skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity".

There is no integrity in lying to fact checkers to ensure your piece gets on the air.

Shafer:

[...] But what joins D’Agata and Capote is this: Both love “real” facts, but when blocked by journalistic convention from the literary effects they desire, they willingly leapt that fence to create whatever rules they needed to enhance their work. Because he admits to his shape-shifting, D’Agata’s work is harmless. Capote’s book, on the other hand [...]

[...]

That other field, the much smaller one strewn with landmines, rusting rebar and barking dogs is called non-fiction — or in its less effete incarnation, journalism. Oddly, without an accurate record as our anchor, it would be difficult to create fiction, as former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel observed in a 1998 essay. “Wrong facts and the truths derived from them are always correctable — with more facts. Fictional facts are forever counterfeit,” Frankel writes.

I believe in journalism, not journalists, and welcome anybody with a notebook, a recorder or a 94 percent total-recall memory to help clear our field and plant it with their work as long as they have a true story to tell. As for latter-day Capotes and D’Agatas, I can give you Google Maps directions to the land of fiction.
His picture to the right of his response is priceless in context.
This American Life retracts Apple/Foxconn story (due to fabrications)
He loved the Urbanspoon iPhone app. The iPad app, not so much.

Someday I'll write up the story about the time we met in person. Yes, I too got yelled at by Steve Jobs.
+1 for bitbucket.org. The free private repos for up to 5 folks is awesome (for git and hg/mercurial). Very stable, never had any issues.
Maybe that user is not available anymore or something else because if you try to download cristina-export.zip it sure works.
Will corporations prevent the Singularity?
If this will be one of the most powerful encryption-cracking facility in the world, can we just set our key strength based on it's computing power? So if they end up being able to crack 1024 bit keys, can we just set our keys to 2048 and be ok? And then when they upgrade, everyone goes to 4096?

I'm not a security expert (obviously), so maybe I'm wrong, but in general I don't see how they'll be able to build new monster computing facilities as fast as consumer hardware can be upgraded to use slightly stronger encryption.
Would storing a git bundle on dropbox be better to avoid concurrent modifications to your refs? (A git bundle is just a git pack file of commits along with new ref pointers in a single file).

Could you push to one bundle per computer and then git fetch all the bundles from your peers? Once all your peers have your changes, you can start making bundles from a later revision so that the incremental bundles aren't too big.
At first I thought he was referring to Ireland with the "Google/Facebook/Amazon/LinkedIn/Zynga" comment -- they're all here too. If you're at a tech event looking for a developer, the response is likely to be a chuckle and "good luck!"
Is it disrespectful that Twitter makes my tweets publicly available via their API?
I completely agree with you. I also think that "most people" never truly understand and instead chase the almighty dollar believing it to be the measure of their success.

Money doesn't motivate me at all. It is a means of surviving without self-sustaining. I cut my pay in half to become an automotive mechanic and it was the greatest move I ever made. I was no longer working for the dollar, I was working for the joy of fixing things. Literally overnight I became poor and happy simultaneously.
Quantified Self: 12 of the Best Self-Tracking Apps for Health & Wellbeing
Site's having major load problems, but the google text-only caches work reasonably well:

Link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.thi...

Blog post: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Your posts on this thread read like you are living in an Ayn Rand Dystopia. Nearly everyone around you works for the government? You are too dependent on government benefits to start a business? Your hope is that at some point the cost of living will be cheap enough that most people can live comfortably on welfare? There is such a dis-incentive to creating companies and jobs that even a motivated, well-spoken developer can't find a company that is hiring within any reasonable distance?

If it's really as you say, perhaps a "safety net" is the last thing this "stuck" generation needs.
Skydiver passes halfway point in quest to make highest jump
We are using Pusher and Backbone.js to create the live experience on the web and are also using libPusher in the iOS app.
I was expecting a funny joke... but no.
Privacy is not about whether something is public or not. It's about being in control of your data.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding that seems to be rampant especially in countries like the US that lack basic privacy regulations.

Just because information was public, doesn't mean that using it in certain ways without the permission of the person involved is not a breach of privacy.

I seriously doubt this was a type of usages Oink users explicitly agreed to (and no, burying such provisions in the small print doesn't make it legal).
His story reeked of dramatic license. His opening line that he "field stripped his Macbook (pro?)" was what tipped me off in the beginning. Firstly because doing that would be boring, and secondly because you'd probably break it after the 5th or 6th time since there are some fragile cables in there.

I think it's good that TAL will set the record straight. But it never seemed more than an emotional argument anyway. His story hit way too hard and way to consistently to really seem real at all.
I think this is what jaques is trying to say:

page-rank's design is open to being gamed which has led to an arms race of algorithm tweaks. A social graph has much more powerful signals for figuring out relevant search results.

this isn't a hypothesis. the first iteration is called "search plus your world" and everybody already knows about it.
I've had some concern about the quality of some more recent O'Reilly titles. Nonetheless, I've long felt and continue to feel and hope that their heart is in the right place.

I've seen this with authors who work very hard to make their primary mission communication and education, without "sweating the small stuff". And I've seen it at the top, with the way Tim has run and cared about the business.

It's worked, with me. Currently, I might be better off purchasing single titles than maintaining a Safari subscription. But it's nice to have instant access when I need it. And, damn it, someone has to promote a rational, useful model for ebooks. (Purchased copies feel more like my books, rather than a DRM-choked "license" (aka timebomb). With Safari token-based downloads, that even includes titles from other publishers', e.g. Addison Wesley.)

I now find some other publishers who likewise earn my respect and support (e.g. Pragmatic). But O'Reilly was one of the first to be there, especially in commercial digital publishing on a large scale.
Hi Jason, thanks for answering questions.

I'm curious if you analyzed your customer profile based on entry point into Fab at all? Do you see the same type buying profile (% of users with purchases/frequency of purchases) on tablet-first vs. web-first customers or are these high tablet numbers mostly a result of pre-existing web customers downloading the tablet app.

In other words, do cohorts of users signing up from a tablet actually outperform users signing up from the web, or are you just migrating users who are already engaged on the web to purchase on tablet?
You could reward recommendations that result in more recommendations since (hopefully anyway), people won't recommend spam to others. Then you could encourage good products spreading rapidly. But then there's a delay to the reward and users could lose interest. You could also end up dominated by a few power users.
You, personally, have full liability if your app burns the retinas of your users out. You also get slammed with taxes.

It only costs ~500 to create an LLC in NYC, and it takes ~48 hours. I imagine it's less in almost every other state.
"I was careful to say you "need a plan" for the real world when it comes to college."

The problem is that we've been told all of our lives to "follow our dreams," because "being happy with what you're doing is more important than financial gain."

It's a nice sentiment, but when you're 18, you've never lived in the real world and you simply cannot appreciate the trade-off you're making. This is to say nothing of student loans.

This is to say nothing of people who picked an industry that just blew up. Nobody entering college in in the early aughts knew the economy would wither in 8 years.

"You can get from pretty much anywhere in the US to anywhere else for under $500. What's that? You want your stuff? Ok, that's the real problem."

Before you can sign a lease, very often you need two months' rent and a security deposit. This amount will vary wildly, but in the above case, call it $1K altogether. Maybe you can find a roommate but uh now you have nproblems++.

You also need to find the right financial trade-off between living somewhere where a car is necessary vs. not. Maybe NYC is the exception to the rule, but cheaper places also trend towards less safe and less convenient.

You still need to pay for food, utilities, and continue to pay rent while looking for a job. Tack on a car payment and gas mileage if the only place you can afford is far or public transportation sucks. If you went to college, tack on a student loan payment or two.

The fact is that you must save up a non-trivial amount of money to go... somewhere... for some as yet undefined quality of living and no guarantee whatsoever that you'll find a job. Oh, and you won't have any friends or family, either. Maybe you guys are all people who make friends easily, but I am emphatically not. I'm highly sympathetic to people's unwillingness to leave behind their support networks.

Remember, what provoked this was an article shaming these kids for not moving. In response, they're voicing perfectly reasonable objections. They made the rational economic decision not to move because it's a lot of work and money for uncertain gain.

If we want to shame them for making sensible financial decisions instead of living up to baby boomer standards (or whoever's), I don't think the problem is on their end.
This is very true, but I think a company that is open sourcing it's source code is the ideal breading ground for an open source project. A lot of the marketing did already happen. This is especially true, if the main clientele of the company are developers.

For other ideas, maybe a new team will actually pick up the idea and continue to work on it as a company. I am currently working a startup project and we found a company, that was working on the same idea for 3 years and ultimately gave up. We emailed them and are hoping that they can share some lessons, but imagine we they open sourced their code. That might have really given us a jump start. But then again, as a developer I prefer writing by own code from scratch, to working on someone else's (by definition) crappy (most likely) PHP code base.
Um - no. I was entirely serious about curing cancer. I even did a speech at the NY Tech Council on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1x6VYEc1Q
I believe we can only solve out big problmes by using big data - please do not down vote me
For a great dev shop to give something to the community, it is an insightful gesture that speaks to their concern for their users. Rather than shuttering and issuing a 'screw you', they made the business decision to stop actively maintaining, clink beers with their customers, and give it away. How do you not respond with "cheers"?
Unedited: The New iPad Seems Like a Pass
One will sometimes see this in Berlin, at both the airports and at monuments/the Reichstag etc. For some reason they don't come across as particularly menacing, though.
Here's a youtube video about the system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJnlgM1yEU0

Basically they're taking pre-treated water from the city sewage plant and running it through their own mini-treatment plant to a level that allows them to use it in their cooling system. They do mention filtration & sterilization from chlorine, so I am wondering really how much different the cooling water is compared to potable drinking water.

The water they're getting from the sewage treatment plant is definitely not raw toilet water. I imagine Google is getting a big discount by treating their own water.
I also wonder why so many people forget about bitbucket. To me really it's the matter of taste, and there is certainly less differences between github and bitbucket than there is between git and mercurial.
> GitHub is great because you get to use git.

That's exactly my point. The article seems to be confusing a concern about Github for a concern about Git and then spends most of its time addressing the latter. I can (and do!) use Git without using Github. If my organization decides that Github is too much of a risk, that doesn't necessarily mean we'll be dropping Git.
Just writing that email at all puts This American Life in very small journalistic company.
A World Without People - photo-set
One Feature in One Month or Ten in Six?
Now that you know that this segment of customers have a higher lifetime value than non-tablet users, how do you intend to capitalize on this knowledge? I understand you can't get too specific on future strategy... but has this data changed how you intend to develop and market your mobile channel in the future?
Can you going to a restaurant and see your friends pull out their iPhone to snap photos of everything they eat and drink? I'd want to smack them at the back of their head.

Good riddance to products like Oink, if it fosters habits like Rose's, if his photos are anything to go by.
> Per your view, the employer can then claim your "thoughts" outside of the office as their "property".

Yah, and in fact that is exactly what they do. Usually they make you give them a list of any prior inventions you already have, and they claim ownership of everything else.

Obviously you can negotiate and not sign it, but it's pretty typical clause.
This.

I shot a wedding for a couple in the church who could not afford a professional wedding photographer. One of the most stressful experiences of my life. I promised myself I would never shoot another wedding.

(Now, as a pastor, I can tell you that I found performing a wedding ceremony to be less stressful than photographing one. Go figure.)
You should get in contact with many blogs who might find the app interesting enough to write about i.e. TechCrunch
You are mistaken. SOPA required a court order.
The Mono project translates JGit to C# for MonoDevelop:

https://github.com/mono/ngit/tree/master/gen
That's just the image at the top, the real value is in the article. I didn't notice it was there until I read the comments and someone pointed it out.
What a load of horseshit. Unless he prefaced every performance with a disclaimer that the piece was a work of fiction, his theatrical performances were no more legitimate than the TAL appearance.
Tell that to a country that has had a military coup, or similar. One day the military obeys civilian orders, the next day they don't. Same could happen with NSA. One day they obey the law, the next day they don't.

Wouldn't have to be the whole agency, just some small, but connected, group. They could sell information to foreign countries or, maybe more likely, companies or do all sorts of other socially destructive but personally profitable things.

Of course it doesn't literally happen overnight. But would we know about it if NSA/CIA and similar started going rogue? Seems to me that the government would cover up any extra-legal activities that were discovered so we'd never know until it was too late.
Content creation vs curation in a Pinterest era
My mom has an older Roku box that she uses all the time. It much easier to use than most cable boxes.
We do analyze this. We are finding that users who join fab for the first time via iPad convert to purchasers 5x faster than normal.
I feel very bad for this american life because they're brilliant. Extremely unfortunate.

I have noticed a drum beating on NPR since the piece aired regarding Apple's working conditions, on the news and the various podcasts. Will be interesting to watch for a change in tone.
How to build an opinionated product: Design the marketing first
Most likely most of their breaks consist of widespread implementation of very specific techniques on problematic protocols (say timing attacks). Even with the ability to straightforward break certain primitives, it's computationally intensive, so widespread crypto usage still hurts their dragnet ability. And they certainly can't engage in widespread active attacks, so I doubt they care very much about digest/signature algorithms. And why would they waste time snooping SSL banking sessions just to screen scrape the HTML when having the banks/FinCen setup a DB mirror is much easier?

Even if you were to find out, what good would it do? Let's say the worst case scenario was true, and all block ciphers are extremely busted, and their contents decrypted and mined along with everything else. Would you basically forfeit your life to be a patriot of humanity and publicize that fact? (Especially given how much kool-aid you had to drink to find out in the first place, and how overwhelmed you'd be by the reality of an industrial spying operation). If such a break really is the case, the private sector will figure it out over time. Meanwhile, IMHO, the only thing a freedom-preserving person can do is assume the abstract concepts of cryptography are feasible, and build systems with the primitives we currently have. Don't worry about them reading your present communication in the future, because if we're to the point where they're casually arresting people based on their ideas, we're boned anyway.

Also, to anyone who thinks "US laws protect citizens from spying", your wishful fairytale is only deceiving yourself. I'm sure NSA views the whole process akin to a quantum computation, where they massage the data on everyone using massive vector operations (which they don't consider interception on individuals, as it's a mechanical process), and then a kind of decoherence step where they read the answer. If your completely-between-citizens correspondence is interesting, it's reflected in the interest level of a cross-border relationship, and the latter is reported. They start a specific investigation (with the sham-court rubber stamp) and see the whole picture eventually. And yes, I know the NSA isn't interested in widespread de facto criminality, but if the only reason the details of your personal life aren't being scrutinized by another human being is that you are just not interesting enough, exactly how could you claim that you aren't being spied on?
Navy, Army open labs looking for robot, energy, fuel, mechanical inventions
I don't know about the specifics of this report, but Marketplace last month had another emotional story turn out to be false. Perhaps that is what prompted Rob?

Retraction: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/commentary/returni...

Story about the fabriaction: http://jimromenesko.com/2012/02/02/marketplace-scolded-for-a...

I listen to Marketplace everyday, and I just donated to both groups because it takes a lot of integrity to admit when you're wrong.

EDIT: donated to This American Life as well as Marketplace
They're definitely collecting information, but they don't use it.
Total agreement, everyone knows the best places are:

1. Bay area
2. New York City
This is why $75,000 a year is not a fair salary. Joel is intentionally hiring college students because they are uneducated about what their real job prospects are if they are willing to move to NYC.
This is a good idea. I have not visited the US in more than 15 years, so has not been subjected to fingerprints or this online form..
Do you think it is wortwhile for me to wait until rules change, or should I get used to the idea that the rest of the world will hold enough of interesting scenery for me to visit during my lifetime.
Btw, what was Oink about? I'd never heard of it before it was shut down and this Google story, so it's hard to find out anything about what the app actually was. They seem to be getting a lot more attention post-shutdown than pre.
I pressed Cathy to confirm other key details that Daisey reported. Did the guards have guns when you came here with Mike Daisey? With each question I got the same answer from Lee. “No,” or “This is not true.”

Daisey claims he met underage workers at Foxconn. He says he talked to a man whose hand was twisted into a claw from making iPads. He describes visiting factory dorm rooms with beds stacked to the ceiling. But Cathy says none of this happened.

I must say that while listening to the story some things seemed a little exaggerated, and the his whole style didn't seem very objective. But I didn't suspect that he made things up from whole cloth.
You might want to resubmit with your question in the subject line. Good question, but most people won't bother clicking and reading it b/c there's no subject.
Coding the Next Chapter of American History
>Privacy is not about whether something is public or not. It's about being in control of your data.

Um.. that's not what the word means. It's possible for you to not be in control of your data but still have it be private, and vice versa.

Google: Define: Privacy

The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.

The state of being free from public attention.

That's what the dictionary says.

>I seriously doubt this was a type of usages Oink users explicitly agreed to (and no, burying such provisions in the small print doesn't make it legal).

Depends on how the site worked. For instance, look at Twitter - everything is public by default unless you go to your profile and check a box that says "Make my account private", and then nobody can follow you.

Are you saying it would be a breach of privacy for Twitter to provide a zipfile containing all of my tweets I've ever made publicly? Which any person could get anyways by searching @myname site:twitter.com ?
Indeed it does.

curl -I http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/cristina-export.zip

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-id-2: gIfqnrhzuVR2HJIhT8Msk37Pp96qabi6Amtq6ZG9makBlT/d5z+bYivF27tac16v
x-amz-request-id: 9A1C02D63152317A
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:47:27 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 06:09:58 GMT
ETag: "6326a2bc6724b1566530f34f5d96bf26"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: application/zip
Content-Length: 212717
Server: AmazonS3

Wouldn't take much for someone to whip up a script to parse the search results to build a list of usernames to bounce off of. There's also a fair amount of item-specific data too.
Absolutely. I would bet we are one of the few mass market companies trying to think mObile first in terms of marketing , product, etc.

Excuse typos I'm on a plane on my iPad ;-)
This idea of taking guides like this and putting them on Github is really powerful and underrated. What could be a static document or perhaps a wiki, becomes a transferrable standard that can reflect the insight of the author and the conversation of the community. Also, the threat of forking means that if you don't keep up with current ethos of your subject, then somebody also can (and probably will). Well done.