skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an insider you have a different view from others. I wonder though if you do not see the forest for the trees. Does knowing more than others about the inner workings of the NSA make the effects of the NSA actions on the country less apparent to you?

But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.

Those aren't the only two choices for what is happening here. There is also the idea of a government bureaucracy without a credible internal counter balance to its desire for more and more information. I have to wonder if an analyst there ever got promoted for saying something is wrong. That the something in question goes against the People's right to privacy.
Firstly, thanks for the detailed review.

> I feel like your branding/message suffer from Prospect being a common term, and all the Prospect info being hosted under 'Human' (another common word), not being on its own site. Hard to have a uniform top-level message.

This is something I agonized over - Human is my company and I almost launched Prospect on a separate URL. However, I felt that I could better integrate customer service by using the sub-domain. Maybe the name is a bad one but It was short and one that wasn't in use by anyone else in regards to this type of HR function.

> 3) Work on your pricing grid. This is a key step of your sales funnel; literally no one can become a customer without seeing it. I would flip the grid into the more common vertical format; you can search for "four column pricing grid" for advice here. I would consider naming the 4 plans, offering a discount to those who buy longer plans (and show the discount!), and add a 'start now' etc call-to-action button for each plan. You don't want this grid to be dull or a dead end.

Absolutely, I need to improve the pricing marketing. I will work on the grid asap.

> 4) Marketing ideas: I might continue to sell personally until you have some decent stats to speak of, in terms of # of jobs posted and # of job seeker subscribers. It's clear that you've done good technical work, but the marketing side needs more focus to be able to scale well.

Thanks. I can certainly market the number of jobs posted and subscribers for sure though right now, it's nothing to shout about. (Less than 10 customers)

I probably need a designer and in terms of back-end, it's far from perfect as others have pointed out.
This is sad, I got mines about a month ago and backed it with like 24hrs left( think I was in the 6k range). I got an email today about how some backers still don't have there's and now they are blaming DHL, Germany imports and everyone else. I'm not as mad since I lucked up (still haven't played but 10mins since I got mines), but the really need to fix this issue ... it was the backers that made this device any possible.
No, it's situational awareness. "Is this company doing well? Or is it not?"

That's a very reasonable and business-minded way to approach your employment. You have a very direct interest in the company's success: your paycheck, reputation, friends, etc. Being aware if the company is exploding is simple sanity.
The word "startup" is the least important part of the whole story.
I thought this was going to be a post about anonymity and internet privacy. It's pretty fair to say that the combination of content, scripts and headers for almost any page you see on the internet has been uniquely crafted for you and your browser. Sure, there are some super static sites out there, but the vast majority of pages that normal people view every day are instrumented to the hilt with little nuggets of personalized tracking cookies, personalized JavaScript beacons and everything else that helps marketers and traffic analysts happy.

The OP page is far from unique in its uniqueness.
Ask HN: Contacts at Netflix or Rdio? Tracking a robber via IP address
Recently, I was robbed in Oakland, CA. Amongst various items taken from me was my iPad. The robber knew enough to disassociate my iPad from the iCloud, so "Find My iPad" no longer works. However, the robber didn't know enough not to use my Rdio and my Netflix apps on the iPad. I didn't change passwords on those, and now I see stuff in my history that has been watched and listened.<p>Does anyone know any engineers at Netflix or Rdio who would be capable of sending me all the IP addresses of locations where my account has been accessed? I reached out to customer service at both; Netflix CS said they can't provide me that information, and Rdio said they can, but it's been a few days and they still haven't gotten around to it.<p>Before you say "let the Oakland Police handle it", know that the OPD is widely considered to be one of the most dysfunctional PDs in the country, with <10% robberies solved, so I am doing as much of my own investigative work as possible.
I cannot confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of a sense of humour, irony or shame on the part of the poor functionary who had to send out that response.
> Is it painful? Of course. But it isn't death.

No, but firing somebody who is the head of household and has major medical issues at home, is a helluva lot more serious than 4th down.
That's an interesting thought. BAH employees spend on a lot of time on what they call "the beach" while they're waiting for a switch to a new job. A lot of that time is spent on reading/writing training materials. You wouldn't be working with classified documents though, typically.

It looked to me more like something some Air Force captain who was looking for a promotion put together. There are all sorts of junk slides floating around like that, which don't necessarily reflect active programs...just proposals to show that the people writing them can think outside the box and whatnot.

For obvious reasons, I can't comment on classified things, but I was very knowledgable about things and I had never even heard of PRISM when all this stuff came out. Take that with a grain of salt, though, since there are plenty of compartmented programs.
see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939782
I have used Jekyll and like it, the only problem there is that the customer is non-technical, so they really need a fairly simple interface to add or modify content in the app. I was initially thinking a simple web interface with a WYSIWYG editor. Perhaps Markdown is simple enough for them to grasp, and I can just build something around it to simplify the process of pushing changes into a Jekyll rebuild.
> Significant parts of that standard say "do it like Word does" with varying degrees of indirection

That's not correct. What it actually does is reserve some markup for use by third parties that have reverse engineered various old programs (including programs that competed with Microsoft programs), so that if those people have workflows that depend on features of those old programs that cannot be represented in OOXML, they can still use OOXML as a storage format but add in the extra information they need.

Here's the use case this is aimed at. Suppose I run, say, a law office, and we've got an internal document management system that does things like index and cross reference documents, manage citation lists, and stuff like that. The workflow is based on WordPerfect format (WordPerfect was for a long time the de facto standard for lawyers).

Now suppose I want to start moving to a newer format for storage. Say I pick ODF, and start using that for new documents, and make my tools understand it. I'd like to convert my existing WordPerfect documents to ODF. However, there are things in WordPerfect that cannot be reproduced exactly in ODF, and this is a problem. If my tools need to figure out what page something is on, in order to generate a proper citation to that thing, and I've lost some formatting information converting to ODF, I may not get the right cite.

So what am I going to do? I'm going to add some extra, proprietary markup of my own to ODF that lets me include my reverse engineered WordPerfect knowledge when I convert my old documents to ODF, and my new tools will be modified to understand this. Now my ODF workflow can generate correct cites for old documents. Note that LibreOffice won't understand my additional markup, and will presumably lose it if I edit a document, but that's OK. The old documents I converted should be read-only.

Of course, I'm not the only person doing this. Suppose you also run a law office, with a WordPerfect work flow, and are converting to an ODF work flow. You are likely going to add some proprietary markup, just like I did. We'll both end up embedding the same WordPerfect information in our converted legacy documents, but we'll probably pick different markup for it. It would be nice if we could get together, make a list of things we've reverse engineered, and agree to use the same markup when embedding that stuff in ODF.

And that's essentially what they did in OOXML. They realized there would be people like us with our law offices, who have reverse engineered legacy data, that will be extending the markup. So they made a list of a bunch of things from assorted past proprietary programs that were likely to have been reverse engineered by various third parties, and reserved some markup for each.
There are lots of things you can do to make a console cheaper, but not a whole lot you can do to make a hunk of plastic with buttons in it cheaper.
How do we know that they haven't been?

His supervisors, by the way, are at Booz Allen, not the NSA. Although certainly the NSA has to take responsibility for the contractors it does business with.
Ok you guys are right. We're adding this to our site right now.
>In other words, considering how US has promised to treat him

You mean the promises to arrest him for releasing confidential information? I'm honestly confused why people don't think he should be arrested. If he had released weapons designs instead of NSA documents, would you support his galavanting across HK and Russia?

The question, "Is the NSA program unconstitutional?" is a far different one than "Should those who release confidential documents be arrested?" Unless you think that there should be no state secrets, it makes absolute sense to arrest and prosecute Snowden. I'm grateful that he shed some light on a very troubling program, but that doesn't just grant him immunity from prosecution. It would be far more honorable to accept responsibility rather than to continue this mess.
We're talking about startups in the Silicon Valley Business vernacular, which has some strange definitions for common words. (See: Disrupt)
Hmm. Thanks for this.
Thanks, I'm building Angular.js app and adopting Rails 4 for api backend, Will Rails-API be updated for Rails 4 ?
Yes, he really said this: http://lenta.ru/news/2013/06/25/putin/ (just put the link in the google translate if you want).

Here is my crude translation of the relevant part:

"Considering possible extradition somewhere, we can extradite people only to the countries which have extradition treaty with us. We don't have such agreement with the USA. Snowden haven't committed any crimes in the territory of Russia".

Note: Putin hasn't used the exact formal term "extradition". So he may have spoken of some other type of agreement.
waow free bear feet slippers
I love the subtle patronization in your post. "You are building a small business." "You are among solid companions with your local plumbers, restaurants, and barbers."

My brother in-law has a bootstrapped SaaS company making six figures per month at a profit margin of almost 100%.

Is he building a small business? Is he among his local plumbers and barbers?
Indeed it is. Its sad, looks like this was accidental. This guy was a legend.
Wow that's so crooked. On the other hand, Nixon looks like a saint by today's standards.
In my experience it's always possible to get java level performance out of clojure when you need it, even if that ends up meaning that you essentially write java with sexpressions and macros. However, even for "medium data", when I find clojure too slow I fall back to C/C++. I've never found myself thinking "maybe I should write this in java."

Unfortunately, I can't find good examples of modern performant clojure with benchmarks at the moment. As far as I understand, the alioth benchmarks are still out of date.
> Lack of an extradition treaty does not prevent Russia from handing Snowden over, or expelling him; it would merely obligate them to.

If Russia has a constitutional government with limited powers (which, I think, on paper it does, whatever it may otherwise do in practice), not having a legal basis to detain and hand him over may, legally at least, prevent them from detaining him and handing him over.
I couldn't help but notice the highlighting of the website is weird. If you start highlighting somewhere on the text then everything except the paragraph you clicked on will be dimmed, and there is a slight background difference on the actual highlighted text.

Gimmicks like this put me off websites straight away.
“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively”
Ah, I see. Sorry, I should have read more carefully.
Here's a more portable version (works with bash, pdftk and wget):

wget http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch{01..14}.pdf && pdftk ch*.pdf cat output merged.pdf
Other BAH personnel and BAH corporate liability are dependent on whether there was either process negligence (e.g., Snowden's team members didn't enforce policy) or inadequate measures. One man acting alone, even within a corporate structure, doesn't implicate his co-workers or the company as a whole. (Of course, this isn't always the case in court. See also: Arthur Anderson.)
>(1) it's a lisp. This is 2013, compilers can deal with +-/, I don't need to.

The s-exp notation is actually more* programmer friendly because when you're using a decent editor you can work with code at structural level.

When I work in Clojure I'm not thinking in term of manipulating lines. I think in terms of expressions. I want to take this expression and parent it here or there, I do that. I want to factor out a piece of logic I can select the block and move it out, etc.

This also facilitates the powerful macro system where I can trivially write code that templates code for me or create DSLs to express the particular problem domain I'm working on. The whole aversion to prefix notation is incredibly superficial.

>it lacks good documentation. Most functions are documented, but badly. In particular, they lack examples; sometimes they are really tricky to use

This is simply false. There's excellent documentation available at

http://clojuredocs.org/quickref/Clojure%20Core

and

http://clojure-doc.org/articles/content.html#clojure_languag...

with lots of examples for each function, tutorials, and guides. Furthermore, there's tons of traditional documentation available in form of books.

>it's full of magic. You can feel it, but you can't really understand it without digging through the source code.

It's quite the opposite in my experience.

>I know OCaml, can read Haskell, and wrote a small library in closure. I still find it very hard do get around and very hard to learn.

I find Haskell is much more difficult to read than Clojure. Perhaps it has something to do with familiarity as opposed to any inherent difficulty?
And someone at the NSA needs to be taking responsibility for why Snowden had access to as much as he did, sysadmin or not.
(Not the OP) I've read PG's article, and it makes sense, but it narrowly fits YC's model and leaves out lean, bootstrapped companies. For that reason, I prefer Steve Blank's definition: "An organization in search of a repeatable, scalable business model". There's a good discussion here: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-definition-of-a-startup
I love the description on their blog about why they made this film:

"This is not a film about robots going haywire and becoming hell bent on world domination. The fear of machines is well trodden ground. Instead, Dr. Easy suggests that these machines function perfectly but have an impossible task, because humans are faulty machines."
Copy & Paste from Rails Guides
Tip: Double click on the code examples on http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ will transform them into a textarea and mark all the code.
I keep meaning to dive into the MRI source code but have never known where to start. I suppose I just need an excuse like the one the author had here and a little more motivation and a little more time. :-/
You're right, I've gone and confused accelerators with VCs. And no, not all VCs are short-termists.
I'm confused. Is it magical because you don't understand it, or do you not understand it because it's magical? It seems like you're saying the first one.
I have to agree. I really appreciate the effort to update the site but it seems like there is even less cohesion than before. I think there are at least 20 different combinations of font family/size/weight/color on every documentation page. The arbitrary sizing especially throws me off. And all the images could use some finessing, like the jaggy comment up/down-vote arrows.

It's a really good start though. I'm heartened to see the site get some love.
I flew without passport or ID once, when my passport was stolen in Germany and I had to return to my country of residence, Switzerland at the time. I am a Danish citizen and I called the embassy who told me they could only get me to Denmark through the partly state owned airline Scandinavian Airlines, but I managed to talk to the the relevant people at the airport and I even managed to get a VAT refund from a jacket I bought in the airport and eventually got back to Switzerland on my scheduled flight.
You mean the promises to arrest him for releasing confidential information?

Arrest, a fair trial and humane treatment is different from what Bradley Manning suffered. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/11/stripped-naked-b...

Also, need I remind you all the statements made against him by politicians?
> is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.

In this case, I trust the disgruntled worker more than the people still getting a salary.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
...those who deplore the "treasures" destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma

http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.htm...
Optimizing memory usage in Python: a case study
These bait titles get on my nerves.
As long as there is no default way of doing that for the majority of activity of the lowly user it will not succeed. If, e.g., Mozilla and Ubuntu built it in to all their assets by default with the ability to disable it, then you might have a working plan to overload and drain away the resources put towards decrypting data.

Does it dawn on anyone else that our government has and will continue to have turned on its own people. Let that sink in for a couple seconds. The the majority of the legislature instituted it and the executive has been executing it with impunity.

It is already bad enough just based on principle as to what is being done to the rest of the world, but our own government has turned on its own people. Just like Europe didn't quite understand what it was getting into, let's say late ~1910 and again in ~1930, because what was to come was so beyond their experience and comprehension; we are making the same mistake and not quite comprehending the ramifications and consequences that will wash over us.

No one wants to acknowledge it, but the enemy is within. Tyranny is spreading the way it does and will not be apparent until it is too late.
When the reward value is tied very closely to the amount that is backed, Kickstarter is defacto acting as a store with preorders, despite their protestations.
US immigration deal envisages use of military surveillance at southern border
What's your company web site and what are web sites of competitors?
Loebner Prize 2013: Three of Four Finalists are Pandorabots
How does the anonymous gathering of statistics harm you? As an app developer, this data allows me to measurably improve my apps.

I have several free (no ads either) apps in the Android market, and even in the most trivial of apps I will include Google Analytics to receive crash reports, see what screens are most popular (so I can improve my apps where it matters most), where the app is being used (for some reason one of my apps was really popular in France, I then added a French translation and the adoption really took off), what devices are most/least popular etc. If I add a new feature, I want to know if its being used or if I wasted my time, if I need to improve the discoverability of the feature etc.

Last but not least, the usage data is really motivating to me as a developer of free apps. If I release an app, and I see it being used daily, that makes me happy and motives me to keep updating it.

As far as I know, the GA data is anonymous and only shown to the developer in aggregates.
More options for marketers: Announcing the next wave of Ads API partners
Watsi is looking for a front-end developer, our first hire
Watsi.org is a global crowdfunding platform for healthcare that enables anyone to directly fund low-cost, high-impact medical treatments for people in need. We're a technology-focused non-profit startup fresh out of Y Combinator with one goal: global access to basic health care.

We're looking for a senior front-end developer (with some design chops) to join our fast-moving 4-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate will be an HTML/CSS expert with Javascript, design, mobile web, and Rails experience. The more Javascript and Rails experience you have the better. You have to be serious about alignment, consistency and executing the design to the fullest. In fact, the more design you do the better.

A few challenges we'd like this hire to tackle:
- constantly improve page load time, let's say by 10% in the first few weeks
- implement a really nice redesign that looks right on all the most popular screen sizes
- take responsibility for anything a donor or a team member sees on all of our apps
- get us off of Bootstrap, or at least slim it down to the bare minimum
- maybe even get us off of the asset pipeline, as it slows down deployments to Heroku

If you are excited about joining a motivated, passionate team that's working its ass off to help people receive the medical they deserve, we'd love to hear from you. Please send your resume/github to jobs@watsi.org
uggggg... i truly hate when people that don't understand statistics jump on a soapbox and spout out lies.

a very good example of your flawed logic can be demonstrated with birthdays. with 366 potential birthdays, it doesn't take a room full of 366 people before 2 people share the same birthday. after you get over 40 people, it's almost guaranteed that 2 people will share a birthday.

nice squiggly line.
Looking into what you said, that is what happened.

I'd always heard that said about the tool we used today to point out "It does way too much for a single SCM, you have to find what YOU need a SCM to do and use that".