skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This argument keeps coming up on HN lately. Either the HN echo chamber is in full effect, or just the age of people posting not aware of history...but secrecy has been alive and well and around long before 80% of the people on this website were born. Recent reference: The Cold War. I'm sure older references can be brought up if needed.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(TV_series)
First line should say 'over a 5 year period.' oops.
Yes, but sillysaurus omitted one:

Lecture 7: Seeking New Laws http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIN_-Flswy0
Yep, I agree. This is just the 1.0, export options will improve.
This attempt at humor distracts from the discussion.
The problem I see is, all this are asked to be kept secret. How much money the Government gives the Telcos, ISPs and websites like Google, Facebook etc. for monitoring people and how much these people charge etc. are being kept secret.

You create a ghost. Create fear of the ghost. Tell people that only you can protect them from the ghost. But you don't tell them how they plan to protect them from the ghost, nor are you willing to disclose how much you spend to protect people from this ghost.
As a student of critical social theory, the fact that it is a viable philosophical and practical viewpoint means it should be on the table for discussion. We get absolutely nowhere by only considering the already approved options set before us as citizens. Making qualitative change requires considering all viable options.
I disagree. Complaining about some deficiency on a free blogging platform sounds exactly like a misplaced expression of entitlement to me.

Maybe it is anti-social, but I don't feel bad about that. I have yet to receive a coherent answer to my original 'so what' question, about why Tumblr should enable NSFW content indexing on Google if they (Tumblr) feel that it's hurting their brand to do so.
It's not about their interests. It's about our interests of preserving that ancient culture for our research purposes.
The article inexplicably fails to mention if Nissan [car company] ever simply offered up a large amount of money to transfer over the domain. It's pretty human nature to dig in when you are attacked.
All you have to do is issue a decree that encourages people to upvote civility and downvote incivility, as opposed to the current standard which says upvote agreement and downvote disagreement.

People upvoted this guy because they agreed with his fundamental points despite the baiting, and in turn he received positive feedback. I think maybe you underestimate the effect karma has on posting behavior; it's not just about pushing comments up and down the page.
"Functional record update" [1] was the one missing feature that bothered me most about Standard ML. If you want to change one element in a record, you've got to specify explicitly that every other element in the record didn't change.

[1] http://www.pllab.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/smlsharp/docs/1.0/en/Ch4....
Thank you for replying!

I will make sure to add meaningful insight and information!

Thanks!
The cost of hustling
Well this is kind of weird to see here. Especially since it happened almost 10 years ago. I am Mike Rowe. I can answer any questions if people want. I did an AMA on reddit in 2009 as well http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ajsih/i_am_the_guy_who....
Doesn't everyone love decade old news? http://slashdot.org/story/04/01/26/1816210/microsoft-agrees-...
Since Nissan is the only major international company unable to acquire their first choice of domain, it appears an outlier. The lesson perhaps is that the market, coupled with the dispute resolution system, works well with respect to web domains.
Excellent idea, very useful functionality. Name unfortunately made me think of Microsoft Bob and/or Clippy, but I don't think that will be a barrier to adoption.
Bosch self-driving car spotted in California
Am I missing something? The wikipedia article claims he intentionally bought the domain because it sounded like Microsoft. The domain very clearly infringed on Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft offered to repay him the cost of buying the domain name (which they are under no legal obligation to do). I don't really get why Microsoft is the bad guy here (and I'm no particular fan of the company).
FastMail(.fm) costs $19.95 per year with 1 GB of storage and $39.95 with 10 GB of storage. And no ads, no NSA etc.

Stop complaining. Change provider.
Other companies with projects named PRISM:

Palantir https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html

Mozilla (inactive) https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prism/

CriticalBlue http://www.criticalblue.com/prism-technology.html

Goodwill http://www.goodwilltalentbridge.com/tb/projectPrism.aspx

Universities with projects named PRISM:

Texas Tech http://www.texastech.edu/it/prism.aspx

Georgia Tech http://pag.gatech.edu/prism

Princeton http://www.princeton.edu/prism/industry/industrial_affiliate...

While many of these projects have nothing to do with technology, they illustrate a point: PRISM was a great name for a project. The fact that Facebook has a "Project Prism" too is just coincidence.
Building an API for the next 100 million developers
> PRISM is a great name for a project

---or was.
Windows 8 Home Premium (upgrade) started to sell at $29.99 during introductory period last year. It was a time when I finally got licenses for all my PCs. And many other people around me in my country did as well. Even if we cheated a bit to install upgrade version on a clean home-made hardware. Previous pricing was too high for developing world. ~$200 for an OS? I do not even know for sure what was that price, it was too high to even care about it. What I am really interested in, is what they will do with the pricing of 8.1. I hope they do special upgrade pricing again for a couple of months. That's one way to hide the fact that new Windows price is much less now than it was 5 years ago.
You're probably right. If Wired wrote about it 6 years ago there's probably no point in repeating it, in spite of people telling me it was interesting and something new to them. Maybe they were lying to be nice to me.

But thanks for the link, I found that useful. Even though it repeated stuff from the Wired article.

Remembering stuff is only the beginning, yes. But you need it nonetheless.
I don't think this will work again. This time even the administration admitted they are spying on people. And last time the Supreme Court decision was 5-4.
Agreed, I can't think of any tech company naming a project PRISM again, even if it's internal.
I simply do not understand why Nissan Motorcompany dont just offer the guy a good pile of money.
He has all the rights to use the domain, as its his name, and simply bought it first.

That or spend millions and a decade on lawsuits that lead nowhere...
So much for that "debate" we were supposed to have. There's also the "balance" thing that apparently only Obama administration gets to decide on.
Do You Google Yourself? Are You Hiring?
Intuit acquires Australian startup Fifo
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6068873
I suggest Fastmail. I switched a few months back and haven't missed GMail yet. YMMV, but you owe it to yourself to give it a look.
I read information there, instead of complaint. It's just like we live in the city and there are many ads on the road. Ads in Google Mail, so far, are not so annoying as other free email provider did.
From the Fastmail thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070070

Fastmail has servers in the United States (https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html), which means the NSA can still request access to those servers.
When a multi-billion dollar corporation thumps a 12th grader over the head with its legal department, people are going to call foul.
The thing about "so what?" questions is they are rarely real questions.

I like apricots... so what? Taxis are yellow... so what? This T-Mobile coverage at the airport is shit... so what? Some people are displeased with recent tumblr changes... so what?

Why would you expect an answer to any of those "questions"?
Richard Stallman Spyware on Ubuntu using Amazon 2013
I just wanted to say, you are my hero.
Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.

As it happens, my wife is a HN member but has not found it easy to get traction for stories she submits. On a couple of occasions I have re-submitted an article that I thought was unfairly overlooked and it has attracted replies and karma in abundance. Anecdata to be sure, but based on this and other observations in HN and other online communities I think your hunch is likely correct.

If anyone feels like exploring this in R or somesuch, MetaFilter (where upvotes by other members are public) makes a large amount of its user pattern data available for analysis: http://stuff.metafilter.com/infodump/
Lg Optimus G Pro vs Samsung Galaxy Note 2
Why is he your hero?
I would start with more terrestrial aircraft instrumentation. They already operate on three axis (pitch, roll, yaw) so tend to be somewhat similar. For commercial stuff, take a look at something like the Garmin G1000.

I started a remake of a space video game a few years back which I didn't end up finishing, but I did tackle a lot of problems like 3D navigation. Here's a screenshot:
http://pdevine.users.sonic.net/images/sundog-cockpit.png If you're interested, the code is all there and runs in Python/OpenGL.
Nope, but everyone has to do them. But not everyone get their door kicked in. Or you could just tax people for the money the state will be paying for people to fill in there taxes ...
Also, I doubt that the NSA told Facebook that their surveillance project was called PRISM.
From my reading of the article (which may well not represent the whole story, I admit) they only "thumped him over the head" with a C&D when he asked for $10,000 for his infringing domain. I'm not sure being a 12th grader gets you off the hook for that.
> open source only meant the open source definition by the open source initiative

Some people will argue about that point and say it ain't so, but you've seen what I think about that :-)

> 'access to the source code but no free license'.

I've never seen a good term for that but some big names do it - Atlassian used to do it with JIRA and Confluence (don't know if they still do). It's not a bad thing to do - it's just not Open Source.

I guess this confusion is why Richard Stallman wrote this: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
FrontPage 4.0 is FrontPage 2000. I know because I remember using it.
For the first paragraph of the article, I believed that you were the host of Dirty Jobs...
Tried signing up with the code, keep getting a 500 something went wrong error :/
According to the article, all they did was send him a cease an desist order (albeit a rather long one.) That's pretty standard.

Just sounds like the public got riled up for no good reason.
It does this only because the market thinks that management thinks the shares are undervalued. If things are "efficient" then a buyback and dividend are equivalent Conversely, if shares are overvalued then a dividend payment is better for management.

At any rate, the relevant thing to compare Microsoft's investments to is the opportunity cost of the money. If Ballmer spent ten billion dollars on a project that netted only a 3% ROI, then shareholders would have been better off receiving that money and putting it into other companies.
Luckily it's easy to disable, or I'd be jumping ship now. Just turn off the tabs and the ads go with them - and the tabs are pretty useless anyway.
I think you need to re-evaluate your criteria in choosing a hero.
A small isolated population like that will be free of most infectious diseases. The number of Sentinelese isn't known, but may be as low as 100, since the Sentinelese, Great Andamanese, and Onge,(i.e. those on the island in question as well as the neighboring islands) have "a combined population of 400–500 individuals." [2].

Several studies, two on the genetics of the Andamanese [1,2] and the other on their linguistics [3] suggest that they have been isolated for 50-70,000 yr. The genetics studies also showed a very low population diversity, so in common parlance they are "inbred". Oddly enough, if they have been isolated for long enough, they will therefore be free of most genetic diseases, since the rare ones will be manifested early on in their isolation due to inbreeding, and then selected against. Genetic conditions that don't affect reproductive fitness could be common, though. Genetic isolation can also result in increased susceptibility to pathogens later introduced from outside said population.

[1]Kashyap, V. K., et al. "Molecular relatedness of the aboriginal groups of Andaman and Nicobar Islands with similar ethnic populations." International Journal of Human Genetics 3 (2003): 5-11.

[2] Thangaraj, Kumarasamy, et al. "Genetic affinities of the Andaman Islanders, a vanishing human population." Current Biology 13.2 (2003): 86-93.

[3]Abbi, Anvita. "Is Great Andamanese genealogically and typologically distinct from Onge and Jarawa?." Language Sciences 31.6 (2009): 791-812.
Two Sentences that Explain the Crisis and How Easy it Was to Avoid
Well because as a high school student he stood up to a multi-billion dollar corporation and didn't bend over to their offer of $10 measly dollars.

Also my original comment was half joking, but the sentiment remains.
Just guessing, but since it "just" gets all of the traffic that is passing in and out of the other server(s)/switchport (probably much like a hub), i don't think it'd be able to interfere with the monitored servers traffic.

Also, it'd kinda tip off the monitored person(s) if there suddenly was another hop on the route to their server, no?
Low pause garbage collector in Java 7
I'm pretty much the opposite of that Mike Rowe. I've never worked a day of hard labour in my life. I've considered starting a YouTube channel with me doing clean jobs, but there's only so many times in life you can copy the success of other people/companies.
Haha honestly my comment was sort of half joking :p

I still really like that he didn't bend over to Microsoft's will despite him being extremely young and up against one of the largest companies on the planet.
Still not convinced about promises.
The two sentences:

“From 2000 to 2007, [appraisers] ultimately delivered to Washington officials a petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers…it charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition, lenders were ‘blacklisting honest appraisers’ and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets” (FCIC 2011: 18).
Since you've gone through the trouble of being sued, was it worth at the end?

I am considering buying a domain name that has a similar spelling to an existing domain name but it only existed briefly, I wonder if it's worth buying knowing I could be sued.
Unless he has the ad executives' consent it was a bad move posting their full names in the video. Something I've noticed about mavericks (myself included, to a degree) is the willingness to engage is unusual/risky behaviour transcends the generally desirable (given that the "desirable" is classically the usual and proven). Arguing against myself, however, advertising is a fertile home for a maverick.

Generalising the experiment, I'm now curious about soliciting executives for business via this method.
Wait, the government can ask me to pretend that a physical object is not there?

Do they really expect engineers to start ignoring the laws of physics?
Stack ranking has been used at Microsoft since 2006. Furthermore, he wouldn't be overly involved in deciding performance evaluations. That's more the role of Lisa Brummel, who is the EVP of HR.
What leads you to believe that the NSA isn't monitoring FastMail?
I never got sued. They just sent me a cease and desist letter telling me to stop using the domain. I went to the media with that and it all blew out of proportion from there. The only thing I was ever at risk of losing was my domain name. I ended up selling out for a bunch of goodies and a couple trips to Redmond.
Ask HN: How do Google ads work
Google always serve me with ads of websites I have visited before. For example I visited nexmo.com and since then, all the ads showing on the websites I visit are Nexmo.

Forgive me if I am missing some points here.

How I thought online advertising should work is that the advertising platform should be able to show me ads related to my interests. In a case of Nexmo example, I should be able to see others ads related to Nexmo.

I believe online advertising should be a way of helping a user discover useful information based on their interests.

I stand to be collected, I don't have any technical know-how on how online ads work BUT its not been useful to me.
I find his fiction enjoyable; it reads easily and his sense of humor is similar to my own. (It is possible to overdose on his style, as I did on Vonnegut after a few volumes.)

"Single greatest book on writing of all time?" We'll part company here too. I read On Writing shortly after it came out, and was entertained through the front half, but can't for the life of me remember a shred of advice from it. I do recall the striking discontinuity in the last part, where he writes about the auto accident that nearly killed him. The writing was obviously different from that in the front of the book, and I felt the topic was out of place, and even self-indulgent. But he gets a bye, 'cause he's Stephen King.
Buying a bunch of fake listens/votes on platforms like SoundCloud, Beatport etc. is actually a very common way of building an audience in the dance music genre nowadays. Nobody likes it but almost everyone does it, because it's the most effective marketing strategy on a small budget.
i dont think so. Its not like Reader which was shut down, gmail will operate like it always has and most people wont bother to switch or simply dont know anything about PRISM/NSA etc.

The noise on HN regarding this is extreme because this is a community of people who are really passionate about these topics, most people are not though.
What does trademark law say about using one's given, legal name that was not intentionally selected to resemble an existing trademark in trade when it does, in fact resemble such a trademark? I don't think it's as clear-cut as you suggest, though admitting to choosing the domain name because it resembles Microsoft is a bad move from a legal perspective.
Its just a small website of a guy running a computer shop.
Sure hes monetizing on the Nissan brand name, but wouldnt you do the same if they run multi-million dollar lawsuits against you for 10+ years to get your domain? And all that while you just bought it first, before they even had the idea to and its your legal last name ?
That is clearly not OK because the 4th specifically mentions that your house is protected.

The issue here is indiscriminate copying of data from third parties through whom your information traveled. Under the government theory it is not a search (because nobody has looked at it), it is not a seizure (because you still have your data), and your person, house, papers and effects were not touched. Therefore it is an activity that lies outside the protection of the Constitutional phrase, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Randomized TSA screening is stupid
No. Its entire job is logging. Doing MITMs could very potentially lead to information leaking that shows surveillance is going on. Pretty much any switch a datacenter's going to use has port mirroring, which allows for a passive, invisible tap of a server.
I mean, your morals and ethics are great, but if they lead you to not using any major product because of them, then how effective is that?

I understand sticking by your morals, but literally every big companies has turned over data to PRISM. Not using any of these products because of morals is silly.
> The result is a platform that can juggle as much as 100 petabytes of data — aka hundreds of millions of gigabytes

No more than 105 million gigabytes actually.
In practice, this seems to be a large part of what Western governments do. There's nothing the West loves to do so much as meddling in other people's affairs and bringing the blessings of democracy to people that never wanted it.
http://english.ruvr.ru/news/2013_07_12/Snowdens-letter-to-hu...
I wouldn't, but that wasn't the sort of question I asked. Instead, I quoted the specific context, because I was curious about why the parent poster thought it mattered if adult-flagged blogs got delisted from search engines. He had phrased his comment in such a way that it seemed like he considered this a Bad Thing, whereas it seems to me that a) you could still build an audience without relying on Google and b) it seemed strange to me that the existence of a blog should be measured only in terms of its readership.

I think this was perfectly clear from the context, and substituting arbitrary statements about nothing in particular to critique my original question (after having complained about how I would communicate with my mother or console a bereft cola drinker) suggests to me that it's you who doesn't have any particular point to make.

I found some of the other comments disagreeing with my viewpoint more enlightening, but I'm not clear on what your point is other than having a go at me.
I think the concept of "patent troll" is doing us more harm than good. The implication of this expression is that the badness is in the "trollish" aspect, and not in the "patent" aspect of it.

Patent trolls are what happens when the patent system is taken to its logical conclusion. So if patent trolls are evil, then the patent system itself is evil.

The fact that some or even many patent holders _aren't_ evil is beside the point.

Imagine, for example, that there was a law which gave husbands permission to rape their wives. Presumably only _some_ husbands would take advantage of this law. So one might conclude that the law isn't bad, it's just that society has to find some way to deal with those bad husbands, the so-called "marital sex trolls", who take advantage of such a law.

And the bad husbands would say something like: "Morally, I think husbands deserve some reward for the benefits that they bring to a marriage."
Why do you conclude that they find it acceptable?

The majority made their ruling despite lawyers for the other side pointing out this catch-22, and the minority decision outlining this exact scenario as a reason to have granted standing. I do not think that the majority could have so ruled if they found the existence of this catch-22 to be unacceptable.
I'm interested in what you mean by "12 angry men" type movies. Do you mean ones with less action and more human drama?

If so, I think those films are out there. They just don't make it to the big cinemas very often. I've just checked my local art-house cinema and it's currently showing

- a film about a Saudi girl who is banned from buying a bike

- a re-telling of Snow White as a bullfighter

- a "passionate ensemble drama of family dysfunction"

- a documentary about Pussy Riot

- a comedy about a bunch of blokes trying to recreate an epic pub crawl
'In 1993, Atsushi Ohori extended the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler at Kansai Laboratory of Oki Electric, and named the experimental prototype SML# of Kansai. [..] The name SML# of Kansai symbolizes the field selector #〈label〉, which was given a polymorphic type for the first time by this compiler.'

http://www.pllab.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/smlsharp/docs/1.0/en/Ch1....

It predates it, actually.
I wonder if the secret just boils down to "I started offering SEO services instead of design services"?

To be honest I wouldn't know how to guarantee a client that a new web site would earn them 100000$ more. I suppose that is simply SEO territory.
Why are cosmetic items okay in a cash store but not stats gear?