skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> then ask me to delete all data associated with your account

You may not even have that option:

http://www.dataprotection.eu/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HU

As for keeping the history for anti-chargeback purposes, it is my understanding that you are allowed to keep username and log in data and your IPSP will have the rest of the information that you'd need to fight a chargeback.

Also, someone requesting deletion of their data would make it pretty easy to fight that chargeback because they're providing you with auxiliary proof (the request itself) that they've been active users of your site.

The patent claim is a good one, I'll have to think about that.

Keeping a free service 'up' without allowing new data to be entered in to the system post shutdown without support or development costs a very small fraction of what it would cost to run the service in an active way.

For example, Yahoo! claimed that running Geocities cost them tens of millions of dollars annually, and yet, somehow I can maintain a large fraction (how large a fraction we'll never know) of their accounts up and running for approximately $500 / month.

The problem with giving notice is that many people will never get your notice, even when given 6 months ahead of time.

Imagine dropbox shutting down their free accounts overnight. It's technically within their rights. Ditto google docs and a myriad of other services that people come to rely on.
I imagine it's about being able to include the whole framework inside your project, without inflating it with a number of files or even having to create a new folder.
1. The Google example is only relevant in 1999, when the market was nascent. Now that you have a big, established product there is--in all likelihood--no way to create a google killer at $30k a month. If there was one at that level, it probably would have been found by now. Established markets take bigger checks... nascent markets take smaller checks.

2. I actually did get Mahalo to profitability last December. :-) Of course, the Panda Update endend that brief, beautiful moment.

3. Actually, I do mean the entire industry. Now that the internet is global, fast and ubiquitous (mobile) everything good tends to get really big, really fast. Heck, bad things get big fast (Rebecca Black's Friday comes to mind), and so do super simple things (i.e. Angry Birds).

the internet is biased toward big...
I hope this doesn't portend bad things for Firebug down the road; it's nice to have a variety of tools, but kudos to Mr. Barton for making the move and, more importantly, providing a devastatingly useful and revolutionary web development tool.

Front end web development changed seemingly overnight for the better when Firebug came on the scene.
I think it's naive to claim "fuck" is an arbitrary word.
No, I just meant that you could have saved me some reverse searches, since I just want to get to his wikipedia page anyway :)
Your view is exactly the kind of fear I'm referring to.

Re. Tylenol, 7 people died in an isolated area, and the response was national legislation and money and materials spent tamper-proofing every drug made since then. People are still scared of Halloween candy being tampered with (which in and of itself has never been recorded as happening). By that logic, we should have outlawed cars years ago; more than 7 people die every day in accidents.

Re. military action, the occupation of Iraq had little to do with stopping "terrorists." If you recall, we invaded because of our fears of WMD's--which of course, turned out not to exist. You would also do well to recall that we have had terrorist attacks since we invaded: remember the shoe bomber, or the underwear bomber, who both successfully smuggled explosives into a plane after military action had begun? Only their own incompetence and the alertness of the passengers prevented tragedy--the military had nothing to do with it. To suggest otherwise is, frankly, simple ignorance.

Finally, I'm reminded of a Simpsons quote: For $100, I can sell you a rock that prevents tiger attacks. It really works: I've never been attacked by a tiger since I bought my own rock!
Looking at the source is just one search away, instead of having to navigate many files or build a tag file or whatever. Also provides an incentive to keep shit tidy.
We can produce videos at much, much less than $10k a video. Think about it, what does it cost to put an expert in a box and record them sharing their knowledge?

not $10,000.
I suspect that running an informative blog raises your visibility in some areas much more than others. Looking for a web-related job by making a blog about Basecamp is quite possibly the best case, since the proportion of people hiring for a 37signals-product-related job who also read and care about blogs is probably fairly high. But, writing a popular welding blog may not work as well to increase your employment prospects as a welder, if most of the people hiring welders don't read or care about blogs.

(Then again, maybe people hiring welders these days do care about blogs. But I'm not sure you can extrapolate from a Basecamp blog helping you to get a webdev job, to all sectors of the economy.)
A one-size-fits-all is not going to work, I think.

The correct model is probably something similar to the Creative Commons model -- create a few bundles of rights, let creators/site operators compose them, creating a 2x2 matrix of licenses or whatever.

For instance:
1) Ownership of content/derived rights
2) Persistence of terms through exit (bankruptcy, sale, change of control...)
3) Revocability (can never, can easily, or can after N day waiting period during which users may delete all data, or opt in/out of new terms...)
4) Law enforcement: we'll actively bend over/cooperate like eBay, or we will require warrants and resist to the extent legally allowed, or technical countermeasures, plus which jurisdictions (I'm usually fine with USA law, but wouldn't want my content under e.g. Saudi law)
5) ...

This matters more for power users and API users (developers) than for casual users, but I agree something like this is necessary.
This is totally missing the point. Everybody I know is working hard and is keen to work hard to achieve things. But today it's not easy. 30 years ago you could work hard and you had good chances to succede. Today you may end up working up to update a power point, or because the boss doesn't use vba and you have to do all things manually.

I mean, work hard is a really, really, bad metaphore. It is more about learning good and useful stuff. Which is also kind of diffucult having seen the total absurd that universities have become.
All true. Today's middle class are forced to act like newly-arrived immigrants, turning back the clock on decades of progress and rising living standards.
Logic has nothing to do with it. People have emotional responses to certain words. Arguing that it's not a "logical" reaction misses the point.
> I actually would love for the US to stop all military actions and then have a major terrorist attack. I know I would be the first to blame all of the people who said we were too "paranoid".

So you'd happily see thousands of people killed as long as it proves you right?

Classy.
Of course it all depends on many factors, location included. I thought it was obvious, but apparently judging by the down-voting frenzy it is not.

Ironically enough the only time I walked out of public place over a left behind bag was in Vancouver. A hippy-looking Jesus person marched into a Starbucks, dropped his canvas bag on an empty chair, paused for a second and marched out. He was completely spaced out, not focusing on anything, and it all looked as odd as it sounds. It was on Robson street around lunch time. So I got up and left, and do tell me that it was not reasonable thing to do. The guy was outside, just outside the entrance, yelling at someone over a cellphone, and that explained his behavior. But without knowing that it could've been something else.

And, yes, I am familiar with the term "security theater".
There are two kinds of terrorists: The desperate and the insane. A life of terrorism is very unstable, and usually quite brutal and short. The desperate join up because the only other alternative is rolling over and either dying or becoming enslaved in some way. Theirs is a rational choice. The insane are men who crave power to such a degree that there is little they won't do to secure it, but in order to succeed they need numbers. That's where the desperate come in.

People prefer order to chaos. Order brings prosperity and security. But when there's no hope of prosperity or security, people start to look for ways to change the political landscape to improve their chances of surviving as a group. The closer they feel they are to having their lives or culture or way of life annihilated, the more desperate they become. (It's worth noting that you can manufacture greater desperation in the minds of people around a kernel of real desperation, which makes for an effective recruiting tactic, especially among the religious)

If you want to stop terrorism, you must work to end the source of their desperation. Once you remove (or diminish) the desperate from the equation, the insane will neither be able to form numbers of any notability, nor secure the goodwill of others. They will be treated as they are: criminally insane.
Unfortunately, that isn't a sentence: "jejune" is an adjective, not a noun; "belie" is a verb, not a noun; "inculcate" takes an indirect object with "in", not a direct object. (Well, it does take a direct object, but it's the thing being inculcated, not the person it's being done to.)
RSA SecurID-based hack 
Second defence contractor targeted in RSA SecurID-based hack • The Register: "Second defence contractor targeted in RSA SecurID-based hack
Valid point, although if you interview other people in the industry, they're going to know about your blog. It's the same concept as interviewing potential employers. If you make them aware, they will be. It doesn't matter what the industry is.
Here in Kenya most phone users (about 95%) are on a pre pay plan, ie you pay first then the money you have paid decrements as you talk. 1US dollar will give you about 15 minutes of talk time.

What we want to do is give users about 2minutes of free talk time for every ad they get from us.
So while it appears Massachusetts does collect fingerprints

For driver's licenses? Not as far as I know - I've never been fingerprinted for a MA license.
It's almost a tautology - by definition, if you're employed, you're skilled (at whatever skill the employer was looking to get). If you were 'skilled' in something an employer no longer needs, then you become unemployed. Are you 'less skilled' in the absolute sense? Probably not, but from the previous employer's POV, you're not skilled (in what they need).
I'm hoping someone will help me out and correct my logic because that would be most helpful.
This seems like an anti-pivot poison pill.
New Google Search Feature ( Appears to use Google Sets )
Good to know. i will look into implementing a word of the day. That's a really good idea.
Huh? Microsoft would never do that. Tell their customers to use Free/OSS system? An MS controlled VM system is exactly what they want, and exactly what they've done.
You can replace that with "the first group of individuals who are always employed is skilled employees who has highly sought after skills" ... It may not be 100% but for the majority you'll find the statement to be true, no?
What prevents the user repackaging the application given its source?
I've actually been writing a small OS-like system for the PIC24 line of 16bit microcontrollers to make my own life a little easier. Its written in a mix of C and PIC24 assembly. I'm trying to write as much as possible in assembly (without making the task too difficult), so that I know exactly how many cycles a given function takes (which will be useful for RTOS features; but I'm doing MIDI/audio stuff, so low (or at least, deterministic) latency is important to me). Its still lacking most important features, but so far it can do premptive multitasking and contains a few handy utilities (cycle accurate microsecond and millisecond delays, stuff for configuring peripherals, task management (create, start, suspend tasks) and the start of a driver interface).

At the moment, IPC is very simple: since there is no memory protection, tasks can access each others memory. I have a very simple mutex implementation (basically, a spinlock where tasks yield if the mutex is locked) to protect shared memory, but so far thats it. I plan on supporting a maibox/messaging system sometime soon. I still have not got a memory management system though, so tasks need to know ahead of time what memory they may use. Currently, tasks are all within the one program binary (ie, no runtime program loading yet), so the C compiler can handle most of this, butI cannot use malloc unless I temporarily turn off premptive multitasking. I cant just turn off interrupts because PIC24's only allow you to turn off interrupts for a known number of cycles and I don't know how many cycles malloc may take.

I have already got some UART code to interface with a bluetooth module, and I plan on writing a little shell for it soon, so that I can connect to it from a laptop/desktop over bluetooth.

I also want to expand the scheduler/multitasking to have more RTOS-like features: task priorities, higher priority tasks pre-empt lower priority tasks, deadlines (and an error system for when deadlines are not met) etc

Another thing I would like to add reasonably soon is an SD Card interface and FAT driver, so that I can load files/programs/configuration from SD cards.

Finally, I need to finish the driver interface and write some drivers for my most commonly used peripherals (planned devices I plan to support for my own use: various types of buttons, analog input devices (sliders, pots), seven segment displays, LCDs, SRAM modules, USB devices (some of the devices I am developing for have USB OTG), an RF module I have, a way for two devices running my OS to talk to each other over SPI, eventually ethernet).
Where does one find the badges earned? Either I don't have any, or I'm just too stupid to find them.
These days, the companies involved are probably protected from such, but I'm put in mind of some of the successful slander lawsuits against credit reporting agencies for their errors.

In the absence of a better, more rational process, it would be nice to know that an injured party can walk away with some hundreds of thousands of dollars from such contemptuous companies (and I wouldn't mind seeing the State dinged, as well, although that's probably even more difficult). (I fully support punitive judgment in addition to compensation, in the face of such activity as it is described.)

The State is actually probably more at fault, but I can't help imagining a certain amount of collusion with firms seeking to sell them this business.

"Guilty until proven innocent" really seems to be taking hold in the U.S. Shoving the work off onto private contractors further aids in this regard, I can imagine. I'm also put in mind of states' use of private, commercial databases to make an end run around their own statutory limitations on data collection and use.
The article tries to make it sound like this is some kind of a computer-age cyber-problem, but in fact, any face recognition technology, including the Mk. 1 human eyeball and brain, is going to have a certain false positive rate. Actually, the article says the pictures are already reviewed by humans before it's decided there is a match.

The real problem, in fact the only problem in my opinion, is the "guilty until proven innocent" approach of the state. They are sending letters which state that the license has already been revoked! If they sent a letter saying "we strongly suspect fraud, you must verify your identity in 30 days", I would not have a problem with that, as long as they have a decent match.

Instead, we get talk about how "driving is a privilege". Guess what - working for the state is also a privilege, and people who abuse the citizens who pay their salaries should lose it.
Interesting. My perspective is that I share things my friends and family might find useful, but potential for enjoyment is not a factor.
If I am not misinterpreting the article and, "his driving privileges were returned...after 10 days..." is the time between receiving the letter and having his name cleared, I am impressed that the government moved that quickly.

You probably right that 10 days is "quick" for a government, but ten days is a long time to be without a license if your work requires a valid license.

Similarly, the eleven day notice (well less considering mail travel time) is BS. I travel a lot for business and two+ week trips are not out of the ordinary. There should be at least 30 day notice.
To refactor or not to refactor
Music21: A toolkit for computational musicology
I think you misunderstand what's occurring. Facebook wasn't "scraping" anything; Gmail provides a simple API and UX to allow users to export their information. In fact, Google called Facebook out for their lack of reciprocity in this area last year, and has experimented with blocking export directly to Facebook: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/google-facebook-data/
Your "logic" is socially naive.
A small (and dangerous) C hack
But who are you targeting as your audience? Just HN? Really??

This isn't my project, i hadn't even heard of it until it was posted today.

The comments clearly show that even a portion of HN is offended. And doesn't every single startup want the largest audience possible?

A portion of people are going to be offended at everything. Frankly, if i was starting a company it'd be nice to get rid of the easily offended people right off the bat, as they're the biggest complainers.

And no, you don't want the largest audience. A smaller but loyal audience is going to do a company more good in the long run, and the word 'fuck' helps weed out the non-loyal, easily offended people that aren't going to do a startup any good.

Finally, i used HN as an example. You can use all the people in the first world if you'd like, and i'd still make an educated guess that a tiny portion of them have so thin a skin as to be offended by a word in a domain name.
Natural, a natural language processing module for node.js
Sure, it would be great, but whatever we consider would have to be very complete and very mature. There's not much room for evolution in standard library APIs, and with lightweight frameworks being relatively new to the scene, the framework developers themselves probably do not want to give up their current freedom to grow in whatever direction they please.

If we look back at this in a few years, maybe it's worth considering as usage grows, APIs are more locked down, and a clear winner shines through. Right now, any inclusion would be months of bike shedding, assuming any of these framework developers are willing to give up external maintenance of their products and go 100% into the standard library.
Hammock: So, if my logic is socially naive, that makes it incorrect?
I would say the sweet spot for defining your users rights is right after you gain some major traction and before any kind of exit is even on the horizon. And definitely before other companies start to rely on you, and/or network effects have put you in a position where you can afford to screw people over.

Probably it would be a good idea to have your business model figured out as well.

A side effect of this is that it may force you to think a bit harder over whether you want to support this creation for an extended period, and that alone might be enlightening.

So, pivot to your hearts content, but when you feel you have a 'live one' define your users rights and stick to it.
You work 8 hours a day, then come home and study for 8 hours, which is really just more work for your employer. Life-long education is starting to sound like a prescription for non-stop labor.
Ruby Arduino Development
Do you know enough about the Python ecosystem to make that assessment? Aaron Swartz's web.py was around as a single-file web micro-framework years before Sinatra even existed. An early version of reddit, after they switched from Common Lisp to Python, was built starting with web.py.
I hear you, but we will set standards that will be adhered to by employees who may be in a position to see a users phone number. Just like your ISP that has your email, but does it send you spam just because it has it? Google has my phone number, but they don't send me spam. because they have policies against those kind of things, that's what we aim to put in place. Maybe hard but we will.

Just to reiterate, phoned numbers will be in our database, advertisers skill not get their hands on this db.
...and yet, I remember it being a serious issue that sites like Facebook were asking for users' usernames and passwords to other sites, the disclosure of which is a violation of the terms of service of even Gmail. I do not remember Facebook offering this service as "upload your contact information", at least during the time when they were growing to prominence (important for your argument).
Well, it boils down to money, and Google's got it. I'd call that a major win for Google ;)
Do all my twitter peeps have to connect to migratus as well for this to work? That's what it seems like.

I was expecting a service that would scrape all the G+ profiles for the twitter names listed there and compare it with my list of twitter followers.
I have (1) MS thesis, (1) half-finished prototype for a desktop app, (1) idea of a ios app, (1) idea of a niche MUD.

But I also work at a BigCorp, so I'm perhaps atypical.

I gave up on having one zillion unfinished programs a year or two ago, when it became apparent nothing was getting meaningfully done.
> As for keeping the history for anti-chargeback purposes, it is my understanding that you are allowed to keep username and log in data and your IPSP will have the rest of the information that you'd need to fight a chargeback.

If I'm keeping your username, your login and usage history (likely IP address) to fight the chargeback, I haven't deleted all your data by a long shot.

> Keeping a free service 'up' without allowing new data to be entered in to the system post shutdown without support or development costs a very small fraction of what it would cost to run the service in an active way.

Keeping anything running has cost, you don't just stand up a machine, step back, and hope for the best. There's maintenance, patches, IDS work, etc. Hitting a "read only" flag in your software (presuming it exist) doesn't make the machine invulnerable.
Actually I think it would be cool to ask ~10 big acquirers, both of talent and of products/tech, to see how they'd feel about deals with these terms.

Google seemed ok with Etherpad running in parallel for a while. The concerns seem to be:
* Acq wants to be able to develop their own products with the tech, less competition -- shutting off system supports that, but so does disabling new account creation on it, and making your own product superior. Some changes seem ok, some seem borderline (flickr -> yahoo login), but just shutting down a service is different.

* Wanting full resources of the team -- running the old site on autopilot

* If the old service is inherently unsustainable (patent/IP issues, negative marginal income, ...); the former might be a big deal (although YouTube won by having the Google lawhammer on their side), and the latter might not be a big deal if the absolute dollar value involved is low relative to the deal.

Even if a deal ends up being 5% less due to the requirement that the service stay operating after acq, if it makes user acq easier so you get 2x more users and thus a 2-10x higher valuation, it's win/win/win/win (acq, founders, investors, users).
The refusalists will have won.
Weakest growth in start-ups since the early '90s
Yes, that is what I was trying to convey. The final part of mastering a subject often consists of hard, unglamorous work. Addressing your own weaknesses is never much fun, even if you know deep down that the pay-off will ultimately be worth it.