skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stewart Baker, who was quoted extensively for that article, had some interesting words regarding it[1]:

When one of the authors, Ryan Grim, called me for comment, he said that while Glenn Greenwald was transitioning to his new Omidyar-funded venture he was temporarily publishing his Snowden leaks with HuffPo. So when he asked for my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of times and emphasized that it summed up my view.

I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. The article itself is so tediously long that I defy anyone to read every word in a single go.

Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent, hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly ‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].” His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both are motivated by the same idea.

Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites.

The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories. And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us.

[1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/
Show HN: Compare the Top 20 Startup Ecosystems
Yeah, I wouldn't really consider any of those things to be "serious" problems, at least for the level that this guide is pitched at.
i just hide the title bar with the window manager, its linux after all ;-)
How do you know Leo gets the money?
As a data point; A few weeks ago, siri stopped recognizing some people (in my contacts) that I'd been able to call before. I have a 4S w/io7. Adding phonetic hinting didn't help.
In practice people do lend bitcoins. Of course they do, and the entire system does not demand anonymity or non-accountability. If someone actually wanted to short bitcoin in such a way, they can do it right now.

Shorting is, as in the normal securities market, a dangerous gambit because the downside is infinitely larger than the upside. But if someone wanted to do it they could.
The simulation is always buggy. Don't you watch movies? ;)
People have analyzed the blockchain. Here is a paper that discusses an only somewhat out of date analysis:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf

So in April of this year, 64% of bitcoin had never traded hands and there were about 4 million bitcoins circulating.

I also think it is fairly likely that there are people monitoring the 'Satoshi addresses'.
Is that a troll attempt? Not sure.

Haven't had any of my 15 extensions break in 20 releases. I don't expect any breakage any time.

The reason for rapid release is that they need to get new features out to load stuff properly like google docs, yes.

The main reason to use firefox IMO is that its as fast or faster than others (and has all the features of course) AND has this: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ to tip things on it's favors.

Also, I'm using Australis and its just fine. I switch back to release sometimes and I don't really notice the difference anymore. I do prefer the australis tabs contrast.
Some good commentary by Fred Wilson about 409a's...

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-the-option-s...
This came up in a discussion last week -- it got garbage collected.
So if I go to an upscale neighborhood and offer $100 at random, would that mean that anyone who refuses my offer is motivated enough to code?

Of course not, that's silly. We are discussing within the context of homelessness, in which the guy is playing a game with a vulnerable individual by offering an amount that is far higher than a change, but far lower that any developer (even junior) would consider an offensive offer for a mobile app.
>why is almost all physics local?

Do we know that it is? Clearly we are experiencing major observation bias.
California man arrested for running 'revenge porn' website
I remember reading mozilla saying this is a battle they have lost.

If they had more marketshare, they'd have won. The open web would have won.
I think it's rather more that the history of states turning fascist shows that the turn is usually proceeded by the state acquiring extraordinary powers on the basis that "insert-bogeyman-here" is out to get us (see Italy, Spain, Germany for past exemplars) and that current citizens would rather be vigilant and ensure that we don't have a fascist future than sit back and allow the possibility that it might occur.

"The fight against surveillance is essentially defeatist and fear mongering. It assumes the government will turn evil and it'll start trying to make your life miserable. It's all part of a collective psychosis. We think that it's an inevitability that one day the US will turn into an evil dystopian nazi regime."

I think that history disagrees with you. Have you ever heard the phrase: all that's required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing? People questioning the reach of government surveillance are good people doing something.
A 5% fee to sponsor a project seems a little excessive. I'm still a top sponsor on http://coingiving.com/
Yes, I get the gist of it.

I am not convinced it is plausible.
Not every exchange of power is exploitive.
Dear Motorist
Interesting ideas. Can you suggest some sources that are focused on boot-strapping rather than producing black swans?
That is what I and the parent comment were saying - that they ought to do this.
1. Buying extra RAM or a faster CPU is almost always super cheap compared to buying a bigger car (consider both initial price and reduction in fuel efficiency).

2. Farming computing out to EC2 is nothing like renting a car.
Please see historical and global context related to 'police-state' and despotism in order to understand the significance of these issues. You will need to set aside your American exceptionalism.

I do have an issue with the article though. My middle school did have quite a few young criminals in it, and a zero-tolerance policy would have been beneficial for everyone. Instead, quite a lot of physical violence and theft was dismissed as 'bullying' which resulted in escalation. I know for a fact that many of the students who misbehaved in less extreme criminal ways (and were allowed to get away with it) did enter into a life of crime before they were halfway through high school.

So there is a difference between militarization and despotic control and disciplining students enough to prevent them from becoming criminals.

I think that rather than worrying about harsh penalties for vandalism etc., take issue with the propaganda being fed to students and the lack of focus on problem solving outside of narrow domains.
Excitement builds as more of the article is read until near the end...

> Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes.

...way to hide the disclaimer guys.
I look at it like emails – yes, we could make it so that it costs $0.50 to send an email, and this would make less people spam... but it isn't an elegant solution.

I think that domain name squatters should be flagged and the domains should be removed if they aren't being used appropriately. Furthermore, bulk domain registration should be banned – I can't think of a simple reason that this should be allowed.
its actually pretty good since drive by are the most common attacks. grandma won't click the button if she doesn't care about the content
Even in Japan if you only rely on Public Transportation (and you probably have heard its one of the best out there, worldwide), there are a number of situation where it just does not work. For example: you want to come back later than 11h30 pm ? Bad luck, most of the metro/train lines have stopped.

Or, there's usually always a way to get from point A to B with public transport, but unless you go to major stations or hubs you need to change several times, take an additional bus and walk an additional x minutes. It's very tiring and inefficient, and costly as well, because public transports aren't subsidized here as much as in Europe for example.

And of course, if you ever want to carry something large and heavy with you, welcome to hell, with a number of stations with no elevators and just stairs, and lack of space in trains to even put your stuff.

It's fairly obvious there are excellent use cases for having a car. Or at least renting one when you need it.

ANd that's not even considering : confort, risk of viral transmission (did you take this in account when considering the cost on society ?) and freedom aspects.
Thousands receive 'fines' for watching RedTube videos
Aside from them being an aggressive display of power (even Russia uses them only for riots), they are very expensive!

The military spends a massive amount of money for maintenance - now the police can do that, too! Very cool, except you pay for it and they'll need more money.

APCs use a lot more fuel, have more expensive parts and need special training to operate = more money from the local budget (= more taxes).

Next thing, they'll be buying jets and drones for $10 each and spending millions on their maintenance.
We don't know, but everything Patrick stands to gain from this would be undermined by keeping the money. Everything except the money, and I doubt we're talking about enough to be worth a reputation.
Yes, very entertaining and enlightening (even if you already know the subject). Love Strang's teaching style.
Cars kill density, but they don't kill cities. I live in San Diego, a very car friendly city. I can get to almost any store, restaurant, or shop in 15 minutes or less. The key is medium density city with lot's of freeways. High density is not all that it's cracked up to be.
I think the whole premise (one "growth hack" per day) isn't right. I would call this more like "one UI touch-up per day." I don't mean that in a condescending way.

If you want to make a bigger impact you have to dig deeper. Look at your analytics and conversion funnels for ideas.

For example:

Is there a bottleneck for many visitors on their path from First Visit to Signup? Do visitors from a certain source convert or stick around longer than others? Is there a page within your Docs section that a significant number of visitors view before eventually signing up?

Now make some educated guesses to explain the data. For example:

If 13% of the Trial User segment viewed the demo apps prior to signing up, maybe the demo played a significant role in convincing them to sign up. (BTW, you can even segment this group out in Analytics as Demo Viewers and compare their conversion rates vs those who did not view the demo.)

And now for the test:

A/B test adding a link directly to the demo somewhere prominent on the homepage (maybe even replacing the subscription link under the CTA).

* * *

Lots of blogs make it seem as though you can "growth hack" by merely changing a button color or adding a modal popup somewhere. Easy things like that only work when you're starting from the bottom. Once your site is half-way decent, it takes more ingenuity than that to make a meaningful impact.

EDIT: From looking at the other comments here I'm getting the impression that you don't have a whole lot of traffic. In that case you probably don't have enough Analytics data to look as deep as my examples. Still, assuming your Analytics is setup properly, you should be looking at it for opportunities.
> The anti-PhD meme on HN really needs to stop

Well. The most common way to feel superior is to put other things down. It just happens to be focused on PhDs when academia related stuff comes up :P
Top 20 Private Equity / Venture Capital firms of 2013
Why are you putting discredit radicalizer in scare quotes? The released NSA document shows that the act to discredit radicalizers is used in a very specific context. I feel as if you're trying to twist it and make it ambiguous.
Project euler then implement in javascript.
How do you know visits from ads won't convert any better than your current visitors? If you do a half-descent job of targeting your ads you could get visitors who are much more likely to convert than your current visitors.
On Ubuntu you can install the 'randomsound' package. There used to be a different one I used but I can't remember the name.
Very clever 4 in a row game! Makes me want a 5c.
Did you really feel you needed to respond to them this way? A simple downvote just wasn't enough?
Well one advantage for a person like me is that I can buy a small development board with Parallella chip on it. It hasn't been delivered yet, but let's assume it is soon. I don't know where I can buy a small development board with an AMD Temash. If there is one, I am interested!
It's still necessary to consider the total number of shares. Let's say you've been issued 500,000 options with a $0.10 strike price, and the company is currently valued at $4 million. The approximate pretax value of exercising your options immediately would be:

~ $2,000,000 if they've only issued 500,000 shares
~ $100,000 if they've issued 13,000,000 shares
~ $2,000 if they've issued 40,000,000 shares.

And your returns would be negative for any greater number of shares.

The real problem is that you don't know the price per share from the current valuation.
What's wrong with Ayn Rand?
Would their patent be enforceable? Their claims include anonymity. How do you know who to sue if the payments are anonymous?
Oh weird, it's there now.
Depends on your appetite for risk.

It's just a sign that it's really risky, and the other founders obviously think the odds of it succeeding are low and are asking you to put in sweat equity, as it were.
For a forum that spends a lot of time talking about disruption with members who I'm sure pride themselves on their rationality, there is a surprising amount of "damn the torpedoes" defense of the status quo here.
What does this product do that you can't already do using
pywin32 and the COM API ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309878
I used to do more wireframing than UI design, but that's changing, and I've been looking at the available tools.

PS is not good for multiple resolutions, and I find Illustrator too complex for the task.

The thing I like about wireframing in Omnigraffle is the wide array of stencil libraries available.

Have you found it easy to find and/or create design libraries for Sketch?
I'm confused. Have you searched google for javascript koans? I'd link you, but it's literally the first one...

Also, I don't think javascript is a good first language. A first language's syntax should get out of the way, allowing the concepts to take root. It's also very hard to determine what is good javascript. Classes aren't really present there either. I'd suggest ruby, and teach the fundamentals, then introduce to js.
The fact that we are somehow considering Americans' privacy more important that non-Americans' privacy is what I find disturbing. Also, the illusion that they were ever discarding American citizens' data never took hold of me. The NSA collects ALL THE DATA.
LOL. I like Gibson, technology, and stuff too, but that's not a reason to be stoked about authoritarianism.

Anyway you are probably kidding.
Jesus, no it would not!

It would lead to the US military becoming way too large, and given the prowess in media propaganda, you'll get tens of millions of people with a highly militaristic mindset with nothing to do - think current soldier worshipping x10.
How is that inelegant? That would be a fantastic solution to email spam!

> I think that domain name squatters should be flagged and the domains should be removed if they aren't being used appropriately.

Who gets to flag squatters? How do we define "used appropriately?" Who gets to decide whether a squatter meets that definition?

A system of flagging is more complicated than you think.
Coffeescript and C Macros: Clean and Fast
That's correct -- the people in the box starting "EFF would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to...".
Ahh.... me too. The Amiga community was great. sigh
assuming I could, would you buy it? I am confident I can
Unfortunately, Rebecca doesn't realize how Amazon is hurting her by threatening to stop selling her books if they are available gratis somewhere.

For further reading of why Amazon is bad for authors and customers alike, see:
http://stallman.org/amazon.html
We have major race issues with Natives, nobody wants to talk about it though.
Hard to believe that these talks are conducted in secret behind closed door. It is quite clear the some of the proposals are strictly designed to serve powerful interest groups. Great work by Wikileaks to put this in the public arena.
If it was me helping, I could afford to invest a certain amount in someone and help them learn to code, but providing enough money for stable housing is probably beyond my capability.
Some words have multiple definitions. Here's one of the definitions of the word "slave"... someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; "a slave to fashion"; "a slave to cocaine"; "his mother was his abject slave"
We can use solar powered vehicles instead..
I give the Opera guys a lot of credit (I met a few engineers years ago at a conference and they seem like awesome dudes too), but one can hardly blame them for "throwing it away."
Indeed. I was referring to the squiggly line in the center of the country that looked like he was going along a road of some sort
Am I the only one for whom the article had the opposite than intended effect? I was expecting some real life horror story of a false positive or deliberate framing, but instead I was given examples of how this data could be used constructively to try and evaluate where there might be a high likelihood of crime occurring, and trying to prevent it. In my eyes, using tax dollars to prevent crime rather than punishing it a HUGE win!
Unison is no longer under active development, right? Would love to use it but going forward, is there a big enough community to fix bugs, add new features etc?

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/status.html
Thanks for the response. Fairly inline with what I thought. Next question, how to prepare? Is it futile to make an effort to protect myself and those around me, or is such a thing feasible (I imagine this would require a huge edit to lifestyle)?

I don't want to be "that guy" but I also don't want to be caught in the headlights if shit hits the fan (which it seems is inevitable). Anything to study to guide my thinking without going full-on bomb shelter?
Our marketing is simply trying to build the best product and assuming that well dominate the scene die to it

Plus we are pretty lazy when it comes to that
Make something society wants. Don't focus on how much you want money
I'm pretty sure digital ocean uses it in production
If the main page is insecure, then everything is insecure.
That's because Turtle Graphics is logo. In Python.
It is not as easy as Omnigraffle. My rudimentary way of doing this is to have a template file that I can copy/paste elements from. One function that I love from Sketch is that you can copy/paste styles, which makes the library use more flexible. You can copy CSS, but I wish that you could also past CSS into an object since we also have an ongoing UI library written in LESS
It is ironic, isn't it.
I completely agree. It amazed me that people hailed HL2 as one of the greatest games ever. I thought it was awful - and as you say, all because of the lack of agency. It's not so much a game as a series of set pieces to show of the cleverness of the level designers.
I don't know where in Canada you've lived, but there is plenty of that in Toronto, and Calgary, especially dealing with the natives. I'll bet Montreal and Vancouver aren't must different.

There was no culture shock moving from Canada to the US.
I like this post. How do we solve this as a society? Sometimes I wonder when the earth will reach it's maximum number of human inhabitants. Will there me a meritocratic system for reproduction? What factors will/can be taken into account?
I can't wait for the results of this to come out so I can use it in debates with people who are against legalization. I'm almost certain Uruguay will be better off for this. The resources involved in trying to suppress cannabis is ridiculous; especially for a substance that doesn't even do as much harm to society as some other things that are perfectly legal.
It feels like we're just about at the tipping point with cannabis. Once enough states in the US legalize it, the Feds will have to back down.

The next step will be for people to wake up to the fact that harder drugs need to be legal too. Not so that more people can take them, but so we can have less crime and eliminate a key justification for the growing police state.
The basic idea of diplomatic negotiations being secret is that it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France.

Unfortunately, in this situation, diplomatic negotiations are being used to end-run around the domestic legislative process. This is the intrinsic downside of allowing diplomatic cooperation to extend beyond its traditional domain of war and peace.[1] In liberal democracies, the organs of foreign policy are designed to be opaque and non-responsive to the public. In the United States, this is by design--stemming from the framers' worry that a democracy wouldn't be able to speak with the required single voice when it came to issues of foreign policy. But the flexibility of the process militates towards keeping it restricted to a narrow domain.

[1] There is something fundamentally undemocratic about using the diplomatic process to normalize law between countries. Yes it makes business easier, but it undermines democratic control over law. The law of a country should be an expression of the will of its voters, and only its voters. Some egghead in the UK has no business weighing in on what America's laws should be, and vice versa.