skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very nice for Bruce Schneier to express opposition to invasion of privacy. I agree with him. But unless I totally misunderstand Schmidt's comments, Schmidt is not suggesting people should not make love to their wives, for example, but rather, that if you are going to do something that you don't want the government to know about you, you shouldn't give it to someone that is legally obligated to tell the government about it if they ask.

Regardless of how Google feels about privacy, it's unreasonable to expect them to martyr themselves for our sakes when the Department of Justice or the FBI knock on their door with a subpoena. The way to protect your privacy is to not tell people things you don't want them to know(or to use Tor or the like).

Edit: fixed a minor typo
I had shingles (a herpes zoster re-eruption) in 2000. Initially, I wasn't sure if it was shingles or a somehow widespread eruption of cold sores (herpes simplex), so I did some reading up on both. Neither is contagious except when they are presenting, ie when sores are present.
Infectious disease.

When you base an initial argument on a false statement it becomes meaningless.
I think I've given up on the questions "is this very bad?" & "should this be illegal" not getting mixed into one.
Those docs refer to ephemeral storage. I haven't seen any claims by Amazon or test results that indicate it is also true for EBS volumes. I have been meaning to test this myself.
Your response is far from unusual; in fact, it's probably a greater example of the psychology of AGW denial

I hear "we've created a computer model from ten thousand variously interacting systems and we can predict temperature change in a hundred years" and I grab my wallet. I would think, as somebody familiar with complex systems and computer models, that I am acting rationally.

But who knew? As it turns out I have deep psychological problems that are expressing themselves in my opinions.

I have no idea what the climate is doing. And I'm perfectly happy with that. Others are completely entrenched in the idea that some future catastrophe awaits us all that demands immediate action.

Which group was it that is the example of some kind of psychological condition?
Lobbyists usually lobby for something or other--some government regulation to serve as a barrier to entry, some government subsidy of this or tax on that, but usually with some understandable commercial interest involved. I can't conceive of any self-interested goal that's furthered by combating anthropogenic climate change, other than mitigating the effects of it actually happening.
When this happened Samy was the roommate of a coworker of mine. Some time after the described events my coworker was in the shower when he heard hammering on the door saying, "OPEN UP! THIS IS THE POLICE!" He called back, "Just a minute, I'm in the shower." "THIS THE THE POLICE! COME OUT NOW!"

He thought it someone playing a joke so he decided to play along. He wrapped a towel around himself, opened the door, and found at least a half-dozen guns pointed at him from officers in several different forces, FBI, local police, etc. Let's just say that dripping wet and naked under a towel that is slipping off is not how you want to be for the next half-hour in front of a group like that. Particularly when they are not all men.

It turns out that they had a warrant to remove all computer equipment from the premises. Whether or not it belonged to Samy. This included my coworker's laptop. He was fast on his feet though, he pointed out his laptop and said, "That is eBay property, you'll have to talk with eBay legal before taking it." (We worked for Rent.com which had been purchased by eBay. The laptop was his personal laptop, but did contain some proprietary eBay stuff, mostly VPN stuff so he could work from home.) He managed to convince them not to take his laptop.

Samy's stuff, however, was gone for an extended time. His case got settled out of court. I don't remember the exact details, but I think he wasn't supposed to use the Internet outside of a work context for a period of time.
You're right. Asking you to accept anything as inherent is a big deal. If you do, you should have privacy pretty well defined.

I think that the problem is that private vs public is often a question of expectations. People know that when you sit in your car people can see you & when you site in your house people usually can't. If you become viewable (public) while in your house it feels like an "invasion" whether it is malicious (telescope) or not (neighbour's new attic window).

When we talk about privacy in complicated, non obvious & changing circumstances, people constantly feel invaded because they find out that they might be in public when they thought they where in private.

I think that invasion of privacy is mostly about knowing where you are at any given time & having private as an option.
In a world where watching other people is easier and easier, I don't think that asserting that not being watched is a human need is going to hold up. Data collection is only going to get easier in general, no matter what laws are passed. Cameras and listening devices are only going to become more prevalent, in spite of last ditch attempts by theater owners and angry police. Aggregation of everything that goes on around a person will become a tool that is so useful that those without it are like those refusing to use search engines today: able to get along, but at a noticeable disadvantage.

No amount of posturing and rhetoric about rights and privacy will long delay the world we're moving into; those are political activities, and the coming abolition of privacy is a technological and economic matter; politics can only weakly affect such things without becoming overwhelmingly invasive -- a solution more to be feared than the problem.
A commenter there also pointed out that if the performers do become employees under Cal/OSHA, the mandatory HIV testing they undergo will become illegal.
I know of two enterprises (about 3000 to 3500) one and the other about 5000 hosts that still use IE6. The devs recently started using Firefox 3.0 (or something like that). Guess what their JRE/JVM version is? :-)

Edit: A quick way to verify this is to run your webserver logs through "whois" for clients with IE6.
That monthly testing will become illegal if they become employees. See the Marginal Revolution post linked to above.
I'm with you that HPV is generally overhyped, and for bad reasons, but as far as I know, the strains that raise cancer risk are not much (if any) less common than the "low-risk" strains that don't. I can't find any reference for this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, we currently use Flash for audio as a fallback. We've been working on native audio with mixed results. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/news/Snow... It is definitely something we're continuing to work on tho. And thanks for the kind words!
You know, this whole episode could turn out to be a positive thing if he keeps pointing toward the Patriot Act as the real culprit. Which it is.
Just want to stop by and say that I used this service back when jedberg was here talking about it (a month ago or so I think) and was really happy with it.

I had some problems with their credit card processor and they (being reddit) responded to my emails withing a few minutes until we were both sure that everything was as it should be (this was impressive to me because I was spending such a small amount of money).

That and it ended up costing me about $0.10 CPC - considerably less than I remember spending on google ads back when I tried them. The lottery system really scared me, but it ended up working out pretty well. I'd definitely recommend it to anybody else.

People say that redditors are a terrible market to advertise to (they use adblock, etc.) but I disagree. I think they'd probably be a terrible audience to market to if you're selling teeth whitener or pyramid scheme "Google pays me $1000/hr from home!" things, but if you've got something useful to show them (like a webapp that they would like) then you're going to be buying a lot of eyeballs for not a lot of money.

All-in-all try it out - I was really happy with it.
> The procedure that generated the hockey stick graph doesn't generate roughly the same graph almost independent of the input data?

I'll do a little looking, but do you have some more information on this? I'd love to see it.

> The initial dump contained the uncontested statement that they can't explain the last decade's cooling....

This one I know off the top of my head. You're almost certainly referring to the now-infamous "trick", roughly related to tree ring datum.

There is still apparently some debate among climate scientists over what the differences in tree-ring measurements versus expected measurements actually means. It's going to take a while to sort out. Does it mean that the trees are growing very differently under different climates? Is there some property of tree growth that's been overlooked?

But either way, this is only one method of data gathering amongst many. To point to this one thing and say, "A-ha! This proves that the planet is actually cooling and thus this is a field that I don't have to understand" is exactly the same kind of tactic used by those who refuse to accept evolutionary theory for the divergence of species.

This is the case, again, with the data stations. I wholeheartedly agree that more effort needs to be put into monitoring them, and from that standpoint at least, the work being put into cataloguing them is important. However, even given all of their differences, and even assuming that there was no other data to go off of, they still would not lead to a dramatically different climate model.

The field of climate science is much more complicated than a smattering of weather stations and examinations of tree rings.

> And you know this because....

Look at my comment history.

I'm a former "AGW denier" who, years ago, was pissed that cans of spray paint stopped working right and was annoyed by emissions control systems in vehicles. However, climatology has remained one of my interests, and I've continued to try to understand it. I know far, far less about the field than any of the scientists actually involved in it, but I've seen enough to convince me that the human species is better off listening to their claims than the claims of those that can't be bothered to try.
Exactly what I'm thinking. I thought this tinfoil hat mentality has died with slashdot. Face it: any e-mail provider can read your e-mail, including the e-mail provider of your recipient. The sysadmin in your office can read your e-mail. Your ISP can read your e-mail even if you host your e-mail server (unless you use https). Same goes for the ISP of the recipient. The only way to be safe was if everyone hosted their own e-mail servers and used PGP/GPG to encrypt their e-mail.

Maybe it's time to stop being paranoid and start concentrating or real problems? Like pondering on how to create an e-book reader that doesn't suck or discovering how to cure AIDS and cancer efficiently?
>you shouldn't give it to someone that is legally obligated to tell the government about if they ask.

I think you nailed it right there; after carefully re-reading exactly what he said I believe that was the intended meaning.
I really object to people collecting data about me without my consent, because I value my ability to lie and misrepresent myself when it serves my purposes. I think that's an important part of human freedom, and taking it away is evil.
I did see a pretty significant slowdown on IE7 (XP service pack 3) in the Crystal Galaxy demo in the section where there's a wall down the center of the screen and a big mass of the "bubbles" both above and below. By the end of that, it's really chugging.

Firefox 3.5.4 is really smooth, though, and IE7 is surprisingly smooth even then.
It's a bit facile to say that it's evil for Google to watch us. Yes, a company can abuse the data in its possession, and yes, all that data in one place makes the government lick its lips in anticipation.

But don't forget, Google does a lot of wonderful things. Millions (billions?) of people's lives are enriched by Google's products, and most of those people (certainly those of us on HN) know that Google needs some information about us in order to deliver the things it delivers. The startups that will change the world in the next decade or two are likely to be built with the help of things Google makes — and which Google cannot make as well without some personal data about its users.

So yes, companies now know more about you than they did 20 years ago, and we should certainly note the dangers of that. But don't ignore the huge value of what you get in return.
The article's mention is a pretty weak use of the "Cargo Cult" analogy. It would be better if they just talked bout benchmark shenanigans in general. There is nothing particularly "Cargo Cult" about the situation. It's not as if the purported culprits are completely clueless at a paradigmatic level about what benchmarks are, but rather, that they aren't applied in a rigorous enough way. That's a far cry from making driftwood mockups of airports and radar sets. (More like using working radar sets that are unreliably cheap and trashy.)
Changing their ridiculous per-month pricing on femtocells would be a great start:

• $20 For customers who only have AT&T Wireless

• $10 For customers who have AT&T Wireless and either AT&T Internet or a landline.

• Nothing if you've got AT&T Wireless, AT&T Internet, and a landline.

From http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Femtocell-Website-Comes-Online-104559

Why would I have to pay for your bandwidth again if only Comcast is available in my area?
I have doubts about AGW not because I borrowed other people's opinions but instead I went to an original data source - the Global Historical Climatology Network - and plotted the raw (version 2) temperature data, both for different countries and also as a global average. The results show that there are a range of trends going on. Some, like that for Sri Lanka, are clearly related to geothermal activity. Temperatures for Countries such as the UK and Germany have neither increased nor decreased significantly over the last 150 years, and Canada, Russia (Asian sector) and China have been getting colder.

I know from examining the raw data that the global temperature graphs typically shown in the media contain significant distortions, which are due to missing temperature data within the series for particular locations. For example, Turkey only has reliable temperatures for the last 50 years or so, and when you add patchy series into the global average it appears to increase or decrease suddenly.

If I only plot temperature series which are more than 98% complete over the last 150 years the overall trend looks like a very linear increase in temperature of around 1-2 degrees. It certainly not obvious that there is a significant anthropogenic component.
I'm familiar with your point of view on this.

You're practicing argument-from-ignorance: you can't predict an outcome, so nobody else can, either.

Additionally, psychology does factor into all kinds of decisions, even those by "rational" persons. Sites like lesswrong and others on cognitive biases focus on exactly this.

Remaining ignorant of it doesn't make it less true.
True. I think a big danger underlying people's general reservations about this stuff is government abuse of all this newly available data.
I remember this essay from when it was new. To me, it is Schneier at his best, and it makes a perfect retort to the most pessimistic interpretation of what Schmidt said. And bravo to Schneier for doing so in a timely manner.

That said, I wonder what Bruce would say in response to a more optimistic interpretation of Schmidt's statement. What if Eric's sentiment was more along the lines of "if you don't want people to see you making love, then don't do it behind the bushes in Buena Vista Park"?
You could say that people collect data about you without your consent constantly. When someone says "mquander would hate that!" they are using a mental model of you that was built using data collected without your consent.
Why the Open Government Data Initiative is Awesome
The lesson in A/B testing isn't to find magic bullets in other people's results. It's to actually do A/B testing. If you could generalize from other people's results, you could just catalog what works and be done. It doesn't work that way.
Looming Geopolitical Disasters
The idea we have actually eliminated infectious disease from our day to day lives is silly. There have been massive strides in sanitation, but the primary benefit is clean drinking water, sanitary kitchens, and the removal of bodily wastes. Disinfecting your bathroom everyday does little to reduce the onslaught your immune system deals with every day. You could walk into a forest pickup a handful of dirt and eat it and your only real concern would be parasites. However, licking the average public door handle is best avoided.
Perhaps the simplest explanation for falling belief in the AGW theory is the best - that "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...]

I think what we are seeing is the gradual realisation that the alarms have been ringing a bit too loud, a bit too often, and people are beginning to wonder what all the rush is.

If you want an anology it's similar to when people realised that .com companies with massive costs and tiny sales weren't actually ever going to make any money, and started to sell. Remember the quaint term 'new economy'?
Well, it's a free alternative which is the main differentiator here.
Okay fair enough, let's assume that lying and misrepresentation are good things. So, how can Google be responsible for preventing your ability to lie or misrepresent yourself in a way that's not entirely within your power to prevent?
I've heard good things about Bento, but she'll need a Mac :)
http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/features.html
Exactly.

The immune system, like the muscles and the brain, can grow stronger with use...

This makes sense, but is it true? Without statistically significant evidence to back this up, we don't know for sure if it is true. It could also make sense that we are stuck with our immune systems like I am stuck being 6'3" tall.

I get the feeling that a lot of pseudo-scientific "natural" cures use a lot of common sense arguments, but have never gone down the scientific rabbit hole to make sure that the cure has been scientifically shown to be effective.
Going even further with your question, what's so wrong with Patriot Act when it's there to ultimately protect us? If there is information in one of our gmail accounts that can help to unveil the plans of an imminent terrorist attack that could potentially kill hundreds, would you not compromise 'privacy'? Where do you draw the line?
Outsourcing software testing
Don't you find it even just a little odd that in every other developed nation, the questions have been settled in a different way?

Gosh no, because I don't mix up discretionary spending with required spending. We spend lots on things we like to do, like sports stadiums, airports, etc. There's no reason we can't choose to spend some money on something like healthcare. I just wouldn't mix expenses like that up with expenses like the local vice squad.

My body is the most important piece of property I own. If the government protects some of my property (e.g. my house, from a fire), why does it not protect the most important piece?

Once again, these questions are long settled. Your body is indeed the most precious thing you own, and the government's obligation to protect your body ends in two places: at your skin (meaning the government really has no business telling you how to treat your body) and at your neighbor's property (meaning your right to live doesn't include stealing food from the neighbor's farm)

Once again, that doesn't mean that we can't help hungry or ill people. Of course we can. It just means that it's not the same kind of necessary invasion of private property as, say, drafting your kid and sending him off to war because the nation is in danger.
> Whether that's a good enough reason to require condom is worthy of discussion, but this guy evidently doesn't want that discussion to happen.

So is unprotected-sex pornography the newest scapegoat we're erecting to cover up our profound failures in sexual education? The last 15 years have seen schools engaging in the most ridiculous forms of sexual education imaginable, and then we wonder why people don't make informed decisions. It must be the porn.

It's this kind of authoritarian control-their-thoughts logic that gives rise to all sorts of absurd laws. It's not even clear that it'll do anything. It's legislation for the sake of itself.

So we can have that discussion, but I don't think it's going to go anywhere for that argument.
Don't Suck At Email
Did your data include ocean temperature measurements, ice mass measurements, and atmospheric temperature measurements?
I know the designers on HN will crucify me for saying this, but it seems to me there is a very real market for templates like this. Maybe even a blogozine startup?
I didn't like it at all. I liked the graphic showing who paid who what amount of money (and why), but the other graphics were unnecessary and made it hard to find specific information. I didn't want to read the entire article-I wanted to find the answer to the question.

But then again I may not be the kind of reader they are trying to attract.
Tis the season for Grad School Advice
So "AT&T To Curb AT&T Use" then?
De la Vega said that 3% of smartphone users are using 40% of data traffic.
I think you've answered the question for the wrong side. Climatology is an incredibly complex field and working out what the climate is requires multivariate modelling in order to try and work out what has happened and what will happen.

However, to try and simplify the theory for the man on the street, the AGW theory proponents have watered down the complexities to one villain : CO2. They are saying that, despite the complexities, despite the many variables, an increase in one of the least significant greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic (the word is everywhere - cue the screaming girl) warming.

The rational thinkers don't think the field of climate science is a hoax or conspiracy. What they think is that a small group of influential scientists is doing poor science and going to any length to keep a lid on it. A hoax implies forethought and planning. The reality is that they are caught up in the populuarity of the theory and the fame and fortune that it brings, and so are (probably) indulging in a good old 'us and them' groupthink session.
I get nervous around science that have political prescriptions mostly because of what I know about government intervention and how it have a tendency to create unintended consequences.

AGW can provide powerful excuses for expanding governmental power so I am naturally weary of the science.

That is not to say I don't think AGW is real. I accept the possibility that it could be real for the lack of climate knowledge. The only question is how much it should factor if at all in my long range decision making standard operating procedure.
Phil, you didn't make an argument about scientists. You made a blanket statement about everyone, and singled out the political classes.

It doesn't actually benefit anyone to convince people that anthropogenic climate change exists unless anthropogenic climate change actually exists. In fact, it's a huge pain in the ass for everyone...It doesn't even help the political classes...

Incidentally, scientific communities have gotten behind theories with little evidence for political or religious purposes: Lysenkoism and various eugenic theories, for example.