skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
England has some useful things that the US should consider.

i) loser pays costs.

ii) if Ann is offered £X out of court, but declines it, and the case goes to court and she's awarded £Y then she has to pay costs if £Y is less than £X.

iii) Costs are controlled.

There are considerable problems with the English legal system, and many people are not able to seek justice through the court system. But this kind of thing would probably prevent some of the abuses of the US system.

i) (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2013/9780111533291/conte...) (http://www.justice.gov.uk/civil-justice-reforms) (http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/funding) (http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/areas-of-work/civil/high...)

ii) There was a case some years ago where two women (sisters?) were accused of swapping eggs. They were accused of taking cheap eggs out of the carton and putting expensive eggs in. They were offered a lot of money, but "wanted their day in court", and although the court said they didn't swap eggs the court offered a smaller amount in damages, which got wiped out by the costs they had to pay.

This is the kind of thing that I find tricky to web search for. It seems like it should be easy - ["legal case" "eggs"] and then various supermarket names. I should try limiting the date range to before 2005. But if anyone has any tips about how to better search for it I'd be grateful. (Of course, Usenet news probably has some discussion about it, but Google is sub-optimal for searching their Usenet archive. It's a great shame.)
"There's something about our culture and politics that's making that happen, even in a system with centralized price-setting like Medicare"

It's not a difficult puzzle: nobody in our system is incentivized to care about costs. The insured consumer never sees the cost, the physician is incentivized to be cost-blind when choosing treatment options, and the insurance companies pass the costs back to employers, who don't get any say in treatment. The only other people who know what health care costs are unemployed and/or poor, and well...screw them, right?

You couldn't possibly choose a worse economic model for allocating health care. Medicare is much cheaper and more efficient than employer-based healthcare, but it can't overcome the structural expenses created by a system dominated by people who are almost totally cost-insensitive when it comes to their health.
I understand that changing the name member of the Bob object to Gary will cause it to be Gary in every subsequent member access. Perhaps I've grown spoiled in my old age, but I'd be shocked at any system which didn't have this property. However, if I called out "Hey Gary!" down the hall, would he respond? Would his driver's license still read Bob?

The last time that I tried to learn Smalltalk, it was drilled into me that Smalltalk works directly with objects and not just their representations. For instance, the collection of black pixels on the screen was the Mouse object itself and not just a manifestation of a Mouse object somewhere in memory. A large amount of my confusion has possibly come from those lessons.

I agree that Lisp is an enlightening experience. I spent two years using Scheme as my primary programming language at work. Then again, I may just be stuck as a Blub programmer. I spent a year focused on Common Lisp, but never found any use for SLIME, despite using Emacs exclusively.
You mean attorney-client privilege[1]? It seems that one is a bit more solid and harder (but not impossible) to break. But IANAL.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney%E2%80%93client_privile...
I see nothing wrong with releasing an utterly bare-bones version, like the schema one he mentions, i.e. a MVP. Then, you polish over time. Even SO wasn't a SO clone at launch. (Of course, if someone promised a complete clone, that's foolish).

The big problem is that you can't get started on this upward curve, because no one will use it, since SO already exists and is far better. There's no oxygen.

[a different story if SO suddenly stopped meeting needs e.g. turned expertsexchange in cash-pursuit]
Won't matter: a shell company can dissolve and not pay anything if they lose.
Right. If only Lavabit had been Snowden's attorney... and not just his email provider.
I feel like I'm very concerned about the justice of the overall system, but that instances of injustice within it don't generally indict the whole system.
The resistance to the initial request was likely because it targeted a whistleblower attempting to expose the NSA's unconstitutional surveillance, not a member of the "criminal class" (nice framing attempt). It was a courageous act of civil disobedience.
Ask HN: Service for collecting donations on your website?
I was using PayPal for a long time and searched for alternative Donate buttons out there. No results satisfied me so far. Is there a practical solution like Stripe's quick checkout interface for donations? Or can I use Stripe for donations actually? Any help is appreciated.
PR and wishful thinking.
Thanks for the answers. I'll be looking forward to see it hit hackernews.† :)

I've mentioned it elsewhere here, but i'd suggest you also look into https://github.com/habnabit/passacre , since its creators put a LOT of value in getting the crypto parts right and its main creator is very responsive online.

And thanks for answering the footnotes. It is an interesting thought that users can be helped by the wiggling animation of the barcode and its inherent suggestion. (That would be worth a trip report on how you got there.)

† I'd prefer to follow an rss feed, but your blog seems to be 90% marketing and only 10% user-relevant posts with no categories.
Not to mention I have to question anyone that is saying a Microsoft product is more usable than literally anything. I look at IIS vs Apache || Nginx daily and IIS severely irritates me.
Let's rally for Lavabit to fight for the privacy rights of the American people
Congrats Mehul and Navneet! Very happy to see such a positive outcome. Can't wait to see what you do with Google's firepower behind you.
Here's why this is stupid: This is 1-factor authentication, but it's actually LESS secure than a username and password.

A password is something you know - it's in your head, so it can only be stolen if you save it somewhere, or if there's malware on your computer sniffing it.

The tokens in the phone are saved in the phone, so if you lose the phone, you've just lost your password/set of keys. On top of that, malware in the phone can extract the keys.

With malware on your phone, your accounts can be pilfered without your knowledge, at any time. Or if your phone is stolen. This is different from 2-factor, where you have to both know a secret AND have access to a device.

(If the prospect of malware on your phone doesn't phase you, consider that news articles over three years old reported hundreds of thousands of malware installs found by various security companies)
The press-release conviction of a biotech CEO and its impact on research
The FBI is not allowed to break the law, and the Constitution is the law.

If Snowden showed that some people in government were violating the Constitution, and other people in government were trying to suppress his evidence, would that not mean that the people trying to suppress the evidence are complicit with the violators?

Even if these people didn't swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, it is still the law, and they are still bound to obey it.

So, what's the penalty for helping someone violate the US Constitution? And who enforces that?
No email in your profile. Messaged you via Twitter.
Finally, an office messaging system to defeat NSA eavesdropping
Lucasfilm shows off realtime CGI rendering
Tom Clancy dies aged 66
Which is right up there with the abortion debate. In the vast, vast majority of actual cases, you find relatively little disagreement. Rare edge cases, however, ignite incendiary reactions from both sides.

As a pathologist and father, I'm 100% confident there are very good reasons for electing to abort in a variety of circumstances, not all related to the fetus or mother, though there is little reason to rejoice in any of them.

Similarly, I am 100% certain that human development is part genetics, and part environment. But we can't control our genetics. So I don't worry about that much. Maybe there's some fascinating biology discovered every few years, but I can learn good lessons from observing other parents every day.

Maybe that's a good way to frame the environment issue: if you really don't believe environment matters, then ask yourself, should you have kids so you have someone to take your frustrations out on?
Calling shenanigans. I wrote a couple of fairly complex publishers and Chrome isn't the problematic browser (if you use ExtermalInterface correctly). It's Safari which doesn't handle plugins well, but Camera and Microphone devices should still work as Flash handles those by itself.
The key on the phone is of course encrypted with a password.
Buy bitcoins without fees with Ripple
When it's used to attack whistleblowers, yes.
Perhaps it is technically true,

No it isn't. The government isn't entitled to jack shit. They can demand whatever they want, and they may be able to take it through force, or threat of force, in 99.99999999% of cases, but if the request is bogus, it's bogus, and an individual certainly has the right to take a moral stand and say "no, fuck off".

Now, that individual will probably have their name drug through the mud, be bankrupted, and wind up spending the rest of their life at Gitmo, but they can say "no" if it's important enough to them.

Some people are willing to die for causes they believe in, so it's not such a stretch to think that somebody, somewhere, would tell the govt. to fuck off in a case like this.
It's not that easy. You've got to get a really good, clean, complete print of the correct finger and avoid damaging it during processing (nontrivial).
>My complaint is that neither of these things is coming back in a relevant way.

Where is this directed? It sounds like a criticism of Lisp, Forth, Self, etc, but please correct. The fact that the ignorant masses flocked to C and Unix doesn't grant them one _iota_ of merit. C isn't even a good low-level language. And look at the most popular platform of them all - the web browser, if you want a good laugh.
OP is probably referring to Lodsys, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/patent-troll-lodsys-se..., who is known for suing iOS and I think Google Play developers for using in app purchases.
How the FBI tracked down Dread Pirate Roberts of Silk Road
Flynn?
I thought the same thing as I typed that. But that would be an expensive email service. lol

EDIT: It kind of sounds like this is a grey area for attorney-client privilege[1]. I'm sure someone could successfully argue that privilege does not apply here because a) "LawyerBit" is not acting primarily as an attorney b) Email being email, the communications are disclosed to third parties

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney%E2%80%93client_privile...
That quote would have read “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws so long as those laws are of equal or greater unjustness than Jim Crow.”
> his site is so beyond ugly, that it detracts from his message.

No, not really. It's fairly easy to read. And while it might not be a super design by some standards, it doesn't bother anyone unless you want to be bothered by it. Contrast that with the site he's reviewing, where you physically can't read the content because the site explicitly prevents you from reading it.

> It's like we had a genius color-blind guy critique a

…website.

That's something you should do.
You missed the point. The psychologist had specialized in child development. His claim was that receptive vocabulary in grade school children was the single best predictor that was known for their IQ and tests scores in high school and presumably beyond.

Studying vocabulary as an adult is probably not going to get you very far. But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.

(He was telling this at the same time that he was telling me that my 7 year old son had the receptive vocabulary of an average 13 year old. So I was happy to hear it.)
> A commenter on that story makes a good point: Forget for a moment that the user they were looking for was Snowden. If the FBI had been looking for info for a case against a serial killer or a child porn ring, would we still hold Lavabit as heroes for not following the court order?

I would, because it's impossible to forget for a moment about Snowden. The context cannot be ignored; this is about Snowden. It's better to let 1,000 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man behind bars. As far as I'm concerned Snowden did the right thing and if protecting other criminals is the only way to ensure Snowden's protection... so be it. To quote Armin from Attack on Titans: "If you aren't willing to sacrifice anything, you can't change anything". In this case, sacrificing the chance to punish the guilty is worthy of protecting the innocent.
That is a fair point. But I take it you understood what it is that makes it hard to hire a candidate when their ethics go against what a company believes is ethical, and/or what a company is legally bound to do.

Also, don't worry about what you say to me. I'm nowhere near important enough for that to matter.
Just click on the 'Fetch More' button, and 50 more rows will be retrieved. For cloud based _free_ solutions, I haven't found anything better than this.
Malware on the phone isn't covered by their attacks and weaknesses page. (https://www.grc.com/sqrl/attacks.htm)

The Userview page seems to miss that point as well: (https://www.grc.com/sqrl/userview.htm)

> In other words, only the smartphone's owner can use the system to assert their identity, and nothing will prevent them from asserting their identity whenever they wish to.

I think they mean "only the person currently in possession of the smartphone" ...

except they go on to say that whoever has the phone has to identify themselves to the phone using a strong password.

> The SQRL system was specifically designed to eliminate username and password authentication to remote websites. But controlling access to SQRL authentication itself requires the smartphone's owner to prove their identity to their own phone.

> And to that end, “a secret only the user knows” is still the best technique for users to repeatedly, quickly, easily and privately prove their identity to their own smartphone.

> The cryptographic design of the SQRL system inherently provides identification security for every website it contacts. In that sense the system itself is fully secure without any password protection. We refer to the SQRL password as a “local password” because it is only used to prevent others from using the SQRL smartphone app to impersonate its owner.
How to handle negative feedback
I agree. FOD (Foreign Object Debris) at high speed can damage a car and cause a crash. Lets assume that a metal object on the highway hit the underside of this car; If that same object severed a fuel line or hit the gas tank of a conventional car, A fire could result.
Four days’ charge on an Android
> ...it turns out that hosting email for the criminal class carries real risks and isn't terribly lucrative.

That's quite an assertion. I had an email account on lavabit. From what you're saying apparently that means I'm a criminal.
Start Small: Why Tinkerers Get Things Done
To my knowledge, Pivotal has a small mobile division called Pivotal Labs. That is the division that Xtreme Labs is most relevant to, as XL is a mobile company. This will increase Pivotal's presence in the mobile scene, which was nowhere near the size of Xtreme Labs.
Cross-platform tools for feature phones - options?
I think you can then use the whole charade as an argument that the prosecution made lots of mistakes, increasing the chance for a favorable outcome or conditions for appeal.
Yes, and I'm specifically thinking of them too regarding how rare it really is - IAPs have a massive presence in iOS and Android and Lodsys have gone after just hundreds (if even that?) of developers.

It's like startups speculating about what some giant competitor is going to do "about them", it's somewhere between premature and a fantasy in almost every case.
Check out our blog post here: http://blog.simplyinsured.com/what-startups-need-to-know-abo...

The chart under Question #2 - answers your question.
You wouldn't really describe this guy as a "can do" sort of person, would you?
Settling for nothing should be held against them in a future case. It's clear the value of their property is zero.
We're working on the blog :D

I'll definitely make sure to look over passacre; it seems great.

And no problem on the footnotes, if you ever have any more questions don't hesitate to email me at jesse at our domain name!
Like all contractors, either the contractor makes the design and follows up with the client, or the client makes the designs for the contractor to follow. If you have any issues or complaints, please direct them to the appropriate party. There's a 50/50 chance you'll get it right (I don't know who which path was taken :p).
As usual, visual data presentation rocks. Interesting how 500st perform comparing to others accelerators/early stage investment funds.
Yep. Because we all know that private industry never fucks anything up.
I checked this out a while ago but found it only works (out of the box) on EC2. Eagerly awaiting support for other environments.
My att unlimited is the same for $30/mo extra
To hopefully clarify a little, Pivotal is the "joint venture" of EMC and VMware to which the article refers. Big data in the cloud is the idea behind the business.

Pivotal Labs was purchased by EMC, though, and is thus a part of Pivotal. I can't say for sure, but I'm betting that's where the name comes from.

Source: Pivotal Labs employee.
They don't offer a reference implementation.

The documentation provided is a bit rambling and jumps around; it has stuff people don't need and doesn't have some stuff people do need.

It's a bit scary to think that people are going to implement some crypto stuff based on just this and release it into the wild as a secure solution.

There's a similar problem with password safes - some of them seem secure enough, but there are many and who knows whether those are any good or not.
Your point seems to be "I'm willing to read the mysql introductory documentation, but not the postgres introductory documentation".

I will definitely grant you that mysql is easier to use than postgres if you're only willing to read the docs for one.
My counterpoint to that would be that I can still sit and read a hard cover copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. It'd keep me just as disengaged and is certainly more dangerous than an iPad when airborne.
But the money will get spent eventually. And didn't it reside in consumer hands before it became tax coffers?

I still have a tough time with reduced government spending being considered a cost.
> because it's better for us all

Or so authoritarians would have us believe.
Forget Walter White, we need a show about Ross Ulbricht
This is true of any new system. There is a huge complexity in supporting even the standards that most people would consider basic. Just to surf the web you need TCP/IP, HTTP(S), HTML, JavaScript, JPEG, etc. Implementing all of these from scratch is a huge pain.
The technical term for opposite world is Bizarro World.
What kind of max damages are possible in an IP case like this?
Depends on how are you using your phone and what applications you are running. Try to use G-maps and facebook for a couple of hours and your battery will be empty.
Seems like there some good justifications for why they were so cautious. There were suspected cases where a PED interfered with the plane.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...
>Also I wonder how they got a server image without him noticing since it is typically something you'd need to shut down the machine for. Was the whole thing running off a hosting service?

How often does one of your servers crash? I mean, it happens. I estimate maybe once a year/server, on average, assuming a 5 year lifecycle. (well, usually it's more like 'no crashes for the first three years, several crashes a year after' - hardware ages.)

Hell, whole racks lose power at times. Doesn't happen all that often, but it happens often enough that if your provider says "We blew breaker X" well, more often than not, it's a honest problem, and not the FBI yanking power to image a drive.

Or hell... what if it's a server with a mirrored drive? It'd be easy enough to pull half the mirror (the drive 'failed' right? Hell, you can say you let the salesguy into the co-lo and he bumped the hard drive release catch, or you sent in the new kid to swap a drive and they pulled the wrong one. These things aren't common, but they are way more common than the FBI.)

Hell, a drive could have legitimately failed and been sent back to seagate/wd by the provider (assuming he was renting servers) for warranty repair. The FBI could have intercepted the drive (or gotten it from the manufacturer) and run their own analysis.

So yeah. I totally believe that the FBI could get a reasonable image without DPR or anyone being the wiser.
So, all of the people making $0.25 / hour doing MT tasks, would be making exactly how much per hour without MT?

I don't agree with any systems that perpetuate poverty.

I, OTOH, agree with any system that doesn't involve initiation of force or fraud, and involves voluntary transactions on a free market basis.
Note that Naval, founder of Angel List, was heavily invested in passing the Jobs Act. He told the whole story on this interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2htl-O1oDcI

Text Summary: http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/16/pandomonthly-with-naval-rav...
Open Source Version of Google’s Container Stack
Automated bitcoin trading bot gaining popularity
Am I the only one busting a gut that he printed out the SSL key over 11 pages in 4pt font for them to re-key? Hahahaha that's fucking hilarious... though the kind of OCR software the FBI has access to would no doubt have made short work of this.
The Inevitability of Hating Your Job
> However, if I called out "Hey Gary!" down the hall, would he respond? Would his driver's license still read Bob?

Yes and no, respectively.

Perhaps a heavily contrived example might help: Consider a system in which there is exactly one representation of an object member's value, which is stored in that object; when you call an accessor method, what you actually get is a reference, which is instantiated with an observer attached that listens for a notional "change" event, fired whenever the referred value is modified, and whose event handler updates whatever context exists around the reference, regardless of its nature, so that the displayed value matches that newly assigned to the object member.

...and now perhaps you can see why people familiar with Smalltalk think so highly of it; what in, for example, Javascript, would require an enormous amount of manual infrastructure and completely fail to generalize, in Smalltalk happens entirely transparently. It's not so much that you don't have to think about it; it's that there's nothing there to think about.

> I spent a year focused on Common Lisp, but never found any use for SLIME, despite using Emacs exclusively.

And now you've lost me. How can this possibly be the case? What was your Lisp workflow like? I mean, I can understand not getting the appeal of Lisp if you're just talking to the REPL and not working in an actual Lisp environment of the sort you get with Emacs Lisp or SLIME, but I have trouble understanding how anyone could work with those tools for a year without recognizing their potential.
Does the government normally pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for that kind of info? If so, I may need to start thinking about a career change...