skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author here.

Thanks for the up votes and the comments - both positive and negative. I'll take all feedback into consideration when I next post anything. I didn't post this on HN myself, just added a link in a comment to another post.

Just to clarify - I do want to try and fix what I perceive as the current problem. I'd hoped the post ended on a positive note, but maybe people stopped reading. (It was rather long)

The TL;DR did have a question mark after it (although the rest of the punctuation left little to be desired). I've had positive and negative feedback with regards to this, so I'm leaving the post alone, warts and all.

I completely acknowledge that my post comes across as arrogant and condescending at times. Please realise that I spend all day being patient, polite and helpful to both my students and colleagues. My blog allows me to blow off a little steam every once in awhile.

Anyway, I'm very flattered to have made the front page of HN and I'm sure it'll never happen again. I love this site and the community. If you want to berate me or support me then feel free to do so by replying to this thread and I'll endeavour to reply.
Would a service like Listia.com be against their terms of service? Specifically these seem contradicting:

(50) virtual currency that can be monetized, re-sold or converted to physical or digital goods or services or otherwise exit the virtual world

===

(52) selling video game or virtual world credits (unless you are the operator of the video game or virtual world),
Damn, made me cringe and lol at the same time.
So you're saying ARmstrong elected to give this guy severance and unemployment benefits instead of firing him for cause and having to deal with none of that?
In a court of law in the situations I provided, would the difference you are trying to argue (a semantic difference IMO) be satisfactory to a judge such that the judge would eliminate CF from a lawsuit? Take your average judge - is "They're more of a cache" as an argument going to be enough to convince him/her to rule for CF? I think the answer is no. As with any case, "if you can find a sympathetic judge, you can win" so sure - there are judges who will choose to see a difference. But who wants to build a business strategy based on finding a sympathetic judge if/when a major problem occurs?
The stock price has been driven by share buybacks, and the appreciation of Alibaba.

It's more accurate to say that financial markets, past acquisitions, and activist investors have driven up the share price.

That said, the share-price uptick has extended her "honeymoon." Hopefully, all of these acquisitions, cultural changes, etc. add up to something.
What do you mean by perspective issues?
uhh yeahhhh that is too common, look at github and see how many projects use link-trackers+url-shorteners instead of raw-github-urls.
Note that there's no suhosin for PHP5.4, and therefore it no longer appears in the Wheezy repositories.
> Until the recent revelations about the NSA, we also believed (perhaps naively) that the U.S. had data protection laws that prohibited spying on citizens without a warrant.

If people believed that email that a person didn't host themselves was protected, it was only because they were lazy and didn't so much as Google the laws in question.

The reason we keep telling you that the NSA behavior is probably legal isn't because we want it to be legal, it's because we want you to stop living in a fantasyland ;). Look at ECPA for instance, it's been around since 1986. CALEA has been around since 1994.
I can almost stomach that over absolute mass analysis and storage in Utah of everything I say, email or browse, when I'm not a US citizen.
Install Noscript. Torbutton helps, but for those who don't want to use the outdated tor browser bundle you can also try Blender (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/blender-1/).

What we really need is a modified ``privacy'' build of FF that reports spoofed js/css data (screen res etc), but I'm not skilled enough in web stuff to make that.
I think most of these are reasonable, and I immediately see why they are on the list.

I think I know why this is on there:

"(10) age restricted products or services"

But wouldn't that also apply to every business that has a COPPA disclaimer in its ToS.
Converting "image/png" to "image/jpeg" is easy given a knowledge of those formats, but how do you convert "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" to "image/jpeg" or "text/html" or anything else? The only thing you can do is invent your own arbitrary convention, which begins to stray pretty far from the design and intent of PUT.
It's an old link, but human hair and very realistic extensions are super valuable, and nearly impossible to trace once stolen. Governments are trying to de-incentivize theft by regulating the secondary market. http://business.time.com/2011/09/13/now-people-are-stealing-...
President Obama Proposes Reforms To Surveillance Programs
I've found "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python" quite helpful: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest

And if you're a Windows user wanting to use Python modules that are partly implemented in C, I recommend downloading them in binary form: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs
They seem to be on a crusade to strip useful features out of their Android app.
Even trying to be less trackable makes you more unique.
It just doesn't make sense to be earning minimum wage and spending $1400/month to live in a 1-bed apartment. There are cheaper places to live elsewhere that are safe to live where you can earn similar wages.
Funny, maybe, but not absurd, at least not in a way that's Stripe's fault. I'm curious about the hair one. I wouldn't expect selling hair to be a real problem. Is there a story that motivated that restriction? I notice it's also in the list of Braintree's restrictions that toomuchtodo posted.
> I'd teach them critical thinking, because it's really the only skill they need to learn

Metacognition isn't really possible to teach. It doesn't really transfer. Everyone talks about how important it is that students "learn how to learn", but it's 99% bullshit which only refuses to die because people want it to be true.

Now, there are a few things which work. A few examples from memory (it's worth googling a bit though, as I may be wrong):

- Thinking of the brain as a "muscle", to encourage students to improve incrementally. (OK, this is new, and it's hard, but if you work on it you'll get much better with time).

- Plan, Do, Check, Act.

- Setting goals (maybe).

- Picking out a small number of key ideas for any topic (typically 3, in English speaking countries - we like 3, I think Chinese speakers like 4 but there's nothing magic, it's just a cultural preference).

But I'll reiterate - when people say "learn critical thinking", they often don't know exactly what they are talking about. Mostly, they mistake their own narrow expertise with "deep" thinking, when in reality their own "critical thinking" skills wouldn't get them very far in an army boot camp, or a chess club, or a debating team, or any other environment which they aren't already well adapted to.

When most people say "learn critical thinking", they mean "get really good at it, like I am, so you don't get all bogged down by trivial details".
I'm not sure these are that spammy:

* personal computer technical support

* travel agencies

* hair-extensions

What all of them is the ability to be a scam, but any business can scam you. Surprised fortune tellers aren't on there.
>There has to be more to that story.

Why? Because cops are never wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Donald_P._Scott
Disposable Income Kid
Even though I said it wasn't absurd, this does seem contradictory since they seem to allow face-to-face tobacco sales, which are certainly age restricted.
Looks like they want to avoid shady businesses, con men, and being placed in arduous regulation regimes (e.g. banking, financial regulations, etc.)
Still better than having all your data traffic piped to the NSA. Don't forget that this pipe is behind the SSL-Wall of Google. Being from Germany too, I'm seriously considering to move my mail account from GMail to Web.de. Already started moving my private Docs away from Google.

I like Google services and even before Snowden I was aware of the fact that international communication is watched by Secret agency. But really, why do they keep track of everything?
My transcription of an interesting part of his talk:

""I don't have an interest, and the people of the NSA don't have an interest, in doing anything other than making sure that where we can prevent a terrorist attack; where we can get information ahead of time, that we're able to carry out that critical task. We do not have an interest in doing anything other than that. And we've tried to set up a system that is as failsafe as far as we've been able to think of, to make sure that these programs are not abused.

But people may have better ideas. And people may wanna jigger slightly sort of the balance between uh, the information that we can get, vs. the incremental encroachments on privacy that if haven't already taken place might take place in a future administration (or as technologies develop further).

And the other thing that's happening is that as technology develops further, technology itself may provide us some additional safeguards. So for example if people don't have confidence that the law, the checks and balances of the court, and congress, are sufficient to give us confidence that government's not snooping. Well, maybe we can embed technologies in there that prevent the snooping regardless of what government wants to do. I mean there may be some technological fixes that provide another layer of assurance. And so those are the kinds of things that I'm looking forward to having a conversation about."

-- Obama
Could you explain how it would work?

The user signups up, connects their phone to their account and you use the fingerprint as the ID for future validation?

How do you handle changes in fonts/plugins/browser versions/timezones while travelling.

All of that data seems to be muteable over time. Unless it's a 99% match kind of thing. Also what about companies that hand out laptops with the same base OS/browser-installs (or is that the goal)?
http://www.ovh.com/
We shouldn't ever trust our government, and we should absolutely never trust someone else's.

However, I trust the political system more in Germany than I do elsewhere. It is designed (ironically by the Allies) to be stable and multi-partisan. Germany is used to coalitions and party's such as the Piratenpartei and the Greens actually have a voice here. The votes count, every single one.
> one in 506 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

So is this good or bad?

Some time this year, I'm planning to write a browser add-on which will send random (legitimate, from real browser versions) header combinations of the user agent (+OS) and accept headers. It can be semi-random, e.g. send the same headers to the same host during one visit. Combine it with the NoScript addon, use the RequestPolicy addon, block 3-rd party cookies, tell the browser to delete the cookies and local storage on exit, use plugins only in "on-click" mode (or don't use plugins), don't send "referer"s (or send fake "referer"s), use Tor for HTTPS sites (and sites that don't need authorization), and this will make hard to track you.
The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that they have continued offering location services as part of Google+, but they've retired a service that works on iOS for one that does not. This strikes me as an incredibly user-hostile action.
The founders recognized this, which is why the 4th Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution, is supposed to be enforced by the separate branch of government that is the Judicial Branch.

You're saying the police power is the province of the Judicial Branch?! This is a...unique interpretation. The Constitution divides the power of the government in legislative (making law), executive (promulgating and enforcing law), and judicial (evaluation of the law). In common law jurisdictions the judicial branch does not have any kind of police power, and to the best of my knowledge never has had.

I am perplexed by the number of HNers that seem to think we live in a civil law jurisdiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
A good writer should not pay for his own coffee
So we were supposed to have conversations about things we didn't know anything about?
Startup Ideas: The Billion Dollar Misconception
Fun Side Of Riots
I think the end goal is exactly that. Sigint is about getting everything.
Ah. Those are things meaningful to those suffering directly but not to those designing security systems, which is what particularly concerns me.

I still think a Gingrich or Tea Party level congressional revolution in 2014, bipartisan, focused on "re-establishing effective oversight of the military/intelligence apparatus", should have reasonable odds of going through. There are enough districts which don't financially benefit from this (and a lot which are going to be hurt by it, like Silicon Valley and Redmond), that a number of junior congressmen could probably get elected on it (assuming they're not otherwise psycho).
> Advertising is a "tack on" to bring in the money

Advertising is your core business when almost 100% of your revenue comes from that. I wouldn't call what turned it from a dorm room project into a behemoth a "tack on", that's dismissing Eric Schmidt's contribution. What you do to achieve this goal doesn't matter as much. Amazon core business is e-commerce but they rent servers and sell portable devices.

> Ad relevancy is really just a natural extension of their Search algorithm.

You can argue that advertising is a natural extension of everything they put their hands on, from search to social networks to maps to glasses with HUDs. Everything they develop lately has advertising potential, and are shutting down everything that doesn't.
This article gets so much right. I was initially offended by the TL;DR; I read it hoping to get a quick gist of what it was about but instead was told that I should go watch kitten videos. Reading on, it shares so many of my opinions. Even the small paragraph about driving your own car or having Google drive it for you strikes home. I've talked about that with people and everyone's still like "I'm sure we'll keep driving for a good while because it's fun". I fully agree with the author on every point he made in the article.

One of my favorite parts:

> Cameron announces that ISPs are going to start filtering The Internet. It’s described as a ‘porn filter’, but the Open Rights Group’s investigations implies that far more than porn will be filtered by default. Then to top it all, Cameron’s chief advisor on this issue has her website hacked and displays just how technically illiterate she really is.
What? Wow, that sounds really dangerous. The same fingerprint is available to any site out there, so anyone could just capture it and try to replay it on a "SecureAuth" service, no?
The Edge has physical volume buttons on the side. We'll see if the lack of a Home button ends up affecting the UX or not; it depends on the responsiveness and resiliency of the OS.
The Cult of Originality
You 'pay' through your private emails being scanned, analysed and the advertised to. With Web.de you pay a subscription fee.
When you have a job, maybe you can afford to be annoyed. When you don't, a recruiter is helpful.
Amazon.co.uk: What Is AutoRip?
Advice for a beginning Linux programmer
We Make Big Plans But Get Sidetracked Along The Way
It's far better simply to say that either everyone has the same capabilities, or to say that they ought be afforded benefits and restrictions that match their talents and deficiencies. Doing neither is unfair nonsensical from a societal standpoint.

That's not necessarily against what I had in mind. Essentially, all should have the same rights a priori. But a right may be "apply for an unbiased, specific exam that proves they are able of performing X without harming others". Of course not everyone should be able to do everything anyone else has is able to do at each moment. But no one should be denied that possibility just because they had some alcohol in their blood-surrogate, nor should anyone be waved from the requirements. And the requirements shouldn't be bullshit designed to keep certain groups away.

I'd rather have a ruling elite, because they presumably be reasoned with

Sure they can. But in politics, reason is mostly a way of justifying one's preferences. You can't reason with core axioms or goals, just with what they entail and/or the way of reaching them.

or removed in favor of a better elite.

By whom?

---

In any case, don't take me too seriously. I'm far too ignorant and immature to have a real position. I'll argue for anarcho-capitalism today and for situationism tomorrow, without really having my mind set into any.
Is a Nest worth the money?
Is there anything preventing a website that has access to your email address or name for that matter (ie because you created an account on that site) to sell the information between email and browser fingerprint to advertising networks?
I worked help desk in my university's computer labs for several years, and got consistently good reviews. When I fixed someone's problem, I made a point of explaining what I was doing as I went. I wasn't just pretending to be polite; I really do enjoy helping people to get a better understanding of their world. Sure, it's obvious to me that you need to empty the recycle bin before the space is really freed up, or that saving a shortcut to a file won't let you access the original from another computer. I'm sure my users know any number of "obvious" facts about math or architecture or medicine that would've left me dumbfounded. What right do I have to claim that my domain of knowledge is more important? If I'm pleasant and helpful and educational, then the student can solve their own problem the next time and my job is easier.

I'm pretty sure I was the only person in the entire campus-wide computer lab system who felt that way. Sometimes students held on to complex problems until my next shift because they knew I was the only one who would actually explain the problem. Techs all over the world seem to treat clients as unteachable idiot annoyances to be shuffled through as quickly as possible, so they can get back to what's really important: complaining on the internet about how nobody understands computers.
John Carmack's Quakecon 2013 Keynote
That implies that an individual person has the same resources as a Company.

No, just the same rights. "Privileges" should have no place in the law.

Put another way, as an employer, why should I lose my rights of free association simply by partnering with one or more other people in a corporation?
I think courts are the logical choice but I don't think it's ideal that the only way you can get Constitutional questions decided is by getting screwed by an Unconstitutional decision already made somewhere and then getting it overturned, or by having the government try to Unconstitutionally beat you over the head and winning your case.
Surprised fortune tellers aren't on there

They are. #27
The NRA will make sure that whatever they do, it will be in the context of guns. It's what they do and with good reason.

My point is more that some privacy advocates and some gun advocates share their distrust of governmental data snooping. The NRA has long fought data collection/abuse about gun owners and is well used to doing do. It would behoove the privacy movement to learn from and work with the NRA on the issue as it pertains to guns, because that knowledge will be useful in the more general case.
It seems that W3Fools has changed recently since it was popularized in 2011, but the page used to have a very lengthy list about the recommended bad practices or flat out inaccuracies of W3Schools.
C++ explained
> It's not very trackable - I've replaced my user agent string with my full name, which is very unique.

The more unique, the more trackable.
The FISA court that's been around since 1978? There's entire major commands of the military that have been created and then killed again in the time FISC has existed, seems pretty legit to me.
This seems really cool. Unfortunately my app crashes and I can't see any logs to know why. I have some ideas as to why, but I won't know unless I can get to the log. I posted a message to the support link but no response. Logs would be good.
> Why isn't there a Judicial Branch agency that safeguards the Constitution from the other two branches??

Because there is no authority for such an agency in Article III, and because the type of ombudsman agency you describe would be undertaking investigations of a sort that are executive, rather than judicial, so that even if Congress attempted to create such an agency, it would be (were it Constitutional at all) an Article II agency subject to the President even if Congress gave the Judiciary the power to appoint its officers.
Thinking about it further, it's an interesting question.
A typical HTTP system has 3 roles: the client, the intermediaries (proxy/proxies/CDNs/caches), and the application (which combines the server, and any edge devices with knowledge and behaviour that is specific to the application).

Currently, the business rules are governed by a complex interrelationship between the request method, request headers, and response headers (including response status).

Although request and response bodies may be present, I've not come across any system where the contents of the body affect the business logic of intermediaries.

Yes, this could be simplified. But chucking out the request methods is both a low-hanging fruit, but also a short-term saving. Much of the complexity is in the request or response headers (such as Vary), whilst the request method provides a consistent and simple community standard.

One of the common limitations I come across is caching of content that varies according to the individual user (or perhaps the role(s) that user has access to within the site).

Most web systems send a plethora of cookies - for google analytics, web tracking, advertising, a dozen other things, and eventually for the session. But the proxy-controls that can be sent are limited to "Vary: cookie". This reduces the cache-potential massively. If I were to request one improvement in the HTTP 2 protocol, it would be the ability to vary according to a particular named cookie, rather than the entire cookie header.

Oh, and yes, I am aware of the ability to parse the cookie in a proxy, extract the proper key-val params, and vary according to that…but it adds unnecessary complexity to the application, and you can't currently expect uncontrolled downstream proxies to accommodate this practice.
> I'm planning to write a browser add-on

Do it for chrome.

...and let me send you money.
The Nexus devices are supposed to be developer devices and should therefore have other priorities. An unlocked bootloader is not enough for a developer phone.
Honestly, it doesn't make sense to put anything under NFA. Silencers are harmless, SBR's are bigger than handguns, and full auto is going to be less effective in the hands of a nutcase than semi auto. There is really no sane justification for it at all.
You missed his (pretty funny) joke.
Certainly it would be easier, but even NSA doesn't have enough hard drives to store all of GMail, Outlook.com, Skype, etc.

Some selectivity is required for them to do analysis, for the same reason we would run "grep foo <star>.cpp" instead of "find / -name '<star>.cpp' -exec grep foo {} \;"
We should go with http://black.bikeshed.com instead. The black background will save power on devices with OLED displays.
For me, the list of installed plugins is by far the most unique bit of information, so just blocking that would be helpful.