted.
I can't wait to see a title that reads "Newest NSA revelations show that the Al Qaeda transmits information through MMO 'World of Warcraft' with in-game Gnomes jumping in morse code".