skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hm, I guess I don't know what you're referring to. I am mainly talking about NSLs, since that's what we know about, but that's an FBI thing - a relatively "open" agency, as these things go. I imagine the other three-letter agencies have their own versions whose existence is not yet on the record.

The very existence of the NSLs, however, kind of sweeps all these pleasant ideals of due process and transparency off the table. They're a legal warrant for any information whatsoever, can be signed and validated by any FBI field officer, and the recipient is legally obliged to keep the fact of their receipt a secret. There have been hundreds of thousands of such letters issued.

Better yet, the FBI has gotten sick of writing the letters, and the recipients know they have no chance of resisting giving up the information, so nowadays they're not even writing them. See the above article. And as a commenter on that piece writes, if you believe for one second that the FBI has mended its ways since 2007, I have a bridge to sell you.

There are no barriers whatsoever to law enforcement or national security services getting whatever data they want, whenever they want, with no oversight whatsoever. And if you extrapolate a little, taking into account developments such as the NSA's new $2b, 65MW data centre in Utah, I bet the intelligence agencies have full bulk data access and probably a replication of all major email and social networking providers' data for mining purposes.

I don't think any of this could be called a conspiracy theory any more. It's just the reality of world we live in. We might not know all the details yet, but the writing is very clearly on the wall. I congratulate your skepticism and lack of credulity - we sure need more of that in the world - but most or all of this is real and happening right now. The new system was called TIA, then it was called ADVISE. Its current codename is unknown, it was supposedly cancelled, but whaddya know, that data centre is still being built, and another similar facility in Texas. What do you think they're for?

Remember, ECHELON was a "conspiracy theory" too once. The very nature of classified activity is that we don't know all the details while it's going on. But we can sure connect the dots. And there's an awful lot of dots.
Snaptalent Lessons Learned - Lesson Two - Indecision Kills
I don't know about a sci-fi story, but the non-fiction book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot is friggin amazing.
You'd be surprised. Russia, which was still a pretty decent sized world power, defaulted on its debt in the 90s.

I'm not an expert on what occurred, but I believe the Russian government thought process was something along the lines of:
-We could either sell off all the country's assets
OR
-Default on debt now, have a bad reputation with future foreign investors, but not shrink our country further.

They went with option B.

Not saying this would or will happen to the USA, but theoretically it could.
Given that my startup I not only had people paying me money and then turning it around and giving it out to others, I definitely know that pain. I just totally thought of it as core to the product; people generally have asked me about gateways and whatnot when they have their "ohmygodIhavethisidea" conversations with me.

This was more about the stuff they didn't ask about that they should have, but your point is exceptionally well taken - people who are picking a revenue model should support that revenue model before launch.
Fotos do Campus Party 2010
Acabou neste domingo o Campus Party, certamente é hoje o maior evento de tecnologia e internet do Brasil, com espaços destinados a blogs, robótica, astronomia, games e software livre. CP contou com mais de 30 mil visitantes e uma participação fixa de mais de 3 mil pessoas.
I'm confused about what the point is for this project. So far I only get the sandboxing part. That part makes sense. But running "emulation" for other libraries? If you just use jquery/yui/extjs you don't have to worry about native prototype modifications.
I couldn't even get through that due to formatting issues. Good lord I've never seen a site more in need a little web typography restraint.

I'll just leave this here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Subscriptions have been 'the new black' and a mainstay of my income since 2000 or so, but subscriptions do not lend themselves to all kinds of content.

Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable, and as long as there are companies marketing products there will be advertising. It would be wasteful not to tap in to those dollars.

As Patio11 elsewhere already pointed out adsense is a form of micropayments, and micropayments are the 'pay-as-you-go' of subscriptions.

The only problem with that is that adsense is not transparent and it doesn't allow you to set your own price. In fact, you don't even know how much your inventory is really worth.

So if your site does not have a very tight coupling between the users and the sites, one that you expect to last for many months or years advertising is actually a very good solution, but adsense in particular may not be the best you can do.

Another problem with adsense is the fact that clickfraud benefits both google and the fraudsters, so for advertisers it is very difficult to track whether they're spending their money correctly or not.

I wished someone would start to give google some serious competition in this space.
Corporations are not citizens.

This means that technically they cannot cast a vote in an election. But it also means that in practice the power they can exert to effect certain political outcomes must be constrained (otherwise votes of citizens will become even more meaningless because of the asymmetry of capital concentration).

You say "although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates". Surely they were not actually able to push unlimited amounts of money to influence political outcomes, otherwise there would have been no reason for the Supreme Court to make the change. Or no?
Can you imagine if they used those sorts of techniques to refine TV schedules? You'd end up with non stop reality and talent shows. Oh, hang on..
Announcing TwitterBot
A really simple IRC bot like app/lib for twitter written in Python.
Good? NASA has spent decades pouring money into scientifically-useless programs like the shuttle and space station, while starving out the robotic missions that actually produce results. Spirit and Opportunity were such a slam dunk, it's hard to believe we're still having this discussion.

The Constellation program has been a particularly sad example of NASA's refusal to face reality. It was conceived as a cynical political stunt by the Bush administration, and essentially abandoned the day after it was announced. NASA should have faced the fact years ago that Constellation never had and never would have the budget or popular and political support required to get back to the moon.
Sorry, but I can't lie to you. I heard all that Google campus stories a zillion times, except probably for j-k buttons, which are hinted at the bottom of the GMail page, right?
Downvote at will.
Were corporations not accorded protections under the Bill of Rights (as argued in this piece on the theory that "state-created entities" are artificial and were not intended to be covered by such protections), among other things:

1. The government could conduct searches and seizures at will of corporate property in disregard of the Fourth Amendment.

2. It could take corporate property without compensation in disregard of the Fifth.

3. It could deny the rights of free speech to the New York Times and other corporate entities in disregard of the First.

4. It could deny the right of religious expression to churches, synagogues and other religious organizations that are incorporated.

Nor, if the logic of this piece were to be followed that "state-created entities" should not be protected under the Bill of Rights, would any other legally-recognized entity be entitled to such protections.

How about:

1. Universities.

2. Schools.

3. Charities.

4. Partnerships, LLCs, trusts, and other business entities (want the government to confiscate the IP or other assets of your startup and say it owes you nothing because it is not you but a mere "state-created entity" from which it is taking the property?).

This list could go on and on at great length.

The analysis in this piece may be something that one may want to advocate as some sort of ideal but, in terms of law, history, etc., it is quite flawed. I think this is more a talking point in the recent uproar over the Citizens United case than it is a serious point of constitutional discussion.
I have been thinking of another aspect of this case. One that obviates net neutrality, IMO. The ruling against McCain-Feingold states that government does not have the power to create penalties (criminal or civil) that limit speech. In the case of McCain-Feingold, the court ruled that it was enough to base its ruling simply on the assumption that the law "may" limit speech, without proof that it actually has. I think this is reasonable. Here is where it unravels:

There are other laws the government has passed that provide penalties as McCain-Feingold does. A key example is broadcast spectrum sales. The FCC has sold rights of public spectrum and provides criminal penalties for infringing on the use of that spectrum. This of course creates third party arbiters of content and has provably limited speech. Case in point: next week's SuperBowl will show an ad against abortion but has refused an ad for a gay dating site. Political ads are refused all the time by major broadcasters when they do not suit the content arbiters. I think the duplicity of the court lies in the cases they refuse to hear that should apply the same logic as this ruling. Does anyone know of examples of such cases that have been refused or ruled against?
Bullshit. For example, do you honestly think that Android UI was done in a data-driven way from the scratch without designers?

Google uses data to tweak experience of their existing products like Search UI. That's it. Designing interfaces for new products or features is done by designers (or in some case, like many Google Labs products, by developers).
I'm pretty sure you're essentially incorrect, in that one of the things Citizens United struck down was the ban on "vote for Smith" by any non-media corporation in the 1-2 months before a Federal election (1 for a primary, 2 for a general). Wasn't it a specific ban from that provision in McCain-Feingold on their anti-Hillary movie that prompted them to file the lawsuit?

I wasn't able to quickly determine if Citizens United itself is a 527, but they are affiliated with one (http://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtes2.php?ein=&cycle...).
> The ruling isn't really about speech, though, it's about money.

Its about money spent on speech. Free speech that you can't spend money on, isn't free speech. If a news paper was told that it was welcome to print a specific story, except you can't spend money on ink for it, it'd still be censorship.

> spend its money on political candidates, with a clear expectation of a positive ROI. How can that possible be legal

It's not, that's corruption. What you're referring to is rent-seeking, and it's been around as long as politics itself. The best solution is to give politicians less power, simply because there's less rent to seek.
Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, first interview since 1989
There were the Germanic invaders at first, against whom the late-Roman landholders organized; then there were the Vikings, against whom the mixed late-Roman landholders and Germanic invaders organized; then there were the Muslims (who were a threat earlier than the Vikings, and stayed a threat later than them; remember what "reconquista" means, and what happened to Byzantium); then there were the Protestants, and/or the Catholics, and/or the French... and this is leaving out the alphabet soup of East European enemies like the Balts, the Slavs, the Bulgars, and the Magyars (and the Germans themselves were not part of the medieval world until the 8th century or so AD and the conquest of Germany west of the Elbe by Charlemagne).

This is not to imply that the nobility always _did_ oppose the enemies who they should have been opposing; but it's not at all the case that had there been no feudal militaries, medieval Europe would have been a peaceful place.

(I acknowledge that this is a very late post, and I apologize for that; but it's a common mistake to imagine that medieval European history occurred in a vacuum. The primary culprit here is the, ah, _insular_ way that English-speaking schools teach medieval history...)
> Obviously, the Constitution should prohibit these things, and it does.

Yes, the first is 'unreasonable search and seizure', the second is a 'bill of attainder', both things Congress is explicitly prohibited from enacting.

But the constitution doesn't establish a means for Congress to handle the creation of corporations: that's completely delegated to the states. While Congress can regulate their interstate actions (as if they were people), corporations don't really exist at a federal level. In early independent america they didn't exist at all.
People don't want to subscribe to stuff. They only do it when there is no other choice. If your site only offers subscriptions, I'll make a site with a one-time payment thing, store the users payment information and sell them new 'innovations' and 'features' that will be as easy as clicking a button to get, and that will bring me more money that your subscriptions.

If I have someone using my site all the time, it's easy to sell him something new.
>database systems
Email me if you need intros to anyone I interviewed.

Also, why aren't you on camera? Email me if you want to know more about my setup.
I think you misunderstand what was struck down in McCain-Feingold: an explicit ban on non-media corporate speech advocating the election or defeat of a candidate in the 1-2 months before a Federal election (1 for a primary, 2 for a general).
That is silly. Of course hacking in any language is possible after one week of experience. But, someone who has many years of experience with any set of tools will likely have a serious productivity advantage over someone with no experience.
I care about you.
Well, you can kiss Jupiter goodbye if that happens.
While this seems like a cool idea, I definitely don't want my (bookmarks - I don' t see the point, but it doesn't concern me) saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs synced to my phone.

1) If I lose my phone that is a lot of personal data/security info that is available on my phone. Saved passwords would be useful, but I don't save any passwords on my phone now, and this isn't going to change that.

2) Last thing I want, if I'm returning through US border is all of this data on my phone, given http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/16/laptop_border_search... (There are better articles, but that is the first Google result)
Not too mention loads of arcane laws that haven't been cleared (probably because of the cost).

I.e. "In Toronto, it is illegal to drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on a Sunday."

more: http://www.mundayweb.com/weirdlaws.php
I worked with a guy that did that. We have no showers at my office (like most offices), he quite after a couple of weeks when people started to complain that they didn't like the sweaty B.O. mess coming in with them in the mornings.
> Not in a criminal court.

Because a corporation isn't a person, and can't commit felonies. If it could, it'd be tried in criminal court.

> The board of directors, actually, or, even more accurately, whoever holds a controlling share of the corporation.

Yes, they have free speech, just as any minority shareholder as well and managers and all employees. The latter just don't have the same access to spend company resources on said speech.
If they copy the style but not the substance, it makes things worse for YC and for entrepreneurs. And they can coast on YC's good PR.
For longer documents, I haven't written in raw html for quite some time. I use Markdown instead, and had assumed that most everyone (except maybe some web designers) uses some form of prettier markup for writing their longer content-heavy documents; either Markdown, reST, or maybe MoinMoin-style wiki markup. Those seem to be the big three (with reST only making it into that group by virtue of being used for the official Python docs, and thus also for many Python-related projects).
As a pretty die-hard Obama supporter and also a huge geek, this is a tough one for me. The change in funding priorities gives us another 5 years of funding for the ISS of course, which is by far the greater achievement than landing on the mood yet again. And the greater funding for private space flight is also an excellent idea.

Still: it would have been nice to go to the moon.
Thought provoking, but to those of us with less mathematical knowledge (I had never heard about simulated annealing and definitely didn't know it was the path to happiness !! :P ) it sounds like you smoked something :P

Advice I liked:
- "Leave the comfort of your local minimum"
- "consider every possible idea, belief, and value no matter how crazy or wrong they seem at first" (ok, I admit I sometimes dismiss stuff that's TOO crazy - after all I don't have infinte time!! (yet :P )
- Trying to remove biases and beliefs (and man.. is that hard)
Ok, so you freely admit that there are (probably) things that are wrong with it if you looked hard enough.

...So why isn't it better?

EDIT TO ADD: You know, this is really part of the bigger problem. Google has a fair amount of side services that just barely scoot by and it's pretty stupid. Example: Google is a search engine company, but their Chrome Extension Search page HAS NO SEARCH FEATURES.
If getting it done was the only objective then why isn't Blogger just a web server that people can FTP self written HTML files to?

Blogger has a lot of paper cuts that slowly make it either unbearable to use or unsightly to visit.

It takes me 4 refreshes just to comment on a page.
I think this is the link you are referring to: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
I agree that people prefer a sense of ownership rather than renting, even if renting is in their best interest.

However, the problem with a one-time payment is that the vendor loses incentive to continue supporting the buyer after the transaction. The primary way to generate additional revenues from that customer is, as you say "sell new innovations and features".

This adding of new features can increase complexity which eventually impacts the ease of use and increases the learning curve. These two side effects can have a negative impact on new user signups.

I'm optimistic of the web app user model after having developed desktop software for the past 10 years. Each version has to "work just like the previous, but better". You can only do that for so many versions :)
As long as you don't have a system where they get compensated for selling stuff that actually loses money in the long term

Absolutely. Any fool can generate sales by selling for less than it costs to make the product... Especially if he can scarper as soon as he collects his commission but before the product is due to be delivered!
IPads, Tinkerers, and Visigoths, Oh My
You're essentially wrong: while arrest and jail are obviously not in the cards for corporations, they are subject to criminal charges (RICO was in fact established to do this with a lower threshold for making the charge). Arthur Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice WRT to Enron, and while that conviction was reversed, it was too late since it had lost its CPA license as a result.

You're also wrong about the draft bit: while the mechanism is different, private companies have found themselves taken over by the Federal government during e.g. WWII ... or at least the credible threat was made (most recently I read such a case WRT to the Manhattan Project, that threat was required to light a fire under one company that supplied them).
> Because a corporation isn't a person, and can't commit felonies. If it could, it'd be tried in criminal court.

And yet they should be granted all the rights of a person?

> Yes, they have free speech, just as any minority shareholder as well and managers and all employees. The latter just don't have the same access to spend company resources on said speech.

Any access to spend company resources. If you don't have a controlling interest, you can do just about jack and shit. I suppose you could embezzle or misuse funds though.
It sure took the author a long time to get to his main points–I almost gave up.

Maybe reading Williams Zinsser should be the new black ...
You're right, I should have qualified that. That said, there are a lot of people working as designers in Google, but in my experience they are essentially user interaction designers.

The more woolly aspects of design -- like picking a different font just because of how it "feels" -- Google's pretty hostile to that. There's a default concept of "Googliness" which everyone understands to be a kind of high-energy, primary-color blandness with near-magical UI. There aren't a lot of projects that deviate from that, no matter what the designer thinks.

If you compare it to the kind of design variety you see at Yahoo or even Microsoft you'll see what I mean. At Yahoo a lot of projects are almost led by design, for good (Flickr) or ill (almost everything else). And there are design principles of Flickr which Google could never accept, like "serendipity". The idea that a user interface could be deliberately not laser-efficient, in the name of promoting exploration and community engagement, would totally baffle Google managers and they wouldn't tolerate that kind of designer-talk.
Ideas vs Features
I don't think a blanket exercise regimen of more is the way to go. I feel miserable when I exercise more than 5 times a week because it takes me at least one day to recover so piling on more exercise just keeps me in a constant state of recovery which is quite counterproductive. That being said I wonder what kind of diet those 100 mile a week runners are on to have such stamina.
Applying the Analytics Annotation Feature
As a side note, I noticed that someone down-voted my comment. That's fine, you obviously thought that 4 points was more than it should have, but I'd be interested to know why. To my mind the things I said are relevant to the enquirer given that I am an employer in a shop that uses Python extensively. I clearly marked it as my personal opinion to try to make it clear that I wasn't speaking for the industry as a whole.

So anyone who thinks my comments as stated are inappropriate and deserving of a down-vote, please let me know so I can learn. My email is in my profile if you prefer that route.

Thanks.
Oh... I was referring to the fact that the author just completed his first month at Google...

It's hard to judge a company just in one month especially when some people might spend their first week (or two) doing company orientation.
See my above comment, corporations such as Arthur Anderson have been convicted of felonies.
I was amused by the insinuation that you could "plagiarize" a business model.
I'm curious to know why you think cryptographers don't write lolcat apps.
That's a good portion of the book "Founders At Work".
I'll just offer some counterpoint, as we didn't do this. We created accounts manually with a script for a long time. By the time we needed a panel (leads were starting to get out of hand), I knocked out a fugly one in Rails in one 20 hour coding marathon. Then I banged up an email parser in Perl to add all of our current accounts / correspondences. That was just a couple months back.

The biggest problem that I could see with building a panel up front is that you might be building it for the wrong product. In my eyes, testing your product to see if you get any traction would probably win.
Who told you I wasn't stupid?