skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't for a minute agree that law enforcement's operational problems trump every other right citizens have.

I find it _astounding_ that people are supporting the idea of forcing Levinson to back down on the guarantee of privacy he'd made to his _other_, not under any probable cause level of suspicion, 400,000 fully-entitled-to-the-privacy-they've-chosen-to-pay-for customers. Violating the privacy of four hundred THOUSAND unrelated-to-the-investigation users? Users who had an expectation of privacy, who were buying a service from a company marketing themselves on providing privacy. Then attempting to coerce that company's founder into not only failing to provide the service his customers were paying him for - but also denying him the right to let them know.

All because _one_ customer has monumentally embarrassed a particularly powerful government department.

Is that _seriously_ "OK" in anybodies worldview?
The IBM Punch Card
Yep, and CDBaby and others..
Just saying there were like 20 articles about the all star obama campaign tech team that built a super scalable cloud infrastructure and ab-tested, email spammed, and narwhal'ed their way to victory. Couldn't get any of them for the actual governing?
Blaming IT is an easy scapegoat. The notion that the Feds and various states should be operating marketplaces in the first place is absurd on its face. California and New York aren't subject to federal procurement guidelines, and their systems are basically non functional as well.

Government is successful with complex public facing IT in areas where the processes are well understood. The DMV, tax collection, and unemployment are good examples in most states. Medicare billing is a success story in the federal space. Most other things are not very successful unless they are limited in scope.

The whole system is a screwed up farce. "Obamacare" is a flawed system to begin with, to the point that nobody really understood what was needed for months. So the Feds and states were forced to roll with some highly generic requirements and specifics were made up as they went along. That scenario is a dream for Accenture (Cali) or CSC (ny) to churn hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's not trolling whenever somebody says something that you don't want to hear.
> But by this point the government didn't trust him to act as a spy on their behalf (which frankly is not an unreasonable assumption).

I don't understand this conclusion. He cooperated with legal investigations before, he just needed time and resources to implement what they were asking for.
The lavabit case highlights something interesting that we need. We need that not only individuals have privacy, but that businesses have privacy of who their users are. The same way we provide anonymity to users through centralized means, is there not a way to provide a way for service provider to have a sufficient level of opaqueness of who their customers are. You can't subpeona Service Provider A if you don't know whether Person of Interest X is using the services of A, B, C, or D, etc.
It's definitely down in the US: https://store.apple.com/us
Getting a warrant to search one person's inbox seems pretty reasonable to me. (Seems pretty analogous to searching one person's rented storage space.)

Forcing Lavabit to hand over everything seems like searching all storage lockers, even for people who are suspected of nothing. That's way over the line for me.
If you want to stop child porn, maybe you should go after the source instead of the consumers? Even if you did stop the spread of the digital pornography you still have all the molesters and other physical abusers out there. Maybe we should expend resources on actual cops patrolling neighborhoods and keeping pedophiles in jail instead of releasing them and confining them into "safe" zones. That is if you really want to protect kids, and not hunt down perverts on the internet.
Yes, Norway is very, very wealthy. This is a fairly recent development... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=norway+wealthy
Uhh, because they can?
My favorite part is

"Bike thievery is essentially a risk-free crime. If you were a criminal, that might just strike your fancy. If Goldman Sachs didn’t have more profitable market inefficencies to exploit, they might be out there arbitraging stolen bikes."
I'm Jeff, it's nice to meet you too.
While I agree with this statement in general, it is a bit of a tautology - do cash reserves come from success, or cause it?

I agree that cash reserves help, but I think it's hard to ascertain how big a driver of success it is, given that it is also the result of success.
Is it just me, or has there been a recent explosion in the number of east coast "tech journalists" who couldn't code a hello world website who earn paychecks and page views by attacking tech startups with social-justice warrior type articles?

This is what happens to a country with too many worthless bachelor's degrees floating around.
confirmed to be down http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/store.apple.com/us
That's the nature of risk. Being able to associate negative perceptions around a company isn't exactly worthless either.
Are you serious? Christ.
I use pingdom for this, it's very simple and they have a free plan you've just got to look for it on the pricing page which is perfect for the task especially if it's just a free heroku app that you aren't spending money on anyway.
Because it can be, and doing so provides a better experience. If you have the chance to design a system from scratch, you're going to want the best design you can afford, right? So why not create a marketplace where buying health coverage is as simple and straightforward as buying speakers on Amazon -- a list of products with prices and a buy button.

The asynchronous alternative is a menu of plans you may or may not qualify for, at prices that may change after you apply, based on inputs many people will get wrong (unintentionally and otherwise), with a true cost that won't be known until someone does your taxes up to a year later and computes what subsidies you qualified for.

Even if there's only a day between signing up and verifying your information, that turns an hour of "getting it done and over with" into a multi-day ordeal. Considering this is a mandated purchase for a lot of people, they want to devote multiple days to it about as much as they want to stand in a long line at their local DMV.
I think in the first half she makes her point about Twitter, while the second half is devoted to defending herself from the attacks that will come her way.
I just opened an account and get really dissapointed when I found that your Logo (silvrback) it's all over my blog. We are already paying for your service, there is no need to put your logo all over OUR blog.
Hmm, I regularly used things like code injection and/or edit and continue in Visual Studio to dynamically change the UI code. There were limits, but it worked great for doing things like incrementally changing the positions of elements, turning on/off OpenGL states, and the like. If you made enough changes in a single run it would eventually give up and force you to recompile, but by and large it was pretty seamless. It was great for things that did not require reasoned thought, but required experimentation (what does OpenGL do if I set X to Y). All my work these days is algorithmic, so I am not entirely sure what state of the art is, but it couldn't have gotten worse, could it?
Because it's giving the user real-time access to which plans they are eligible for.

The only other two options I can think of would be:

-- Pre-verify all of the potential applicants, many of whom may already have coverage and never come to the exchange.
-- Ask users a bunch of questions that they may or may not know the answers to.
Nice, my googling didn't find anything for this so I decided the irony of using a Heroku App to overcome Heroku pricing was too good to pass up.
Inventor of Null Reference: A "billion-dollar mistake"
Whoa, Paul Graham Just Liked Our Facebook Page
Hacker Dojo startup helps rocket scientists perfect trailers
All the time, man. All the time.
I went to NYU, and commuted to Manhattan from Queens. My parents were also against me dorming. Yea I wasn't too pleased with them for that. Oh well. This was over a decade ago - now I live in Berkeley, CA; I work as a consultant programmer on various web related projects, after having done a few startups as a cofounder (none worked out) and at this point the fact that I lived at home during college is no longer relevant - after college I got a job, moved into a four bedroom apartment in Brooklyn NY with a couple of dudes some of whom I knew from high school, and pretty much spent all of my twenties doing what people do for four years in dorms in colleges: coding with my roommate, partying, self-analyzing, making mistakes, building and fucking up relationships, developing various professional and social skills.

My advice is probably exactly what you'd expect a reasonable, more adult and "mature" person on the internet whom you've never met say: don't do anything drastic. Finish your college at home, maintain your GPA, see if you can maybe land a job, local or remote, while you are still in school so that you have some money ready to be at your disposal once you graduate. As soon as you graduate, move your ass to a major city that is an epicenter of whatever your career happens to be, and live in a cool neighborhood with lots of other recent grads. Hopefully there will already be people you may know - maybe from high school, maybe from college - this will be your starting point for a social circle. Or if not - there's always meetup.com and okcupid.com

Good luck, and don't worry about missed opportunities. I've missed ten times as many more opportunities in my twenties as I did during college. If I had spent a lot of time thinking about all the things I missed out on in life, I'd probably put a bullet into myself a long time ago.
FTA:

"One might look at this and go: Why can't we get the smartest people from Facebook and Google and from Twitter to come and work out these problems?" Johnson says. "The problem is that the way that federal contracting works is so burdensome that the only people who get contracts like this are experts at lobbying and experts at regulations that require you to get these sorts of contracts. And they're not experts at doing the job of building these websites."
what have you ever done that is worthwhile?
MIT's Self-Assembling Robot Cubes Change Shape Automatically
I don't think it's that recent, I feel like they've been pretty 'wealthy' for a while. Interestingly, NOK-EUR YTD hasn't been that great http://ur1.ca/fuyz4
No, quite literally not. The campaign team is a private organization, not subject to rules for hiring federal employees or spending tax money.

This is precisely the sort of shit that make people believe that the government is incompetent. It really is for certain undertakings that require some degree of operational flexibility.
Don't show HN your project if you're easily offended, but definitely show HN if you want constructive valuable criticism.

Reddit is a much better place if you want your ego stroked.
The Future of Winemaking Is in High-Tech Robotics
Standing raises my heart rate, which is about 50bpm sitting and 70 standing. In an 8 hour day, that's about 10,000 extra beats, which is about as many extra beats as riding my bike for 20 minutes. That translates to around 100 extra calories burned a day, just by doing nothing! (That's a pound a month, or so.)

I also spend about 8 hours a week on my bike, so 20 minutes is relatively insignificant, but I'll take free weight loss any day. The benefits on posture are not to be dismissed, either.
Very nice on the market place approach. I wish discovery services were of sufficient quality to allow us to find new and unknown/small musicians. Word of mouth and algorithms only go so far.
I grew up in Detroit. Please try again.

I'm not talking about apathy, I'm talking about justice. If systemic apathy is the problem, then they won't be beating them, either. It's a straw man argument.
I think that's highly unlikely. Easy to test for though with the right test image.
> Was Levison trying to cooperate? No.

You sound astounded that someone on the receiving side of legal action is trying not to cooperate. Next you'll be stating that him hiring a lawyer is proof of non-cooperation and evidence of guilt.

If you got to do overbroad things every time a defendant was "non-cooperative" it would apply to every single court case.
Bandcamp allows musicians to sell their music directly to listeners.

From DistroKid.com: "We'll put your music on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and Amazon."

Different model, no?

DistroKid helps musicians get their music in the mainstream stores. Bandcamp is its own store.

I think they're serving different ends.
Me too, though given the stance the government has taken on climate change and investment into the future, it's unlikely such subsidies will be significant or fast coming.

And retrofitting apartments would be great, but again given the track record with the NBN rollout, you really have to ask how committed they are to infrastructure projects. Also brown/black outs happen during summer as the grid struggles to keep up with the increased demand. Adding EC to that? Yeesh.

Tangent: I'm all for EVs, but paradoxically they are really quiet - as in silent if they're coming up behind you. If you've ever been on the footpath, turned casually to cross the road only for a cyclist to rush past you out of nowhere it's really frightening like someone jumping out and yelling "boo". Can only imagine once we transition away from fossil fuels.
> All modules use require_once... well, well...

Why on earth is that a problem?
fifos by themselves aren't useful if you're trying to do multi-process signaling with them, as input from multiple programs is not separated or delimited in any way. fifodirs are a nice signalling mechanism built on top of fifos:

http://www.skarnet.org/software/s6/fifodir.html
Did you try Firefox ESR? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
Being handed impossible constraints (serve 250k simultaneous users, verify them all with the IRS, but the IRS service you have to talk to can only handle 1000 simultaneous requests) isn't incompetence on the developer's part, and we don't know whether something like that isn't what's happening. The team that built this site (which has had no unintentional downtime, latency or server errors -- whatever code they wrote hasn't fallen over, it's just stranded most people on a "please wait" page when they try to register) has no power over systems at all the other agencies they have to work with.
Ellot Ness of cyberspace
I noticed that as well. A critique turned into self-affirmation. Stuart Smalley would be proud.
Yes, in this case, it was the Lavabit service. But tools to allow for private communication already exist, and in those cases, the 5th amendment protects the parties involved, with no service provider able to provide the police useful data. The more the government abuses its surveillance abilities with massive collections, the more pressure will exist for criminal enterprises to turn their attention to the likes of Freenet, that are inherently difficult to surveil, even when working with the physical ISPs.

So, you ask, how do police investigations compensate when the criminals they're after increasingly use anonymous, private, secure, distribute means of communication?

Aside from the standard drug detection at borders or traffic stops, money tracking, physical surveillance, informants, undercover work, district attorneys giving deals to catch bigger bad guys, or other, you know, physical police work that doesn't include being told who, when and where the deal is going to take place, I'm not sure how Police will be able to function.

But I'm sure they won't be useless.
This is an example of someone who's riding the hate PHP bandwagon. Honestly sick and tired of people who have no idea just what PHP is capable of who like to bash it because it's "cool".
Can you elaborate on how selling an insurance policy is not "well understood" or how it's inherently more complicated than administering the tax code (!) or running medicare? I don't follow that at all. Insurance has been sold successfully for well over a century. Hell, governments have been running and regulating markets for all sorts of things (many of them much more complicated than a handful of insurance plan choices!) for the whole of modern history.

That doesn't mean that this site isn't a mess, but I don't see where the "screwed up farce" bit comes from. I rather suspect it's driven more by your choice of political tribe than any real intuition about what the government is capable of.
Well, it actually is true that the asymmetric encryption feature of the premium Lavabit service is designed to make intercepts impossible. Only the account holder can decrypt it.

Handing over account payment information in response to lawful requests is quite a different matter from defeating asymmetric encryption. Account info is unencrypted records that Lavabit has access to in accordance with their TOS. They can turn those over, in accordance to their TOS.

Faking out their own service to defeat their own encryption, which they specifically advertised as being only decryptable by the account holder and not Lavabit, is a whole different ballgame.

I noted exactly what you stated, that Lavabit offered to help the government implement something like that -- only after being threatened with the "nuclear option" of key seizure.

You've got to concede that there's room for some doubt as to whether Lavabit could be trusted to comply with something as extraordinary as that. It would be trusting them to reneg on a specific promise made to all customers about the security of their service, namely that it is impossible for Lavabit to snoop on encrypted communications.
This post is lazy and probably dangerous and I know how to use a browser add-on to collapse comments and so should everyone else, so there’s no need for this and no real problem beyond how incompetent people are, and if they can’t read past the first negative comment it’s their fault.
I don't think any of the questions being asked were particularly hard: certainly no harder than doing your taxes. The system could clearly say "based on the information you provided, here are your options".

I know it's nicer if it's instant, but I don't think anyone expected it to be instant; private health insurance is a multi-day process. Nobody is getting this health insurance until January. It sounds like the system is asynchronous anyway, in that it then goes off for further processing (no matter what the website promises).

In any case, we're talking about a delay of a week at most; I'm not suggesting that nothing be verified until tax season.
It's that last point that's so strong:

"Yes, yes, you have the right not be subjected to unreasonable search and seizure, but not if you're walking on the public sidewalk."

The key here is that the government is not like a private land owner. That's why government workers have so much leeway in criticizing their employers, and why you're allowed to protest on government land, and why schools can't have daily prayers even though they want to. The government simply isn't a private actor enforcing rules over the stuff it owns; we own the commons, and the government simply administers them according to some strict rules. Unlike a private land owner, it can't say, "if you don't like the way I do things, take your business elsewhere." Otherwise you get "You can vote for whomever you want, but since we own all these voting booths, you can only use them to vote for the incumbent."

If the government can pursue any arbitrary policy just by virtue of "owning" some infrastructure, the whole constitutional democracy thing gets circumvented.

Edit: changed "to privacy" to "not to be subjected to unreasonable search and seizure" to avoid confusion.
Two points:

1) Our government has a huge set of rules about procurement. Who's allowed to get their bid approved, the right kinds of projects, who's allowed to manage them, who's allowed to set project requirements (different than the former), who's allowed to pay them, etc. In theory this is all really smart and awesome: you don't get someone giving their brother-in-law a swell multi-million dollar contract, physically impaired people can access your site, etc.*

2) Governments and campaigns face different incentives. Campaigns don't have many cross cutting concerns: the goal is to get a candidate elected. Sure, some high powered consultants are simultaneously angling for a new job after, but IT and most staff are relatively immune from that. Your job is to get something done, and you want to get somethng done. Government, though, has no such incentives: you can do shitty work and not face consequences, and the mission is inherently less aspirational and more shoveling shit. Much of the time government bureaucracies also double as a social welfare program, or a private welfare program if a well-connected corporation has a well-placed surrogate legislator or bureaucrat.

*Reality, needless to say, can turn out a bit different.
I knew/know people who took multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations at a community college while in high school. As far as I know, there is nothing stopping most people from doing this. By the way, this is 1 or 2 math courses short of the amount of math most universities require of most technical majors. You might need something on statistics or discrete math.

So you have a story about dropping standards. I have a story about motivated people getting an 'advanced' education at the same level of schooling.
Hilarious considering that Medicare had far more serious problems throughout its inception and you consider the billing component to be successful.

Like all website launch problems in the months and years from now people are going to forget they ever happened. And instead will find having an independent marketplace to be incredibly useful. The states that have exchanges have already seen insurance premiums drop significantly.
Why is Email So Complicated: The Legacy of the IBM Punch Card
Hawkins? You mean Hawking?
Yes, I was surprised how negative the community was being :/ I am all for the "Constructive Criticism is better the 'you rock!' comments" thing but the Null view people didn't have any other point than "People are stupid. They shouldn't take batteries out. If there are false alarms it's YOUR fault that the detector is misplaced"

I like HN's usual healthy debates, but at this point things just seemed absurd.
Problems -- No Micropayments and Probably service is only for US merchants..
Doesn't that sorta directly compete? Why bother buying on Bandcamp when you can support the artist right from Google Play/iTunes/Amazon MP3, which you're already using?
I really like the suggestion of doing the calculation for everyone in advance. We could even have sent a letter to everyone that would be better off if they enrolled.
I am sensing a lot of continued hostility here. I am not sure why, since we apparently do not disagree, and since I have made it clear that I did not have any malicious intent.

> I make the assumption people will ask if they are unsure or not clear.

You have misunderstood me. I did not find your comment to be unclear after reading it. However my take-away from your comment was incorrect.

Complaining about a loaded question, instead of simply and civilly correcting me ("I don't think that"), came off very strongly as a dodge. Or, as kordless describes, "conversation killer".

I hope this clears up any lingering confusion.
I built the worlds tiniest Hadoop testbed (reddit AMA )
Come join the conversation over on Reddit for an AMA about a tiny (500MB) Hadoop testbed single-node cluster I built for iTnews.com.au and what you can do with it. You can built it yourself from the instructions or down load a pre-built one if you prefer.