skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't watched the video yet but I have read through the slides and found them to be rather honest. I really do enjoy presentations where the tradeoffs for using a technology are well displayed rather than disguised in other forms.
22 light years, in layman's terms equals 5 billion round-trips from San Francisco to Paris.

.

- SF to Paris (1 trip = 5831.79 miles)

- double that for a round trip

- 22 light years = 5.87849981 × 10^12 miles

- Divide 22 light years by the round trip, yields total trip count.
I'm undecided on the issue, however it seems completely logical to me that terrorists wouldn't use venues that are being monitored by the NSA. Would that still be the case if those lines of communications weren't monitored at all? In addition, if the NSA started monitoring whatever the terrorists use at present, would they continue to use it? Doubtful.

I don't think this article comes to the clever conclusion that it thinks it does.
> What is it exactly that Snowden did that so many Americans consider to be bad?

I don't think anyone who thinks Snowden is a traitor actually has considered it at all, they are just eating up the standard post-911 narrative that has been driving this country for over a decade now. The problem is that being anti-terrorism is such a political bi-partisan pillar that even appearing to rationally consider the cost-benefit (let alone the constitutionality!) of something as obscene as the NSA's domestic spying program in its current form is political suicide . It's a sad state of affairs, but the public debate driven by politicians is based on the strength of Twitter-length arguments. Based on current sentiment, can you can concoct a stronger sound bite pro or anti NSA surveillance? Critical thinking doesn't enter into it at all.

That's why only the people can change this debate. We need to convince each other of the slippery slope we're on, and the futility of an ever-increasing police state in 100% prevention of terrorism. Then we need to make the politicians aware that we do believe in the first and fourth ammendments, and that we will not allow our proxy power to be used to spy on ourselves en masse, and we will vote out of office any politician who does not respect the limits of government power.

A little help from the media would be nice, but big media is almost as beholden to political winds as politicians are these days.
The opinions on HN regarding Snowden are so lamentably one-note in unconditional support that I really dont have the strength to articulate my counterargument. What's the point? I probably agree with many others who feel the same so I'll just point you towards other people, lazy as that may be.

As for my "homophobic" joke, I'm merely quoting Office Space.
I'm on the side that doesn't turn every controversy into ad hominem nonsense.
Real-time Profiling a MongoDB Cluster
Look again. Someone inside shot a smiley face in the shape of |:-)
Is there a time at which approaches any faster?
the number of tor servers has increased.

https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.png?start=2013-03...
https://metrics.torproject.org/direct-users.png?start=2013-0...
Are you an expert in this domain or are you just parroting what the article said? I can think of at least one reason for a spam filter to contact the computer for an HTTPS request but not for an HTTP request- you want to find out what certificate they're using.
Why not double down and keep pushing forward?
The government should enforce, and follow, the laws as they are written, not go by what one man or another considers to be "just" or "unjust."

What "the law" is at any point in time is just a reflection of what men (well, "people") think is just. Except in this country, our political system has become so corrupt that a significant body of what passes for "law" here is total bullshit. People should feel empowered to violate unjust laws. Personally, I encourage everybody to break a few laws each and every day, simply as a matter of principle.
I backed this project and received my Ouya a few weeks ago. We played it as a family a few times, and then forgot we had it. Overall, decent quality hardware, but the OS was a little slow and awkward. Also not a fan of the way games are presented. It's like downloading demos for XBox Live.

Once I get some more free time I'll play around with it as a developer. Perhaps that's where the true value lies.
How To Start Your First Podcast
Those are the client libraries. It seems like the actual manta compute environment is primarily for SmartOS.

http://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/compute-instance-software.ht...

https://github.com/joyent/manta-compute-bin

Also probably a better article:

http://www.joyent.com/blog/hello-manta-bringing-unix-to-big-...
In general, I think these behaviours are better explained by the Hedonic Treadmill theory, rather than by malice.

If your $1M house isn't perfect, you start looking at $2M houses. If your monthly costs are what other people hope to make in a year, any decrease in your means seems horrible and unfair.

This doesn't address Pincus' comments, but there are jealous rich as well as jealous not-rich.
Top Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits [May 2013]
I presume they are referring to the summer, a time when people traditionally plan a holiday.
Some excellent ideas, but not enough time to develop them, and too risky or not obviously profitable enough for me to be able to quit full-time agency work (which would obviously be the goal). Ideas come easy, the kind that intersect with "potentially profitable within 6-12 months" are much rarer.
Wasn't the Google Reader apocalypse the week following the announcement from Google? You know, when every post on the front page of Hacker News was a Google Reader alternative.
Isn't this giving in and doing exactly what they want, always using unencrypted communications?

The question is, how much do you want an unchecked organization with no oversight to know about you? Do you trust the NSA to know everything about you and never do anything wrong with it, 10, 15 or 20 years from now?
I think the next leak will show they've redefined 'terrorist' and that a terrorist these days is anyone who does anything the US doesn't like and is vaguely related ultimately back to national security. So, I think already we've established that any drug crimes (even low-level ones) are national security threats. Bitcoin miners will soon be terrorists I think. People encrypting email are highly suspect and probably a national security threat. People running free web hosting will soon be terrorists. It directly serves the interests of the government for everyone to be considered a terrorist. It's probably one of the biggest loopholes our country's seen.
A relevant clarification from an earlier version of the list; the article includes it so you can judge for yourself: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/351930/lookout-list-not...

"A November 2010 version of the list obtained by National Review Online, however, suggests that while the list did contain the word “progressive,” screeners were in fact instructed to treat “progressive” groups differently from “tea party” groups. Whereas screeners were merely alerted that a designation of 501(c)(3) status “may not be appropriate” for applications containing the word ”progressive” – 501(c)(3) groups are prohibited from conducting any political activities – they were told to send those of tea-party groups off ”to Group 7822″ for further scrutiny.

That means the applications of progressive groups could be approved on the spot by line agents, while those of tea-party groups could not. Furthermore, the November 2010 list noted that tea-party cases were “currently being coordinated with EOT,” which stands for Exempt Organizations Technical, a group of tax lawyers in Washington, D.C. Those of progressive groups were not. "
Google may index a lot of the spam as relatively useless since it is often found at top levels. If the number is correct what it is probably missing is all of the content that lies in databases, easily accessible, but not necessarily on the front pages of web sites, or found without entering a query of some sort.
"Product after Product"

It seems like you were building mobile apps
Actually, they were using Gmail drafts to communicate with each other?
Stop Stressing About Startup Competitors
I get that you and we all have different interpretations of what we would expect privacy to mean. But the government only has the one that it has to go by, the law, and the law was made much more expansive by the USA PATRIOT act and only brought back in a little bit by the 2008 Amendments. I could have sworn that the Supreme Court has had a chance to strike down part of the USA PATRIOT Act by this time and hasn't.

I like your analogy on physical proxies, but I didn't need convincing that information given to a third-party on the Internet deserves a "reasonable expectation of privacy" (up to the limits of the privacy policy itself, though...). I just don't think the law agrees at this point, which is why I'm pushing back against people with the idea that everything the NSA has ever done is illegal.

The law needs fixed, once and for all. I think most of us agree at least in theory that there is a need to handle counter-terrorism and domestic law enforcement so we also need to decide what "features" (if any) are built-in for that.

And then we need to decide how far those laws extend to cover those from outside the U.S.
If you see music from an economic standpoint: there is an abundance of music being made and distributed today. And the cost of making a professional sounding recording, and bringing it to a large audience, has plummeted to where it is within the means of anyone with a bit of talent to make, and distribute, music. Merely recording music isn't "special" anymore. Anyone can do that.

There is a sense of entitlement that is out of sync with reality here.

The world has changed. Whining about it isn't going to change that.
In 30 days my startup will be dead.
I think the content is better suited to a horizontal layout because of its shape.

You can argue against the usability of it if you wish, but I think Javascript hijacking the scroll wheel and converting scrolling vertically to scrolling horizontally would be really useful in this case.
You need to turn DEBUG off in Django.
But if copyright infringement is theft, doesn't that make communications into possessions?
Nifty Modals
Americans’ reading habits over time
I have seen productive systems over which money in the tens of thousands of Euros came in which had hidden fields in the HTML containing complete SQL queries which even included the price (apart from the obvious downfall of enabling someone to just POST a 'DROP TABLE' statement, etc.). I have seen systems with something like static 5-digit user authentication tokens that would show up in the URL; You could just sit behind an admin, note the token and be an admin forever. And of course I have seen the ugliest, completely unmaintainable mess of code that would be humanly possible, with no documentation whatsoever (of course).

To be fair, only the last thing you list could but doesn't have to apply to PHP, and mostly refer to incompetent practices which could be applied with any language. I'm not going to be a PHP apologist, But I do remember a couple of weeks when it looked like every day there was another exploit in Rails (which is not Ruby blah blah blah) or a problem with exposing app tokens or something. Do I get to say Ruby is a toy language because at some point the YAML parser allowed for remote code execution?

Of course not, because that problem's been (I assume) fixed. The SQL libraries are being deprecated in PHP, it's had parameterized queries for a while. You can do secure cookies and sessions. People just don't -- it's not as integrated a community as with Rails and Python. You can't just say "everybody update your repos" and then the problem goes away, unfortunately. But that's an issue with education, and deployment, not necessarily the language.

I also heard from a friend who had to fix something in the C-code making up php about hundreds of lines of codes being copypasted to different locations twelve times. While I haven't verified that for myself, it's not something I'd be surprised about.

Well... then that's just, like, your opinion man.
Interesting. I would have thought at least some math would be required during the planning/design phase to ensure the design is physically stable (e.g. load calculations to ensure spans are supported well enough). Thanks for the info.
I've been noticing this for a long time. Any facet of government is described in this extremely inconsistent way. Think about it, the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second). We can't trust the government to hand out lollipops to children because they will enact UnAmerican(tm) enforcement of socialist conditions on the recipients with an iron fist, that money is better spent on law enforcement and our military heros (you know, the afore-mentioned jack-booted thugs).

Somehow the organizations that align with one's ideologies are painted as efficient do-gooders in a horribly inefficient and bumbling system, while the ones that align with opposing ideologies are capable only of a incompetence at a level usually reserved for high comedy.

I think ultimately it comes from this notion of "the" government. It is easier/lazier to assume that government is a monolithic entity rather than a large organization of people, therefore complex and not at all monolithic. Since people are used to this sort of treatment, it becomes a nice dramatic vehicle for people to tell stories and push agendas, and it is so ingrained, people rarely say "hey wait a minute..."

Just for fun, pay attention and call people out on it sometime. The anti-jackbooted thugs rants and law enforcement needs more money (from the same person) crowd is pretty common in tech - note the switches in perceived competence, and position, and call people out. The mental gymnastics of retaining the position are awesome. Seriously, if there was an olympics of cognitive dissonance, people who like US politics would win the gold every damn time.
If you are considered a foreigner they have to break the encryption. If you are US citizen, constitutional restrictions have to be overcome. Nothing lost when encryption is used.
Air Pollution May Have Suppressed Storms, Research Suggests
> A tech company which only exists as a napkin held between two hungry young men with no asset other than a gleam in their eye gets a notional value of $250k+ on day one.

Here's what I don't understand. Why?
Woah, we don't want to go there.

If they can't get the data in transit, they'll go for the sources and destinations. Legally mandated keyloggers, anyone? An 'adversary' as markedly omnipresent as the NSA has had no problems [1][2][3] with intruding upon infrastructure, and I doubt your pesky little Win8 tablet or your pretty little Linux box would be able to withstand even a fraction of what the NSA could set up as a push-button intrusion system.

A click of a button, and you're compromised.

If you mess with the bull, you'll get the horns.

[1] http://rt.com/news/snowden-nsa-china-hack-120/
[2] http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/12/nsa-global-surveillance/
[3] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/snowden-says-nsa-ha...
7 Months with TypeScript
I hear your argument & it's valid but it's important to not wholly discount image & marketing when choosing a solution, as they also affect how widely used a product is, for better or worse. Apps are "cooler," some people will be more inclined to use it as an app. Again, this isn't a really meaningful reason but it's a real factor and bears consideration. I'm not sure if bookmarking to homescreen is a common workflow for many people.

My point is that there's a trade off (I tend to suspect people would use a mobile site less; you have to find it each time etc.) and if you determine that product X would be less accessible, but used by more people, if you implement it using technology Y, it's not unreasonable to accept that compromise.

Lest I come of as a grumpy gus that doesn't care about accessibility, I'll link to this PR https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/pull/37 which hopefully illustrates that I do care about accessibility, I just recognize that there are other factors when choosing a solution as well and not all will be perfectly accessible, for better or worse.
'while' is actually faster than 'for'. But in this example the while loop does extra work (mutating the array). while loops are always faster than forEach, as they simply do less work.
More than you think. ADC/load balances like F5 have hardware security modules that offload SSL.

Folks who host PKI often offload key generation. This might e as complex as some sort of appliance, or as simple as a smartcard.
What does that even mean? People usually say this when they want to sound wise but to me it sounds like nonsense cowardly pseudo-intellectualism. So you've determined the truth is "somewhere in the middle" of two vast extremes. How does that contribute to the conversation? It's like playing the "guess what number I'm thinking of" game and the options are between 1 and 1,000,000 and you guess "somewhere in the middle" and proudly walk away. More importantly, it adds to the idea that there is one truth, that the whole thing can be boiled down to any easy and simple truth. This isn't the case, reality is far more complicated than that.
The author is focusing on the wrong issue. He is mostly concerned with whether or not the surveillance is effective.

If effectiveness were the only consideration, he would have a weak argument. Even if most terrorists are smart enough to avoid Gmail, Skype and cellular networks, it might still make sense to eavesdrop in these places.

After all, smart criminals sometimes get caught because they make dumb mistakes. For example, my understanding is that Sabu (a member of Anonymous) was caught because he forgot to use Tor in one instance when he logged into a social network.

But we can argue all day about whether or not PRISM is effective. I think the author would have a stronger argument if he focused on the fact that the program is unconstitutional, regardless of how well it works.
part 1 of the video series - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0MoGRZRtcA
This email was sent to all backers this morning: http://pastebin.com/R9RQS3ak

"Backers, I am pissed. Some of you have not yet received your OUYA -- and, to you, I apologize." -- Julie (who usually writes OUYA backer emails)

"Unfortunately, the vast majority of those who haven’t yet received OUYA are international backers. It just takes a lot longer to ship to some countries.... Please accept my personal apology for not yet delivering on our promise." -- Ken, Head of Operations at OUYA
I would like to send you an email, can you contact me ?
simone at mweb dot biz
I don't find it easier at all, the purple blocks / elements overwhelm the content.

The old site looks way better for 'information consuming' than the new version.

My two cents.
I've been through all of this, it sucks. But this line sticks with me:

"Honestly think the only thing that keeps my health and my marriage intact is my running."

I gotta start running. That's the one thing I always get wrong.

Good luck. Just remember, this happens all the time. For you, it will be a learning experience. In a year's time, you'll be in a new situation with almost a completely new life, and your experience will be valuable to that next step.

Next time will be a little bit better. You'll be a little more trusting of yourself, with a little less naivete, and you'll create something again. Or you'll help someone else create something. Either way, your life will get better, because you're a capable person who started a company, and you're capable of even more. Do the best you can right now and stay positive. The future will be brighter.
As Nursie said, £1 is not exactly $1. I can't believe that taxes inflate that much the price.
Pivoted, pivoted, then pivoted again. The other founders can't stand any more and don't want to "give up" on the latest baby.

At this point, I'm running out of options and have a dev team that I can't afford to pay for much longer.
I wish things weren't the way they are.
Phone calls are protected by the 4th Amendment but emails are not. (Under current interpretations of the 4th Amendment.)
"Happiness is a business model" is a bit much, even for me. I've got respect for Tony but I never really agreed with that one. I think it's easy to say when you've had a few base hits - but I'd love to see today's 'in the trenches' entrepreneurs try to sell that line to their investors or stakeholders.
Could the OP chime in as to why he is writing and publishing this blog? It appears to be a cautionary tale, but I'm not sure what anyone can learn when all the particulars are removed. Why not just write a retrospective after the next 30 days?
641A? Probably ECPA in conjuction with FISA. Likewise for fiber taps. The real "innovation" there is how much domestic data is allowed to be captured by accident and then minimized later. Might meet with the letter of the law, but definitely not the spirit!

> The fact that we don't know the answers to these questions because they are being deliberately withheld from us means that we are not "secure against unreasonable searches".

Well, the lack of an answer to this isn't what is violating the 4th Amendment. If they answered "we record everything" you'd have your answer but would presumably still feel that your rights are being violated.
" the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second)"

To be fair, the thing you described sounds like they're doing they're jobs, but that they're also idiots, so it actually makes sense to me.
On its own, isn't this fallacious reasoning?

There seems to be no reason in itself to believe that the truth is between two (arguably) suspicious portrayals, and merely splitting the difference won't lead us closer to any truth.

"The fact that one is confronted with an individual who strongly argues that slavery is wrong and another who argues equally strongly that slavery is perfectly legitimate in no way suggests that the truth must be somewhere in the middle."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
I think the best way to look at this is as a learning experience. You have "scar tissue" now and won't make the same mistakes again.

Since you are an entrepreneur, you will inevitably build another successful startup - except this time you'll make it happen in half the time with twice the wisdom.
Failure is a part of growth. This may be a monumental failure, but this blog is both therapeutic and introspective for the author. Examining failures helps us as we move forward.
We get the added benefit of looking in from the outside. Kudos for coming forward with this kind of honesty.
Bp;dr - behind paywall, didn't read
Did you have the self-awareness at the time to realize that what you were building is something DHH would be proud of, or was that only in retrospect? I'm asking these questions, because I struggle with listening to outside advice vs listening to my gut, and Ive been trying to strike a balance as of late.