skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at the trends, I suspect Facebook will be the goat in the tech group cull that's being contemplated.[1] The reasons for thinking this are three-fold:

a) Extremely poor share performance post-IPO (which has irked a lot of heavy-weights) and demise of Zynga's revenue sources. Although ad revenue is there, there's a lot of industry research showing that $/click return is minimal at best (out of all of these models, FB appears to have the lowest, and easiest to Bot). FB ad revenue has more to do with the current glut in Corporate $cash holdings than real returns, fyi.

b) Lack of utility outside data mining / advertising (all others, even dead ducks like Yahoo! have secondary and tertiary utility, not to mention the shining lights like Google who are still willing to push the envelope). By this, I'm not referencing Social Utility, but Business Utility.

c) Their ties to NSA / current security concerns go so far beyond the base level of acceptance that it's a given they'll suffer hard blow-back. Those Bilderberg meetings weren't about unicorns and skittles and any serious business should be concerned about having their employees mined so easily (and in certain fields, more open to Social Engineering hacks directly due to this intel). Even as an American company, you'd want this be considering this; for the rest of the world, it's a major concern.

You can argue about these, but I suspect as they hit their 10 year mark, there will be a hotter, faster, hungrier and probably more honest model to replace them (i.e. "We will do X with this data - agree, and get Y benefit, or even better - we'll pay you Z for it, and not in Farmville Tokens, or even "pay Z+1 to go dark").

Anyhow, since this is free commentary, YMMV. But, realistically - the age of the "Dumb Fucks" is closing. Wild Wild West is ending, and the Buffalo ain't roaming no more. If you need that explained: a large amount of the cash generated by web 2.0 (e.g. Huffington Post sale) was created by parasitical leveraging of user's ignorance & goodwill. I suspect that's about to change with a newer generation; although, hey, Pop Idol still makes money, so perhaps not - but it will only be farming the ignorant, which is hardly "cutting edge". Face Book as the online Walmart - there's an image to take to heart as you look @ it's stock price over the next 6 months.

Full disclosure: Never had a Face Book account, because Privacy / Anonymity is the coolest thing in a connected world, nor do I hold any FB stock, nor am I shorting FB stock in any manner.

[1]FT - Real progressives believe in breaking up Google (no link, as it is pay walled). I don't agree with the opinion piece, I'm merely using it to denote a recent trend.
I wish him the very best.
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Actually Putin is a well beloved leader in his country, and does very well at elections (BS memes aside). He's just less popular with tech urbanised youth, an insignificant minority in Russia, but quite vocal in the intertubes.

Yes, there is corruption in Russia (not that it doesn't happen in every country, it's just than in Russia it's old style as opposed to the modern western style (from Enron to Maddof to trillion dollars bailouts for golden boys). Actually it's more or less the same in Italy, not nobody gives a damn about Italy, because the mob are good with foreign interests, and the US is not competing with Italy for resources anyway.

What's important is that he didn't sell the Russian assets to foreign interests and fuck his own people, like the much beloved to the West Yeltsin did. Foreign interests that would like to be able to grab Russian resources and do as they please in the country have sponsored many a BS campaigns against him, from the classic old "Voice of America" style to modern "NGO" style, to blowing out of proportion BS political opponents that get 1/5 of the votes, if that. Like covering US elections by focusing on some third party fringe candidate.

But that's for the Russians. For everybody else, the even more important thing is: Russia doesn't mess with other countries outside their neighbourhood.
Usually, I respect and appreciate your comments, but this suffers from being overtly pedantic, and clearly missing the forrest for the trees.
"There is no open IM network anymore"

Cyrptocat? IRC?
http://www.usenix.org/event/sec10/tech/full_papers/Backes.pd...
Nope, just Select All → View Source, which shows the current DOM state, at least on Firefox.
That alone says something about the longevity of the business.

That and the fact that the people that are leaving are the geeks of the world. Which typically have a lower friend count, lower engagement and fewer connections to the popular 'tastemakers' in society.

Facebook will start to see problems when the popular people leave and drag their social networks with them. But these people are the ones that don't care so much about privacy, security or whether Facebook deletes data now, in the future or not at all.
Equally he has not been given the penalty of "exile." There is nothing the U.S. would like more than to have Snowden return to U.S. soil.

This stretching of the truth does not engender trust.
I live on another hemisphere from my mailbox. (Don't blame me, blame webapps that don't accept non-US addresses.) I get my mail about 2-3 times per year.

I stopped filing tax forms in a state I once employed someone. N.B. up front that I am configured _entirely_ paperless with my bank.

The state (Indiana) made up numbers because, despite 6 quarters of forms filed with zeroes, they had assumed that no more filings meant "tax evasion". They mailed a few angrygrams, then filed a tax warrant. They handed it off to a private processing company who got a lien and sent it to Chase's lawyers. The bank's lawyers notified me by mail, of course.

My first indication that any of this was happening was when the entirety of my business checking account balance disappeared from the web interface when Chase turned it over (less $150 in their processing fees) to the state.

A half-dozen notarized(!) forms printed and certified mailed to Indiana and most of a year later, I've now got a credit on file with them - still no refund, of course - and I'll never get the processing fees back from Chase.

It's not so much about the money (it's less than $5000) as the fact that, due to this insane idea that not calling someone, not emailing someone, it becomes A-OK to involuntarily seize someone's funds BECAUSE YOU SENT A PIECE OF TREE.

Sorry, my little anti-mail rant turned into an anti-bureaucrat rant. (But are there really any others who oppose gutting the paper mail system once and for all?)
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Joins The Verge to Host Web Series
I'm just wondering why he released this.
This damn car is too ugly -- where's my new horse?
Winklevoss twins to offer Bitcoin ETF
I think you shouldn't look at Warhol as some kind of technically superior artist. I like this quote from Robert Rosenblum (an art historian): "Warhol’s art is itself like a March of Time newsreel, an abbreviated visual anthology of the most conspicuous headlines, personalities, mythic creatures, edibles, tragedies, artworks, even ecological problems of recent decades. If nothing were to remain of the years from 1962 to 1987 but a Warhol retrospective, future historians and archaeologists would have a fuller time capsule to work with than that offered by any other artist of the period."

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It occurs to me that there is a kind of deep hypocrisy for those who make the rules to claim that someone broke the rules. Rules require focus and diligence to apply, and they favor those that apply them regularly, vs those to whom they are applied.

I suspect that the Obama administration broke may of their own rules rushing through the a change in status that fast - a bureaucracy the size of the US doesn't process anything quickly without breaking the rules.

The Russians are clearly using Snowden as a pawn, probably because Russia is threatened by people like Snowden just as much as the US is. Snowden threatens those who make the rules, and then apply them fully to others and not at all to themselves and their cohorts.

For the third time in my life (the first two courtesy Bush Jr.) I'm deeply ashamed of my government.
What does it even mean for a passport to be revoked?
What Top Performers Do Differently in their First 10 Years at Work
Kindness courtesy of #BARTstrike
David X Cohen is doing an AMA
I also found that gesture is much more used in the center and south of Italy.
I don't think that thread is convincing. The one substantial comment makes assertions with very little evidence. Here's some evidence:

Rockefeller's General Education Board wrote the following in 1906:

"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our
molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our
minds, and unhampered by
tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive
folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children
into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not
to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of
letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters,
musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen,
of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is
very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a
perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an
imperfect way."

In 1915, the Carnegie and Rockefeller organizations together were spending more to promote and directly fund primary education than the entire government.

President Woodrow Wilson (one of our most academic presidents) said this to a gathering of industrial leaders:

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class,
a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a
liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

It is well-documented that the push for mandatory public education in the US also had a big xenophobic component. Protestants of Northern European descent were horrified by all the "dirty", "drunken", Catholic Southern European and/or Irish immigrants who didn't share their culture. Literal battles were fought over who was going to take those children and indoctrinate them into one culture or another. Mandatory public education was not about uplift per se, it was about conformity. (It's supporters would call it uplift, but only because they were xenophobic bigots.)
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1) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree

2) binarytree.com - Binary Tree: Exchange Migration and Notes Migration Software
I don't buy that. So far we've seen nothing but pitch perfect and intentional language choices from him. I still can't believe how remarkably well thought out and savvy all of his answers to the AMA thing were. I suspect he'd argue he's stateless because his citizenship in the US has been compromised, that he wouldn't be afforded the ability to be treated fairly like a citizen, hence the asylum requests.
True, but "my passport has been revoked" is not nearly self-promoting or dramatic enough for Snowden. Also, being a citizen of any nation doesn't mean a lot when returning to your country of citizenship means a (possibly one-way) ticket to some place that's not home and comes with the concept of "solitary confinement," among others.

Not that self-promotion or drama are necessarily bad things in his position. Both are most certainly things he's using to keep himself on the minds of as many people as possible for as long as he can.
It's almost as if he's deliberately provoking the most rabid response possible from the United States Government.

Regardless of what happens to him; he is writing himself into the pages of history.

His actions have opened the possibility of Western Europe defecting from the US led coalition that has dominated world affairs for the past 70 years. Which is not a result anyone could have predicted.
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Reddit needs to get rid of all moderators from the default sub-reddits if it want's to survive over the long term.
It's probably too late now, but I feel like it was a mistake not to release a public encryption key along with his initial effluence of records. I for one believe that this was written by Snowden, but it seems like an obvious use of some basic form of identity signing.

Edit: It now seems like there is some reasonable doubt that this notice was forged. I still remain confident this is no forgery, but the point I'd like to make is that there may in fact be an identity question -- and that is a problem with a technical solution that unfortunately seems not to have been leveraged.
> France also has a history of sheltering people from extradition to the US (just ask Roman Polanski).

No, he was able to stay in France because he's a French citizen, nothing to do with extradition.

Swiss, on the other hand, did refuse to extradite him and then let him go free.
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That's a solid point. Thanks!
The man is desperate for attention, but doesn't want to appear so. I guess.
Nice "classic" (2009-2010) English-captioned drawings by Alfredo Cassano about Italian Popular Gestures (click on images for bigger resolution):

http://www.alfredocassano.com/buyitaliangestures.html
>He couldn't get away with poisoning a journalist.

Well, no, but then again, he wouldn't even have to know. The system is quite extended. If someone, say a Hastings guy, makes too many waves, he could, say, die in a car crash.

Or if some Garry Webb guy discovers something too bad, somebody can make some calls, and have 13 reporters investigating him (a fellow journalist) instead of his claims. And if they eventually prove to be true, 10 years later, and are even admitted by officials, who cares then?
The state in question may feel that he still "belongs" to them in some fashion, but it seems pretty likely to me that he does not believe that state is "his" anymore.

He is under no obligation to make concessions to them by adopting terminology which they control.
Best read if you can imagine a voice in your head a-la Diablo III, how various spirits of past talk.
A popular Coup d'état
I very much doubt that the United States government is afraid of me. Snowden is a real drama queen.

I don't think that he deserves asylum either. I think he should come back to America, have a public trial with media coverage, and then we can firmly establish if what he did was wrong.

Edit: It appears that I'm unable to reply to the various comments on this, so I'll try to refine what I'm saying:

I do think that whistleblowers are necessary, especially in large, secretive organisations. But I think that Snowden's limbo isn't providing the requisite closure on the matter. I think that he should be compelled to explain his actions in court. I think all whistleblowers should, just as I think that anybody who kills somebody under a make-my-day law should still have their actions examined. Whistle blowing isn't something that somebody does lightly, and i think that should be doubly true for matters of national security.

Additionally, trying to vilify the government in a press statement is silly. Let their actions speak for them, and let your own actions speak for you.
Best investment I ever made. Especially when buying new appliances. Ha.. It's kind of pathetic that I flinched at spending a few bucks a month for good content.

I have an entirely different perspective of Consumer Reports (the online variant which has external site ads on it).

Understand that they are entirely biased (as we all are): They take home the lucre by keeping you thinking that you need them, and that they're doing an important service. Hence why the big noise about things like not recommending the iPhone -- all just noise to keep the subscription dollars coming and to create a sense of utility. They're also prone to taking complex products and then trying to distill it into easily quantified values that they can put in a chart and categorize, leading to a detachment from real-world value and "need to fill this issue". I was a subscriber for several years and eventually came to realize that their top picks were usually not really top picks, and they were often in areas where they were entirely out of their depth (I discovered that particularly after buying a set of their top pick speakers).

After that print subscription ended, years later I was looking at getting a new furnace and saw that the online site listed furnace reviews, though they were hidden behind a paywall. Okay, bought a subscription to find that there were no reviews at all, but some useless summary about basic efficiency levels. Well that's useless. Oh well, a year subscription wasted. A year later I discovered that they auto-renewed (never signed up for that, but whatever), and put it on my todo list to jump through hoops to cancel at some point, wasting my time (as they give NO clear way to cancel, despite subscribing being a trivial painless step). The next year they sent me notice that my credit card had expired -- awesome, easy way to finally unsubscribe from an auto-renew that I didn't opt into without sitting on hold for half an hour! Imagine how funny I thought it was when they guessed my next expiry and just used that, continuing the subscription.

I have an extremely poor opinion of CU, and I think the belief that they're more pure or their opinion more useful is a bit naive.
BA testing luggage tags made of electronic paper
Possibly, neutrality would work both ways I suppose I never really thought of it that way.
The phone in question (Droid X2) was released on June 19, 2011. Google acquired Motorola Mobility on August 15, 2011.
Google's not a phone company either, but they sell phones. Why would you not expect them to sell cars when they're obviously dumping so much money into auto technology?
A few years back I bought a used HP volume laser printer on ebay. When I went to configure it it had some existing ip addresses entered and when I checked they trace back to the CIA or the NSA (honesty can't remember which but it was one or the other).

Reading this post got me thinking

a) you would think they would have flushed that from the machine before giving to a third party (where I purchased from).

b) I would imagine that some agency (not necessarily of our government) could sell used equipment with the express intent of modifying in some way to collect info. Possibly even target (ala the dropped usb in a parking lot) specific companies or individuals.
Everything you mentioned is actually data I've purposely made available, EXCEPT for the twitter account, which continues to vex me. I haven't tried to delete that recently; I'll try again soon. (I can't remember what happened the last time...)
I hope I'm not the first to break it to you...

You most certainly aren't. I normally cite this as an international phenomenon, but it's gotten to the point where either people know that or they've had their heads buried in the sand, so it's hardly worth belaboring the point any more (not that it'll stop me, but I no longer feel quite so tied explaining it over and over).
Or it screams: "I'm sending a message now to anybody else doing the same thing".
Which rules do you suspect the Obama administration broke?

In general the reason things take a long time to do in a bureaucracy is because of the required approvals from many different officials. If the President or a cabinet secretary wants something to happen now, this is less likely to be necessary.
To apply pressure on the US government regarding the revocation of his passport making it impossible for him to reach Ecuador or where ever, of course. He's stuck in Moscow due to his passport being revoked and Putin's basically told him that he's not welcome there. He's in a tight spot.

You'll notice he never once mentioned the documents or their contents in this message. He's not "making the story about himself" - he's using the media as a tool to apply pressure to the forces aligned against him in the hopes of securing his safety.
Boost 1.54.0 released.
I would have gone to New York, grown a long hair and lived low profile. I would create a fake profile on Elance if I had to earn money.
Probably because he and Wikileaks have the entire world media asking them for a statement daily.

I, for one, was grateful for the update. Yes, I care about how Snowden is personally doing in Moscow.
Because, like anyone in that situation, he's trying to find a home. Unfortunately, for him to receive justice he needs to be in the spotlight because politicians won't make the right choice unless confronted by their constituents.

If he chose silence, he'd be infinitely detained, and would receive no justice.
You're parting hairs and completely missed Snowden's point: that the US government has slickly put him in limbo. He either turns himself in or ends up like the guy in the Tom Hanks movie, Terminal.
Ha, thanks. Guess this is me falling for anecdotes; how embarrassing. :)
BIG BANG ON 4TH OF JULY
How is this "a lot about himself"? It's very short, he states his situation, and his position. He clearly says "Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me." and then talks about Bradley Manning and Thomas Drake.
I'm saying you can't use the Bradley Manning case as an example of the bad treatment Snowden would receive from the DoJ, because the DoJ is not responsible for whatever is going on with Bradley Manning. Snowden is a civilian so he would not be tried by the military.
Yes, and I hope you do see that taxing this self-sufficient community (assuming it did not require the benefits from the govt like highways and whatnot) would be akin to theft if it were compulsory.

Of course all communities require something from the global external economy, but I see no reason why a community's internal transactions would have to be assessed by an external entity. Alas that is not the way of the world today.
If your alternatives are "Return to your home country and face torture." or "Accept that you will have to live out your days under the protection of a government not your own."; I would say that qualifies as being forced into exile.

And no, the use of the word "Torture" is not hyperbole in this case; no matter what technicalities you sugar coat it with; the US Government lacks all credibility on the issue of human rights at this time.