skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's what I think the citizens of countries in this situation need to do:

- Coordinate activism without leaking information to authorities
- Get the word out to the rest of the world about what is happening
- Restore the ability to browse the rest of the Internet. Make
available the viewpoints from the rest of the world as an alternative
to government propaganda.

In order to facilitate these three aims, I propose the establishment of new or adaptation of existing Open Source projects:

- A DIY packet radio uplink kit.
- A one-click install for installing a Fidonet node on an older laptop
with a modem
- Inexpensive WiFi-based "Text messaging" handsets.
- Open Source software to convert netbooks and smartphones into encrypted
communication devices
- Weatherized WiFi communications cells which can be hidden, plugged in, and
abandoned (With some UPS capability to give immunity to power interruptions.)
- A low cost "pirate cell tower" which can be used to re-enable SMS comms
on conventional handsets when the government deactivates mobile service

In addition, I think it would be a good to found an international volunteer organization which designs and prototypes relevant hardware, with the aim of getting donations over the network through sites like Kickstarter and reddit and using the proceeds to rapidly construct and disseminate such hardware to affected citizens.

EDIT: Another hardware thing: A plan for acquiring 100's of cheap, outdated GSM handsets which can be reprogrammed to implement secure encrypted messaging over SMS.

EDIT: Yet another hardware thing: a drone suspended from a balloon, equipped with a long-duration battery, an altimeter, wireless, GPS, and aimable directional laser comms. Ideally, one would be able to give it the the altitude and GPS coordinates of another "laser link drone" and automatically aim the laser to establish line of sight laser comms to provide a long-distance network link.
It has been my experience that more often than not, aggregator sites don't provide any value whatsoever because their only mission is to display ads and drive traffic by spamming Google's index. At least travel adviser sites offer some benefit if they host real reviews (instead of just showing scraped content like the hotel's address and some images).

This is one symptom of a larger problem where I feel Google search is falling flat and the quality of search results is getting progressively worse. It's not the fault of the aggregator sites themselves, either (though some of them employ very shady SEO tricks) - instead I believe the problem is that Google search increasingly ignores specific user input to serve up "what I most likely meant as opposed to what I actually typed in". I would welcome a return to stricter search phrases and maybe a few options regarding what search mode I would like to use. For example, it would be nice to be able to explicitly include or exclude aggregator sites in search results. By now, Google certainly knows enough about the nature of the URLs it indexes, they should pass this knowledge on and empower their users to make more specific queries.
Please Match Me
Allows anyone with a FB to play and match up friends, high school/college classmates. Hopes to be very fun and viral.
On Tor usage in Egypt
I'd say free money is more corrosive - yes in the hands of some (some is relative) it will be useful. In the hands of others will let them walk down a bad path longer.

For analogy, I'd use the resource curse. Countries which should theoretically be paradises are not, because their natural resources prop up bad economics and bad governance.

As always, its an opinion. I guess a data driven answer would depend on the contra event of what these companies would have done if they weren't offered the money.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Digital Sky Technologies
That may be; but the point is: no one is calling for banning the same BBC here (in the US). Here we accept BBC with open arms, NPR and PBS carry BBC news. I was calling out this double-standard.
The horizontal axis on that graph really needs to be clarified. Yes, I can figure out what the 1s represent, and count the years, but...
There's no "somehow", it is almost like telecom companies can force govt to form regulations in their interest.
Umm, whatev. Allowing the market to set prices is a core tenet of capitalism. This Canadian ISP thing is certainly not "very much capitalist". Not in any way.

I'm not looking for a flamegasm here, so this is my final reply to this thread. Peace.
Whoa. That's impressive. I'd like to see the snow blower they used to cut those (incredibly neat-looking) tunnels through the snow. It doesn't look like a plow was used, to me.

I doubt, however, that the depth is really 100 feet (30.5 meters). A regular car is what, 5 feet? Then it looks like maybe four or five cars tops, which would mean about 20-25 feet (around 6-7 meters).
"Regulation of natural monopolies." Wikipedia goes into it better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly#Regulation
I came here to say the same thing.

Folks, we can do without hyperbole on HN. Please keep your BS biases out, and just lay out the facts. The readers are smart enough to decide for themselves.
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How To Get Rid Of Chin Fat
Hotels online are a bit of a mess.

Personally I'll go straight to Tripadvisor to find a hotel in an unfamiliar area. I may book there but I will also call the hotel in question, particularly when my company has a corporate rate. Not because the corporate rate is betteer but because when the website tells you the hotel is full for the requested dates a person at the hotel will tell you what dates are the problem and possibly bump you up to a higher room class to make your stay possible.

As an aside to people who develop hotel aggregates:

1. Never make me register;

2. When I search a date range show me, for each day, the rate, availability and include all room classes. This way I can easily see if a single day is the problem and adjust accordingly.

In fact I'd like to combine the hotel and flight so one one page I can see flight costs on my requested dates (+/- 2 days) and the matrix of per day rates and availabilities.

All sites I've seen have these as too many separate steps. What's worse, refining the search can be problematic.

As for Google search results, this is one area where there is simply too much noise. Hotel affiliate programs combined with cheap hosting mean thee are 234245556345 aggregators, almost all of them useless and hotel sites, except for the largest chains generally, tend to be useless.
A government less internet already exists, it's called Packet Radio AKA AX25. It's a network that spans the globe with gateways to the internet at various locations operated by radio amateurs using FSK modulation on regular HAM equipment. Bandwidth is quite restricted.

The problem with creating a government-free internet for mass use is one of resources and determination as well as some technical difficulties in operating networks like this with large numbers of nodes. In rural areas the problems will be the longer stretches without connectivity as well as all the issues that come with routing packets around the world without network congestion if the number of nodes should get large or if something exciting were to happen.

On such a network the communications should be limited to the essentials, rich media is pretty much out of the question.

On another note, the frequency spectrum is highly regulated, powerful base stations operating as hubs could be shut down by triangulation and force and operating transmitters outside of the alloted frequency ranges is forbidden by law.

The only part of the electromagnetic spectrum that does not currently need any regulatory before equipment can be sold or operated is as far as I know > 10GHz, and even then there are strict limits on power. Other options are UWB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband and optical links (for instance lasers).

In the United States the current frequency allocation chart looks like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Frequency_Al...

Setting up a 'government free' internet for a large number of users and without using existing infrastructure is a serious technical challenge, especially if you want to operate it without breaking the law.
Not "almost like", it's exactly that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
I guess that depends on where the designer lives. There are some incredibly talented and experienced designers in developing countries and they obviously don't request the same pay as, say, a designer in the USA.
Today's Slylock Fox puzzle: did you get it right?
An office at 1768 feet
If you like games a lot, do it!
Seems like "drake hotel" ought to get you to the Drake Hotel web site. "drake hotel reviews" ought to get you to an aggregator. "drake hotel reservations" ought to get you to whichever has the better prices.

Google's emphasis on domain name helps a lot here, though a lot of hotels are owned by holding companies and have domain names like: http://holdingco.com/hotelname (hard to differentiate between that and an aggregator URL).

It comes down to inbound links-- and the aggregators have armies of people doing link-building SEO work. I don't envy Google. Short of human editors, how would you fix it?
well for a start, Fu.js is using straight forward assignment statements with the = sign, whereas in jquery you're passing two arguments into a function without being able to see what they're for or what order they should be in.

some of the fu.js lines are a bit unwieldy but at least it's obvious to me what they do - i found jQuery code pretty bewildering until i delved into it
If there is an Oligopoly, then how has this occurred? What entity is there providing the conditions for the Oligopoly to exist and persist? If there were not government interference via the CRTC we would have open competition. But we don't because the CRTC is there. And they have the power to make sure that no real competition can take hold. Where does this lead us? Straight back to corporatism (the government and corporations are in bed together) - Let's not use the term capitalism anywhere in this context.
re: #1, I'd like to hear some Stanford kids' feelings on that. When I was managed developers and doing a lot of new college interviewing/hiring at Microsoft, I honestly can't remember a single candidate from Stanford who didn't elect to do the "BS+MS in Computer Science over 5 years" option.
Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001 - 2008
Increase every next fine by two. Drop older fines after year.

If we will start from 1, then nobody will be able to get more than 32 fines per year, even Bill Gates. ;-)
In order to be really successful on iOS you have to make an extraordinarily excellent game (which is hard to do), license some intellectual property that your audience is already familiar with, or have a large marketing budget you can use to buy your way to prominent placement.

On Android there's a bit more opportunity - if you move quickly, you can do alright by ripping off iOS game concepts that haven't been ported over yet. Monetization is still pretty bleak vs. iOS.

Funding's available to companies who've already had some successes (although in that case you really shouldn't need to take it) or to new teams with a track record at other companies.

There are a ton of people doing this - you'll face a lot of competition. I wouldn't let that stop you if you're super-passionate about the field and your ideas.

I know of one YC company doing exactly this and doing well, although they got there after a pivot - they were accepted on the basis of something completely different.
I've heard some bad things about 99designs too. While I've not done this, it may be worth looking through dribbble.com to find a few designers that have done something you like, and get in touch with them. They're generally excellent designers - I have no idea how much they'd charge, but could be worth asking.
And sometimes web services go down for good. Again, this is an understood tradeoff, and I'm not arguing that. What I do argue with is that "git is distributed" does not cancel out this particular tradeoff, which I'd the statement that was made by the person I am responding to. An actual solution used by many other services is "let me use my own hostnames with this service", which GitHub does not support for your repository, as While their fundamental value comes from the social features and nifty git UI, they seem to mentally be stuck in a "we are the git hosting company" mindset.
>such as the cell phone market

Not in Canada - same two monopoly suppliers. Means you get the iPhone 18months after the US, kindle 2 years later, still can't get skypein etc.
How quickly we forget. Tunisia, earlier this month.

In fact that example was the impetus behind the Egyptian protest movement. If (as seems likely at this point) Egypt falls, expect to see several other governments fall as well.

This is as momentous a time for the Middle East as the fall of the Iron Curtain was for Eastern Europe. (Incidentally said fall gives several more examples of how military might doesn't prevent democratic revolutions.)
All You Wanted to Know About Digital Sky Technologies
For those not familiar with Canadian bureaucracies, the CRTC governs telecom issues, similar to the FCC in the US.

What may not be so obvious, even to Canadians, is that the members of the CRTC used to work for Bell, Rogers, Telus etc. Much like employees of the Treasury Department in the US, these people go from private sector to public sector and back continuously. A running joke at Rogers used to be that whenever they wanted some sort of legislation changed, the VPs would draw straws to see who had to quit and join the CRTC.
Wael Ghonim, head of Google Middle East, is missing
From the liveblog: AJE has been contacted by friends of Wael Ghonim, head of Google Middle East, who has been missing since last week. His wife is appealing for any information on his whereabouts. Ghonim was guest speaker at the Al Jazeera Forum for Online Journalism & Freedom of Opinion earlier this month.
>The telecommunications situation in Canada is terrible.

Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe?

I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world), including when I lived in a mid-sized town. Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high speed for a low cost for almost a decade.

I think our situation is quite good, actually. Broadband penetration is very high, average caps are competitive with the world, and bandwidth numbers lean very high on the curve.

There is so much misinformation about this whole situation (not helped by people making "incremental cost" calculations that assume that the infrastructure for infinite bandwidth is already in place): The best is the other post where someone talks about it being Soviet-style central control. The humorous aspect is that CRTC is essentially unwinding that central control, put in place back when Bell was the big, untouchable monopoly. It was then that many of the "unlimited cap" companies were basically given leave to leach off of Bell in the name of competition.

Bell is far from alone in providing bulk bandwidth in Canada. If the economics are so straightforward, clearly Teksavvy and the like will just run a Cogent or the like to their distribution. If they don't, ask yourself why not.

Ultimately this is a lot of people up in arms because they want their free lunch.
The "Australia/New Zealand" link seems broken - it prompts a refresh back to "World" when I select it.
What do people really think of this idea? Would you buy it? I have written a web interface for managing git repos called GitHaven (my personal home install is here: http://git.meyerhome.net:8080/). It has the usual goodies, private/public repos etc. I have some friend's companies that run it in the cloud already. Do you think it would actually make money i.e. Would you be willing to join me in a startup on it (in boston)? Would it pass the y-combinator test?
I think my favorite technology that never was is the sunflower. It was a sterling engine with mirrors for solar concentration.
Wouldn't it be interesting if someone like Keith Olberman went to Al Jazeera.
I couldn't link directly to the appropriate section of the live blog which states:

"AJE has been contacted by friends of Wael Ghonim, head of Google Middle East, who has been missing since last week. His wife is appealing for any information on his whereabouts. Ghonim was guest speaker at the Al Jazeera Forum for Online Journalism & Freedom of Opinion earlier this month."
>While the news networks are indeed in the business of providing what people want, they also have a hand in shaping their audience's desires.

Yeah. It's a classic feedback loop. Surely this is obvious?
Well apart from the first one (clearly my mistake) I was trying to translate the original semantics as closely as possible. Hence the repeated (if not very useful) `body` anchors.

> (When is a ul ever going to be outside of a body element?)

Document fragments? XML documents? Not sure you can use that style of jQuery calls on those, but~~
Of course, and that's how it should be. They've added the value, so they should make the money.
I think caps lock works differently on macs. I remember it making everything uppercase, regardless of whether the shift key was pressed.

My Mac is running Windows at the moment and I can't reboot into OSX to test for several hours, so someoneelse will have to confirm or deny this.
finally someone who understands that in all Media there will always be those groups who use finances as a way to manipulate to supply bias..

Qatar's dictators have some real Oil income reasons for pitting one Oil country against another..
I'm well aware of the issues that some designers have with 99designs and such. I have sent briefs to recommended local designers, but they're either unwilling to work within my budget, or ask for unworkable terms (e.g. no revisions).

Given that, I don't see how I have any other recourse. So far, the traditional designer/client relationship certainly hasn't served me well.
I'd say "most developers" already have a box running some kind of website where they are doing this anyway, but even if you disagree I think you have to be willing to cede "many", especially given how many people who use GitHub are currently doing Ruby on Rails or node.js work. I'd even go so far as to say that those that currently aren't /should/, as the experience being a sysadmin is important when understanding how other sysadmins will react when they see how your software is deployed, which I guess is another topic of discussion that comes up often here (oft filed under the "Debian vs. Ruby" banner).

(Part of me is wondering if many of the more controversial discussions on this site are between people who have sysadmin experience (and considered it valuable) and people who don't.)
But those contributions don't go unrewarded. They are compensated highly, otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. The problem here is that higher tax rates are being mistaken as punishment when they're just a reflection of reality. The rich leverage society's institutions more to acquire their wealth, consequently they pay a greater share of their income for them.
Probably similar, but it's my own formulation which came out of observing 1) how people are dishonest when they discredit other's ideas unfairly and 2) the actions of people I admire as intellectuals.
You can find all of pg's essays at http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html. They are of good enough quality that it is worth browsing that occasionally.
A very minor suggestion, but I think the last line (var appview = new AppView) is a little bit confusing on first reading - it's not immediately obvious that you're setting the variable to initiate the view... I've seen it written elsewhere like so:

window.App = new AppView

which I think is a good idiom.
Interesting because I didn't understand the point of your question in the first place either.
I seriously doubt Mark is the type to appear on a TV show because the Facebook PR team convinced him to.
Bell owns the lines, it is (or rather, was, I've left Canada 4 years ago) illegal to put lines in by other entities.

> Your complaint is that some rural area has poor service. Is that not the case around the globe?

No.

> I've had high-speed cable service since long before it was available in most urban centers in the US (much less the rest of the world),

Good for you :) I had four bonded 28.8 modems and four landlines giving me crappy bandwidth where a simple baseband modem would have done the job but Bell simply refused to remove the chokes from the lines.

> Here in a suburb of Toronto I've had top-notch, leading-the-bandwidth (15Mbps around the clock) high speed for a low cost for almost a decade.

Toronto is but one very small part of Canada and one of the most populous areas at that.

If you run a monopoly you should provide all your customers with equal access to the system, otherwise you should open up the market and get the hell out of the way.

> I think our situation is quite good, actually.

your situation is quite good.

> The best is the other post where someone talks about it being Soviet-style central control.

That was pretty poorly worded but the author makes a much better case further on. Also, state propped up monopolies were very much a feature of communist countries.

> The humorous aspect is that CRTC is essentially unwinding that central control, put in place back when Bell was the big, untouchable monopoly. It was then that many of the "unlimited cap" companies were basically given leave to leach off of Bell in the name of competition.

They'd gladly put their own infrastructure in to the ground, only they're not allowed to.

Just like you're not allowed to hop across the border, buy a satellite receiver that receives 'free over the air' programming and operate it legally within Canadas borders (because that would deprive the government sanctioned operators of their subscription fees that they can charge you for that same content).
There's also an iPhone app for watching aljazeera now. It's a great way to watch it on iPad. Great feed.
There is a reason why lots of technical people from Canada seek to find their fortune in the United States.
i went to a top-twenty liberal arts school in the US and frankly it wasn't worth the $. Further, top-tier private schools dumb you down when it comes to life skills because they coddle you.

If I was this kid I would go to SUNY Binghamton

A good school can help you but you really have to ask yourself if it worth $200,000 USD

Also, this 18 year old may change his mind in two years about his major and decide that he wants to teach high school science, in which case he will be screwed financially.
RHEL 6 requires reboot for adding new partitions, NOTABUG
That's true; however, to claim communism does not work whereas it works better than anything else is a little bit arrogant.
> whereas in jquery you're passing two arguments into a function without being able to see what they're for or what order they should be in.

Unless, of course, you've spent roughly 5mn reading upon how jQuery's getting and setting works. Then you know the first argument is a key and the second one is a value to set.

I can see you've also quickly moved the goalposts, from "fu.js's syntax is much nicer" (emphasis yours) to "I claim to undetstand what fu.js does without having read its documentation"
This is really excellent insight. I think we are going to build one game first to see how our development and success rate go and if there is any traction there we will look toward an incubator. I feel like being involved with incubators such as YC gives a sense of legitimacy that would allow us to build games for larger companies or license material that would otherwise be unavailable to us as a startup. I am not familiar with licensing though so I could be wrong.