skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article and title are super misleading—the title appears to be a flat-out lie, in fact. It spends five paragraphs ranting about the issue until it finally concedes:

> "...Das and Kramer claim to only send back information to Facebook that indicates whether you self-censored, not what you typed. The Facebook rep I spoke with agreed that the company isn’t collecting the text of self-censored posts."

In any case, the fact that Facebook is, or wants to be, slopping up every ounce of data about its users is no surprise.

EDIT: Viewing the actual study[1], it appears this article is even more fluffy. This "self-censorship" feature appears to only have been in place for a small segment of users for 17 days:

> "We collected data from 3.9 million
users over 17 days and associate self-censorship behavior
with features describing users, their social graph, and the
interactions between them." [1]

Yikes, Business Insider. Come on.

[1]: http://sauvik.me/system/papers/pdfs/000/000/004/original/sel...
Peter Thiel is correct. But, it should be noted, that as an investor in Lyft, Thiel has a big interest in scolding Uber publicly.
It wouldn't be the first company to be rewarded in spite of bad behavior, that's for sure, and I'm sure the fraternity network doesn't hurt.
The bummer is that the bullshit misogyny feels like it's been running pretty rampant for some time, though maybe it's only lately that we're seeing the sort of graduating class of this particular brand of ethically vapid growth-hacked shops seeing some success (Uber, Tinder, Genius...)

I like making things, but the part of our industry that manages to sustain such an asshole-farm gets me wishing I'd chosen a different career path sometimes.

Kudos to Thiel on this, though. I think the quickest way for the culture to change is for folks to stop funding it.
Convert Blu-ray to iPad Mini Much Faster
All CAs for most browsers are all audited by a third party. That's what provides the trust.

https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements/
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu...
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu...

Geez the people without a clue wanting to patronize on HN - I'm telling you - nothing like that to lose faith in humanity.
I think Thiel is an investor in an Uber competitor. If so, I'm sure this would bias his opinion. If he were an Uber investor, I doubt he would be saying this. Which implies a weird sort of ethical dilemma - where money invested makes the person not say things about ethics. Just as I'm sure Microsoft investors in the 1990's didn't call out Microsoft for its monopolistic tendencies.
Notice the language here. He doesn't seem, at least from my reading, to be chastising Uber for doing things that are morally wrong. He's instead chastising them for doing morally wrong things and not pulling it off. For example:

"Sometimes the people who break the rules win and sometimes they push it too far,"

implying that Uber could be doing wrong things in some more correct way and continue to thrive, and that there isn't anything wrong with that. He doesn't say "broke rules," or "did bad things," he said "pushed the envelope."

Look at the implication there - you can and maybe should do unethical things, break some rules, "push the envelope" with questionable behaviors as long as you get away with it.
>We need to stop publishing stuff over HTTP. Period.

This is a short sighted solution. If you go this route, then you are constraining authentication to the client. Users always choose bad passwords, so we are stuck.

In mobile networks, you have the network in a position to strongly authenticate the subscriber, without necessitating the weaknesses that can come with bad passwords.

I generally agree that TLS is desirable, but if we go all in, there are interesting and potentially more desirable alternatives that are lost.
Yup, preferably an separable induction heating surface that can be paired with the pan to intelligently control the temperature.

Separate so that you can flip that pancake/burger.
D'oh. Thanks for the correction.
Objectivist World View + Wild Success + Survivorship Bias = Incredibly Dangerous Mix when it comes to ethical behavior, IMO.

Having said that, Thiel's very Randian himself, so I'm not sure how much of this is his actual concern for Uber's drivers or journalistic critics versus just being a Lyft investor taking a jab at the competition.
Windows Azure is down
OK, so it's obviously a little transparent of Thiel to say that Uber [a competitor to Lyft, a company in which he has invested] is "on the cusp" of going too far, but Airbnb [another company in which he has invested] has "a different feel" and is OK.

But it's also a little ironic that the champion of "Competition is for losers", who says that monopolies can be a good thing for society [0], is against Uber trying their best to achieve such a monopoly.

[0] "Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren't just good for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better." -- http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo...
Their first product was very similar to the deadbolt one but it was a retrofit electronics for someone else's mechanical deadbolt. It was also powered and had to be connected to Ethernet. I'm going by memory and could be a bit off on the details.

But yeah the deadbolt is a refinement of their earlier product. Which makes me a bit baffled about how badly executed it is the second time around.
Could you comment a bit how the approach you took on Crystal differs from what's described in the OP? (... “Soft Typing” [1], introduced by Mike Fagan in his 1991 dissertation ...)

1: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/16439
I guess you're right - I was considering the fact that someone once owned a domain was a threat, but it is already.

But with a delegated chain of certs, the problem does get worse - not least because you'd require individual domains to manage their own certificate revocation.

But since there's basically no secure way to obtain CRLs or perform OCSP cert validation, it's kind of moot.
Business Partnership Due-Dilligence Checklist
Here's the problem for uber:

(1) In many places they are breaking the law and/or want the law changed so they can expand without breaking it.

(2) This means they need the moral high ground. They need to have people believe they are acting in good faith when operating outside or in the grey areas of existing legislation and policy.

(3) Winning at all costs mentality means operating in ethical grey areas.

(4) You can exloit grey areas but you cannot at the same time occupy moral high ground.

Without a coherent strategy "winning at all costs" (to hell with being ethical) will almost surely lose the war, even if it wins a few battles.

That means, their future as a brand and as a company could be greatly impacted if they continue to have public PR meltdowns that involve dis-proportionate and underhanded approaches to solving their problems.

Things are always going to be messy in their line of work, but they need people's trust and political support outside of pure-business. The specifics can always be debated (and the nuances sometimes are critical), but they need to demonstrate proportionatly and good faith are core values to their firm.
My theory is that FBI is providing cities with some of these technologies as a sort of dog fooding. To iron out the kinks in their tracking technology. It does seem over kill to use something like that for a robbery, in a city like Baltimore.

I know your post was more about the defence and the trial.
Hooray Dean Heller - way to not-be-a-dick!

I find it interesting that Barbara Boxer voted for it, given her staunch defense of the NSA's abuses-to-date.
Cost to Develop and Win Marketing Approval for a New Drug Is $2.6B
> What about if you had pages open that you don't want to lose (literally hundreds of tabs)?

There's always one of these in every discussion about a web browser. That one person who, instead of bookmarking things, keeps literally hundreds of tabs open.

(Some of my best friends are "this guy")
I lived in Amsterdam for a while and loved commuting on my bike.

But here's an anecdote for you.

I grew up in a large town in Australia where bicycling was very popular. I rode everywhere and had paper runs. I don't remember anyone having a serious accident. At 17 I went to University in Sydney and rode everywhere; again no helmet and no accidents.

In Amsterdam I had one big crash; my wheel went between the cracks on the footpath and I face-planted into the concrete and took a lot of bark off my face.

What does that tell you? Perhaps nothing :-)
Go is good at two things. Simple portable command line utilities with no dependencies - and network services.
How closing roads could speed up traffic – The Braess Paradox Explained [video]
When a guy who doesn't like women's suffrage says you've gone too far, that's saying something.

http://gawker.com/5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-could...
C Object Oriented Programming
But this guy is buying and selling without any knowledge of the item, he is literally just following other people.

If he actually used domain specific expertise to make judgements on value of what he is trading, I would agree.
Am I the only one that feels the color was just too glaring for my eyes? My eyes couldn't stand looking at the page for 5 secs.
I really like how Facebook went about getting as much information about types as possible without the coderess, not forcing her to do unnecessary stuff. Behavior design on the code level at its finest.

And on the side note, I bet Facebook did this just to make nerds install OCaml and show them the light :)
between Palantir and Uber? Tough choice, until of course invested in one and missed on the other (plus being invested in the other's competitor).
Do you consider this likely?
It was a "manager's amendment" from the House Judiciary Committee, meaning that it was a majority consensus of whole committee.

Here are the 23 Republican members on the committee:

Bob Goodlatte, Virginia, Chairman
Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin
Howard Coble, North Carolina
Lamar S. Smith, Texas
Steve Chabot, Ohio
Spencer Bachus of Alabama
Darrell Issa, California
Randy Forbes, Virginia
Steve King, Iowa
Trent Franks, Arizona
Louie Gohmert, Texas
Jim Jordan, Ohio
Ted Poe, Texas
Jason Chaffetz, Utah
Tom Marino, Pennsylvania
Trey Gowdy, South Carolina
Mark Amodei, Nevada
Raúl Labrador, Idaho
Blake Farenthold, Texas
George Holding, North Carolina
Doug Collins, Georgia
Ron DeSantis, Florida
Jason T. Smith, Missouri
Yeah the second he said that he was invested in Uber's biggest competitor, I couldn't take him seriously. Uber has gone over the line sometimes, but he's obviously going to make it sound worse than it is.
Even if it is an empirical process of following trends - It's not contributing anything - its betting on trends.

It just feels like you aren't investing to build industries, just to gamble.
Just apply same buggy network patch to all DCs at once? They use software networking so causing something like this should be easy. Or mess up network routing for *.blob.core.windows.net which pretty much all of Azure relies on.
Yes, and the subsequent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silla%E2%80%93Tang_War

It's amazing how quickly allies can become enemies once their common enemy is defeated. US & USSR after WW2, US & Taliban after the fall of communism, etc.
Let's not forget the time China "helped" unify a divided Korea in the 20th Century.
Why is this a problem? If your password is "foofoo" and was set after the cutoff, then it won't be halved; if it is "foofoo" and was set before the cutoff, it will be halved, and then not match the password in the database, as intended.
I'm not even going to attempt to argue this, because I sense I'm simply going to be banging my head against the wall because you're going to be locked into semantics and obsessing over "unguided".

Convergent evolution, and history argue against you. C4 photosynthesis evolved independently 60 times. There's no guarantee it will, and I'm not arguing it will. However, the weight of evidence argues that if there's a readily available niche it is a matter of time.

If you argue I won't win the jackpot, you're likely right - in fact I'd put money on my probability of losing. However, if you argue no one will win the jackpot in the next 100 years you're an idiot.
Oh no, did we break the status page too? Sorry Azure team, really didn't mean to pile on!
The McMass Project
So, I think you're putting words in his mouth suggesting these comments are anti-monopoly in this sense. I don't think in the abstract he's saying he's against a company like Uber striving for market domination.. he's just saying they crossed a line in that pursuit.

As for AirBnB I think the Uber vs AirBnB comparison is a really fair one. AirBnB is a very similar example of a company doing serious disruption and facing pretty severe friction in the form of established lobbies and laws... but they've not been accused of threatening journalists, hoteliers, or anyone else who's challenged them. That's the distinction being made here.

There are lots of startups that appear to be really riding the line that I think Thiel is identifying here (AirBnB, Tesla, and 23andMe come to mind) by taking risks in the name of getting innovative services to customers, not in the name of providing air-cover for cashing in at the expense of their users.
The "well, now that the last 32 bit app on your Mac gets with the times, life's gonna be better" comment shows (a) this wasn't just about Java, and (b) they knew they're way behind the times.
>It's not really in the U.S. best interest to push for unification

Yes it is.

>A unified Korea makes justifying a large military presence in Korea very difficult

Exactly.
I have never understood how "we filibuster!" is acceptable. If you want to stop a bill, get somebody out there in sneakers reading out of a fucking phone book, but going "tee-hee, we say no, go fetch a supermajority" is asinine. I don't get why the body has chosen rules that make filibusters require no effort.
That status table with all the randomly located green checks is painful to look at... I guess a green check in the 'Global' column implies a green check in all location specific columns? But what about all the rows which have no Global green check, but most columns are still empty? Are those regions where the service is not deployed? Can we gray out those boxes or something if they are 'N/A'?

Also, funny if you try to zoom out in Chrome to see the whole thing, the row headers get out of alignment.

Why would I want to 'X' out specific rows/columns in the table? It was so complicated to begin with, someone thought adding more complication through end-user customization was a good idea? I just noticed, you can even expand some of the rows...

Seriously, a status page should tell you either "It's up" or "What's down". It's not even showing history over time, this is just a snapshot. The text at the top directly contradicts the icons in the table, making the whole thing even more ridiculous.

The footnote at the bottom is the best, "The Australia Regions are available only to customers with billing addresses in Australia and New Zealand." Thanks for that useful nugget! /s
This is exactly correct. As Bob Dylan so succinctly noted, "To live outside the law you must be honest."
I just wanted to chime in and say that I had always avoided infosec as "too hard" (I'm primarily a UI guy), but the Snowden leaks have made me a lot more conscious of my digital footprint and security in general. I even spent several months on khan academy learning the requisite maths to understand the stanford crypto 101 class on coursera (awesome course by the way!). Of course I'm far from journeyman status but I believe there are many more like me whose awareness of the issue was significantly raised by the leaks. Even if no political changes come about as a result, that's a huge aggregate effect that will only increase over the next years/decades.
Regretting the decision to go with Azure. Talk about terrible timing. We have media outlets interested in our site, we send info and the site is dead. Talk about a crap first impression.
You mean like group chat? One of the key features of Hangouts?

Oh well, it's Google's loss, we've moved to Slack where I work instead.
The problem is that what you have written is useless. Your claim is that in a capitalist world, Uber has to do anything "no matter how ethically questionable they are."

But presumably there is some ethical line, even for you. For instance, outright fraud, overt criminal acts, smear campaigns against families of journalists -- some or all of these might be a problem for you or for even an ardent devotee of Ayn Rand.

Which leads us right back to the original question.
I have an auto loan with a company which truncates the username. It's bizarre because they'll happily let you key in the entire username when you go to log in, but it truncates when you first set your account up.

Why on earth would you ever need to truncate a username?
I didn't down vote you (I was too busy reading your link).. but he wrote a reply to this reaction to his original article.. saying what he said was:

... a commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns that is often called the gender gap.

It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/01/peter-thiel/suffrage-...
I have my own theories on why "following others" adds efficiency to the market. It's a losing strategy if applied on every situation with zero context obviously (which is why most traders lose money), but traders who find a consistent edge doing it "bring the market closer to where it's supposed to go" so to speak, in general. But this is all theory in my little head with no substantial research so I don't care to stake my life on it.

In the end, I don't care that much to argue about social utility. I trade my own cash or I trade the money of guys who completely understand my objectives and choose to back me. I respect your views and I won't bother to persuade you otherwise.

I get the feeling if this thread was about losing $200k to Phil Ivey heads up in Hold Em or Nate Silver losing $200k by betting against Obama on a political betting site, nobody would care to bring up social utility.
In the context of the rest of the video and other stuff Thiel has said, I interpreted that statement to mean that rule breaking is not necessarily immoral but a company like Uber can get carried away and what is essentially a "culture" of rule breaking meant to undermine unjust regulations becomes one meant to undermine competition at any cost.
Qualified people review closed source designs all the time.
How is misogyny relevant to what he said or what is being discussed here?
It's funny you bring up Palantir. I learned a bit about it today and still don't quite see what it adds to things.
Title should be "most unethical".
Moxie Marlinspike's Perspectives addon for Firefox was a good attempt to resolve some of the problems with self-signed certs.

Unfortunately, no browsers adopted the project, and it is no longer compatible with Firefox. There are a couple forks which are still in development, but they are pretty underdeveloped.

I wonder if Mozilla would be more likely to accept this kind of project into Firefox today, compared to ~4 years ago when it was first released, now that privacy and security may be more important topic to the users of the browser.
> Meanwhile, Facebook is pretty much the most evil and dangerous company in the Valley

Oh, come on. You're just being a sore loser.

> Look, nobody owes anyone a paycheck for their business model -- you gotta show up to work and earn it, just like everyone else. Taxi companies may not exist in 50 years, and the people involved just have to adapt to figure out what to do next. As for the people driving for Uber -- again, look, it's their prerogative to enter into financial situations that are not sustainable long-term; nobody is forcing anyone to ride for these guys.

Labor regulations exist for a reason; so some asshole from Silicon Valley doesn't turn a non-insignificant part of the population into Slaves-As-A-Service. Just because Uber is lying to people about possible wages doesn't make it right [1] [2] [3].

> I believe in morals and ethics. I believe in what is right. There is NOTHING immoral about Uber. Maybe they are aggressive and crazy, but maybe you haven't seen how every single multi-billion-dollar business looks like from the inside. If anything, I find it refreshing to see Uber be so transparent in their sentiments; the sort of completely unethical and fucking evil shit rubber-stamped by Peter Thiel during the evolution of Facebook should be far more concerning.

"I don't believe in evil.....but everyone else is doing it!"

I'm not here to hero worship Thiel; honestly, I couldn't care less about VCs in the Valley. Uber is an amalgamation of everything that's wrong with the startup scene (Frat house culture, "win at all costs", disrupt no matter what the law is); the faster they burn through their VC money and sputter out, the better.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-say-theyre-makin...

[2] http://ktla.com/2014/09/09/uber-drivers-protest-unfair-wages...

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/10/uber...
Same here. Maybe "flux" adds to that?
Complete X86/x64 JIT and Remote Assembler for C++
I think close to 100% of successful entrepreneurs would agree with the statement "You can, and must break some rule, push the envelope, and engage in questionable behavior when building a company - the challenge is in always remembering where the line is, and never crossing it."

Uber clearly crossed the line when their executives voiced out load their frustration with the media and then continued talking and imagined how nice it would be to give the media a taste of their own medicine and do all sorts of reporting on them personally.

It's fine to have those little fantasies in your head - but that's as far as it can ever go. What's troubling is that the Uber exec honestly thought it was acceptable to give words to those thoughts... I'm wondering if alcohol was involved.
Apple mentioned Force Touch during the unveiling demo, and there is a blurb in their documentation as well:

"Force Touch. A small screen can only accommodate so many controls. That’s why Apple Watch introduces an entirely new interaction model: Force Touch. As well as sensing touch, the Retina display also senses force. Force Touch interactions display the context menu (if any) associated with the current screen. Apps use this menu to display actions relevant to the current content." [1]

I've heard people compare this to a long press, but its subtlety different. Force touch can bring up a context menu faster, because you don't have to wait to determine if a touch is "long" or not

[1]- https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
Very nice concept. Reminds me a lot of my TI-83 graph calculator days with a small dose of Scorched Earth :).
Dark mode makes the dock non-ugly, at least. It's not the same as before, but it's inoffensive, especially with Reduce transparency / Increase contrast.
Does that mean docscript is no longer in development? I was kinda hoping it might develop into a low featured, easy to use replacement for latex.

I find that except for math I use a minimal amount of features of latex, but a lot of work and weird code to display simple things.

I just don't get why there isn't something that does a few things well and nothing else.