skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similar point raised by Jamelle Bouie: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon...
Note that the headline of the Venturebeat article itself doesn't use the word disrupt.
The Social-Media Bubble Is Quietly Deflating
The first paragraph of your post is what I'm going through right now.
The Problem of DIY Fecal Transplants
Surely government institutions would never break their own rules, or lie to anyone?

To be clear, I'm not saying anything is true or not. I'm just saying we shouldn't rule anything out. It's possible that some of the tech companies are themselves partially or fully in the dark.
True. You read my mind.
I know this isn't exactly adding to the discourse but... YAY! Thanks EFF.
The East India Company behaved like an independent state, complete with an army, civil service and diplomatic corps.

As for countries dying, even great powers, consider this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugqGueQ9Ud8
Ask HN: open source video analytics platform?
To start, I'm not a technical person but I love reading HN - we are looking for an open source video analytics platform or recommendations on the best video analytics/player platform that we could potentially white label. The ones I've seen so far are VidYard, VidCaster, Wistia, Brightcove, Limelight Networks.. If anybody has experience in this space, would love to hear about it. Thanks for the help!
uR SMRT.!1
From the title, I had expected an article on start-up communities that were themselves spread across many countries around the globe. However, it turned out to be about city-centric startup communities that can be in any city.

Are we still at the stage where a community needs to be based in the same physical place? Why don't the currently available collaboration tools enable start-ups and the communities around them to be independent of location?

Does it come down to: most VCs won't invest outside their own cities?
Ask HN: Any startups working to capitalize on the coming privacy boom?
Big opportunities are opening up for companies in a position to offer services free of government snooping. Are any startups in the community specifically oriented to this market positioning?

Any big company or non- U.S. government seems likely to ask the question "If we move our tens of thousands of users to service X or service Y (i.e. gmail or Oracle)" will our data be gathered by the U.S. government? If the answer is yes, or "maybe" then surely they'll look for "snoop free" alternatives.

Is anyone working to become the snoop free alternative?
Its not always that simple though and depending on how the immunity develops you might end up becoming allergic to mosquitos instead of immune to them. This is specially prone to happening if you are only exposed to them every once in a while when you go on a trip.
My feeling is they're still abusive, but I also agree with your analysis. They're so over the top that it's impossible for them to be completely serious.
I could care less which you choose so long as you're getting a proper Linux toolset.

Powershell is a skill I don't have yet which carries over to ... precisely one declining technical dinosaur (with a penchant for expiring its skillsets).

The Linux toolbox is a set of skills I embarked on learning over a quarter-century ago, most of which goes back another decade or further (the 'k' in 'awk' comes from Brian Kernighan, one of Unix's creators). And while some old utilities are retired and new ones replace them (telnet / rsh for ssh, sccs/rcs for git), much of the core has remained surprisingly stable over time.

The main difference between MinGW and Cygwin appears to be how Windows-native they are considered, which for my own purposes has been an entirely irrelevant distinction, though if you're building applications based off of the tools might matter to you.

http://www.mingw.org/node/21
UK Government Considers ranking Pupils in England at age 11
This theory that Al Zheimer is due to a form of Diabetes does not have much support from the key thought leaders currently. [Disclaimer: I worked on Al Zheimer]. For all we know, it may be a combination of several factors and not a single one.
I would like to offer a contrarian view. Gittip is a nice initiative, in the "thank you for developing this project" kind of way - but I doubt anyone believes they can (or will be able to) pay the rent with donations paid through it. I wrote a post on this subject a couple of months ago, title "Open-source can't live on donations alone" [1].

I also don't subscribe to the notion that open-source should only be about the love - if companies like MySQL and Red Hat can make it into a huge business, and with the immense value open-source provides to the software industry, open-source developers should be treated as first-class citizens, not relegated to volunteer work late at nights, while doing their real job during the day.

Of course I'm biased, since I'm the founder of a company who's making that change happen. We started Binpress [2] to help developers build profitable businesses like MySQL and Red Hat around their open-source code. We do it by providing them with a platform for adding a commercial layer over their open-source code (whether it's self hosted or on GitHub, etc.), through commercial licensing and by providing customization, integration and support services.

We are a distribution marketplace, similar to the appstore or Steam but for open-source code products. We already have many developers making silicon-valley salaries working exclusively on their open-source projects - and we're just getting started. We've been bootstrapped (and profitable) for 2 years but are now closing our seed (after going through the 500startup program).

If any of this makes sense to you, you are welcome to reach out to me at eran@binpress.com (I'm Eran, the CTO and co-founder).

[1] http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-l...

[2] http://www.binpress.com
Clara.io: the power of your 3D software in the cloud?
Google Maps for iOS adds iPad support, live traffic updates
Gives a new meaning to "won't somebody please think of the children?"
Wearing a device that is constantly connected to a company that has repeatedly violated users' privacy (both for itself, and for the NSA), and is still comfortable lying about it....

Sounds like a great idea.
I sincerely recommend working at a large University as an alternative to this. Instead of one large company it is a constellation of large companies. They are almost always desperate for more good talent, and in many cases the innovations you can bring to the table can benefit the entire community, not just shareholders and customers. Otherwise, all of these points hold true.
Could the big software corporations turn on the government?
Trust in U.S. Internet companies has been destroyed by the spying government.

Is it possible that these companies will turn their considerable resources to fighting the government and fighting the secrecy that is destroying the trust customers used to have in them?
Here's a really enjoyable regex crossword from, as I recall, the MIT Mystery Hunt:

http://www.coinheist.com/rubik/a_regular_crossword/grid.pdf
Youtuber Grant Thompson made some interesting videos on that: http://www.youtube.com/user/01032010814/search?query=solar
> what a crock of shit.

calm down, it's a common suggestion that THC levels are rising and rather than just repeating it I asked if it is, in fact true. A simple "no" is better.

Your first link does not support your point as strongly as you seem to think. Your second link is obviously a joke - no one would present such an obviously biased source with so many cherry picked reports seriously.
The Data.gov team collaborates with many other agency open data initiatives, including Healthdata.gov. Many data sets in next.data.gov are sourced from Healthdata.gov via their data.json file. See http://hub.healthdata.gov/data.json

You will notice similarities in "technology stack[s]" for open data initiatives. This is great, as it promotes code reuse. Further, we utilize popular open source projects like CKAN and Wordpress so that fixes benefit a much larger community and so that more developers are familiar with the underlying technology, hopefully making it easier to contribute to open data initiatives.
You need to prevent the rot before it starts.

Let's not get too ahistorical here, a lot of what we have today was implemented (if not established) in the freaked-out aftermath of 9-11. Yes, I know, Clinton rendered/tortured, etc. but it wasn't institutionalized through the PATRIOT act and associated mechanisms yet. There were certain people who used, intentionally, the hair-on-fire emotions of the times to expand government powers to the insane degree we are dealing with now.
It's not as if private companies or entrepreneurial off-books pharmaceutically-oriented import-export fraternal organizations haven't resorted to violence. And they're hardly the only ones.

Standard Oil literally blew up the competition. Homestead Steel hired the Pinkertons to bash heads (and kill a few). Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Aetna kill indirectly by denying shelter, access to finances, or healthcare coverage.

The Libertardian arguments are getting more than a little tired, and we've heard them repeated a few too many times.
Slow start, insane end, typical Stephenson.
There was a point where I was so miserable that I was considering transferring schools because I didn't like any of the people I went to school with. The great teachers and my girlfriend were what helped me stay sane. To be honest, look elsewhere. Find friends who are programmers and into startups, you will find that they are much more interesting and mature.
That sounds interesting, I'd like to see how that's done.
Thanks for asking the question and interested in the discussion, but something tells me the startup community is going to be relearning the dynamics of "regulatory risk" with this one.

Move fast.
Unleaded gasoline.
Don't know. But I can tell you for sure that I'm looking into ways of abandoning ALL the major US web services. I have already quit Google for DuckDuckGo and I am moving from Dropbox to Swiss-made Wuala.com. And that's just the start.
Wow, great, you could come up with a SINGLE example for a company with State-like powers, and that was 200 years ago. And they never waged war on large regions at a time. And let's not forget their expansion was blessed by their own government.

Do you have any recent example of super-powerful corporation waging war around the world by themselves? Any example of corporation launching WW1 or WW2, or even something remotely big as the Vietnam war, all by themselves ?

It's fairly obvious that no corporation nowadays has the financial means to wage war by themselves. It takes 100 billions to wage war in Iraq. Top tier companies make that much in REVENUE, not even profit. How would you expect them to spend so much? Your point does not make sense.
I really wonder. Are the people who run Google and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and Oracle and Yahoo all happy and content with this situation or are they hopping mad that the government and the NSA has brought the party to an end?

These organisations have VERY deep pockets and if they decide that their businesses are being destroyed by the government, then they are probably in a position to start spending money to change things aren't they?
Surprisingly, I get much worse performance from the prototype version than the "external method" version (I wouldn't exactly call it private). Up to 50% worse in fact on Windows Chrome 28.

Interestingly, just defining initializeSomethingElse within Cell only results in ~10% slowdown, and that yields a truly private method. E.g.

function Cell(x, y) {
var self = this;
self.x = x;
self.y = y;
self.things = [1, 2, 3];

// private -unreachable- method
initializeSomethingElse();

// Private methods here
function initializeSomethingElse() {
self.dir = Math.atan2(self.y, self.x);
self.total = 0;
self.things.forEach(function(thing) {
self.total += thing;
});
}
}
I actually disabled paredit when I was using vim and have done so again while using emacs+evil. The way I write code i typically simply do opening parens and at the end just jam parens until the rainbow-delimiters start to show up unbalanced (red in my case). If I need to pay attention because I'm not at the end of a top level form, I quickly glance to see which matched parens are flashing as I add each delimiter.
It's definitely the Defense Intelligence Agency. They do a lot of intelligence collection.

I'm disturbed by Snowden's grandiosity in those statements. He fits the personality type interrogators would call a "grand egoist." He exaggerates his individual importance and skills to the point of self-delusion.

Ironically, this package of traits is often found in people of extraordinary skill. He has managed to abscond from the country with thousands of our deepest secrets, and prevent his own capture amidst the biggest manhunt in the history of the world.

But at the same time, he seems to be losing his grip under the pressure. There simply is no way that an individual can guarantee he or she won't give away information under threat of torture or under the manipulation of interrogation. The secrets live in his head, and the operating system that runs on our grey matter is eminently hackable.

Deeply, deeply disturbing rhetoric.
Perhaps that any attempt to subvert snooping by the government will simply be made illegal?
I'm not hating brand in the abstract. I've had specific technical, aesthetic and business issues with Yahoo throughout it's entire existence.

Technically I've had a lot of trouble with Yahoo mail, and those types of problems have been typical for me with every service of theirs I've ever tried in the past.

For example, I often have trouble emailing people who have yahoo accounts due to bizarre spam filtering policies, some of which have no resolution path. I also have a Yahoo email account, and my mail client complains almost daily that it can't connect or my password is wrong.

It's just my personal taste but aesthetically, I can't tolerate their interface design. I'd be willing to bet Godaddy recruited their web designers from Yahoo.

I started noticing them as a 'brand only' company when I was in Japan in 2003. A local telecom was marketing a Yahoo branded DSL services. I suppose they where trying an AOL play (at least they had a focused business goal, and they've updated their design sense this century), but the combination of all this product noise (i.e. unrelated service offerings), combined with bad UX make the Yahoo brand ephemeral to me. Other then an email service, for the life of me, I can't put my finger on what they do. Crawl around the web and put a yahoo sticker on anything they think is cool?

Now however, maybe their brand can start to represent something I care about, but they'll have to actually do some useful things too.

And then there's this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email_address
Yeah, I was pretty close friends with the people who moved away, but we've mostly stopped talking.

I think the hard part is that it takes time to develop close friendships, especially with a full time job.
German Spying Debate Goes to Parliament
Maybe the startup opportunities will now be in Europe.

Perhaps the silicon valley capital will see the scale of the opportunity and fund euro companies that can live outside the U.S regulatory domain.
You define the start command in the package.json anyway, so presumably Herkou can just read that?
Why higher education is so expensive
> In this case, str_replace() would be not only be more appropriate, it would have helped remove the risk of exploit.

Actually, the exploit was a backdoor planted by the hacker, so the system was already compromised. The recommendation to use str_replace in this instance would be useless, as it appears the victim didn't even put the code there in the first place.
WaveMac, A Gesture Control Device Developed By Indian Students
LivingSocial closes its New York office and terminates its local events division
Thanks for the reminder - looking forward to it.
OP here. I find it interesting that despite paying $80 / yr for past 5(?) yrs, I completely forgot I pay for Amazon Prime (thanks for the reminder!).

Does that mean it's easier to maintain renewals for SaaS offerings if the service includes high levels of premium/add-on/normal purchases?

Dunno, but I'm going to re-read Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational :)
LinkedIn Revealed - The Professional Network Your Career Can't Afford To Ignore
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, at least 10 people have created a profile on LinkedIn.
I also received a bonus while working in London (I always thought it was called "London Waiting" [1], which seems like a more accurate a reflection of their train system).

I think it was £3000, which was a large amount back then.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_weighting
What Was The Most Valuable Experience You Gained From Y Combinator?
I was being serious about my price point. Not because I expect he'll lower the price, but just to give my data point to take into consideration with whatever other feedback he's getting. If it were $12.50, I'd buy it. That's on the high end of what I like to pay for eBooks, but I respect what the author's doing, and I want to be a better senior engineer. To me, that's a reasonable price to pay with the preconceived notion that I'll probably have to dig through the book for the gems that really resonate with me. Maybe it's my background in econ, but I often approach things with my valuation in mind.
And a few more:

6) Behaving like a global imperial power, doing whatever it likes (from invading to operations) in sovereign countries.

7) Secret prisons, outside legal process.
+1
And you aint going to disrupt anything by investing "$5 million in 25 companies".
>PJ O'Rourke once observed that "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys".

Sure, but he said that because he is an uncorrigable neocon.

He would be totally OK with giving the same "money and power" to big corporations.
Is this a relevant line of argument? Yes, historically, companies have acted violently and even taken on state-like roles (I listed the EIC as an example elsewhere in this thread).

But these case are remarkable because they are rare, not common. And because in all such cases they predate the settlement of an uncontested government monopoly on violence in some geographical area.

I suppose you are mistaking me for a Rothtard, an anarcho-capitalist who believes in a free market in violence. Not so; it's been pretty well shown by now that centralising the social violence function is, on the whole, a better strategy.

But it comes with the downside that you've centralised a lot of power and it needs particular supervision and constraint.
The thing is, even non-US governments appear to be snooping on their people and companies (as we have learnt, following the NSA scandal), so I am sure if there is really a safe haven out there? And as someone else said, governments make laws, and can declare it illegal to prevent snooping from their secret agencies. The best you can do is use strong encryption, but even that is not 100% sure it's enough.
The "pet project" project
Don't think that Europe is so much better, Tempora is bigger and more powerfull then Prism and the germans have a hacker paragraph* for example.

* https://www.fbi.h-da.de/fileadmin/gruppen/FG-IT-Sicherheit/P...
>Corporations don't make War and enlist people to fight for them.

Oh, they very much do. Either through friendly governments or directly, in less developed places.

The Krupps and several other business interests were financing Hitler, for example.

And multinational corporations push dictatorships, civil tension and even full blown wars all the time on smaller countries. There is a reason some are called "banana republics", and it's not because they produce bananas.
| Don't use /e with untrusted input

This isn't a case of someone running:

preg_replace($VAR1 + "/e", $VAR2,'');

No one passed untrusted input to '/e.' It's a case of untrusted input being passed to preg_replace() in an insecure way, which allowed '/e' to be enabled. All of this is sort of irrelevant anyways. The developers did not add the preg_replace() function, the attacker did so as a way to eval code without directly calling eval() (which would be easy to spot in the code, since it should so rarely be called in practice).
If you look elsewhere, I've pointed out that companies take on state-like functions and character when a government monopoly on violence hasn't yet been firmly established. The EIC is one such case.

My problem is that I am arguing a centre line that two schools of thought are misunderstanding. The centralisation of violence in the state serves a useful social function that decentralisation does poorly; but that selfsame centralisation is dangerous and must be closely and jealously guarded.

The first clause of my argument angers certain strains of libertarian and the second clause confuses various kinds of leftists who mistake me for a libertarian.
How to Avoid Startup Stress and Anxiety
Was mainly commenting that we don't how THE MAN will react. New Congress soon, new President soon enough...all could quickly change and new legislation could kill/amplify any business going after this "problem". Maybe it's systemic and ripe for disruption. Maybe Bernie Sanders will have a smackdown this week and the privacy issue is moot. We don't know what lawmakers might do = regulatory risk.

Was just suggesting investors might use that lens...if that's the route a startup takes.
Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.

There is a necessity for someone to have the men, guns and dogs -- even if they only figurative. But men with guns and dogs are dangerous and so whoever has them needs to be strictly controlled and supervised. The ability to acquire more such men, guns and dogs needs to be resisted as much as possible, because it is very hard to claw back.
Bitcoin Author Accused of Plans to Overthrow Government in Amazon Review
Expansion in times of crisis, real or perceived, is an old pattern.
History time: France had some pretty onerous crypto regulations back in the 90ies. Europe can and does stupid stuff too.

Also, it remains to be seen whether people care enough about this to vote with their wallets.
That is an incomplete summary of her credentials...

Hello! I’m a freelance science journalist living in New York with my ball python, Agamemnon Fang. I spent the last few years as a marine geochemist by day, contributing editor for CBS SmartPlanet at night. Before that, I was a news intern for Nature in Washington, D.C., an editorial intern at Discover in New York, and a reporter for the infamous Point Reyes Light in West Marin, California.

In 2008, I graduated from the Earth & Environmental Science and Journalism dual-master’s program at Columbia University. I conducted my Earth Science master’s research on, broadly speaking, Climate Change and Human Evolution at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where I used geochemical analyses to understand paleoclimatic changes in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean. And for my Journalism master’s project — “Salamander Eggs and Hyena Phalluses” — I narrated the discoveries of two novel life histories (or biological oddities). At the University of California, Berkeley, I studied Integrative Biology (evolution and natural history) and English literature (19th-20th century novel and experimental fiction). I spent a couple years at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology as a georeferencer, a curatorial/field/research/lab assistant, and I skinned and stuffed birds and rodents. (You can also find my immortalized birds at the American Museum of Natural History, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, and Yale Peabody Museum.)

http://janetfang.wordpress.com/about/