skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really is appalling that this isn't more rejected. A couple decades ago impeachment, resignations, firings would happen. Everyone thinks about how this affects us now, how will it affect everyone decades from now? Pretty soon warrants won't be needed at all because Executive Orders override them and are 'legal'. We may as well just remove the 4th amendment since everyone is so scared and complacent.
uShip appears to use accredited transport brokers. The pitch mentioned in the article suggests that Alice and Bob drive goods to each other.
Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?
Rails developer looking for free lance work, form Queens, NY. Please let me know if someone interested I will share my details.

Thanks,
Americans knew all that in the sixties/seventies.

Nobody would have doubted surveillance then, in the way that some young sophisticated people nowadays believe BS like official statements.

The government, police etc was "the Man", etc, and they were tied with big corporate etc interests. And those "pigs" where against the blacks, the Vietnam war protesters, leftist students, workers etc etc.

Those views might have been naive (in the utopian, free love and dope aspect), but were also very pragmatic (in the those in power are not using it in our favor) aspect.

Then the Reagan eighties happened, and all those "hippy" stuff were scorned in favour of greed and careerism.

Now, with Wall Street getting a trillion for their services in fucking up the economy, the middle class in worst prospects than ever, and the country in more abused mode than even during Nixon's reign, this "greed" didn't seem to have served the people well.
The government lawyers' opinion is that they can later get a warrant to access the data, long after it was recorded (see the whole discussion on "collect" meaning to take a book off the shelf and read it). They also seem to think it's ok to datamine the recordings as long as it's done anonymously.
Having a $2k/month semi-passive income stream is pretty relevant to this discussion!

Given that you have the savvy to get that much, you would do much better to develop and build upon that success than to start trying anything else. A lot of people struggle and it takes them years to get to $1-2k a month in product sales. If you can do that now, you could be at the pre-takeoff point of a hockey-stick curve without realizing it.

I would take tptacek's advice, and develop your WP product. Make a Pro or Enterprise version, make a version with a monthly support cost, offer a premium support plan, offer annual billing, make a family of related products, etc. Or do all of the above.
FBI probes were improper, Justice says (2010)
Or I'll just buy a Mac, which I do. I'll spend a grand on an Air for a relative so they aren't asking me either how to disinfect their machines or why their applications don't make sense. And regarding iOS: it is entirely the Linux community's fault. Consumers don't care that it's hard. Consumers expect it because everyone else has it.

Users aren't developers. Users don't care about freedom. Users care that their shit works. If it doesn't, it's not the user's fault.
There seems to be a lot of legal niggling regarding that, obtaining the data itself is perfectly well within all legal avenues -- including indexing it and organizing it into whatever manner -- however querying the resultant database is quite restricted (with apparently many levels of oversight).
It's illegal and we are supposed to do it.

That is the core duality of spying. First, we understand and except that it's illegal and if our spys are caught they will be put in jail, and second we understand that we're going to do it anyway.

In contrast, the current debate over domestic wiretapping is that the government is trying to ignore the first part of that equation. They are trying to legitimize an act which at times might be necessary but should always be illegal, and punishable.

It is far too simplistic a world view to think that just because something is illegal you shouldn't do it, or that just because something is necessary you shouldn't be punished for doing it.
I'm not talking about privileges, I'm talking about the nature of what is "private information." I don't think the ethics of the government collecting information you share with people on Facebook you might have met once, along with god knows how many employees at Facebook, Google, etc, are clear cut.
As a small counter-point, my mother (and the rest of my family) were lifelong Mac users, but their last desktop ran Ubuntu.

They barely noticed the difference, Firefox looks the same, and they never paid close enough attention to the other details to make it a big issue. There was a teeny bit of minor 're-training,' but they already asked questions about how things worked, so they didn't perceive it as any different.
Do you have a specific debt with a certain criminal organization? Just so we know who to call if you disappear off HN... ;)
Much ado about MOOCs
http://netbsd.org/ :)
> the NSA might be sitting on audio recordings of all your phone calls for the past several years

I believe you would be interested in Laura Poitras (Snowden advisor and documentary filmmaker) and William Binney (NSA code breaker who designed some of this software and then got a friendly FBI raid-at-gunpoint and who spoke at the same DEFCON as General Alexander). Specifically, Snowden watched Poitras's documentary about Binney, The Program, before seeking her assistance in learning how to live the surveilled life:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
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I've always thought spreadsheets were a great indicator of B2B startup ideas. Just find a spreadsheet that's key to a process that now involves multiple people, hasn't changed in a while and is relatively important and you probably have a SAAS right there.

The only problem is having the business agree to store data on your servers, something that's getting harder and harder these days thanks to the greed of some agencies
I attempted to implement the Julia technique in Cython using BLAS dgemm but was not able to beat Jake's original version. Not sure if I am doing something wrong or linking against a non-optimal BLAS library on my machine. Comments/feedback is welcome:

https://gist.github.com/synapticarbors/5790459
The problem with this is that it assumes perfect judgement from the whistleblower. I explain this more here: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/why-its-dangerous-to-call-whi...
And I say that how we should treat Facebook collecting data and how we should treat governments collecting data (even data from Facebook) are entirely disjoint. Anything else is a peculiar brand of corporatism.
There seems to be some suggestion of confusion on the Representative's part about call content vs Subscriber Information, actual video here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/video-congressman-cl... So this might not be the "gotcha" it first appears.
How much investment is optimal in China
Right. The People's Parcel was essentially ride-sharing for packages (but packages can't move themselves to locations for pickups or deal with transfers or travel the last mile after getting dropped off close-to-but-not-quite-at their final destination).
Why we should raise the simplicity bar of our products
I haven't participated in a startup weekend but from following what has come out of our local one "AirBnB for x" does seem the be the most popular starting point.

I would agree with the author that the idea is unlikely to hit on something that will actually work, given the way it goes against economies of scale for what essentially be a commodity service.

At the same time though, I think it is good that people are exploring these ideas. Sure after a month or 2 (or even just the weekend) they might realise that the idea isn't going to fly. In doing that though they may have learned something and stumbled on an even better related opportunity.
Bitcoin can remove central control without replacing anything... It's already serving that purpose.

It doesn't have to be the "one true anything" to be successful.
A Python script that saves Google Reader unread items to Markdown files
Because people get abortions for reasons other than "the child is the wrong sex".
What I'm saying is that we have two reported cases of reporters getting hacked.

We have the AP having their phone records pulled.

You don't think there is a little there to be worried about? Do you think the Chinese have anything to gain from hacking a reporter's laptop?

Occam's razor man. Learn it.
1984 is not a how-to manual.
I would submit to you that there are bad ideas that we know are bad without having to throw money at them and watch them fail. (And, look--even if we do throw money at them and watch them fail, that's not a definitive disposition, since it could have been execution errors that caused the failure). I think I made a strong enough case as to why this particular idea was bad, even in lieu of having an actual case study of someone trying it and failing.

But I would be happy to be proven wrong, and I'd bet some cold hard cash on failure...
In the USA the last 60-80 years we've had a radical social engineering project to force people to live in suburban areas. Home interest mortgage deduction, demolition of urban neighborhoods for freeways, the funneling of tax dollars away from cities and towards new suburban/exurban development, the wholesale dismantling of public trolley and transit systems..

Detroit is just one example of many.
"This is an awesome service…for transporting drugs" - There can be safeguards put in and doesn't seem like this service would even benefit drug dealers. I'm mr. drug dealer and for some reason I want to trust a chain of 3rd party delivery people with my illegal substances. Not gonna happen.
How about saving starred items?
It's a while ago now, but I said the million dollar website (the first of many) selling 10 pixels of advertising was a stupid idea and wouldn't go anywhere.

It'd sold about $600 when I said this. Unfortunately I said to my flat mate at the time I'd run round the block naked if it made a million bucks.

It was cold that night.
This is iOS 7 control center, kids
Have you been to China?
I was hoping that Notational Velocity is a measurement and method that could quantify how good given notation is for given family of problems.
I tried to make it clear in the piece that I think Startup Weekends are a really good and useful event. I think that everyone who participates in one, no matter what experience they have had to date, will learn something from one. I definitely did.

My complaint is more that our "startup society" pushes us far more toward the Startup Weekends of the world, and away from "boring" jobs at large organizations--and that's really silly, since (as I argue) a great case can be made that the most viable, most fund-able startup ideas will come from working at large organizations (mo' money, mo' problems, mo' moving-the-needle-a-little-means-big-returns).
See? Now this is a problem. I don't see how you can interpret Court precedent and statutory law regarding telephone wiretapping to mean anything other than that you can't intercept that without a warrant.

I remember the other day saying that the "warrant canary" was far too cute to make it past a judge. This might be an even "cuter" argument... should it ever make it in front of a judge (I suspect NSA doesn't actually care about that, given that they're not generally trying to bring cases to court anyways as they'd have to give up their top secret methods on purpose).
If your customers pay you before you ship, and they trust the shipper, it's definitely going to happen. Happens every day now already.
In other words, the market "makes" people who aren't really vulgar act like they are? I'd rather say caring about money first and foremost itself is a symptom of vulgarity.
From my experience anyone who doesn't do proper research into viable options, is always the person who wants to build "cool" amazing bleeding edge things are junior developers.

There's nothing wrong with this mentality when developing fresh new code for small projects but once you work in an established company you need to stop and think.
Is this a new language, technology?
What kind of support is available, how hard will it be to hire someone that knows this or train them up?
Do we already have something pre-existing that objectively is just as good?

Without such conservatism, you end up with undocumented frameworks that are no longer officially supported, no one knows it and there are hundreds of these things that just replicate each other, just because it was something "cool" at the time.

This applies to frameworks, languages, libraries so on.
Someone has to support these things 2, 5, 10 years even down the track.
Is this based on anything but 'well he sounds Japanese and he's done some stuff vaguely like Bitcoin'?

Just once - once! - I would like someone to try estimating how many east Asians or people of east Asian descent there are who might fit such vague criterion, and think about what that implies about any particular bit of speculation...
What were your reasons why it would fail?
I've also been a Start-up weekend judge, and have seen this idea (P2P package transport) in various incarnations. I have three responses:

1: For me Startup Weekend is not about creating businesses, rather it is about helping groups of people understand and experience a compressed version of what it is like to start a company. The ideas are often very similar across events (it's rare to get anything truly new), but learning about connecting with customers, changing in response to feedback, building something (anything), working as a team and so on and on are valuable lessons. The group is invariably exhausted at the end, but in a good way, and many go on to build or help build something else.

2: As a judge I've made it a point for us to give positive feedback to every participant, not just the winners.
It's an exhausting process being a judge, with back to back pitches and no time between to mull, but we owe it to the participants to understand as much as we can, ask hard questions and also to keep it fun and positive. In the sessions I've been a part of the panel has retired for 20-30 minutes or so, come back and given overall group feedback, positive feedback and key questions to answer for each team and then the winners in reverse order. Plenty for each judge to do in there.

3: I agree the idea is flawed as it stands. But then a lot of people thought the FedEx idea was flawed, and we all know countless other stories about crazy ideas that worked. In every crazy idea is often an element of a business, and as a judge or coach or advisor or founder our job is to help identify the bit of the idea that is doable and can be built into a valuable business.
Athens also had a much different population than we do and not everyone was eligible to be chosen. And I don't think it would go over well today to limit the pool of candidates to exclude those who are nominally unqualified for statecraft.
Personally I'm not sure we're reading the same HN. Maybe today the facts regarding Prism are finally catching up but it certainly wasn't the case yesterday or the week+ before.
Enjoy our brave new world.
I think the Founding Fathers would approve of this. Despite their being the elite in society they identified that there must be a a design for a government that discretely limited its ability to screw the people at will. The Bill Of Rights was their way to make it obvious that government must be limited and that its existence is dependent on the people's will, not the other way around.
> If you read all my comments on this whole annoying story

Your comments have repeatedly attacked the credibility of whistleblowers, derided their claims as factually and technically impossible, and asserted that NSA statements about NSA capabilities are wrong.

> My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer at Google approves or rejects them, not a SQL query.

I don't think Google has much say in this, but what do I know? Only that your assertion otherwise is in open conflict with claims by Snowden and the NSA officials who have briefed Congress, both of whom tell us that authority over which targets to tap is in practice delegated to security analysts.
He should be glad its just a wiretap and not anthrax like that sent to the Prime Minister past year.
You realize that when you call something "a peculiar brand of corporatism", you're saying something equivalent to "a label that thus far exists only in my mind".

Is there a more direct, refutable way you could construct your claim? How would anyone falsify your argument otherwise? You know what else is a (very) peculiar brand of corporatism? "Not corporatism".
You're saying that Google's claims compete with NSA's.

They don't.
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Has this been taken down? Mirror, anyone? Not working for me, just gives a black rectangle once the video is accessed.
For fuck's sake. So you don't just disagree with (1) and (2), but with the whole thing. Why not just say that?

Yes, to whatever extent that slide deck said NSA has direct access to the servers that run Google Mail, I am arguing with the slide deck.
When did we ever have cars blowing up on a regular basis. I get your point about general life in America being OK, but that is only because many people turn a blind eye to the evils that our government is doing in our name that work against us in the longer view.

There are short-term benefits that you're talking about, but long-term costs that you seem to be ignoring as well.
The document was very aware of that, and continually said that this was a short-term strategy of last resort (with the exception being Apple).
It's true, email is mostly transmitted over TLS.

But I'd be very reluctant to conclude that the NSA doesn't have clear-text for the vast majority of email that gets sent.

Google and other email providers have denied giving the NSA access to their servers, but if you think about it, that would be a lousy way to share data with the NSA, from a purely technical point of view. A company like Google is going to be constantly evolving their infrastructure. Giving the NSA direct access to the servers hampers that, because they'd have to break compatibility with whatever client software the NSA is using. It'd be easier to just send copies of all email that moves in and out of their system to the NSA and let them sort out how to process it. That would be more convenient for the NSA too.

Beyond that, all the denials issued by Google, Facebook et al mention that they do provide the government with information as required by law. We know that there are secret laws at work here, and if the law requires companies hand over everything, then that's what they're doing. The may even be required to lie about it. They're definitely absolved of any legal liability for doing so. I don't doubt that internet companies try to protect their user' privacy as much as they can, but that may amount to "not at all" where the U.S government is concerned.
This is not a bad idea. It's all about the execution.

Your first point is spot on. It is going to be hard and fuck to figure out the logistics issues with this idea. But not impossible. Does it look like the The People’s Parcel will be the people to do it? Probably not.

This idea already exists to a certain extent. Check out keychainlogistics.com.
I agree with the first conclusion, that this is a bad idea. Yes, AirBNB is able to compete because it is as convenient and provides a similar level of service to regular hotels. However, even as an outsider to the shipping industry, it's clear that UPS and FedEX have extremely complex systems to get a package across the country quickly, and reliably. And yes, it is very likely that crowd sourcing ride shares would never be as efficient. Additionally, my experience with receiving packages gives me very little exposure to how the system works. All I know is that I click buy on Amazon, and a box is at my door 3 days later.

However, I disagree with the second point, that one NEEDS to work in an industry to understand product/market fit. There are plenty of industries that can be studied from a distance. Perfect example being the AirBNB founders. (as far as I know) They did not work in the hotel industry - they merely participated as a customer, hated it, and spent enough time studying to understand it. In addition, staying at a hotel as a customer gives me much more exposure to the system than receiving a package. I check in, I see the maids, I see the food prepared, the room keys, the furniture, etc. Yes, working in an industry will give you an edge, and it may be nearly necessary in some industries (such as shipping, semi-conductors, most physical products), but plenty of founders have built/exited successful businesses without working in their market first.
"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

Ah, but I don't believe his actions have been consistent with this motive at all - and actions do speak louder than words. Since publicly revealing himself as the whistleblower, he's made a significant portion of the story about him and not about the issues he claims to care about - for much of the media and public, it's become just another human-interest saga with Snowden as the star.

If your sole motive is truly to inform the public about a cause, leak your leaks and then do whatever in hell you can to stay out of the way and not blow it. Perhaps he's just a glory hound, perhaps he really means what he says and didn't realize what effects his actions would have - but either way, Snowden did his cause a lot of damage when he put himself at the center of the story. We'd all be a lot better off if we'd never heard his name.
tell that Drupal when they go from one version to the next.
TERROR_BOT searches your comment history for the Terrorist Keywords used by DHS
I agree with everything you've said here, and it's possible that one could pivot the idea of ride-sharing for packages to something viable.

I think I could have made it clearer in the article, but my point was not that The People's Parcel was "the worst startup idea", but that "the worst startup idea" is that doing Startup Weekends and Y Combinator are the best ways for you to create a company that will help you climb the entrepreneur ladder.
There must be a sale on tin-foil hats or something.

Why would the Whitehouse intermittently take down the petitions site ? The petitions aren't binding and are merely used to help guide their decisions and provide a forum for clear responses to issues.

It's not like the response to this petition is going to be revelatory: National security is important. Leaks compromise national security. Snowden is bad. The End.
Then we should definitely consider DDG, a much smaller company in the same country, sharing its keys with NSA. They too might be under some gag order that not only stops them from saying that they are compromised but also gagged to say that their users are anonymous so that all the terrorists, law breakers and cheating husbands use this service because of a false sense of security. It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

But everything that is plausible is not probable.
Turns out we are collecting metadata too! You might be wondering what all these acronyms mean. Rough approximation:

CSEC (see-sec) = NSA
CSIS (see-sis) = CIA
RCMP (R-C-M-P) = FBI/DEA/ATF/Secret Service/Regular Police

(RCMP are federal semi-paramilitary force that
can move across provinces, they also serve as
a police force in remote regions.)
And we had our own Democracy cheerleaders trying to export our system to every corner of the globe as well.

If they were honest, they would have allowed discussion and dialog rather than the McCarthyite witch hunts and branding communism as AIDs-spreading terrorists strapped with nuclear suicide bombs.

They didn't even trust in their own ideology to survive a rigorous examination, and that's why they turned to demonization.
Brazilians Protest High Cost of Hosting World Cup