skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trust me. I'm not bashing.

I have a blackberry hooked up to Google Voice and Mail servers. They know my name, address, all my phone numbers, all my emails, my contact lists, frequency I receive calls on my Google number, text transcription of voicemails. They also can potentially record every call I receive and make with GV.

Considering the benefit I get from just Mail and GV, the datamining is a cost I'm willing to make. I also know if my phone is lost, I dont lose my data. And I can back it up elsewhere.

And I am somewhat happily shocked that they came such forthright that they "fired him for snooping". Most places will only say "They no longer work for the company".
TC followup - http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-fired-secur...
already submitted earlier... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690894
As much as I like duckduckgo it's not even on the map.

Even Altavista is larger than duckduckgo and they're at 0.14% or so.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/altavista.com+duckduckgo.co...

So if that holds true on the percentage then duckduckgo is at about 0.035%. Which is really not bad at all.

Small fry: search.com 2.7%, ask.com 1%, < 1%: naver.com , aol , baidu , yandex , altavista
Hey, you're not Steve Jobs, are you?

First, aspire to be a great engineer. Ninjas are for turtles and Rockstar is caffeinated sugar water.

Second, design and implement software. Write programs in areas that interest you. Then iterate and design something that your friends or family can use.

Finally, do your best and forget the rest. And continually get better doing it.

(It wouldn't hurt to read "Programming Pearls".)
Okay, so he joked around about being a total sleazebag who can't be trusted with people's private data, or be trusted to do the right thing. Now that he's in control of millions of people's private data, WOW, those 'jokes' are SO FUNNY! He should retire and become a stand up comic, it's the BEST!!!
Props for the link to a great presentation of Avi Bryant (http://twitter.com/avibryant, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant, who is not only brilliant for his work on his startup that got bought by twitter, his seaside framework, which brought continuations to web, copied later by Scala Thrift framework, and also helped pg get on twitter).
So what is stopping the people whose privacy was violated from suing google or the fired engineer?

Just wondering.

Perhaps someone can shed light on possible recourse one has in such situations.
I dunno, it seems like Zuck is plenty successful and will go on to lead a wealthy and fulfilling life. Maybe the takeaway should be, "Don't worry about how you talk to your friends privately. By the time it can come back to bite you, you will already be too rich to care."
Well, I downvoted that guy too, for feeding the troll. It went without saying that the original comment was lousy.
Thanks, joke explainer. The parent version is a little more subtle, but has the same implication and is less heavy handed.
Dropping Kilometers From Highway’s Signs Divides Arizona
Agreed. I think the founders are still trying to rationalize otherwise, but the goal is to make the service the best it can be. Any clients in the way will be consumed.
I wish they included more sample data for the 2nd problem, Events, as that has a lot of potential - especially if the allowed single readable lines for multiple actions (instead of one)
I'm also surprised by the amount of "high quality" entries in Texas.

But then again, the people smoking shwag probably aren't reading hacker news and adding their cost of weed to an online database.
Nice Photos of Our Planet at Night
The world at night is not all dark. Take a look...
Wow, who put the more money initially in ESA and ITER? It's France, beside one of the 4 fields medal this year was a Vietnamese that had worked in France many years (then was recently naturalized) it's maybe not too bad to work in France when you're a foreigner. And frankly I've traveled in almost all EU and the two countries with the more immigration IMO are France and UK. "France is notorious for obeying only those EU laws which benefit it" a great thing of EU it's when one of its member does not respect the laws and treaties there are sanctions so the law is the same for every EU nations. Stop spreading FUD, please.
I think google manned up well on this one. They will always have this problem. At least it seems they have less (that we know off) incidents than the government does. It's pretty incredible how many stories of government employees snooping (even selling it to organize crime) information stored in their databases.
Visually, the site is clean and well designed.

However as a product I'm still not clear exactly where it would fit into a businesses needs. Is it a sales lead management tool? A customer support tool? An easy to use CRM? Project management software?

I think most of your target customers may be confused by these cross-functional purposes. IMHO, you need to simplify the messaging and purpose of the product. I think the tag line "Private Social Network for Your Business" confuses the positioning further.

The actual service may be great but I think you need to work on how you describe and position it. For instance, it may be simpler to use positioning like: "The easiest way to manage and develop sales leads into successful projects."
Want to work in Chicago?

Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google?

Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank, and plenty of boring paperwork to do at Google. It doesn't make sense to me.
Google CEO says no "standalone" social networking site
At Twitter, a Web Site Is Revamped and Simplified
Are you serious?

You said "No-one ought be allowed to...".

Well, to do those kinds of things, we need laws, and ways of enforcing those laws.

So, to enforce "mandatory attribution" to an author of a work, would require some sort of legal mechanism to do so.

Protecting the author's "moral right" involves him or her having some sort of protection by the law, in the same vein the law protects citizens from rape, murder, and other violent acts.

My point being, simply because there is a law or a "moral right" to prevent certain acts, does not and cannot stop those acts from occurring, although it may reduce the frequency of those acts.

Lastly, I was unaware this thread mentioned anything about "getting rid of copyrights", particularly when you "think it is necessary to recognize an author's moral right to the work or, if you wish, mandatory attribution."
Google: 91.95%

Yahoo: 5.45%

Bing: 2.60%
> The average salary at Goldman Sachs in 2005 was $521,000

Wow. New title suggestion: "Working at Goldman Sachs will earn you enough money to found a startup with zero revenue."
I'd argue that ability is more important than if he can come up with a good card-shuffling or string-reversing algorithm on the spot. Algorithms can be looked up easily if you're having a mental blocj. The ability to know that you need more information is a bit more elusive.
When you allow variable air density, and variable speed of sound, the problem depends strongly on what assumptions you have made there. For example one complication is that if the plane is high in the sky at a 45 degree angle, even if it isn't moving it will sound like it is in a different place than it really is thanks to refraction.

Those variants of the problem are much harder, and less interesting to me.
Software that claimed to protect Iranian web surfers doesn't
> c) being such "a bag of hurt" that it didn't get added to Apple's computers.

Uh, yeah it (HDCP) did; on specific movies rented via iTunes, if you don't have an HDCP compliant display, it won't play.

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/11/18/apple-incorporates-hdcp-...
You can be a web designer and not know HTML/CSS?
Hey, Capitol Hill: who's your daddy? AT&T
I don't know where 'here' is but you might want to edit that comment.
Does Alex have a contact address :-)?
"f them in the ear" was not in the context of users, it was in the context of ConnectU and competing websites. It's more obvious in the New Yorker article.
Found from Boing Boing's link-filled story
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/14/haystack-is-burning.htm...

(I did search for haystack on this site and found no recent references to this, but I won't be surprised if someone points out a dup)
And all of a sudden I want to give my wife a candle-light dinner.
Just curious if anyone is actively developing, or has plans to develop, any applications or services targeting WebGL in a business context?

We've run some initial tests and its a very promising visualization surface. The best place to start are the lessons on Giles Thomas' up-to-date and instructive site:

http://learningwebgl.com/blog/

Then delve into the draft Khronos WebGL spec:

https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webg...

Everything is pretty straigtforward if you are familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0.

N.B. I've had better luck with Firefox 4 Minefield than the Chromium builds, and Mozilla also has its own WebGL tutorial site but its not as current as Learning WebGL:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/WebGL
The first thing I do when I install Ubuntu and open Nautilus is to turn this feature off. It's so much faster to type "~/Scripts/some/hierarchy" than it is to click through that. Then again, I (probably like most of you) believe in the commandline.
Screenshots of the New Twitter
Yesterday, I wanted to show a friend a video and typed http://hulu.com/top-chef, and the show's page came up. This seemed natural and efficient to me, but my friend could not get over this "magic".

REST FTW.
That explains it. So price raise in my case. Doh.. no worries. You guys are worth it.
Yehuda has already made some fantastic changes to the Abbot build tools that should be landing with the 1.4 release any day. It's in rc2 right now, just run gem install sproutcore --pre, the tools are super fast now.
RWW's account gets deactivated at Quora
Its also an interesting move towards "app" style, with ajax and less page changes, which is something rather unique in the social network scheme of things.
That link just goes to a empty HN page
I love Chicago... that sounds good to me.
I'm impressed with how transparent Google was with handling the issue. Unfortunately, things like this can and will occasionally happen. You can either put up your own Postfix server if you do not like it - or you can thank Google for continuing to provide such a kick ass free service.

As for David Barksdale, good luck to you, you will need it.
Turn on showdead.
> I think we're agreeing.

Yep. Sorry if my sarcasm broadcaster had a weak signal
It's not activated for me yet, but it looks cool. They learnt from twitpic and long-tweets :) I've never wanted to use third party applications for that before
He was fired? That's all?

From all reports, it seems that this Google employee accessed data which he knew he had no authorization to access. That sounds like a textbook case of computer crime -- why hasn't he been arrested yet?
I've heard the same thing about "The Da Vinci Code". Doesn't necessarily mean that a majority of people hold such a view (that said: a sizable enough minority is not too far from being a majority).
Yes, but my point is that the written word now encompasses the kind of ephemeral that would never have been preserved in the past.
I know that the larger more prestigious companies will require more intensive hiring processes but I think this kind of attitude is really hurting smaller companies. The process for getting hired at smaller companies is getting so convoluted for one particular reason. It is hard for a company to simply hire and fire. In the most logical situation, you hire the best application, work them for a week and throw them out if they don't fit. As it is now, people whine, sue and pitch a fit when they get fired so that companies have to come up with aggravating hiring practices to get the people that will work out.
Maybe Google should add more questions related to ethics in their rigorous interview process.
I'm hearing the immortal words of my first (and only) law professor:

The E in E-mail stands for "Evidence"
If SSL was being sold as a tool to allow people to visit censored Internet sites from ISPs controlled by a government that still kills people by burying them in a sand pit and hurling giant rocks at their head? Yes. It'd be the same argument.

Since I never argued that all crypto protocol design work was "antiquated", I'm not sure how to respond to that. What I've said a bunch of times is: it is prohibitively difficult to get stealth circumvention tools right on the first try, and the adversary being circumvented could pay the couple million it would take to turn any such tool, without even noticing the cost.
PayPal introduces Aria Subscriptions Plus
At first glance, google comes off pretty good on how they dealt with this, but you have to wonder how come a single engineer has access to google voice and google mail and IM data of end users. SRE's as these employees are labeled (site reliability engineers) are 'highly experienced engineers who can be trusted'.

It goes beyond just snooping too, apparently this guy changed end-user settings which had specifically made to lock him out, and spent a lot of time and effort to use his position at google to achieve real world effects with the people he was snooping on.

This guy has a serious case of sysadmin god complex and while I'm really not sure if it is ok for him to be exposed with name and picture I hope he'll never be in a position of such responsibility again, and I hope that google will perform better oversight of the people that have access like this.

The only thing that got the ball rolling here was the parents of some of the kids alerting google.
Tweets per day from 06/2006 to 09/2010
People list all the programs they've used. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, Firefox, Internet Explorer, [no, not a web programmer] Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, emacs, Visual Studio, gcc, g++, ssh, Putty, xterm, armed robbery, and emacs. (Typical start to an interview: "You listed emacs twice." "Really? Oops, sorry." "That's... not the reply I was fishing for, but 'oops' is acceptable.")

Frankly, I don't blame them. I looked through a stack of a dozen resumes on my boss's desk and noticed that every single resume listed Scrum. Somebody in HR is screening out candidates that don't list Scrum on their resume. I pointed it out to my boss and he just laughed and said he didn't think he could do anything about it. (I didn't look for other patterns, but I bet it's just as bad with particular software technologies.)

So listing every single piece of software you've ever noticed installed on your computer is a good policy unless you're personally handing your resume to the hiring manager. It makes a bad impression on technical folks, but that's better than getting your resume round-filed before anybody technical sees it.

(Note to self: next time job hunting, prepare different HR-friendly and techie-friendly versions of each resume.)
Read the gawker/valleywag article, it goes a lot further than that:

http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...
Everything in Moderation
I fully agree with you on the 2-3x multiplier, but lzw never claimed an evaluation based on 50 x Revenue. He stated that operating profit would be used--which is exactly what EBITDA essentially is.

That being said, you probably could still flip a web company for $1M with the 50x multiplier (given $20k in revenue). If you're serving an SaaS to 167 customers (paying $10/mo), your EBIT to Sales ratio --> 1.00 with negligible variable costs. God bless the interwebs.
His view is similar to mine: The only privacy filters you need are discretion and sobriety.
I'm sure things vary state to state, but where I am you can form an LLC online at the Secretary of State website in 10 minutes, for about $100.

A couple of things I've been advised by my attorney (not that I'm giving anyone else legal advice...)

If you form an LLC but then don't operate it "seriously" (keeping records, having written articles of organization, etc) a court may nullify your "limited liability" protection.

The author states that "Unfortunately, the US is a litigious country and any idiot can sue you for anything." and while technically true, in practice it's not that easy. Outside of small claims, you can't file a civil complaint unless you hire an attorney, and in most civil litigation each side pays their own fees. There may be exceptions for gross negligence but that would be pretty hard to prove in a contract dispute for software development. So unless a fairly substantial amount of money is at stake it's not going to be worth doing. No good lawyer is going to bring a lawsuit that costs his client more than he can recover, and you also have to take into consideration the ability of the other party to pay (an LLC that has assets comprising a laptop computer and a few thousand dollars in the bank is not going to be a target for any litigation).
The problem with "what do you know" questions is not (or so much) that they may reject people who know stuff but recall it differently, but that they aren't selective for having the ability to stick with something for an extended time. Avoiding distraction with the internet, or the more subtle types of distraction into futzing with things rather than doing the most important but more discouraging tasks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690578
Regardless of how Google is playing this in the press, the question people need to be asking isn't about the rogue employee. It is: "what are the controls being put in place to prevent SRE's from accessing sensitive data inside Google apps, and what specific forms of information is Google considering sensitive for those purposes, and is there a class of employee at Google that is expected to be exempt from these controls?"
Right, because Apple's influence over AT&T has led to drastic reductions in monthly fees for all iPhone owners and given them access to additional features such as MMS, tethering and unlimited data for free.
his seaside framework, which brought continuations to web

Is this the case? I looked (briefly) for confirmation and did find at the very least papers discussing the use of Scheme's continuations for web session management, circa Seaside's first public announcement in 2002...
Hells yeah you can. Deliver integer (integer >1) multiples of my salary and you can hire my talent tomorrow. And if you're interested, I know a group of people that built systems that work at enormous scale, probably only shy of the G and better than Y. Make the same offer and you can probably get any of us. Especially if the integer is greater than two.
What bothers me more is the possible presence of mercury in HFCS, as tested by Consumer Reports: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/health/2009/01/mercury-in-h...

(Mercury is really bad for you, of course.)

Also of note: HFCS is even found in whole wheat bread at my local grocery store, which seems quite odd.

I can understand saving money by using HFCS over sugar in a sugar-laden soft drink, but the few grams of sugar needed to get the yeast going?!
The mayor of Iceland's capital agrees:

http://www.nerve.com/scanner/2010/06/28/new-mayor-of-reykjav...
Yep- Zero calorie sweeteners (especially Aspartame) are much worse than HFCS or Cane Sugar.

When Aspartame breaks down it releases Methyl Alcohol (anti-freeze) into your body. It's also been shown to have a similar effect as MSG regarding brain damage.

HFCS isn't much better though. The problem is that Fructose is normally found in fruit and therefore eaten with fiber, which slows the digestion and controls the insulin spike. Fructose alone digests much faster than sucrose.
No that's not true. A private person can privately record any conversation he or she wants. (Remember Monica?)

Warrant requirements only apply to government action, meaning the government itself or someone acting on the government's behalf. If you talk to someone on the phone and that person records you on his own, without government inducement, then the court will consider the recording hearsay but admissible at trial under a few exceptions to the hearsay rule.
I agree: these numbers just don't add up. Where are the sites that get 35%+ of their search traffic from Bing to balance out the plethora of sites that get 85%+ of their traffic from Google? I haven't heard of any.
He did have authorization to access it. He didn't have authorization to abuse it in the way that he did. It's all kinds of icky but what do you think was so obviously criminal about it that you expect him to be in jail?
"There is nothing new under the sun" was first said before there was writing. It was wrong then and it's wrong now ... there will always be a fine line between copying and creating, and if you give a damn, your job is to stay on the right side of that line. The argument in the video is that the line doesn't exist.
76% Google, 10% each Bing / Yahoo, 4% also-rans at BCC.
The Wire was written by people with intimate first-hand experience and they worked really hard to make it as accurate as possible. Of course the characters are fictional but the world they inhabit is real.
That he went way beyond accessing the data but apparently used it to coerce people in real life.
That's fantastic!

I'm going to borrow this for client use.
Sure you can, you can also be a writer and not know what punctuation is. In fact that would explain a few things around the web.

oh wait, you meant a good web designer ...
A123 Opens Largest U.S. Lithium Battery Cell Plant
That was my first take as well, but after reading up a bit on it it seems that they tried to make it go away by not charging him, when if you look at the severity of this case they had every reason to.

So they tried to sweep it under the rug by just letting the guy go.

If an employee of mine had ever snooped on end-user data and would have used that data in order to get real-world effects in the lives of those users I'm fairly sure I would have registered a complaint with law enforcement.

Google has their 'image' to be aware of, but in this case just letting the guy go may not be the best way to preserve that image.
I think we'll see several multi-million dollar companies built on Twilio. It makes every phone into a smartphone (i.e. a first-class citizen of the Internet which speaks HTTP). That is just gobsmackingly awesome if you have a good way to exploit it.
This is, in part, incorrect. "Irony" is in its original (from Ancient Greek) and primary usage a rhetorical form -- in other words, something intentionally used by a speaker. Experts disagree on whether "verbal irony" and "sarcasm" are the same thing -- sarcasm might require a kind of sharp, biting tone. But the original comment is certainly ironic.

A situation like your drowning example is also irony; sometimes to be explicitly this is called "situational irony" as opposed to "verbal irony."

I apologize for being pedantic; mostly I just wanted a justified link to Silva Rhetoricae:
http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/I/irony.htm
(but see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony).
Renaissance Will Keep RIEF and RIFF Funds Open
Ask HN: Fastest way to make $1000 a month online?
I'm looking for an easy way to pay for school that I can do part-time, that aren't scammy.I'm not looking to build a monster business, I'm looking to cover my costs of going to school. Got any bright ideas?
Yeah, but you have to look at the big picture. Not everyone has friends with licenses. Your still doing a favor for a friend and breaking the law, meaning you deserve a premium on the resale (not that you'd take anything from a friend).
Using Python and Twisted to talk to Customers
Lightcrest staff discuss how they used Python and Twisted to boostrap their customer service software.