skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm from Sebastopol; sonic.net is a truly great ISP. I've cited them as an example of great customer service in general, not just within the (typically awful) ISP industry.

I now live in Tokyo; I enjoy synchronous gigabit fiber access for a similar price. (It's actually closer to $50, but that's because my whole building is wired for it, and the building management has negotiated a group price.)

The difference is, here in Japan, pretty much anybody in any major metro area can get cheap gigabit Internet service (or synchronous 100Mbps at the very least). That's because here we do have a level of (intelligent) regulation; precisely the kind of regulation that this article points out the FCC eliminated during the Bush administration. There can obviously only be a tiny number of companies who run last-mile cables (telco and electric utilities here). So if those companies aren't required to reasonably resell that acess, you will never achieve the kind of competitive landscape that drives rapid progress.

It's pretty awesome that Sonic is able to do this in sleeply little Sebastopol, but it's pretty sad that most of America languishes under with barbarously primitive connection speeds of just a few Mbps because of its dysfunctional government.

EDIT: My anecdote about their service harkens back to when DSL was fairly new. My connection was flaking out one day, so I called. It rang twice. "Hello, Sonic.net." What, no menu tree? I explained the gist of the problem. "Do you mind if I connect to your DSL modem and check it out?" Of course not. "OK, I'm seeing the problem. Some of these units unfortunately shipped with slightly incorrect settings. I've updated those for you; is it working now?" It was. Total time on the phone was maybe 90 seconds. Even getting a human on the phone in that time was pretty astonishing (and still is).
I thought because of various fallacious reasons, gigE was highly improbable in the US. At least, that the was the reason given when S. Korea, Japan, and major cities in China were blessed with it.

I've heard everything from geography (even in NYC, one of the densest population on Earth, we couldn't get it together for consumer gigE) to culture (yes, culture! As I understand it from various explanations, we're too culturally "heterogeneous" for gigE connections. No seriously.)

I wonder how Sonic made the highly improbable not only possible but, apparently, profitable?
What about those who bribe the electorate for personal profit ? What about politicians who blackmail each other for personal profit?

Is it not possible to profit by bribing/blackmailing a government official and benefit the public at the same time?

Please think these things through next time before you cathartically post that someone is "the enemy".
Sounds like a smart deal.

Cloud syncing is now something that Android (or at least HTC's Androids) will do better than iOS.

Apple really should have done a similar deal with Dropbox when they found out they couldn't buy them, but I guess it really isn't in their DNA to rely heavily on 3rd party services. Unfortunately, doing cloud syncing right also isn't really in their DNA.
Colocation Hosting: A Working Solution for Websites
Areas with high speed internet might see their house prices go up. If this happens, it might become profitable for homeowners to band together to finance high speed internet installation. Of course, they will need internet based coordination for this to happen efficiently. There might an opportunity for startups in that space.
I love the dickwadery, if you loved programming you would spot that editor wars are for fucking idiots. Grats on being fucking idiots.
Friends of WikiLeaks (Facebook for Revolutionaries)
it seems to allow duplicate keys but drops all but one. I have no idea if this is correct since the JSON spec doesn't really cover it. personally I think the spec should ban it because it means you need to parse the closing brace for an object before you know you have the right value for any field. also it means you need to keep a dictionary-like representation in memory to detect the dups, a list or stream of pairs wouldn't consolidate dups.

a nitpick for sure but several times I've wished the JSON spec had something to say here.
i'm not sure you can say that wikileak's goal is to effect change. their goal is to take information that was private, and make it visible to as many people as is possible. controlling the release furthers that goal. they don't seem to care what happens with the information once it is released, just that the release gathers notice. i don't think their goals have changed over time, they've just become more aware of the fact that releasing information is no good if there's no audience for the release.
I'm not sure why you were down-voted at least a couple times for this comment. You've done a much better job of summarizing what this article was about than the "spoiler:" above (which is more based on the title than the point of the article).
This analogy is flawed. Stratfor is not a government organization like the LAPD is.

A better analogy would be to compare the Crips and a private detective agency.
WikiLeaks to Publish Stratfor E-Mails
I'm another Bell Labs alum. This article seemed banal and backward looking.

Think about what a "hothouse of innovation" is and was. Back then, you had to physically gather people together to get ideas flowing. Today, we can do it here, on chat rooms, listservs, irc channels, blogs.
Abuse of the welfare system has been explored in the past and found to be a tiny minority of all people receiving it.

Depends on what you mean by "abuse". Most poor people don't work and don't even look for work, preferring to collect free money. That's not "abuse" in the sense that welfare rules allow people to do this, but it is behavior we should try to prevent.

Ultimately I favor eliminating welfare and replacing it with a guaranteed unskilled job having below market pay. That's the perfect way to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor - no work, no welfare.

I'm not sure how this relates to the republican platform - as far as I know, the two front runners (Romney and Santorum) are basically democrats on economic issues. But I haven't followed closely, so feel free to correct me.
Intel Joins LibreOffice
Fastest and Easiest way to multiply any number by 11
I remember them talking about their sources in the FSA when discussing Syria, etc. I still think targeting this was absurd; I lost sympathy for Anonymous after they attacked Stratfor.
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As a practicing scientist interested in open source scientific software, you should consider learning Python if you don't know it already. If you do know some Python, then take a hard look at projects like:

[1] Sage: http://www.sagemath.org/ (Sage is scientific software that bundles many of the packages outlined below)

[2] SciPy: http://www.scipy.org/ Open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering.

[3] NumPy: http://numpy.scipy.org/ Linear algebra for Python.

[4] Scikit-learn: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/ Machine learning in Python.

[5] Matplotlib: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ Python graphing and plotting library.

[6] RPy: http://rpy.sourceforge.net/ Python bindings to the open source R statistical package (modeled after and compatible with S statistical software), which opens up the vast world of statistical computing to Python.

As a chemist, you might also be interested in some of the following Python packages, mentioned in a blog post of Python for chemists [1]:

Cheminformatics

OpenBabel (Pybel), RDKit, OEChem, Daylight (PyDaylight), Cambios Molecular Toolkit, Frowns, PyBabel and MolKit (both part of MGLTools)

Computational chemistry

OpenBabel, cclib, QMForge, GaussSum, PyQuante, NWChem, Maestro/Jaguar, MMTK

Visualisation

CCP1GUI, PyMOL, PMV, Zeobuilder, Chimera, VMD, Avogadro

Most of the packages listed above feature performance-critical code written in optimized C or Fortran, so they run fast -- much faster than most equivalent proprietary platforms. Really, if you've not looked closely at what Python has to offer, please do yourself a favor and take a close look. If you already know a programming language, you could probably be using Python comfortably in a week or two.

1. Python -- the scripting language of chemistry. http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2008/03/python-scripting-lang...
Are there humans from Google involved in the review process somehow? Or do they just automatically accept claims from the copyright owners?
So journalists are evil because they're paid for what they do?
In the US, they will likely also have to battle expensive lawsuits from the (sleazy) corporate incumbent oligopolists (and the influence of their lobbyists).

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of...

It has been done some places, however...
is anyone clear or not? The Sun "Sunday" is the same shit scape that "news" of the world was.
Never thought that this would make it to HN top news. Is there anyone who haven't read this famous paper :P?
Anyone who is down on their luck can walk into prison, receive benefits, and move out as soon as they find something better?
Do only french journo's use vim?
without minimum wage wouldn't simple Supply and Demand take over and cause wages to plummet for unskilled workers? Compare it to software engineering, lots of demand and not enough qualified people = well compensated software engineers

without the minimum you are correct that theoretically more jobs would exist, but at a pay rate so low that it would create an incentive not to work at all. the government assistance required for an employeed unskilled worker and an unemployed one would be about the same, whats the motivation to work?
It is more likely that the police would press their luck against a suspect who does not know his rights and cannot afford lawyer. A high socioeconomic class suspect is less interesting to the FBI.
Leaked Email Shows Stratfor CEO Resigned Two Hours Ago Over Latest Breach
It's also a huge opportunity for commercial property managers. Wiring a building is a good way to attract tech companies that can afford higher rent.
There might be an opportunity for a startup in the too ... we-hate-telecoms.com
How to Manage People Effectively - 4 Tips for Small Business Owners
what publications does murdoch own in france?
I think it's sort of ironic since PGP was pretty good privacy.
At this point in history, would most users even be able to benefit from gigabit connection speeds?

I have 20mbps FiOS, and I feel like my connection is almost never the limiting factor in delays online. Sites that are actually serving at full speed load in a fraction of a second. Lots of sites are slow, but it's almost always the server side or intervening networks (overseas sites, etc.)

For the vast majority of content, 20 reliable mbps completely meets my needs. I can stream HD video with no buffering. I can download ISO images in much less time than it takes to boot a VM. My Dropbox syncs within a few seconds: I can't recall actually having to wait for a file to be available.

Not saying that gigabit internet isn't awesome. But I don't feel like connection speed is the major bottleneck on the internet experience right now for those who can get a > 15mbps connection. I'd rather focus on expanding the availability of that, before we move on to the next tier of bandwith-heavy applications.
google has ceded the lead here because files suck. users don't want files or filesystems. look to how iOS works for how most users want to access their files: they open an app and the documents that are relevant to that app are available to them. whether that data is stored in a filesystem or in a database, locally or remotely is totally irrelevant. google docs works like this. picasaweb (or g+ photos now i guess) works like this. google music works like this. the very nature of dropbox is to not be the ideal solution to the problem they are solving. they're the realist's solution, google is going for the idealist's solution.

imho, google is leading the market here by not being a part of it.
> Or we can assume that the company that does the hiring via 60 second challenge is not ran by complete idiots and they do keep track whether those hires end up being effective employees for them. Let's give them the benefit of a doubt.

You don't seem to be aware of just how disastrous a bad hiring decision can be. The direct financial cost is easily in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on how long it takes to identify their poor performance, warn them, and finally fire them (all the while documenting their performance rigorously to avoid frivolous lawsuits later on). Beyond that, the opportunity cost of having a poor programmer in place of an excellent one is even worse. It is far, far better to avoid a bad hire in the first place than to catch them later.

> Your argument seems to be that there are only two possible programmers: effective designers that are slow to code or fast coders that are bad designers (designer in terms of code architecture, not graphic design, of course).

I'm sorry, but you wrote a lengthy rebuttal to an argument I never made. Read my comment again. When describing the "10x" programmer, I never said that they had to be a slow coder. In fact, I explicitly said they "may be" lightning fast. My actual argument was merely that the most dramatic improvements in software construction speed are due to making better decisions about what to code, what tools to use, how to approach the problem, etc. And, in my opinion, the benefits of making good decisions about these things absolutely dwarf the benefits of being able to slam out the code in record time.
I think the impact could be bigger than you suggest. Communications between Stratfor staff, clients, and sources are buried in this data dump. There is an entire spreadsheet of non-US media contacts who had agreements of some kind with Stratfor. There is correspondence between Stratfor executives and their attorneys that was most certainly subject to attorney/client privilege before it was posted. This only scratches the surface.
Honestly I suspect Google is trying to grow a third party ecosystem.

By that I mean they leave obvious problems half solved or unsolved so that someone else can come along and do a really good job of it.

Cyanogen, GetJar, Dropbox, Opera, alt home screens, etc. By doing a 40% job Google leaves easy victories for third parties.

I expect the 'end game' is a better OS with a healthy ecosystem and is not dependent on Google.

Remember Google got into mobile to protect their ad market. A healthy competitive OS ecosystem would do this all without massive long-term engineering effort. Why build an OS and ecosystem if all you have to build is the OS?
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Like other HN members, I'm also a Strafor subscriber and my details and credit card information were leaked, so I have a vested interest in this issue.

At first I was pretty supportive of Stratfor, and thought that Anonymous attacking Stratfor was completely stupid.

However, a couple of things from the news release caught my eye. I guess I was naive, but I believed that Strafor was more like a news agency, and they would do their best work to uncover information, analyze breaking situations, and supply information to its members.

However, from reading the news release from Wikileaks, I get the vague sense that maybe Stratfor was gathering a lot more information than I thought, using it to their advantage, and then throwing a bone to its subscribers every now and then, just enough to keep them subscribing and generating income.

It certainly seems like there's a lot more going under the covers than I anticipated. The comment about "Control means financial, sexual or psychological control... This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase." makes it seem like Friedman is more than willing to make anyone their pawns, including subscribers.

Also, the idea of their StratCap Fund really kind of makes me question exactly what they are. I thought their motivations were really about analysis and information, but I kind of don't believe that now. At first, I didn't think the emails themselves were important, but now I'm definitely going to be keeping a close eye on whatever gets turned up from this point on.
Awesome! I'll have to pour over this as my summer project before the actual class next fall. Thanks!
Global Logistics Media - Damco the Movie
This was one of my CSE professors...he passed away the quarter or so after I took his Java class. I'd also like to add he was a great guy and incredibly knowledgeable. I think he knew he was sick because he gave me 6 or 7 Java books for free out of his personal bookshelf.
Took a peek at a few emails. It looks like some of their 'analysts' are what people call 'social media experts'.

I was beginning to wonder what kind of job that skill set can land you.
I used to be a corporate subscriber (tens of thousands a month) and personal subscriber (a hundred or so a year). Some of the intel I commissioned at corporate worked its way into retail analysis; this was their policy.

STRATFOR is getting heat since they're well known in the public because of their philosophy that everyone should have access to top-grade intelligence. I don't understand how attacking the guys who find secret information, analyse it, and sell it to businesses, governments, and the public promotes an open society.

Now we have shifted our business to Kroll and Dilligence and similar firms. They are stoutly anti-public. Not coincidentally their IT security is also top-notch. What was once public will now be very, very secret (Kroll has a 30-day email full deletion policy).

I worked for an investment bank. Found their idea of a STRATFOR hedge fund funny, but not evil. Another way to woo colleagues over from the public side while giving themselves a marketing tool against finance firms by being able to point to a performance trail. Mis-guided, perhaps, but given that Google basically runs a prop desk off its cash pile and has no problem with it (many corporate treasuries operate for profit)suggests it may not be an end-of-the-world conflict of interest.

Note: I hold no bad blood for Wikileaks; they're informatior brokers. But I do judge the guys who hacked them. Though I judge STRATFOR as well for being so cavalier with their security.
how exactly do you personalize an email to an angel investor.

Dropping blog posts etc just seems very superficial...and actually saying how they'd be the person to help you just makes you come off as needy.

Multiply that by 30-40 people, and it's no wonder it takes people months to raise funds.
At this point in history, would users even be able to benefit from 28.8kbps connection speeds?

I have a 14.4, and I feel like the BBS's and AOL chat rooms I frequent struggle to keep up. What could I possibly need double the speed for??

Not saying 28.8k isn't great, but the internet just doesn't need speeds like that yet. Better to focus on getting everyone up to 14.4k first.
Just curious, some of these seem like really interesting potential OSS projects. In particular, I'd consider writing a couple of them just for practice - i.e., I might write your plasmid viewer/editor just as a project to learn clojure. I imagine I'm not the only one.

Why don't you post a more detailed list? The OSS community might surprise you.
> You can either apply force (by making the urban poor work at some crappy job)

I'm not suggesting applying force. I'm saying that they only get money for doing crappy jobs. If they don't want to do the crappy jobs, fine, but no money.

> Looking at the number of urban poor, the current system isn't working.

The current system rewards bad behavior.
This problem, if it arose, can rather quickly self-correct. If people choose not to work at all at the offered rate, you offer more, until you have the workers you need. (Similarly, if you need better workers, you offer more, as long as it is still profitable to do so.)
Good stuff. Has anyone used SignalR before? I imagine it's a lot easier to use that instead of rolling your own.

https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR
There's an issue here that I really don't understand: why is this never used?

For example, the original C++ STL generally did a heck of a good job at exposing an interface to the 1997 state of the art in general-purpose algorithms. So, the spec for std::stable_sort was aimed at Mergesort: O(n log n) comparisons and O(n) additional space due to the space required by the Stable Merge. HOWEVER, if limited space is available, then it is allowed to use O(n log n log n) comparisons, since a slower in-place algorithm is used. [1]

Why? With the algorithm from this article, we can do an O(n log n) in-place Mergesort. I imagine it's not as fast as the standard algorithm that requires O(n) additional space -- although the abstract of this article does call the in-place merge algorithm "reasonably competitive". But it certainly sounds like it would be a better fall-back option.

Similarly, lots of languages have moved toward some version of Mergesort for their standard sorting algorithm: Perl, Python ("Timsort" is a Mergesort variant). Even some versions of the "C" Standard Library's qsort are implemented with Mergesort these days. I never hear about any of these being in-place. But the work in this article isn't exactly a secret.

So: I don't get it.

[1] EDIT: I checked the C++11 spec. It is the same. std::stable_sort does O(n log n) comparisons if sufficient memory is available, and O(n log n log n) if not.
Of course we can and will use more.

But in any optimization scenario, you eliminate bottlenecks first. I question whether the ISP to home link is the bottleneck in the modern internet experience the way it was in 1998.
I recently moved from Chicago to New York, getting 6Mbps DSL at home in Chicago and 1Gbps (yes) Internet at work. The difference is noticeable.

Regardless of need, once you have fiber to your building, 1Gbps and 20Mbps cost the same. It's getting something other than a POTS circuit that makes the difference.
This just happened to me with a parody video I created. I created all the music from scratch and obviously rewrote all the lyrics. And UMG review my video and said that it was indeed their property. So, I can not run ads against the video, which at this point has probably cost me $500-$1,000. There is nothing I can do right now but wait and hope YouTube changes its mind...

The video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJQAnamKeLs

Here is what I see:

These content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content:
Entity: UMPG Publishing Content Type: Musical Composition

These content owners have reviewed your video and agreed with your dispute:
Entity: Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society Content Type: Musical Composition

Your dispute is still awaiting a response from these content owners:
Entity: Social Media Holdings Content Type: Musical Composition

What should I do?

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.

What can I do about my video's status?
Please note that the video's status can change, if the policies chosen by the content owners change. You may want to check back periodically to see if you have new options available to you.

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