skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm wondering how they got around the state banking laws requiring them to be a chartered bank if they want to use the word "Bank" in their name (for example, in New York, Banking Law Section 132). All the confusion in this forum as to whether they are actually a "bank" makes me think they may not yet have heard of these laws...
Hi Josh,
This all sounds great. It's exactly the sort of things I think you should consider you putting next to those portraits or on the Team page. I know you guys have all the technical chops, and as a potential customer, I wanted you to show me you knew what you were doing eyes wide open. Just a throwaway line "Plus an army of payment systems, banking lawyers and regulators ensuring the safety and security of your money" would make a world of difference.
Mens Timberland 6 Inch Chocolate With Watermark Boots
Is search still a feature request. I thought it was basic site design?
Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed.

OK, it's a tired point, but maybe relevant here: the USA is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic, a few bits of which are managed democratically.

Just as the myth about Columbus being smart enough to ignore the popular notion that the world is flat, the bold experiment that is America was not Democracy: that's been around for thousands of years, since the Greeks at least. Heck, pirate ships were governed democratically.

No, the bold new idea embodied in America was that of a limited constitutional republic. Our contract with the government is now thoroughly broken, because it no longer views itself as being one of limited, enumerated powers.

As you say elsewhere regarding Jefferson and the Declaration, we have an obligation to show that the contract has already been violated. But as far as I can see, this is obvious enough to be a mere formality.
You didn't ask this question of me, but I would add the unenforceablity of non-competes. E.g. it's hard to see how Shockley -> Fairchild -> A Hundred Flowers would have happened in another state.
Rarely is there a clear rationale for who a middleman should extract their fee from. In practice, it comes down to who is willing to pay to be part of the transaction.

Comcast customers pay for internet access, but I doubt that agreement specifies anything about network topology. If L3 wants a special connection, and it's worth more to them than it is to Comcast, then I don't see what's wrong, in principle, with charging for it.

Regardless, the net neutrality thing certainly seems bogus. On the other hand, if L3 didn't go on the offensive with PR, they probably would have taken a larger share of the blame from users than they deserve.
That was my point chrome os without the os

edit: chrome doesn't have these features atm.
I'm not sure this is even realistic given the multitude of laws you would have to overcome. For starters, you would have to change state laws to make this work. Many states currently outlaw private lotteries, in an effort to maintain a monopoly on government run lotteries.
He's not the only guy in the organization, he's the spokesman and maybe the director. Disappearing him hinders the organization, but doesn't cripple it, much less terminate it.
FYI: OCaml on Xen: http://www.openmirage.org/
I feel the same way as the original poster, and I don't see how government misinformation has anything to do with it.

Do you remember when wikileaks launched, it was described as an anonymous organization "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa"? When their website had a raw archive of documents on the front page?

The changes in wikileaks started happening before the government became very interested in them. They became much more focused on fund-raising, manipulating the media to their advantage, editorializing the leaked material, and Assange became the figurehead associated with every release of information.
Amazon and Rackspace both seem to be less prone to lock-in than AppEngine
In my opinion Chrome OS is going to bomb.

- Tablets are going to eat up whatever market share netbooks have. I bought my girlfriend a netbook about a year and a half ago and it's a nice device for taking to a coffee shop or sit around in bed and browse the web and maybe send a few personal e-mails. And a tablet would be an even nicer device for those tasks.

- Google should be smart enough to not risk their burgeoning Android growth by confusing users.

- Almost every office worker I knows still uses some sort of thick client application that would be grossly frustrating to use as a web-based application. Photoshop. Excel. Visual Studio. Etc. I love web-based applications and Google Spreadsheets is great for creating a list of who owes who for that ski trip, but there's no way I'd ever try and crunch real numbers.

- Moms aren't going to use it because tablets are better. Office workers aren't going to use it because they still need thick-client apps. Developers may be curious enough to play around with it for 10 minutes, but that's about it.

It was an interesting idea a year ago and maybe a good way to hedge the Android bet. But the Android bet paid off, so in my opinion Google has no reason to keep going down this path.
champing at the bit
Ask HN: Mini hack help needed
Is there a hacky way to get the all company names from below link instead of looking at map and writing down their names?

http://jtools.smartmoney.com/middleware/map/mapMarket.html

FYI: It uses a horrendous amount of JavaScript which doesn't explicitly contain the companies info. It must be going off to a server to get the details for specified co-ordinates, which is very hard to untangle[for me].
The difference is that those spies had a whole government behind them wanting to save face. I'm not sure many governments are very happy with Assange at the moment.
OK, I feel dumb. Thanks.
Because of that he would make a good target for a false flag operation.

FSB could make him disappear (they could fake a botched kidnapping operation by CIA or FBI) and everyone will instantly suspect the Americans, and it will damage relations between US and EU countries.
Anyone else notice the left-side nav in the INTERPOL website screenshot? Looks like someone’s using an outdated box model ;)
You should probably mention this somewhere on your page about the book. I read it and came away thinking that it was a book about marketing and SEO techniques. I couldn't understand why the book was called "Design for Hackers" when the site didn't mention design at all.
You know, western democracy isn't about leftist complaining and seeing oppression everywhere, but is about building things.
General Motors is the 38th biggest company in the world (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l...) and they went into bankruptcy protection in 2009.

Assets value and size doesn't protect you from a fall in demand. Their revenue fell 23% in 2009, and their profits fell 78.8% (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/snapsh...).

Their biggest concern has to be their share price. In December 2008 it peaked around $40. It's now around $9. If it keeps falling like that people will start talking about takeovers and/or private equity buyouts.
We have certainly heard of that law and similar rulings and are in fairly regular contact with the regulators.

BankSimple is the name of our product, our company is Simple Finance Technology Corp. (rolls off the tongue...) There is plenty of precedent for our situation - not being a chartered bank but having 'bank' in our product name and URL. BankFreedom, BankRate, FindABetterBank, etc. Not comparable businesses, but face similar issues.

IANAL, but, by god, we pay them handsomely to deal with this and many other banking issues.
The wikileaks tweet was 12 hrs ago. Difficult to sustain a DDOS for long periods.
In case your wondering, a funding paper trail for a non-profit doesn't entail bias in a writer for (or employed by) said organization. Bias in a writer doesn't entail factually incorrect information or invalidate a writer's arguments.

This statement does not contradict anything explicitly stated by the OP, in case you're wondering.
If anyone is interested here is the full PDF that is quoted throughout this article dubbed "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
I think his point was that, through his actions of attacking the fundamental values of society, Assange has declared himself an outlaw - in the original Anglo-Saxon sense of the word
As a Swede, I'm going to have to disappoint you.

The police have been proven to be rather.. sub-par in politically-loaded cases.

An example: Claiming Peter Sunde wrote the pirate bay search engine when the name and phone-number of the programmer who did was in the sourcecode on one of the seized harddrives.

The prosecutor in Assange's case has also been questioned by peers and media alike for questionable behaviour and decisions from day 1 of Assange's case.

He offered to give statements and be questioned in Sweden, and his lawyer asked the authorities for permission to leave Sweden. They declined his offers, and gave Assange permission to leave the country.

It's not being handled very well at all.
And how much more attention have they received to their cause since then?

Apple has Jobs. Microsoft has Gates. It was Jordan and the Bulls. Wales is calling for donations on Wikipedia.
Would they go after The Guardian? The NYT? All were recipients of the documents. Manning is the only one who (supposedly) committed a crime.
> I really believe that this is one of the greatest actions to happen to democracy in a long time, and everybody should be rejoicing in these leaks.

He'll certainly be written into the history books* for it.

*wikipedia edit logs
who does the design? I really like it (both web and PDF)
Yes it is about building and doing things, but WITH the people's consent; as opposed to just doing things and citing state secrets when asked for the rationale. Giving the people the awareness of what's going on helps them build dialog and better political awareness.
For game development you can safely avoid dealing with exceptions and RTTI. You can probably avoid most template magic, too.

Most game developers use C++ as C-with-classes and generally keep the inheritance and OOP-ness fairly simple.
MyYearbook Introduces Realtime Social Gaming With Video Chat
It's not just the online aspect either. The internal tools are absolutely awful. And even small credit unions spend hundreds of thousands a year on them.
I did, and I've written about it here: http://hackermonthly.posterous.com/on-designing-hacker-month...
That may be the case, but if the peer made a contractual agreement that limited the peering to symmetrical traffic, then Comcast should be free to renegotiate or straight up sever the peering under the terms of any contractual agreements....if this is what is allowed by what's on the contract. While people can hem and haw about the moral and ethical implications, it seems like this is something that is likely spelled out on paper somewhere. It seems like one or both organizations is fanning the flames in the media to rile up end users.
I hope that you are using the word customer in the old fashioned sense of "someone who pays you for your product or service." If so then ask your current customers:

For referrals
For testimonials
What websites, tradeshows, websites, on-line forums they read.
Take part in these as they are likely to be target rich environments
I have a conspiracy theory that the day he does get rubbed out, he won't publicly die, he'll just be "hiding" forever. Some nefarious organization will privately fill his role and take over Wikileaks.
How to represent strings, the heavy way
thanks, yes, i am planning on tossing out obviously bad data.
You only have to read his interviews to that his "ideals" are taking backseat to everything else.
It should be possible now if HaLVM has proper PV drivers; AWS allows custom kernels and what do they care what language your kernel is written in?
Do you have any incentive to share what positions you took?
If you look at netcraft's realtime global status link it sure seems like they are saying it's ongoing. They show mostly failure from all sites over the past 8 hours, and all locations minus romania failed the last test ~15m ago.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/graph?site=www.wikileaks.org

They have enviable RTT stability as well, even for a site not being DDOS'd:

tsl@crabapple:~> for i in {1..10}; do curl -s -w "%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null http://wikileaks.org/4oh4$i; done
0.176
0.180
0.177
0.174
0.176
0.174
0.174
0.177
0.174
0.176
celebrity and power?

You know he is basically living as a fugitive, moving from place to place, working underground, etc.
I come to HN for the tech stories, not for completely ill-informed, conspiracy-theory-laden political speculation. I get that it's not my place to say what HN should or shouldn't be, but some of the nonsense I've been seeing recently, especially about the domain name seizures and WikiLeaks, is really making me lose respect for this community.

I'm a political science student and a web developer, and though I don't claim to be an expert on either, I think a lot of you seem to think that the world is a whole lot simpler than it actually is. I've said it before—I think a lot of what makes geeks great at conceptualizing data and logic makes them terrible at understanding nuance and subtlety, and without the ability to see shades of grey, you're always going to have simplistic, naive understandings of the world. How do you operate on a day-to-day basis when you think that the government is out there to take away your freedoms and cover up conspiracies at every turn?
Could a "Microsoft TV" service succeed?
The Chinese Government has been using hackers/crackers against Google and many other organizations. I don't see why the Chinese Government --or any other Government pissed off at the present moment-- wouldn't do the same with WikiLeaks.
Twitter's murder project( https://github.com/lg/murder ) for deploying via bittorrent was also really creative.
> it's rather mature to hate a country's government

On reflection, I think this is too strongly worded. Hating a government can be counterproductive because the emotion can get in the way of devising an optimium strategy to counter what one doesn't like.

"Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment." -- Michael Corleone, Godfather III
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden/view
Yes, he has brought attention, and in a very reckless way, I believe. But I didn't come here to debate that, I just wanted to point out that it isn't some government campaign of misinformation that has shaped my view of Assange.
Yep. Level3 more or less decided to start offering a CDN service without setting up an actual CDN. Or at least one that provides any benefit to Comcast (or as Comcast would argue, their customers).

As mentioned in the thread, this is compounded even further by the fact that not only is Comcast not receiving revenue from L3 for power/colocation, but they are also getting taxed by having lease more fiber/lambdas to wherever they are peered to L3.
seconded. I live in Boston and I am almost never further than a single block from a BofA ATM here. Their ATMs now allow me to make deposits at nearly all ATMs, so until I move out of Boston there's no reason to switch.
Gesture-based browsing using Kinect
You are just being argumentative. Autism is a condition, not a type of behaviour that you can opt-in to.

By your logic, anything someone does that is sufficiently abnormal qualifies as autistic. I guess I'd hope that you'd step away from this conversation and stop calling non-autistic people autistic. "Weird and frustrating" is probably more appropriate anyhow.
It's funny, strings are one of the most often-used data structures, and yet people don't think about them as much as they think about more sexy things like hash tables. Strings are just part of the scenery. They deserve more glory. (Except for C strings, which need to die.)
Some other popular sites with similar ideas are caps.fool.com and YC funded socialpicks.com.
The benchmark for theorem provers is the CADE theorem proving competition [1].
For SMT provers there's SMT-COMP [2]. Z3 last participated in 2008 [3], with decent results, but "world's fastest" seems a bit too generous.

[1] http://www.cs.miami.edu/~tptp/CASC/

[2] http://www.smtcomp.org/2010/

[3] http://www.smtexec.org/exec/?jobs=311
Seeing as you opened most of those issues only 5 hours ago, I think you meant to say "the library is full of problems", no?
I haven't had a hard look, but this reminds me of the Android build system. Was that an inspiration / have you had a look at it? It's quite nice. One issue I have with all build systems, Android's included, is the amount of magic that goes on -- variables defined in other files which are automatically in scope for your Make file, and, worse, variables you define being magically modified by something else. This is an issue for all Make-based systems because there are so many possible sources for variable definitions. Scons is also guilty of this. Any thoughts on reducing that issue?
Wikileaks - good or bad for the people?
I think it's good. I think they stand to remind everybody that in every system checks and balances should be maintained and if the system can't do it, it's good that citizens hold to it.

Discuss :)
I'm not saying it's necessary, I'm saying it happens. And I'm not saying it's presenting it in the best light or anything like that.

It's more a kin to proof reading. I'm asserting that the leaks are closer to unedited rough drafts than any evidence of misconduct or wrong-doing. At least, so far as I've read and heard, it's more embarrassing than it is anything else.
You'll find all that data in JSON format at http://jtools.smartmoney.com/middleware/datamap?src=marketda... (which is the url that this page hits). Go ahead and explore that; I think you'll have fun there.
Explain Apple's popularity, taking OS X and iOS completely out of the equation.

Steve Jobs and his quest for perfection.

Now think why Jobs refuses to set up licensing contracts with other vendors. Those iMacs and iPhones don't look so interesting anymore if you can get a HP computer/phone with OS X/iOS two third of the price, one and a half times the performance. I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.

Apple can easily compete on price with anyone nowdays. They choose not to in (low to mid range) computing, but the iPod/iPhone/iPad are ultra-competitive price-wise with anyone out there.

The real reason is because Jobs believes controlling the entire experience (both the hardware and the software) gives the best experience for the user. He may well be right, so long as he is in charge of the experience (cite: any other company that tried the same strategy).

Steve Jobs is a genius, but he's also 55. He's a once-in-a-generation leader, and Apple is lucky to have him.
I have no doubt that a government could not function without the ability to keep some data private, hence my assertion that Anarchy existed as the consequence of absolute transparency.

> But what about more routine things? A lot of times we trust the government to keep our personal secrets. Consider health care. Most governments provide health care to some people in some capacity, be it the local public hospital or through a single payer system like Canada or even the NHS. How do you run one of these systems without protecting the privacy of your patients--i.e. keeping secrets?
>
> Or perhaps we should consider the criminal justice system. No state secrets means no Witness Protection Program. Sealed juvenile criminal records are generally considered a good thing, as is (in some cases) jury sequestration and the identities of rape victims.

I think that the conflation of individual privacy and the privacy of a government as an entity is erroneous. I can elaborate further, if you disagree or do not see why I assert such a thing.

> * Perhaps we should consider diplomacy, given the recent leak. Sometimes diplomatic negotiations are very sensitive, and the smallest leak can catastrophically queer the deal. Consider the Cuban Missile Crisis--a well-placed leak there could have led to war.*

I hope to address this below. Please do let me know if you feel that I have not.

> Finally, a government that can't keep secrets can't use cryptographic authentication or cryptographic channels for anything, from running an HTTPS service to transferring funds. Hell, they can't even secure their computer networks.

There is a distinct difference between degrees of openness with regard to citizens and with regard to external peoples. If we posit a totally transparent government, secure networks and the like could exist if every citizen were granted, on request and without possibility of denial, the appropriate credentials.

> We would all have the constitutional right to root access on every government computer.

I don't believe that this deduction necessarily follows. If we posit a completely transparent governmental apparatus, a distinction may still be drawn between a citizen's right to agency and a right to knowledge. Concerns and further objections may be raised, of course. However, I do not believe that total transparency is a feasible model for a government--hence the Anarchy--and do not believe that elaboration on this hypothetical is profitable path.

I am not--and I had hoped to make this more plain earlier-- advocating a state with no ability to keep data private. I do not wish to live in a society so ordered. Rather, inspired by the rhetoric of my State officials in response to WikiLeaks' actions, I have begun to wonder at the ideal compromise point between total openness and total secrecy of data. The current and former US administrations have certainly abused the privileged of classifying documents as State Secrets. Though I am a US citizen of voting age, I have no way to determine why a document is given a Secret classification, nor can I make an informed vote on sitting candidates if part of their actions remain hidden.
One they did not ask: Alan Kay
It would be great if you can show instances of that nonsense and explain why they're nonsense.
Very odd that they included XSRF tokens but did not validate them.
It's hard to imagine a government that routinely invites 'unhappy accidents' on people they don't like would be unable to find someone.
I understand the words and intent well enough, but taken out of context the statement would have been deemed slim pickings even 240 years ago. What acts must a government and people do, etc. are not even hinted at. I can guess at Alex's intent--assume he's read similar things to me, has a roughly similar education and so forth--but the ambiguity impedes a well founded conversation.
Yeah, it's pretty clearly a dead man switch.
The Russian spies were traded for US contacts detained in Russia.
I'd be happy if they just stuck to the 'why'.
13. got all the old langs and the bonus. Missed Scala and Php, oh well...
>Suppose the author aggregated information from many doctors and wrote it down an ebook?

Then it should cite the sources.
Comment moderation to me means that comments do not appear until approved. However I don't think this really avoids the issue: are you going to take the time to research every comment to be sure that there is no infringing content?
I'm pessimistic about the benefits of Wikileaks' activities simply because history has shown, again and again, that nobody cares about conspiracies except the conspirators.

Then the true audience for leaks is the conspirators, they'll feed off their own paranoia. Apparently, the watchers watch themselves, but even they have doubts about the trustworthiness of the watchers.
Actually, both programs use the same algorithm, but they represent its flow of control very differently. The Pascal program could be written elegantly in any language.
Even those are just opinionated adjectives designed to get noticed and voted.