skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are simply trying to own a particular, important part of human consciousness: Lyrics.

The founders court popularity as their primary business function, and they hype Rap Genius lavishly.

Monetization is completely an afterthought.

I am convinced that Rap Genius is the purest consumer play.
if that number were true, then I would be all for it. even with a restrictive definition of "rich", and even at the current rates (top marginal of 39.6%), 2 days out of 365 days of spending is less than 1% of govt expenditures, and even a small number of "rich" people would be paying more than that.
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Really?

My immediate thoughts when Snowden's first revelations came to light were "I wonder just how much our local Australian government has rolled over and played lap-dog to every US intelligence request, no matter _how_ illegal or immoral?"

I also have very little faith in the Australian civil rights movement - the US has some powerful, smart, and noisy civil rights activism - here I see very little that appears in any way effectual.

Encrypt all the things…
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Maybe you should avoid letting your temper get the best of you with such emotional outbursts as: "fuck people like sneak," on Hacker News.

If you can't control your temper, why are you even participating in the discussion here?

Personal attacks like that aren't acceptable here, and I'd think you would know that by now after three plus years. It's disgusting to see that level of discourse here.
Maybe it's done in view of personal security? Maybe he doesn't want to make all his enemies at once.
The Ten Most Disturbing Things About the FBI Since 9/11
this isn't for the same reason, its because they learned from wikileaks that the publics ability to absorb information is limited. a lot of important issues were burried in the wikileaks' releases.
Wow, who would have ever guessed this???
(Well, my 9 year old son for one.)
It's the info about what Wikipedia knows as

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

As you can see in Wikipedia, a lot of it was known for many years (decades?) The new thing is that these topics got a bit more exposure mostly because of the thriller-like situation Snowden is in.

The Australian journalists actually just "decoded" the references to Australia from the slides first time presented in Brazil some days ago.
Write a linked list in python
I'm in the beta as well and the account section explicitly mentions an annual membership and the date that the trial ends and the membership starts. It would make absolutely no sense for them not to offer this as a subscription.
Try Zabbix

http://www.zabbix.com/true_open_source.php
That is very true. I would like to see a remote like that with a slight bump on 'up'. Outside of the symmetrical design, I love the idea of a small keyboard on the bottom.
PLOS ONE: Basketball Teams as Strategic Networks
Time is a tool that Snowden is using well.

By dumping everything at once he creates work for everybody else to scour through for the interesting bits.

Instead by releasing bits at a time he lets us digest it all before moving on to the next info.

As for enemies, yes, he may never leave the Moscow airport alive but I'm pretty sure he understands this.

He's doing what he feel is right, not what is easiest on him.
Generally speaking, I've tried to stay away from messing with products or services that require a lot of marketing, and go with ones that tend to market themselves. General ideas (such as classifieds) have big potential, but require the most work to get sustainable traction.

With that said, building the product is half the battle. Put it up by yourself. The biggest question you need answered right now is what do random visitors to your service think of the overall concept? Any flavor of classifieds websites will have some kind of critical mass, but that wont stop a few visitors from making an attempt at using it. If you get some positive feedback, or even negative, use it. If it's positive, it will go a long way in finding a valuable partner. It will give you hard data to share that will start to pave a path for you.

The problem with splitting a pie that hasn't been baked is that nobody knows what the flavor will be. You may be a great baker but the consumers are the ones who will inevitably decide your offering (Apple).

Once you get a basic data set from those few visitors you were able to convince to at least give your service a glance, now it's time to grow your inventory. The best things you can do as a lean start-up is find some mutual business relationships. Can car dealers post some of their inventory on your site? If so, they would love to do it and it gives you a little bit of content. There are many other similar circumstances you can find yourself in. I find it most effective when you can get other businesses to sell your product for you because it enhances their own.

To get back to the root answer here, my suggestion is do a solo soft launch. Gather usage data from early visitors, and use it to grow your inventory and perhaps more importantly, find a valuable partner.
I thought Snowden had already released everything and it was up to the media to decide what will be released when?
If you spent a few days in (central California belt of) Stockton, Modesto or Fresno looking for a job, you might learn some empathy
> Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S.

As if there was 1 person in the World who would have doubted that. It's scary that such titles are still being written.
> Assuming: 150k/yr salary * 0.5 (paid leave) * .33 (4 months) =$24750 for just raising a kid, damn.

Chances are if you are making 150k/yr, you're comfortably set in the upper middle class (cost of living complaining notwithstanding). At that point you probably don't have to worry about money, assuming you don't have any expensive hobbies. Taking time out to spend time with your children could be well worth it for a lot of people, since they don't feel they actually need those extra $24750 for anything.

> To be the devil's advocate, why not let people who do not have children take a 4 month paid ($24750) vacation every 5 years? I would like to take a round-the-world vacation for 4 months...

Because society wants to facilitate people having children (and a company might facilitate that if they are forced to by the government, or all of their competitors give the same benefits)? People can complain all day about overpopulation, but fertility rates in western countries are low, many places below 2.1 child per woman. Bringing in people from other countries brings with itself assimilation problems, and simply letting the population decline without interfering can lead to lopsided distribution of age brackets, for example to a disproportionate amount of pensioners that have to be supported by a shrinking workforce.
I disagree.

This ruling, and others like it hint at a fundamental flaw in constitutional law and how most people perceive their relationship with the state, particularly in regard to social contract theory. These rulings call into question the very legitimacy of state authority.

Let's assume for a moment there is a social contract with the state. Then, as in all contracts, there is a reciprocal obligation. Specifically, as a citizen, I have a duty of allegiance (obey state laws, pay taxes, etc.) in return for the duty of protection, from my government. Since the state itself has ruled it has no constitutional duty to protect, then the contract is inviolate, and long since void. In other words, there is no duty of allegiance to the state per the rulings of the courts if one takes social contract theory to be valid.

In my opinion, police corruption is one example of a foundational flaw in our current institution of governance: rule by means of coercion.
> believes the US government can be reasoned with and negotiated with

Whistle-blowing is an important exercise that keeps the system in check. And I do think this whole thing was an important wake-up call. But it really seems that Snowden has gone beyond any capacity for protection -- the leaks are so far-reaching that it will be easy to steamroll and discredit him. He doesn't deserve treason, but the politicians will be able to make a convincing argument of that (or at least espionage), given the scope of the leaks.

> this issue as one which affects the whole world

No doubt.

> Of course the only country and legal framework we can currently work within is our own

Exactly. This information is too much, too fast, and is overwhelming reasonable options for what can be done. Fix the first things first (surveillance, tapping US companies), and other things later (vacuuming up data globally).

Of course it's impossible to say how fixing the "other things later" should/would have worked -- it could've required another leak (or at least a less egocentric approach), or the process of fixing things in the US could have strengthened rights elsewhere. The way things are going now, I fear we may not even have chance to fix anything at all.
Very Cool. People might make any language editor with syntax highlighting in data url.
The thing is you don't know how the site is going to playout. IMHO their biggest advantage is having artists annotate the lyrics. It gives fans an insight in to the song like never before.

Monetization will come in time. But first, they need to be sure what they are creating.
I've seen a video with a guy ranting about that, but I'm not looking for it again, because I think he's spinning PR and doing dodgy math.

Thought experiment time.

Look at http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42870 (which is discussing 2007, so if you can find a more-up-to-date source, I'd love that).

From that article, the top quintile paid an average rate (not their marginal rate, of course!) of 25.1% of their income in federal taxes, and that these payments made up 68.9% of all federal income taxes. A little arithmetic there shows that if you upped their federal taxes by 50%, they'd lose 12.5% of their gross, and that would cover 100% of the revenue currently generated by federal personal income taxes. So if you wanted to tax the rich and not tax the poor, and by "tax" you mean "federal income tax", it's hugely doable!

If you're wondering how much of total federal revenue is personal income tax, it appears to be around 40% to 50%.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numb...

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2007USrn

So that means that the 25.1% of income paid by the top quintile makes up 0.68*0.42 == 28.5% of federal revenue. It's pretty clear that if you kept the second-to-top quintile taxed as they are now (12% of federal revenue), cut payroll taxes in half (to say 20% of federal revenue), and kept the non-tax revenue (roughly 10%), that the remaining 58% could be met by slightly-worse-than-doubling the taxes on the rich.

Again. Double taxes on the richest quintile, keep taxes as they are on the next richest quintile, halve payroll taxes, and keep non-taxes, and you're done. You can set corp taxes to zero, and also income taxes for the bottom 60% to zero.

So. If you want to tax just the richest 1%, you can't run the country on that. But you absolutely can run the country just by taxing the rich. If you wanted to.

(Note: this was a thought experiment, not advocacy. I am not a fan of this proposal. I just want to demonstrate that videos like the one I've seen, saying it's impossible to just tax the rich, are using shaky math.)
I have vague recollection of reading it on HN before, but meh, it's not like we're wading through a swamp of reposts. My scrollwheel still works.
you need a cross-platform USB stick program, with all your secrets on it encrypted properly, for that kind of thing. (The simplest hack I can think of would probably be python binaries, with a local-webserver based interface.)

I don't know of such an application, or whether the approach is rigorous, I'm afraid. But I think that's the shape of the solution.
I love it. Data URL make editor possible in a single tweet.
then don't trust government controlled CA's, just as you wouldn't trust government controlled keyservers
Now all I need to do is memorize this string when I'm on the phone trying to write down a phone number!
Congrats on the wonderful job.

So I guess my first question about Slim is how does it work?

For instance, I am trying to figure out how on your home page, you have the following copy:

Upload, organise, and share your photographs alongside others, like Robert May did with this superb image.

Where 'Robert May' and 'superb image' are dynamic links - that correspond to the image below it (although maybe you may want to change the copy to "the superb image below" or something of the sort, because it took me a while to realize that image showing on the page is the same image you were talking about and linked. I thought they were 2 different images).

So, I guess just to start off...where is the actual copy of "Upload, organise, and share your photographs...." actually stored. I don't see that copy in the .slim file at all. It seems to be abstracted to 'home.blurb' - https://github.com/afternoonrobot/photographer-io/blob/maste...

But I have no idea where that is.

Sorry if this changes the topic a bit, but I am curious.
Yes, we're always very careful in this industry not to overload TLAs.
Another way to get at the money is to raise taxes on the top 4%.
I'm a bit confused too.

From the article:

"Classified US National Security Agency maps leaked by Mr Snowden and published by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Brazilian O Globo newspaper reveal the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence collection sites that contribute to interception of telecommunications and internet traffic worldwide."

It sounds like the Guardian released this information, but I'm not really sure.
Http://www.onlinejobsfree.com/mem/invitefrnd?id=1345017
I hate the "everyone is doing it" "get a clue" excuses. The U.S. government hacking into Hong Kong computers is wrong and disclosing it is a public service to the people of Hong Kong. If we don't demand moral just governments we will never get them.
Under-developed "rational" brain before 25 years of age is a funny meme. Most readers should stop here.)

Difference in spending between cach and credit card attributed to "layering" is another meme. Correlation is not causation. The effect is, probably, based on the fact that there almost always bigger sum of money on the card than in cash in a pocket, so, the loss seemed less significant.

As for monetization strategies, it seems that nothing can beat "status items" (same as in so-called real life) such as "armors", "cloches" and all those "things" one could display and compare with others.

But so many papers..)
Oh I am positive that there are millions in this very country who believe that he should have stayed and gone to trial, that his fleeing is cowardly, and that his actions are traitorous.

I have to wonder on what grounds people can think this, when there are examples in seemingly any area of public cause where an individual succumbs to the might of heavyhanded authority of government. Probably those who judge a situation by what they see and read in the media and/or in the headlines, without stopping to really consider the facts (rather than opinions, which is what most news is these days) and make a judgment themselves.

I can't say I'm completely immune from the influence of popular media, but I try.
This is now getting so entirely overwhelming. It's like you're on the beach getting repeatedly smashed by waves that get bigger and bigger. There's nothing you can do to fight it, stop it, or move, and it just keeps coming. I feel so helpless with every new leak.
I wonder when this MVC type phase will stop being popular.
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Ah ha, that's actually not the doing of Slim but rather my usage of I18n, the localisation system used in Rails. Whenever you see t("something.stuff") or I18n.t("something.other.stuff") it's looking for those keys in YAML files under config/locales, primarily in en.yml at the moment. So the text you're looking for is here: https://github.com/afternoonrobot/photographer-io/blob/maste...

I'm not sure my way's the best, but I'm passing two generated links into that t() call which are then interpolated into the string in the YAML file.

If you've not used I18n before then it can make the views really confusing to read through without the text to reference! :)
Save it as a bookmarklet, drag to your bookmarks toolbar.
Interesting stuff. Everything there is straight out of basic behavioural economics. One technique I didn't see mentioned is intermittent rewards. Basically, if you are only rewarded some of the time for performing an action you're more likely to repeat than if you're rewarded every time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_rein... It's the basic mechanism that drives grinding in games like WoW.

Now the big question is, how better games ("skill games") be monetised? Nobody really wants to play manipulative games, but it's not clear to me how you can effectively monetise free-to-play. Any ideas?
Does RapGenius have the proper licensing to republish these lyrics? Is that what the funding is for? Lyric websites have been shutdown many times for this.
The kind of techniques described in the article are horrible indeed.

But there's a good kind of F2P. There are games that you download for free, which are essentially a demo. Once you finished that, you can buy the full game via IAP, this is pretty brilliant from a player's perspective. It's a shame that we use the same term for that.

I suppose the good thing about F2P in general is that it might just bring a very important message across to the general public: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Bored on your holiday break? 3D printing some Lego bricks
Well, of course it was unexpected. There was hardly any documented precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...
Isn't that nitpicking? Snowden released some information through the Guardian.
Infographic: The Impact of 3D Printing on Supply Chains
What's interesting and gruesome about the "free-to-play" (F2P) game market is this:

Game companies can extract the most money from players if they exploit patterns of human dependence and addiction. An understanding of techniques for creating addiction is---in fact---a competitive advantage.
Netiquette people. If something is down, don't link to it from a high traffic site. Mention it if you want, don't link. Flagged.
An App for People Who Want to Find Someone Nearby with an Inhaler or Epipen
You have to tax not just income but wealth. And even if it'll work for only a short while, that's OK. It increases the amount of money available to regular people. Suppose that it turns out that there's no need to wage a war 2 more days, or spend a couple more days sorting IRS forms. Well, that's more cash to something else. It adds up. And after that's paid for, the cash is in the hands of individuals, to spend as they see fit.
By that same logic, you would have missed Google.
Where do you get this number from?

Social security tax is 6.2% of the first 113k of income, 0 after that

Medicare is 1.45% for income under 200k, 2.35% for income above 200k.

At no income level do these add up to anything more than 7.7%

http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240/~/so...
You need to URL encode it for it to work in Firefox.

data:text/html, <style type%3D"text%2Fcss">%23e{position%3Aabsolute%3Btop%3A0%3Bright%3A0%3Bbottom%3A0%3Bleft%3A0%3B}<%2Fstyle><div id%3D"e"><%2Fdiv><script src%3D"http%3A%2F%2Fd1n0x3qji82z53.cloudfront.net%2Fsrc-min-noconflict%2Face.js" type%3D"text%2Fjavascript" charset%3D"utf-8"><%2Fscript><script>var e%3Dace.edit("e")%3Be.setTheme("ace%2Ftheme%2Fmonokai")%3Be.getSession().setMode("ace%2Fmode%2Fruby")%3B<%2Fscript>
For a few reasons that would be nearly impossible for the US as-is to implement:

-The safety net is already established. Giving someone something from birth ingrains in them that "this is just the way it is" -- giving them nothing and then turning the switch on results in disaster (see: professional athletes, lotto winners, etc). A catch-22 situation. Perhaps not insurmountable over a long enough period.

-Very low corruption, which in my experience is a function of organizational size. When people think the cards are stacked against them, right or wrong, they tend to opt out. An org the size of the US will never be low-corruption, imo. The reward is too high, and the risk continues to be too low.

-(off topic to my original point) Spending+military. The Nordic model has an obscenely high tax burden (40-50%) which is straight-up untenable with a military spend like the US's. We also have, because of our vast geographic size, a number of infrastructure we have to dump tax money into.

edit to add: also, tax-paid ("free") education, so the barrier to producing is much lower. Think about it, you're born into a society that says "we're going to make sure you have enough to live, always. Go out and do your best", then nature is usually going to take over and you'll do your best at something useful/productive. Do the same in the US and 1/4 of those folks will be using their stipend to pay medical bills, 1/2 will be tapped out from education, and 1/4 will straight up opt-out. It could work, but it'd require reworking education, healthcare & the military. Never going to happen.
I'm curious of its efficacy versus the wikileaks style dump.

How do you propose to measure such a thing?
<rant>The previous discussion is a sad display of what HN has become. Clearly most of the posters didn't go further than reading a few pages from the project's website. When instead they should've read some of the project's well commented C source code as anyone would expect from a group that's comprised of hackers. For instance http://unqlite.org/db/unqlite_doc_intro.c – Luke, read the source!</rant>

Now I'd like to get back to the topic, Unqlite. The project's documentation is objective and adequate to serve as a quick reference during the development of projects that use this library. The scripting language that goes with this DB feels very intuitive, its's apparently is very fast, and it has a small footprint. Its zipped source code with tests are a 23KB download, impressive. Later this week I will build a small test app with this database to develop a more informed opinion of this library. Anyhow, I'm really glad that we finally have a reasonable licensed alternative to Tokyo Cabinet and BDB. Big kudos to the author of this project. Keep up the good work!
My gut reaction reading this article was "Oh great, someone didn't learn from the 90s."

But once they started talking about Sandberg and Andreessen annotating books, speeches, reports, etc... that has to be where they're headed. I can see some sort of monetization strategy there.

If the site focus eventually shifts (and I doubt this was planned from the beginning) to "true experts explaining things," I can see a lot of potential there. Maybe not "bigger than Google," but certainly far "bigger than a lyrics explanation site."
You thought wrong, and apparently there is more to come, so put on your seatbelt.
You're far, far from alone.

Relax and join the movement... it's going to be a long ride.

--> http://goo.gl/lc7Fz
well if it's a tsunami situation we quite literally need to run for the hills. The question is, where are "the hills" and how do we get there in this situation?

Or maybe we need to democratize the analogue of a submarine.
SPAM shit, no-1 cares about your terrible website
Russia said it would grant him immunity under the condition there were no more leaks. So who is responsible for this leak is certainly relevant.

That said I could imagine this is enough for Russia to make their case either way.
iirc he did store the files is various places on the internet, encrypted.