skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny pictures, plural. With text accompanying many of them. Kind of like reddit, 4chan, digg, et al. But of course none of us would ever peek at those site while at work. Not something to get worked up over by any means. Someone who isn't me had a read over the files and had this to say.

Email addresses. They're common, but these aren't just any emails. We can now attach these address to a specific organization and try to target them to get the information we want; if there is any in their inboxes. Think OpSec.

Bids and purchase orders. This takes time, as you actually have to read them, but you can find prices and bidding tactics of ManTech and maybe undermine them next time around. OR as entrepreneurs you can read them and learn how to acquire government contracts.

Tons of employee IDs in there used to login and out of services. You can guess why these are important.

They were in negotiations ~2005 with NATO to undertake maintenance of SatCom Afghanistan. Do some research, find out if they have the contract, new vector to exploit; very nice pay off. From the same document we learn a valuable piece of information about how NATO accepts bids from clients:

----

This will be a competitive procurement. We will be up against large American and European firms. We were informed that NATO puts a requirement for a Bid Bond in their RFPs to eliminate some of the small firms from the newer NATO countries that are part of the former Soviet Union. Experience has shown, over the past year, that these small firms tend to low bid on the basis of a lower wage base in their countries. We do not believe that this procurement lends itself to that bidding environment as the dollar value and the Bid Bond requirement may preclude these small firms from bidding but, nevertheless, price will be the determining factor.

----

In fact, all of the SatCom.doc file is interesting.

There are usernames and passwords in an .xls files. They all share the same password as well. Maybe it works the same in other places on their intranet?

To be honest, a lot of the material is outdated and none of it is particularly interesting. Sure, you can learn a lot from it... but it's not bleed edge. So take it for what you will.
Even if sexist ads sell, are they good for society? Or do they trivialize and objectify women and give children unrealistic, toxic stereotypes to live up to.

And yes, these ads are stupid. Stupid because they lack originality and intelligence. They sometimes work because they are manipulative.
You're welcome!

And, the answer is yes :)
KISSmetrics has a post explaining how the tracking works. http://www.kissmetrics.com/how-it-works They claim that simply using AdBlock is enough to defeat the tracking. They also claim "KISSmetrics has never, and will never, share anonymous customer activity of what people did on customer A’s site with customer B."
Interesting idea - I wonder why I should use something like this over another free service/community, such as Forrst. Okay, so you claim to have "average users" give feedback, but I wonder if that's of significant benefit, because it can take experienced designers to spot potential UX problems.
It is only a game to psychopaths.
The title should be clear that the advocate or advocates in question here are Google employees. That doesn't make any gag right, but it is vital context.
It could also be a hedge position by someone who sees the
trade as insurance on an existing portfolio and not a outright bet.
On Airbnb... Tiger Legs Ruined My Cruise
Maybe, but I have yet to hear a cogent argument that doesn't require the axiom that intellectual work has no value, either to society or intrinsically.
A lawsuit over what in this instance?

Seems to me the gag is in place simply to prevent any more bad press, which is understandable. You can't have your own employees disagreeing with company policy in public.
So you're saying absolutely no plan at all can be considered unlimited because with current technology there is some maximum download speed? I guess that's right (and probably not just about current technology: I would think there are theoretical limits to download speeds as well).
I wonder if this is related to Steve Yegge standing up in front of the entire Internet and saying that Google+ is a huge waste of time. That happened on the 25th as well, and could easily have annoyed a VP to the point of prohibiting negative comments by Google employees.
"I would be having lawyers talk to you if we were doing anything malicious." -- this seems like the type of defense that a good lawyer would tell you never to use.
Ask HN: Startups and independents, what do you do about health insurance?
I am not working for a BigCorp for the first time in my life, and I have not had health insurance or benefits since leaving my last employer. Given that there are a lot of small startups and independent contractors on HN, I am seeking advice on the best options for insurance and benefits.

Who offers this to individuals or very small companies?
I just tested incognito, it seems to defeat the etags mechanism of tracking.
Lion is the same OS X with some interface changes. Everything for the power user is still there...

Today I learned "power user" means someone who changes the Finder preferences and knows some shortcut keys.
As others have noted, 'The South' in the context of 1964 is more likely to have meant ex-confederate states. Even today, nothing west of Texas is considered 'The South', though west of Texas inclusive is often called 'the Southwest'.

And, the South's population was relatively a lot smaller 45+ years ago. In 1960, Texas was the 6th most populous state, Florida 10th, Georgia 16th. Now Texas is 2nd, Florida 4th, Georgia 10th.
@pg I think you should consider that your portfolio company is possibly not telling you the whole truth after they screwed up in a major way. I have no idea what happened -- just asking you to consider the possibility, which you seem to reject out of hand.
"LOL"-type responses generally don't go over too well here. In fact, humour in general is strictly forbidden. It's kind of like smuggling drugs across the border: you have to hide it really well.
That's a good point. I guess a service like this is less targeted at hardcore devs who know where to get feedback and more targeted at people who are in charge of building a website but don't already participate in communities like Forrst. So if you're an average manager and your boss tells you to build a website it's really difficult to make decisions. But with this, you can cheaply and easily figure out whether the designs you're seeing are good or not.
Poker is zero-sum, and everybody knows that going in. Business is supposed to be positive-sum, and when it isn't we should consider changing the rules.
Yeah, they pronounced it "uncle" at the CouchConf presentation.
For those examples are you saying that science or research is clear? I think it isn't for any of them.
Why Microsoft Can’t — and Shouldn’t — Give Up on Bing
> So if a user came to Hulu.com from an ad on Facebook, and then later, using a different browser on the same computer, visited Hulu.com from Google, and then at some point signed up for the premium service, KISSmetrics would be able to tell Hulu all about that user’s path to purchase (without knowing who that person was).

It seems their method relies on using cached javascript files to identify a user. How then are they able to track the same user using a different browser?
Is it by IP address?
Disagree strongly. If catastrophe happens, voters just may remember who caused it. I'd like to come back to this comment in 16 months.
Puppet Dashboard - Bug #8712: Erronous T-Shirt... - Puppet Labs
My mom did the exact same thing. She wanted to finally get her first smartphone, so she went to Best Buy to upgrade from her crappy flip phone to an iPhone 4, but the sales rep insisted that Android was "way better".

She knows how to use a computer, but she isn't the most tech-savvy person around. She was calling me constantly trying to figure out how to use her Android phone. I finally said she should probably switch to an iPhone instead, and a day after she did she was playing Angry Birds and sending me MMS picture messages, all without any help at all.
The trick is the server generates a unique Etag for each visitor.

Then the visitor's browser sends the Etag back to the server (in an "If-None-Match" header), and thus it acts as a quasi-cookie.
My experience has been the opposite. The main problem for me is that people in real life expect me to read and manipulate MS office documents.
> Except for that virtually every single one of the biggest problems we face is a marketing problem, rather than an issue where we don't have the science or technology.

Interesting point, and I agree.

> if there's any hope of humanity making it through the next thousand years then it'll almost certainly be due to improvements in our ability to market things rather than new technology.

If by our ability you mean progressives/the left, then I agree. Surely marketing per se is at best a neutral force.
Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher
Give me a break.

This isn't evil marketers hiding in their underground lair. This is web developers, designers, and product managers gaining insight about their users. They don't package this information and sell it wholesale to advertisers. They use it to make the product better.

You are taking this -way- too seriously. The ability to have perfect information on how users interact with your product is one the earth-shattering advantages we have as makers in the digital world. It means we can make something people want - better and faster than ever before.

I'm not saying that all use of tracking is good. All power can be used for good and for evil. But that doesn't mean that power is implictly evil. Save your rage for when you discover someone actually being evil.
Yeah, I just don't see how that will do anything but prove AT&T's point and make the data users unsympathetic.

*See all those hackers brought down our network! We need our caps and we need our T-Mobile merger!

More appropriate would be showing up at Congress along with the CEOs from Netflix, Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, Hulu, Google, Wikipedia, and having all of those guys making the case for network neutrality and even more data and a demand Congress Block the TMobile merger. Get Dan Hesse to say he thinks unlimited data is a fantastic thing and he invites Sprint users to use as much data as they can.

Then go ask Steve Jobs what he thinks.
They can use browser fingerprinting, for instance.
http://panopticlick.eff.org/
Google+ on its present trajectory is headed to the deadpool.
Of course there's a place for this. If you are serious about building an app, then you wouldn't be asking for justification before doing so - just build it, and see what happens.
If the information in the story is accurate; and the trade was in fact based on inside information, then someone just committed a major crime. Of course, the likelihood that the SEC or any other authority will take action, let alone prosecute, is precisely zero.
Actually, it's not. Not if you're using photovoltaics or anything else with a "band gap." According Einstein's Nobel-Prize-winning research, you have to "tune" the energy emitted by the material to match the band gap of the photovoltaic cell. If it's too low, nothing happens. If it's too high, the conversion is inefficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect#Emission_m... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap
Poor. Seems like you have to be already greasing the skids before using it, or else you're just another dude with a product.
And it should also be clear that it's not even clear any gag orders have occurred. The entire evidence to support this thesis is:

> @Skud: ok, unless someone tells me otherwise, it looks like google employees who don’t support the names policy have been gagged. #nymwars

> @Skud: @lizthegrey this is your chance to tell me i’m wrong, btw.

Somebody not responding to your tweet is hardly proof employees are being gagged. Here's one idea: maybe Liz doesn't want to be the center of attention on this anymore.
I really don't mind the constant dribble of down-votes that I get for trying to prevent the splitting of discussions

I don't think you are "harming the community", helping if anything, but after seeing yesterdays posts I do suspect you are more hurt by downvotes than you say you are, and that you might benefit by not being so.
Let's be clear: this ability isn't used to have perfect information on how users interact with your product.

It's used to allow publishers to make more money from their consumers through advertising.
Sometimes it's necessary to learn lessons that cost real money. A few five-figure lessons are a serious wake-up call. If you're paying attention, you learn not to do that again.
Students’ musings becoming start-ups
According to the stub in the URL, that was even the original title of the post.
You're making the leap from "every big problem we face is a marketing problem" to "and the solution is to track users in minute and excruciating detail".

I can accept that there are ideas which are critical to the survival of the human race and/or modern civilization, which require mass education, and utterly reject your conclusion.
This is getting silly and borderline paranoid.
I think this whole pseudonym thing is an overreaction, and an unfair criticism to an incomplete project.

As for the this 'gag' stuff she offers no proof and seems like she is just conveniently picking narrative to complement her disapproval.

Just let it go already.
"Evercookie" is more than just standard browser cookies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie
One important detail for AdBlock: you HAVE to be using a Tracking/Privacy filter subscription. Please, if you're using ABP, add one of these as a subscription: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-tracking.txt (Fanboy's Tracking List) or https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt (EasyPrivacy). None of the default filter subscriptions block KISSmetrics, but either of these will.
Pennies from radio play is different from pennies from an mp3 sale.

I don't know any start-up making significant $ from mp3 referral sales. Tops they may make couple grand but that is not much when you are getting 5m uniques(won't even pay for the streaming; and making 2k from mp3 affiliate sales is tough even with 5M uniques.)
I really miss not being able to down-vote you.
Amen to JS from third-party domains.

I see this as biting us in the butt sometime. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

What's more annoying is playing the "NoScript allow roulette" game of trying to figure out which domains/scripts you have to allow for some site feature to work.
Looking into something very similar right now. What's your tradeoff been in terms of, for example, disk taken up by Elastic for indexing? How do you find Elastic in terms of how well it keeps up with indexing the data recently inserted into couch?
An asshole who gets things done is infinitely better than a friendly person who is utterly worthless.
Thanks, I see that in the Inspector now.

I recall menus in Safari, Mobile Safari, Firefox and Chrome which listed all the databases stored, along with the name. It was in Preferences near the cookie and password management.

It looks like the 'databases' menu is no longer in Mobile Safari preferences, and now Safari 5.1 will tell you what a website is storing in general terms, but no longer details the individual databases in preferences.
Sure, maybe it will appeal to folks who aren't plugged in to those sorts of communities. I wonder if you would get a better conversion rate with an example of feedback data?
Maybe I misread this, but this seemed the basis for assuming it was a gag order:

>On July 25th (four days ago) she stopped posting on the subject altogether. Looking at her stream, though, I see that she did post, without any comment, a link to a Wikipedia article talking about gag orders.

Further, the poster says liz is a friend, so it seems likely they'd get some response to a direct question if she wasn't gagged.
Ten websites that will make you say... Huh?
"patent-ineligible abstract mental steps"

This the phrase we need in order to kick the nuts off of software patent trolls!
"Style of interaction"? I bet Jeffrey Skilling had a "dissimilar style of interaction" with Enron's accountants. Hitler seemed to have had a "dissimilar style of interaction" with the Jews.

Believe it or not, sometimes people in authority are irredeemable assholes and you have no option but to escape. If it makes their lives easier too, so much the better.
Big Pharma R&D: It's like watching 5 year olds play soccer...
1. When a project is incomplete is _exactly_ the time to raise a fuss about something being wrong. Acting like we should excuse Google because it's incomplete is completely missing the point.

2. The gag stuff sounds pretty well confirmed by Skud's contacts at Google, a company she was until very recently employed at and knows a lot more about the internal machinations of. Where do you work, exactly? (And by the way, why are you posting under a pseudonym?)
Jeez guys, not all tracking is evil. You know all that awesome content that exists on the web? Well the people that make and distribute that content need information to make your experience better. Let's say you start a new site. Let's use 8tracks for example: they provide a two-tiered service, one free and premium. The free service exists to drive you to a paid account, but you still derive value from it, nonetheless. In exchange for that free value, you give them stats that they use with their advertisers, who in turn give them cash they can then use to make your experience better. It's a give and take system. Thankfully, money isn't the only currency on the web, a little bit of info and some advertising goes a long way. I am willing to trade value for value, it's fair that way.
buy her something nice

If this is all playing out in her head the way she is blogging it, I don't think she wants something nice. First, she probably wants what nobody can giver her (her peace of mind back). Secondly, she probably wants her dignity back - and that is the kind of thing where only a totally honest public apology for any wrong AirBnB have done to her, real or imaginary will achieve.

I mean, if she perceives that they have publicly denied things that she believes are true, I don't think they can buy her off at this stage, so one is down to "Grovel long, grovel hard and make it believable".
Designer Bookmarks - A little creative project I've been working on.
If you have a Tax ID and at least two people that want the insurance, you can get a small business policy. Just do a google search for brokers.
I'm suggesting a little bigger than that - Blizzard is making a ton of money from WoW subscriptions every month, and $12/month for turntable would be pretty easy for me to justify.
Good point. #15 is also implying subordinates manage (make decisions). While it's helpful to give/get recommendations, the subordinate may not have the full context of a problem. Which has shades again (see my remarks above on repeating) of a manager who doesn't want to manage.
Which is useful if you're brute forcing, md5 is also algorithmatically broken AFAIK.
Looks cool, Dan!

Reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376956 from a while back. I also think utest.com does usability testing.

If you haven't yet, check out don't make me think - the way Krug explains usability tests is pretty useful (also, screen-capturing user sessions would be nice).

Finally, one thing I would want is a case study, website before/after and a list of feedback.
VC Funding Down Amid Economic Worries
>not all tracking is evil.

Tracking isn't evil. Tracking people who specifically do not want to be tracked is evil.
Thank you for that bit of information. I was down voted a few months ago for a comment and now I finally know why.
1. It must be in proportion, and not expect an immediate fix specially since Google has valid reasons for their policy.

2. Still not a proof. And she could be interpreting other instructions as forcing a 'gag'.

And me using a pseudonym here has nothing to do with anything

Also having a misleading headline doesn't help validate the content of the post.
Another example which recently made the news is comparing education systems of Wisconsin and Texas. Each ethnic group in Texas performs better than in Wisconsin, but Wisconsin has fewer of the low performing groups and therefore has higher test score averages.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-ba...
That's a bit like saying a car with a flat tire is better than a car with a dead engine. Sure, one might get you a little bit further than the other, but neither one will get you very far regardless.

Know what's better? A person who is respectful (albeit not always popular) and gets things done.
Well, the pseudonym thing was a valid complaint, and it is a genuine issue for some people.

Though I don't think it's an issue that deserves the sort of day-after-day-after-day-after-day-after-day-after-day nonstop coverage it's getting. It's a minor-ish problem some people have with a new product or service, though, and for some reason the tech press loves to latch onto those and make them into OMG ONLY THE BIGGEST PROBLEM EVAR (see: "antennagate").
I think the reason you're being downvoted is because you didn't provide any proof.
The latest WWDC featured a session on UI Design that made a very compelling case against building springboard UIs. The cliffs:

Users arrange their home screen personally, so they know where to go. They haven't done that with a custom springboard so skimming is inefficient compared to lists or tab bars. Because they describe functionality which is more generic than specific app identity, giving feature icons the same visual weight as app icons is ill-advised, and users must process the icon before the text, which slows things down.
The pattern of humanity is renewed in the unreal
I agree, most people use their real names (see: Facebook), and a new service should focus on the majoring or its users first get that right then address the statistically less significant (but evidently very loud) segment.
Can anyone say when Oracle is justified? I have yet to encounter a problem the postgres or mysql didn't support but alas I have not worked on everything.
Upon signing the legislation, legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation"
No. You can completely remove logic from the view. I've used more than 1 templating system that does exactly that and have written one.
Maybe she just got tired of discussing this subject, as opposed to the author who seems to be on a crusade.
There are no valid reasons for this policy, and after weeks of criticism, Google ought to realize it. This would not be an "immediate fix", this would be a "month or more in coming" fix.

As for "proof", either you haven't read Skud's entire post, or you're just calling her a liar. Oddly enough, I trust her up-front statements more than your vague intimations.

You using a pseudonym has a lot to do with the present issue. The entire issue revolves around pseudonyms. You apparently have no objection to forcing people not to use pseudonyms, but use one yourself. I think that's needs to be explored if you're to have any credibility in a debate about Google's policy on pseudonyms.

You still haven't said where you work.

The headline isn't at all misleading. It is slightly vague, but the vagueness is resolved simply by clicking the link. Vague headlines are nothing new.
I'm taking my chances.

I've already moved halfway around the world (my startup needs cheap labor) and run a much higher risk of death than in the US. Why should I worry about a financial hit on top of death?

(Amusingly, my Mom worried about the Mumbai bombings 150km away from me. In reality, she should worry about me looking the wrong way while crossing the street.)