skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any behavior or opinions they expressed, true or otherwise, would have built that mental model, and thus with implied consent by providing the information to them. If you provide information to someone, you are giving them consent to collect that data. The retention and use may be implied or explicit. Such as, if I told you "My luggage combination is 12345", I have consented to you collecting that information. There may be an implied expectation of you using, or not using that combination.

The key thing to understand about what is being discussed is that this is all with regards to an expectation of privacy. Such as, I buy product X and store Y every Friday. I have a reasonable expectation that store Y will not tell anyone that asks that I buy product X, or that I buy something every Friday, or that I buy product X every Friday.

This expectation of privacy is after having entrusted company Y with that information. An employee at company Y could suggest product Z to me, having seen me purchasing product X repeatedly. This is not an invasion of privacy as the information collected was with consent (I provided it to them), however, it may be a misuse of information collected, depending on any standing agreements.

However, if served with a subpeona, I should have no expectation of company Y withholding information, just as I have no expectation of preventing a search of my home if I was presented with a search warrant (providing the subpeona and warrant provide in them the necessary scope).
Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Myspace buries Imeem
Myspace acquires online music site imeem, announces plans to migrate "aspects of" imeem to myspace music.
My startup Pretty Graph is working on an online graph-making app, which will make such graphs easy to make in the browser. Sign up at http://prettygraph.com or email me at hrishimittal@gmail.com and I will let you know when we go live.

(My usual HN id is revorad, but I'm... err noprocrasting :-)
> (Side note: why does it have to be that you never hear someone say, "I love my cable/phone/internet company, you should sign up with them."?)

I've heard that about TekSavvy DSL in Canada, but they are reliant on Bell which controls the last-mile copper and started throttling even 3rd-party providers 1.5+ years ago. I never got to try them because I moved away around the time that I was considering moving over.
Blumpit: full-screen Firefox desktop (rough)
"People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?"

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

The quote was in response to a question about to what extent it is wise to trust Google(not a moral question, but a pragmatic one). All of Schmidt's response, except perhaps one sentence("If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.") which is itself ambiguous, is describing pragmatic reasons why Google can not legally protect you from the government. Given that the context of the remark in which "maybe you shouldn't be doing it" either means you shouldn't be doing something you want hidden, or means that you shouldn't be trusting Google with the knowledge that you are doing something that you don't want the government knowing about because they may not be able to keep that information from the government without violating the law, I'm inclined to interpret it as the latter.

With regard to "google v martyr" being a false dichotomy, how could Google not respond to a subpoena for the search data for a certain IP address without suffering legal consequences?
Your argument explicitly mentions "anyone" and "political classes"; in no way does it single out scientists. It's a very general argument which, based on context, I assumed you were specializing to scientists.

If you wish to claim it is true for scientists, but not people in general, you'll need to explain what special features of scientists make the argument true for them.

In any case, there is direct benefit to climate scientists to exaggerate the dangers/probabilities of climate change: it raises the importance of their field and by extension themselves. Exaggerated fears of global warming benefit climate scientists, just as exaggerated fears of the next great depression benefited Nouriel Roubini.
Depends on the job. I've seen some very unfortunate PC deployments (most in the 90s) that axed perfectly good 3270-based systems in favor of clunky, crash-prone, button-and-wizard GUIs that were so bad, employees had to go back to paper-based workflows to get their jobs done.

Terminal-based systems often have a very steep learning curve, but I've seen many cases where they were better designed and met business needs better than COTS replacements.

Granted, those terminal-based systems were probably phenomenally expensive when they were put in (mostly in the 70s or early 80s, that I saw), and I suppose it's possible that after 15-20 years we have a biased sample that only represents the best of the breed, but they got the job done.
It's akin to the argument Comcast trotted out when they claimed a similar disparity where a few (bittorrenting) users were consuming most of the bandwidth.

I guess AT&T can always start traffic shaping, but I'm wondering what exactly those 3% of people are doing since there's no real need to download massive files to the iphone and there's only so much streaming media you can watch / websites you want to refresh.
Yet Another Ruby-on-JVM implementation (dormant project)
Keep in mind that some people use their iphone as a wireless tether for their computer.
I wasn't in any way suggesting that warfare per se was related to my point. My point was that birth rates in America were very low during WWII due to men being off at war and incomes were astonishingly high, while at the same time there was little to spend it on, resulting in high savings rates. So this phenomenon of a growing economy and low birth rate has occurred before, right here in the USA. And the results of that -- the post-war boom time -- are generally looked upon as an idyllic time in America's past. So I don't see why this would be some kind of "problem" to do the same thing in China.
AT&T's cellular data plans are already capped at 5GB. Are they actually purposing to punish users who consume less than 5GB/month? Personally I have no problems with reasonable caps but I have a major problem with a previously established cap being lowered mid-contract. I can't see how it's even legally possible for AT&T to do this. It's straight out fraud, breach of contract, bait & switch advertising.

If they absolutely need to change the terms they will probably have to offer all currently contracted AT&T cellular data customers a penalty free contract opt out or at least grandfather in anyone who signed up for a 2 year contract with the terms of $30/month @ 5GB cap.
Once you label me, you negate me. - Kierkegaard

Specialization is for insects. - Heinlein

Eat my shorts. - Simpson
This is even better kungfu than the Flash bytecode verifier bug (from the same team!).
No one is saying CO2 is "evil", just that there are limits to how much we can safely emit into the atmosphere.

Incidentally, "carbon trading was invented by Ken Lay" is a classic logical fallacy. It's no better than saying "assembly lines were implemented in the auto industry by Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite who was decorated by Adolf Hitler and personally refused to assist in the war effort". Ford's evils don't invalidate the fact that cars are affordable, and Lay's evils don't invalidate the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
Usually if they change terms mid-contract you can cancel without penalty... now if only you could use your phone on another network without having to hack it then a lot of people would do that.

As it stands if you leave AT&T your iPhone becomes an iPod...
Credentialism (even for lawyers and doctors) isn't my favorite thing, but it's defensible by fairly reasonable people. But this baseless elitism is just too much.

"I'm not an astronaut" because I don't go to space, but "I am a musician" because I play the guitar, despite the fact that I do it poorly and have no formal education.
Personalised data is one thing. How long data is kept for is another.

Also, a theoretical possibility of a government demand for data is very different from a yearly demand for data on 5-10 people which is very different from a daily demand for data on thousands. US citizens/residents only or data on foreign residents? International terrorists? Terrorist states? Enemy states? Any states?

Which government? US only. Google invoices have an Irish address on them, btw.

A whole other spectrum of problems appears when you look at this internationally. The US has the Patriot Act? What other countries have or will have data seizing laws? Will Google hand over data to these? Does it depend on where servers are? Servers move.

It's not just that their position is unclear. Where you stand is unclear. People have no idea what could become of their data, what it can be used for & by who.
If You're Not Doing Code Reviews, You're Doing It Wrong
Instead of using 'unread' another option is to archive all messages and leave only in the inbox the pending ones.
Go read the full Bruce Schneier article that was also posted on HN.

According to you searching for an embarassing incident/health problem etc on Google is equivalent to putting your private diary on your coffee table? Well trolled.

Privacy is a fundamental requirement to remain human.
"a small group of influential scientists is doing poor science and going to any length to keep a lid on it"

That is in fact the definition of a hoax.

Tell you what. Why don't you publish your competing theory which explains global warming in a more convincing fashion.

You do have a competing, more plausible theory, right?

BTW -- the theory of evolution has poor explanations for several things in the natural kingdom. Does that mean it's a fraud, being perpetuated by a small group of scientists who are keeping a lid on more plausible explanations?

EDIT: Downrated? So, in response to an article talking about how people shut down their brains and respond emotionally, you start downrating people you disagree with rather than responding intellectually?
The more catchy title at Hack-a-Day was "robot will hand you your ass at beer pong."

That said this video is worth watching. Think of it like a positioning arm for spherical (ping pong ball, orange, onion) or ellipsoid shapes (water bottle). The device maneuvers objects through mazes and can handle stacked objects (two spheres in the same column of air).

IEEE Spectrum article on the device if you want to know more
http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/robotics/robotics-software/aut...
Really like Michael's clear writing style (remember reading Railsspace back in 07). Thx for this new resource.

Also like the fact that he doesn't use many gems, but discusses building stuff from scratch (regarding Railsspace book).
ciaopp: an advanced preprocessor
I was responding to the vague claim that statists, who have an interest in increasing the power of the federal government, are exerting influence on climate scientists to fraudulently manufacture a rationale for a presumably wide-ranging and invasive intervention in the economy. My argument is that it's very hard to identify any sufficiently powerful group with any identifiably vested interest in fraudulent climate science other than the petroleum, automotive, and energy industries.
Why does it surprise people that jquery is slow? Nothing new here.. jquery has always been pretty inefficient.
The most important take-aways from that article are that the actors will have to become employees which: (1) makes mandatory HIV testing illegal and (2) makes discriminating against HIV-infected actors illegal. How could either of these things be considered a good for the industry or the employees?
Have you read the text ?
Well, nobody would pay $20 per impression.

It will go exactly as high as people are willing to pay for it.
Ugh. This is incredibly annoying. It’s a dramatic change and one that is not at all obvious to users. The fact that third-parties have access to _everything_ about you and you have no way of restricting that is the worst.

Facebook’s attempt to characterise all the changes as improvements to user privacy is disingenuous.

Facebook is great tech and at times useful services run by a complete dickhead of a company. Facebook’s annoyances are outweighing it’s utility.
Finding my passion but....
Hello I hope someone can give an advice. I have posted in anonymity thanks to the internet. I am a university student in my last year. I am not particularly thrilled by my classes, but I do get motivated once in a while. How it usually happens, is that I'll get very motivated. I'll read extra material outside of class, and begin trying out some projects. I can get a lot done during this romantic period with my work, but after 2 weeks or so I get sick of it. I don't end up finishing what I have started. I have this problem with focusing on something in particular.

I usually do ok if not well in these classes. Nevertheless, this last semester I took a class that I have been able to keep fully motivated. My conflict is that I am not doing very well.. I am below average... I would like to pursue this field more deeply, but I am unsure what to do with my performance? I liked this field I can keep myself committed to it. Any advice? Thanks in advance
Strange phenomenon in Norwegian sky
If by "green screen" you mean 3270 terminal, then ... yes, but it would be pretty hard. The networking hardware for a 3270 is pretty expensive. (I was going to say "getting pretty expensive," but in reality SNA has always been expensive; it's just that other networking hardware has gotten dirt cheap by comparison.) And, of course, you need some sort of actual backend computer to attach the terminal to.

But sure, if you had a terminal, a spare IBM system (the iSeries is probably the lowest end) set up to support SNA, and then a networking controller to attach the 3270 to, you could probably get Lynx working.

Alternately, if you just want the effect, you could just pick up an old green/black monochrome display and hook it up (via a physical adapter) to any VGA card. Buggy implementations excepted, all VGA cards should be backwards-compatible to MGA.

Add a nice IBM Model M keyboard and you'd be all set. I suspect someone has probably done this as a case mod before (if not ... I might); stick a modern mobo in an old IBM PC case with the original monitor and keyboard.
Under what conditions does google have to turn over the search records? Can the government say, "Give ue all the records for those who searched for 'murder' related queries." I'm guessing not, and that a warrant must be presented, but I'm still curious.

My search history probably makes me out to be a psychopath, when in fact I just have a wide array of strange interests.
I can't seem to access gigaom.com. Is it just me?
I don't think a future where bandwidth is capped is going to work. We need more bandwidth in our homes. We will eventually need more bandwidth to our phones.

It smells of a limited-vision knee-jerk reaction. And my reaction is to bail on AT&T, jailbreak my phone and find a carrier that is wise enough not to play the bandwidth game.
I think this may be a place where anti-discrimination and OSHA bump up against each other. If producers can't turn down HIV-infected actors, then aren't they endangering their HIV-negative actors?

To answer your question, the risk of a condom breaking is much higher than a surgeon getting bodily fluids into a patient. Sexual intercourse necessarily involves production of bodily fluids with nothing but the condom to contain them. A surgeon is not required to produce highly infectious fluids as part of performing an operation. If a latex glove breaks during an operation what are the chances that some HIV-infected fluids will leak out and into the patient? What are the chances that an actor/actress will be infected when a condom full of HIV-positive semen breaks inside of them?
The problem here is that the design field doesn't seem to have separate forums for amateurs and professional.

I'm into photography, and that community has sorted this out fairly well (for good reason, it's much older than the craft of web design). There are amateur forums (where professionals participate, but nothing is judged for commercial quality), and there are professional galleries where people who do it for a living put their best work forward.

Nearly every place that showcases photography sits on one side of this divide - and make this context clear. You're either a place to show portfolio-level work, or you're strictly for-fun. This keeps the marketplace clear, and also doesn't confuse people trying to hire photographers.

Web design galleries like the one above don't seem to do this, so in a way they're the cause of their own problems. One hit wonders are only a problem if they're trying to get hired doing it, they're simply not a problem at the amateur level.
Designers resort to snobbery because they operate in a realm where everyone has an opinion, and thus they need to distinguish their opinions from those of the untrained in order to reinforce their value. It's a rational, albeit unfortunate, response.

They are the experts who are tasked with deciding on the color of the "bike shed":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_shed
Carmageddon was my first exposure to what I would call "tinkering" with games. I was amazed at the things you could get the cards to do by changing the cars' config files for speed, weight, wheel diameter and etc. I credit this game and "reverse engineering" Geocities sites as what sealed my fate in being some sort of developer or programmer. Not to mention it was a terribly fun game to play, regardless of the customization ability. I knew it had some controversy when it came out, but it's interesting to see just what they went through in getting it made.
If I'd known the video was going to get this kind of coverage I'd have rescheduled the meeting that confliected with this. Oh well...
Runners are baring their very soles
Incoherent is a good word:

"Don't build a framework ... It's advice the Perl Parrot and Radaku [sic] projects should probably have heeded ages ago, advice the Ruby on Rails people should keep in mind today."

Why does he cite open source projects as examples of things not to build in a startup context? The fact that Awesome Project X isn't (a) going to make lots of money right off the start, and (b) isn't currently the most popular project in its area doesn't mean it shouldn't be worked on at all...
They're different units. When chipmakers claim six-sigma (about 0.999999 reliability) they mean that when you order a million chips from them, on average 1 will be bad.

It's not apples-to-apples, but if you look at the number of lines of code executed before a noticeable bug it's in the trillions.
I have to admit, it seems a little odd to me that there's a clear divide in photography. The barrier to entry is low, and the quality of a photographer's output is somewhat subjective. Does my friend with his $500 camera, who gets paid (albeit rarely) to take pictures, fall on the "pro" or "amateur" side of things?
I'm like that with Verizon. I had their wireless service for years before I switched to ATT for the iPhone. I have their FiOS service now and LOVE it. Of course, I've never had to deal with customer service, so YMMV.
“We needed a reference for what someone getting run over looked like, so of course he was the volunteer nutcase and I was driving a half-ton Chevy station wagon at the time. There was a car park outside the office, so we went out there and drove into him repeatedly: he had a piece of cardboard stuck up his shirt, as if that would help. At one stage, Neil was driving, and Tony asked if he could floor it and hit him harder so he could clear the roof. Neil hit him at about 35mph and he went clear through the windscreen! The police turned up because they’d had reports that someone was being run over in a car park, but when they saw the camera and stuff they headed off.”

Who knew making video games could be so dangerous.
If you really like the field, give it more time before giving up. You may get better, or you may find a subset you're better at. Liking something is a sign you're on the right path, which is as much optimization as you want to do as an undergrad.
Everything is fine in FF. It was the Galaxy demo, but I tried the others too and they aren't working in Opera either. The Mario one does work, except the space bar Pages Down, so it isn't playable.

Opera info:
Version
10.10

Build
1893

Platform
Win32

System
Windows XP

Java
Sun Java Runtime Environment version 1.6

XHTML+Voice
Plug-in not loaded
And why don't they do the same with DNS queries?

Quoting from the recently released public DNS service:

"The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using... We _delete_ these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours."

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

Is there anything in the Patriot Act that says explicitly that search engines should keep search logs but not DNS queries?
Eric Schmidt is an American business leader. He has the same First Amendment rights as anybody else. He is obligated to follow the law, but he is not obligated to do so without complaint, let alone make excuses for his activities and those of his government.

Schmidt could have said "We understand that Google collects a lot of data; we have privacy policies that protect that data and we fire anyone who abuses them. We take data privacy very seriously. But we're aware that people are unhappy that various governments can compel us to disclose data. We believe that this is wrong. We believe that a world where anonymous government employees can see anything you do is a dangerous world. We believe in the power of data, but we want to encourage society to take steps to prevent this kind of abuse."

But he didn't, of course. Instead he told us that the innocent have nothing to hide.

it's unreasonable to expect [Google] to martyr themselves for our sakes

"Martyr", indeed. That is no mere hypothetical. Read this:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1910.html

This is Herta Mueller, formerly of Romania, describing her life in the Ceausescu regime. There you could, indeed, face harsh reprisals, ranging all the way up to martyrdom, for refusing to spy on your fellow citizens.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect those people -- Mueller's friends, stuck in a scary totalitarian regime -- to stick up for their principles and resist the state's order to inform on their friends. (Though many did resist, and paid the price for it.) But Google? Google isn't even human. It has no fingernails to pull out. It is an American corporation, whose leaders live in America, with enough legal budget to sue God himself. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the company's leader to use some of that power to lobby for good, instead of looking sheepishly at his feet, kicking the dust, and claiming that he's only following orders.
36 million people with TB cured
Reasons to Drop NDAs
Divvyshot (YC W09) launches free iPhone App
Should You Hold "Office Hours"?
from spaceweather.com:

UPDATE: Circumstantial evidence is mounting that the phenomenon was caused by a malfunctioning rocket, possibly an ICBM launched from a Russian submarine. A Navtex no-fly alert was issued for the White Sea on Dec. 9th, and photographers appear to have recorded the initial boost phase of a launch below the spiral (see inset). A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern, so this explanation seems plausible, although it has not yet been confirmed.

http://spaceweather.com/