kjackson2012

Hyperbolic nonsense? I suggest that you educate yourself on what is going on right now. There is no hyperbole, there is no pollution, there is only uneducated folks like yourself that don't seem to understand that things have broken down.

Obama signed off on the execution of known American citizens via drone attacks. These are American citizens that are protected by the US constitution against things like this. We're not talking about Pakistani citizens, or Afghanis. They were American citizens. Sure, they may have been terrorists, but they deserved a trial. Just like the Oklahoma Bomber, and the Unabomber. If you think it's okay for the US government to target its own citizens for drone execution without a trial, then we really don't have anything to discuss here.

http://rt.com/usa/us-government-drone-killing-660/

Kevin Mitnick was thrown into prison, and suffered years in solitary confinement because of lies told by the US government. The 8th amendment to the Constitution is supposed to protect American citizens from this, but because of lies and delusion, they subverted the Constitution because they "feared" that Mitnick would become a nuclear terrorist and destroy the US. By saying that the US needed to be protected from Mitnick because he could start a nuclear war with whistles in a phone, they essentially charged him with being a nuclear terrorist, before it became chic. Yes he committed crimes, but they were social engineering crimes and electronic hacking. Nowhere did he even have a hint of wanting to destroy the US, and yet somehow his charged were trumped up to nuclear terrorism. This was 1995. You don't think today he would be thrown in Guantanamo or some other military prison indefinitely at this point? I have NO confidence that the current US government would give him due process in this day and age.

If you missed this news article, 3 religious nuclear protesters broke into a poorly guarded nuclear facility and set up a protest. Over the course of a few months, their charged escalated from trespassing to charges of sabotage and "intending to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States and willful damage of national security premises in violation of 18 US Code 2155, punishable with up to 20 years in prison."

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

They are now jailed because "the court ruled that both the sabotage and the damage to property convictions were defined by Congress as federal crimes of terrorism".

And, of course that poor kid who was thrown in jail for making a terrorist threat for uttering a stupid "joke" online about killing kids.

Now, explain to me again how what I'm saying about Guantanamo is "hyperbolic nonsense"? Do you really believe that in this environment we're living, that Mitnick wouldn't be charged with terrorism? More importantly, is this really the US that you want to live in?

You probably won't read this, but:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/animal_fore...

It's not enough that an asteroid hit the Earth, but it's such a simple theory that everyone can remember, it has been popularized by everyone.

Exactly. Technology and especially things like cryptography and hacking, can potentially get you thrown in jail again, after a decade of peace. Does anyone even remember the immense legal problems that Phil Zimmermann had with releasing PGP? What about Kevin Mitnick? They put Mitnick in solitary confinement for years because the US government convinced a judge that "he had the ability to start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone" (as per Wikipedia). Guys, this is what we're dealing with, except now we have Guantanomo Bay where US citizens can be thrown into indefinitely with no due process for potentially being a terrorist.

Are we bound to repeat the same mistakes again, because a generation of "hackers" don't want to educate themselves on the importance of politics and concepts like "freedom"? Or is all you want to do is sit back, and fantasize that you will create the next Facebook, and you won't have to care about things like freedom, the Constitution, etc?

If HN wasn't interested in politics, the threads wouldn't make it onto the first page. If you don't like the post, then downvote/flag it. If you don't like the post, but your peers do, which appears to be the case, then suck it up. That's the whole point about crowdsourced moderation, you might not like what you see. Crying over the content of crowdsourced newsfeeds because it's not showing what you want is ridiculous.

Politics has been extremely important in the past several weeks to many Americans. It turns out that our hacker peers have been using technology to circumvent the Constitution. This isn't something done by lazy, government-level programmers. If you look at some of the other IT projects commissioned by the government, like consolidating government datacenters, those projects have all essentially failed. Instead, as Snowden demonstrated, you have a very, sophisticated mechanism to view everything about anyone. The programmers at the NSA are the very best of our peers. And they are working on arguably illegal programs that have made the US a worse place. It's certainly a worse place for foreigners who want to use services like Google, Facebook, etc. If I were a foreigner, there's no way I would use those services, since I have zero protection or privacy against the NSA. And if you are one of the 0.01% startup success stories and become billionaires, you will now need to face the US government and hand over all your user data.

Forgetting about politics, forgetting about things like the Constitution, and living in your bubble of a life is great if you're a kid, but the world doesn't work like that. Things like DefCon that remind people that sometimes you do have a reason to be paranoid is important. I was talking with an Ivy League 19 year old, and he didn't care that the US government was potentially reading everything about him. He said he had nothing to hide. This is the type of fate we need to avoid, having the seemingly best of the best being uneducated on things like like politics and ideas of simple freedom.

The theory that dinosaurs died due to a meteor is already outdated.

This. The Catholic Church supports both the Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang Theory (no jokes about the TV show please). So don't blame the Catholic Church for this one. Given that South Korea is split between Catholics and Buddhists, it doesn't seem like there is a particularly religious reason for this trend.

Is this "revelation" really that interesting? Everyone knows that Microsoft can't fight anyone based on price. Every salesperson in the same situation knows that the only way to fight low price is by selling based on perceived value. "Oracle is expensive, but if you compare its value, it's much cheaper." BMW can't compete vs a Hyundai based on price, they need to compete based on perceived value. For me Hyundai is more than adequate, because I only look at my car as a way to transport myself, not as a status symbol or an extension of my being. For those that do, good for them, and they will find value in a BMW.

Same goes for MSFT vs Linux or GOOG, etc. There's nothing new here.

Is it true that Google does not protect the rights of non-US users from having their emails read and copied by the NSA?

If that is the case, then why would any foreigner ever use Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc?

It's so creepy how Zuckerberg and Page, as well as every other CEO's responses are worded exactly the same. The same goes for Apple too. It's entirely not believable that everyone's answers would sound so similar.

So we're expected to trust someone that has been lying to us for 5 years?

- What indirect access does Google provide to the government?

- What lawful data does Google automatically provide to the government without any requests?

- Can the government can ask Google for data once, and then Google is required to constantly supply data, periodically? If so, what is that data?

- What data does Google provide to the government upon request?

Do they hire H1B's? That would be a really quick clue as to whether or not they are doing work for NSA. None of my Indian friends know any H1B that works at Palantir, which is really odd, but maybe other people have different anecdotes.

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Sorry, but why exactly is the founder of Referly posted on HN as if they actually have credibility? I've seen a bunch of posts by them, but if they can't generate $40k in revenues... do they actually know what they are talking about?

There are too many snakeoil salespeople that talk authoritatively on subjects, but don't actually have success to back them up. Referly definitely seems like someone in this category.

The problem of ageism is pretty well documented in engineering, especially software engineering.

I'm in my 40s, and I've been programming my entire career. I'm trying to get into management so as to extend my career into my 50s and 60s. The realities are that I likely won't be able to compete against kids 1/2 to 1/3 my age in the next 15 years, so I need to use my experience to my advantage.

It's too bad because I would rather just program.

Congrats, you singlehandedly killed any desire for anyone to ever want to acquire your business. Who would possibly want to buy a business where the founder is ready to abandon ship as quickly as possible?

Or, in Reddit parlance:

"Bro, do you even lift?"

Half the time with same amount of bugs? I consider low bug-count as part of the requirement for "predictability", since a buggy product isn't considered finished.

If you're talking about someone who consistently hits their deadlines with a low bug count, vs someone who gets it done in 1/3 of the time, but 1.5x as many bugs, I would prefer the person with the longer but more predictable times.

As well, if the entire team is targeting 6 weeks, and the unpredictable person finishes their task in 3 weeks, then it means that the entire schedule gets out of joint. I would prefer the person had better insight into the task and say it would take 3-4 weeks, so that other work could be properly scheduled.

Sorry but I disagree. The best engineers are the ones that can plan reliable estimates and hit their targets. They deserve to be highly paid, since they create stability and predictability in an otherwise chaotic process. You don't have to be a speedy coder in order to be highly valued. You just need to be reliable, and the team needs to have confidence in the work that you do.

To do things like cut the number of features in half and double time estimates, as is advocated by the author, are things that only contribute to red tape and chaos.

Of course this is helping. They aren't convicting anyone, they are tracking down leads. I'm sure the police would be engaging in this exact same exercise if they had the manpower. Luckily, there are hundreds or thousands of motivated volunteers who are willing to sift through this data and hopefully something really good is in there.

In another era, maybe 5+ years ago, any API provider that had such draconian service terms such as Twitter would have been promptly dropped by most API developers.

Why do people continue to develop to Twitter's API? It's obvious that Twitter doesn't want people to use their API. In my years of developing on top of 3rd party APIs from Microsoft, Oracle, etc, I've never seen such contempt for developers as I see from Twitter and Facebook. Developers should abandon Twitter en masse.

But they don't. Developers keep using the Twitter API and they keep getting shut down after spending significant time developing their app. Fool me once, shame on them, fool me twice, shame on me.

I think developers keep doing it because they are still hoping for that one app that will get them acqu-hired by Twitter or Facebook, so that they can become fabulously rich. It's the one big difference between now and 5+ years ago, and especially before the Instagram acquisition.

The only way it "works" is if people start using it to pay for goods and services.

Right now it is an investment vehicle for speculation. And the crazy volatility suggests to me that most people won't feel comfortable using this as a currency for transactions, until the volatility decreases immensely.

This entire incident has snowballed from ridiculous to insane.

However, I find it interesting that Playhaven wasn't DDOS'ed for firing the guy. If they had acted rationally and didn't fire him, this wouldn't have been the unmitigated clusterfuck that it has turned into.

They forgot to add that all childish jokes should not be shared amongst each other, ever.

It doesn't just pertain to diamonds. It's the same thing with expensive clothes, bags, shoes, wines, cars, gadgets, etc. It's just a way to flaunt one's wealth. It's unfortunately a side effect of our consumption-oriented society.

Facebook can lose 50% of its users and still have more users than basically anything else on the Internet. All they need to do is figure out how to monetize these users consistently, and they will be fine.

Only 3 exit Tor nodes in the Bay Area? I'm surprised, I would have expected a lot more.

That's not how a market works. First it overshoots its "true value" because of a buying frenzy and then falls back down, rinse and repeat. I can't speak to whether right now it is still on the rise, or if has overshot its "true value" and then it's going to drop. Some people believe the former, others believe the latter. Differing opinions is what makes a market.

So far, momentum is on the upside, but don't think that it will just neatly and asymptotically reach its "true value". Expect a lot of volatility. The fact there isn't a lot of volatility here means that consensus is that prices will continue to rise.

A rising price does not imply long-term viability. A stable price does. For long term viability, people can't just be buying and selling it, they should be transacting with it. It seems like the most active form of Bitcoin use that I've seen is trading. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a double-edged sword, as people learned last year. Once more and more regular people actually start using it for real purchases, then I'd be more willing to say there is long-term viability.

At the Safeway where I live, there are nuns that stand outside with a grocery list of food they ask people to donate for them. I didn't know if they were really nuns so I asked the cashier, and they confirmed it, so it made it a lot easier for me to go ahead and donate food. They make food for the homeless and the donation goes straight into feeding these poor people so it's a lot better than giving food or money directly to the person, who will likely use it for drugs, etc.