skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather than get into the ethics of it, I was simply hoping that people would pause, even if just for a second, to make sure they were comfortable being involved. I'm not trying to sway people either way.

I agree with you - you can't put Pandora back in the box. I don't, however, think that changes the classification of the leaked documents. When judging an individual's fitness for a security clearance, I imagine that they're looking more at character traits than specific instances of undesirable behavior. Sharing these documents that are already "public knowledge" is only noteworthy because it may indicate that you're not uncomfortable with the idea of releasing classified documents if it's for a cause you believe in. (Just speculating here)

>>Also if State et al. don't hire anyone interested by the cables I think we might be slightly screwed later

I disagree with this. I can think of a handful of reasons somebody lacking interest in these cables would still want to work for the government. Example: To do engineering work for a defense contractor, you'll undoubtedly need a secret+ clearance. You might seek such positions for the job security they provide. Or maybe you're interested in working with cutting edge technology that isn't necessarily available at more budget constrained (IE commercial) companies. Many of the engineers working at a high technical level are drawn to the technology, not the politics.

To reveal any bias, I should note that I do contract work for the US government.
Leading Chinese politician ordered attacks after Googling his own name
Except Intel already put in specific instructions for that.

I was surprised to discover that GPUs can accelerate SQLite http://pbbakkum.com/db/ and routing http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ (although you're probably better off using an NP for routing).
I have the same problem with PayPal. 70% of my income comes from Europe through PayPal. I'm seriously considering moving to Moneybookers, though, for my European customers. This really stinks.
I'm honestly not sure. Perhaps this topic would be more appropriate for a linguistics forum?
I can't reply for nickpinkston, but I suspect what he was getting at is that some practises of VCs could be seen as unethical. If someone is deliberately making other people's lives unpleasant in order to make themselves rich, most people would regard that as unethical, and that's what VCs are doing if they prevent founders from getting money in order to keep them "hungry".
21 More Notable Free Linux Games (Part 1 of 3)
I disagree - the title is spot on. Groupon's monthly revenue isn't directly related to the personal finances of the founders. The point of the post is to show that a founder's bank going from 5m to 500m doesn't have as much of an effect as it does from 10k to 5m (or 500m).

5m to 500m is actually so inconsequential that they willingly turned down a lucrative acquisition in order to go it alone and make their impact as they see fit.
Yea, I think we're actually the same page. It sounded like you were saying that things like making the founding team more comfortable (i.e. paying down loans or a wedding) weren't good investments - it sounded like a classic "arm-chair" type comment. But I think we're talking about two different things.

I think I'm still on the side of letting the founders take some money off the table, but not satiate their hunger. I like Mark Suster's article on this:

http://www.cloudave.com/1616/should-founders-be-allowed-to-t...
Nope. While they may have a case against the original leaker, once it's out, classified information is out in the United States (not so in the UK, with the Official Secrets Act) and further disclosure is at least nominally protected by the Constitution.
Best Space Pictures of 2010: Odd Aurora, Ring of Fire, More
It's even more a problem that the law isn't even on the government's side here...
It took about 18 seconds to get a response from the server and about 25 to load the page completely.

Montreal, Canada
Well, the meetup is open to anyone who wants to network with future founders and co-founders. (We just don't let service provides and consultants in).

That's how it has worked in Silicon Valley: maybe a third of the attendees are there to have a look, get a feel, before they jump in and actively consider joining as co-founder.
Just on the off-chance that you are serious: it is of the utmost importance that the owner is a government, not a private person. The argument is that the government is keeping secrets from its people without the people being able to change that by normal means.

You are also incorrect about Wikileaks stealing any documents. They are only publishing.
According to the wikileaks schedule, the raw cables on china are being released tomorrow (sunday).
Couldn't the web be controlled from a legal standpoint? What if people had to fear imprisonment for downloading classified documents? I'm not asking this rhetorically; I'm hoping someone can point out why I'm incorrect.
> Well, I gave some examples, like providing a basic safety net, and policing.

Policing isn't provided by the market because there isn't a market for it, and this is not a shortcoming of the markets either - it's human preference. Policing an imposed "service" that free people would not solicit.

If we take an empirical analysis of what provides safety in our life's I would argue that mitigating the risk of harm is provided almost exclusively through voluntary means, such as markets, friends and family.

Security cameras, seat-belts/airbags, cell phones, firearms, door locks, fences, pepper spray and tazers all provide FAR more cost-effective security than a policeman driving around making a quick buck on speeding tickets.

These technologies are sufficient for most people, but you can always buy more security, which malls frequently do. Police don't keep us safe and prevent theft, which is why malls have to buy mall security.
I can't close my PayPal account yet (although I will be encouraging my European customers to move to Moneybookers), but ... there's no way to email them about their own corporate actions. Does anybody know of an email address that I can just address with a complaint? Although a paper letter with a real stamp may get their attention more effectively...
not compared to an IPO
Much less did Amazon or PayPal violate any law.
Um: “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”. Tim Bray quoting Phil Karlton

If you haven’t heard that quote, hopefully it’ll conceptually expand to where my post completely agrees with you. If it doesn’t, I completely agree with you.

My arts degree helps me think laterally in the extreme.
Life Lessons From A 27-Year Old
I definitely agree with that: many of the skills I've used as a CS grad student came directly from my philosophy minor, not from my CS bachelor's degree. Being able to construct or refute an argument, writing 6-to-20-page essays, etc. Writing in CS isn't the same as writing in philosophy, but at least the philosophy classes gave me some grounding in it, which was totally lacking in the CS curriculum.

The other big thing I got out of philosophy but not CS: how to frame and motivate a problem. In undergrad CS, you're usually solving problems that come prepackaged: someone has already posed this problem, developed the framework in which you're expected to come up with a solution, etc., and your job is to find and explain the solution. But in CS research, sometimes >50% of the work can be in convincing someone that something is a problem to begin with, and moreover that it's a problem they should care about, and your way of framing the problem is a good one. Only then will they even bother to look at your proposed solution to the problem!
Hey, check out this new concept for a chatroom I made
GoWalla Founder discuss battle w/FourSquare & Facebook
Great interview with founder of GoWalla on the value of product design, FourSquare's success, integrating with the "enemies" and Facebook.
I'm surprised that Malzahn's only now coming into the spotlight nationally. He did great work at Arkansas ans Tulsa as well, not to mention his high school work.
"a web hosting company isn’t the government. It’s a private actor and it certainly can choose what to publish and what not to publish. Indeed, Amazon has its own First Amendment right to do so. That makes it all the more unfortunate that Amazon caved to unofficial government pressure to squelch core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its customer’s right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs…."
Definitely a shortage. To be specific, there is a massive shortage of engineers with extensive qualifications in very specific sets of frameworks used by a given company and expertise in their specialized domain, who are willing to work for less than market rate and/or relocate to some backwoods town at their own expense.

There is also a shortage of new 2010 Porsche 911 Speedsters in chartreuse with candy apple red leather interiors available for the reasonable and normal new car price of $15,000.

There is also a massive shortage of qualified licensed plumbers who will come out to my house for less than $150.

I am also terribly unhappy about the shortage of reasonably priced fresh strawberries in winter.

No, I am not the unreasonable one. The government must supply me with the engineers, plumbers, cars and strawberries of any quality I wish at whatever price I name. Help me gubmint, help me with the shortage.
My favourite sites are ones I built myself, for myself. http://twitya.com and http://hackerbra.in

In particular, on Twitya, the Twitya and Israel drop down category at top.

Hackerbra.in's Ask page.
Site appears to be down, Google's cache is at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:donhodg...
Really glad to see this here on HN. I read Boyd by Robert Coram a month ago and I still can't stop seeing the parallels in any competitive endevavor. Definitely a great book for hackers.

The book covers the history behind Boyd's OODA loop and a lot of Pentagon bureaucratic infighting as well. Corporate politics at its finest.

http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316... (I got my copy at the library though)
I don't see anyone suggesting Amazon or PayPal violated any laws in this discussion, but maybe I missed it. I certainly haven't made such a suggestion.
And speaking of tempo, Venkatesh Rao of Gervais Theory fame is releasing a book on that very subject in the next quarter. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/
Review of Cinchcast.com and the Cinch iOS app
Just to play devil's advocate: Isn't the end result basically the same, though? The commercial entities in the US ultimately took the content down. They may or may not have had to, technically/legally, but the fact remains that they did.

That companies obeyed this "request" from the government only empowers the government further - and as soon as someone eventually pushes back against this kind of thing, a law or technicality will be found making such push-back illegal because, hey, they used to get away with these requests all the time and it totally must have been making the country safer! We wouldn't want to give that important national security power up! Let's make it official! And then boom - we're just like China.
You might try reading the article - he wrote that "This year, the annual quota of 65,000 hasn’t even been used yet."
It also begs the question why don't comments regarding duplicates on duplicate submissions automatically get de-duped?

The fun aside, it boils down a matter of ROI on effort. It is not trivial to detect duplication (save exact matches) on URLs. If the community is enabled to deal with it in a non-automated way, it is not worth the trouble dealing with all the threads about false positives and other similar troubles.
Why I ditched Gmail for Facebook Messages
This project looks great, but is there any financial institution supporting or using that protocol?
PG has stated many times that he's investing in people just as much, if not more, than their ideas. It seems to me like part of investing is people is making sure their personal life is in order.
Digg Will Delete All Content From Your Blog
Digg Will Delete All Content From Your Blog
Check out the speed at which the NYTimes Magazine - even the online edition - gets to press:

With victories in its final two games of the season (Arizona and Oregon State), it would likely earn a berth in the national championship game in January, either against a traditional power like Auburn or Louisiana State, or perhaps an upstart like Boise State or Texas Christian University.

The URL says this is a December 5th article and yet LSU and Boise were both knocked out of contention last weekend. Auburn and TCU are still in the hunt.
PayPal suspending payments to WikiLeaks is a clear signal to any startup hosting potentially-controversial comment needs to be concerned about it happening to them.

Don't piss off the US government.
>Now, because of flawed U.S. immigration policies, most buy one-way tickets home.

I assume, since you are claiming that is a "flaw" that you want to hire a cheap engineer. On the other hand, if you were an engineer looking for a job, I would suspect you would think that was a good policy. On the gripping hand, and recognizing this is TechCrunch, you are probably just repeating liberal cant on immigration without thinking about it.
Ah, I had seen that written with //<!-- to open the comment and always wondered why people would settle for old browsers displaying // in the script tag, looks like it wasn't required and was just bad code written by people who didn't know what they were doing. So it goes. :)
Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding"
Many times those credit cards are used to pay for basic living expenses and/or even to bootstrap the business.

Having high cc debt does not mean they've been irresponsible.

Seems to be a double standard here...

Founders are expected to pour every ounce of their life into the business, which means they can't work a 9-5 to pay the bills.

Yet having debt is considered a bad thing.
This was a great show to watch live. Liked the discussion on creating a startup outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, building on top of the Facebook and Foursquare platform, and creating great company culture.
No kidding. I'm wondering if Groupon founders are overestimating the ceiling of that business.
It's not a baseless threat. Security clearances do not just disappear because classified information has been made public. Security classification is a government process/label, and applies until it is removed.

The key issue is that a person with a security clearance cannot knowingly distribute information that he knows carries a security classification. It's not a matter of "being interested."

You can rant all you want, but that does not change the fact that if you have/want a security clearance and you redistribute the Wikileaks content (the American stuff; the foreign stuff is okay), you will lose or be denied a security clearance.
Why not? I'd say it's about time people stop being afraid and start pissing of the US, Chinese & European governments, no?
I do not know what info they are using to select ads, or whether this one might be relevant, but the goal is not to have ads that are relevant to the game; the goal is to have ads that are relevant to you.

Here, given the rather narrow focused subject, i would say they are fairly good to select an ad that is memorable to you.
Sure it is a curtailing of freedom of speech, much like prohibiting yelling fire in a theater is

It's nothing like that. Unless you're talking about one person in one theater yelling fire and getting persecuted for it while a dozen+ others in a dozen+ other theaters (NYTimes, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais to name just a handful) sit back and "get away" with the exact same activity.

Of course, it's also nothing like yelling fire in a theater because there is no evidence that releasing these documents is a direct threat to the safety of anyone, as yelling fire in a theater is.
Ah, cool. Hadn't heard the quote actually, hah, though I was pretty sure you weren't completely hardline serious that you'd summed up the benefits of liberal arts education.

You just tipped off a complaint I had (and have) building up inside. We're in the same boat, argumentatively. I'm just speaking (yelling, crying) from the other side.
I don't think it's possible to control the internet when any sort of stronger encryption is available that prevents inspection of passing information by the routing nodes. Even then, you could use steganography to hide data. It would be very, very difficult to enforce this sort of legal restriction even if it were passed as a law.
There is no replacement for trying out circuits.

I have been told there are some good introduction to electronics manuals published by the Navy through the US Government Printing Office, but I have looked at them myself. If you happen to run across one of those you might check it out.
It wordpress :-(
As the web stands currently, no. Look at repressive regimes such as China where dissidents still get unfiltered net access via VPN, or at the other end of the spectrum technical measures such as freenet that make the current situation look like a locked down paradise for authorities.

The fundamental architecture could be changed to the point where it actually was controllable, for example if all packets had to be encrypted with a key that was provided to the sender by a centralised authority. This would make all the unencrypted traffic stand out like a sore thumb, and the encrypted traffic would be amenable to deep packet inspection and the like by the centralised authority. Banning encryption that does not use an escrow key would of course also be necessary, but this would also stand out like a sore thumb.

To say the technical challenges of actually implementing the aforementioned approach are non trivial however is to put it mildly, not to mention the necessary political hurdles and the degree of power the centralised authority in question would need to have to practically pull such a plan off. We're not there by a long shot, and it appears that the majority of people who want us to get there do not have the intellectual capital to pull it off or indeed even come up with it, or indeed even understand the reason that they would need to come up with it.

And if you're watching, you can't steal mine, I've patented it. ;)
Assange is not American. Thus he is not bound by American laws. This does not change the legality of the acts in regards to the American citizens who leaked the information to him.

Some of those acts were criminal, some were not. Some were (non-criminal) violations of contracts they signed with their employer or as a condition of their security clearance.

New details keep coming out every day. It's too early to say with any authority what happened.
That was my impression of silverstorm's comment - that PayPal has to comply with US law and thus shouldn't be denigrated for this decision. Not even Wikileaks has been shown to have violated US law, but my point was that Yahoo and PayPal can't even rely on the fact that they have to comply with US law, because they haven't violated it at all.

Well. They may have now - PayPal in particular could be accused of fraud for freezing an account unless they release the funds relatively quickly. This might even have the kind of visibility that would result in that kind of good outcome.

Wikileaks really is shining light on a lot of roaches this week...
It depends on the type of small business and the situation that it is in. There is a wide range of risk vs. reward opportunities.

For example:
If you are a service business, assume you are a massage therapist. If you are a new business your overhead tends to be the space you rent from a salon. So discounting your product to get 1st time customers in and filling potentially empty hours that are only costing you money is a good thing even at a reduced rate. Add to that knowing that if you do a good job some of those customers may repeat is a win win for your small business. Not only do you get business you might not have normally had you gain the true potential for future business and the opportunity for some word of mouth marketing as well.

A restaurant on the other hand is a much different situation than the massage therapist example from above. A restaurant owner has a lot of cost built into their product. Not only do they have overhead but they have a cost of goods sold and usually have a limited margin on everything but alcohol. Restaurant coupons are seemingly always in demand and the daily deals sites are always looking for more offers from them. Crafting a deal that can insure profitability is key because more often than not these coupon using customers don’t come back until they get the next coupon.

If you are an e-commerce small business and you are selling a product you have to be much more careful. Business with large margins and sales prices in excess of $100 seem to do best. Businesses with smaller margins almost always lose money on their sales because they don’t have the margins to be able to absorb the discount plus their share to the daily deals site.

I work with a few of the largest players in the space so if you need help or advice let me know.
The site is responding slow because he mentioned he hosted it on a, I kid you not, SheevaPlug. I'm suprised it didn't take his house down with it in a ball of flames after get HN'd.
Thank you God!!!please include the following links when link-baiting me OR I WILL NOT tweet you back or link to you from my high page-rank blog: www.mahalo.com www.calacanis.com www.launch.is www.openangelforum.com
I like these two passages:

"The team’s graduation rate for football players, as measured by the N.C.A.A., is below average."

"James did have one complaint, having to do with the music: “The other day he had like ‘Hakuna Matata’ or some [expletive] from ‘The Lion King’ playing, which I don’t think nobody wants to hear. He needs to bump some Lil Wayne on there.”
2. How is a string read from the terminal fundamentally different in Lisp than in Python? How is

(eval (read-from-string "(anything here)"))

different from Python's

eval('anything(here)')

? Just because it's possible to build the arguments of eval without using strings in Lisp does not mean that they are somehow less arbitrary.

3. I don't see how Python's import is different, the SBCL runtime, for example, locates and reads the source file when you import it, compiles it to native code (if a cached copy is not available), and runs it.

4. I missed the (apparently) implicit "that easily fits into GCC's present compilation model" in your earlier comment. I'm have no arguments with that statement, and indeed, I don't think GCC would be a good place to work on static compilation for Python. Rather, my argument is with a claim (intended or not) that Python is just too dynamic to ever be compiled, for which I think Lisp compilers are a living counter-example. From the sbcl man page:

SBCL compiles by default: even functions entered in the read-eval-print
loop are compiled to native code, unless the evaluator has been explicitly
turned on. (Even today, some 30 years after the MacLisp compiler, people
will tell you that Lisp is an interpreted language. Ignore them.)
Sorry, I deleted my previous post because I'd misread yours.

You could compress the bitmap, but we still can't handle duplicates.
Absolutely true. And if Calacanis meant people who are passionate enough about what they are working on to pull some late nighters when necessary, vs someone who punches the clock every day at 5pm and says "that's not in my job description", then he would find a lot more people in agreement.