skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
GCHQ in the uk have been doing it for most uk traffic, and it seems the approach is to store full data as long as they can, and store headers for longer. All the content is stored for 3 days, then the headers are kept for 30 days, and shared with other agencies like the NSA, who may well keep it all indefitely if they have enough storage available. They probably do some early filtering to keep it manageable, removing duplicate content, unwanted videos etc. and the headers and metadata are probably not that large. Before reading the GCHQ docs I wouldn't have found this claim credible...

If they are not collecting every communication in the world, you can be sure it is not from lack of ambition to do so. In the words of General Alexander:

“Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” the N.S.A. director was quoted as saying. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."

Which is a worryng thought when you realise the implications of this ambition. We used to think that only a god could be omniscient, but that is the current ambition of our intelligence services and politicians.
> Visa, MasterCard, and co. have rules that effectively prevent you from using the same backends in different areas.

What's the reasoning behind that restriction? Could you just re-use your backend stack, but use a different data center / machines, that's isolated from the backend of other countries?
> The fact that bitcoin is extranational must open up a lot of completely legal loopholes for avoiding taxes on everything except when you repatriate money in one form or another.

I don't see why being "extranational" would do this, and would find this argument much more convincing by pointing to actual loopholes that this applied to.

If it does, and it becomes a problem, those loopholes will be closed.
As an undergrad product of one of the IITs, and among one of the last ones to write a main exam back in 2005, this was a nice article to read and a bit too self aggrandizing. One of the most amazing things about being on IIT campus was the collaborative culture, and the drive to initiate collaboration. There was no sense of competitiveness on the campus, that was once prevalent while giving JEE. Being among bright kids, all in their developmental stage, seeing their personalities form, seeing them follow career paths after graduating is so temporally connecting. One of the best memories remain the usage of campus centric lingo [1]. I am in contact with every single of my classmate without use of any social network. The bonds formed on campuses are incredibly strong. The support of our seniors deserves prominent mention, be it in school years or after passing out...that worldwide meshed network. Unparalleled.

[1] - http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/5134/da...
Mr. Kreider's work was linked on the front page recently so I thought it appropriate to 1. expose more people to his work and 2. talk about his idea to try and make a living as a writer in the 21st century by selling his essays at 99cents a pop.
"Garvey doesn't have a Wikipedia page"

Well that didn't take long. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Garvey
Is email traffic typically encrypted between major providers? E.g. could a network attacker, located between Google and Microsoft, intercept unencrypted traffic between gmail and hotmail addresses?
Propeller is so cool!
It's remarkably fast. The network transfer is AWS-to-AWS if you do it right, so the only time is creating the backup and populating the new DB. It takes almost no time for a ~5GB database I'm using.
The mean density of the universe is something like 3-6 atoms per M³. When you consider the number of atoms in your typical cubic meter of matter — you, the ocean (water is ~10²² molecules per cubic centimeter), a mountain, let alone things like stars, where most of the matter in the universe is, anyway — that should give you a rough idea of just how empty space actually is.
> Observe -> Hypothesis -> Observe -> Repeat.

So many people try to define it as:

Hypothesis -> Observe -> Hypothesis -> Repeat. You even learn it at school where they make you give a Hypothesis before running the experiment, instead of after.
would that cause criminals who have already committed a crime to commit more crime since each extra crime costs less due to the concurrenct sentence?
A few configuration issues while we learned which ones performed as described on FreeBSD. It loads python modules BEFORE forking workers, so if you use multiprocessing or anything to create procs it will do it once before the fork, and all post-fork children are left sharing the same pool unless you instantiate it during the first request or a similar approach. These are just things to be aware of, and are not necessarily black marks against its usefulness assuming you are willing to accept a certain cost of learning the features (there are a lot). I'm still using it, but I'm not really convinced that I'm better off than if we had picked gunicorn or similar initially and skipped some headaches.
> People think that Ford Motor was one of the first (if not the only) car manufacturer in States in the early 1900s, but it was quite the contrary. The car was a revolutionary technology: it had a combustion engine, it was fast, etc. Over 100 car companies were launched in the early 1900s.

There were over 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States from 1896 to 1930. Very few survived and only a few new ones were started after that period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturer...
"Reclaim Your Name" - FTC Commissioner Keynote Address on Privacy
I am channeling grugq here. The answer is clearly stated in Biggie's 3rd Commandment of OPSEC:

Number 3: Never trust nobody
Your moms'll set that ass up, properly gassed up
Hoodied and masked up, shit, for that fast buck
She be laying in the bushes to light that ass up

The answer from the SIGINT community is

In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor

The answer from President Reagan:

Trust but verify
I'm American and I've never done cut-and-switch. Since I was a kid, I've always knifed with my left and forked with my right. Never understood why people feel the need to cut meat with their right hand. So weird to me.
The point is that a corporation really ought not be the one that determines things like this for something that has up to now been a fairly open standard.
It depends. Bigger providers like Google typically prefer to use TLS, but there are a great many smaller providers who do not. In order to keep everything flowing, there has to be the ability to fall back to unencrypted messages.
Thank you for your feedback. We've heard feedback on that page and the work is in progress.
They discontinued the program to save just the 3 headers because now they've got other programs that save the entire email message. And phone calls, and text messages and tweets, etc.
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there's a lot of to-scale installations. May even be one in Your Fair City or Town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

or if not, try the web: http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/
It is often encrypted, but since the encryption is negotiated using STARTTLS it can easily be stripped by an active attacker. It works fine against passive attackers.
"a. Illegal Activities
b. Certain Adult Oriented Products and Services
c. Illegal Drugs
d. Counterfeit Goods
e. Gambling Businesses
f. Money Making ("Get Rich") Businesses
g. Tobacco Products"

Source: https://www.simplify.com/commerce/docs/misc/legal/merchant-t...

Much, much less restrictive than Stripe, and cheaper to boot. Now adult websites can switch to this instead of CCBill (which I find more sketchy.)
Learn How Entrepreneurs Make Millions
I'm left handed, never been an issue. I also never understood why table settings are the only thing where the world seems to appreciate my left-handedness.
The .org site hasn't been delisted, so it's obviously not based on content:

https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.org
Go With Your Gut
I had a hard time understanding most of what you wrote, but

"They are not powerful without a societal structure that ensures that corporate law is enforced as "the rule of law."

What are the cartels in Mexico then? I would argue that that's what corporations would look like if they could no longer depend on the rule of law and government to protect some of their interests.

It's true, US Corporations depend on the government's power for some of their enforcement and structure, but US corporations still wield significant power that could be abused. If the government went away, they'd just use that power to defend themselves and we'd end up with violence, intimidation, etc, like you see in cartels. Corporations don't completely rely on the government. Apple has billions in cash reserves and in the end it's the money that counts.
It's because the banks that issue credit cards have most of the negotiating leverage, and they don't want giant US banks competing on their territory on the payment acceptance side. As a result, you need to use a European bank to accept payments in Europe, a Latin American bank in Latin America, and so on. The payments industry is full of these non-obvious (and unfortunate...) power dynamics.
Are We Warming Up To Cryonics?
I too had noticed this. It's unfortunate because searching via Google with site:news.ycombinator.com in the query is much better than HN's own search when you have a good idea what you're looking for (spearfishing search vs BFS)
It is remarkable. It is a game of chess. You have to be in upper 4000 ranks to land a good engg. stream. And the ranks often have incredibly minor mark differences between them, which makes for harsher penalties in form of being denied good streams in good IITs. The mind games played in JEE is a game of chess. You only know the syllabus, and that's it. In my times, physics paper was easy and people scored a lot. It was Maths exam that made the difference. This is what makes the exam remarkable. And these iterations are there in every exam. I have given 3 hour exams in IIT in morning and evening...those were not grueling....but JEE was.
Better still, relegate the knife to food prep.
Snapchat's early cash-out
That was actually what drew me to the headline. I saw "Simplify" and thought it was about my bank.
Consensus mistrust? Did you just coin a new phrase or is that some new lingo the kids are saying these days? I have never heard it before and google was no help.

I think the issue here is not so much "trust" but "trust and verify." With a proper level of effective oversight it seems that things would be much different.
Ah, so you'd prefer that plugins continued to exist, to differentiate the open standards and the DRM?
The US government's acquisition of people's biometric information, including DNA, has already been outed by WikiLeaks in their release of the Embassy cables a few years ago. Did you see this story?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...

The text of the original cable:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...
I thought the story was all metadata was captured but a warrant was needed for the contents because metadata was ruled to be not covered by the 4th amendment.
You can get a permit for this and do it legally: http://www.parksconservancy.org/visit/tours/golden-gate-brid...
"unexpectedly" - those that know the Mothership is waiting aren't in the slightest but surprised by this.
>Mr. Parker's wedding costs were around 1/168th of his net worth. It wasn't extravagant by that measure.

That's a silly measure, thought, because it would imply that a $1 billion dollar wedding for a $3 billion dollar net worth guy would not be "extravagant".

The costs are not tied to the net worth, they are about sitting so many people, feeding them, closing the venue, the flowers, photographer etc. Poorer people make do with less expensive restaurants and venues, and richer people go for more expensive. Still, there's only so much you can spend of a venue, food, wine, etc before it becomes extravagant.

Similarly, a guy that makes $100 million per year does not eat meals that are 2500 times more costly than those of a guy that makes $40.000 a year.

If he did, that would put those meals in the 25.000-50.000 dollars per meal region. Which would be extravagant by any measure.
It is more common in Europe to hold the fork in your left hand rather than your right. But I think that has more to do with handedness than anything.

I'm right-handed, yet hold the fork in my right hand and often get comments about being 'cack-handed'.
Presumably because cutting meat takes more strength and/or control than simply holding the meat still. It seem reasonable to relegate the latter to your non-dominant hand.
SMTP relay is almost always unencrypted. The client that connects to the SMTP server may connect via an encrypted connection though, but that's mostly to prevent snooping on the client's local network.
First one's simple enough, but second one I couldn't figure out if there's a clever trick. Or are students expected to apply the quadratic formula and do a bunch of symbolic manipulation?
How to Price your Product
It's a stretch, admittedly, but most email marketing interactions have campaign-specific email addresses to follow conversions. They would certainly be able to see what companies you've previously interacted with by the fact that you are receiving emails from company.com.
He's speaking as a buyer of equity. Later, equity will be worth more (i.e., have a higher price) so that same $3MM will be less dilutive. Conversely, from the entrepreneur's perspective, that same $3MM will be "cheaper" in the future.

Depending on the math, you could easily wind up with the same amount of cash raised but less dilution overall.
What if the near-term result of all these revelations is that it just becomes the new normal? Is it necessarily such a bad thing for the snoops in the shadows if they know people will eventually just get used to it? After all nothing really feels different day-to-day so ... meh.
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The DRM extensions are just as proprietary as the plugins they replace. And the Microsoft DRM extension, at least, is quite likely to go far too deep into the OS (see also http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html).
One has to wonder whether asm.js will play a role in playing encrypted content in the browser. Surely decryption on the fly is feasible?
You know there is a page is the faq (http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) about it right? -> http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is trivial to do in any modern browser without DDG.
In Japan moving is more of an art
Interesting. I used to hold the fork in my right the entire time, cutting with knife in my left hand.

Upon being informed that was a faux pas, I cut with the fork in my left, knife in right.

Finding it difficult to lift the food with my left hand, I intuitively adopted cut and switch and would eat with my right.

Noticing that no one around me (in Quebec) seemed to do this, I eventually adopted the European manner.

Now, following the Paleo diet, I frequently end up simply eating with my hands when at home. Feels great.

www.marksdailyapple.com/eat-with-your-hands/‎

I'm now either incredibly avant garde or a brute.
a guy that makes $100 million per year does not eat meals that are 2500 times more costly than those of a guy that makes $40.000 a year

According to the receipts posted to rich kids of instagram, many actually do!
Facebook news feed ads generate 49X more clicks at 45% less cost
I'll be honest: I have never really learned how to code through books or lessons and then started a project. I've always had an idea and then decided which language was best to create it in. If I didn't know how to code it, I'd learn as I went. Plan out your app on paper and then look up how to create the app. For me, this was the best way to learn a new language. It helps me keep my interest. If you get stuck just seek help through a friend who knows the language, on google, or in stackoverflow.
It's physics, yes, but since the light has a uniform wavelength you can't "split" the beam with a prism: you get one beam going in and only one beam going out.

Curving the cable as the other comment mentions might make sense if the curvature were calculated precisely, as then some (and not all) of the light would escape instead of being refracted back inside the cable.
Thank you for the clarification. So going back to one of your earlier comments

>> "If major market FM stations paid the same rates as Pandora, based on audience, some would be paying thousands of dollars for every song they played. How much do they pay performers right now? Zero."

> He's using industry jargon to pretend like FM radio doesn't pay out to artists. The reality is, he's being very deceitful. (Emphasis added by RurouniJones)

But based on what you have said above he is correct. You do not pay out to artists, you pay out to associations (I understand this is not by choice and that you are basically screwed by powerful publishing cartels).

It may be a small semantic difference but you said he lost credibility and was being deceitful by saying it when he (at least to me the layman) appears to be correct.
I believe that web crypto is an API implemented natively in the browser, there will be no need to implement decryption in javascript.
We use Braintree, but it's a payment gateway in Australia not a full stack solution. You still need to provide your own merchant and account and deal with the endless hassles that come with it. Merchant accounts are really the hard part of accepting money in Australia at this point.
Its still stupid credit cards.

Most eCommerce sites have a profit margin of less then 10%, often around 5%. Charging 2.85% + $0.30 kills most business ideas.
A case for start up visas from the horses mouth
I think this company is going to explode. Smartphone usage is becoming more and more ubiquitous, but a lot of organizations simply don't have the funds or the expertise to convert their old website into a responsive one, or make a native mobile app.

I just think back to my time in the Boy Scouts. We used to print out a sheet for every Scout every other meeting, showing them what requirements they had completed and which ones they still needed to advance to the next rank. We finally re-did our old, single page website into a more full-featured application. Scouts could now see the troop roster online, check requirements, access knowledge banks with packing lists, and more.

But no one brings computers to the meetings, and the site is just too complex to navigate on your smartphone. Propeller would be the perfect tool for them, because many of the Scouts have a smartphone and bring it to each meeting, and would be able to access the information just when they needed it the most.

I'm sure you all know of organizations like the one I just described. But do you know any mobile developers who are interested in helping them? The money just isn't there. The glamour isn't there. But these apps still need to be built. THAT'S why I think Propeller will sine.
Nope. Sorry.
Hey Matt,

I'm sorry to reach out to you directly on a public forum like this, but my company's website encountered a major negative SEO attack last month and we were hit with a manual penalty by Google today. I thought you might be interested to hear about what happened, and I of course I would like to resolve it as I do my best to always keep my company's SEO efforts within Google's guidelines. Please reach out via email to me at mbrody@myclean.com if we can help each other fix this! Thanks again for everything you do to help make the web a better place, and in advance I understand if you're too busy to respond.

Best regards,

Mike B.
Data Stories: Christian Rudder of OKCupid
A Promise layer atop IndexedDb
Maybe the app review process is so computationally intensive for the same reason.
I did say "one of the reasons", not "the only reason".
Freemium - The Gift that keeps on Giving | VentureStab
Ha ha ha! The jokes on them!

I'm part of a movement called "fake clickers". Everybody involved tries to click on ads by theme. For example, I've decided to click on gout, knee-replacement and diabetes ads, in order to give the ad AI the impression that I'm a diabetic, gout-ridden old fart. It's working, at least for me, as I now see neuropathy, AARP, erectile dysfunction, and strangely latina bikini model ads that I never used to see.
Startups: The Idea Is Not Enough | VentureStab
8 Crazy Perks Tech Companies(AnyPerk YC W12) Actually Give Employees
Looking at those photos it seems like they just have a staged segment where you can get a "climbing the tower" picture taken, not actually climb the tower.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/parksconservancy/sets/721576304...
Steve Wozniak on Newton, Tesla, and the original Macintosh
Rampant, completely unsubstantiated speculation that is probably contradicted by the evidence: I wonder if we'd be even more fat if we didn't switch. Switching slows down your eating, and I know that there is data to show that slower eating means you eat less. I guess the foods we eat too much of that are really bad for you, like snacks, sandwiches, and sodas, don't take a fork and knife at all.

That said, my wife and I are eating out French tonight, so I'll try to put down my guilt and manners and not switch hands!
>5x memory usage of what?

Of what he was seeing without PyPy.

He doesn't want advice on how to lower that. He wants to get the same memory usage or better out of the box.
I hate dining etiquette. It's a fancy way of saying "doing something a specific way because that's the way everyone else does it". Groupthink at it's highest. I eat whatever way is best suited for the meal.
> Use a model to guide research.

This I'll concede. I misinterpreted your point and tone as "don't rely on anything you haven't already measured". I would also agree that it's rather grating to read things that say "X totally happens (according to model Y)". But I don't think that it is inherently bad for one to say "Model Y predicts X".

> No. It started as a model (or idea), but every single step was confirmed using the actual world, and not a model.

This however, I do disagree with. It's still a model. It wasn't "confirmed"; it was "not disproven". Physics will always be a model. I don't see the problem with saying "this model turned out to be wrong so we need to come up with a better one" (exactly what's happening in the article). A large number of important breakthroughs in physics were from scientists demonstrating the failures of models or running into them accidentally (see caloric theory and the Michelson–Morley experiment).
The Google Reader blog (back in 2005!) had a great post detailing many of the XML validation errors their feed crawler found and must workaround:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds...
"I hooked up [two] my shock absorbing lanyards"

You really didn't read it, did you?
But you have to pay the Windows tax on most instance types if you want to use FreeBSD.
>It’s telling that Caicedo, Patrick, and Post all attributed the decline of the cut-and-switch to a larger trend toward simplicity and ease—not a desire to seem more European.

There seems to be a strange connection. Americans don't worry very much about how Europeans do things, they are different but that's fine, but Europeans are obsessed with showing the Americans how they really should be like them. We are not like you, get over it.