skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some ideas are legitimately terrible. But most ideas that are deemed bad are usually ideas that have a bad track record of poor execution.

FedEx, up until the point that they succeeded, was a phenomenally bad idea...one that received heaps of ridicule from academics to VCs. Now their hairbrained competitors are the ones that receive the ridicule.

Logistics is hard (I work in it), but it has a track record of crazy innovations that sweep the entire world in a matter of years. Think about it: Canals, Railroads, Containerization, The Automobile, Air Parcel Delivery. While I don't think an AirBnB for Packages would go anywhere, the idea has at least a semblance of merit: It is a new approach to sortation (probably the biggest problem facing logistics today). A completely distributed sortation system. If this company came packed with a few OpsResearch professionals and a few good lawyers, I would hold off on my ridicule.
I actually never argued (or at least didn't mean to argue) that one needed to have worked in a particular industry--rather, I was arguing that one needs experience with the particular industry. Experience can certainly mean (a) customer of the industry and (b) having researched the industry extensively. As you point out, receiving packages in the mail gives you little insight into the industry.
This same argument can be made for courier services and they seem to manage just fine.
They could if they were air lifted over the last mile by a drone. Maybe a flying box that can transport itself the last/first mile?

Taking it further, what if the flying box could rendezvous with a moving vehicle? Preregistered vehicles could then pick up / drop off parcels without deviating in any way from their already planned journey.

That sort of tech could even be useful for existing courier companies, as it would make pick up and drop off of small items very efficient. The truck would just drive a predetermined route, that passes within 1 km of each point of a city, without stopping.

It could make an interesting partnership with the local bus company. Each bus would have a roof mounted drone docking station. The drone would fly from its start point to rendezvous with the nearest bus, then hop from bus to bus until it is near its destination, and fly the last mile.
Cuban Project
Unibox
No, as 'DannyBee has been at pains to point out, no federal statute ever obligates anyone to lie about anything.
I've heard many people say this, but it's not that simple. By putting a face to the story, he made the story more appealing to mainstream media and interesting to the average citizen. Yes, his stepping forward diluted the dialogue a bit -- but it also increased the exposure of the dialogue immeasurably.
The parent said that any additional revenue recovered from uncollected taxes will necessarily be spent on oppressing people implied there is no point collecting it.

I wasn't starting a debate on how we should spend tax revenue, just a comment that this sort of statement is inherently silly.
keychainlogistics looks like uShip--using existing professionals on the road. I totally buy that business model. I don't buy Alice and Bob transporting packages on their way to work.

As I said, though--definitely happy to be proven wrong. It would be pretty amazing.
Harley Davidson seems like a better example. Apple fans don't literally form gangs.
The books look really interesting. Did you confirm demand before starting the project?
Agreed. I think it would be nice to see company logos too, so that I can start remembering their brand, and generally just to mix up the heavy amount of text.
The point is that most people didn't assume that the government had access to the extent it did and how much was done domestically. That's why it has been such a big story.

So on the basis of this it's obvious that Snowden endangered national security. Not all terrorists are sophisticated remember e.g. Boston Marathon.
> requiring all employers to confirm the identity and legal status of any new workers by tapping into a Homeland Security Department system called E-Verify, which is now used voluntarily by about 7 percent of employers in the United States.

This is where it's all been tending for some time anyway.

> within four years all employers would have to electronically submit information gathered from new employees, including citizens, to confirm that they are eligible to work in the United States.

Luckily, there'll be a lot fewer jobs in four years so no one will need to use it. /snark
UX Metaphor Equivalents for iOS 6 and Android 4
One thing I've always appreciated in concept about American law is the idea that sometimes- we just say that the law enforcement can't do something because we (should) hold ourselves to a higher standard. Found out about something during an illegal search? Inadmissible. Think someone's selling drugs but don't have anything more than a hunch? Well, just can't do anything about that and you've gotta wait for a reason to search them.

Yet, we're at a point that the boogey-man of 'terrorism' has made us throw that away for the concept of safety.

Yes, I'm absolutely certain that if you're in the position to protect people and enforce the laws that its rather nice to be able to do anything to make that happen- but we've just got to accept some level of risk (and hazard) in exchange for them not violating everything just to create that risk-free perception.
I suppose I did not spell this out clear enough for you.

A traditional corporatist could be accused of trying to bring corporations up to the same level as governments. Rayiner seems to be playing at the idea of bringing governments up to the level of corporations. Despite appearing to be opposing positions, it should not take a rocket scientist to find the common ground.

Of course if you have no interest in doing so, it should not be surprising that you won't.
Far more than enough people use Chrome (or a different browser with cert pinning) with GMail that such an activity by the NSA would already have been tripped.

This is how other hacked SSL certs have been caught in the wild, remember? Do you think Iran has more GMail users than the U.S.?

Even my own S/MIME private key the NSA wouldn't be able to get a hold of without actually having to take my smartcard, and I'd certainly notice that.

Either way, there's something that the NSA has actually screwed up so I'm honestly a bit surprised that people are still arguing so much about a FISA compliance API. That horse is already essentially dead and buried. So dead and buried that others are saying that tptacek is tearing down a strawman for still mentioning it...
Tuktuk
Did I understand this correctly?

"The IRS last year used a profiling test model to study 1,500 tax preparers with histories of reporting deficiencies and managed to recover $200 million. It cited the experience as proof that its data analysis works."

They recovered $200M from 1,500 citizens? That's $133k each. Seems like an extraordinarily large amount.
That wasn't what was pitched though, and what you are suggesting is not The People's Parcel. It also has it's own problems. It's a completely different idea.
Here is the video clip from General Alexander's congressional testimony three days ago, where he stated this was not happening:

http://youtu.be/ZmBAxEWxDFs?t=1h29m50s

It's not clear to me whether they were sworn in for this hearing or not, but if this new report is true, then this seems to be at least the second documented case of an exposed lie about the scope of surveillance during congressional testimony.

The first, of course, being Clapper's "not wittingly:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY
From what I understand, once you're at a certain level as a presidential candidate (and already a senator, governor or representative you get some of this anyway) then you're given some of the briefings on this stuff. It isn't that they just learn everything day-1 when they get in the oval office.
Working here. Maybe try this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4SRCOouw5I
Officials: NSA programs broke plots in 20 nations
Surprised this hasn't gotten more exposure. Seems like Snowden should be covered by this.
I grew up a Jehovah's Witness (now attend a Presbyterian Church), and every piece of data in this article that touches them is bullshit.

The idea that gold-rimmed glasses are banned is just bizarre. You may see a different pair of Witnesses come by at different times because that was who was out that day, not because there is any tactic. There are no "immediate superiors." You are not disfellowshipped for "questioning an order," the idea that you even get "orders" is foolish. I suppose that idleness is a sin in some vague way, but it's not highlighted, and is no more so than for other Christians (ie., the Protestant work ethic). You can't lie or cheat, but you can drink. Maybe he's thinking Baptists? Also, you are not allowed to "lie for the cause." Witnesses don't refuse medical treatments in general, but do refuse blood transfusions.

Getting every single point wrong takes some special talent.
So I assume everything else in the article about similar (or more cultish groups) is also wrong, though I am not an expert.

On the other hand, someone should definitely write an article about why the Apostle Paul was a great startup founder.
There was a courier service that had an office next to mine about 15 years back that took all sorts of precautions that they weren't shipping drugs. Here's an article that shows that those guys (Asheville Courier) weren't an isolated case: http://network.yardbarker.com/college_basketball/article_ext...
Nothing you are saying really changes anything from the article. Indeed, you're only confirming the article and it's conclusions.
Tone was lost over the Internet. Inclusion of "probably" was a joke: without Favreau or another speechwriter, Obama isn't going to sound particularly erudite, in the same way that an actress without makeup generally looks much more normal. Most people don't realize that Obama doesn't write his own speeches anymore than he picks what suit to wear.
Of note, the company I most recently founded absolutely fits into the "finding a problem that large companies have, build a solution, and sell it to them". I can also name a bunch of highly-profitable B2B companies in the insurance and lending spaces that fit into those same categories (Global DMS, Guidewire, and Eagleview, to name three).

So it's definitely not true that those opportunities don't exist.
Why is Pres Obama keeping Yemeni Journalist in Prison?
Blasphemy. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
Not so fast. We backed multiple military coups in multiple democracies.

Basically any tin-pot dictator who wanted our support could declare themselves "anti-communist" and they had it. And many, many did so. No matter how obvious it should have been that we did not want to support their actions.
Two days ago you were arguing with a slide deck. At this point, you're also arguing with a NSA brief of Congress and numerous public statements by members of Congress.

Swearing at me isn't the solution in any case. If you want to stop taking flack on HN, you should stop attacking the credibility of whistleblowers on the rhetorical basis that you know more about what the NSA is doing than the NSA does.
How hard have you thought about it? What's the line of thought that makes the current government less respectful of the 4th amendment than, say, a government that, with the knowledge and approval of the president, sends a bunch of goons to commit burglary and dig up dirt on its political opponents?
Are you saying that the "collection directly from the servers" claim of the NSA document is simply the systems we already know about (FISA warrants or otherwise) until proven otherwise?

To me the terminology of the document probably (though not necessarily) indicates something more serious, but I'm not sure its necessarily 'cables into gmail' (which you seem to indicate as the only alternate). For instance, potentially someone working for Google may transfer selected records out manually without the knowledge of Google.

Thanks but I'm not so concerned to be 'singled out' as 'lumped in'. I want to get to understand your views more than simply disagree. I hope my previous posts haven't seemed too argumentative either.
It's like observing an electron, once you take your measurement the outcome is forever changed.
Didn't we expect this coming?
Communist agitprop. They know that unless they address the bad reputation their article will lack credibility. They aren't stupid.

I think the article is hilarious and I'm glad China is sticking it to the US. Not because I support China, but because I hope this makes Americans uncomfortable with the prosecution of American whistleblowers to the point that something will actually change.
Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction)
Sounds like an amazing premise!
But I don't think the blinding scheme presented in section 3.2 can be trusted if the bank logs all coins it signs and all coins it verifies.

When signing a coin to make a withdrawal, the bank is given

(r^v · M (mod N)) - N and v is publicly known, M and r are only known to Alice.

The bank computes r · M^s (mod N) (using s, which only the bank knows).

Later, Bob supplies the bank with M', a message, and (r · M^s (mod N)) / r, and the bank is not supposed to be able to link M' back to M.

But the bank can enumerate all (r_i^v · M_i (mod N)) that it signed, and divide by M'; if M=M', the result is of the form r_i^v (mod N). The bank knows the prime factorisation N = pq, so they can test r_i^v (mod p) and r_i^v (mod q); for a prime modulus, computing a power residue is efficient, and for a large enough p and q (as you want in cryptography) and a moderately high v, this gives a high level of confidence that M=M'.
OP:
If you want to come up with awesome, fundable ideas, go work for large companies with deep pockets that have old and archaic processes and few highly-technical and dynamic problem solvers. Identify the inefficiencies, make friends with decision makers, and then leave, build your solution, and sell it back to them.

Parent:
"That doesn't work. The theory is that these deep-pocketed dinosaurs are just waiting to get some top-1% talent to tackle their hardest problems. It's like they're sitting on their hands just waiting for smart, energetic people to solve their problems."

From what I've heard, this happens in (e.g.) pharma all the time. But, as you clarify in the rest of your comment, probably not at the "billion-dollar concern" level and not (from what I've heard) with massive VC funding/interest.

I think that part of the OP's point might be that every would-be founder shouldn't set his or her goals as "the next AirBnB" or "the next Facebook," because the path to "the next GNC" might look a lot different.
There is one huge reason why this isn't as scary as it could be:

Tabloids.

If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what is true or not. So just the fact you have all this information really puts you in the same position of not having any information--not knowing what to believe is almost as bad a problem as not knowing at all. So you are really forced to ignore most of it.

Now, the NSA can read everything you say/write/browse/whatever. Ok, well, what about the people who know that someone is listening so they intentionally create fake stories? Part of being a good criminal or anything is misdirection. Maybe you portray over email (for, get this, years) that you have hideouts at x, and you are good at y technology, and you associate with z people---but in reality you only ever say meaningful stuff in person. Anyone doing anything actually wrong is doing this anyways. That's why there are private code languages in the first place.

So, no, the power is not in the hands of who can listen, it's in the hands of who can deceive--which is you.
NSA made $payments to telcos that shared metadata in Bush era spying program.
I can't the video at the moment, who is the senator speaking?
I wouldn't say that ALTER TABLE is never useful in production, but you should try to avoid it, especially if you have large tables. Many implementations of ALTER TABLE, lock the table, which means that no process can write to the table, until the ALTER TABLE command completes. If the ALTER TABLE statement takes minutes, or a few hours to complete, then you will have degraded performance or downtime.
Ill be honest I'm glad you chose not to submit it. But you are correct it is required reading, and it was required reading in HS civics class and any 101 Intro to US History class. Its also tinfoil hat 101 so anyone who would find this interesting would have already stumbled across it if they were not previously exposed to it in a school setting.

I'm all for cypherpunk/tinfoil hat stories on HN. I just expected the stories to be of a higher caliber and more interesting/nuanced than something as rudimentary as wikipedia's coverage of COINTELPRO.
What parent means probably is that, given a surplus of rural labor, farming has been intentionally kept backward so that all these nongmin have something to do. As labor moves from the country side to the cities, the requirement of giving people work to do just because disappears, and technology can be brought in so that agriculture more resembles that of a developed country.

They really need to do something about hukou first. I can't read the article yet because I'm behind the wall without a working VPN, perhaps they mention that.
I recall some months ago a seemingly fairly technical and generally informed commenter -- here on HN, I believe -- laying out their back of the envelop calculation of what it might take to archive all the U.S. voice traffic.

The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions.

And here, in this article, we have a description of Brewster Khale coming up with what is truly a trivial dollar amount to accomplish this.

It's increasingly apparent that there is probably no technical limitation to their accomplishing this.

The only question remains, is any other limitation stopping them?
Well, that was sort of my point. We were so hell bent on fighting an enemy we'd created in our minds (and vice-versa for those in the USSR) that we lost all rationality, it seems.

I'd liken it to religious fanatics who seem incredibly fearful of other religions. If they're so sure they've got "the way," then their beliefs should be able to stand up to scrutiny or comparison with other belief systems.
IMPORTANT -

regarding the 2-min video CNET bases its story on.

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2013/06/15/nadler-and-mueller-o...
Fully Homomorphic encryption
I would be the first person to agree with you.
To be fair, you've stepped into a giant pile of irony. Indeed, the Weathermen were a violent terrorist group that needed to be shut down. But very key point in the story: its members originally were an extremely radical but small faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Until its fracturing, the Weathermen had committed no crimes, and SDS was undoubtedly a legitimate organization to exist in a democratic society.

And the irony? Well, the FBI played no small part in the fracturing of SDS. COINTELPRO planted agents who acted as infiltrators, agitators, disruptors, and agents provocateur, with the explicit goal of destroying SDS.

So those bombs put more than a smidgeon of blood on the FBI's hands as well, and the FBI were every bit as much a malign anti-American, subversive influence as the Weathermen.
Some percentage. It's also been reported that one tactic used by terrorists or suspected terrorists was to share a login to an email account - editing unsent messages that live on the email provider's servers in draft mode. Email monitoring won't catch those.

The same technique used by former CIA Director David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell to communicate.
This is a three-paragraph article with minimal detail. The original Pakistani article that it cites is also quite brief and displays the content as an image, rather then as text, so Google Translate won't work on it.

I'd like to see something more concrete before I put my faith in the Pakistani media.
> Then we should definitely consider DDG, a much smaller company in the same country, sharing its keys with NSA.

Do we not? The only reason to think that the situation for Google and DDG is different is that DDG may be insignificant enough to ignore.
Purpose in Email Marketing
No. You're making an unfounded assumption, which is that the interpretation Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman took of that slide deck --- an interpretation Snowden appears to share --- is also what NSA believes to be the case about their access to Google's servers.

It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is that they have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail that that's the only reasonable interpretation of the slide deck. In fact, in the week since we found out about the deck, it's looking less and less and less likely that the original interpretation is reasonable at all.

I don't mind flak (as I'm sure you can tell), but I do mind being drawn into unproductive discussions; when I asked if you disagreed with the post I made above, and you disagreed with only a small part of it in one comment but then the whole premise of it in a later comment, I got frustrated, because why take the time to reply to your comments if you're just going to move the goalposts around?
For folks in the states, we usually know the RCMP down here as "Mounties"

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Mountie_i...
Thanks for the response. See my reply to tptacek above. I probably should have said 'appear to compete' or similar, as reading them together does not lead to an easy answer - and there are a number of possibilities as to how you could interpret them.
Just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario demonstrating a potential absurd situation that could arise from dragnet surveillance.
I have to admit, I did not expect this surveillance scandal story to have the legs it's shown, and I didn't expect it to "go international". This makes me very happy, to see that people in other countries are starting to get involved and ask questions about their own governments as well. This needs to stay in the public eye and it needs to stay there until changes are made.
It isn't even just active money used against suburbia, but the subsidization of urban sprawl by giving everyone "free" roads. In practical economics, it tremendously subsidized the capacity for people to live in suburbia to not have to build and maintain the roads that lead to their doorsteps, and instead let that burden fall to the common man. They weren't making the economic choice to live compact and not pay for connection to the outside world, because the public purse did it for them.
Penyakit diabetes dan pengobatannya
Penyakit diabetes kini tidak hanya bisa diobati dengan cara kimia seperti yang biasa dilakukan orang pada umumnya. akan tetapi ada cara lain yang lebih aman dan alami. Dengan cara ini bisa diobati beberapa macam jenis penyakit diabetes.