skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Google providing the NSA direct access to servers"
[Citation needed]

The NSA appears to have tapped 3rd party fiber links, and not Google directly. Google is now encrypting data across those links, moving all client access to use https, and advocating for http/2.0 (based on SPDY) to allow only encrypted connections.
I think the best answer you're going to come away with from here is this: Yes, it is possible, but it is more difficult. YMMV.
I run a consultancy so its easier but we pay hourly and provide benefits (payroll taxes, health, 401k). People can work whatever hours they want and from where ever they just keep the team updated and request a workload consistent with their expected hours. I have team members who work 50 hours a week and some who work 20 hours.
Ask HN: Why is Twitter forcing users to login to use the mobile site?
I normally use twitter's mobile site as it loads faster. But recently they've been forcing me to login to use it so I switched back to using the desktop site. But I was wondering what they have to gain by forcing only mobile users to login.
I'd even go as far as say that people are hired on a temp basis because Amazon's somewhere working on fully automating the picking job. I can see a setup where people are only needed to load the machines with products, where the machines are item dispensers of sorts that can contain a buffer of products.
ArrestDB: A RESTful PHP API for SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL Databases
Maybe that's the only time they have leverage.
Kentico How To: Custom Filter Control In CMSDesk Listing Mode
It doesn't mention anything about security. There's a backup system, and a web front-end. Whatever his work was, it was impressive enough to get him an invite to the Tailored Access Operations. Not all work at the NSA was cutting-edge encryption.
This reminds me of the outrage surrounding some sites that call home when one selects text or hits cmd+C to copy.

Oh, what a thin line we pave between auto correction and key loggers!
No, you're not getting this. Claims require evidence. Non-claims do not require evidence. If you want to claim that minarcho-capitalism is the optimal social and economic system, such that anything else is downright immoral and wrong by comparison, then you have to justify that claim using evidence.

In contrast, I do not have to justify my position that no ideology or system being proposed today is globally optimal. That is simply an accepted truism.
Snowden differs from many of the whistleblower ilk in that there is nothing to dislike about his character (yet). The media have not dished any dirt, none of his friends/family/ex-lovers have came forward with anything untoward about him and he hasn't shown any signs of being deluded.

Even if you try your hardest to 'believe', a lot of whistleblowers have been deluded one way or another. They can be overly indoctrinated in their 'mission', so, whilst bringing to light useful information they have also been a bit keen to believe the propaganda that goes with The War Against Terror, e.g. Coleen Rowley. They can also be deluded in their importance, to be less than convincing, e.g. Sibel Edmonds. They can also fully jump the shark, e.g. David Shayler. Then there is Assange, 'deluded' in my opinion for thinking leaks could be monetized.

Unless I am missing something, Edward Snowden has taken a stand for truth and not allowed his character to be compromised in any way whatsoever. He has not made any mistakes, there is nothing where you could think he could have done better. Am I being deluded in thinking this?!?
Designing new protocols and constructions using primitives like AES and DH is exactly what cryptographers are talking about when they refer to "rolling ones own crypto".

Look at the description of their protocol, particularly the handshake, which negotiates number-theoretic parameters, and try to make a list of all the checks they'll need and the additional protocol that they'd need to specify just to make the handshake secure.

Not only that, but the crypto in Telegram is idiosyncratic; for instance, this is the only system I've ever seen that used IGE mode.
It is the "techie types" I'm focused on. They are the ones who drive progress in computing, not your mom.

When every device in your home is connected to a public network, I imagine that you, a techie type, are going to want some control over what and how those devices communicate with the public network.

That control will not likely come through the device (at least, not easily, anyway). However it could come through your router/server.
Bruce Schneier leaves BT
That is one of the reasons I don't buy a book at Amzaon.de or any other Amazon anymore. I use Amazon tho find a book, see preview pages and ratings, and then order the actual book by one of the, preferably local, bookstores, like wittwer, hugendubel or similar.
I mean, yeah, that's what we're told. But the fact remains - drone strikes create terror. And on the other side, believing terrorist acts are simply to create terror is naive.
Which revelations would those be?
Wasn't there some parser other than Nokogiri which was focused more on being lenient than correct?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You have made these accusations without any evidence. Be responsible and ethical and show us something real, if you have it. (note: I am not taking sides.)
Said "user"s lawyer can certainly argue on bases of jurisdiction as well.

Also there is no "crime" here, it's all preliminary stuff.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of Al Qaeda type jihadists in Yemen who would very much like to kill U.S. citizens. Otherwise I'd agree with you that we shouldn't be there.
I think it could, but I don't think so in this case. MAD, for instance, isn't an act of terror because it is only an existential threat. Most nuclear capable countries won't use their weapons because of MAD, and thus it actually provides a safety net.

No one, though, can really do anything about drone strikes. They just happen, seemingly at random, wherever we decide they should happen. And if we take out a civilian then we say "oops, these things happen" and so there are no repercussions, no one gets punished and it just keeps happening.
The idea is that he does not speak for all anarchists, just like the idea in the book I read doesn't either.
"The job terms don't really matter. If you hire a worker it should be full-time and at a living wage or your company is riding on the tax payers."

- College age liberal
>An appropriate response:

If what you got out of Mr. Franzen's essay was that he's a technophobe who divides the world into Mac and PCs and doesn't know what an operating system is, then yeah, appropriate response.

Personally, I think his essay was a little deeper than that.
Protocol I and Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 are later agreements that added to the 1949 Conventions, the United States is not a party to either Protocol, though it is a party to all four of the 1949 Conventions.
> It matters because it changes the fundamental nature of combat.

Said about literally EVERY SINGLE change in warfare over the centuries. I am talking all the way back to armor and catapults to gunpowder based munitions, the blitzkrieg, rockets, planes, bombs, and of course nuclear weapons.

The thing is -- it is absolutely true, but it is always true, and therefore meaningless.

Lets look at the Gulf War for example -- the US lost 113 soldiers to the enemy (an addition 35 to friendly fire)... they killed "at least" 20,000 -- some estimates go as high as 35,000+(and an additional 3,500+ civilians). The asymmetry of modern warfare is nothing new, pointing to drones as some line in the sand is just, IMHO, silliness.
A tech startup recap, 12 months in
How else would they make Amazon care?
Your analogy is inapt. What does the federal reserve produce when it prints a dollar? All that ink and paper, not to mention the increasingly-sophisticated antic-counterfeiting measures, are going into these useless bills. But that's the cost that we pay to sustain our currency. Likewise with the computing power devoted to bitcoin.

You're right that bitcoin completely lacks the properties of gold that give it use outside of being a currency. But is gold's use in electronics really why it became used as a store of value? It has other properties, too: it doesn't corrode, it's quite rare, it can be easily tested for purity. Bitcoin adds to those the ability to be stored on a piece of paper, the ability to be transferred in minutes anywhere, and a difficult-to-obfuscate ledger.

Of course bitcoin loses the price floor granted by its real-world applications, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's as doomed as dogecoin (the world's first internet-meme based cryptocurrency).
Sure, and those who refuse get replaced by new ones who won't. Doesn't take long to "fix" that "problem".
That quote is apparently the opinion of one of the NSA staffers that worked with him. Apparently he was more talented than most of the other employees and contractors.
Why is Haskell different than any other high level language in this regard? All high level languages make compromises between expressivity and performance. If you want to code really close to the metal, C exists and you know where to find it.
I can't remember how tight I made it... but I would think you need a couple spare: one for the number of iterations, and another for the screen stride. But yes, spilling registers like SP and LR is a useful trick if you need it.
Attacking Online Poker Players
Have you ever tried using them before? You can set your search path, you don't need to type out schema.table. Your objects are already in a schema anyways, it isn't like you type out public.table all the time. What are these "lots of downsides" you leave unspecified? And how do they outweigh the benefits of grouping database objects together for both namespacing and permissions purposes?
It doesn't matter what he or you think is likely happening right now. The fact is there is a conflict of incentives and in such situations people act according to the ones the closest to their personal ones. We can't expect people to be heroes against their own personal interest.

It won't change until people in the chain have incentives to avoid war.

Now let's think how to accomplish it: maybe there should be huge tax on profits for military contractors in the time when operations are going ? Maybe private for-profit military contractors have to go in the first place ? Maybe we shouldn't pay them for every piece of equipment but only for time spent working ?

As to people in the field, there are some ideas as well like freezing all bonuses during the military operations and such. The thing is it has to be profitable for individuals involved to seek peace not war. The war machine is never going to stop otherwise. The balance should be such that once high command in charge feel it's necessary to start military operations they should meet at least some resistance from rest of the chain not "fuck yeah sir!" as it is now.
Visual Studio and ILNumerics: Adding Controls to the VS Toolbox
I am not quite sure how the dimensioning of the bloom filter affects the false positive probability. Of course it is easy to iterate through many phone numbers, but at least you can not know for sure if a probed number is actually in the filter or just a false positive, giving means of plausible deniability.

I did not want to imply that there is a perfect zero-knowledge synchronization mechanism for your contact book.
Maybe Hpricot[1]? It's been deprecated for a long time but from what I remember it was much more lenient on the structure of the incoming document.

[1] https://github.com/hpricot/hpricot
"Do you think that facebook tracks the stuff that people type and then erase before hitting <enter>? (or the “post” button)"

Well, it's facebook; of course they do...
Business’s Biggest Trend: Convergence Around Tech
>...on what basis does his genius rest?

It rests on some of his co-workers thinking he was very smart. Is there anything wrong with that?

>AFAIK there is no record of Snowden doing any kind of work out there that'll suggest he knew anything about computing security.

But how far do you know, exactly, about the work that Snowden was doing, or how good he was at it?
Well put.

Also, even for a front-end person, those don't have to be mutually exclusive options.

Case in point: this week I am working on both heterogeneous end user-facing UI stuff AND [relatively] controlled-environment node-based webdev tooling for our FE team. I enjoy both types of challenges and think its healthy not to get too pigeon-holed into one such context or the other.

/$.02
Move over to Finland. True 9-to-5 workday. 30min lunchbreak and 37.5h work week.
> Bitcoin is an economic dead-end. It takes CPU cycles to make a Bitcoin, and those cycles aren't used for anything else. It is an output of production that has no intrinsic value.

You simply don't understand bitcoin. It is not like Satoshi couldn't come up with "useful" computations with "intrinsic value". He deliberately chose "useless" computations. Why? Because these computations serve very important role in the network: they make fraud(like double-spending) very costly(you have to control 20-30% of network computing power to have even smallest change to execute your attack, and 50%+ to have 100% chance of doing it). Computations having "intrinsic value" == extra incentive to attack.

Also, you miss all the work done by armed guards to protect large piles of cash( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-in-transit ). Do you think they do their work for free? And this is only obvious work. How much does current banking costs to us in total?

> Gold has industrial uses due to its physical and chemical properties, and it is desired in the consumer space as a material to make jewelry out of.

Gold was used for thousands of years long before it had some uses in the industry. It has no really special chemical properties: it doesn't react much with other chemical elements (which is actually awesome for a currency: it means it can preserve its value for many many years). Jewelry - maybe, but isn't it so desired for jewelry because it is scarce? You could make jewelry out of less noble metals.
Its not just that, the conditions are described as being "brutal".

If you are interested: http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...

Better yet, if you can read german: http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2013/11/08/a0001.text
but but they have all our cell phone and internet records. How can terrorism still happen?
You're not deluded. I expect we'll see more of this kind of thing and these kind of people to appear.
How did you miss that? the whole article speaks to his supposed security prowess:

* Snowden had been brought to Hawaii as a cybersecurity expert working for Dell’s services division but due to a problem with the contract was reassigned to become an administrator for the Microsoft intranet management system known as Sharepoint.
Ask HN: Is it realistic to earn £1000/$1600 per week?
The short of it: I want to earn £1000/week (~$1600) as a freelancer.

I'm in the UK (not London) and I've found that the majority of prospective clients consider this too high. I've been mostly a lurker on HN for a few years now so it's entirely possible I'm being unrealistic and spent too much time reading about SV/US rates ($100/hr and so on).

Now I can do front end, HTML, CSS, JS, work with bootstrap or code from scratch, I can also do backend PHP and some JS there too. I've also got a couple of iOS/Android apps under my belt. I understand the front/back end crossover is sought after, but perhaps that's not really the case? Perhaps it's the mention of PHP?

To head off some possible responses: I am trying to expand my skillset as I do know a lot of people here frown upon PHP to put it mildly, for example trying to pick up on Python and Angular, but I can't spare too much time when the rent is 2 weeks late and Christmas is approaching fast - and I seriously doubt anyone would pay me to learn as I go!

So I am being unrealistic? Do I need to lower my expectations - and if so, how low would I go?
This is interesting. On the one hand, I can almost see a case for this, kind of like Amazon saving you shopping cart and search history, as a convenience if you switch computers, and for their market research.

On the other hand, most users would expect that what they enter in a random textbox and then delete is not going to be saved anywhere. These posts are equivalent to email drafts and I would hope they would be as private.
What sort of dreadful tasks are you talking about?

There are plenty of things that managers do, that could just as well be done by some kind of junior administrator.
Indeed; a statement like that is either reflective of Snowden's skill level, or the average skill level of his co-workers. I haven't personally seen anything out of the ordinary yet for a generic sysadmin/developer/hacker/internet freedom fighter character.
Retina scan please, and maybe some developer DNA
I think it's possible if you can prove your knowledge with very good references. In my opinion, it's more important to get the job done instead of having a degree but no clue about the work you are supposed to do.
Leadership: Japan airline boss (old but gold)
> Your profile looks like you're an objectivist

I have my own philosophy, induced from reality, which (conveniently enough) corresponds to Objectivism (since they both use a logical methodology).

> But as others pointed out, you can't just dismiss anarchism off-hand.

Correct, and I can make a number of arguments against anarchy. That is just the simplest and most clever I have run up against other than "It's contradictory."

> As an objectivist, you're against coercion, but in favour of centralized power? Is that correct? If so, don't you think it's a contradictory idea?

That is a good question that people often have. I think the government should use retaliatory force, never initiatory force. Preventing alternate defense agencies (the anarcho-capitalist idea) and levying taxes for the proper functions of government (police, courts, and military) actually are retaliatory exercises of force, not initiated force.

The threat of initiated force is tantamount to initiated force. So, retaliatory force to stop a threat is legitimate. Moreover, consider the case of a just war against a country that threatens the US; there may be civilian casualties among non-participants in the country of the enemy. The proximate cause of such casualties would be the US military, but the fundamental cause is the enemy government; they died to retaliatory force. A similar case is occuring when an ideal government uses force to collect minimal taxes to establish police, courts, and military. The fundamental cause is the natural threat of those that would violate rights. It would be ideal if all funding for government could be levied voluntarily, via donations, but if not, my argument here provides a solution.

This is not an Objectivist view, because it was not part of anything Ayn Rand wrote. I think many Objectivists would consider it to be compatible with Objectivism, while some no doubt wouldn't.
Terrible blog post (half-baked recruiting link bait), but some interesting discussion below. /$.02
The basis for his genius appears to be the opinion of his colleague, which you're free to accept or reject. If his colleague's claims are to be believed, his activities and accolades within the NSA would be sufficient record of his computing security experience.

Not everyone has to publish a white paper or open a GitHub account in order to be taken seriously.
I don't understand that. Why is doing the right thing somehow "patriotic"?

You don't need to "love your country" to want to make it a better place.
The Harvard Crimson has some more detail in realtime: https://twitter.com/thecrimson
Also quite a few times when ordering from amazon.co.uk, my orders have been actually shipped from Germany.
This just shows cellphone records alone are not enough.
If you want to get drunk and write code that's great. Good for you. But for a bunch of HN users to vote that up to the front page and be super excited about it is dumb. It's the acceptance and promotion of immature "brogrammer" culture that I find really distasteful.
Kindle Fire HD 7", HD Display, Wi-Fi, 8 GB - Includes Special Offers
My guess: the difficulty is low enough that it's profitable to mine dogecoin and flip it for Bitcoin or Litecoin. I know a lot of altcoin miners do this, and there are some pools (middlecoin) that are geared towards this.
The idea that the character of the whistleblowers themselves has anything to do with the quality or impact of the information they leak is a propaganda trick enforced by the media-- a leak with a face can be discredited if the face can be discredited, and in the 21st century, everyone has skeletons in the closet. Additionally, if your aim is to obscure, it's far easier to focus on the flaws of the person behind the leaks than the leak itself.

A discussion of the leaker is a discussion that is not entirely focused on the meaning of what they leaked.
To be fair, if you were going to suddenly deposit a ton of money to your bank, or make a ton more money this year than last, you might call up your bank or accountant beforehand. It's perfectly reasonable.
I'm occasionally a hiring manager for engineers, and yes, it's very possible to get a job without a tech degree. Tech interviewing usually has four major steps: 1) sourcing candidates, 2) filtering resume candidates, 3) technical phone screen, 4) in-person interview.

For most companies, having a degree only matters in the first two phases, and ability/interviewability matters in the last two.

Experienced engineers avoid getting filtered out in the first two phases by working through their network, which allows them to skip those phases entirely. If you're trying to break in without any experience, it's much harder because you probably don't have a network and degrees are often used as a filter during candidate discovery and resume filtering (especially when the engineering manager is working with a recruiter).

My thought would be to proactively send your resume directly to a bunch of job postings, especially ones which go to a "jobs@$company.com". Anecdotally, I know I don't get many direct resumes these days, so I'd end up reading them, skipping any explicit filtering.
I've been working as a web developer since I was 17. It wasn't hard for me, but I had an incredible good luck by then, getting my first freelance clients out of nowhere.

I'm about to get a master in computer sciences, and I really think it is worth the time (no money in my case, I'm from Argentina). It teaches you the foundations of CS and that normally improves your way to think about technological problems and problem solving. Also, it generally qualifies you for different kind of jobs.