skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read it some time ago. In the case above, it had to be brought to google's attention and so I would say the logging and monitoring is not invincible. Who polices your log access monitors? I understand that gmail is somewhat distributed and policing remote sites in poorer areas is problematic - especially if one were to consider how much easier it would be to persuade google employees in those areas, should gmail/g+ be offshored in the future.

Should have elaborated: I'm not sure if a civil/criminal proceeding arose out of the case above.
I think they have been trying for a long time, but while it's possible to conceive the idea in a second, it might be harder to find the right algorithms to do it in an effective way. After all they make changes every day and study the response of users randomly distributing new versions of the algorithm to a small group of users that are effectively beta testers without even knowing it.
It is a known problem, that's true, it can be tricky. For example it is massively clear for webpages that have keywords such as "iphone" "jailbreak" and so on that pretty much have just ads or want to sell you something without really any content in the page.
But if you try to find, say something about a scientific paper in blogs, you don't want to penalize the page of a good blogger that has a few ads towards maybe a crazy crackpot that has their own idea about the universe and knows nothing about real science just because their pages have no ads.
Jonathan Coulton on MegaUpload and piracy
This gives new meaning to the imperative that you should have off-site backup.
Don't do a start up. Be an intern.
To be fair, he didn't imply a causation.
Hiring a Founding CTO to join me at Startup Chile & beyond
Two Behemoths Fall: The Costa Concordia and the "Gimli Glider"
You have a very valid point. I can't think of the enormous change the introduction of the home electric providers must have been. I mean, from candles to bulbs!

But then again, I think that the main difference now is the current rate of adoption of the new technologies. How many years took to build the electric system? How many years took the use of the mobile phone to become widespread? Everything moves faster and faster, and that's what is letting lots of people behind. They just can't adapt fast enough.

For example, my mother. Every time she has a new mobile phone, she asks me to teach her how to use it. I start saying, "Read the screen, think, decide and then press the buttons." Because, i tell her "if not, what will you do when even your TV has more and more menus?" Of course, she grumbles, but at least tries. And when she REALLY needs help to learn something, i help her.

And I see this pattern everywhere. Tech changes so fast now, that while a few people adapt extremely fast, and to some it takes it a little longer, to the rest, they're just tired of learning how to use new stuff, every now and then.
But as long as money-votes < protest-votes we win.

Your math is flawless.

Your perception of actual reality is deeply flawed. I envy your idealism.
Jolicloud
I'm not sure. I enabled G+ to manage our business page, which made my account visible. The couple of people who found it added my personal account from knowing my email. I circled them mistakenly (a slip of the mouse is all that's needed) and then uncircled them. They get a notification that I am, indeed, on G+ and am now ignoring them.

Knowing this beforehand I would have made a new email address to manage the account, and could freely allow circling. I guess I'll go find out now if I can change the owner of the page.
Apple's restrictions do nothing but prevent things from "just working". It locks down where you can obtain apps, what you can do with them, and can even lock you out of something if there's a problem on Apple's end (example: iOS 4 was widely considered to be unusable on the iPhone 3G, yet it was impossible to downgrade unless you had the foresight to use circumvention tools in advance of iOS 4's release).

One could argue that DRM is required for there to be a thriving market in media, and therefore is to the user's benefit. Now, you don't believe that, I don't believe that, and maybe even the MPAA doesn't believe that, but the argument isn't invalid on its face. It's clear that restrictions which only limit users can be considered to be good for them. Apple's restrictions only limit users, yet you and many others argue that they're good for users.

I don't really care about Apple's intentions, care, or pride. I see Apple as pushing the entire world to a much worse model of computing. The MPAA, on the other hand, is fading into obsolescence one way or another.
T-Mobile USA IPv6 Beta program
Supercharge your Google+ social results: Google+ Suggested Users.
Ask HN: cross platform mobile development platform for native apps - (Gaming)
Hi<p>What is best cross platform mobile development platform for native apps - especially gaming apps
I just listened to this in the car, and I must say it was really interesting. A lot of what Taleb said struck me as very insightful. Especially intriguing was his idea for fixing the economic crisis: Since any bank that is deemed too big to fail is going to have to be bailed out by tax payer money, the tax payers are the true stock holders/risk takers behind that bank. So the solution to this issue is to institute a law that prohibits any bank or company that is too big to fail from paying out any bonuses (alternatively, perhaps all profits from such banks/companies goes directly to the tax payers). This would provide a direct financial incentive for banks to stay small enough that they aren't targeted by this law.

I found that very intriguing. I don't know if it would work in practice, but it seems perfectly doable, and it does seem like it could work.

Edit: Here's a transcript of the relevant section:

It's very simple; you take the convexity and you certify whether company sales--you don't know if it's going to fail, but you know, should it fail, the taxpayer has to bail it out? Yes/No? If you think the taxpayer would need to bail it out, if it fails, then automatically the employees can no longer can no longer get bonuses. De facto, potential civil servants. And you can't play the long option game at the expense of taxpayers. Remember, my ethics problem is someone who owns the option at the expense of taxpayers or someone else. That would automatically force companies to be of such size as they won't be bailed out. It's a very nice pact you make with a company. You say: You can do whatever you want, you can pay each other as much as you want, we don't care. Provided we don't deem that you are to be bailed out. Now, of course, it's a gray area, a large gray area. For a lot of companies we know it's very visible. We know we are going to bail them out. Therefore they are civil servants. And now by putting caps on how much banks can pay in bonuses, people are moving to hedge funds, the risk is slow into hedge funds, and these are not to be bailed out. Great; let them go. Exactly. So, I am not asking to regulate society. So, government can use something to protect citizens from large corporations. Not exactly a rent directly in proportion to their size. It's an interesting way to limit their size organically, in theory at least. It's a way to discourage them from growing because they realize that if they do they will lose their opportunities for the upside. Exactly. They no longer can use the option, it's the option of society. Or do what I call the Bob Rubin. Bob Rubin had $5 million in bonuses, retroactively financed by the taxpayer. We have to eliminate the Bob Rubin problem.
Teachers consider the practice you describe (paying someone to spruce up an essay) cheating, but it's not clear that that is the kind of service that OP's site offers. Many teachers also encourage students to get critical feedback on their essays, and so they should. Many professional and academic writers seek out the same kind of feedback. I share your desire for the democratization of online education (that's the point of essayjudge) but there are so many sites that appeal to the baser instincts of struggling or just lazy students (selling pre-written or custom written essays) that I think any site that provides legitimate feedback to students, even if it's for a modest fee, should be welcomed.
Maybe this was the reason the Pirate Party of Germany and Sweden were formed. Someone had to make it their top issue.
Maybe some of the networking hackers in the US could be interested in this one.
Kratos vs. Wolverine: Who Wins in a Fight?
Reddit organizing Black March: One-month boycott against media
I'm not sure about the rest of the stuff, but the idea that you should return links instead of IDs strikes me as horrible. Your REST API should define a way to ID the objects it deals with, and a way to access information about those objects. An example of such information would be an API to return the URL for a photo given its ID (expecting the client to construct that URL is certainly brittle).

My personal best practice would be to build batching facilities for your APIs. Batching is incredibly important when your application data grows.
Renewing old resolutions for the new year
Hiring a Founding Designer to join me at Startup Chile and beyond
Better idea: Lets make it illegal for FBI to lose your data by shutting down a site.
Those things would only get more frequent and easier as the science progresses. I think the best shot to avoid a major disaster is to progress the science far and fast enough so that the consequences are not that severe. For example getting to a point where an "universal" antiviral agent (with an easy to update/modify "database" of targets) is possible.
I think he did, given that he was answering the "Why?" which referred to a claim of logical necessity: "The President needs to raise upwards of $1,000,000,000."
I actually think that the new unidirectional media monopoly that has emerged as TV and radio have become dominant is a large contributor to today's biggest problems in social thought. Before radio, local newspapers ruled and while they certainly do not accept input, it is easy to launch a competing paper; while presses weren't cheap necessarily, they were obtainable to men with reasonable means, and such men can be found on almost every side of an issue. It was common in the 1800s for a retaliatory newsletter or paper to publish and get roughly common circulation with the item whose claims it sought to address. Thus, people received both sides of an issue, and with some legwork could create a response and receive a more or less equivalent initial readership.

That changed immensely as we entered the radio age, where extremely expensive equipment was required to broadcast and there was some competition for a limited spectrum of airwaves. No longer could one semi-wealthy backer get a viewpoint published; it now took some very serious capital and/or investment only available by forming large amalgamations of wealthy people (or having a SERIOUSLY large backer on par with Rockefeller or other barons), and even if you got that together, you had to file requests for airspace which the government does exactly distribute loosely or quickly. The problem was exacerbated even further as television took over and expensive cameras, lights, and other equipment became necessary to produce a piece with equivalent credibility.

The internet has restored the equivalence and access of publication that existed in the days of paper and taken it further than it ever existed before; now there is almost no barrier to entry whatsoever to publish something across the whole world. Naturally, the corporations and interests that thrived with an exclusive voice among the people are beginning to wane and they are going down kicking and screaming. We will see what is ultimately required to root them out entirely.

Just think what would have become of the revolution if Thomas Paine's Common Sense went unread because everyone was too busy watching TV broadcasted by what were indeed 4 separate entities, but entities all friendly to the Crown which had already allotted them privileges and protection, and entities which were in identical businesses and therefore shared the same legal interests.

I think we have been thoroughly manipulated the last 70-100 years or so and I believe that we are continually reaping the consequences of that manipulation. Thank God for the internet and the freedom to publish which it restored, and which makes it among the most important structures in the world today.
Best iOS training course?
My company allows each developer to take a training course of their choosing each year. This could also be a tech conference. Last year, I attended the jQuery conference in mountain view. This year, I would like to find a good iOS training course to take. We are about to release our company's first iPhone application. I have been one of the main developers on this project but there is still so much for me to learn. Anybody have suggestions?
Inside Megaupload's Megamind: Kim Dotcom's Playboy Bunnies, Russian Nuclear..
I followed the modular init file approach at first, but keeping track of dependencies between different modules was a chore. Having all of my initialization code in a single file greatly simplifies maintenance: I could instantly tell what code runs before or after a certain line and I could easily navigate among sections of code and fold them based on headings.

Nowadays, my emacs init file is 239 kB. Is it messy? Yes, in some places, for customizations I don't care that much, it is, because each section I rely on constantly gets constantly refactored.

Modularization helps when you are going to share code among different projects, but your init file is a single project, what does splitting it buys you? Only increased complexity. Of course, as soon as functions get refactored and made more general and independent, they go into a module of their own.
This is pretty bad. I've received password reset emails from dreamhost in the past and the passwords are in plain text...I just renewed two days ago too.
After writing a post about how much value the Hacker News Google+ Circle added to my search results for technical queries when google turned on social results (http://thesash.me/how-google-got-its-groove-back), I got to thinking about how that could be applied to other interests, and then came across this. It seems to me that despite all of the hand-wringing surrounding the launch of social results and the implications for SEO, following experts in a variety of areas adds a pretty impressive layer of value to search.
Well, to be precise, this site was indeed shut down based on accusation alone. The operators of the site have been charged with criminal offenses, but until they're actually convicted in a court of law, they're presumed by U.S. law to be innocent. So what's the justification for shutting down the site before the jury renders a verdict? And if the jury acquits them (we don't know how strong the government's case really is, so it's certainly possible), will the government compensate them for their lost earnings?
Campaign finance reform is a bad idea. Not only would it also limit legitimate free speech it also wouldn't solve the problem. The real problem is excessive power in the hands of the government. Today congress has its fingers in every industry, to a degree that can easily result in causing the success or failure of one or another company based on their more or less arbitrary decisions. This creates a natural need to try to control or influence that power. If we take away the ability to contribute to campaigns then corporations and moneyed interests will simply turn to more direct forms of corruption.

In short corruption is a symptom, trying to stop the least objectionable types of it will merely drive it underground and more direct. The problem we need to solve is the ability of corruption to be successful.
Your own experience contradicts with your stance. You got from

>15 years ago, I'd have stood there dumbfounded..and asked for help

to

>I understand the whole system well enough that I can understand what is wrong, form and test a hypothesis, and take action.

by

>I spent years upon years learning the mechanics of vehicles fairly intimately

Clearly you didn't "focus only on your strengths". You identified a weakness - no knowledge of the mechanics of vehicles, and acted to fix it.

You can do the same for fundraising, and it may take years to become a guru at it, but it doesn't take years to start having some success at it, just as with the mechanics of vehicles.
This is already common with Megaupload/Rapidshare piracy. People upload password-protected RARs to prevent the files from getting pulled via hashes or manual inspection.
"You don't have to follow this exact formula but the basic idea is that you set up "stripes" of seniority, where the top stripe took the most risk and the bottom stripe took the least, and each "stripe" shares an equal number of shares, which magically gives employees more shares for joining early."

As usual, Joel proposes you use some common sense, instead of trying to come up with some perfect function. The important thing isn't if employee 4 was hired on Dec 31st and Employee 5 was hired on Jan 1st. If Employee 4 was working in your living room and working off his own laptop, and Employee 5 joins when you have a tiny office, provide him with a computer, have comprehensive health insurance, they're in different bands.
Agree. 4 years ago I was offered a position at a Norwegian company that used a modified version of Firefox to read various news sources and compare them, so this was definitely possible back then.
They could allow people to download their personal files by keeping the site up for a few days after seizing it.
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS or Indiegames: Dungeon Dash
OPEN: The New Anti-Piracy Bill, now with input from nerds
Teaching recursion isn't an issue as long as they explain why you should avoid tail recursion in Python.
Lofgren, Issa and Chaffetz were anti-SOPA at least since the first hearing Dec 15th (That hearing is the source of those clips). I'm not sure when you consider "serious pressure being applied".
I ran this calculator with two founders, one of which "had the original idea and told the others", the other "the developer who would end up leading all the developers when a team was hired". All else equal.

The calculator gave a multiple percentage point bump to the founder with the idea.

So, grain of salt.
It should be noted that Fuji was more on the $5 film roll side and less on the $30 processing, so they had less to lose. Kodak supplied chemicals and paper to the entire industry.
Maybe the problem is that there exists an organization which initiates the use of force to solve problems, which actually creates more problems than it solves.
Well the author worked at Facebook, so you've got to think he truly believes they were changing the world. His work on the 'like' button was that of a small cog working to achieve that change. And as often as I openly express how I dislike much of what Facebook does, you have to admit it's done a lot of good. Like SOPA/PIPA being dropped; sure the tech community did a lot of the legwork through the blackouts and spreading it through the channels of HN, Reddit, etc, but when those sites went down, all my non-techie friends were all over Facebook discussing it, and getting riled up over SOPA/PIPA.

And that happens ALL THE TIME. Sure, this was one of the most unified and effective examples, but you can't deny that Facebook is a hub not only for socializing, but for political and social awareness. It's been a great force in drawing back the blinds from a whole lot of mystery in the world. I'd argue we're much better off for all the openness and discussion that Facebook has provided.

On another note; screw Timeline.
Fighting for the rights of child soldiers
I agree with the comment about domain knowledge trumping technical knowledge here. It will only help for you to learn how to code, but you definitely do not need to do so. If you have your own capital or sources of funding, it would seem to me to be counterproductive to spend a lot of time becoming proficient in a craft when you could work with a partner on it. Your instinct to find a developer you can work with seems to me to be the correct direction to go in, while you spend some time familiarizing yourself with the development world.
I thought it was possible to hide who you have in your circles. I know I can for a page, but haven't looked for my personal account.
well nnoremap ; : is a good way to do that and keep space open for other things unless you use ; for something more useful.
There's also the flip side: when everyone can say something, they do, and we get a ton of cat pictures and other... less intellectually stimulating material. Or more pungently: Opinions are like ----, everyone's got one, and they don't always smell good.

There's some level of value in having some barrier to competition, it discourages the apathetic and very casual participant and encourages a higher signal:noise ratio in the discussion discussion.

Well, at least in my opinion. :)
I'm not sure quite where you're going. You agree that having a client construct its own URLs from IDs is brittle. But then you propose an API to turn photo IDs into URLs—but that service itself lives at a particular URL, and is equally subject to change!

Can you explain a bit more? I'm just surprised because returning URLs (not IDs) is a fundamental idea of proper REST.
Two points:

1. It's not always about the salary for employees. Some people just don't have the DNA to work at the type of company who gives the 120k salary ( assuming large-co ). They like small companies, being empowered, and all of the other benefits of being part of a team building something. They expect to get 70k and not recoup the difference because they consciously "buy" the lifestyle with the difference in pay. They are driven by the passion of the founder and want to be involved in building "something big". They can't miss the chance to get this experience that would take years in a big company.

This type of employee sees equity in two parts: First as an emotional connection that they're working on something they "own" and second as the dream of a potential payout that gives them the vision / hope of a great future. Both are important emotional motivators that enable the team to gather round a vision and kick-ass nights and weekends to make something valuable.

A startup employee who says, "4%, so you need to sell at 15m or i'm out of here…" is the same person who says they should pay less for electricity because they didn't use as many lights as you. That employee shouldn't be choosing to work at startup A because they offered offered 5k more salary and 1% more equity than startup B. Which one are they passionate about? Where do they want to spend their life for the next few years? The equity is just gambling.

2. Not all founders will share the risk equally even if they all work full-time, quit their jobs, etc.

Scenario A: Founder A is a serial entrepreneur with a few M in the bank while Founder B is an engineer who needs a paycheck. Does Founder A give B 50% or does he just pay him for his work as employee #1?

Scenario B: Founder A doesn't take salary from the company but has a consulting gig that pays 10k/month and takes ~4/hrs a week. Founder B is wealthy and doesn't take salary but doesn't need to spend 4-8 hours a week doing "other obligations" and says Founder A isn't dedicated.

Things get more complex once people become serial entrepreneurs.
This HN post is a discussion about data expressions leaner than JSON. I believe the points I've made contributes to it and I've never said such compactness is more preferable. It's merely an observation.
Any company that gets a few hundred million users is changing the world in some manner. But before the said company gets the few hundred million users, it must get 100 user and then a 1,000. I'd argue facebook at 1,000 users would not pass the author's greatness test. And yet, you can't have hundreds of millions of users before you have 1,000 of them.