skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that the main slip-up was the use of the same account on BitcoinTalk to both promo SR and to post his personal Gmail account to try to hire Tor experts. Everything else listed above sounded like it either came chronologically after that discovery (the CBP intercept) or it was a result of that discovery (the StackOverflow and LinkedIn accounts)
I like the simple/clean UI
Oh no, not this again. This account is highly biased and inaccurate in many places. Please read Dan Weinreb's rebuttal to this.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....

Edit (a partial summary of the above link but not a direct quote):

It is really hard to bootstrap a top of the line computer company, especially when you need capital to pay for your own fab. Greenblatt insisted on bootstrapping and being CEO too, and many hackers at the Lab did not think he would be a good CEO. It had nothing to do with "backstabbing".

Symbolics hired AI Lab hackers full time because other AI spinoff companies were inappropriately using AI Lab resources, so Symbolics wanted to make sure this didn't happen. Hiring workers full time wasn't an "evil plan" to destroy the AI Lab, it was actually a well thought out ethical course of action.

Since MIT owned the source code to Lisp Machines (read: it was copyrighted and not free in any way), they licensed the software to several companies under the conditions that all proprietary changes could not be distributed to anyone else except MIT. AI Lab hackers got all the changes that came from a private company, so they didn't need to leave the lab to work on Lisp Machines. The AI Lab hackers had free will, too. No one forced them to leave, and Stallman's suggestion otherwise is actually really offensive. In fact, if LMI had been the only company, the same people would have left the lab.

Stallman thought that Symbolics's compliance with MIT's licensing agreement was actually an evil plot. His essentially wanted Symbolics to support LMI by giving them proprietary changes. If Symbolics had actually done this, they would have been shut down by MIT for breaking their licensing agreement. The same was true for LMI, which also had to make any changes proprietary. Stallman should have been angry at MIT, not Symbolics.

Stallman completely misunderstood this and his offensive (and quite possibly libelous) slander against honest and ethical Symbolics employees is a very off putting.

Symbolics was a huge company and developed an entire OS, architecture, and many programs for their platform that Stallman did not and could not copy. Stallman mainly copied some features from Zmacs (the text editor). Symbolics made high end machines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody would have ditched an expensive Symbolics machine, one of the leading CG platforms of the 80s, because some other platform also an editor that sort of looked like Zmacs. Stallman had pretty much no impact on Symbolics's revenue.
Man Charged as Operator of Online Market for Illegal Drugs
I agree. Google's business model doesn't seem sustainable and I doubt they'll ever be profitable.

\s
Destructoid reported an ad-block rate of 30-45%. In general the wider estimate is 30% of ALL ads across the web are getting blocked.

http://www.destructoid.com/half-of-destructoid-s-readers-blo...

At Quartz we're lucky - it appears to be 13%. I've used Ad-Blocker for years in the past. Not sure why I stopped (new computer, never installed?) but its been a few years at least.

However now that I work more on the ad side of things (how to make site experience better and maintain reading experience) I can see that blanket ad-blocking is harmful to sites bottom line.

I'm not sure what the answer is, its still Users right to manage their browser VS site operators trying to stay in business
Love your passion social justice. I share it, and I can understand how a cursory understanding of mTurk may feel exploitative.

That said, it's clear neither the NYT nor the Daily Beast understand MTurk users - and because of that, they mistake a hobby for a job.

For many people in the US, MTurk isn't about making money, it's about doing something while you're bored. It's not a replacement for a job, it's a replacement for Farmville.

"Ever wonder what our labor market would look like without minimum wages or labor law protections?"

If Turkers were paid with a virtual currency, there would be no comparison to minimum wages - but because they're paid with cash, the puzzles/work exists in a weird world between work and play.

Also worth mentioning, I intentionally price my HITs low so as to target turkers who aren't looking to supplement their income. It only takes 5 minutes of trying to find one person's email address to realize $.03 isn't worth it - if your goal is to make money.

I may be still missing the boat, but if Turkers really are doing this as a hobby - is it still exploitative?
This argument sounds good on paper, but it has centuries of evidence against it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#History
How to turn on Windows Defender in Windows 8.1
Have you seen Titanic? It sinks.

Seen JFK? He dies.
It seems that you have trouble understanding what I said.
Indeed there are no proofs but there are unexplained phenomena that deserve to be researched and if all people would be closed minded and rejected the possibility as silly then with this way of thinking we will still be in that "earth is flat" mentality.

According to drake equation the probability of life in the universe is immense, the strange things is that nobody visited us, either they didn't or they didn't want to show us that they did like we don't disturb the life of the lions in the jungle when we film a documentary.

If this is so hard for you to understand then I give up, have a nice day.
Link? (That wouldn't be tfat? who was a grad student at the time iirc.)
Explain to me, game-theoretically, what the public policy answer is for prosecuting criminal conspiracies who have amassed enormous fortunes from their crimes?
This was the first video I ever watched on a computer. I will never forget staring at this, realizing that I was seeing the future.
To all the bashers: detecting AdBlock or other plugins like Disconnect is sometimes necessary for ad-free sites as well. Some sites malfunction when the user has such an extension installed, and it is a great user experience when the developer is thoughtful enough to put up a banner at the top of the page saying "This site may not work correctly if you are using AdBlock". (sorry for the "some sites"; I was browsing recently and saw such a banner, but cannot recall where). Of course the better option is to test your site under AdBlock and make sure it works regardless, but sometimes the detection is needed.
"Greenblatt wasn't daunted by this, he went ahead and formed a company too. So there were two companies to make Lisp machines. And Greenblatt's plan was successful enough even without the help of all the other old Lab hackers, that it's clear they were mistaken in thinking that it was a hopeless idea...."

Ummm, no, not even close. Speaking as a LMI employee during this critical period who then became for a few months one of RMS's roommates after leaving the company, right when he formally started the GNU project:

Yeah, LMI was with some angel investment able to build a run of CADR Lisp Machines just like the AI Lab did (25 vs. 75 or so that Symbolics did of its repackaged LM-2 version), but the company came to a dead end long before its next generation machine was ready. And went to Texas Instruments for money (TI even ended up buying Western Digital's engineering workstation unit, which LMI's processor was designed to work in).

For a couple of months the management said "We've cut your paychecks and put them in the safe, working is of course optional", we all continued to work and TI then made their investment (a loan followed by buying a 25% stake exactly 30 years and 1 month ago). But even then the company would have failed, for the hardware talent consisted of Greenblatt and a physics student who'd learned the basics of digital design on the job and they couldn't get the wirewrapped prototype(s) to work.

I even considered doing that (I was also a scientist type, could program and do system administration, was hired as the only person in the community with a foot in both Lisp Machine and UNIX(TM)), but I managed to recruit a graduating classmate who'd in his digital design class made a baby Lisp Machine (and I then left the company in frustration after about 9 months of never being in a position to do what I'd be hired to do and ran out of "make work" like sending a software update to our existing clients).

He then put in many "100 hours weeks" and with Greenblatt and the physics student (and perhaps some help from a couple of other friends I'd recruited) got the LMI-LAMBA processor working.

See http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb.... as fsck--off linked to for the viewpoint of a Symbolics founder, although not from the AI-Lab (he took a detour to a LLL Navy supercomputer project), a very honest guy who's name was also on the Lisp Machine manual like RMS's.
Response of US Govt to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and LinkedIn [pdf]
So hard to read. Also, do we really need another modelling language? UML was not enough?

(not saying ML could be used to do that, more like "didn't we learn with UML that these kind of stuff brings pain and no benefits")
Rob, as a software engineer at google, I would not expect you to to be able to relate to those without opportunities. In fact, there is some evidence that utilizing your brain to solve technical problems can restrict its ability to empathize. Of course amazon has no gun, but that does not mean that poverty in itself is not violent.
As you like science and data, here is a read for you:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.ht...
If the FBI has been tracking down SilkRoad for years, I find it completely reasonable that they finally find the location of the server just based on traffic analysis. I'm sure that FBI or NSA runs number of exit and intermediate nodes to collect statistical correlations from traffic and track down hidden services given enough time (there is even public research that shows how it can be done: http://epub.uni-regensburg.de/11919/1/authorsversion-ccsw09....).

All that said, its even more likely that they found his identity other way. He seems to have slipped from time to time. I think most people underestimate the amount of boring and tedious chores they must do year after year if they want to conceal their identity from FBI who is actively searching them online. It seems that the main theme in revealed identities seems to be reusing usernames or using the same email in two different contexts that link person to his anonymous identity.
Hence the need of AGPL.

I do a lot of development with closed source software as well, but when I do open source, I take the point of only using copyleft licenses.
Webdevs reading this: it does work. I whitelist all sites that have responsible ads on their pages, reddit being a prime example. They have ads in a couple predetermined spots on their pages, and they're never intrusive. I've actually clicked on a couple (something I never do). Be responsible and open about your ad policy and I'll listen.
I've never used the road, but rather I fear it was central to the high value of Bitcoins. I would love to be wrong but I can see my investment dropping and I don't have the guts to sell back into fiat.
In language garbage collection just makes implementing a compiler that much harder to do and frankly bloats up the runtime. Basic c++ shared pointers take up pretty much 90+% of what people need in GC (non stupid software architecture decisions should make up the remaining 10%).

I have seen problems with stalling caused by kernel memory heap defragging on linux resulting in some serious thrashing. What that means is that the issue of heap fragmentation can be a problem regardless of which language used.
Silk Road is (was) a hidden service, internal to the Tor network, so controlling exit nodes wouldn't be relevant here. You'd need to actually be able to analyze traffic within the Tor network. Which still seems plausible, but maybe more difficult since the Tor network as a whole is a lot bigger than just the exit nodes, so it'd be harder to control a sizable fraction of it.
Ah, so the NSA's spying does have positive effects. It helped capture a drug king-pin who hires hitmen. I'd believed that dragnet capture of Internet traffic presents problems in trying to isolate relevant evidence, but you claim that this is not an issue.

This certainly bolsters the claim that the NSA's surveillance is doing society good. I'm not comfortable with that, but there it is.
Is it really worth potentially breaking your site for innocent, non-adblock folks in order to serve ads to a user who has explicitly and deliberately taken steps to not be served ads?

Take the reddit approach: put a humanizing message kindly asking users to disable it and then don't make offensive/hostile ads. And then make some percentage of the ads a "thanks for whitelisting us, we really appreciate it" message.
Majority support is not what defines national interest.

You are confusing political opinions to the workings of US government.
PageFair lets publishers reach out to adblock users: to explain why ad revenue is necessary to keep the site running, and ask them to support the site by whitelisting it so ads appear or by making a donation towards the running costs.
It wasn't just "big talk". It was big talk, a negotiation, and then a massive cash payment.
Did you try mouse-hovering over paragraphs?
The complaint [PDF] : http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalCompl...
I would split Microsoft into far more pieces, 1 for each product.
Well that was not entirely unexpected, with the Freedom Hosting details coming out it was pretty clear that the FBI put out a major effort to deanonymize Tor and once they have done that, its just a matter of following the packets to get to the goods.
This brings up another case for detecting AdBlock: if you think your users are receptive to whitelisting non-annoying ads, you could detect the plugin and let them know that you strive to incorporate ads in a non-intrusive way and kindly ask them to disable AdBlock.

Edit: sounds like this is what reddit does. Props to them!
Agreed. Surely the ~350 email addresses (although stated about 1/2 were valid) were worth much more than $10. In my opinion, it's unethical.
The Perils of Hacking Math
Aw shucks. Thank you
ok, what interesting problems are you working on? And I'll tell you if they're interesting or not?

Because 95% of startups I've come across are solving trivial problems.
He's talking about being in the ad block circumvention business, not being in the ad business.

However, I don't like Google's business model either. Being profitable isn't a measurement of making the world a better place.
Because you said so? You need arguments to sustain your claim.

Science should prove or disprove some phenomena to be sure that is either true or false, otherwise there is still a probability, this is how it works.

If you have a valid scientific proof that the abduction phenomenon is a collective hallucination then you could dismiss the phenomenon, until then this is just unexplained and the probability remains.
While I get the point, you can't claim revenues you never received are a "cost."
OCR'd and searchable version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/szjkt48tt0rlhpi/UlbrichtCriminalCo...
It's a pity this isn't web based as well.
AdblockPlus, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising network.

Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", etc. If that wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware.

In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblock, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them.
Most of what you find in a used book store isn't available in ebook format at any price

Which is precisely the problem. eBooks destroy the very valuable (particularly in a societal sense) used books market.
When I visit that page all the videos start auto-playing at the same time.
I find AdBlock to be superfluous.

I just block advertising websites from my hosts file.

In particular, using this: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
I use Adblock, NoScript and Disconnect. Been using the former two in conjunction for years.
I think they might need to work on their collision detection. When going up the staircase I suddenly found myself beneath the staircase, unable to escape.

http://i.imgur.com/EUYwin7.png
I know several people (me included) that installed AdBlock because of YT annoying pre-roll ads. Google seems to be shooting themselves in the foot.
Or you can join Google and make close to 250k a year as a new grad...
ownership : means of production :: source code : binaries
Is Page Fair supporting evil?
Now everyone will tell you that you can use ByteBuffer or sun.misc.Unsafe to keep memory off-heap and hence out of sight of the GC.

BUT what that means is that you have create your own custom implementations of the data structures you need and you'll have to write your own memory allocator.

Unless that memory area holds just a simple data BLOB (like a video file) you're always going to be much more productive implementing the entire thing in C++.
These days, it's a good idea to test your site with AdBlock the same way you test it with multiple browsers. When a page appears to be broken the first thing I try is temporarily disabling AdBlock; the second thing is loading it in IE.

It does suck that you have to jump through these hoops because flagrantly intrusive ads have poisoned the well for innocent site-owners. I wish it were otherwise.
Today's Bitcoin price chart
I'd say RethinkDB (http://rethinkdb.com). It's labelled as not production ready, but most of the things that matter have been solidified (like data integrity).

It takes very good cues from both the NoSQL and SQL worlds...it's document-based but supports server-side joins. It uses MVCC (no global write lock) and while I haven't scaled it yet, the server administration is a lot simpler than MongoDB (`rethinkdb join [any_server_in_cluster]` vs creating 3 config servers and a bunch of repsets and setting up sharding schemas that just don't work). Also, the query language is crazy good. It's the only database where I've felt like I'm programming against my data (map/reduce doesn't come close).

There are some gotchas, like it doesn't have a binary storage field type, and to upgrade versions you have to dump/restore your data. I'm sure there are more. Like I said, not "production ready" yet. Give it a year though.
Official announcement from PostgreSQL.org: http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1485/

OpenSCG is pleased to announce the release of PostgreSQL Studio 1.0. PostgreSQL Studio is an open-source, web-based GUI for PostgreSQL. It allows users to manage and query their database from a browser.

Version 1.0 of PostgreSQL Studio is distributed under the PostgreSQL License. Some of its key features include:

- Easy to use AJAX web interface

- Secure access over HTTPS

- Robust object wizards

- Query editor with syntax highlighting

- Cross platform and easy to install

You can find more information about PostgreSQL Studio at www.postgresqlstudio.org
If you read the statements in the Freedom Hosting case you can see that the FBI managed to deanonymize the Tor network using browser tricks. Once you've got the network the rest is pretty straight forward tracking the bits I would suppose.

This also explains why the other market place shut down quickly, unlike DRP they apparently deduced it was only a matter of time before their location and identity was disclosed.
Doesn't the claim that human choice isn't a product of environment and genetics bring along all the baggage of "free will"? If my choices aren't based on my experiences (i.e how my physical self perceives my environment) or how my brain was initially configured in-utero, then it starts to suggest that I have a supernatural soul that makes those choices for other reasons.
Lotto tickets are the greatest example!
I hope you're right, but I fear the people who block scripts are a minority that'll be ignored. Both by those who think doing all in Javascript is "The Way", also by those who want more control over the user.

More and more sites are requiring JS to display content that could be served just fine (if not better) as a static document. I don't know how much of that is done with the intent of having control over the user, but I've witnessed at least one web developer admit to making JS non-optional because of an advertising contract -- the idea being that users will allow scripts on an all-or-nothing basis, so to view the site, they'll also run the ad scripts.
> MS didn't manage to sabotage WebGL

To be fair I don't' think they really wanted to sabatoge WebGL out of spite, they had some very valid reasons for not implementing it right away.

Here on hacker news some of our best minds sided with MSFT on this.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/81732190949486592

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2677899
"Well, Symbolics with its investors had more money and hired several of the best hackers from the Lab, and a year later they hired the rest of the hackers except for me and Greenblatt. And the result was that my community was wiped out. It felt like a ghost town. It was desolate, and I was grief-stricken."

"By then, Symbolics had given everyone at the AI Lab an ultimatum. They said: We demand that you choose a side. I had been neutral, I had been more favourable towards Greenblatt's company, but not particularly involved with it in any way. But at that point they demanded that I, like everyone else in the Lab, choose a side. And I said, in that case, my choice is obvious, I'm against you. "

Wow! It's interesting that arrogant actions by various corporations are still pushing people towards OSS and away from closed source.
It's even worse when they are written by recruiters who don't consult requirement details with the target company and start inventing their own. I've recently seen ads for the same position in the same company in my city (you just could tell) with different frameworks listed as required experience.
For those interested in this type of thing, Apiary is building a platform that generates a mock server based on a similar specification language: http://apiary.io/
I broke it http://imgur.com/YrdFbLU
(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not on anything related to mTurk)

Is there reason to believe that people are using mTurk full-time as a significant source of income? I've Turked a bunch -- and know people who do it for a couple hours a day -- and my understanding is that its overwhelmingly used as a way to pick up a few extra bucks while catching up on TV, a slightly more civilized replacement for clipping coupons or filling out paid surveys.
Nice retort. I like a lot of what you said there. One thing I would love to see the US government implement is a referendum system that would allow the public to vote on deadlocked issues like this. Congress would be behooved to work together more because if they didn't it would lead to a referendum and take the power of the vote out of their hands for the issue. It would have to be framed very narrowly and only happen when Congress is incapable of deciding as a whole on what to do.

There's some holes in that of course but I think we could make it work.
New Android App Let's you rate drivers by license plate