skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This American Life did a story on the origin of the State Secrets priviledge.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/383/o... skip to 29:05.

The gist of it being, in the original case where this came up, the government claimed the information in classified documents couldn't be used as evidence and thus the case couldn't proceed. The supreme court upheld that request and now the government can always waive their hand and say "classified" and the documents can't be used as evidence. 50 years later, the documents from the original case were declassified and there was no secret or classified information in them, they just proved the government was at fault.
The Nook actually already does the same thing. No Market, but a vibrant hacker community based around it.
What is the magic beyond SSD (and good acpi/power management integration), trusted boot (using a TPM), and OpenGL?
I'm not interested unless it's:

1) easily flashable with an actual Android ROM (a la Nook/cyanogen)

2) got a 3G data connection, similar to the current 3G kindle

If both are true, it's a really compelling device.
Another issue is that many New York startups focus on supporting advertising, finance or other businesses. Most internet users don't notice these products in their daily lives, and BI is doing New York a dis-service by ignoring some very useful and successful companies in the B2B space.
I use Google Desktop dozens of times daily. I suspect lots of enterprise users are in the same XP boat without a fast search paddle.
Prime membership is a genius move by Amazon. Since getting Prime I buy things at the drop of a hat. I literally think I order about 10x more product from Amazon now than before Prime. The fact they can give this away as a benefit is a double win for them.
Twitter as Molotov Cocktail: Wael Ghonim, and Oscar Morales on Social Media
I use Google Desktop. My corporate mail is in outlook 2003, and this is what makes it usable.
SEEKING WORK - Remote/Milwaukee

I'm a user interface engineer who enjoys working on great interfaces and experiences. I specialize in high-end JavaScript/UI implementations, but I'm well-versed in most popular backend languages/technologies as well.

I prefer larger scale projects (3+ month contracts) and will consider full time positions.

Prior work:

- http://www.mapquest.com/

- http://www.mapquest.com/tools/mapbuilder

- The widget library that powers most of Harley-Davidson's community sites

- http://rideplanner.harley-davidson.com/rideplanner/ridePlann...

My email address is in my profile or I can be contacted via Twitter/GitHub at @andykant.
I actually really liked fast flip as an interface to google news. I was hoping they'd expand on that, perhaps making it an alternate interface to Reader (the Google RSS Reader).

So to answer your question, an RSS reader as sound as Google Reader but with a better interface is still an unsolved problem, IMO, and FastFlip was on the right track.
That is my current project's design. Web frontend stuff in GAE and AWS doing the backend processing. AWS is needed to run media servers which can't run in GAE. I was going with it despite the disadvantage of the split architecture because I liked GAE. Now with the new pricing model kicking in, the frontend cost has skyrocketed and it doesn't make sense to run frontend stuff in GAE.

Also the way Google handling this confirms my fear of proprietary lock-in, leaving a really bad taste in mouth. I meant I've spent lots of time to develop in their framework to work around their quirks and limitation. They have been advocating to developers to optimize for CPU time and that's what we did. Now they found out they don't make enough money with CPU optimization and change the whole billing scheme, screwing all the efforts done by developers. What would stop them to change again tomorrow if they find instance-hour is not making enough money for them?
Whut?

I just happily browsed the web, listened to podcasts, checked my RSS feeds and flicked through my Twitter stream for six hours during a train ride on my iPad. All tasks for which the iPad – or more general the tablet form factor – is ideal.

I think your argument is incoherent.
Can someone point to an example where a website where a clone was more successful, or even on the same level of success as the original? To be clear, Facebook was not in any way a clone of Myspace or Friendster. I'm talking about someone who posts a request saying "I want a clone of X website" and then proceeds to turn that into a successful business.
Best song in Music this year
That's the point. Appengine is changing their pricing from CPU hours to Instance hours, so an app that previously had 3-4 hours a day is now going to have 48-72.
Show HN: TOSAmend (My weekend project)
I heard a lot of rumor that the rumored Amazon tablet would use a Qualcomm Mirasol passive color display technology with a refresh rate capable of running video. I wonder if this rumor is still circulating or confirmed.
How to Create a Fan-gated Facebook Tab with Rails and JavaScript
Google cleans house, closes 10 projects
Relatedly, the gmail tasks have a little-known fullscreen UI: https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas?pli=1 Also a mobile webapp.
Very true. Most people don't understand how to properly resist police intimidation until they've already been victimized from it.
I'm using an embarassingly old Ubuntu release on my main machine and Unity on a test machine.

I've really tried to like Unity but I simply hate it. The machine I'm using doesn't show that many bugs. I'm patient with bugs - they'll fix them, they fixed them in the older release. It's not that.

The bar side is OK-to-mediocre but the lack of a main-menu/start-menu completely crocks the thing. WTF. I can't find my apps, the apps I have installed. I've looked quite a bit. WTF were they thinking? Their particular search thingy sucks but that's not the point - even if it was great, I'd also need to know the stuff that is "just there". Sure, maybe I am an idiot for not knowing the names of the obscure graphics program I just installed and want to use but I don't think I'm the only idiot with this problem and other interfaces are forgiving for us idiots.

It seems like there are two kinds of users that wouldn't be bothered by Unity. Those who only use the browser or about two-three GUIs and those who only use the command line.

For all I know, these might a majority but as a former Windows power user, I suspect that there's an important minority of Ubuntu users and potential Ubuntu who'd like to use a wide variety the existing Linux GUI. Ubuntu has essentially excluded us.

And its not just that Windows/GUI "power users" are a fair share of Ubuntu users but that I think we'd be the best ambassadors/evangelists if Ubuntu is to get off the ground - those who use the OS as only a launchpad to start a browser won't have a strong opinion and the average person isn't going emulate those ten terminals to get their work done.

I can see the "everything slightly confusing must be destroyed" ethos leading to an "OS" consisting of a brightly color candy-machine interface with two buttons, "browser" and "off". No one will be confused but it will still suck.
As someone pointed out in another thread, they reportedly threatened his family's immigration status. That's a big stick, and one routinely used by real cops (i.e., it was reasonable of him to believe they'd retaliate unfairly if he asserted his rights). I don't blame him for complying under the circumstances, even though it's outrageous that he was asked to (whether they were fake cops or not).
Calderón got in touch with us yesterday in an effort to clarify who, exactly, had searched his home on an evening in July.

This did happen under Jobs -- if true.
Hurting your users, and knowing when you’re doing it
Was Bieber Street Racing?
Not the brightest animal.
I've started spending more time over at http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ it's much closer to what HN used to be than HN is now.
I thought VirtualBox could mount the .vhds natively? I'm pretty sure I'm running one right now...
Why is it worse than running an installer? It has identical capabilities, but the .sh file can be read.
When I say they, I mean the jQuery team, or whomever made the decisions to make the data api work that way. Clearly if someone was carefull in reading how the data api interacted with the data-* attributes they would see what was going on. The blog post is helpful in pointing out what jQuery actually does. I am just not sure in a cursory look at the api it would click in someones mind that it worked like that.
Google's applications are not part of Android.

Putting a skin on Android and not shipping it with Google apps is NOT a fork. Even if you want to consider it one in a technical definition, it's not a significant one. It's as much a fork of Android as CyanogenMod is. (CM does not come with Google Apps, though they can be added after-the-fact).
Well, don't forget to let us know when the full article is out. I'll happily post it up on swombat.com - it's a great story - but I have to say I'm not too fond of the multi-part post format either.
The strength of GAE is the magic scaling beans, but to take advantage of it you need to lock yourself in massively. It's probably not realistic to port an existing application that actually needs real scale to GAE given the complexity of most apps by the time they reach that point. Therefore, the key funnel for them is new apps with hopes of becoming truly massive. Fortunately for Google way more people dream of scaling than actually will, but they need to A) not scare poor startups away with the price today and B) not scare them that they're going to get bent over and raped on price changes later.

Personally I'll never touch GAE with a 10' pole simply because of the support issue and perpetual-beta-culture uncertainties.
> Most people don't understand how to properly resist police intimidation

Got any links on how to do this?
Brilliant, was just about to start making one of these myself (this practice would be great for actually getting responses out of lecturers), thanks for sharing.
You haven't qualified your statements yet, nor demonstrated you know much about either situation we're referencing.
I don't know... Photoshop didn't sell Macs, but iPods and iPhones did. The time and energy is takes for them to produce pro software versus the return on investment is probably too low. It's such a small market, relative to general consumers.
You need A Brand for the On the Internet Company
Have you considered applying to Startup Chile ?
I think similar statements could have been made about Bill Gates: we would be without microcomputing, we would be without computers in home, business would not have a computing platform to carry them for 2 decades, etc (and who is to say someone else would not have done those things?). But Bill Gates, in doing all that, also found time to give away tons of money.
> our tools for consumption are advancing at a significantly greater rate than our tools for production

Our tools for production have advanced as far as they can—what major changes have the desktop and laptop PC had over the last five years?
I'm talking about individual failure recovery, not full queues. What happens when a worker fails a job? What happens when a server dies? Is your code bug free? How do you recover?

IMHO, you're making a pretty big assumption here anyway with the fixed queue depth. The idea with a message queue is that it delegates the responsibility of ensuring message delivery to another component, so that enqueues always work, and that messages always get delivered. Perhaps it's ok in your use case that some tasks fail to get delivered, but I'd prefer not to voluntarily give that up for some reason that I may have missed from the original post. In the linked .NET example, they used capped collections because it was a chatty message bus, not a worker queue, and guaranteed message delivery wasn't important. I've nearly filled the drives up on a RabbitMQ box with messages and it was still able to insert and pop them off at thousands per second, with full durability and persistence.

Celery can read and write JSON to a multitude of backends. Last time I checked, both Ruby and JavaScript have pretty solid JSON support. DaemonKit on Ruby supports building a robust worker pool over AMQP.

Every wheel reinvented is also conceptual and maintenance overhead, and I'd argue that, most of the time, is probably far worse than writing tools from scratch. There's a highly likelihood reinvention will introduce a bug or poorly-handled "edge" case in a from-scratch tool than if an existing, mature tool is used. When "bad things happen," a mature tool will give "a way out" that a custom tool probably won't have. Much like the honey badger, when scale and disaster strikes, it simply does not give a shit about how minimalistic your stack is. Good tooling can make short work of navigating out of these messes.
All the things you just listed are forms of consumption, not production.

The argument seems coherent enough to me. I'm not entirely convinced about the "centralized authority" part, but the "tools for consumption advancing faster than tools for production" seems true (and inevitable).
Can you explain how a tablet-form Kindle is more centralized and passive than one with physical keys? I don't follow.
You seem to have misunderstood. joebadmo was saying that the post-PC era seems to be more about content consumption than content production. You responded in the negative by saying you spent 6 hours consuming content, which doesn't make much sense because that would be anecdotal evidence in favor of joebadmo's argument.
There have been several white-label 8'' multitouch tablets for a long time.

http://www.androidtabletspcs.com/8-Inch-Android-2-3-Tablet-P...

For example - the tablet above has A8 Cortex, gingerbread and dual-cameras.
Oh, I thought Floating University was going to be free. Disappointed.
My original points of Google building half-assed products they don't care about was succinct. It's others on this board that keep dragging on and defending the company for some reason or another. Perhaps it's because they're employed by them?
Ubuntu Unity Dev Team AMA
Hahahahha - genius. I can hardly type this from laughing. Thanks :)
that's awesome, thanks - will hit you up once all the 'parts' are out.
Here's how to not make a fool of yourself on the day of your interview: Don't have the first contact with the company be the day of your interview.

What I mean is, make sure that you've talked to people in the company. Like others have suggested, talk to people outside of the HR department. If you need a suggestion for how to go about contacting them, I've had a lot of success with finding someone who works there, sending them an email with a subject "What's happening at <company name> this summer?" Inside the email, include a sentence about why their company is cool, a sentence about why you'd like to work/intern for them, and then ask them if they might have a place for you.

Not only have emails like this been well received, they give you the chance to craft your initial conversation with a company, and talk to many more companies than going through HR would allow.

In my experience I had a much higher response rate than I expected, and while many weren't looking for anyone, a follow up email asking if they knew anyone who was hiring often produced another lead or two. Best of luck.
You just listed four activites that are consumptive in nature. What was the last thing you produced on your iPad? Not just that, but even the way you use it is not the optimized-for case, I think. Apple wants to optimize you buying music, movies, books, etc. through iTunes and iBooks. Amazon is continuing this trend. Yes, the post-PC devices will continue to allow you to participate in the Web, necessarily, but they will privilege consumption over production, and centralized broadcast models over decentralized peer-to-peer ones. Because that's where the money is.

In contrast, the native Web on PCs is more read-write by nature. And Web technologies are making production increasingly easier.
I think your reply exemplifies his argument - you used an ipod to 'consume' media for si hours, rather than creating, which older computers may have been better suited for.
You might be interested in:

http://www.voidtools.com/

http://www.launchy.net/

Not affiliated, just a fan of both tools.
It sounds like you want a Galaxy Tab 7 for $250.

I'd actually be surprised if Amazon allows it to be reflashed (insofar as you can actually restrict it). That would eliminate their entire point in selling it (their ecosystem of content).
I have started to play around with this foR custom OpenStreetMap rendering. Carto, the css format, seems a bit easier to play with than the raw mapnik xml.
In that sense of a fork, all manufacturers of Android have forked it. I assume if they (or the person who showed it to MG) called it a fork that would be more significant than just a custom UI (which Android is designed to facilitate).
Try a different route. How about getting amazon android (what do you call it?) running on a touchpad. Damn knows how you would do it. Would be a lot cheaper than buying the colour kindle though and the touchpad includes a few of those features you want (but probably no software to run them).
If the story is correct and colour kindle does look like a playbook then I'd argue that the touchpad looks better too.
http://www.aclu.org/drug-law-reform-immigrants-rights-racial...

http://flexyourrights.org/
Jobs has been on medical leave since January and Tim Cook has been acting as CEO since then. Jobs just stepped aside completely in August by resigning.
Something not mentioned here, which I feel is always left out of CSP discussions: Don't ever offer paid-only content which enhances the game. If a person cannot play for free for extended periods of time and have a good experience, they are less likely to recommend the game to others, and when you live on microtransactions, you really want as many potential wallets as possible.
$250 is too much. Ebay/Amazon has similar specs 800MHz/7"/Android 2.2 for $87 and below with a free shipping.
It's not clear to me that people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read. I wonder if you've conflated having an item flagged dead as opposed to being hell-banned.

The only instances I absolutely know of people being hell-banned were pretty clearly appropriate. When I've occasionally turned on "Show Dead" and looked down the list, I've pretty much agreed with them being inappropriate, off-topic, repeats, or otherwise of little value.

Having said that, I have seen what appear to be instances of vengeful downvoting, and cases where I really haven't understood why something has been flagged, but I've not seen the nastiness you describe.

And even so, I'm no longer finding much to interest me here. That's why I'm doing two things. The first is to create a personalised filter for HN items. That's starting to pay off - I'm seeing mostly stuff that interests me, and less of the - to me - uninteresting.

The second is to create a different place for people that caters more readily to a wide range of interests, while still providing each person with things that they find valuable and interesting. That, too, is starting to work.

If you're interested in either project, reply to me here.

========

ADDED IN EDIT:

It was some time ago that PG increased the ranking penalty resulting from flags, but certainly it doesn't take many flags for an item to fall quickly from the front page, if indeed it ever gets there.

The problem is that with such a hugely diverse "community" here now, for every submission, there will be a substantial number of people who consider it "off-topic". My concern isn't the topicality, my concern is the complete lack of content or depth of so many items.
Not more than the old kindle, but more than the old model of computing, PCs with dedicated input.
You're right, but it doesn't solve the problem discussed in the article. He's not looking for a laundry list of emails he needs to follow-up on in the future. He (like many of us who do Inbox Zero or are otherwise GTD-ish) will only want the three emails he has to act on, exactly two weeks from now, to show up in his inbox on that day.
I agree with everything you said. The whole point behind technology should be accessibility for everyone. Geeks (guilty myself) tend to get into a bubble where we forget about the rest of the world. And there's just something about the Hacker mindset (which most people on HN have) where there more complicated it is, the cooler it seems. Instead of having the mindset of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.", Geeks/Hackers tend to think "If it ain't broke, lets break it!!!"

Linux Mint is based upon Ubuntu/Debian. Give it a try. If you're a Windows power user you'll probably really like it. And all the commands you learned in Boontoo will work in Mint.
Improving consumption doesn’t imply much about creation.

So what if consumption is easier? Does that mean less people will create something? Why? Creating something doesn’t get harder because consumption gets easier. I don’t see the causal connection.

(That central authority bullshit is just patent nonsense.)

Oh, and our tools for creation still are rapidly improving. Prices for computers have gone nothing but down. People are today able to buy a great PC and a tablet for the same price of a PC ten years ago. Software has become hugely more accessible, hardware has become so much more capable. Creating stuff was never – never – as easy as it is today.

We are living in a golden age of content creation and in a golden of content consumption. Tablets will help with that, not hinder.
I think it's largely just a function of growth. There are enough people here now that a tiny tiny fraction of them flagging can easily kill stories. Same problem with random comment downvotes. This will continue to be a problem unless we have categories, but that's also not without its issues.

Meanwhile, what was that picture? :-)
The Gmail Snooze Google Apps Script is another semi-solution; rather than BCC, it will make a message reappear in your inbox in X days. The difference is that you add a label to any sent mail that you want to follow-up on.

Here's the tutorial: http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze...
Countries/companies was a typo. Thanks.

The 6 types of companies Blank outlines:

* "Lifestyle companies", like the companies associated with individual professional surfers.

* "Small businesses", like money-losing corner groceries.

* "Scalable businesses" (ie, your typical YC company, "born to be big")

* "Born to flip" companies that are conceived of as features of some other company's product

* "Large companies" like Google

* "Social companies" with missions other than making money

The implication of my brief comment was specifically that this way of breaking down companies suggests that he's promoting venture capital.
This seems like a misstep to me that will ultimately hurt users and developers.

If any API incompatibilities emerge (beyond the normal API level that Android uses to distinguish between release APIs) then developers will be forced to fork their own products and maintain 2 separate release channels -- one for the Android market and one for the Kindle market.

Beyond that, Android will continue to fly ahead with each release and the Kindle won't be able to keep up without significant time pulling and merging changes from upstream. I'm not looking forward to continually only having access to last years apps because the Kindle is a year behind the mainline Android release.

Unless Amazon goes through the Android certification process, and keeps their "fork" as a pure UI modification, I'm going to pass on this. It might be bright and shiny on day 1, but on day 365 it could be a different story.