skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was wondering if the real problem wasn't that Google discovered the attack vectors were essentially government-mandated holes.

That is, the required local hires, the mandatory native firm partner, etc, It could be that the rules don't allow enough control over those resources to achieve acceptable risk.

If that's the case, it makes perfect sense that Google would issue a public threat to close the office. Nothing else would carry as much weight and if the current terms are untenable, there's essentially no risk.
Vanilla browser based https encryption cannot stop states like the US or China which have access to all the major pipes. All it takes to do a man in the middle on basic https is the key for any one certificate that your browser trusts. Any organization that has one (including many employers which install certs) can easily watch your traffic.

HTTPS is fundamentally insecure against MITM attacks by governments.
The web I sort of get, but... 9/11? You think the problem of evil was new to the world on 9/11? At least, I assume you're referencing the problem of evil since that's the only way I can make sense of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
I had already used the name for my lisp flash library :( http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/gordon (not that it is a very original name or anything ;))
Has anyone travelled to both Spain and Latin America? Spaniards are white. Latins have on average a mixed colour. So it's clear that extermination did not take place... there.
Nice, congrats on making the jump Patrick, I've really enjoyed your BCC posts.
Sou you think being all but exterminated was for the better of the native Americans?

Maybe you are trying to argue for something good, but dead people are dead. They don't benefit from a civilization that emerged a couple of decades later.
Not to quibble too much, since this is a complex issue, but as it is 2010, "last 10 years" would mean since 2000, so stuff from the 80s and 90s isn't precisely on target.
Okay, but you could also say

19 = 20 - 1

then multiply by 1.6

20 -> 32
1 -> 1.6

and get the estimate 19mi = 30.4km, which is even closer and seems rather easier to me than figuring out a set of Fibonacci numbers which sum to 19.
No, you're talking in vague abstractions without referencing specific period of brutality in humanity's history. Platitudes prevent you from making an actual judgment about a given event.

> "It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people."

Conquistadors, went to the Americas and slaughtered millions. Regardless of your assertion that both could be "savages", one group initiated and subsequently conducted systematic violence against another group over several decades. You're honestly saying you can't judge that as "bad"? What if you were among one of those indigenous groups that were killed? I know I would not appreciate it...

But of course we can't make concrete judgments about that.
The world is a lot more complex than that. Germany was not treated well after the First World War. It was almost certain that there will be another war and a dictator would come to power (the only question was when, and what the dictator's name would be).

This does not mean that everything the German army did was good or justified (e.g. the Holocaust). And neither was the allies knights in shining armour (firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo comes to mind).

My grandparents (although not German citizens) were fiercely supportive of Germany in WW2, as where many people. This stemmed mostly from the UK’s treatment of people in its colonies.
What's your answer to my question?
Pixel Qi screen on Android Tablet (CES)
In Europe for example Rumania comes to mind. Dark ages not to be taken too literally.
> Does being a victim cleanse your sins?
Only if you subscribe to simplistic narratives about how the world works.
This is the single biggest problem with contract drafting, and lawyers do it as well as lay people - to read into your words what you think is there as opposed to what they actually say.

The law sometimes gives a contracting party a way out by allowing you to admit evidence in a dispute over what the parties truly intended if the language reads ambiguously, assuming the language is merely ambiguous and not plainly and incontrovertibly against you. But, trying to salvage a contract in this way is like playing out a desperate last act because, by the time you reach that stage, you will already have a losing situation on your hands. Even if you win such a dispute, by the time it reaches litigation, you likely will have already lost economically on the deal in most cases.

The lesson here is not necessarily, "always use a lawyer" (though you should if you have a lot at stake in a particular contract) but rather, "read your contracts carefully and literally before signing." A good lawyer will do this, as will a seasoned executive or contracts manager (or founder, for that matter) who is experienced in dealing with contractual issues or who otherwise has a knack for this sort of this (some founders do have such a knack, most don't). Never simply assume that the language is what it appears to be at first glance.
Congrats Patrick!

For entirely selfish reasons, I hope you start consulting for AdWords/marketing/optimization stuff :-D (If you do, please contact me! (email in profile)).

BCC seems like a great way for you to have learned a lot, but I hope you find a new product that is really worthy of you!

Incidentally, is it normal for a company to want you to stick around for 6+ months? I usually give 2 weeks notice, but offer to stay for 4 if needed ...
Client side hashing?
Valleywag’s $100,000 Bounty For Apple Tablet Leaks May Face Legal Repercussions
Yes, they're definitely a competitor, but with important differences. As far as I know, they're more about full-featured "API portals" (usually for complex yet free APIs). WebServius is more about enabling very quick experimentation with simple and lightweight "software components in the cloud" (with a focus on direct per-API-call monetization).

Practical differences:
- WebServius has instant integration (connecting an API to us is literally just typing in a URL)
- WebServius is free for low-traffic free APIs
- We have per-call API billing through PayPal built in (as far as I know, Mashery doesn't, though I may not have all the facts on them of course)
This strikes me as patently false-- it is perfectly possible to discuss the relative merits of those who conducted genocide versus their victims without justifying the act.

The problem with attributing these kind of motives to those with whom you disagree is that all discussion then shift away from the logical merits of various positions and into the decidedly illogical territory of whose voice you think this the most "authentic". In short, instead of asserting that your opponents have different positions then they actually do, perhaps its worth asking whether or not that is their position.
Also, I think most of the newer SWF files have lots of actionscript bytecode which is something that Gordon probably can't handle unless they implement their own stack-based virtual machine and implement all of the mx.core set of libraries.
Intellectually I like that you can make a game on the platform it is targeted for. Realistically - I can't see myself trying to program it on the xbox itself, but rather going with the windows version.
This is BS. The article isn't condoning chasing antelopes in the savannah. It is against genocide. Just because your civilisation is more advanced (whatever that means) does not mean that you should simply murder and wipe out the other civilisation. You can live side by side and allow the others to learn from you and interact with you, etc. If there was no genocide, the US will probably be just as advanced as it is now but would have much more native Americans. In fact it would probably advance faster because in the beginning shortage of people was the main thing slowing down the US advance. If native Americans were free to join the American population, the population would grow much faster.
What, quantitatively, makes one culture "greater" than another?
Holy crap, I can't believe this. Let me say this for the record:

The slaughter of Native Americans by the Conquistadors was a terrible thing. Awful. Tragic. An abomination.

Also, and completely not taking anything away from the awful abominableness of that terrible tragedy, the Native Americans had lots of other problems with their culture, and were in many ways, quite savage.

The Conquistadors had really good food, and the technological know-how to cross the oceans, which are both quite good and important things.

Being a murderer doesn't mean your ships aren't great. Having great ships doesn't make you less of a murderer.

My point is that you can't just say "they did this awful thing, therefor everything about their culture was horrible".

My point is also that you can't just say "they had this awful thing done to them, therefor everything about their culture was better."

We can judge the act as bad without thinking that it somehow pollutes everything that is good about the culture that did the heinous thing.

We can also judge the act as bad without thinking that being the victim of a heinous act somehow erases everything that is bad in the victim.

The real world is complicated, and all-or-nothing thinking is irrationally and unforgivably lazy.
Television Watchers Die Sooner; Each Hour/Day, Brings 11% Risk of Death
I think this is the big point people are missing from reading this article: the author is shameless in his bias... the aboriginals were saints! They lived the perfect, tranquil life before the barbaric Europeans came and killed them all!

This sort of moral absolutism is hogwash, and has no place in intelligent debate.

This is an interesting topic worthy of discussion, but I really do not think this article serves as a good basis for it. Until we can come up with a fair resource that doesn't look at the natives like saints, and Europeans like evil incarnate, I don't think any productive discussion can happen.
Designing a better WalMart receipt
Same here. Nothing happens. No Crashes. 4.0.288.1 stable build
That's not what I meant. I revised my post. Are we trying to classify which civilization is better? If yes, I think that this is not going anywhere.
Thanks. We will likely change the logo at some point.

The speed issue with the extra network hop (on the order of magnitude of 100ms right now in the US) may indeed be an issue for some cases, and we will probably add a "non-proxied" mode in the future to handle such scenarios (though the integration will necessarily be a bit more difficult from the API provider point of view in this case).
Try D!
not really, if you're writing flash apps, there's a huge chance that you're actually writing as3 code, which gets compiled into DoABC tags (actionscript bytecode) and I don't think DoABC tags will ever be supported unless they implement a stack-based virtual machine in javascript.

It gives the appearance that it got cheaper to re-target, but really it will be a ton more work when you realize what will never be supported. Even if they managed to implement a virtual machine in javascript, they'd still need to implement all the library code that normally doesn't ship with every swf file.
I don't know why you're being downvoted for this statement. It's true, the entirety of the "why" is in that sentence, which you'd think would be what this community was interested in.
Thats struck me as odd too - he's avoiding anything unnatural and man-made, but feels no issue with popping a bunch of pharmaceutical chemicals?

No offense to the author, and I'm glad if the above strategies are working out for him, but this smells a little like too much new-age health food mania. I too know people who swear by organic foods and will spend hours lecturing you on the dangers of industrialized food production... and have a row of pharmaceuticals they pop daily.

This reminds me altogether of the Jonathan Coulton song: "I Feel Fantastic" (look up lyrics if you don't know it).
They do mention "bad press" in the movie. I would imagine that word of this defeat would get out and bad press / lawyer action might make a return painful.

I do wonder about the modern press applied to historical situations (WWII, American Frontier).
The site looks nice, the idea sounds great. At first I thought this would be a great service to integrate into our service but there are a few blockers.

If we charge our customers for other things besides the API access then this will require our customers to manage their account and payments on our site as well as yours. Unless you have an API to manage your API manager?

Response time is also another concern as sync already mentioned.
Being a victim does not cleanse your sins. I'm sure that the Natives Americans were not perfect human beings. No one is. Being killed does not make the Natives good but the Europeans bad. I hope for you that you agree with that last sentence.
There was miscegenation for sure, not
only with native people but between Europeans,
Africans and everyone else that came here.

But that does not imply that there was not an extermination. [1]

[1] A single and not isolated example. -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people#European_colonizati...
I wonder how many FX players are here in the HN community?
Comparing the rate of political change in China from 1988 - 1998 to the rate of change in 2000 - 2010 it's clearly slowed down. As to corruption I can only suggest you research the topic both from a historical perspective and a modern business one. Read up on how Google local competitor has benefited from close government ties and multiply that by every significant business in China. Look at the percentage of multi millionaires with close family connections to government and suggest corruption is not a major issue.

China has had just as long to grow economically as Japan and South Korea. Yet, only by ignoring the vast difference in population sizes are they in any way comparable from an economic standpoint. Suggesting that a non "free-market" system is a better approach when it's provided such poor returns is ignoring history.
Google Nexus One's price in Germany leaked
read some articles on the "modern, civilized" Indian Health Service and find an reason to reconsider.
Without knowing who this other group is the fact that they started the process in 2008 and still hasn't finished does not mean that Virgin would be unable to complete it in 6 months.

I got my figures from http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2009/12/30/virgin-break...
I'd agree with that completely.

My roommate recently interviewed with Facebook(we attend a state school in the midwest). The other candidates were going around saying where they were from, many were from Stanford, and when it came to him they basically snubbed him afterwards.

That said in programming competitions we've beaten schools like UIUC.
I find that the key to going through long work days is to have a routine.

Out of my 16.5 hours of being awake, 14 hours go towards my startup.

Come to think of it, I think I'll write up a post about it. Since it'd be a wall of text on HN otherwise.

Ok here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051217
Can you quote the portion of the article that you interpret as saying that Western civilization has never done anything good?
404: "The requested URL /blog/2010/01/Dear-EarthLink-Customer-Support.html was not found on this server."

going directly to http://www.charlespetzold.com/ yields a placeholder saying:

"This domain is powered by EarthLink Web Hosting."
What should I make of the fact they're mixed color?

Extermination didn't take place, but rape did?
It's just a meaningless expression. If you want to compare 2 classes, you have to define the comparison method.
Would be nice if the link showed this was from DISCUSS.joelonsoftware.com... My first reaction was "Joel quit his day job!?!"
one of the most interesting moments of my 2009 was listening to a guy showing off this http://tafkav.blogspot.com/ and talking about how we do not still consider plants (and computers!) as having rights (cfr. "Should Trees Have Standings?").

This seems completely unreasonable to us but the same was true between e.g. people and animals, europeans and native americans, japanese and chinese (see the nanking massacre).

The "evolution of empathy" is probably still an ongoing process for which our descendants will consider us barbarians.
Animation. Easy to work in parallel but output is very constrained stylistically. Multiple author books tend to have stylistic constraints as well otherwise the book suffers from an uneven feeling.
This is a false dichotomy. It would have been quite possible to have had peaceful coexistence with the natives, and to slowly assimilate the natives into American society. In fact on a smaller scale that actually happened in a lot of places. Many early settlements had natives living and trading and working in there on a more or less equal footing as whites. In fact it would have been probably more beneficial economically for the early settlements to assimilate the natives rather than wipe them out, because the biggest problem for early settlements was lack of people.
Disclosure: I wrote the piece.

But anyway, I'm still with andrewvc here. I concur that NIH - the pathology you're describing above - is equally unproductive, and that deciding when to build or buy is a difficult question to answer.

That all being said, it seems fairly clear that due to a wide variety of factors, heterogeneity is accelerating, which makes life more difficult for general purpose, volume solutions. Think of it this way: Windows XP was, for a lot of people, a more than acceptable compute interface. But it wasn't designed for phones, devices, tablets, and the like. And attempts to bend it to that purpose largely failed.

We need different tools for different jobs, and with the number of job increasing, sometimes there just isn't a good tool available. At which point rolling your own is not only appropriate, but desirable.

Point being that specialization is the new norm, and as such roll your own - or at least leveraging the results of someone else's roll your own - will become more common. IMHO, and so on.
What entrepreneurs and startups can learn from the whole Conan O’Brien debacle
Five types of companies
When I was working at Google in 2007 the DNS in China would redirect Google to Baidu every now and then. Can't point fingers at who was making the changes... but it usually coincided with the U.S. doing something China didn't like. Talk about irritating.

It honestly wouldn't surprise me if China blocked Google all together, made a clone of Google's UI, and powered searches on Google through Baidu.
There have been a couple of programming languages named 'English'.
Ask HN:  feedback wanted on my open-source project:  envbuilder
I am astounded. The server actually dropped my connection when I tried searching for it!
It's translating to SVG, so there's "just" the script translation overhead, not rendering overhead. I think it's quite practical if maybe not especially useful given Flash penetration.

I wrote a Flash player for the PS2 ~9 years ago now that was fast enough. I'd say that current PCs + jitted JS are faster than that platform.
Nasa photographs 'trees' on Mars
FYI, this is an early-stage Python build system that's sort of buildout-like, but more transparent and less "enterprisey".

Bear in mind that this is the "minimum viable product". I'm looking for feedback in terms of what's a pain about it and what features would be cool to add to it.
Isn't there some rule, that if there is a dispute in the contract, whoever wrote it gets the "less beneficial" interpretation?
Haha yeah that was my first reaction too, was rather shocking ;-)
Thanks for the explanation and link. I wasn't familiar with the term "phylogenetics" -- although it's not too far removed from concepts in high school biology.

> Also, since I can smell the "But you can't prove any of that" coming...

Not from me. I just wanted more information, not an argument.
It gives you the Flash (animation) authoring environment without plugin requirement for playback.
Thanks for the information - I'll add this to the list!
Largely irrelevant - at least for now, since Twitter, Facebook and a host of other social networking sites are currently blocked in China.
Reduced personal wealth, no easy access to credit, reduced consumer demand... but that isn't the whole story.

IMHO the health care problem has a huge impact on this. I'm a Canadian expat in the US right now, and I unfortunately had to pay a visit to an American ER last night. I'm insured, so my out of pocket costs are manageable, but imagine a startup founder struggling to get to ramen profitability doing the same.

Oh, unrelated note: the whole "private health care works better" thing is total hogwash. ER wait times here are as bad as they are in Canada, main difference is that in one place you're not paying through the nose for it.
> Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live.

But what suggests "places that operate in the European tradition" will remain better (i.e. what traits of Euro civilization are optimal given any group of humans)? What makes this expression any more meaningful than something like, "C had lots of problems, but languages in the C-family are better to work with"?
The future is hopefully something more secure than client-side hashing, probably SRP, or it’ll be NTLM all over again. It would be nice if web browsers implemented it directly, but until then there are JavaScript libraries like http://server.denksoft.com/wordpress/?page_id=27 .
Google’s reasons for leaving China aren’t as pure as they seem
"I claim this piece of land for my own. Oh, look! There are people living on it already. I guess I get to enslave, rape, torture them."

Actually, you can say EXACTLY that. The very idea of private property is founded on that principle. When whoever it was originally decided some plot of land belonged to him, that's precisely what he said. All I would add to that statement is the clause, "Or they can get the hell out."
The discussion at hand is about history of imperialism so 'appealing to history' shouldn't be that surprising.

Also, I'm curious, how are things in your post-imperialist future? Is everything lovely?
Ditto, using a 3GS.
And they would be dead now even if no one had killed them back then. And those that killed them are all dead now. And no doubt more Amerindians were killed by other Amerindians over the centuries than ever had any contact at all with Europeans.

This is like all the whining about slavery. Slavery has been one of the most widespread practices in the world. Europeans were the ones who have come closest to putting a stop to it. And in fact it is only European derived morality that makes slavery and genocide wrong.
Just because it hasn't happened to you yet doesn't make it untrue. I know at least 2 people who have had deals fall through because they refused to sign NDAs.
I wonder if this takes into account the new micro tech startups? I doubt it.

What this is really indicative of is just how bad the credit situation was in early 2009. I know that restaurants and other capital intensive 'start-ups' really suffered.
Thanks. We're certainly thinking about the more complex scenarios you mentioned (where users pay both for API access and other things on the same site) and will likely add some features to support this (e.g. an API to WebServius itself as you suggested), but these features are probably at least a few months away.
with these kind of sad news, a phrase always come in to mind; "Permanent solution to a temporary problem"
Awesome news! Glad to hear you are doing what you want to do.
Wikipedia has a secure server that is linked from their login page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin) so users don't have to send passwords in the clear.