skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hear me now, believe me later: If you keep your customer data on your servers, it behooves you to host your servers outside the USA.

If you do this now, while you're a startup, you'll have a lot less hassle in the future when you're losing customers because of jurisdictional problems.

Right now, people are only barely aware of the growing surveillance state in the USA. They're all aware of it, of course, but they think that only terrorists have to worry. In the last couple years, increasingly the government has gone after regular people, like hip hop blog authors, and people using megaupload to avoid emails file size limits.

I'm sure for many of you, you don't care cause you're hosting cat pictures or whatnot. But if you've got customer confidential data, especially financial data, it would be a good idea to find a jurisdiction that still respects privacy.

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but my casual explorations indicate that Iceland might be a good jurisdiction.
Looks like many of us had the same idea here. I've been trying to hack together iOS OCR libraries but realised it's actually quite doable without, so derailed a little and therefore got beaten to the post by you all :-) My thought being that the lowest level of friction always wins.

The other option would be to use some magic similar to Dropbox's Camera Upload to automatically save screenshots in the cloud, check whether they're Letterpress, and run server side analysis with a push notification. Feels like a gaping privacy hole there, so I didn't investigate.

My motivation is that a lot of the opponents I've been playing are coming up with the craziest words (and I'm a fairly literate person and regular Scrabble player). At that point, it just boils down to who has the best cheat program :-)
Some elements of US seem determined to destroy any advantage that the US has for some tech companies.

Some tiddly micro-nation will get some decent bandwidth, implement strict privacy laws, and become Switzerland for data.
Whatever. " Not one Microsoft product on Kaspersky’s top 10" implies that Microsoft products are secure. They are not.
I don't really see the point. While looking for a job in the Bay Area, I only met extremely cool and open people. Sure, the VC world might be a bit different, but I don't know where this idea that entrepreneurs are "douches" comes from. Maybe I happened to meet the only good ones of the lot, but I highly doubt it
It's against their TOS.
So it's the same libel laws that we were regarding as batshit insane just a few months ago, when they were being used to silence scientists and journalists. But since they're now being used against a company some people don't like, the tune has changed to "you don't mess with the UK courts", "they had it coming", "my judge can beat up your judge", and similar outbursts of vicarious machismo. I find the tribalism in the tech community reprehensible.
My opinion is the same as Rick Falkvinge's: "The role of any entrepreneur is to make money given the contemporary constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties, even if - and perhaps especially if - they are unable to make money in the face of sustained civil liberties."
ParaBlu - Create your own, personal cloud
The US government has taken upon itself the power to go thru safety deposit boxes at any time, for any reason, in recent years. They say it's necessary to "fight terrorism" and "money laundering" (which is a "crime" whose definition is so flexible that you can get a conviction of anyone for it.)

Don't confuse what the constitution says with what the current "legal perspective" is. Under the constitution, most of the government is illegal.

Since the US Federal government doesn't follow the law, there's pretty much no limit to what they can do.

Hell, in the megaupload case they violated the laws of New Zealand and the USA, and still are not giving people the illegally seized data back.
This is why I avoid 4 and 5 platter drives like the plague. They tend to overheat and die faster no matter how you try to cool them, and I'm not sure why: I'm pretty sure the drives aren't intentionally defective, and I doubt the manufacturers haven't compensated for the additional load on the spindle motor and the power bus.
Missing gamma rays were abducted by light from the first stars
Yeah I didn't bother downloading the file -- but looks like they bailed on it after awhile.
I've used http://www.aicipc.com/ for low-end. Or Chenbro, or Antec. (and eBay, or craigslist, or otherwise sourcing used stuff getting thrown out at a datacenter)
Besides Supermicro and Chenbro and Dell and HP and IBM and (whats left of) Sun, who else is there to buy from? There doesn't seem to be any other brands anymore.

ASUS makes server mobos, but not cases (I'm not sure who's cases they're using for barebones units), and Antec makes low end server cases, but no barebones, and Intel makes pretty horrid server mobos but use someone else's cases for barebones.
how often it fsyncs that log?
This is an important point. Elections follow similar patterns every cycle, including much bravado. Silver totally disrupts that with data--it's not just the punditry that is angry with him, it's political operatives. He's pulling the curtain back and revealing the "wizard of Oz", so to speak.

If you really want to know which side feels less-than-confident about their chances, the best indicator is "leaks" from campaign insiders that talk about the candidates' future plans. Laying the groundwork early is an irresistible urge for those who think they might be in trouble.
What would that achieve? The people making the decisions are in the US, outside of the UK's jurisdiction. So the court would have to go after some minion in the UK office, punishing someone for the sake of punishing someone rather than for the sake of justice.
Disclaimer: I'm a newbie in Haskell. I do, however, have experience in Java, Python, Javascript, and even C/C++.

My understanding is that you claim that all these languages can be made to offer you the same benefits as Haskell. I hope I'm not misrepresenting your position, but this is preposterous.

None of these are built around the concept of dumb, immutable data structures and stand-alone function (C/C++ can work with immutable data structures, but most data structures I have seen are mutable). Java is almost completely designed around mutable data structures with associated behaviour (objects), up to the point where you don't have standalone functions.

So, sure, you can have copy constructors everywhere, and static methods (say bye bye to dependency injection...). But it's not idiomatic code. You are fighting against the language and the ecosystem, and the only thing that will likely result is inefficient, bloated code which will get refactored out when it needs to be modified by somebody else than you.

Now, maybe you limit this to your API, but claiming that "the backend implementation is irrelevant for consumers" is a cop-out. Immutable data buys you safety. Maybe you know your code is safe, you don't have any dangling pointer issue anywhere, no concurrency issue, etc. Unfortunately, this might very well not be the case next time you or somebody else refactors your code.

There are certainly reasonable arguments to be made against Haskell (learning curve, Cabal, size of the ecosystem, difficulty of reasoning about performance...). But claiming you get the same benefits in terms of safety out of traditional imperative languages is not one of them. Not to mention higher-level functions, etc, that you certainly are not about to experiment in Java.
Dotcom wants to lay some fibre
Star Citizen's Chris Roberts discusses upping the ante on PC gaming
Please name an individual person who has been forced.
as I said to dasil003, it's not really about behaviour, it's about genes. to reply to your post: we have a better understanding of the world compared to the other animals so maybe it simply happened that at a given time we understood that cooperation allows you to gain an unfair advantage vs single individuals and so on (in some way you need to keep that cooperation going).

my point is that it seems to me that exploitation of weaknesses is the central theme of evolution and it doesn't mix well with fairness. then again, I don't study biology so take my words with a grain of salt.
Ask HN: I have a good idea and money. How should I start?
I have an idea, which I think 99% will be a successful startup. I'm medical student now in Germany, and I can't code. I saved up money in last year in amount of I think is enough to hire 1-2 people (such as coders, designers).

But I don't know how to start, where to start, what to do in the beginning.

Should I just hire a hacker? Should I find a technical co-founder? Should I do it myself at the beginning and then grow slowly? or apply for incubators? (I've heard here in Germany are also some of them) or speak to someone? I appreciate any kind of advice.
This was a night project which I built in a couple of months. I wanted to be able to auction things from my website, and didn't want to use eBay for various reasons.

Any feedback/comments are welcome as usual.
> You should overthink how you put your loyaltys.

You should think harder about how you choose to phrase a sentence. "Overthink how you put your loyaltys"? C'mon.
It's balls, not bandwidth that are the concern.

Iceland and Switzerland are possibilities. As is panama.

Right now, the US has managed to violate he privacy laws of almost every country- famously Switzerland bank secrecy is no more.

But the decade of bullying other countries in the name of "terrorism" is not making a lot of friends, and as the power structures in the world shift, eventually someone will get the balls to stand up to the USA.

Panama might be that country, because China is heavily invested in the expansion of the panama canal. The canal is a massive proportion of the countries economy, and much of the economy that isn't the canal is indirectly boosted by the canal.

With China as a strategic partner, they may be willing to stand up to the USA. Not now, not yet, but in 5 to 10 years.

Europe and the US are both in the middle of massive financial crosses, which will likely result in the destruction of both currencies, and a significant amount of damage to asia as well... but as a result, confiscatory tax policies will go into effect and capital flight from these regions will accelerate. The diminished demand will hurt asia and south america, but increasingly businesses will relocate to those regions.
The only ones hurt by low pricing will be the manufacturers. Companies with no software expertise and no way to differentiate themselves (basically all the Android OEMs at the moment) will become the Dells and the HPs of the mobile space.
I like Ariely but he's off the mark here, and ironically I think his "conversion" is just as much a rationalization as any he represented in this post.

It sucks to work hard on something that you're not renumerated for to the degree you'd like. Suddenly maybe you're a big enough name that this isn't simply due to obscurity, and you resent the fact that people got something out of your effort without paying you for it. But the only thing obligating them to do so in an absolute sense is copyright, and the moral compass of great swaths of the general public seems to have evolved quite decisively beyond it, and as problematic as that is for the current model of creative business I doubt it will change any time soon.
I'm no economist but I suspect it has to do with an innate understanding of the value of the bits in and of themselves, which due to the low cost of reproduction, is practically zero. This causes cognitive dissonance in some, who believe it is their moral duty to support the originators of those bits by purchasing them through on online store, but apart from the few who actually take an overtly principled stance on the matter, I suspect most who prefer this mode of distribution actually do so because what they are really buying is the convenience and quality of the transaction.

So yeah, artists deserve a fair shake in all this. But perhaps it's more sensible to recognize the market is shifting and that the artists and publishers of the future are going to need to take new approaches toward monetization.
> I'll self-appoint as an intelligent voter. I think you might be one too. The problem is that not everyone is.

That sounds like a dictatorship.

> Steven Hawking --or someone like him-- could never become president.

FDR and polio.

Anyways, the fundamental problem with your proposal is that every candidate is still going to be inclined to act as close as possible to how they currently act while still staying with in the rule established. They will want to do this because that is how they get votes. The problem is the electorate not the candidates or the system, the people get the candidate they collectively want, and in many ways deserve.
Forcing people to say something they disagree with is very dangerous. Reminds me of the ancient Catholic Church and their struggles with scientists.

What legal remedy do you feel should be available to Samsung in this case? Apple made a claim in its advertising that was found to be untruthful under the law. Why isn't it fair that they be required to publish a retraction?

Bear in mind that the UK does not have anything resembling the First Amendment in the US Constitution, and even in the US, libel in particular and false advertising in general are not considered eligible for "free speech" defenses.
This only works if you are a top-down thinker. Many people are bottom-up thinkers.
since you have some money saved up, you can hire someone to build you a working prototype for cheap off of like odesk or elance. Once you have that, you can start demoing it and improving it based on user feedback and then possibly team up with someone who has technical skills to turn it into a full fledged product.
This was a night project which I built in a couple of months. I wanted to be able to auction things from my website, and didn't want to use eBay for various reasons.

I am not sure if such a thing is actually needed by anyone other than me, but it was kinda fun building. I'm going to use it for a couple of things and market it a bit. It may live or die based on the general enthusiasm.

Feedback/comments are welcome as usual.
Eliminate ego, don't focus on k, and understand engaged users
> as junction temperature rises so does Ron, which creates more heat

What's interesting about this is that bipolar transistor has the opposite property -- as it heats up, resistance decreases -- and yet this opposite property causes the same problems with thermal runaway. (Okay, when talking about bipolar transistors we don't really talk about "resistance", but if you know that then you probably know what I'm going to say anyway...)

When hooked up to a load with a relatively constant voltage, there will also be a relatively constant voltage on the transistor. As the bipolar transistor heats up, the resistance decreases and more current flows through the transistor, and the transistor will dissipate power according to the law P=V^2/R. So once a transistor gets hot, it gets hotter until it blows.

The question is, "what kind of load looks like a voltage source?" There's actually a quite common load -- any amplifier with parallel output transistors will look like it's driving a constant voltage load, from the perspective of one of the parallel transistors. Basically, hooking up bipolar transistors in parallel does NOT multiply the power rating as you would think, because thermal runaway might cause one of the transistors to dissipate all the power.
Hope to see the frameworks on the Web.
Also, his modeling is MUCH more accurate for presidential races, where there is more polling data, and thus a lower sampling error.
Currently, mostly students, since course websites are kind of hard to find.
Well, if you get three-five small machines, put CouchBase on them, and maybe even install the CBFS (couchbase filesystem) project, do you not have a private cloud? Replication, failover, etc.

You certainly have a private cluster.

While "cloud" is associated with living in some datacenter somewhere, it is not a precise technical term, and there's a lot of marketing towards businesses to "build an enterprise cloud" (where it's a private cluster in a datacenter or building owned by the business.)

You seem to imply that there's a minimum latency between your personal machine and the "cloud" machines for the cloud term to apply. Or just that the servers have to be owned by someone else?

I think the real meaning (or intended) for "cloud" is a cluster, or set of services that are designed to run on clusters....a collection of machines that provide services, as opposed to the specific meaning of "cluster" which is a set of machines providing a specific service.
Tweet Your Vote (exit polling app)
I just found this on the "DecidingToBeBetter" subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/DecidingToBeBetter/comments/12jh16/p...

One comment: '"Permission to suck" is quite the erotic sentence :)'
The steady gain of humanity
Is there anything currently in the "let me access my files from anywhere" (aka Dropbox) space that supports private key encryption while maintaining some level of convenience?

I'm happy to give up some features (collaboration, web access) for the peace of mind that comes from random governments not being able to read my data whenever they like...

Or do I have to roll my own?
So you're implying what were witnessing at the moment is Adobe improving as steadily and quickly as it can?

Why do I find that hard to believe. Oh right, because I've launched and used Adobe software in my life.
The UK is one of the few countries with a more active surveillance state than the USA. Hell, they have cameras everywhere there. (Don't teach 1984 in schools anymore?)

The US government generally considers anything on US soil, owned by anybody, to be their purview... but in the Megaupload case they siezed servers and data in new zealand, along with the USA.
60-year-old startup founder is bringing a wingsail to cargo ships
But the iTunes backend is still QuickTime 7 on both Mac OS X and Windows. QuickTime is really only present on Windows machines nowadays as the backend of iTunes.
Google and amazon have started a race to the bottom and no one will win that way. It has to be profitable for all concerned otherwise there is no point.
(1) you don't know me

(2) I actually was, but decided not to, what you believe is not in any way material to that.

This is a first for HN actually, someone telling me they know me better than I know myself. Incredible.
Yeah, it's not static analysis... it's runtime instrumentation. And BTW it's very useful and helped me find a race condition.
IPad Mini Jailbroken Successfully
For the time being, I think there are enough Squeezebox users out there that will be able to fix the Perl problems.
After all, the Squeezebox server is Open Source, and you're not dependent on any online services from Logitech to make it work.
Hello --

Responding here as your latest post is indeed dead:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4737582
I'm not an editor, but might be able to offer some insight.

Most likely, it's not your site that is banned, but your account: you've probably been "hell banned". This is probably statistical rather than personal. 20 posts, all to the same site, with few upvotes definitely fits the pattern of a spammer. It's also possible that the post I'm responding was flagged by users: unlike the interviews (which are great), this one is weak and could legitimately be considered "blog spam".

Your recourse is to contact pg or someone else prominent in HN by another channel (email, most likely) and ask them to consider your case. Alternatively, unless your site has also been banned, it may be easiest to start again with a new account.

Personally, I think you're skirting at the edge of the rules. While much of the content you are posting is high quality, it's not clear that you are posting it because of that. As it's your own site, you certainly have a self-interest in promoting it. While not explicitly forbidden, it's definitely frowned upon to use HN for PR.

But I really do appreciate that you are not using puppet accounts to do so, and presume your intent is true. I've just reposted your Wing Sail article so you can check if the problem is with your domain, or with your account. Also because it's a good article, and deserves some attention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4737760

Good luck!
Ha, I had an idea to build a product around this (and related services) the other day.
Actually, Democrats attacked one another and/or Obama when the race tightened in early October. You wouldn't believe the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But seldom would you hear somebody say, well, the polls must be wrong.

The difference is that generally when the polls sour for Dems, they blame themselves collectively. When Repubs see the polls sour, they blame the polls. Neither is objective, but one of them is somewhat less isolated from reality.
There's a technical problem with this. Dropbox syncs between multiple clients. That means multiple clients can change a file. IF the files are encrypted and the service doesn't have the key, there's little the service can do about a file that's (effectively) simultaneously changed on two machines, that then try to sync.

You could zip up your files, encrypt them as strongly as you want and then upload them to some server somewhere at any time (Say you get a hosting account) and then nobody else but you has access to your password, and presumably that would be a solution you seek-- but maybe not the same level of convenience.

I think the convenience (depending on what you want) is intrinsic to the lack of security.
Like beating a dead horse: Client side encryption key creation and encryption!

Zero knowledge is the answer. We need to become accustomed to securing our data BEFORE we make it 'cloud available'.
PSD to Bootstrap $99 a page
Spideroak.com, Wuala.com and Ciphertite.com all support client side encryption key creation/encryption and zero-knowledge privacy.
Cross check for dead post, but also a good article!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4737582

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705813
Check out http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for an alternative to Nate Silver. It uses bayesian analysis and dynamic program to come up with a deterministic snapshot of the election.
Dr. Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, wrote a spirited defense of Silver on the Princeton Election Consortium blog (http://election.princeton.edu), where Wang also does some insightful statistical analysis on the Presidential election.

Wang sometimes disagrees with Silver, but supports the notion of a data-driven approach. Fascinating stuff on his blog, too: he's running Bayesian prediction models, Random Drift, and has a popular meta-margin that is worth checking out.

He also takes some delightful shots at journalists and others who are trying to keep the focus on political "horse race" reporting, instead of using more rigor. And he has a great sense of humor - his "Nerds Under Attack" post is hilarious - http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/
It's even beyond that really. Most journalists are just functionally illiterate, period. Journalism is no longer a respectable profession, and it largely now draws from a pool of people who wouldn't be good at much else. As far as I can tell, the journalism majors that have a bit of intellectual horsepower all end up as lawyers.
> That's where vacation, or the lack thereof, comes in. That's another banking no-no, precisely to prevent this kind of chicanery.

One of the key embezzling rules from from Frank Abignale's The Art of The Steal: Any regular employee that refuses to ever take a paid vacation is robbing you.

Vacations should be forced if they aren't taken voluntarily, because schemes like this require daily maintenance and even a day off could ruin the whole thing. If you're trusting someone with your finances and they're doing a good job, then a week off shouldn't destroy everything.