skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am on record here on HN as having participated in the Take Back the Fourth protest in Minneapolis about overreaching NSA surveillance.

Let your argument stand on its merits, not on what the argument-maker has or hasn't done in the past.

> He would have done a lot more good for humankind by increasing the NSA's ability to conduct surveillance in China and in Russia...

The United States has done tremendous good for humanity. But given our history of extralegal, unaccountable meddling in the foreign policy of other countries and how spectacularly it's blown up in our faces over and over again, I must absolutely disagree with you.

> the two countries that have protected him so far...

Every time a Snowden discussion comes up this point also bubbles to the top, as if people actually thought Snowden chose to flee to those countries because he felt that Russia and China had better support for freedom...as opposed to those two being practically the only possible countries he could flee to without being assured of his extradition.

> I seem to be joined in my daily activities by a lot of Americans who think that Snowden didn't help anyone by revealing official secrets

I think the NSA didn't help anyone by grossly overstepping its mandate and doing things which only tinfoil-hat cranks would have claimed the government did five years ago.

> which governments to oppose

This sort of belief, where government wrongdoing can never be exposed because the United States is implicitly locked in some sort of existential crusade against foes which do even worse (and exposing it would undermine this crusade), can be used to justify all sorts of evil, totalitarian actions. I don't think our moral yardstick should be set relative to the worst country(ies) in the world. I don't think our ideals (the ones tested by the War of 1812, the Civil War, WWII, the fight against segregation, and countless other times) are so fragile that we need to sink to the bottom of the barrel in order to guarantee our national survival.

> another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there

If this is the mindset of the "general opinion of the American public", I fear for the long-term future of rule of law in this country.
Use of real name isn't problematic as long as you don't have unpopular opinions. I'm not foolish enough into thinking that the work world is like college when it comes to free expression. My employer wants to be popular in the market place, therefore they don't want to be associated with unpopular opinions.

If Gawker writes a hit piece on me because I held down an unpopular opinion in a discussion on feminism in tech I know I'm out of a job. I would likely be out of most jobs in Silicon Valley.
The biggest question for me is if it will be cheaper to have same day or same hour delivery by drone than just walking or driving to the store and buying it. I use Amazon now because for almost every single item, Amazon is the cheapest place to buy it and I'm willing to wait a day or two to save 10-20% than if I bought it somewhere locally. If getting a drone to fly it out to me costs an extra 10-20% on the item, that basically negates the value of using Amazon to me.

Articles like this also beg the question, why doesn't Wal-Mart do delivery right now? If pizza can do it, why doesn't Wal-Mart have delivery guy at each location that fulfills local orders from Wal-Mart.com? Either 1) They've never even though of that (not likely) or 2) they evaluated that option and figured out it wasn't economical. I doubt having a drone swarm is going to be cheaper than paying some teenager minimum wage to drive around in his car delivering stuff (at least anytime soon).
Ask HN: Anyone using RethinkDB for log analysis?
So you'd be fine with someone stealing data the government holds on your, say your medical records, and publishing them on the front page would you?

Maybe your last few tax returns. May as well publish those as well!

How about state secrets on any weak parts of military defences?

Yes I have moral reasoning. It's stolen information.
Interesting, are you using the word "warrantless" as a synonym for "baseless" or as meaning "without a warrant granted by a court of law"? If it's the first, I agree wholeheartedly - it's both unethical and just plain stupid for my government to spend time, money, political capital, and the ability to look itself in the mirror without cringing on being able to access the pornography of private citizens of ally countries. If it's the latter, I disagree - I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.

You should be pissed, and it pisses me off that my government is pissing you off, but that doesn't mean I think it needs to get warrants to spy on other countries.
You've given as little data to your claim as he did to his. Maybe he said that just to seem noble, or maybe he actually looked into the numbers and is speaking the truth. Without looking those numbers up yourself your comment is just guesswork.
My main concern with this is account security questions like "what was your first car?". With how much information people put online these days, these questions are often pretty easy to crack. Some websites allow you to change your password after simply answering a couple of these.

I personally avoid this problem by generating "answers" as passwords in 1Password. But the vast majority of people don't do this.
You can also take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities created by the regulations against selling cigarettes and beer to minors and make a tidy profit. A similar opportunity exists for all sorts of waste disposal, if you ignore all the pesky environmental regulations.
Not broken, you just don't need to include the full link to your twitter profile - just your handle.
How are you supposed to deal legally with your government doing something bad, when it is illegal for you to know about the bad things?

Just think about your proposition for even ten seconds.
Yes I do believe that, and it's what the heads of GCHQ MI5 etc told the government when they were asked that question.
I felt the same way about nicknames, but at some point I realized that I had a digital trail attached to my online-name that was a mile wide. I figured I might as well just start using my real name (which is rather unique already).

Also, I find your story of rules interesting. When I was first introduced to the internet (when I was about 7 years old, in school), the one "rule" I remember being told to us over and over again, by parents, by teachers, by anyone in authority was:

Everything you do online *can* be traced back to you. Communicating online
requires the same etiquette as communicating face to face. Don't do or say
anything you wouldn't do or say in real life.

That was the "one rule" of my day, and of the people I knew. It's one of the things that made switching to my real name easy, since I didn't have to change how I wrote.
My teachers have been telling me this since 2000.
There is. Immediately under the freelancers name, if they've added it. Here's mine: http://availability.is/for/niftydigits
LLCs aren't double taxed. Or S-corps.
Just think about your proposition for ten seconds.

You're suggesting that the entire government is corrupt, and covering up 'something bad'?

There are endless systems of checks, balances, and disclosure within our government.

Sorry, I don't buy the conspiracy theories, endless theoretical debates about what the government "could" do with data it has. It's moot.
I believe this is solved with gocraft/web: https://github.com/gocraft/web

The middleware would be, per the example there:

func (c *YourContext) UserRequired(rw web.ResponseWriter, r *web.Request, next web.NextMiddlewareFunc) {
user := userFromSession(r) // Pretend like this is defined. It reads a session cookie and returns a *User or nil.
if user != nil {
c.User = user
next(rw, r)
} else {
rw.Header().Set("Location", "/")
rw.WriteHeader(http.StatusMovedPermanently)
// do NOT call next()
}
}

Compatibility with Handler/HandlerFunc is kept at the top level, but not at every step along the middleware chain.
LOL … that was great.

I've always thought this CSI clip was amazing too…

“I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic…see if I can track down an IP address.”

http://brad.me/1hGJgIk
It doesn't require all of them. They just need enough to reach a critical mass at which point they can start rejecting.

Also, a client can submit their cert to the log regardless of CA support. The only thing CA support is needed for is automated submissions.
There is a reason we have a public interest defence - the Guardian believes that it is in the public interest that these documents and their implications are made public, discussed and changes made to our security services.

I agree, but I see why others do not - but I ask you, how would we have the debate without the leaks and without the defence? If there is a way, please tell me.
No. It's totally different.

This is not about censorship. Newspapers can say what the hell they want. Unless they obtained that information via illegal means - which The Guardian did.

They are absolutely the same as the phone hacking papers.
> Appealing to the Constitution isn't really a valid line of argument, though.

Fully agree - because it's only valid in the USA. Assuming libertarianism has some value outside of the States, the fact that the Constitution (and the Founding Fathers) may or may not back it up is irrelevant.
He said more people in Ivies are there because of legacy/earning power of parents, relative to the average school (which I think is a rather uncontroversial point). He didn't say everyone, which is what you're saying.
The guardian didn't steal documents.

The fourth estate is part of the established checks and balances you mention, in fact it's the most important and independent part.
A large, perhaps majority, of the government, didn't know what was happening.
No, in fact his comment and now yours are some of the only ones that dishonest about what the conservative position really is. It's a lot easier to paint people who disagree with you as fiends than it is to understand their point of view, which was the grandparent's entire point, which you and the parent have willfully missed.
(I'm going to ignore your presumption that information can somehow be "stolen" in any meaningful sense, but you really ought to explore that notion further.)

For your first two examples (my medical records and tax records), that is personal information which is limited utility to others. By contrast, the state "secrets" here directly impact the day-to-day lives of thousands if not millions.

Your third example is exactly something that would be beneficial to know--any enemy presumably already knows about it, and keeping it secret from the public at large only serves to allow the people who should be working on it to function without oversight.

As for the actual information being leaked: that is not personal information; a good chunk of it is operations details for state security apparatus, and that's exactly something that I, a citizen, would prefer to know about.

With such great resources at its disposal and so much power at its beck and call, we simply cannot afford to allow the government any secrecy or opacity in its functioning. To do otherwise is to encourage the sorts of corruption and corrosion that turn a state into a horrendous place to live.
That is exactly the opposite of what you said above.
A point he tried to make later on but wasn't very clear is that value is more than just money, and might be subjective. This is basic economics, everybody has a different value function and they may value the smart coworkers at a good corporation at $100k/year. They may value time spent with kids at $10M/year (I know I do). When you put numbers to those things the outcome is basically completely subjective.
Embrace Go's HTTP Tools
I go by epochwolf online and I very much care about the reputation I have under this name. Somewhat by accident there is an entire group of people that only know me as "epoch" in real life. My reputation among those people is just as important as my reputation among people that know me professionally under my real name.

I do try to keep my professional and personal relationships separate which part of the reason I have a pseudonym. In a bit of irony my company uses github and I use my epochwolf account at work. The seperation is less important than it used to be but I will always be epochwolf online.
And the same goes for the rest of us and our respective governments as well, of course.

I think a big part of the problem here is the idea that not only are governments responsible for protecting their own citizens, they are also only required to respect the basic rights of their own citizens. That inevitably leads to one of two conclusions if governments then feel entitled to conduct mass surveillance of everyone else's citizens.

One possibility is that those other people's own governments consider the surveillance a hostile act. Now everyone's government starts a cold war of information with everyone else's, even if they claim to be allies.

The other possibility is that those other people's governments do not defend their own citizens from the mass surveillance, or even actively collaborate in it despite their apparent obligations to their own population. Now people don't just have cause to mistrust foreign governments, even supposedly allied ones, but they can't even trust their own government to protect them.

Obviously neither of these outcomes is exactly taking the political or ethical high ground. But no-one seems to want to take a lead on what to me is the obvious third alternative: everyone accepting that we are all part of a global community today, and that international trade and communications and transportation are in all our best interests, and that which country's flag was flying when you were born probably has very little to do with whether you are a good person (probably) or a real danger (in which case everyone has legitimate grounds to go after you and already has processes in place to do so), and that because of that same level of international infrastructure and modern technology it should be just as possible to recognise everyone's basic rights by default and collaborate to go after legitimate surveillance targets anywhere instead of drawing artificial borders that are mostly accidents of history and creating a them-and-us culture that serves no-one.

Modern politics reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode, which seemed amusing at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc
1. It reminds me to be civil and think before I post.

That sounds very much like "I don't kill people because I'd get caught". Why can't you be civil (whatever that means) and think just because?
At some point I figured: why pretend to be anonymous when I'm obviously not?
I use my real name here and in a few other online communities. The choice wasn't intentional. I'm just really self-critical about the dorkiness and unoriginality of any usernames I'm able to come up with. (Pop culture, video game, and sci-fi references tend not to age gracefully beyond a certain period in one's life.)

HN has been my first major experiment with RealName™. It's gone fairly well so far. People who want to talk shop can get a hold of me. People who want to talk trash can get a hold of me, too, but fortunately those people seem few and far between. Prospective employers are free to search my corpus on HN, and in doing so, they'll probably find better content than they would on Facebook or elsewhere. In fact, I've had some opportunities come my way via HN that probably never would have elsewhere. (AngelList is the one possible challenger in that respect.)

Most important: using my real name forces me to think before I post. That's not to say everything I post here is a gem. Far from it, as the record shows. But I don't mind that the record shows something here.
Excellent speech.

I think we should view market capitalism as like an AI algorithm in a very convoluted space.

Start everyone off with the same amount of resources, and then let market capitalism go. For the first few iterations, inequality is forming but everyone is better off; even the poor are making absolute gains. You'll conclude that the algorithm (market capitalism) works. Untended, though, it starts to diverge after some time. The parameters go to infinity, the model gets ridiculous and ceases to represent real information (which institutions are worthy and add value, which do not) and goes into the self-perpetuation of early, parochial advantage (like overtraining, in ML, where noise in the data is misinterpreted as genuine signal).

What we want is to have the growth of that initial training arc, not the degeneracy as the algorithm diverges, and you want to keep having that growth and increasing general prosperity indefinitely. So we need continuous regularization. The welfare state is supposed to do that, but the increasing ability for those with wealth to convert it into power has rendered our government severely dysfunctional, so the normalization has stopped.

The problem with poverty in capitalism is that there's no real solution. Divergence and perpetuation of poverty is exactly what you'd expect. Markets are all about trade, but a person with nothing-- no social capital, no cultural capital, no wealth-- has nothing to trade, except for when terms for labor are extremely favorable-- like, skilled labor is in such shortage that even the out-of-touch rich see value in training the poor, for free-- and that's something we haven't seen since the 1960s.
Gametrailers original:

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/3hpqoi/no-man-s-sky-vgx-2...
You'd think conservatives would support a domestic work tax credit then since they would be most likely to afford domestic employees and thus benefit the most.
I appreciate the concept of disobeying unjust laws, but I don't think hotel taxes are a valid example.
I'm not sure what your first link says, but the other two generally seem to agree with me. The second one gets EMP wrong, as everyone does, but Wikipedia covers it well enough:

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

I'm rather confused as to why you think that map suggests that I'm grossly underestimating the effects. It lines up perfectly. For example, select a Topol and put it over downtown Manhattan. You see that the fireball covers a few blocks, the death-by-radiation zone covers most of downtown, as does the destroy-all-buildings zone, the destroy-residential-buildings zone reaches up to Central Park, parts of Brooklyn, and into New Jersey, and severe burns for exposed people and random fires started by the flash goes out to most of Manhattan, much of Brooklyn, and big chunks of New Jersey. The zone in which "duck and cover" would save lives (outside the death-by-radiation area, inside the death-by-collapsing-residential-buildings-and-flying-glass area) covers almost 100km^2 and probably a couple of million people.
I think you get the best of both worlds with `gocraft/web`. I feel args when you inject 3 or more (db, session ...) is cumbersome. `gocraft/web` is faster too since it has less reflection.
German president to boycott Olympics in Russia over human rights
>Add on to that the reality of scarcity of both needs and desires

Yes! And when people have more than 2.1 children, thus increasing global population, things get even scarcer. So no, your 19 children are clearly not 'all in it together' with my 2, to whom I would like to feed grass fed beef as God - not Monsanto - intended*. But lets all overlook population growth.

[1] Actually I would prefer fish, but lets be realistic - the oceans are now a mercury filled shithole.
Could easily be done with a framework of course - probably something lightweight. I've got competing implementations in Laravel 4 and Slim Framework being worked on right now. I know someone else is working on a HN news clone in Laravel as well, it was mentioned in a thread somewhere.

But yeah definitely, getting people to join would be the hard part. I've seen people build what they thought were the greatest forums ever and just sort of expect people to show up but they don't.
Internet .1 - Finger protocol - Real Names, everyone pretty much knows each other (or the organization where you work) and is atmosphere is generally very friendly.

Internet .2 - Finger is no longer used, malicious users and hackers exist, social networks become very personal (Usenet, IRC) pseudonyms make sense, not just for privacy but to usher in a new sentiment of power and respect through anonymity. Computer security is very low.

Internet .3 - WWW becomes a thing, people still use pseudonyms and generally don't trust anything for good measure, computer security is very low.

Internet .4 - WWW evolves for the masses/commerce and social networks re-emerge on the web (Myspace, Facebook), people start to use real names everywhere. - A new generation exists that was never on the internet before .4. Computer security is much better.

Internet .5 - Pseudonyms don't become popular again thanks to the general ignorance of the tube watchers.

..not entirely accurate..just my 2C
I trust my government to do the right thing. I don't think we have an awful problem in the UK with corrupt greedy government abusing its power in the main.
My argument to her was that my experience dealing with intelligence agencies

Just curious - what experience is that?
It is the government's own claim that, for example, the President didn't know what the NSA was doing:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/28/politics/white-house-stopped-w...

In the absence of leaks and whistleblowing, how do you propose that this kind of power be reined in?
I'm not sure I understand your point here. It doesn't take a whole lot of reasonableness to take cover when you know you're about to be hit by a massive blast wave. As for digging out, many of the survivors will just be able to climb out from the rubble. Escaping death by fallout then becomes interesting for many, but that won't affect many others.
Yes, it feels like a mail-order site to me too.

Not like scam, but more like "hey we are all after you money, and that is about it."

Maybe it is the aggressive adverticing of their products, that makes for that either mail-order/scam/new-age/Evangelical Christian feeling I get?

I'd be much better with a gentler introduction, and then hit harder as I dwelled deeper into the material.

I have actually read a good copy of Sun Tzu already. And after having looked briefly at the sight, I decided to dwell no further into the subject.

I recommend I'Ching translated by Richard Herman, if it has been retranslated into english.
People should start choosing better nicknames! There's a reason I chose this one.
Well, agree to disagree. It would be a far worse place to live where newspapers are allowed to break laws "in the interest of public interest".