The HN community takes a rather strict approach when moderating comments that contribute noise to the conversation. "Nice article!" comments are routinely downvoted. As is sarcasm, witticisms, memes, references and other styles of comments that occur frequently but do not contribute to the discussion. It's a knowingly doomed attempt to hold back the flood of noise that covers Reddit.
So, yes you are able to make an empty comment as a bookmark for yourself that is visible to everyone. But, you should expect it to be downvoted to invisibility.
Thanks, I actually didn't know about sarcasm and wit being frowned upon (is it documented somewhere) - this helps explain why an earlier comment of mine[0] which I considered a valid counterpoint to the parent was downvoted.
OK, this may be a a little-known feature but HN has this built in. Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=cowbell and you can see all the stories that you've upvoted. That way you don't have to leave bookmark-comments.
Edit: P.S. Usernames here are small and grey. Probably no one looked at your username before downvoting that first comment. If I made comments like the ones you've made I'd get downvoted too, because no one knows or cares that I have 26k karma.
I didn't downvote you, but one reason some people did might be that if all you have to say is "nice read", you can just upvote the post. Downvotes are a way of conveying what sorts of comments the HN community does not see as adding any value to the conversation. (I realize people don't always use them that way, but it's still worth considering that view of it.)
I upvote many posts though. I generally only comment on the one's I find most interesting. I would not be able to find the post again looking though everything I upvote.
No worries though. I won't be bothering you guys with my upvotes and comments any longer. You regulars can down vote everything I ever posted if you like. It's clear n00bs aren't welcome here. I won't be coming back to your site.
> I upvote many posts though. I generally only comment on the one's I find most interesting.
That's actually part of the point of making a story you upvote go into "saved stories": to encourage you to only upvote the stories you actually find interesting enough to return to.
My first response was "what are saved stories"? Then I looked in my profile and found the link. It would be really nice if that link were in the bar at the top of the HN page, like "threads" is.
> I would not be able to find the post again looking though everything I upvote.
I understand the desire to be able to find the post again; however, the fact remains that that's not what comments are designed for. You can't exactly blame other users for treating comments the way they were designed to be treated.
That said, I have to agree that being able to "bookmark" posts without having to risk being downvoted would be a useful feature. I've submitted an "Ask HN" post to see how many other users feel the same way:
I thought the same thing. Besides, many elite institutions actively discourage working while at school, and I speak from personal experience here. So there's no way to actually make that type of money away from school. Besides, it puts the responsibility of those outrageous fees on the student again - why don't you just work to get the money? And that's not the point. Competing options are.
Didn't start programming professionally until my early 30s. Quit my job to do it. Spent 9 months with no job teaching myself before landing my first job in software.
How will they outlaw an open-source project? They can "outlaw" all they want, they're already doing what they want, when they want it. It's time for the brave people out there to fight back! Have some balls and stand against the massive abuse of your most private data!
Look at the attempts to outlaw apps like Trapster. You give away the position of speed traps and DUI checkpoints and cops don't like that.
Last I heard, Trapster was forced to remove DUI checkpoints to stay on the app store. That was after attempts to rule it illegal in court failed. Same result. Crowdsourced DUI checkpoint apps are effectively gone if the stores don't have them. If only a few sideloaders have them, then there's no crowd to source.
This would work in a similar manner, but would expose the cops' fake cell towers. I fully expect this to suffer a similar fate.
That is not to say I don't like the project. I commented just so I could find it again in the future :)
That is exactly the reason why we keep this porject as open-source as possible, have a disclaimer for it which basically tells YOU to be responsible what you do with the code and most importantly, we are on NO STORE, especially not GooglePlay. If an App moves to GooglePlay and does something that not plays by the rediculous "rules" (serach for what happened to the awesome HushSMS), they're kicked.
Also, as much as I appreciate your comment just to find this thread later on, this is NOT the official discussion of the App. I HIGHLY recommend just starring the GitHub and (if you have balls) contribute to it's success by submitting pull requests. Thanks for listening, spread the link to the GitHub in all social media and places where potential developers and good Hackers hang out! ;-)
Of course law enforcements won't like the Project. Of course there will always be people in this world who think they can do whatever they want, when they want it and kill people using fully automated drones with IMSI-Catchers on board. But why should we think we "can't do anything"? We are the people, we have RIGHTS! So grab your balls and contribute! Oh, and for the shy ones, here's the disclaimer: https://github.com/SecUpwN/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/blo...
The problem with "Yes, if.." is that the person asking only hears "Yes..." You better make sure the "if.." is in writing, with extra bold font. That, or you're stuck supporting IE6 with no budget or time to do so.
In the UK it is very common for a competitor to send complaints about adverts to the regulators. This is almost free to the people sending the complaints but potentially costly to the advertisers.
One example of this would be mascara ads, which had very many reports being sent to and fro. Now mascara ads in England either use real product on real eyelashes or they contain disclaimers about the use of fake lashes.
Things have changed dramatically since the constitution was conceived. Nobody predicted the internet, WMDs (which could easily be smuggled into the country, they're not just movie fiction), and other nations having spying capabilities.
My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies. Other than protecting myself, my family, and the country I don't really have a good reason for this though.
> My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies.
The solution to this is to make surveillance hard for everybody. Pass laws and build technologies that make bulk surveillance not only prohibited but impractical regardless of third party lawlessness. The goal is not to thwart only the NSA, that barely accomplishes anything. You also have to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.
How does preventing the NSA from looking at traffic crossing an internet backbone serve to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.? If anything, I'd think it would give them an advantage.
(Note that I'm not saying that there shouldn't be limits on what the NSA can do, only that stopping other malicious actors isn't applicable in this case)
> How does preventing the NSA from looking at traffic crossing an internet backbone serve to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.?
Because it gets the NSA and its budget out of the "make security worse" business and puts them back full in the "make security better" business. Because if they aren't allowed to do it then they won't want anyone else to be able to do it either.
I'd argue that sorry state of internet security is almost entirely the result of bad coding practices/protocol design, and the private sector in general neither has the will to fix it nor wants the NSA to assist in fixing it. In fact, as it stands right now, NSA isn't even responsible for fixing public sector network security issues - what little responsibility the government takes for that largely falls on DHS and NIST. According to their web page[1], NSA is responsible for securing classified government networks. Killing off their intelligence component isn't going to make the internet safer for US citizens.
Or as another example, consider what happens when the NSA discovers a security vulnerability in a common crypto library. If the NSA is allowed to use it for surveillance then they will do that instead of disclosing it, meanwhile the vulnerability persists in the wild just waiting for someone even worse to discover it. You can imagine the epic fail if the Chinese government got hold of Heartbleed six months before the OpenSSL maintainers.
There haven't been any actual concrete disclosures showing that DUAL EC DRBG was backdoored, just loads of conjecture. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't - the same conjectures were put forth regarding the manipulated S-boxes in DES and it turned out twenty years later that the NSA was actually strengthening the algorithm, not weakening it. If DUAL EC was backdoored, it was a pretty pathetic attempt: it was hardly ever used (only 720 confirmed vulnerable servers out of a survey of 21.8 million[1]) and due to its slow speed there were recommendations not to use it long before Snowden came along. One year later and nothing in the Snowden cache has been leaked providing concrete proof showing a backdoor; I'm not holding my breath for it.
Regarding Heartbleed, the NSA denied having knowledge of the bug before its disclosure. There was a follow up post on the Whitehouse blog[2] that discussed some of the criteria the administration would use in determining whether or not the NSA should disclose a 0-day.
It sounds like you're wanting them to actively search for vulnerabilities in software they didn't write and might not even be used by their targets (the Chinese government could have taken advantage of Heartbleed, but I don't know how many Chinese government sites use OpenSSL). That's not what we currently fund them to do, and I get the impression that most American tech companies wouldn't want the NSA's help anyways.
> Things have changed dramatically since the constitution was conceived.
If this is true, why aren't all the NSA apologists trying to promote a constitutional amendment? The drafters of the constitution knew that the original document wouldn't be sufficient for the changing needs in the future, and gave a very clear method to modify tour "highest law".
While I suspect I wouldn't agree with such an amendment, I would certainly give the argument for it a full hearing and debate. Given how mixed attitudes are, it's hard to predict how successful such a proposal would be in practice.
What I do know, for now, is that trying to subvert the constitution's guarantees in an attempt to skip the necessary amendment with "vigilante justice" is at a minimum a violation of some people's oath to defend the constitution. At worst, trying to subvert the constitution (and the guarantees it provides) might even qualify as sedition. Reality is probably somewhere between those points, of course.
I personally think this is a perverse view, leading to weird contradictions like the "Third Party Doctrine".
Given the history of US intelligence agencies (COINTELPRO, SHAMROCK, etc), my main thought is that they're a bigger threat to me, my family and my country than just about anything else.
