adelevie

I'm in law school now, so I'm pretty interested in your experiences as a techie-turned-lawyer. Does your software development experience impact your legal work in any way? e.g. , do you work on any tech-related practice areas?

Not sure how many hours go into finding these sorts of vulnerabilities, but his rate of $150/hour[1] seems like a steal compared to the lost revenues he can prevent.

[1] http://www.sakurity.com/

Where's the API?

This looks like a really useful library. A few questions:

1. What size limits/practical constraints are there on freezefiles (and accompanying JSON files)?

2. Are there any code samples for consuming freezefiles, or should I just assume it's simple JSON/YML parsing?

3. Has there been any thought in using this to expose database contents via static REST API?

Final thought: this seems like a great step towards solving the age-old version controlling data problem.

Which part of the Open Internet Order do you think this violates?

This is all nice and good, but can you point to any government/federal agency sources that are citing the Anti-Deficiency Act as rationale for the web shutdowns? Seriously, I'd like to know, since OP just tosses the idea out there at the end of the article without much discussion.

If the Anti-Deficiency Act is not used as justification, then your interpretation of the law, as applied to the web shutdowns, is moot.

This is a rather simplistic view of "bosses in the government."

Sure agency heads and managing directors might have their own opinions on the shutdown, especially since they were nominated by President Obama (or appointed by someone who was). But they have their own responsibilities as stewards of an agency. One responsibility is ensuring the agency acts within the law and shields itself from liability. Shutting down a website is a very reasonable measure for minimizing liability when there is no one around to ensure accuracy of content.

The author seems to take a one-dimensional approach to these determinations. There's much more at play than raw dollar amounts for running servers. While some commenters might see these web shutdowns as part of a larger strategy to win a political fight, they're overlooking some very basic and practical reasons.

Agencies are responsible for the content of their websites. If the agency is shut down, there is legally-significant content online that is under no chain of accountability. Every web page on a government site is a potential liability. In the normal course of business (e.g. when the government is not shut down), every piece of content goes through some sort of approval process, or at least someone can be held accountable for it.

Imagine a law is amended, but FCC.gov still has guidance published on the pre-amended statute. Kind of a crude example, but I think it highlights the problems of not going whole-hog on shutting down these websites.

Moreover, it's pretty difficult to not defer to an agency's judgment when they have been winnowed from ~1700 employees to something around 12.

Awesome. Happy to give my $0.02 on any number of potential verticals. My is email is my HN name at Google's mail.

This is incredible and ignore the haters.

My advice: fine-tune this for different verticals. I'd really love to use a tool like this for taking notes for law school classes. Wire up the search engine with cool parsers (e.g. a legal citation parser[1]) or something that pulls the decision[2] of a case from Wikipedia just by writing the case name.

[1] https://github.com/unitedstates/citation

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...

I've spent my fair share of time pouring over Parse's REST docs[1][2]. It's a fairly large undertaking to fully support all REST features, so it's still a decent trade-off to just use the JS SDK. If there are any Parse + Angular REST client projects, I'd be happy to contribute some code.

[1] https://github.com/adelevie/parse_resource

[2] https://github.com/adelevie/parse-ruby-client

Being able to avoid $scope.$apply() will certainly be nice.

As it stands now, if you want to leave the Angular reservation and use something like the Parse JS SDK (which is a customized set of Backbone models) your code will be littered with $scope.$apply(). Not very DRY, and also adds, from the dev's point of view, a needless level of nesting functions.

Will/can there be an Iron.io OAuth API?

Great post, Paddy. One thing I'd love to see in the HUD is a GitHub OAuth + repo webhook config. That is, you log in with GitHub credentials, you see a list of repos and can select which workers will get POSTed to after specific GitHub repo events[1].

Examples:

- The "adelevie/MyJekyllBlog" repo will POST to the worker "BuildAndDeploy" after event "push."

- The "adelevie/MyRailsApp" repo will POST to the worker "TestMyRailsApp" after events "push" and "pull_request."

[1] http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/hooks/

If anyone is interested in running an _ebooks account of their own, Jacob Harris of the New York Times wrote a Ruby library called iron_ebooks[1] which does just that. Using iron_ebooks, Harris has two accounts: @harrisj_ebooks, which uses his main twitter handle (@harrisj) as an input, and @harrisj_ebooks2 which uses @harrisj_ebooks as its input. The generated tweets have actually been pretty funny and well done.

Also, iron_ebooks uses Iron.io, so you get all the fun of an _ebooks account with all the "serverless" greatness of IronWorker.

[1] https://github.com/harrisj/iron_ebooks

Regulations and rulemaking info would be very useful for the area of law I'm interested in. Though annotations would be a great addition, I think just having a simple UX for searching and accessing these documents (Orders, filed comments, etc) would be a huge win. This is a problem I've been working on mostly as a hobby to scratch my own itch, and I'd be happy to discuss what I've learned.

One big pitfall I've noticed with taming regulatory data is that often each agency has its data siloed differently. Regulations.gov has been great for harmonizing many, many agencies, but here's a list of all the agencies that are currently "non-participating": http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.p.... This means you'd need a parser/scraper for each agency, assuming its rulemaking data is even made available in a sane format (like a spreadsheet).

Anyways, best of luck. Successfully wrangling legal data seems more difficult than building the Hyperloop.

Looks like Code Climate is providing an automated service like this for Rails apps: https://codeclimate.com/security-monitor

See my other comment in this thread for more detail, but why do we keep referring to the cable industry as some monolith? It's not true and obfuscates quality analysis.

> This will be lobbied into oblivion.

Nearly every regulatory issue in telecom (and likely most other industries, but I'll just stick with what I know) is lobbied extensively by someone. Most issues will, whatever the underlying intent, benefit certain sub-industries over others. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's virtually impossible to propose a regulation that won't affect the market. By definition, regulations are supposed to to affect the market.

To assume that "cable" will outright oppose this is false, and overly simplistic. Cable is hardly a monolith, and there are things in this proposal that different types of cable companies could conceivably support. NCTA, the larger cable trade org opposes the measure, while ACA (representing relatively smaller cable companies) supports at least many of the principles behind the proposal[1].

There's a big difference in policy goals between vertically-integrated and non-vertically-integrated cable companies. Comcast, as both a cable company and a content producer, probably does enjoy policies that allow for bundling and would oppose that certain part of the proposal. However, competing cable companies who are not vertically integrated would probably support such a measure. It's not a crazy thought that Independent Cable Co. X would like to pick and choose which channels to buy for its subscribers without being forced into a bundle. In other words, for the same reason that consumers might want this choice, many cable companies could want this as well.

The part of the bill that penalizes broadcasters who switch to pay TV is something that probably all cable companies, even the big ones like Comcast, could support. Retransmission consent fees paid by cable companies to broadcasters are increasingly high and a court-blessed Aereo would provide an avenue for cable companies to simply stop paying those fees (or at least give them a good bargaining chip in retrans fee negotiations).

Oddly enough, wireless companies (e.g. Verizon) might oppose this part of the proposal. They badly want spectrum, and if FOX and others leave the airwaves, this could help get that spectrum into their hands. As an aside, I think the threats from FOX are hollow for a number of reasons.

Anyways, getting a little bit meta here, but the telecom industry is where I've been interning (various places) and would like to work in at some point. There's no reason to expect the average HNer to know these intricacies. However, from what I've learned about telecom, I can at least have a better idea of knowing what I don't know about other policy arenas. Thankfully, this will prevent me from reaching super simple (and often flat out wrong observations) such as "[t]his will be lobbied into oblivion." Obviously lots of money will be spent opposing this, but that's true for nearly any regulatory proposal, and is far from dispositive of any outcome.

[1] http://www.fiercecable.com/story/mccain-bill-sparks-conflict...

Worth noting: The White House released the memo on GitHub[1] and used GitHub Pages to publish[2].

[1] https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-data.githu...

[2] http://project-open-data.github.io/policy-memo/

Prose.io does not require GH pages. You can use post-commit hooks to clone, build, and deploy your site to S3 (or anything else). I've got a quick example of it here: https://github.com/adelevie/iron-publish

Well, what's discussed in the article is a university mulling offering MOOCs to their students. I assume such MOOCs are not free.

At the risk of setting up false dichotomies, I wonder:

Will a MOOC instructor answer my emails, take a phone call, or meet with me in person?

Will a MOOC instructor help me network with potential employers and internship sponsors?

Will a MOOC instructor be my mentor and help me navigate an increasingly difficult job market?

Will a MOOC instructor connect me to other like-minded students and professors?

Will a MOOC instructor act as an advisor for any interest groups or clubs at my school?

Will a MOOC instructor know who I am?

Yea, I was off by a pesky decimal place.

Interesting. Of I course, I'm not trying to discourage this at all. I really dig this stuff. Just writing my thoughts on another, complimentary approach. I guess this makes sense from the perspective of a hacker who wants to build a cool thing for his/her own use.

The questions of efficiency really come into play when you see Yahoo! spending $30 million for Summly. For that, you could hire 60 people to work for $50,000/yr for one year. I wonder how 60 happily-employed English majors might stack up to something produced by Summly et al.

Isn't it always going to be more efficient for the producer of said text to produce the summary him/herself? Couldn't resources be better spent trying to influence the production process of various news outlets to provide summaries?

In the legal community (and I'm sure many others), there is tremendous benefit to writing concise introductory and concluding paragraphs, as well as tables of contents that act as excellent skeletons for much longer documents. In policy-land, the one-pager is king...but I digress.

I guess I'm just kind of lost as to how or when the cost of accurately summarizing text by computer is cheaper than basically "asking" the author to provide one. Will the quality of a computer-generated summary ever be >= the quality of an author-generated summary?

If you're wrong, what good is conviction? I'd think that's even more dangerous. It's easy to call out the cynics who misappropriate and obfuscate words for their own gain. It's scarier when people earnestly see nothing wrong with anything open being "a Linux."

Morozov bemoaned the overuse of "open." Now we take that a step further. Anything that meets the already-loose standards for being "open" can also be "a Linux." Is there any workable standard with which to limit this indulgence? Hopefully it's somewhere between a "Twilio for photos" and a realtor holding a "Linux house" for prospective home buyers.

It looks like we have a lot of different "Linuxes for online learning." Perhaps we should peg different open source LMSs to particular distros. Since edX and Stanford's system seems to be destined to be the most popular and user-friendly, we should from now on call it the "Ubuntu for online learning." Further, I suggest Wikipedia be called the "Arch Linux of online learning." Traditional colleges and universities can be called the "Drupal of online learning."

I know "X for Y" descriptions can be useful shorthand, but "Linux of online learning"? Really?

I know many HNers groaned at yesterday's Morozov essay, but we might do well for ourselves if we take some of the buzzwords back a notch or two. It would go a long way towards preserving the meaning and significance of important words. If anything that is "open" can be "the Linux of something," then what is Linux?

1) There are Access Control Lists which should help with that. Also, note that Parse gives you a Javascript key which is separate from your master key. Though I'm a longtime Parse user, I have not spent much time with the JS SDK on the client (as opposed to Cloud Code, where no keys are exposed), so I can't really say that this just "solves the problem."

2) Wouldn't any similarly-situated Javascript library face the same problems, with Access Control Lists probably being the most practical solution?

3) Moreover, with any mobile backend, you must assume that the keys that ship within the code of your native app will be public. So you should be using Access Control Lists if you're using the iOS SDK, for example.