skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What privacy concerns do you have? Real people reading your email? Computer programs scanning your email? Is it about ads and not privacy?

It's my understanding that virtually no one at Google has the access privileges required to read your email. That won't be the case at most smaller mail hosts. If the host supports IMAP, they can read your email, there is no way around that. I trust Google's security way more than most companies.

If it's about programs scanning your email, well, spam/virus filtering has to do that. And I personally don't care what some computer bot knows about me, as long as a real person doesn't snoop around.

In my opinion ads are not an invasion of privacy, and if you want free you will get ads. Google Apps for Business can have ads disabled, only $50/year.
Being one of the advocates of leaving: The article got it wrong for me, on various points.

First: No, Google is not evil. Nor good, for what it's worth. It's a random company that won a lot of sympathy in the past and became unavoidable (for better or worse) on the internet.

If someone cries that Google is turning mad, evil and creepy, go ahead with posts like this. If people start thinking about the implications of throwing every piece of their online identity into one corporations data center: Stop mocking that.

Yes, you can have less secure solutions. Yeah, email isn't a secure protocol to begin with and pgp/gpg is mostly dead by now, used only by geeks that line up to compare their fingerprints and passports, calling that a 'party' (Hey, I did that. I'm allowed to make fun of my own subculture).

That's totally missing the point. For some people it is just too scary to give email, calendar, news feed, instant messages, mobile operating system, 'office' aka text editor/spread sheet data, pictures, location data (latitude), travel data (maps, google tracks) and probably a lot I missed to a _single legal entity_.

We didn't even touch the 'use Google as openid provider' part here, which puts your 3rd party accounts in Google's hands.

I wouldn't entrust those details to my wife or brother and recently, without fearmongering or throwing my hands in the air and running in circles, decided that Google is not the right place for that level of access either.

If you mock that, if you call that paranoia, then you're insulting intelligent people making a conscious (and - private/intimate. Even if discussed in public) decision. The headline of this article alone is out of line.
Why did you even bother to mention this? I'd think it goes without saying that there will clusters of people who don't smoke.

Your last line seems to imply that you doubt the results of the study, but that's a bit ridiculous to do based on personal anecdote.
Just stay away from milpitas ;)
Test it! Make a landing page which identifies the key improvements. Make a demo instance people can try out. Make it easy to install. Offer licenses for business use, free for personal use. Build a community. See what happens from there. :D

You'll either become too overwhelmed without cash to support it and you'll scale back your efforts. Or it'll start generating some real income. (You don't have to use my suggested business model, but it's worked for many open source projects.)
Get out of that environment asap? Or ask anyway, maybe you can influence change on your environments attitudes.
One thing that works for me is to have a technical book as a pdf that I can switch to during compile/deploy cycles. The difference is that since it is a technical book that is slightly different than what I'm coding on the context switch isn't that great. Also, pdfs are longer and there is another context that I switch into rather than a list of new topics on Hacker News.
It isn't perfect but it seems like a step in the right direction.
I've found it surprisingly easy to start using two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
Is JSON guaranteed to be ASCII?

To clarify: Any "lookup table" that maps hex values to assumed character values is a portability red flag. When using them, it's polite to add comments to explicitly call out the code page dependency and argue (from a spec or RFC, say) why that assumption is okay.
Groklaw - In Defense of Anonymous Speech - Answering Facebook's Julie Zhuo
If there truly is an enviromnment that discourages asking questions because they deem them as 'dumb', then you need to work to improve such environment.

In my experience, the only time questions were discouraged (and almost always in the interest of time) was because it was otherwise possible to get an answer to your questions.

Can you give an example of the environment you would be talking about?
Schedule Emails in Gmail To Be Sent Later
twilio and tropo, while great in us, still has troubles with reliably delivering sms to international numbers. once they solve it, service like you described, becomes viable
I would guess smart because they ask questions. I think there are lots of people out there who just nod to be agreeable. The ones who brave it and ask questions are the ones to gain an understanding. (perhaps this is why nerds are uncool their younger years, they questions things and search for truth, as opposed to just going along with the flow of their peers, thoughts?)
That is a toxic environment rife with intellectual insecurity, most likely. Either ask questions and not give a shit about "looking dumb", or leave. If someone thinks you are dumb because you asked some questions, I wouldn't give their opinion much weight.
Not the first Facebook app to do this.
For example (link now deleted, though), http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334990, which I remember because I posted this comment:

"Oh, I just marked you/everyone to see if you had marked me, I wasn't being serious."
Porn is a $97billion industry worldwide, with the US only making up $13billion of that. The online share of this has been increasing as computers and internet have become far more common - and the privacy factor has helped as well. Depending on the site (single girl, live camera, niche content, adult "dating") they can be highly profitable with a high lifetime value per customer - enough where some of the affiliate programs pay out enough for yet a sub-industry to make a very decent living (I paid for my wedding this way - not ashamed to admit that).

When you say you don't pay for porn, do you torrent it, or do you use any of the "free" sites? If you are using the "free" sites - you are still generating someone revenue, even if it's a very small portion of it.
It's my homie moonpolysoft
Ah of course, a SyntaxError would take precedence over their broken builtins.
Frankly, I kind of understand where you're coming from. I didn't like the offensive rants and videos, either, and I think the content quality has taken a dive in the past couple of months, however there are a lot of articles that do make a lot of sense and even in his videos, Sebastian has some great points.
So, you run a Wordpress blog on your own server. You make it to the front page of HN and you get a lot of traffic. Your server can't keep up. So your conclusion is to get rid of Wordpress.

My guess is that you should get rid of your own server and host your blog somewhere else where they are capable of hosting Wordpress and deal with traffic spikes.

If you do want to keep your own server there is plenty you can do:

1) Use some Wordpress level caching.

2) Install something like Varnish (https://www.varnish-cache.org)

3) and/or load balance your server with NginX (http://markmaunder.com/2009/12/01/how-to-handle-1000s-of-con...).
CDN? I am not looking for a CDN, I want to host a machine not content.
Which is to say, asking questions isn't so much a marker of intelligence so much as of privilege. More than any particular subject matter, that's what Harvard is instructing its students in.
Tesla's work on wireless power transmission [1] was particularly fascinating. Apparently he figured out that electricity could be propagated through the atmosphere in waves, and the inherent efficiency (or lack thereof) problem could be solved by amplifying it using its magnetic resonant frequency, the same way sound and physical vibrations can be amplified via application of their resonant frequency. The result would be efficient wireless electricity transmission from any spot on the planet to any other.

His Wardenclyffe Tower project [2] in Long Island was an attempt to implement the idea, but was never completed due to financial problems. It overran its budget, and investors weren't willing to continue funding it. One of his primary patrons, John Jacob Astor, also died on the Titanic a few years later. I can't help but imagine what the world would look like today had Astor survived, funded Tesla, and Wardenclyffe successfully proven the concept.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
Gladwell's story is completely made up though. Rich kids are more obedient due to their high class structured environment, whereas as poor kids live in a dog eat dog world where they learn fast to fight for survival.

Sociology is fun, any just-so story becomes social science. even.
Actually, the issue of whether or not a reporter should have a special right to preserve the anonymity of sources has been a question of First Amendment law since at least the nineteen-seventies:

http://www.rcfp.org/first-amendment-handbook/introduction-le...

And, as others have suggested, you might want to flip the "bozo bit" on the entire notion of a "bozo bit", because it's a funny metaphor but a lousy rule for real life. Everybody is a bozo some of the time.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627 specifies that the encoding must be Unicode: "JSON text SHALL be encoded in Unicode. The default encoding is UTF-8."
I have a friend who is a doctor and works two weekends a month at a clinic in a poor area. (I think it's so poor that the clinic is closed on the weekends when he's not there.) Part of his job is having the right demeanor that people will trust him and actually follow his advice. That means projecting authority, the old-fashioned confidence and slightly superior air that people probably expected from a doctor in the 19th century. He interacts differently with educated patients; they ask him all kinds of things, and he doesn't pretend to be any more wise or knowledgeable than his training makes him. The less educated ones are likely to say nothing, nod respectfully, and then possibly not follow his advice at all if he didn't sufficiently impress them. (For example, they might drive ten minutes across the border into Mexico, buy three days' worth of antibiotics, and not interact with a doctor again until their condition gets much worse.)

I can only imagine the awkwardness when he mistakes one kind of patient for the other.
I feel that there are certain aspects of cs that I really want to focus on for my own personal benefit. Sure I could study on my own (and do), but being in a program of pure laser focus for 3 to 5 years would be deeply rewarding for me.

I would most likely study some fusion of cs and art. These days I don't feel like I have enough time to move fast enough. I am trying to get into gpgpu (via CUDA at the moment) and I need to get into hardware. Having the full time to do this, without needing to worry about financials with my current lifestyle, is my dream.
Investing in the fountain of youth
I'm assuming UTF-8, so the characters I'm looking for should match up fine (\u escape sequences are also converted to UTF-8 for output).
I wonder how often these loaners that are known to be clean before entering China are actually compromised when they're brought back?
A quick history of software platforms [2009]
Any politicized working environment. People will twist your questions to trying to make you look stupid. You can counter it by actually asking other people in the room to explain it and lo-and-behold no-one understands but that's pretty much a downhill slope as then you're potentially making other people look stupid.

But to echo the other reply, get out, life's too short to bother with that.
this is very cool! I came to the area recently and settled in Berkeley based on a PG essay, and I think it deserves the good review that it gets on the map. I thought being in the Gourmet Ghetto area would be too far away from the bustling student-y area with cheap food, but it's nice to see it got mentioned.

Travel to SV via public transit is a 2-2.5 hr trip door-to-door (maybe a little more, depending where, and if you need to walk). If commuting is only a once in a while thing, it's not too painful with a Clipper Card but maybe expensive.
Not strictly related to this problem, but if you are looking for a kickass application monitoring, that tracks your application's performance from user's browser to the function call on your server, take a look at http://newrelic.com/

disclosure: I'm just a really really happy customer
What is the best way to use a Li-ion battery?
I think I'm making contribution here, so I'd appreciate people downvoting with a click, would make their counter point instead.
Yea, we're actively working on tackling it from all angles.
I think this mostly comes with age. Older people tend to sceptical and challenge everything anyway. Probably because they have been screwed over a few times in their life and ask questions.
I will always remember grade 4 because that was the year when I was forbidden from asking questions. I don't recall if they were dumb questions, but there sure were a lot of them.

It's okay though, because I didn't learn anything from that experience. ;D In my second year of engineering, I took a cognitive science class, and asked a ton of questions. At the end of the course, the professor recommended me for a fourth-year research course in a cogsci lab!
I'm curious what you feel makes the environment one that discourages asking dumb questions. I ask partly, because I think everyone is somewhat insecure when faced with potentially appearing ignorant, particularly around people we feel are smart. So I think it's always valuable to question, is it really the environment that is creating this insecurity or are we simply choosing to feel insecure.
One Hundred Years on Stilts: While Seeking Eschewed Natural Grammar, the Grey Lady's Headline Readers are Bereft of Comprehension

Why is the New York Times incapable of writing headlines in one of the variants of English spoken on Earth?
I can't believe that this story is still being brought up. The concerns of the users were eventually addressed, data was deleted, and they apologized. What is to report here? This is nothing more than the media making something out of nothing, as always.

It's not like they were using the data for something other than convenience for the user. When the users were upset, they reacted accordingly.

Facebook looks at all your data for targeted ads, and Google uses all your data to refine their algorithms. All Path did was try to use your data to help you, and when they were met with resistance they back tracked on their decision.

Mistakes like this are made all the time, and this isn't even that big of a mistake. It's not like the data was leaked. People need to seriously calm their nerves and look at what Path did right.

Stop looking for a story where there isn't one. The real story is Apple's privacy policies. Path should have been forced to ask for access to the data, but they weren't.
It's worthy asking "Why do smart people ask questions?"

I think the answer is that when they don't fully understand something there is some sort of mental itch that just has to get scratched. Things just don't feel right until all of their questions are answered.

Also, I can't help but note how much these endlessly inquisitive smart people sound like the old gadfly Socrates. If philosophy has anything going for it, it is that it teaches one to ask questions about matters that are typically taken for granted.
I had WP Super Cache installed. Also the server isn't the only thing that made me get off from WordPress. I wanted something more social and Tumblr fits that need with the Like and Reblog buttons.
Asking for permission to access the address book won't help, though. People will just go right on through--it's a social network, of course it needs your contacts, so on and so forth.

The intractable problem is there's no way to verify what's being done with that data once it's accessed.
People like being paranoid when there's little reason. Even the end of this article was a slightly paranoid. I don't thing Gmail is shutting down anytime soon, it will probably last longer than any random domain a person buys.
Your physics example is not a good analogy, because your critique of the simulation is not that the hypothetical didn't use enough physics, but instead you point out a number of very specific physical attributes that were missing, and you would have been able to explain the effect each of those attributes would have on the simulation. This is evidence and reason based argument. This is NOT like the argument you used for object oriented programming.
$6/month to match Google Apps features (Docs, Chat, Sites, anti-virus). Plus the $6/month doesn't include phone support ($5/month does). $10 adds phone support, but you lose Docs editing. They spent way too much time creating complicated pricing.

Google Apps for Business gets you all the features of P1 and E1, for $50/year ($4.17/month), or $5/month if you pay monthly. And Google Apps Free gets you most of the features at $0/month.

Also, Office 365 has silly User Agent checking, they don't support any Linux or Chrome on Mac, even though they support Firefox and Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Mac [1]. My understanding is if you change the User-Agent string it works in Linux.

Silly pricing, silly compatibility restrictions, less features at a higher cost than Google Apps. I'm not getting the appeal.

[1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/office365-enterprises/ff6525...
That's the point. Corporations are not human beings, and they methodically exploit your misplaced compassion for financial gain and your harm. Cf telemarketers for a longstanding example.
I spent a considerable portion of my teenage years wasting away in front of books like Windows Internals in the hopes that I would be slightly better at writing rootkits and exploits than the next guy. It's a pretty fulfilling skill and meeting someone with real (I stress real) deep kernel knowledge basically never happens, which can give you a reputation for solving the unsolvable, which is both positive and negative. As you may have surmised however, it's effectively commercially useless to have reverse engineering, assembly or kernel mode driver development skills -- That considered, I'd highly recommend you give it a shot, 'Understanding the Linux Kernel' and 'Windows Internals' are some of my favorite technical books. If you have only a rudimentary understanding of memory paging and assembly, I'd recommend 'Reversing: The Art of Reverse Engineering' and 'The art of exploitation' both published by No Starch (Which also publishes two highly recommended, but certainly not my favorite - "Designing BSD Rootkits" and "Art of Assembly").

Best of luck!
> what nefarious thing Google could do with my email that is in its interest and that would cause me harm

responding to government information requests without due process. google isn't in the business of protecting civil liberties.

i wonder if they're filtering our email on a mass scale for suspicious activities, as defined by Dept Homeland Security? if they were, it would be classified, and none of us would know the difference.

heck, turns out one of my buddies used to be a drug dealer, i had no idea, and at the time he was all over my social graph. i wonder if it will come up next time I apply for a security clearance. I might never know - an old manager once told me how clearance applications have a way of getting lost in the system when things aren't perfect - once eyebrows are raised, you enter a whole new set of processes and red tape that nobody wants to deal with.
Kleiner Perkins Considering New Fund for Cloud-Computing Services Startups
How many times are you willing to hear the words "I'm sorry" from an industry before you get tired of it? Part of life is learning from other people's mistakes but if that learning was actually happening would we be hearing about privacy 'violations' etc from different places?
Over the years I've had a lot of spam mails from services that claimed to be doing this (but obviously weren't). If I'd gotten a message from this one, I'd probably discard it as spam (or a friend trolling).
always have the possibility of the authorities going in and snatching your box if they need to see your email

Encrypting your incoming email[1] fixes that particular problem. It's still not as good as getting others to use PGP, but on the other hand, it doesn't require getting others to use PGP ;)

[1]: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...
I went to school in former Yugoslavia and Tesla was idolized and given duly deserved credit whereas Edison was the guy who invented the lighbulb. We even had nursery rhymes about his inventions.

We were also taught that Yugoslavia was a major factor in getting Germany to capitulate in WWII where if you think about it, it was rather insignificant on the grand scheme of things.

You can't really escape the spin. Some are for the better and some are for the worse, but hopefully, we can sort things out once we start learning and thinking for ourselves.
Does anyone else think that the author could perhaps put that wealth of experience into a startup that ISN'T aimed at the tech sector?

SaaS apps for the tech sector are ridiculously over saturated compared to every other sector, go and find a problem for a non-tech sector and apply a tech solution to it.

Personally i'm in the process of doing this. One is aimed at the tattoo industry and the other is aimed at the property market. There is WAAAAY less competition because all techys seem to do is build for their peers, go and build for someone in a different market that doesn't know they could have a tech solution to their problem, they will throw money at you for solving it.

If anyone wants a further discussion on it, email is in my profile or comment here.
From the post itself:

"Email is simply not secure. Messages are not secure in transit: the protocol used for sending email (SMTP) does not require encrypted connections, so it could easily be intercepted by a third party as travels over the internet. You also have no guarantees about the security of a recipient’s email client or server. A hacker could have surreptitious access to a recipient’s inbox, or curious IT guy could be reading through email on the server."
Dataflow languages are what I'm most interested in these days when it comes to programming languages and I've always liked the symmetry between concatenative languages and pure dataflow languages (visual ones or just stream/flow based textual languages).

I've also been doing a lot of Max/MSP programming lately and really love working in its "passing messages along patch cables" system, but am frustrated by its lack of higher order objects and lack of aggregate data types (hell, it won't even let me create a list of lists).

What I really want is a Max/Pd-like language with richer set of data types (algebraic types with pattern matching would be a good start) which can be trivially and unambiguously converted between visual and textual representations. A concatenative language may make this a lot easier.