skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that a bug implies it was accidental. Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt, but Facebook's history is exceptional in this regard.

Similar to the OP, I have ethical concerns with some aspects of what Facebook does, or at least obvious harmful side effects of what they do. But I think for me the reason they bother me more than Google or others often lumped into the same category is the consistent and, as far as I can tell, completely unabashed disingenuousness they display (e.g., the history of public statements made every time this has happened going back almost to their founding days).
So will everyone who is nit-picking over grammar also be demanding that politicians write their own speeches and statements?!
Perhaps biased, being something of a Germanophile, but Germany could be the uniquely positioned party here.

If the UK loses its continental influence, the willingness of Euro-based business to respect the Pound (in trade, I mean - their acceptance, online or elsewhere, of the Pound as currency without first converting to Euro) may diminish. Further, London may fall out of the tech industry's graces as a good destination for regional headquarters.

In either case, the UK's loss is France/Germany's gain - likely moreso Germany's because they're already ahead by a bit.

Being an American, I know less than Jon Snow about how EU power works, but if the UK's losses mount and create a power vaccuum at/near the top, Germany and France are leading states even moreso than they were before. What that might amount to, I couldn't say.
Books are tricky since the required funding/publicity tends to mean that only people with reactionary/highly-conservative viewpoints can break into that, and come with their own views on why we have this gap and how to address it. Mostly this is something you'll find in academic articles and published statistics.

The US Department of Education's June 2012 report on gender equity is a decent starting point:

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/gender-equity...

What you'll find there is that the conventionally-assumed narratives don't hold; there's a lot more parity in enrollment for higher-level courses including sciences and many maths courses (and sometimes even a gap in the unexpected direction, as with girls outnumbering boys in AP science courses), for example. Girls are also more likely (and have been more likely for nearly 40 years) to be enrolled into programs for gifted/talented students, while boys are nearly 1.5 times more likely to be held back and forced to repeat a grade.

Judith Kleinfeld (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) has written a few articles -- though fully-cited and sourced versions are hard to find free -- arguing that a major component of perceived gaps in performance may also be from greater variability in boys; focusing only on achieving parity at the highest levels of achievement has meant that boys' original overrepresentation at the lowest levels has not only persisted but grown, and remains unaddressed.

A study at the University of Georgia published this year looked into why girls receive higher grades and lower standardized-test scores.

Summary: http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/why-girls-do-better-in-...

Full article (subscription required): http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/why-girls-do-better-in-...

Their findings indicated a persistent grading gap in favor of girls, based on behavioral rather than academic factors.

In the UK, research pointed to expectations and stereotypes as a source for the gap:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/news/stories/girls-believe/2010

Girls and boys both persistently believe that girls "are cleverer, better-behaved and try harder than boys at school".

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. But like I said, spend some time searching on relevant terms and you'll turn up a lot of research that may make you question what "everybody knows" about gender and education.
> Does Snowden honestly expect to not be charged with a crime that he has admitted to

What on Earth are you talking about? It's abundantly clear that he expects to be charged with a crime (or at least to be treated as badly or worse as someone charged with a crime). Why do you think he left the USA and is seeking asylum?
A fake what? A fake statement by Wikileaks on their own site?

Also, bitching about downvotes tends to accelerate the rate at which one gets them. You've been here long enough to have noticed that.
An ETF is basically a bunch of money pooled in to invest in diverse stuff such as stocks, bonds, etc.

The thing is, they can be traded like stocks and their value depends on the total value of all the stuff they're holding.

If you invest in ETF it's generally safer since your investment doesn't depend on one stock (putting eggs in one basket) but you're still affected by the market.
Nature will find a way :)

your client will probably have it's market eaten by someone who understand the tech. hopefully.

/me insert faster horse fallacy
It sounds like the old Russian system where you couldn't leave the country without a passport (and it was made very hard to get one).
For what it's worth, the department of state correspondent Matthew Lee in CSPAN interviews were using "stateless" to describe Snowden as well, and days before he released this release.

If Snowden is mistaken in using this terminology, he isn't the only one.
NodeConf 2013
I wish they'd at least give us a computed goto...but alas, every switch is destined for predicated branching.
Transparency Toolkit
He's not still complaining about his passport, is he? Did Assange tell him to say that too?

A passport means that the host nation is comfortable with the person traveling abroad. For what should be obvious reasons the U.S. would rather he be back home (to stand trial). Even if you disagree with everything the NSA has done or will do, he technically broke the law. If the U.S. considers itself to observe the rule of law, then they have to pursue him as much as they'd pursue anyone else.

The U.S. has stripped persons of their citizenship for things as mundane as fraud, so this is hardly a made-up case for Snowden.

In fact, it's so not made up that there are existing procedures for when a passport may be revoked [1] [2]. Note that despite the foia_reading_room in the URL of [1], it is simply the U.S. Attorney's Manual, which is accessible directly from http://www.justice.gov/usao/index.html .

[1] http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/tit...

[2] http://travel.state.gov/passport/ppi/info/info_870.html

Edit: Also, since when did a conversation without an exchange of consideration or an agreement to perform certain actions become "wheeling and dealing"? This is the kind of stuff that has turned me off from Assange a long time ago; he's just as willing to distort as a government, as long as it suits his purpose.
I wouldn't go as far as "Don't bother with cookie expiration.", but you're certainly right in that you can't _rely_ on "the browser" to honor them (or even actually be a browser).

I'd still recommend setting reasonable expirations, even if it's only to be seen to be doing the right thing. Far future expirations aren't useful (as you explain) and they only serve to make it look like you're "doing in wrong". (And, for the 99.9% case of non-malicious regular users, expiring the cookies normally saves the sever the effort of looking up the session state of an already expired session with a 2030 expiry cookie. Don't _rely_ on it, but take advantage of it working right under normal conditions.)
> Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company?

Aren't mutual's non-profit? They aren't trying to extract a profit for investors or other owners, but just need to charge enough to pay business expenses (including salaries, as well as the main expense of an insurance company, paying out claims and funding reserves to pay out claims, etc.)

USAA mentioned in some other followups is... even weirder than a mutual insurance company, but it's legal structure is effectively the same as a mutual insurance company.
The unexotic underclass
The OP is nit-picking.

At the end of the day, it only matters if a person puts their name behind a statement or not.
NAT separates your network as much as buying 10.10.10.* and assigning 10.10.10.0-100 to the internal network.
What is the difference between asking for extradition and pressuring to deny asylum? It just seems like anyone could make that accusation who flees a country to avoid a trial.
Overview:

An Exchange Traded Fund or ETA was originally a way to buy an index or basket of funds.

Say you wanted to buy Standard and Poor's top 500 stocks. As an individual investor, you'd would need a lot of money and would pay a lot of fees to buy up all 500. Then if some stocks were added and others were removed from the index, you would have to pay to get in and out of those.

Enter the ETF ticker symbol SPY. If you buy it, you own a single stock that reflects the composite value of the Standard and Poor's top 500.

ETFs are generally cheaper than mutual funds.

Common ETFs:

DIA is the Dow Jones index, it is only the biggest/"safest" blue chips.

RUT is the Russel 2000 which is a larger number of smaller than SPY stocks.

There are now ETFs for everything. GLD for gold, SLV for silver. I'm pretty sure if you wanted to buy cows via ETFs you could do it.

ETF Negatives:

There is a lot of debate on the precious metals ETFs because there is a LOT more paper being traded than known world supply of Gold or Silver. If everyone called it in, there would be a lot of unhappy people holding paper instead of metal.

My opinion on a bitcoin ETF:

Bitcoin is bitcoin. Unless you want to say that you are starting an ETF that represents a diverse amount of exchanges and in so doing lowers spread risk, then there is really no technical reason for this ETF being founded.

However, if you think that the less technically savvy stock traders in the world might not be able to buy bitcoin because they do not know how but do know how to trade stocks, then you could act as an easier means to the value store they wish to hold.

This is likely what they are up to, and I think it'll work for a while.
First, why do you think Google Maps doesn't crawl the web? Second, why do you think that every business either has a web page or wants a web page?
I'd like to see both Snowden and Assange in prison, but we can't always have what we want, unfortunately.
> dubious jurisdiction

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no jurisdiction, it is not a law... If you are confusing it for one, then I think you have some reading to do.

> http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_U.S.%20new....

Most political charges are dressed up as non-political. Does this surprise you?

> I don't understand what your point is about the nature of heroism

If your intent for bringing up heroism was not to imply that he should be "brought to justice", "turn himself in", "should not have run", or any variation of those, then consider my point about the nature of heroism to be an aside.
I Live Here
I've actually had an idea in the back of my head for an extensible JSON IM/Presence system, maybe it's time to get to work on that.

XMPP was never really meant to be in my opinion, it had a bunch of great ideas but it failed in implementation (choosing XML was a bad start).
A fake statement from Edward Snowden.
You missed out the bit where they were making ham-fisted public threats to any country who even so much as thought about taking him in.
I'm not sure I follow your analogy. With a NAT configured to only forward certain ports to certain machines, the "bouncer" exists as much as in the firewall case. The question is not whether a NAT can be an effective firewall; it's that it brings some other, rather unsavory features along with it.
I bumped it, I agree, very interesting. A link to the full thread would be nice.
Perhaps they need offending.
The whole point of federation is so that people can do as they please.

If people don't want federation, they ought to want it. I know that's a futile position, but it's mine. And as someone said on HN recently, giving people what they want is what a drug dealer does. Anyone can do that, and shame on them.

Here's a new thought: if you, by yourself, don't know what is good, then you can also not know if "what the people want" is good. And if you do, then you can not heed "what the people want" where it goes against what you know to be good. That people can and should argue about what they personally consider good is true, but a separate matter.

I don't think it's hard to understand, the confusion is also founded in denial; I think people should also face the possibility of being drug dealers and/or addicts. Maybe we all are in some ways, and there is less shame in that than in not even wanting to recognize it for what it is. Lazyness is a drug, and the long-term costs to ourselves and society are staggering. We could be in the information age by now, or at least heading towards it.. instead we're getting kinda silly because it's more fun.

We had the gap between rich and poor, that still keep growing at an increasing pace, and we don't even care that on the net, where everything is super cheap and easy in comparison, and where we could at least play "utopian society" a bit, or practice if you will, most people live in hotels that snoop on them, try to extort as money from them as possible, deceive them at every step, try to suck up all their time with trivial pursuits, and so on..

Gah. All the nice, wonderful things we still have, we have despite of "our" stewardship, not because of it, and partially as crumbs that fall of this table of hi-tech cold war... but I see mostly vultures at the wheels, and it could be much better with genuinely good intentions.
> He _broke the law_ and is a fugitive from justice.

This, while seeming important, is basically irrelevant as long as the US is demonstrating their willingness to torture accused people prior to trial for crimes such as these.

He could have done something 10x worse and it still wouldn't matter. Nobody should ever be subjected to torture - even if convicted. They're torturing people for years before trials even start, if they start at all.

He cannot anticipate anything resembling justice in the US.

It's a red herring.
Show HN: Words 2.2 Open Beta, with RSS-2-Text
Yes, juries in the USA can render any verdict they choose in criminal trials. Jurors cannot legally be punished for their verdicts, judges cannot direct verdicts in criminal trials, and acquittals cannot be appealed.
Fuck you, Motorola. Why do you want my login and password information for?? Your EULA is nothing but a fraud. I smell lawsuit.

Wait, isn't Motorola owned by Google now???
You can also sell and sell short the ETF, which is a big advantage over holding bitcoins.
Paul Graham on Fundraising Inefficiency, YC Stats
Educated citizens drive down the price of knowledge labor. Of course they do.
Misinformation on classified NSA programs by senior U.S. officials
> ...minimal risk aside from your investment losing value.

Classic.
I actually think that's a sane default. With NAT it's a PITA to undo that and in some cases impossible (e.g. when you have 2 machines on a LAN using a protocol that requires a static port, so you can't just forward to a specific machine). With stateful firewalls, it should be much easier to just say "Allow port X through" and have a single application "just work"
I can't really tell you what news to follow, maybe I've just been more interested in Wikileaks over the years. If you really are interested Wikipedia has a good summary of their leaks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks

In any case Wikileaks is opportunistic, they rely on leaks wherever they may originate.
For now in the edit contents menu there is functionality to import your google reader subscriptions. We will provide import from xml file tomorrow (this was a hard day :) ).
Converting USD to BTC is still not trivial.
It may very well be tinfoil. But right now the totality of the evidence points me to the idea that this isn't 100% Snowden's words. Forget about the grammar and punctuation; read the words.

Does that sound like the same person talking about civil liberties and how Obama didn't change enough for him, and being ready to stand up for what he believes in? Or does that sound more like a certain other ego at opposition to the U.S. government and especially its President?
> Snowden has chosen to avoid the U.S., explicitly to avoid the legal system.

No, he's chosen to avoid the US explicitly to avoid torture.

There's nothing legal about that.
Perhaps. I just worry about it being like insulting the person serving your food. Tack needs to be used.
For what reason did he not enter Ecuador before leaking the information?
4chan, so it'll disappear pretty soon.
Maybe we just want a world without secrets. :P
Well compared to the British, for example, it's hard to deny an average difference, at least in hand gestures, specifically.
At least with a decent, non-greedy ISP you have the option of turning off said connection tracking and enjoy your fully routable /48. But I do understand how it remains a problem when most people don't know or want to do that.

Ideally, there could be some kind of uPnP-like protocol to open ports on an IPv6 middlebox, so that you can have a firewall on by default but still be able to punch a hole through it, without user intervention, when an application needs so.

Maybe there is; I haven't checked.
Actually the service itself launched as a private beta in early 2012 [1], while on the H&JF FAQ there has been a "work in progress" statement since at least 2011 [2].

[1] http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-redesign-2012-version

[2]
http://web.archive.org/web/20110707053012/http://www.typogra...
I use iMessage constantly, and while the lock-in bugs me theoretically, everyone I need to talk to regularly uses iOS, so it does not actually practically affect me very often.

The last time I can recall it being an issue was when I went to message someone who was SMS-only from my iPad. The whole SMS-overloading thing for iMessage is the most effective/profitable marketing decision Apple has ever made, I think.
This really makes no sense. Pointing to someone who is 5 years into learning the Microsoft ecosystem and who got their last software update two years ago is the worst possible way to prove you don't get "hammered" when you leave Bizspark.

Are we really going to pretend that never upgrading their software is an option?

For the sake of technical correctness, I'll agree with you, yes its true that you don't get "hammered" when you leave Bizspark.

You get "hammered" when you get 5-7 years into the Microsoft ecosystem and realize that you can no longer put off the software upgrades.

At that point you have to do the math and figure out which is cheaper:

throwing away most of what you have learned and rewriting your software using completely different language and ecosystem

OR

Dropping "5 figures" on software licenses.

Where does the "5 figures" figure come from? An InfoQ interview with the guys behind Tekpub who dropped MS for Rails after being in Bizspark:

"RB: If the platform was holding up fine, what prompted the change of architecture?

RC: Money. We were enrolled in Microsoft BizSpark Program and it was great for getting off the ground, but projecting into the future we realized that everything - from our database down to our development environment would have to be paid for after 3 years. We also figured that we'd probably need a separate server to run videos properly (for streaming) to Silverlight (using Streaming Media) which would be another license cost - and, in addition, we'd need to buy Media Encoder in order to encode the video for Smooth Streaming.

This might not be an issue for a large company, but when we sat down to assess what the bills would be - well let's just say that it was about 5 figures. We put our business hats on and tried to justify that cost - and we couldn't.

Not only that, James and I both knew Rails pretty well. We realized we could push everything into the cloud with better streaming and throughput for a microscopic fraction of the price - so that's what we did.

JA: As Rob mentioned cost was one of the factors, BizSpark is great but it is basically a ticking time bomb. I think more than cost though the motivating factor was around what we both wanted to be using day to day. ASP.NET MVC and .NET are very lacking in some areas that are very important to us. The testing story on .NET is not the best, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to design your application in the right way to handle testing and then writing the tests themselves is not as clean or usable as some other languages. One of the other areas of high friction was deployment, there are ways to handle it in .NET but nothing as nice or clean as Capistrano.

RB: So what does the TekPub platform look like today?

RC: We moved to Rails 2.3.5 using MongoMapper against MongoDB. We have a reporting setup that uses MySQL to track stuff we need to report on which uses DataMapper. We also plugged in New Relic RPM to keep track of our site and it's health - all of this is less than 1% of what it would have cost us, on average, with BizSpark. "

http://www.infoq.com/articles/architecting-tekpub
The Independent Dish: Six Months In
>In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes.

Personally, I'd rather pay some cloud provider a few dozen dollars per month to hang on to a bunch of volumes and snapshots that I can access/redeploy trivially from anywhere than maintain all the same in my home.
It seems that he may have been exposing illegal acts. Isn't it illegal _not_ to do that?
Careful there. Revoking a passport is not the same as stripping a person of their citizenship. The press release itself seems to create some confusion here - Snowden is not stateless because he is still a US citizen, even though he doesn't currently have a passport.

Revoking a passport is routine when felony charges are filed. Citizenship on the other hand is much harder to remove, even if the US government had any interest in doing so (it doesn't in this case - it wants him back home).

Naturalized citizens can be stripped of citizenship in extreme cases when they're found to have lied on their citizenship applications. I'm not aware of any circumstance in which natural-born citizens can have their citizenship removed without them voluntarily renouncing it first.
I think if someone is smart/talented, it doesn't matter that they don't know a lot of things yet, they'll pick them up. On the flip side, if someone just doesn't have the right capabilities it doesn't matter how many degrees they have.
Surprise - a good idea from the Winklevii. The convenience of buying and selling bitcoin from the comfort of an ordinary brokerage account, and making it possible to hedge bitcoin by selling and shorting.

Anyone know how to estimate whether there's enough liquidity in existing bitcoin exchages to support it, and allow them to track the price accurately in the ETF?
At the end of the day isn't forked Android both open and better than Firefox OS?
Isn't that the whole point of the Blur service...it logs into all these social services and combines them to produce a unified presentation? How else could it work?
[insert obligatory xkcd about rubber hose crypto-analysis here...]

Pass-phrases help mitigate the concerns for stolen private keys, but they do not provide assurances that things will not be signed or encrypted under duress. The best you can really do there is throw in more human element to increase the number of rubber hoses your enemy will need.
Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance