skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The metadata was NOT collected because the NSA cared about adhering to constitutional safeguards, they did it out of practicality. They were operating in an utterly intractable and vast ocean of communications information that could not possibly be monitored wholesale. When they thought they should transgress the line of metadata (assuming for a moment that "metadata" is for some reason less private) they did.

>Now the actual recording of calls and data of communications, as opposed to metadata -- that's another animal entirely.

This is exactly what they did, and it was in facilitation of precisely this purpose that the metadata was gathered. As it says in the article:

>Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.

and:

>he discovered that the NSA was collecting the organizations' communications 24 hours a day year round.

Over and over again, defenders of wiretapping and invasions of privacy have tried to suggest that issues of security become so grave or complicated that at some point our rights to privacy fall away, or are impossible to guarantee, as though they don't operate in tandem, but rest on polar opposite ends of a sliding scale.

Why do I hear a defeaning silence the moment I ask if this power is open to abuse? What stops the NSA from being ordered to gather metadata on political opponents, activist organizations, or news reporters? What stops them from learning what those communication channels are, thereby obtaining the power to disrupt them? This is exactly what happened. Doesn't this scare anyone?

Where is the differentiation between abuse and dutiful defense of country? Where is even the acknowledgement of the possibility of abuse? I don't see it, and until it is recognized, we leave unchecked the issue rampant abuse of power under the guise of fighting the glorious fight against terrorism.

Just as the technology enables the "war on terrorism" to spill over into dimensions unanticipated by the framers of the constitution, requiring that we supply our intelligence agencies with new legal tools to continue the fight, there is a paralell duty that we prevent the government from seizing the same space for the purpose of advancing surveillance state powers.
Sure, but I'd value a good general hackers opinion over a specific language specialist.
5 Things I Hate About USA- Part 1. Toilet Paper
I don't quite understand how this could happen. Doesn't Blackberry send all their email via Canada needlessly, when all Blackberry's competitors don't suffer from this flaw?
1) I agree that they made some online comments while hiding their identity. On the other hand they apologized in a way that makes me believe that they will not do it again (check their blog or the mp3s of the board meeting following the incident).

2) They are totally transparent about their salaries which are obviously only a fraction of what they earned while working for hedge fonds (around 60,000 for NYC isn't that much, is it?). Since they are trying to allocate donation money to the ngos which are most efficient, they are actually doing a very important job. Having worked in development aid myself I can assure you that the output (saved lives... )per $ varies probably even more than if you compare programmers in a tech company. Just giving everyone the same amount although one is ten time as productive doesn't seem like a good idea.

3) I haven't heared about any ngo as transparent as GiveWell (providing the records of their board meetings as an mp3 is just one example, check out their website for more).

4) Just because they have worked for a hedge fund in the past means that they are up to no good? Don't get the argument.
"On the other hand, if the potential foe thought that we might not retaliate once the threat served no purpose—that retaliatory "deterrence" would, in essence, turn out to be a bluff—it would encourage those disposed to strike first to cause a nuclear holocaust without fear of reprisal. We had to threaten genocide—and convince people we meant to carry out our threat—in order to prevent genocide."

Well, that's what that letter is about. Not having to build such behaviour into the system while remaining ambiguous about the threat.
Development aid is unfortunately really, really complex (having worked their myself). To pick the right one is probably not any easier than picking the right startup to invest in (if you are not a pro it's mainly luck... ).
Anyone Got Any Good Tips?
Congratulations on your launch. The concept sounds like a good one. Here are a few comments...

1.) Tighten up your USP on the home page - It's not obvious what you're doing at first glance of the home page. The big blue block of text in the middle is too wordy and hard to read. Try to distill what you're doing down to a pithy tagline.

2.) Emphasize benefits more on home page - I like how you've split up the home page to cater to your two audiences, publishers and recruiters, but the text underneath seems to be more of a feature list or a "how it works" list than a benefits list.

Try to focus more on the "What's in it for me?" question your core audience is asking. "Get access to the smartest and most engaged people" is probably the only sentence there that really speaks to that question.

3.) Emphasize sign-up more - My guess is that your main goal right now is to get account sign-ups. The hand pointing to the button is clever, but I think you could do more to make this stand out. Also the big green "place a job now" image under the recruiter section seems like it would be a button, but it's not. I'd turn it into one.

4.) Building trust - I think my first question as a blogger/publisher would be "What keeps JBH.com and the recruiter honest? How will I really know that my referral was the winner or not?" I'm not sure how you overcome this, but that was my first question/objection and I didn't really see anything on the "how it works" page that helped allay that fear.

Overall I think this is a good concept and I wish you well. It's a tough market right now but there's no time to start like the present, right? Hopefully we all have nowhere to go but up from here.

Best of luck to you.
You're making a long-winded argument against what the NSA actually did. My point was to look at the entire picture when evaluating such wrongs. Fix the bad stuff. Leave the good.

Now make a case for why we need the NSA. Then we'll be on the path to some kind of progress. By only pointing out the bad, it's a one-sided discussion. Nothing in life is one-sided.

For a freedom to mean something, it has to be delineated -- i.e., it must have limits. Can't cry movie in a crowded firehouse. etc. I'm completely with you on the freedom discussion. I just don't hear any delineation.
>> It is a functional straightjacket like Haskell and Erlang (no side-effects), appealing to functional programmers.

Not so. Clojure has three different mechanisms for judicious use of side-effects, including Software Transactional Memory. But yes, side-effects must be quite explicit.
That's valuable feedback thanks.

It's great to get an external opinion.
Why should obama reform something that helps US companies squeeze foreign companies out of the market? Most software patents are held by US companies and not by foreign ones.
It really depends on your application domain. Someone knowing that the complex thing I want to do is already in NumPy and she used it herself yesterday and here's a snippet of code pasted into my IM is priceless. Similarly I might say, oh, I wrote some code that does nearly your thing, you could just change this one line. Pretty much anything I need I could code up myself in a half a day or a day, but all those half days add up.

More than one project I've started in Lisp here (not to pick on Lisp, just as an example) and run into an issue that I could implement myself in time T or do the whole lot in Python in time T/10. It's a no-brainer. For non-trivial tasks to be completed within fixed periods, striking out on your own with a new language is a meaningless risk.
There's a lot happening with it ... I think it's main advantage is that it completely seamlessly integrates with java and inherits it's basic syntax from there, so anyone familiar with java or with existing stuff in java (and that's a lot of people) can get a flying start. Groovy on Grails is where the main action is - it's basically a rails clone, but built on a standard java stack so if you need it you can always peel back the covers and access it.

I too initially thought of it as a dead end - why choose a language that only runs on the JVM when you can choose a language that runs natively as well? But once I started using it I really liked it, and the integration with java is really superb (much more seamless than Jython, JRuby etc.). So it kind of stuck. (I use Django as well, but not as much).
If it's such a painful hell of a lot of work, why do it? Why have kids if it's impossible to raise them well?
"Given the ability to block them means they would receive less downvotes and make articles that a lot of people dont want to read"

Errr ... downvote comments I understand, but downvote articles? It's unpossible! Personally, I'd like to be able to hide or filter articles I'm not interested in. User blocking, I would agree, is antisocial and not in the spirit of things.
Startup Goals for 2009
I doubt this would work out. Social pressure is too strong in the US, even for poor people. No one wants to live in what looks like a 3rd world mud hut.
The Upside of Hiring Now
Conceptually, Its great...executing this might be difficult though...

Why don't you reduce the scope and implement it for a city... It'll reduce the effort required to bring it to a level where you could show its value to others...
Shoudn't those LiveSearchers bid each other up until they hit spotprice + 200$?
To log views, you have to change links to redirect to your service first and then redirect. But, that's not a huge technical hurdle. Other than that, I think you've pretty much summed up the basics. Oh, I guess the other thing they do, is convert direct links to the feed into something nice in the browser, and provide embeddable widgets and doodads. Again, nothing terribly hard about it.
My question is, why did Technorati.com not ever get into this market? It seems to me that they could provide more blogosphere tracking and hot spots if they knew which articles people were actually reading, not just linking to.
ExtJS is pretty good, but it's not as awesome as it might appear at first. As soon as you try to step outside the its features you're in for some adventures. For example IIRC there is no way to reorder tabs.
Load balancing is key to successful cloud-based (dynamic) architectures
Rainbow (Arc implementation in Java)
I don't know. I agree with Google on this one. There should be more people paying for this awesome service.

And to be honest, 50 accounts is still a lot. Having 50 or so employees in a company is a fairly large company, companies with that many people can fork up $50/user/year
The "software-expert" meaning of 'hacker' is really being pushed out in popular culture.
I don't think there is much we can do about it, so I guess we should think about another moniker..
postrank/aiderss could offer this service in a snap. they already do the polling. and they also do more analytics than feedburner by looking at other services like digg/delicious/stumbleupon. however, this is not probably ilya's vision
My advice to Google is to lower the user threshold, possibly as low as 12-25 and create a middle-tier pricing option.

1. Bootstrapped
2. SMB
3. Enterprise
The question isn't really "can they" but "will they"? A lot of big companies have very cheap office deals.
To be clear, the Fed is not trying to create inflation. It's trying to prevent deflation. The extreme measures it will have to take (such as the 'helicopter drop') might produce future inflation (it's not certain, as it depends on future demand for liquidity and the rate at which the Fed can recover the money it has injected), but in the choice between certain deflation and possible inflation, possible inflation will always be the right choice. In the choice between certain deflation and certain inflation, inflation would still be the right choice.

Historically, inflation has not hit the lowest paid the hardest. That's because inflation causes a reasonably uniform increase in prices, which includes the price of labour. It may be that the weakening of unions means that this effect will not occur this time, but a fall in the value of the currency suggests that prices should rise across the board, so this should be our working assumption. Usually, inflation is a transfer of wealth from those with savings to those with debts. It could conceivably help the worst off. In comparison, deflation will certainly lead to mass unemployment and will hurt the poor very badly, especailly those with debts.

You say that inflation will lead to higher welfare costs, but deflation will lead to far higher welfare costs due to mass bankruptcy and unemployment.

Furthermore, deflation increases the real value of government debt, and the depression caused by it will destroy tax revenues. This results in a higher risk of soverign default, which potentially causes a run on the currency.

In fact, almost all of the problems caused by inflation will also occur with deflation, only they will be far more severe. So that's why it makes sense for the Fed to pursue this policy. It has bad consequences, but they are minute in comparison to the deadly consequences of deflation and mass institutional failure.
You're absolutely right! I was looking for an editable grid in all of these kits and the best one was in extjs: http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/edit-grid.html

The only other decent grid editor I know is: http://trirand.com/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

Also missing from this list is the http://ui.jquery.com/
We use the paid gmail system in our office and it's the best thing that ever happened to our email infrastructure! Pretty cheap and super easy.
There are a ton of apps out there riding essentially for free on the Twitter infrastructure. This kind of rate limiting is hopefully a step towards Twitter charging money for applications that need to go beyond 20k/hour. While they're at it, it would be nice if they allowed users to buy higher API limits as well. If I forget and leave Tweetdeck running on two machines (home and work) I go through my API limit really quick.
How about using the bookmark feature of your web browser?
In less than a week you should be able to make useful stuff. These are the kinds of programs, though, that it is easy to forget much of what you learn after you don't use them for a while.

Rhino has an evaluation version which is limited to 25 saves. They have very good tutorials, extensive documentation and an amazingly helpful support team and user group.
Clojure seems to be the hot candidate in the "new lisp" space. I think that is partly that Rich Hickey seems a lot more committed to Clojure than Graham does to Arc. (Most of Graham's writing seems to be about ycombinator and startups.) The "100-year language" thing may also play into it; Clojure seems much more likely to be useful in the near term than Arc does, because it is interoperable with Java. Good or bad, there is a lot of Java out there.

Graham's a great essayist, but I don't think he can split his attention between yc and Arc and have both be successful.
WebKit == Mobile
"Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money"
Fighting malware with the experts
I really don't like the idea of running java in the browser like IT Toolkit does.
Congrats to both of them, and best wishes.
Why not just write down the url? I mean, that functionality already exists.
Obama plan calls cyber infrastructure a 'strategic asset'
The front page was very busy in my opinion for a stealth-mode startup.
Keep it REAL simple and lead people to more information.

Also the color, layout and stock photos on the 'how it works' page made me think of one of those pyramid scheme sites.

What is the validation model for the Job Seeker eclipsing 3 months?

Widgets look good.
Roaming initiative could make WiMax a true rival to cellular networks
Stylesheets (called CSS) are the ways of changing the way HTML is presented with a browser. The idea was that HTML would be for document mark-up, while CSS would be for how that mark-up would be formatted (although that idea isn't ever really followed).

You seem to have a news.css, though, so I guess you must've just missed the terminology? That's a stylesheet.

You can just create a separate one which will be used whenever the browser is the iPhone browser, and that would change the entire page such that it's easily viewable and usable on an iPhone. (Change the margins, the view-port, the font sizes, maybe colors if necessary, etc).
Has There Ever Been a Default on U.S. Treasury Debt?
Um, where I was complaining about the quality of the prose in the original article, I wrote "not just easier to read" when I meant "not just easier to write". Serves me right, I guess.
Identity and Authentication are Separate Things: Why Fingerprints Shouldn't be Passwords
Back in the day (on the Sharp MZ-80K) the 40x25 screen was directly memory-mapped with each character on the screen being one byte. So it was possible to write programs by typing them in to the display as characters from the keyboard and then executing them was as simple as calling the start of screen memory.
PieSquared, pg knows what a style sheet is. He was making a joke.
On my threads page, I'd like it if threads with recent comments floated up. Right now it sorts strictly by the date I posted something.
Maybe I'm trying to read too much into this, but I can't help thinking that the author is trying to reference our current debt situation. Problem is that I don't know what they would be saying. The US no longer offers bonds that have any value other than US Dollars and so the resolution doesn't seem to apply.

Maybe they're arguing that the US hasn't been as faithful to its debts as many believe. Maybe it's just informational. In that case, the full text: http://educationcenter2000.com/legal/HJR_192_73rdCongress.ht...
Dark flow: Proof of another universe?
Or maybe just a little envelope icon like at reddit.
I'd expand that to have 4 options: hide totally, hide but watch, watch, and normal.

Hide but watch will not show that story on the home page anymore, but will keep track of it for me so I can follow the comments.

Hide totally will remove it from the home page (just for me), so something else can go there.

Expire the flags, say, 3 days after the last comment in the story (rather than a fixed time).

And include a "view all" option of course.
Good thing your parents didn't think that =)

Having a child (I have one) is a big responsibility but the joys far outweigh the work. I think, for me, the thing that I like the most is it gives me plenty of opportunities to learn not to be selfish but instead invest my time and energy into someone else.

And I would submit that it is not impossible to raise them well -- you just need to approach it the right way and educate yourself on the matter.

Congrats PG! I look forward to your essays on the matter.
Program Tracks the Elusive Metaphor
Doh! the /news link is what I have bookmarked, so I didn't even think about just the index. Source has been updated to fix that.

Thanks!
This isn't directly what you asked, but I'd like to be able to make a list in a comment.

Use the existing code (blank line, indented 2 spaces) and add: 1 space with a # does ordered list, and 1 space with a * does unordered list.

And please add white-space: pre-wrap; to the code blocks.
Does anyone know if this is a full Arc implementation? Like... does it have call/cc?
Yeah, the prices are currently:

0-50 users: $0
50+ users: 50 * 50 = $2500 - ouch!
I'd like to be able to save a story without voting it up. Sometimes I just want to read it later and I don't know if it's something I would actually vote up.

I'd also like to be able to collapse comment threads. (i.e. hide all of a comment's children)
Employees working on their own business
"As predicted, the mobile world has beaten the desktop to the web of the future."

Technically, not really. Most people I know have the IE of phones: just some crappy Nokia or something that just text messages and phone calls.
Yeah I changed the name of that a couple versions back. If you want your old blacklist back, you can do something like:

GM_setValue('hndomains', GM_getValue('hndomains', '') + ' ' + GM_getValue('hnblacklist', ''))
GM_setValue('hnblacklist', '')

And then upgrade to the new version. In the future I'll try and be more conscious of upgrades when I change something like that.
My girlfriend got a degree in Industrial Design, and that is the kind of things they do all the time. Sometimes the degree program is called "Product Design". With Auburn University, it is part of the College of Design. They generally have a studio class, design products and make prototypes out of them. This includes poster displays. There is also a big shop, like a collegiate version of Industrial Arts or shop class at high school.

You may be able to find such a program at a local university and ask a college student to make it for you. Whether or not you are planning to patent it, you will want to have them assign all rights to you, making this a work-for-hire, and be careful about the co-invetor stuff. Alternatively, you can get in with a local high school and borrow the shop class. Back in high school, I remember those old custodial staff messing around in shop class for their personal project (while the teacher spent time playing Quake with my friends and I).

Lastly, I highly recommend checking out Stephen Key's articles, such as this interview: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/26/a-beginners-...

It includes a video where Key shows how he prototyped one of the ideas he had. There are other information in there too about licensing strategies.
I am sure the designer could make it look very appealing. Think about the Rocio Romero house or the Container house.
Publish job postings on your facebook profile
You should hook in a disqus API (if it exists) or roll your own email notifications of a replies to comments.

You'll find people are more cordial when they are responding to a comment via email. It makes people think to be more professional.

That's a feed, but per instance, per user. More powerful, imho.

Backtype already gets of feed of my news.YC comments. I see them in friendfeed, but not the replies. You should talk to Paul Buchheit about SUP too
http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/
I am a big fan of Paul's blog and I've been reading it for quite some time. Congrats on making so much with your blog! It's definitely inspiring for a recent college grad to be making so much from a blog. Hope to see Skribit take off!
You can't downmod submissions. And comment downmods already act as a filtering device by graying out the text of unpopular comments. I doubt many HN regulars would say that the site today suffers from a lack of comment downmods. Those who would choose these hypothetical filtering options would be choosing to passively consume HN as readers rather than as participants. Those who wished to remain active participants would be able to do so. This happens already, where a minority of "leaders" drive most participation and a silent majority consumes the site passively. The only difference would be that you'd be giving tools to the silent majority to make their experience more compelling by automating the filtering that they already do manually.
Inflation would also help with national debt, and considering how high it is, I think it's inevitable.

Inflation, and a weaker dollar would also help import/export imbalances. A weaker currency would help the US, and hurt outside investors.

I think it's all but inevitable.
Mobile Computing is Killing the Desktop PC
el O el.