skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Articles like this disappoint me, mainly because the system is so skewed now in favor of mega corps that the average joe is left bewildered and overwhelmed and largely impotent in their fight. Remember many of these same mortgage holders were mislead at the time they bough their homes too regarding ARM rates etc.
Ask HN: Who will 'own' my data in the future?
1) The NSA scandal. Large corporations cannot be trusted to protect an individual's private data.
2) As individuals we are producing more data than we ever have done.

How do we reconcile these two facts?

At the moment, the NSA can listen in on your phone calls, watch your internet activity, and piece together a version of your life. However, in 20-50 years time, when even more of our lives are lived digitally/online, what do you think will become of private data? Will the NSA start looking into people's refrigerators, checking if people's windows are open, and monitoring who left the front door unlocked?

What does HN forecast will be the next big breakthrough that allows people to keep their private data private? I'm thinking some kind of protocol which ensures that all personal data is 'owned' by the person it is personal to. Then, if facebook wants to run a user specific ad by you, they have to ask explicitly to see your data. They wouldn't be able to keep a store of your data in their datacenters. Thoughts?
I wonder how they define "device". Does my contact lenses count? Arguably they give me quite an advantage over not wearing them.
Your citations don't actually establish your claims. In fact, the wikipedia article outlines many arguments in favor.
I must have misread the name in your comment. The greater point I was making still stands: as far as I know, neither Kerry nor Kerrey blur the lines between public service and military industry as much as Cheney does. If Cheney had at least served and been consistent, his opinions on military actions and these recent leaks' effects on US defenses would at least have some backing.
BBC Q&A: The right to privacy
Is there a reason I can't access the material from the winter semester?
Maybe freedom to communicate without being subject to government surveillance?
We'll go pretty deep on emacs, especially for REPL integration and debugging. My reasoning is that most people never get a course on an editor. But people who already use vim, Textmate, or something else can just ignore those parts and use what they are comfortable with. With 100,000+ students everyone will have some part of the course that they already know cold.
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The material has changed significantly since v1. Page will be updated soon to track Coursera materials.
Yup, this one is not the last. Telkom (parastatal in South Africa) still operates a telegram service.

http://www.telkom.co.za/general/pricelist/international_tele...
This is really dated, an a really good way.
I know a man who spent 10s of thousands on google ad campaigns -- for his bee removal start-up. He was convinced if he was in top three ads customers would come pouring in. They didn't because he had no real marketing plan.
This has been the case for over 10 years... thank you for breaking the news though...
I'm guessing, in the 4th amendment sense.
True, history hasn't been my strong side, but I don't see how Watergate is relevant?

The difference in technology (between now and then) is huge, since our lives have migrated more towards the Internet. Before the wiretapping could only go so far. You needed to install wiretapping in a room (phones could always be bugged).

Now wiretapping is everywhere. You literally carry the equipment for others to wiretap you (mobile phones, laptops, google glass, etc). It's just an order of magnitude more easier now.
I couldn't stop watching this video. It is the most riveting thing I've seen since the Snowden interview itself. It's a pity they broke it up; you have to scroll down the page to get all the pieces. But I highly recommend watching the entire thing if you're interested in this story. It packs a wallop and it's... pretty damn convincing. Every one of the four interviewees is deeply impressive, each in a distinct way. It is hard to believe that they don't know what they're talking about. More striking than that, though, is what good people they all seem to be.

I'm surprised that USA Today put this out and I hope they do more like it. The contrast with typical news pap could not be stronger.
Yes, I (would have thought quite obviously, but perhaps not) know that.

The fact there's an FAQ question on an abbreviation should tell you something.

Thanks for the sigh though, and the substantive response to the points raised in the body of my post, it really adds a lot.
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I also took the class in the winter at Stanford and had an awesome experience. We focused on the things that mattered and a bunch of really cool startups came out of the class. I can also imagine that it'll be excellent online -- Balaji put together great writeups of the content we covered that I'm still referencing now and I believe the (amazing) guest lecturers were filmed.
The full Stanford course materials for the Jan-Mar timeframe are at stanford.coursera.org/cme184-001. The startup.stanford.edu URL tracked the first few weeks, but this was redundant for Stanford students and another page to keep up to date. So the material there is more of a teaser for people interested in the Coursera MOOC class.

That said, it will be more useful for the Coursera students to have a site that is accessible when logged out, so look for startup.stanford.edu to track the MOOC course material beginning tomorrow evening or so.
Well, I think I already agreed in the post you're replying to that these sort of revelations are not particularly harmful to any of the state actors involved.

They are, though, tremendously harmful to him and his purported cause - to the point that I have a very difficult time seeing this as some part of an intelligent, well-considered strategy. Should he ever end up in a US court, any hope of lenient treatment or something like an eventual presidential commutation or pardon is well out the window - you can't be both a principled defender of civil liberties and a low-grade spy. Worse is the damage to his credibility as a person acting out of conscience - he's handing his detractors a complete gimme and even giving his potential supporters serious pause. In the interview linked, William Binney straight up calls him a traitor and it's pretty tough to portray William Binney as some pliant NSA stooge.
Sentenced to a year of probation and community service, Drake was stripped of his security clearance. He now works at an Apple retail store.

I hope they have him employed as a Genius.
Is the TrackPoint (eraserhead) pointer well supported by Linux? I hope the answer is yes. If so, which flavor of Linux?
Sounds more like a "how to build a web app" course. [0]

Building a startup involves a lot of "soft skills" that not all developers are familiar with: marketing, talking to customers, overcoming all sorts of psychological blockers/fears about putting yourself, your ideas, and your product "out there" for all people to judge.

When I saw the title, I hoped that it would focus on those aspects of building a startup, sort of like the 30x500 course by Amy Hoy. http://unicornfree.com/30x500

[0] There's nothing wrong with doing a course for how to build web applications. I just don't think it's the same thing as building a startup.

EDIT:

It seems the official name of the course is "Startup Engineering", which makes a lot more sense than the submission title: "How to build a startup".

Please fix the title of the submission so that this comment might be deprecated.
I actually disagree a bit here -- Balaji and Vijay (the instructors) have both built incredibly successful companies based on many of the principles that they teach in the course. Sure, the online course won't teach you to do genomics or protein folding or build solar panels, but what it will do is allow you to create many of the components that support businesses like those. Thinking in a broader sense about what APIs for various business functions can do and how they can help you can be a tremendous help and this class can teach you how to build those APIs.
JAMR Alpha Invite (Music and Video)
Hello,
My startup JAMR, allows social music video creation. I am looking for musicians and singers to try out the alpha! I really appreciate your help achieving my mission: Allowing the world to connect through a unified music & video platform.
Please comment if you are interested in getting an invitation to the JAMR alpha, or know someone that might.
You can also follow me at https://angel.co/jamr/

Sincerely,
Ron
yeah, but what's the pay like? pay vs price is a lot more meaningful of a comparison than just price.
Yep. My issue is that it's 'by Google' according to the logo. As you mentioned, it was designed by GetAngular.

Promoting it as 'by Google' is misleading.
Building a startup is different than building a web app. It's sad to see that the instructors are not aware of the massive difference between the two.

Building a startup course should have no technical details. I'd recommend Udacity "How to build a startup" course any time and even for small businesses.
I took this course with Balaji at Stanford - definitely the best course I've taken. It was open-ended enough to let me pursue my own entrepreneurial/tech interests but provided enough support to help me avoid mistakes and learn relevant material. Can't wait to see how this course goes on a global level.
Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy
Could you elaborate on how they are against individual rights?
Sounds more like a typical 29 year old to me.
Doesn't have a retirement plan.
It's free online: https://www.coursera.org/course/startup
How well do telegrams compare to, say, overnight courier services like FedEx, or even the telephone? What is their main use in this day and age?
this line of reasoning is basically what leads to the tragedy of the commons, or problems such as the paradox of thrift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift), where everyone does what is best for themselves (which is fine in my books), but then leads to the overall decline of the system. The gov't needs to forcast these sorts of situations, and counter it before it becomes a problem.
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I've mentioned this in a couple comments below, but I think that this class teaches you a lot more than that. I took the class when it was offered at Stanford and one of the most valuable things I took out of the class was how to build APIs for different business functions. Being able to automate huge parts of your business, regardless of what industry you're in, is a huge advantage. Think about an energy company building APIs to monitor consumption and efficiency at client sites and adjusting their work accordingly -- that's huge. This class does a lot more than teach you how to build webapps; it teaches you to think in an automation mindset and happens to teach you a lot of useful skills along the way.
balajis - Thank you very much for your reply, and I'd like to say that I'm happy to be corrected. I've signed up for the class despite my concerns that it's...tangental at best to my interests...but if you succeed, I be quite content in being wrong.
I don't see anything inherently broken about null-terminated strings. It means that the smallest string that can be represented is a single byte, and the largest string that can be represented is unlimited. By mixing in an integer, you're expanding the smallest string and placing an arbitrary limit on the largest string. If the integer and string data are mixed in a struct, then strings pack much less tightly, not just because of the space taken up by the integer, but also because it needs to be aligned. Most of the things you'd want to do with a string are O(n) anyway, like print to the terminal. Null-terminated strings aren't perfect for every use, but no representation is, and C doesn't prevent you from using a different representation when it's more appropriate. If you're writing a parser, then that's a more demanding application than usual, and you ought not feel locked into using the default representation.
This makes sense.

The OP's "It's a cell phone carrier's dream; one tower can potentially reach nearly a million people." is the exact opposite of true. Frequencies used for mobile communication are limited and with that the total bandwidth of a cell site is limited.

This is the main reason new G's are coming out, 3G is packing many more bits per Hz then 2G was, and 4G is doing yet more.

New frequency bands are released for mobile communications to further alleviate the problem.

Network planners have to install more and more cells in dense urban areas and be careful not creating too much noise on the frequency as they have to reuse frequencies and codes.

In a place like HK skyscrapers are creating lots of problems with signal shadows and reflections.

Major office buildings sometimes have (unintentionally) selective glass that keeps outside mobile comms frequencies out and have indoor antennas that have strong and clean signals, but this is hardly the case for residential buildings.
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Even Canada operates a telegram service, although it is mainly used for novelty use these days.

I've heard that Mexico also uses telegram in places where telephone infrastructure is still lacking due either to government decay or drug cartels.
None of those are primary sources, just FYI.

And from the second article (an op-ed by a Congressman):

>Neither program allows the NSA to read e-mails or listen to phone calls of American citizens.

This is blatantly false, and the Government has said as much. The entire article is a mixture of falsehood and slick (read: dishonest) reasoning.

The first link is more unsubstantiated than the submitted link.

And the third link is a tweet about what a Congressman said.

The only one that has any helpful information is the Washington Post article and it's just a statement offered without evidence.

In case you didn't know, primary sources would be things like internal memos, pictures, videos, etc that are related to programs like Prism. E.g., the evidence offered by Edward Snowden and not in any of the links you posted.
It's a normal PS/2 mouse (at least it was on my R60).

There are a few pointers here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoin...
It would be helpful for a class on Startup Engineering to elaborate on company building rather than jumping to product building immediately.

Quoting Fred Wilson:

[...] most of our portfolio companies build the product first, then the business, then the company. And building a company is often difficult for founders because they are so focused on the product. [1]

That said, the course does seem to touch on important topics to build a web product with tools out there today. I found the Unix section [2] a bit ambitious. If someone came in with little knowledge of Unix prior to this, as the PDF seems to assume, it provides just enough rope to hang yourself with.

The Introduction [3] also ends with "Time to start coding", which seems like a great way to build a SaaS product, but maybe not a company.

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/building-a-company-vs-buildi...

[2] https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/cme184/unix.pdf

[3] http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/cme184/introduction.pdf
EU websites track users without warning, against own rules
European institutions are tracking users of their web sites, in breach of the EU's own data protection rules. The fact has been confirmed by Europe’s data protection watchdog, in an interview with EurActiv, while Brussels is reviewing privacy legislation to tackle the abuse.
The main lecturer co-founded one of the biggest personal genomics companies in the US, so I'm quite certain that he realizes the difference between the two.

The course emphasizes using CS-related skills in any startup for product development and getting insight into your market. Example exercises are things like scraping competitor data, wading through genomic data from the cmd line and building internal APIs for managing company data.
thanks for the mention of restangular, i didn't know about it until now.

https://github.com/mgonto/restangular
Yes, although it's somewhat bittersweet. I can't think of another city of similar size where I can live 5-minutes by car from the center of the business/entertainment district and a 5-minute walk from being in the middle of the forest. To give a visual example, this (very high end) residential building is about 10-minutes by car from the middle of the city:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hong_Kong_Parkview_2.jpg

The downside is that housing is close to the least affordable in the world with respect to median income. The average flat size is ~450 sq. ft., (of which typically less than 80% is actually the inside of the flat itself).

There have been a number of photo exhibits of late depicting the housing conditions that a significant portion of the population have to deal with:

http://www.psfk.com/2013/02/hong-kong-micro-slums.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2306842/Stunning-ima...
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Have you worked in the bay area?
I have no reason to make this up :-/

I comment very infrequently, but only use throwaway accounts as a personal policy based in part on HN-the-community's response to my opinions and HN-the-website's aggressive response to downvotes. (I'm actually re-using a previous throwaway because my last throwaway was autodead-on-arrival. Flagged IP maybe?)

Anonymity is not really the point; In fact, there are HN members who might figure out my identity simply because they were directly involved in these experiences.

The SRE anecdote may seem unbelievable, but why would this have been the case with multiple Google SREs? I did not imply that their work at Google consists of waving a magic wand and things getting done; it's more likely that the basic building blocks of Google's infrastructure are very powerful, and you don't have to worry about a bunch of things that other SREs have to. "Nice libraries and tools" is an understatement. Seems it's not only that they are reliant on $ProprietaryTechnologyG, they could not explain how $ProprietaryTechnologyG works or even describe alternative methods they'd use instead.

On the other hand, it is possible that it's only been the lesser SREs that have been interviewing around.

Also: The two Googlers I talked about (one of whom has been there longer than you, if I remember your HN comment history correctly), are doing very interesting work, and are very happy at their jobs. As a disclaimer, I know one well and the other I met only once. Nonetheless, they, in no unclear terms, said what I paraphrased and quoted above.

I didn't mean to imply that the stack was made so huge to keep unhappy employees in. In fact, I did not mean to imply any intent at all. However, as you said, since employees are not forced to understand it, most of them don't, and this becomes just another factor to consider when thinking of changing jobs. Not knowing the whole stack is perfectly fine, but when critical pieces have no comparable equivalent in the outside world, your skills become less transferable. (Plus, you might not feel like leaving all that good stuff behind!)

As I said in another comment upthread, the "proprietary stack" aspect at Google seems to be more pronounced than at other companies like Microsoft. I mean, come on, it's a commonly accepted fact that it takes a year to become productive after you start at Google. What reasonable conclusion about the stack can one draw from that?
Internet marketing spam.
That is quite understandable as OSX is designed to run on one hardware - that is Apple's. It is also the way, apple ensures that there is no hardware fragmentation.
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Sure, but my main point was about the types of things taught in the class: mostly technical things.

Most developers are already good at these things (or can learn them fairly quickly). The hard part of building a startup, at least for developers, is actually learning how to run a business and grow it. How to acquire users/customers, how to market, how to take care of all the "nasty but necessary" paperwork.
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If the balloons could be controlled accurately enough to provide internet access at a specific time each week, then you have a point. But if they fly over unpredictably, guided by the wind, then it's not going to be nearly as useful.
Also took this class at Stanford - extremely valuable, and it does devote a significant portion to marketing and discovering what is valuable to build.

Things such as ways to create extremely minimum viable products, how to generate, and quickly validate ideas are all covered - so it definitely covers more than just the things you note.
As mentioned further up these comments, IMEI's can be forged, and phones produced "off-hours" in the factories often have IMEI's consisting of all 0's or all 1's. I gleaned this much just from reading this thread.
Ooof, kind of, sort of, maybe? I can see the argument, at a very high level but I don't think it survives even a cursory examination of the details, which are - by going to HK he's walking into a very convoluted situation the outcome of which neither he nor anyone else can really predict. And he's basically betting that all twists and turns of the various intermediate outcomes will go his way. This seems incredibly risky and not very, well, strategic.

I don't think, though, that in the unlikely event he gets Vanunu'd out Hong Kong it would cause significant problems for anyone but him. He also doesn't really face any risk of being killed - whatever one may think of the ethics, legality or quality of targeting of the drone strikes, they do target people involved in a violent, armed conflict with the US - 'enemy combatants' as the USG likes to call them. Snowden is not any sort of enemy combatant.
I have very little programming experience/skill but really want to take this course and am up for a challenge. Is it doable?

Anything that I could do to supplement the course to make up for my disadvantage?
i'd love to see it hooked up to this:

http://geometee.com
Crazy to me that our government is capable of a monumental task such as filtering the raw unfiltered data stream into manageable information, but can't manage to get the VA to get benefits to soldiers in a reasonable time frame.
As you say, "without legal authorization" is a very large qualifier.

So is "a single analyst." Gen. Hayden and the NYT's original 2005 report indicated the permission of two analysts -- a junior analyst and a "shift supervisor" -- was necessary under the NSA's pre-FAA program that has continued largely intact.
https://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/01/hayden012306.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/politics/01spy.html?pagewa...

So taking the statement at face value, if a shift supervisor blessed the initial collection, that would be fine without a court order. Or if a single analyst has received "legal authorization," that would be fine too. What the DNI's statement doesn't do is reveal what the procedures really are.
This is the best thing about Hong Kong.
Finish work at 7, take a 10 minute metro to the base of a mountain, do a 3 hour hike before bed.

Check out the view from abovehttp://www.airpano.com/360Degree-VirtualTour.php?3D=honkong