Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/nsl-found-unconstitutional/ <comment><USER2> _Great_ work by the EFF here. There is a delicate balance between the power of the executive and the power of the courts and trying to chill the telecom's access to the court system by claiming that the company was interfering with an investigation by challenging the NSL is a deeply troubling action. Abuses can be fixed, but not if they can't be challenged in court.

<comment><USER3> Kudos also to the unnamed telecom company that went out of their way to fight this, and the EFF for fighting the good fight. Don't forget to donate to them.

<comment><USER4> Credo mobile, it's in the article.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, Credo is sort of a bizarre little company. They created a Super PAC to oppose tea party candidates and to support public financing of campaigns, i.e., outlawing Super PACs (they were a total anomaly in this regard). In 2011, they received one of those so called "national security letters" and just completely stonewalled the FBI. Thank god for this one activist mobile carrier or this case would've probably never happened.

<comment><USER6> Credo is the latest incarnation of the old Working Assets long-distance firm, if you're old enough to remember them and that helps explain their politics.

<comment><USER7> Wow,nice!

Just saw their website. Impressed by the progressive values, saddened by the partisan politicking ('fight the right', WTF?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This part is a big WTF: "After the telecom challenged the NSL, the Justice Department took its own extraordinary measure and sued the company, arguing in court documents that the company was violating the law by challenging its authority."

<comment><USER9> This is exactly what's _supposed_ to happen; the DoJ brought the dispute to the judicial branch and asked a court to resolve it, as opposed to arresting people or seizing control of the assets. They didn't seek the breakup of the company or the arrest or ruin of its officers, they asked the court to require compliance with what they believed to be a valid request in the form of the NSL. The court sided with the defendant, and the DoJ is going to have to abide by that unless they win at appeal.

This is exactly why we have a judicial branch to begin with. You should be celebrating.

<comment><USER10> Wrong. The telecom's suit is the challenge that you're talking about. The second suit claims that the first lawsuit is illegal. It would mean that you're not allowed to challenge the government in court. It would make your flowery language invalid.

<comment><USER11> > It would mean that you're not allowed to challenge the government in court.

IANAL, but is it not true that you can only sue the government to the extent that it lets you?

Can a lawyer chime in on the extent of sovereign immunity?

<comment><USER12> > IANAL, but is it not true that you can only sue the government to the extent > that it lets you?

It doesn't really matter what _laws_ say about that. Your only recourse against wrongdoing by the government is the justice system run by _the very same government_. It's certainly within its power to decide not to _punish itself_.

This is perhaps something to think about.

<comment><USER2> The government isn't a monolithic entity. It's composed of people who have often differing interests to each other. The justice system is run by the government, but that didn't stop e.g. the Supreme Court from ordering the bush administration to give process to the Guantanamo prisoners (and the administration complied!)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, and of course this is just fundamental separation of powers by design, else the government would be exactly a monolithic entity.

But, then this type of victory seems rare these days, as the Executive has grabbed so much power since 9/11. Seems the balance has been upset.

<comment><USER2> The "power grab" since 9/11 is mostly imagined. There is very little the President can do now that he couldn't in 1970, and as a practical matter he can do a lot less than he could in 1955.

<comment><USER13> Not true. In fact, that's a pretty astounding statement.

Executive power has expanded greatly since 9/11. The PATRIOT Act alone vastly expanded law enforcement capabilities. Law enforcement, of course, being of the Executive and including the DOJ. In fact this thread likely wouldn't need to exist if not for the expansion of NSL under the PATRIOT Act. Many of the rights that we ceded as citizens were given over directly to the Executive.

Remember, the Executive branch is more than just the President, but includes all departments under his purview.

I think if there is a myth it is among those who believe that nothing has changed simply because some of these mechanisms (such as NSL and FISA) did exist prior to 9/11. But, in addition to new powers, it is the expansion, interpretation, and application of existing powers that have also represented a large share of the power grab. This started with Bush after 9/11 with his adherence to the theory of the strong unitary executive. This is when we began to see the letters of his attorneys, which re-interpreted existing powers much more broadly and sought to justify unprecedented Executive actions retroactively. That there was never a trial indicates that they were, in fact, successful in their claims to additional power.

Of course one can also point to launching pre-emptive wars as an unprecedented power grab--perhaps of the highest order.

And, essentially, these powers continue to expand under Obama, up to and including the remarkable justification of drone strikes on American citizens.

<comment><USER2> This is mostly just "truthy." In reality, federal surveillance was dramatically higher during the Cold War (modulo improved technology), and the idea of the strong unitary executive dates to the founding of the republic. Stuff that you claim is "unprecedented" is anything but. The concept of "preemptive war" has no real distinguishing characteristic in an American history full of military interventions absent direct attack.

There is nothing "remarkable" about the justifications for drone strikes against ostensible American citizens who have taken up arms against the U.S. and are not on U.S. soil. Skirting along a murky and untested line? Sure, but not "remarkable." There is no consensus among legal scholars on the issue, and it is not without precedent (there are records, of various reliability, of Americans who fought for the Nazis and were killed in the war).

<comment><USER14> Further, and tangentially, the idea that I have to remove my shoes prior to boarding a commercial airliner, without any (I've never hijacked a plane before) probable cause, in the same airport that I once carried weapons through while in the service of the US Army, is a definite affront to my sensibilities, especially as a loyal American.

Just because a small group of predominantly Saudi Arabian nationals hijacked some planes doesn't mean that _I'm going to do so._

There were hijackers back in the 1970's, but no one was subjected to such indignities as we are now. Before anyone mentions "the shoe bomber," how about "the underwear bomber?" Following the shoe removal logic, the next step is strip searches of _all_ passengers prior to boarding, right? Someone might have some explosive underwear! /sarcasm

<comment><USER15> By this logic you've just eliminated the point of all security screenings of anyone, anywhere, ever.

Yet most people would agree that it would be foolish not to take some precautions when loading 300 people on a cigar-tube cylinder in the sky.

It's worth noting that in the 1970s people weren't trying to commit mass casualty attacks with planes via the passengers nearly as often. Today, no one expects a conventional hijacking either.

<comment><USER13> By your logic, the extent to which we protect American ideals and freedoms is a function of what other actors do. Worse, it is the most egregiously abhorrent actors who would drive our direction most.

The problem with this thinking is that it has brought us exactly to where we are today. It is a very slippery slope that can literally destroy the fabric of this country. There is no end to what can be justified under the pretext of security and we have already given up too many freedoms in the name of "security". I will omit the famous Ben Franklin quote regarding freedom and security, but it certainly comes to mind.

Those who would argue that it is necessary to curtail freedoms and rights in exchange for protection, must acknowledge that what they presume to protect would be a wholly different America, and they must be well with this new America. To make that argument would be honest and a simple matter of opinion, but to suggest that we can continue on this course without fundamentally altering this nation is nothing more than illusion.

<comment><USER15> Your freedoms are hardly being overtly invaded by being security screened when you fly. Whether the security screening is _effective_ or a distraction is a different question (or dangerous, in the case of the X-Ray backscatter).

I'm curious what freedoms you think you've given up in the name of security, that aren't simply complaints about being inconvenienced. Because there's plenty of real problems, but, in the context of this little comment-chain, the issue was airport security.

<comment><USER13> You mean what's more invasive than being groped and having an image of my genitals taken when I fly? I think that's overt enough and more than mere inconvenience.

Also not sure how you discount being exposed to dangerous radiation as not "overtly invasive". I certainly don't see that as a different question.

But, I actually wasn't focused on airport security as much as the spirit of your response. This idea that we have to meet everything the bad guys do with "more security", which does equal less freedom, rights, and privacy. The PATRIOT Act, of course comes to mind.

Though, it certainly applies to the airport scenario too. Bad guys put a bomb in a shoe? We all take off our shoes now. Bomb in the underwear? We move to backscatter machines that image what's underneath. Where does it stop? It's crazy, and it's a product of the same general reactionary thinking that brought us the "plenty of real problems" you referenced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the main points of the U.S. constitution is to provide checks and balances so that one branch of government cannot ac t unilaterally without oversight. For the executive branch to argue that in this case there is no way to challenge it is disingenuous at best and at worst, as this judge pointed out, unconstitutional.

It's frustrating to me as a citizen that if a government agency decides it has a problem with me, I'm pretty much screwed unless I have plenty of cash to hire the best lawyers.

<comment><USER9> Realistically, you are just as screwed if any large organization launches a civil suit against you. Congress frequently produces laws that attempt to mandate the behavior of the Executive branch* while excluding that behavior from judicial review (which courts do not take kindly to and frequently dismiss).

A lot of legislators do not like the Judicial branch and consider it to be an annoying restraint on their lawmaking power; what looks like tension between the Executive and Judicial branches is often as not a proxy for Legislative claims. Whenever you see a piece of legislation with phraseology like '[officer of some executive branch agency] shall do x, y, z, in the following fashion...' pay attention to the word _shall_. In law this is understood to make the action mandatory, and where the law is very specific on procedures and actions it's basically an attempt to micromanage the operation of the agency in question.

Consider the following imaginary law:

 _If any person wears white after Labor Day, the head of the Fashion Police shall cause that person to be arrested and fined $1,000. This procedure shall not be subject to judicial review._

Now if you're the Fashionista-general, you have _no choice_ but to arrest people wearing white after Labor Day [for non-Americans, wearing white after late September is jokingly regarded as an offense against good taste]. Failure to do so clearly violates the oath of office required of office-holders in the Executive branch. And the same law says that you don't get to complain about this in court, so judges are supposed to dismiss your case without even giving it a hearing. That will make people mad with the Fashion Police and frustrated with the Courts, even though the blame for this law lies with the Legislature.

Here's an example of a real law that operates this way, from a current immigration statute: <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1252>

Note section (a)(2)(A)(i): the law applies to people who receive orders of removal, aka deportation orders (a); it's explicitly not subject to judicial review (2)(A); and the procedures for dealing with individual cases are very narrowly specified in the section linked to from clause (i), with a lot of detail specifying how people shall be categorized and treated.

<comment><USER17> And (a) explicitly not constitutional in that it attempts to bypass the limits knowingly placed upon government by the people. An order to bypass auditors is _never_ valid, especially from government.

That you think this is okay is scary. But this is why we need to remember that the law is an imperfect rendering of our intent, not the other way around.

<comment><USER9> You need to distinguish between the different branches of goverment; it's not a monolithic entity, nor is it constituted as one.

It's not as clear as you think that the example above isn't constitutional, because in making immigration law Congress is exercising one of its enumerated powers to 'establish an uniform rule of naturalization,' and an argument can be made that the Judicial branch has business poking its nose into that situation. Likewise, there's a school of legal philosophy - a minority one to be sure, but present nonetheless - that _Marbury v. Madison_ , upon which much of the judicial power to constrain the other branches rests, represented an inappropriate overreach by the Marshall court - a criticism first voiced by no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison#Criticism> for example.

 _That you think this is okay is scary._

You have no idea what I think is OK. I'm telling you how it works now, not how I'd like it to work.

<comment><USER17> I know the government isn't a monolithic entity - we rely on it being many departments in many agencies all full of individual people each bringing their own ethics into play or we'd simply have an automated dictatorship - Chinese- Room style. The problem we're discussing is one governmental body trying to remove peoples' recourse to appeal to the other branches of government, specifically to avoid their work being audited.

By that tired "X needs Y, thus X implies Y for any interpretation of X" argument the existence of bottled water makes drinking of rainwater fall under federal control via the inter-state commerce act. It's kind of clever in one sense but pointless in another.

And if you don't think this is okay you sure spend a lot of time "explaining" it. We weren't having a cite contest but you sure tried to win, and in doing so you don't miss my point so much as you try to overrule it with precedent.

We wouldn't have a system of carefully enumerated powers if we really didn't care and they all just meant the same thing. In the end, yes, we still end up governed. But in the same way people dislike trusting a single company with all their services they dislike trusting a single governmental body with too much power. And the power we really can't let anyone have is the power to grant themselves more power. If there's a law, or combination of laws, that read that way, it's a bug not a feature.

<comment><USER9> I have a lot to say about it because I'm very interested in law, as well as theories and philosophy of law. I feel these offer some important context that is otherwise missing from these discussions, and that many people are unaware of. I'm not trying to swamp your point, though.

<comment><USER17> I too am interested in law, but more with anthropological curiosity. My thinking on governance is akin to the rape model though - all that matters is if they're currently saying "No".

It looked like you were just saying that eminent people (Jefferson) had once thought the courts too powerful among the branches of government and that this had bearing on this situation via some "requires the powers to enforce their mandate" argument.

Where were you going with it?

<comment><USER9> Oh, just pointing out that quite eminent historical personages had different opinions on the merits of judicial review, and that similar views still exist today, although they're in a minority. I think people are inclined to assume that The Way Things Are is much the same as How They're Supposed To Be, when in fact the country might have developed quite differently very easily, despite having started from the same constitutional beginning.

<comment><USER17> I've re-read your earlier post and I have to say that any view that requires the supreme court to enact laws they find outside the scope of the constitution is just baffling and tautologically wrong.

Marbury v. Madison didn't establish a power, it clarified the obvious. If the law oversteps the bounds of the constitution the court has no power to enforce it - their and congress' own power being derived from the constitution. Nobody can be ordered by law to do something beyond the scope of law.

But above and beyond that, "The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in [the supreme court]" is pretty clear - congress passes laws and the courts enforce them. If a single entity was desired, it'd have been specified.

It doesn't mean the SC is the final arbiter of constitutionality, the people are, but they certainly have the ability and duty to say no.

<comment><USER9> I don't subscribe to the view that the Supreme Court has to allow laws dramatically outside the constitution to stand; I said there exists such a school of thought with some influential members, whether I agree or not. The SC can't enact laws, that's what Congress does.

The Executive branch enforces the laws, per article II section 3 of the Constutition. The Judicial branch adjudicates disputes, it does not enforce anything.

The SC _is_ the final arbiter of constitutionality - as Justice Robert Jackson said, it's not final because it's the SC, it's the SC because it's final.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This will open up our Monday morning schedule nicely if we no longer have to maintain:

<http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt>

It would be our great pleasure :)

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't this just be considered premeditated intent to violate the NSL gag orders?

<comment><USER20> I think it works like this. They are not permitted to tell you that they _have_ been served a warrant, but they are always free to tell you that they _haven't_. If they should suddenly stop doing so, its up to you to draw your own conclusions as to why. That seems reasonable, even in the context of the madness of federal law.

As the text file says however, its always possible that they are being coerced to lie and continue to say that they haven't when they have.

<comment><USER21> I'm curious where the line is drawn.

What if they had a different file for every user?

What if one were to setup an independent site that reported the presence/absence of these files on 3rd party sites, but explicitly pointed out that the absence of the file, given the history of it's presence, meant there was a high probability that a NSL was served to a specific site, for a specific user...

<comment><USER22> I would be proud of their efforts to push back against an increasingly Orwellian government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As at

[http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Eternal_vigil...](http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Eternal_vigilance_is_the_price_of_liberty_%28Quotation%29)

attributed to Jefferson is

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

So, US citizens need to resist the excesses of big gumment and, moreover, as good news, can do so with a simple letter to their Congressman and Senators, if enough citizens do that.

E.g., it was good to see SOPA/PIPA go down for the count after one punch from a flurry of publicity and letters to Congress. I wrote all three of my guys here in NY.

One way to get more such needed letters is more information on the Internet as here on HN. While the EFF seems to do a lot of really good work, the legal system is slow while a few 18 wheel trucks of letters to Congress can get action as quickly as Congress can act which means in less than 24 hours. Two- thirds of the House; two-thirds of the Senate; do not pass the White House, do not collect the president's signature; done. We actually do live in a quite responsive democracy; when enough citizens shout "frog" Congress jumps; and Congress has the lion's share of the power.

For the power of more information, as at

<http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2003/1203/nv/nv2.htm>

"'Sunlight is the best disinfectant,'" a well-known quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis".

The NSL situation was so obviously unconstitutional that I have to believe that the W efforts to push through that and similar stuff after 9/11 were understood at the time to be unconstitutional but to give a window, until cases were brought and the courts acted, to permit defending against anymore 9/11s.

Hopefully the FBI and the DoJ didn't do too much damage to honest US citizens and did round up lots of wacko Jihaders dreaming of a harem of 72 virgins or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is so awesome. Sometimes it feels like we're barreling towards a monarchy with the executive branch wearing the crown. It made my afternoon to see that there still are operational checks and balances still functioning. I would love to see the judiciary start to rein in the executive branch.

</comment><comment><USER25> EFF just earned themselves a big bonus from me this year.

This is exactly what the nation needs. We should be pushing back against government overreach where fundamental freedoms are concerned.

</comment><comment><USER13> It shouldn't feel like a victory that the DOJ didn't prevail here.

Instead, it should feel like a loss that we are even having to argue this. NSLs are flagrantly unconstitutional warrantless searches.

How far gone we are since 9/11. We gave up so many rights in virtually one fell swoop, and now we are having to claw and fight to try to win back some of our most basic protections and freedoms.

It's so bad that we win back a mere semblance of a basic right that should be ours by the Constitution, and we feel like we won the lottery. I was pretty excited myself until I had that realization.

Not to be a party-pooper.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a lot of grousing in the tech community -- and HN in particular -- about all the threats to freedom, and for all the problems with the government's responses to current issues like new technologies or terrorism.

There's legitimate substance here, but occasionally, the system actually works exactly the way it's supposed to -- the judicial branch both asserting its independence from the executive and striking down an overreaching action by the latter.

In the actual ruling [1], the judge provides a very apt quotation from another case: "Under no circumstances should the Judiciary become the handmaiden of the Executive." This is _particularly_ important in matters of national security. The tendency is for the executive branch to say the magic words "national security" if those words tend to cause other people to let them do whatever they want.

EDIT: Actually link to the ruling

[1] <https://www.eff.org/document/nsl-ruling-march-14-2013>

<comment><USER27> _the system actually works exactly the way it's supposed to_

The system actually works exactly the way it's supposed to far more often than the cynics like to admit. The system isn't perfect, but I'm not about to stop believing in justice just yet.

<comment><USER2> I've always found reading Hamdi v. Rumsfeld to be soothing when I'm feeling cynical: [http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6173897153146757...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6173897153146757813&q=hamdi+v+rumsfeld&hl=en&as_sdt=2,33).

This is just a few years after 9/11, a year into the Iraq war, and Scalia, joined by Stevens, dissenting because the majority didn't go _far enough_ in protecting an accused terrorist from the Bush administration:

"Having distorted the Suspension Clause, the plurality finishes up by transmogrifying the Great Writ—disposing of the present habeas petition by remanding for the District Court to "engag[e] in a factfinding process that is both prudent and incremental," ante, at 539. "In the absence of [the Executive's prior provision of procedures that satisfy due process], ... a court that receives a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from an alleged enemy combatant must itself ensure that the minimum requirements of due process are achieved." Ante, at 538. This judicial remediation of executive default is unheard of. The role of habeas corpus is to determine the legality of executive detention, not to supply the omitted process necessary to make it legal. See Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 484 (1973) ("[T]he essence of habeas corpus is an attack by a person in custody upon the legality of that custody, and ... the traditional function of the writ is to secure release from illegal custody"); 1 Blackstone 132-133. It is not the habeas court's function to make illegal detention legal by supplying a process that the Government could have provided, but chose not to. If Hamdi is being imprisoned in violation of the Constitution (because without due process of law), then his habeas petition should be granted; the Executive may then hand him over to the criminal authorities, whose detention for the purpose of prosecution will be lawful, or else must release him."

His whole dissent, starting at 554, is worth a read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fuckin' A, man!

Please forgive me for that outburst. But this really puts a smile on my face. I think I'll go give more money to the EFF. Maybe rename my daughter Susan.

<comment><USER28> > _Maybe rename my daughter Susan._

Or just have another daughter...or son?

<comment><USER4> Maybe so, but if I had another son, I could never name him Sue. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BJfDvSITY>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If this was stayed to allow it to go to the circuit appeals court, does it only apply in the Ninth Circuit?

<comment><USER30> Yes, but hey once the Ninth Circuit throws it out Google and others might be able to plausibly claim[1] they are no longer bound by the gag orders. If it _does_ get by the Ninth circuit then it will go to the Supreme court. Sadly the Supreme Court has been a bit to pro-government to my tastes lately.

[1] Google claims their headquarters are in California, they also move all disputes into California, and so they could claim _for the purposes of this statute_ they are a California company, even though their Incorporation papers are in Delaware I believe. Not a lawyer so can't advise but it is my best guess as to how they would position it.

<comment><USER31> _Sadly the Supreme Court has been a bit to pro-government to my tastes lately._

I'd have to disagree. We've seen GPS tracking thrown out and other curbs on invasions of privacy. This court seems very interested in broadly defining privacy.

<comment><USER32> IANAL but IIRC the GPS tracking was thrown out on narrow technical grounds - without a warrant the cops can't trespass upon your vehicle to install the tracker. They didn't say there was anything inherently wrong with the tracking itself. In other words, it would be just as illegal for the cops to surreptitiously attach an inert brick to your car without a warrant.

<comment><USER2> That's not a narrow technical ground. Requiring involvement of the judiciary versus not requiring it is a huge distinction.

<comment><USER32> To clarify - they (in my recollection) didn't say anything about the appropriateness of automated monitoring of people's movements in public places. It's already ok for the cops to tail you without a warrant. But automated vehicle-tracking via drones without a warrant (for example) is still up in the air. No pun intended. It wasn't really a ruling in favor of (or against) privacy.

<comment><USER33> Seems to me like drones should be treated the same as thermal imaging cameras, which the Supreme Court ruled required a warrant (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States>) because they're not in use by the general public, and thus there's a reasonable expectation of privacy. But it was a 5-4 decision, and I guess drones might come into use by the general public, so who knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The judge is an America hero. The NSL's are Orwellian. I just donated to the EFF, please do likewise.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is definitely a victory and kudos to the EFF, but keep this win in perspective. The Court only ruled on the gag orders attached to the NSLs.

Therefore, as of now the executive can still issue an NSL, without a gag order attached, which is still the equivalent of a warrant less search and seizure. So there is still a larger fight ahead in getting the Courts to rule the NSLs are Unconstitutional.

<comment><USER36> Please read the EFF's press release closely. Specifically

In today's ruling, the court held that the gag order provisions of the statute violate the First Amendment and that the review procedures violate separation of powers. Because those provisions were not separable from the rest of the statute, the court declared the entire statute unconstitutional.

There is are two separate issues, overstepping of executive authority and free speech, all aspects of NSL are being declared. Not just the gag section. Now there is a 90 day window for appeal, and I would expect the DoJ to appeal.

<comment><USER35> >Please read the EFF's press release closely. Specifically

Thanks, I read the Court opinion.

Though I think you need to read my comment more specifically. There is nothing inconsistent with my comment and your comment, I think you just got hung up on the Court declaring the entire NSL law unconstitutional and I reference NSLs being sent in the future without gag-orders.

You are correct there were two issues in the case, but the second issue "the judicial review provision" was only related to the NSL nondisclosure provision. See Page 1 paragraphs 20-22 of the Court Order (issue one and two "collectively refered to as 'NSL nondisclosure provisions).

Therefore, Congress can reauthorize NSL without gag-orders, and they will bc that is what Congress does when a new law is struck down they rewrite it to comply with the Court ruling. Then the NSL without gag-order will be challenged again and this time not under the 1st Amendment like the non- disclosure provisions but under the 4th Amendment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Given the lack of seriously dangerous threats to the usa we've heard about (and I assume we'd hear), I can't believe that just letting someone discuss a request for information they receive would be cause any real danger.

<comment><USER38> To be fair there have been some seriously dangerous threats that have been forestalled by government action.

Unfortunately though there is a widespread pattern of many of these folks effectively being entrapped by the government, but there are a handful of legitimate threats even so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Two thumbs up to the EFF on this one! I just hope it holds up at the Supreme Court level and we can start restoring the checks and balances of our republic.

</comment><comment><USER40> Anyone know which telco this really was?

<comment><USER41> The article says it's likely Credo Mobile.

They're a fairly great little MVNO out of San Francisco. My wife, who is a customer, loves their customer service. And they've spoken out against the Patriot act - here's tweet of theirs on the subject: <https://twitter.com/CREDOMobile/status/4326145876>

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This ban is stayed so the 9th Circuit of Appeals can consider it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Question: Does this mean NSLs are now subject to FOIA requests?</comment>


What You Should Pay Attention to Before You Relocate for a Job - <AUTHOR> https://blog.relocate.me/what-you-should-know-about-the-job-relocation-process-505369423a2a <comment><USER2> Yeah, the most obvious ones: cost of living compared to salary, local language, visa.</comment>


What is the Olark Retreat? - <AUTHOR> https://www.olark.com/customers/what-is-the-olark-retreat

<comment><AUTHOR> We've recently experimented with making it easy for Olarkers to bring their families to the retreat, so it becomes like one big Olark Family Reunion. On the other hand it adds quite a bit to the logistical overhead, what are your thoughts HN? Bring the family?</comment>


Zuckerberg told execs the company's at 'war,' called media coverage 'bulls---' - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-promises-to-be-more-hands-on-at-facebook-2018-11 <comment><USER2> More discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate it when executives start using war analogies to talk about business.

It has always indicated that I should start looking for a new job because I'm not going to fit with the new culture. It's not just that I'm an anti-war hippie either. Describing your business in terms of war both disrespects the tremendous toll paid by soldiers and civilians, and indicates a "winners and losers" mindset, but that mindset also indicates it's part of your objective to hurt 'the enemy'.

It's a morally broken, inefficient and emotional way to look at business.

<comment><USER4> _war analogies to talk about business._

A previous job had the "tiger team" who would meet in the "war room". But to the entire rest of the company they were mediocre middle-managers of a medium- sized IT department and everyone else called it the "comfy room" because it had sofas and a Nintendo.

Also, to anyone with similar delusions, a Bluetooth headset does not make you a gunship pilot...

<comment><USER5> If there's a concise, non-militaristic name for a team with a specific, urgent, short-term objective holed up in a room together, I'd love to hear about it. "Strike team" and "war room" just work really well.

<comment><USER6> crysis team works really well (and is commonly used in german)

<comment><USER5> That's pretty good. I worry that admitting there's a "crisis" (even when there is) wouldn't go over too well with management, though.

<comment><USER4> Another true story, at a different job I was once on the "disaster recovery" team but that implied there might be a disaster so we became the "business continuity team" but that implied there might be an interruption so we were finally renamed "the major events team".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sure. Maybe Zuckerberg shouldn't have put the screws to every media outlet on the planet. Is he so arrogant that he thought pissing all of them off in unison wouldn't have any blowback in their editorial decisions?

Oh, by the way, he's created a surveillance apparatus that would have been beyond even the wildest dreams of secret police everywhere 50 years ago. He collects thousands of discrete data points about every man, woman, and child on the planet who uses the Web, regardless of whether or not they use Facebook—or even have an account. He put such lax access security in place around that personal data that anyone who wanted to could get access to it. And he did nothing after detecting a state-sponsored propaganda war being waged against US citizens.

But sure. It's unfair.

<comment><USER8> Very well put. There are a few articles detailing his own involvement with Russian players, including oligarchs invested in facebook. And didn't facebook take a lot of money from the and NSA business front back when it was still only for college students?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that anyone who cares enough about Facebook's behaviour has already left. Most folks just keep going back to see their feeds regardless of how horrible it becomes.

<comment><USER10> Sadly groups I belong to have settled on FB as the community forum. It's a lowest denominator thing.

<comment><USER11> It's also free.

I know plenty of companies charge members to belong to private Facebook groups.

Great business for the group organizers while it lasts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When in a hole, start a war with the press. Yeah, that's the way to go Mark the Great.

FB and Google have siphoned much of the media advertising money, so there's no love left.

</comment><comment><USER13> At war with whom? Media outlets, hackers, propaganda organizations?

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't resist, sorry [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV- oHeSjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-oHeSjE)

<comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg)

> War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or > sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to > make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too > intelligent.

\-- George Orwell

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4)

</comment><comment><USER17> Super nasty swan song from NYT and co. Of course FB is at war, when media keeps calling for the gov to break it up

<comment><USER15> The media, the inventor of the web.. but that's all details.

<comment><USER17> No. Al Gore is

<comment><USER15> I was referring to this:

[https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim- berners-...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-berners-lee- says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm really curious if there's a deeper reason for why companies are suddenly thrown under the bus by the mainstream media, or if it's just journalists mimicking each other because they lack imagination. First Elon, now Zuck. Who's next?

<comment><USER19> I don't think you can quite compare Elon to Zuck. As far as we know, Elon isn't stripping away a captive audience's privacy with reckless abandon.

<comment><USER18> Google is just as bad as Facebook but they don't get this constant negative media coverage.

<comment><USER11> Google had "Do no evil"

Zuck had "I'm CEO b!tch"

One is much more likable than the other.

<comment><USER20> Arrogance is less dangerous than hypocrisy IMO.

<comment><USER21> But hubris is worst of all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is probably the most exciting thing Mark has said in years. I rather like it because it probably means that Facebook will be making some bold moves soon.

<comment><USER23> Which bit do you think is bold? That Facebook is paying right wing lobbyists to tie criticism of its past behaviour to George Soros or that it "tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic,"?

Both of these seem like the kind of horrible dick moves that define Facebook as a company.

If they were truely bold they would look for ways to operate without gathering massive amounts of people's personal data or supporting those only interested in fostering chaos in the West.

If Zuckerberg was a truly bold leader he'd be winning hearts and minds by showing up to Parliaments in Canada and the UK when summoned over his company's past misdeeds ...instead of cowering behind generic press releases saying "we didn't do nufin'".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My takeaway from these latest articles was actually that Zuckerberg was, strangely enough, doing a pretty good job responding to the crisis.

It's just that Sheryl Sandburg has been undermining him and kind of stabbing him in the back.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting, Chinese IT companies have long been controlling the media, basically corralling "reporters and self-media operators" into private chat groups administered by their staff, therefore excluding outsiders and naysayers, effectively forestall most negative coverage.

Also they don't have quite as many insider leaks.

Cellphone companies like Huawei and Xiaomi would give these people test units and guidelines about how to write articles. You can hardly see candid reviews, a lot of them just do shit-tier translation of TheVerge and other English sites(not sure authorized or not).

<comment><USER26> Translating an article and publishing it is a violation of copyright, so clearly not.

<comment><USER25> Chinese tech media basically rely on it.

The "self-media" cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao (by TikTok parent company ByteDance) created, is of 99.99% garbage, but they know what content their users want and like to see, boasts "give me a pic and I can spin it into a hit story", they basically provided a heaven platform for sensationalists and hustlers like this guy.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary- clin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton- cameron-harris.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Free Software leader Benjamin "Mako" Hill doing an AMA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fnw13/free_software_leader_benjamin_mako_hill_has/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the link:

Benjamin "Mako" Hill works on issues of technology, intellectual property, and society. He's a key person in the free software and free culture movements. Mako is a core-developer, active contributor, and founding member of the Ubuntu Project. For nearly a decade, he has also been an active member of the Debian GNU/Linux Project, which Ubuntu is based on. Together with Erik Moeller from the Wikimedia Foundation, Mako founded the Definition of Free Cultural Worksbased on the Free Software Definition.

Mako serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation and the One Laptop Per Child project. Currently a researcher and PhD Candidate and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Another fun fact: Mako's apartment is where reddit was founded, and there is spray paint on the roof to prove it[1]. Mako has agreed to answer the top ten questions as of 2/22 in this redditor-built 12 foot Igloo[2]. Ask him anything.

[1] <http://min.us/mvfPWXg#1> [2] <https://picasaweb.google.com/danny.piccirillo/Iglootarium></comment>


Visualizing Incomplete and Missing Data - <AUTHOR> https://flowingdata.com/2018/01/30/visualizing-incomplete-and-missing-data/ <comment><USER2> This is an article with lots of great examples of what not to do.

The "Gaps" example is more abstract art than data representation.

The "Category" examples lack any explanation of the colors in the figure captions.

"Zooming" is a selection and is biasing. It should be accompanied with numbers indicating efficiency and bias. There is also no indication of the statistical uncertainty of these measurements. Let me use that to determine if the data is too "granular" on my own.

Interpolation is not a good suggestion in any case and the example shown is neither sparse data nor was an interpolation performed.

<comment><USER3> I would tend to disagree with this assessment. Nathan has a Ph.D. in statistics and as someone who is a Ph.D. candidate in the same field, I know for certain he has done a lot of thinking about this.

\- For the gaps example, I think it's rather clear what's going on when gaps are present. Is the NYT flowchart not clear? This is valuable advice as a lot of visualization tools (ggplot, d3) will linearly interpolate these values for you so making an effort to avoid that is valuable.

\- The category example lacks color legends because they are not necessary in this situation. He was simply stating that you can show missingness as a category next to other categorical values. The plots shown are simply examples of the plot type.

\- Zooming _can_ be biasing but ultimately any visualization of data is going to be some level of 'zoomed' in. As for representing uncertainty, I'm not exactly sure why that is applicable in this case as he's not talking about that.

\- Interpolating being a bad suggestion, in any case, is... well, just not true. Missing data imputation is a giant subfield of statistics and lots of theory and application has gone into the methods used for it. When it's not a good idea using the 'gaps' suggestion seems like a fair substitute, but there are certainly instances where it is fair to use interpolation.

There are absolutely examples for every technique listed where it is not appropriate, but this is more of a toolbox of methods and the visualizer who is familiar with the data should make their decisions on which method to use for their data.

Adding this response as the above comment was the only one on the article and I know I sometimes use the comments to filter articles I read and would hate to see someone pass up this due to an (in my opinion) misguided opinion.</comment></comment>


An Old Conjecture on Stream Transducers - <AUTHOR> https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2018/06/24/an-old-conjecture-on-stream-transducers/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a stream-processing library that Michael Snoyman recently started working on:

[https://github.com/snoyberg/zerem](https://github.com/snoyberg/zerem)

For background, he authored Conduit, one of the most popular Haskell stream- processing libraries:

[https://github.com/snoyberg/conduit](https://github.com/snoyberg/conduit)

<comment><USER3> So does conduit fall short?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> oleg and friends claim to have disproven the 'pick two' thing. See their 'Stream Fusion, to Completeness' paper [1], and the associated Strymonas library [2].

[1] [https://yanniss.github.io/streams- popl17.pdf](https://yanniss.github.io/streams-popl17.pdf)

[2] [https://strymonas.github.io/](https://strymonas.github.io/)

<comment><USER5> That's not what I recall. Having a quick reskim, I don't believe they can handle the shared mutability in `F(S(X), X)`, so would end up duplicating the work to generate the elements of `X`. This problem looks unavoidable to me; if you are computing `f(x[n], x[2*n])` you need both points in memory simultaneously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > This issue would also appear if we forced stream transducers (processing > nodes) to output a fixed number of value at each invocation: it suffices to > let S repeat each value of X twice, i.e., interleave X with X.

I don't understand how the issue would appear in that case. Buffering one value seems to be sufficient to upsample S to the "clock" of X, ie. project S to the instants where X is defined (flow Z below) while filling missing instants with the previously known value:

       X :  X0     X1    X2    X3   ...
       S :  S0           S1

       Z :  S0     S0    S1    S1

That would look as follows in Signal:

        process test = (? integer x ! integer y)
          (|   c := not (c$ init false)
           |   s := (x when c) cell c
           |   y := x + s
           |)
           where
             boolean c;
             integer s;
           end;

C is the clock which alternates between false and true ($ refers to the last value), "X when C" is filtering, "E cell C" is projection of values of E to the instant of C, defaulting to the previous known value at logical instants where E is not present but C is true.

The clock calculus in Signal (etc.) is way to assess if a program can be generated to use constant (static) memory allocation and constant time. There are programs which fail to do so, but you then need to refine them to add explicit operations ([https://www.irisa.fr/prive/talpin/papers/date08.pdf](https://www.irisa.fr/prive/talpin/papers/date08.pdf))

<comment><USER7> This would definitely work if S didn't produce its output from X. Given that it does, I don't see how the strategy above can implement

        f(x[0], x[0])
        f(x[0], x[1])
        f(x[1], x[2])
        f(x[1], x[3])
        f(x[2], x[4])
        f(x[2], x[5])
        ...

with a single pass over x.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the explanation. I see now that X is read at different rates from different consumers. You need to have a buffer that might grows infinitely in the general case (I remember reading about CSDF, cyclo-static dataflow graphs, where the buffer size is (can be?) bounded).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is interesting because I have (or had) been working on a C++ logic programming library. Many if not most similar libraries are implemented using streams. (See minikanren, LC++, etc.) Naturally as a C++ library I'm interested in if it can be done without or with a minimum of dynamic allocation, and had come to the conclusion "probably yes, but only if I give up on some subset of the things I wanted it to be able to do." So I concur with the article's opening, "choose 2 of 3."

</comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone think up a realistic scenario where you might actually have this problem? The example seems awfully contrived.</comment>


You are the WM - vezzy-fnord http://blog.z3bra.org/2015/01/you-are-the-wm.html?hn <comment><AUTHOR> "You are the WM" until you automate everything with scripts as the author seems to have done (because, why wouldn't you automate?). Then it's "You just wrote your own WM, in bash."

I'm tempted to try this because it's just so UNIXy, but I probably have "better" ("important" and less fun) things to spend time on.

</comment><comment><USER2> Pretty neat idea, but I'm beginning to think that Greenspun's Eleventh Law should be 'All powerful Unix environments will expand to include an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden subset of Plan 9.'

<comment><USER3> Zeveb's Eleventh Law; you heard it here first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like minimalism, but IMO the closest you can get to this idea without wasting time reinventing the wheel is a tiling windows manager. I have been using i3 for about 3 years now and can't imagine going back.

<comment><USER5> Just switched to OSX for work, and i3 is the only part of my workflow I can't replace. I dearly dearly miss it.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.hammerspoon.org/](http://www.hammerspoon.org/) allowed me to write a small i3 replacement, it's not as complete, but it's mine

<comment><USER7> Would you mind sharing your implementation? Even if it's messy, it would be more helpful than nothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Initially I thought this was based on wmctrl[0] which is a nice piece of software. It allows you to do some fancy window manager scripting in bash, even when running GNOME Shell.

[0]: [http://linux.die.net/man/1/wmctrl](http://linux.die.net/man/1/wmctrl)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's written against an obsolete windowing model for a deprecated window system.

What's needed is a successor written as a Wayland compositor and tools that communicate via a d-bus interface to instruct the compositor where to place the windows.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _What 's needed is a successor written as a Wayland compositor and tools that communicate via a d-bus interface to instruct the compositor where to place the windows._

Poe's Law really has me here.

<comment><USER10> I think that's more like Poettering's Law.

<comment><USER11> Hrm. "Poe" \+ "ttering".

"tering" is a Dutch word having meanings of "damnit" or "uncountable".

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tering](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tering)! [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tering](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tering)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Handy.

In case this is useful to others:

I have to use Windows 7 at work. I recently found bug.n, a flexible tiling window manager made with AutoHotkey.

[https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n](https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n)

</comment><comment><USER13> Or you can just run FVWM2, and get everything offered here (including the fine grain control), plus a bunch of goodies for theming, window decoration, window buttons, pagers, virtual desktops, button panels, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Okay, so I know I'm a little odd, but my immediate reaction to this:

"Oh snap! I should totally uninstall my WM!"

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not surprised people hate window managers when they all suck and don't even have basic features RISC OS had in 1990

<comment><USER16> What features? I've never used RISC OS.

<comment><USER15> Most importantly it doesn't have raise-on-click, which allows you to actually use overlapping windows, because who has infinite screen space? Now you can use overlapping windows drag and drop actually works, can't drop if the window you just dragged from now covers it. So there's drag and drop load and save, no save-as boxes.

Secondly window moving/resizing, 1. windows aren't full screen, 2. you can drag the title bar with the 3rd mouse button to keep the z-order the same. 3. if you try to drag to resize off the side of the screen, the window moves in the opposite direction so it still gets bigger. 4. 3rd button click on a scroll arrow goes in the opposite direction, 3rd button drag on a scroll bar allows 2d movement.

Thirdly: No menu bars, everything is a pop up menu, an infinitely large Fitts target. Also you can 3rd button click on a menu to keep it open so you can select another menu option.

Fourthly: The taskbar shows applications, not windows, to open a new document you click the taskbar icon. Drag to taskbar icon opens file in that application, drag to a window on that application inserts/merges/etc. Application level tasks on on the taskbar menu, quit, preferences. Document level tasks are in the document menu.

Obviously this requires application support, can't do it with just an X11 window manager. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop) uses some of the ideas, although the project seems dead.

<comment><USER17> Feh. If it doesn't have pie-shaped menus, it's lame.[1]

[1] [http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/index.html~](http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/index.html~)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a big fan of z3bra's posts. They focus on the unix way, minimalism, and understand your tools.

Another good link is [http://blog.z3bra.org/2014/03/toolbox.html](http://blog.z3bra.org/2014/03/toolbox.html) where he describes some unusual but useful commands.

</comment><comment><USER19> A nice illustration of the UNIX philosophy applies to window managers. Also, a nice illustration of why non-UNIX IPC or protected procedures are much more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER20> For less extreme cases, you can also use xwit(1).

</comment><comment><USER21> I was forced to be minimal 10 years ago with my laptop having 256M RAM. This WM would have been my choice then. Instead I used Ion3 after trying my way through many others like ratpoison, waimea and so forth.

But now I have 8-16G or more RAM in my computers. I also tend to have a nice graphics chip, even if it's from Intel it's better than what I had 10 years ago. So why bother with this type of minimalism if you don't need it?

<comment><USER17> I recently switched back to xmonad and then ratpoison because I'm more interested in getting work done than watching the pretty animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I read VM in the title. Very disappointed.

<comment> vezzy-fnord You certainly can be the VM on a microkernel which supports external pagers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How does this compare to XMonad?</comment>


Surprise speaker at TEDGlobal: Julian Assange in Session 12 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ted.com/2010/07/surprise_speake.php

<comment><USER2> Further reading from press covering TEDGlobal:

Forbes: [http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/07/16/julien- assange-o...](http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/07/16/julien-assange-of- wikileaks-surfaces-in-oxford/)

CNN.com: <http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/07/16/wikileaks.disclosures>

Design Mind: [http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/julian-assange-of- wiki...](http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/julian-assange-of-wikileaks- troublemaker-or-hero.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Wikileaks has been somewhat quiet in its postings of late, as it is rebuilding its technology backbone to make it more secure and make it easier for leakers to submit documents."

That's an understatement - the site has been dead since march. I don't know what to make of Assange but it seems fairly clear that wikileaks is a one-man op now.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps they've realized that a mistake was made (Manning). Infrastructure is probably being rebuilt to correct certain flaws in the structure of the site.</comment></comment>


iPhone 7 review: how good can a phone be if the battery doesn't last even a day? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/iphone-7-review-poor-battery-life <comment><USER2> A phone (or any device at that) must be very good (and versatile) so that you want to use it all the time and drain the battery in less than a day!</comment>


Virgin aircraft 'hijacked' in Bali - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27154139

<comment><USER2> Apparently it was just an unruly passenger trying to enter the cockpit, which made the pilot sound the hijacking alarm. Follow @ChrisCorless for more info, he's at the airport.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hijacking attempt while drunk is not a hijacking attempt.

<comment><USER4> They added that at the very bottom of the albeit short story.

Event the BBC aren't immune to baiting. Then again would I have read a story about drunk on plane arrested?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> #virgindrunkinbali</comment>


Expressive C++: A Lambda Library in 30 Lines (Part 1 of 2) - <AUTHOR> http://cpp-next.com/archive/2010/10/expressive-c-expression-extension-part-one/

<comment><AUTHOR> via reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmnr7/expressiv...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmnr7/expressive_c_a_lambda_library_in_30_lines_part_1/)</comment>


Should the leap second be eliminated? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16597191 <comment><USER3> Why don't we let GPS satellites and NTP broadcast both "regular time" and International Atomic Time (TAI), and let each user use the one that fits best?

So: satellite navigation, financial services and flight control systems use TAI, everybody else uses regular time?

To make the difference obvious and prevent misunderstandings, TAI could even have a different form, like a pure integer of "seconds after date X". So nobody except programmers for financial services and other specialized systems would ever get to see TAI, and everybody's happy?

<comment><USER4> I think you're on the right track, but I'd take it a step further: Whenever you're displaying _what the time is_ to a human being, convert to UTC. In all other cases - especially storage and transmission etc. - use TAI.

We have very rich libraries for dealing with time in software, so it's not like it would be a huge drag.

There are still some unaddressed edge cases, of course. Say there's a leap second on 1 July. Now consider the interval 14:00 30 June - 14:00 1 July. In "human time" it's 24 hours, but in computer time it's 24h00m01s - and, conversely and perhaps more dangerous, should "14:00 30 June" + 24 hours come out as 13:59:59 or 14:00:00?

<comment><USER5> > We have very rich libraries for dealing with time in software

99.9% of which suck goats though.

And then, there's the problem of correctly syncing time display with internal representation: let's say the library stores time as a monotonically increasing number (which it should, ideally, that's the first failure of many libraries). This monotonically increasing number is then mapped onto "human" dates and times via more or less complex schemes.

The problem is that those mapping change over time, for instance the leap second is provided with 6 months of advance, DST/GST changes may be provided with far less (to say nothing of timezone changes). So those time libraries need to be updated all the bloody time or to have a mechanism through which they download mapping updates.

> conversely and perhaps more dangerous, should "14:00 30 June" + 24 hours > come out as 13:59:59 or 14:00:00?

Well this is a human time mapping, in human time mappings the leap second is part of one of those 24h, so it'd be 14:00:00 (same as adding "1 day" or "1440 minutes"), whereas adding 86400 seconds would yield 13:59:59.

The internal storage should not have a concept of hours (or minutes, or even maybe seconds), it would have its "time unit" and then _contextual_ mappings from the time unit to "human units" through calendars and calendar operations.

<comment><USER4> > 99.9% of which suck goats though.

The past decade has seen immense improvements, though. JodaTime is pretty neat and JSR-310 seems to be an improvement on that (haven't used it though).

> And then, there's the problem of correctly syncing time display with > internal representation [..] leap second is provided with 6 months of > advance, DST/GST changes may be provided with far less (to say nothing of > timezone changes).

Since the time zone issue is the larger one anyway, this provides a solid (copyright trolling aside) framework for distributing this information: a database distributed and maintained as part of the OS.

> Well this is a human time mapping [..] contextual mappings

I agree, but it's the context that's hard. You need some way for your abstraction to capture the fact that a "minute" can sometime consist of 61 seconds. Consider an application that monitors the number of foos per minute where the developer perfectly reasonable uses the "minute" abstraction. This might then exhibit faulty behaviour when there's a leap second inserted - suddenly there's 1/60th more foos reported in a minute.

Depending on the application, that might be statistically insignificant and can safely be ignored, or it might be a red flag that triggers someones pager to go off (or worse).

<comment><USER5> > The past decade has seen immense improvements, though. JodaTime is pretty > neat and JSR-310 seems to be an improvement on that (haven't used it > though).

Joda is pretty much the 0.1% in question. On its own.

> I agree, but it's the context that's hard. You need some way for your > abstraction to capture the fact that a "minute" can sometime consist of 61 > seconds.

Absolutely.

> Consider an application that monitors the number of foos per minute where > the developer perfectly reasonable uses the "minute" abstraction. This might > then exhibit faulty behaviour when there's a leap second inserted - <USER2> > there's 1/60th more foos reported in a minute.

Ideally, this application should monitor the number of foos per [[time unit]], and only convert from [[time unit]] to minutes when it displays information.

Of course you'd still have contextual issues:

> Depending on the application, that might be statistically insignificant and > can safely be ignored, or it might be a red flag that triggers someones > pager to go off (or worse).

Yeah. Unless those triggers use the rate per [[time unit]] instead of using the rate per "human" unit (would blow up on summer time end as well, as it "replays" a full human hour)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a backgrounder, read this CACM article:

[http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/5/107699-the-one- second-w...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/5/107699-the-one-second- war/fulltext)

I've wondered, would the technical problems described be ameliorated if a longer timeframe was given? At the moment, we have about six months notice of leap seconds; what if we lengthened this to, say, two years?

That said, I'm not really sympathetic to the proposal. We already have the highly predictable International Atomic Time (TAI); why if we want this predictability, not just use TAI instead of trying to change UTC?

</comment><comment><USER7> This article doesn't give clear enough reasons for abolishing leap seconds. One passage says:

> But those seeking to abolish the leap second say these one-second jumps are > becoming increasingly problematic for navigation and telecommunication > systems that require a continuous time reference. These include satellite > navigation, financial services, the internet, flight control and power > systems, among others.

But elsewhere,

> Ron Beard, chairman of the ITU's working party on the leap second, said: > "This is not a technical issue, it is more a diplomatic one."

<comment><USER8> Well, let me phrase it a little more analytically, then. The biggest reason to switch UTC to atomic time is hacker-cultural. Basically, many countries have said, in law, "we use UTC." This causes most specifications -- in particular NTP, Javascript, and POSIX timestamps -- to also say "we use UTC -- but we ignore leap seconds." Unfortunately, these specifications are thereby rendered useless and incompatible in a bunch of different ways. NTP servers, we'd like, should just broadcast atomic time, TAI. Similarly, Javascript's Date.getTime() should give TAI, and POSIX should give TAI. But TAI isn't what countries have legally specified -- UTC (and in some cases GMT) is what countries have legally specified.

Governments use UTC because we like the idea that the sun rises at around 6 AM. (Or, on my base-10 clock, at around 0 ki.) But that's when the sun rises -- that's a question of setting a time zone!

So the best way to include leap seconds for now is via time zone information: allow the time zones to drift with leap seconds. Time zones are already pretty crazy and hard-to-anticipate and may change by a much larger offset at even shorter notice (e.g. "This summer, we are not observing Daylight Savings time"). If you can't anticipate upcoming political "leap-hours", your software already can't handle the less-political question of "when is the next leap- second?"

During my free time I've been playing with designing a base-10 clock. (Obligatory plug: <http://drostie.org/time/> .) So I've been thinking about this topic off-and-on for a couple years now. During that time I guess I've convinced myself that the right way to handle this is to define a _named time zone_ which implements leap seconds -- this requires _derivative time zones_. So for example, my clock above automatically assigns to New York the base-10 time zone of "+300". With named time zones, it could shift to leap seconds by passing a law saying "the base-10 time zone in our jurisdiction is instead leap+300." Or perhaps the US as a whole would design their own time zone to standardize a base-10 daylight savings time, and call it "us" and then New York might be in the time zone "us+300".

The goal is to really make specifications designers think, "oh, leap seconds are a cosmetic choice, I'd better just use the base-10 'rational timestamp' format rather than rolling my own implementation of POSIX timestamps." Right now they think "oh GMT is old and UTC is new and everyone knows what UTC is so we don't have to worry about it, right?" -- and they don't get it right.

So is this a technical issue or a diplomatic one? Well, it's technical because it affects technical specifications, but it's nontechnical because there is no good _technical_ argument for using UTC versus TAI -- that's a time zone question, a political or diplomatic question about when you want the Sun to rise.

The only technical situation that I know of is the claim that some old telescopes might be using time to find stars -- and might misalign if the time comes unsynchronized from Earth's rotation. I don't consider this a serious technical difficulty, because those telescopes are manned by hackers smart enough to get a feed of Terrestrial Time and pipe it into whatever clock input was receiving UTC. "Hey look, it uses this NTP server, let's just redirect that DNS query to a smallish Linux box which serves TT over NTP." I think we're smart enough to ignore this technical case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is no way to know whether a leap second will be used in the future, beyond the half-year "notice period". This can make it tricky to plan for synchronized events past the notice period. The solution, of course, is to use non-leaped time for such planning. As several have pointed out, libraries handle both times. As someone who needs to deal with both types in data processing, I can report that it's definitely not a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER10> The answer (for software engineering) is to stop thinking of time as a continuous flow with periodic markers such as second, minute, etc. Instead, think of it as chunks.

Mostly one chunk flows seamlessly into another. Occasionally, a chunk is "missing", such as skipping an hour at Daylight Saving. We are already set up to handle that. It would be very simple to add another rule to the DS database to globally add a second now and then.

I really don't see what the problem is.

</comment><comment><USER11> >Over decades, the difference between Earth-based time and atomic clock time would amount to a few minutes, but over 500 years, they would be out by an hour. Over millennia, the discrepancy would grow even more.

Is this really true? Based on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second>

It seems like there's only been 25 leap seconds in 40 years. That's around a minute every century..

<comment><USER6> Leap seconds are expected to become more frequent, and the last decade has had unusually few leap seconds.

<comment><USER11> Does that mean we expect there to be more than a couple of leap seconds every year? (Based on the "more than an hour over 500 years" statement)

<comment><USER6> Err, yes, that does sound an order of magnitude out, now I come to think of it.

The original proposal allows updates four times a year, though only the July and December updates have been used.

<comment><USER12> Four times a year, with up to two seconds added each time should put an upper bound for adjustments accumulated over 500 years to:

500 years * 4 updates/year * 2 seconds/update = 4000 seconds = 66 2/3 minutes

So an hour in 500 years seems to require adjusting almost as much as we can, which isn't realistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know not all of the world observes daylight savings time, but why not coincide any leap seconds/minutes/hours with the changing of daylight savings time? It would at least make it simpler for those who do practice DST.

</comment><comment><USER14> Leap minutes seem like the simplest option to me, if keeping synchronisation with sunrise/set is really that important.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the leap-hour once every 500 years or so idea.

But I suspect in practice, it would never be actually assessed. When it comes due, everyone alive would be more accustomed to the 'hour off' times than the 500-years-ago time, so natural tendencies to eschew change in such matters would make following-through on the promised leap-hour unlikely.

<comment><USER16> We're willing to shift our clocks by an hour twice a year to "save daylight," whatever that means. Correcting for 500 years of clock drift is a far more tangible reason. It's rather pessimistic to assume that the people of 500 years from now would be unwilling to implement this.

<comment><USER17> Correcting for clock drift is not tangible in a practical sense though. We (allegedly) have good reasons for changing our schedule twice a year. Changing it because that's how people lived 500 years ago is not any kind of reason, and I think our ancestors will just laugh at the idea when it comes time for the leap hour.

So if these leap seconds are causing problems, I don't see any reason to keep them. By the time the consequences of getting rid of them are noticeable, they will no longer be negative consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having read the article, I for one am glad they're not leaping to any conclusions without a second thought.</comment>


£20k cash incentive for UK computer science teachers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20003327

<comment><USER2> >> He said existing ICT teachers "would need lots of help" to become adept in computer science

I'm fairly sure they'd have better luck training up Maths teachers.

Either way, I can't see how 2ok will be significant enough to permanently drag people away from industry. (Which I am thankful for: this drive for education is the beginning of programming's commoditisation.)</comment>


Microsoft open sources a big chunk of .NET - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/microsoft-open-sources-a-big-chunk-of-net/#p3 <comment><USER2> A good start, but not good enough.

Microsoft still puts limits on the license, it ties the hands of any developer who wants to make something with it.</comment>


Ask HN: Failed/Strugling Entreprenuers please say hi. - <AUTHOR> What is the difference between a successful and a failed Entrepreneur. Are the successful bunch genetically smarter? Are they more hardworking? or are they simply lucky?
Why do some of us succeed and others fail miserably. Is it nature or nurture. I believe its all about the right circumstances. You throw a monkey on a stack of hey and if he is lucky he will find gold underneath it.
It sucks not to be successful but can you really change that? <comment><USER2> It takes all three, smarts, hard work and luck. Your nature and your nurture affect the first two. Luck is the x factor that is out of our control to some degree. Although, smarts and hard work will increase our probability that we will find luck, i.e. Your location, the contacts you make, etc.

youditto.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey from <http://pollerbare.com> \- Just keep plugging at it. Most people with a head on their shoulders are able to find their way. I'm sure you're one of those, so just keep truckin' along!

</comment><comment><USER4> hi from alpha.beepl.com struggling.

<comment><USER4> <http://alpha.beepl.com></comment></comment>


Mindful in May - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindfulinmay.org

<comment><USER2> Mindfulness for your work: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusr/fgdcnfgmneb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusr/fgdcnfgmneblnnldmaffhbniomfajlah)

Instead of focusing on your (i.e.) your breath, you can practice bringing your focus back to your current task. Whenever you open a new tab, it shows your current task in huge letters to prevent you from going on a downward spiral (cough _hackernews_ cough :) before it starts.</comment>


Trump calls for boycott of Apple products - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/2/19/11071684/donald-trump-apple-boycott-encryption-iphone <comment><USER2> Who wants to bet Trump is shorting the stock or planning to buy-low later?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think everyone on here realizes where his popularity stems from. He'll continue to make inflammatory statements so the spotlight stays on him.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny, I was just thinking "I don't know what the security is like on my phone, but maybe I should look into moving to an iPhone next time."

Tangentially related, but my laptop mobo committed suicide a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday I popped the SSD into an external USB housing to grab my home directory out, only to find that all of my data were encrypted. I had no idea. Immediately frustrating, but wonderfully reassuring once I'd figured out how to get at it.</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News Morning Standup - <AUTHOR>

For a couple week now, myself and a few friends have been doing a biweekly 15m morning call where we check-in and see how everyone's side project is doing (what we accomplished since last time and what we plan on doing). The goal is to hold each other accountable, and provide quick feedback / ideas. Everyone works a full-time job and we're fairly spread out geographically, but this has proved to be quite motivating and some good feedback / ideas have come out for each of our projects.
I'm wondering if this "morning standup" idea could be expanded to include the HN crowd. The goal would be to bring more diverse opinions to the table from people with different backgrounds, skillsets, etc. I want to propose 2 ideas that I'd love to get feedback on and gage interest. I don't see either as paid services, but completely free on some open-source platform.
#1 - HN users are grouped into "teams" of 5 - each working on a side projects. Once a week, the members do a 15m standup where they share their progress since the last time they met, and what they plan on accomplishing this week.
#2 - The goal here is to encourage ideas from different industries to mix together. Every week, 10 random HN users are assigned a conference call where they get 2m to speak about an innovation / problem in their field.
Let me know what you guys think. <comment><USER2> Sounds like a pretty good SaaS idea using twillio. For $9.99 a month you connect 5 people to a conference call every morning to discuss milestones for their side project.</comment>


Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/jeff-bezos-got-darwinism-all-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Did Bezos ever actually compare Amazon's work culture to Darwinism? The Times article quotes a former HR executive as saying that, not Bezos.

I've often seen newspaper articles that report XYZ, and then follow-up articles that comment on or extrapolate from XYZ without ever considering whether the original journalist got it right. I think that's what's happening here. The Times says that a former Amazon HR executive compares the company's work culture to Darwinism, and the author of this piece assumes that because the HR executive used that phrase, Bezos himself 'equate[s] "Darwinism" with "ruthless competition"' and then argues that Bezos is wrong. But the commentator has not considered whether his original assumption about Bezos' beliefs reflects reality.

<comment><USER3> I think that, while it's important not to put words in Bezos' mouth, altering that line in the article doesn't hurt the overall message, which is Bezos prefers harsh competition in the workplace, and that's counterproductive.

<comment><USER4> High performing people often prefer environments with high stakes and high risk/reward. Being harsh is awful for people who can't stand it, but empowering for those who thrive that way.

<comment><USER5> Enjoying harshness for it's own sake is masochistic stupidity. What's the upside for the amazon opportunity? As far as I can read from what's reported, below market compensation for the reward of watching your fucking back every microsecond and possibility of...? Where do I sign up to get books and trinkets delivered to your door a day faster? Beats the shit, mission wise, out of trying to cure cancer...

<comment><USER4> _What 's the upside for the amazon opportunity?_

Jobs at public tech companies also come with large stock packages that become usable after just a few short years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> True. But there are a lot of reports from Amazon employees that they have a policy of culling the herd. Even Nick Hanauer, an original investor of Amazon, tells us that Bezos is pretty ruthless [https://youtu.be/uIGeKMU9izo?t=10m56s](https://youtu.be/uIGeKMU9izo?t=10m56s)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone qualified comment on whether group selection is taken seriously among biologists now? I haven't followed the debate much but Dawkins at least has argued that group selection acts too slowly compared to individual selection to be an important force in evolution.

In either case I don't think it has much bearing on Amazon. In both cases evolution is just a metaphor/scienciness.

<comment><USER7> Dawkins introduced selection on the individual level in The Selfish Gene (great book, before he became all ranty and weird). This has pretty much killed group selection, but EO Wilson is still clinging on. I think his latest book was a bit too much cherry-picking in defense of group selection for some people.

A few years back Steven Pinker wrote a thing about the "false allure" of group selection based on muddy definitions: [http://edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false- allure-...](http://edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of- group-selection)

Jerry Coyne summarised the debate in NYRB: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/the- neighborh...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/the-neighborhood- project-by-david-sloan-wilson-book-review.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whether or not the title is false, it's certainly clickbait, so we changed it to a representative sentence from the article, in accordance with the HN guidelines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a great idea to regulate click-bait. I wonder if others find it to be click-bait though. The title represents the gist of the article. Click-bait would be a title far removed from the actual arguments or content in the article, IMO.

<comment><USER8> It's clickbait because it uses a celebrity name to grab attention. The article contains zero factual content about Bezos.

"X got Y all wrong!" is also an intrinsically baity construct.

If you don't think the title we gave it is representative, we're always open to better ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. I don't know what would be a better title. How about "Does Amazon act too Darwinian in the workplace"....?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review for Thrust VPS - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to rent a smallish VPS for a side project of mine. I came across thrustvps.com. It seems to be incredibly cheap. A quick search turns up mixed reviews. Have any of you guys used this service?<p>P.S. I currently use linode.com. <comment><USER2> Now that EC2 is free, it's hard to justify any of these super-cheap VPSes.</comment>


Why Are Record Companies Dumping Their Spotify Stock? – Office of Copyright - <AUTHOR> http://copyright.nova.edu/spotify-stock/ <comment><USER3> >> _If we cannot successfully earn revenue at a rate that exceeds the operational costs, including royalty expenses, associated with our Service, we will not be able to achieve or sustain profitability."_

This is very thoughtful stuff. And people say MBA are no good. Or team of MBAs.

Record companies might keep them barely alive, or alive enough to leech as much as possible from them. Killing the host might not be smart, unless a new service is created.

</comment><comment><USER4> They aren't hedge funds and shouldn't be speculating in public companies. Shareholders of record companies want exposure to music labels - <USER2> streaming. Very few conglomerates work long term.

If the shareholders want to own a different business they can buy the shares on their own.

<comment><USER5> The article says,

> _Except that WMG is not a stand-alone music company. It is wholly owned by > the investment firm Access Industries. Which is very much in the business of > holding long term equity stakes._

If there is a difference to the reader between a speculator and an investor, this is an investor. The justification may be that the investment has made as much as it could make and they wish to put the money to use elsewhere.

The angle in the article is that they are _dumping_ Spotify because they think it's toxic waste or they want to 'toxify' it. But it could just be profit- taking.

> _If the shareholders want to own a different business they can buy the > shares on their own._

Always true, of course.</comment></comment>


A C# Reading List by Eric Lippert (Principal on C# compiler team at MS) - <AUTHOR> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1769249

<comment><USER2> It's a nice list. I would add _C# In A Nutshell_ , it's a pretty good reference book for both beginners (in the language, not in programming) and experienced developers.

But this list is outdated. Last C#/CLR edition came with some new features, like await/async that literally blew my mind, and it would be pretty nice to have a good reference and explanation on them.</comment>


The US gov't diversity green card lottery for year 2015 ends in 2 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.dvlottery.state.gov/

<comment><USER2> damn, India and china are ineligible for this lottery. Major talent working in US are from these two countries.</comment>


Ask HN: Why Are So Many HN Links Non-HTTPS? - <AUTHOR> Many links on the front page direct to HTTP even when HTTPS is available. Besides using HTTPS Everywhere (which is not always an option on mobile), what can be done to help increase the proliferation of HTTPS links on HN? I don't love that my wireless carrier/ISP, or people snooping on public WiFi have such an easy way to see detailed browsing history. <comment><USER2> HTTPS Ad tech is one problem. Still lots of ad networks that don't support TLS/SSL and lots of media sites rely on ads for revenue.</comment>


100 Billion Note - <AUTHOR> http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/BUSINESS/08/19/zimbabwe.inflation/art.jpg <comment><USER2> I was chatting to a lady at work who often visits her mother in Zimbabwe. She said that they don't use Zimbabwean dollars anymore and are using South African Rand instead.</comment>


Farewell America - <AUTHOR> http://www.zerohedge.com/article/farewell-america-switzerland <comment><USER2> Most of you miss the point. I grew up in Switzerland and have a U.S. passport because my father is american. I know countless other people who have U.S. passports but haven't been in the U.S. for years. They will never be in need of medicare nor do they care what the americans do, never the less they have to pay US taxes to pay for politics that they don't neccessarily support in a country they have never lived in.

This has been accepted by the other nations and they have tried to comply with these rules as much as possible. Switzerland has stricter privacy laws which allows people to evade taxes easily. The problem is, the swiss still pay their taxes even though they aren't forced to – and there are numerous studies suggesting that not forcing people to do something actually works better. I can completely understand nations who want the swiss to close this loophole.

Recent events, this was confirmed a friend managing relations with the U.S. at a big swiss bank, made a lot of people rethink whether they still want to keep their U.S. passports and are getting rid of them. These people are have been living in Switzerland for years made their fortune in Switzerland and plan to retire here. Is there really any reason why they should pay taxes, just because they were born in the US?

However you should read the second part, in which they start talking about estate tax. In this example he talks about non-US citizens, people who have invested their money in the U.S. Obama now wants to make a law that will tax estate in the U.S even if the owner is not in possession of a U.S. passport or a greencard. Doing an MBA in the states is reason enough to being taxed. This means that a wealthy individual who owns US property or stocks & bonds and spent some time in the US now has to pay up to 45% of estate tax in the U.S. on his U.S. property. Just because you own German stocks, should Germany get access to all your financial accounts and be able to freeze the assets when you pass away to determine if you should be taxed in Germany? This is absolutely ridiculous and as they mentioned in the letter, the additional tax revenue will not create enough tax revenue to solve the problems of the U.S. That's why they are suggesting that their clients should withdraw from investing in the US, because that 2 month vacation in California suddenly means, that they'll take 45% of your Apple shares when you pass away.

</comment><comment><USER3> As near as I can tell, this article says "The U.S. won't turn a blind eye to private banking tax evasion schemes anymore, so we're out of here".

So long and please don't come back. As long as there exist large loopholes for high-net-worth folks to evade taxation, we will never get to bottom of "what is fair and reasonable taxation".

<comment><USER4> I'll take the downside. The ability to move capital outside of nations is, in my opinion, critical to freer government and society.

<comment><USER5> You can still move capital out of the US. If you do not wish to pay taxes on your capital gains, you can move yourself outside and take up the citizenship of another country, while renouncing that of the US.

As far as I am aware, there is nothing preventing you moving (say) a million dollars of your personal, post-tax income to Switzerland and just parking it there if for some reason you feel it's not secure here. You have to declare the fact but it's not like there are capital controls in place that prevent you from doing so - I'm quite willing to be corrected on this if you know otherwise.

<comment><USER6> No, when you are dead. Since you were once U.S. citizen in tax sense by owning U.S. properties and securities. (including you as permanent residents, or H1-B visa holders) The U.S. tax authority now has right to go to Swiss banks to request freezing of assets.

The worse part is when calculating your tax, the U.S. tax authority will treat you as a non citizen so they can tax assets more than 60k, instead of usually 1 million in 2009.

This just happens to one of the Taiwanese Billionaire, Wang Yung-ching. He owned U.S. properties and his company Formosa Plastics Corporation now is trying to estimate the amount of the tax they owe to U.S. tax authority, even the company is not a U.S. company and he has no U.S. citizenship and permanent resident status. But because both entities owns U.S. properties. The U.S. tax authority has their bites to all the company assets in Taiwan, too.

Meanwhile, his heirs in Taiwan still need to pay the inheritance taxes for their own shares of the inheritance.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, that sounds interesting but it seems much more complex than you suggest. Mr Wang died in new Jersey and left no will; so far it seems there has not even been a decision over whether his estate should be divided by up by a NJ or a Taiwan court, which would result in different outcomes since some of his unmarried lovers would have inheritance rights under Taiwanese law.

[http://www.probatelawyerblog.com/2009/08/new-jersey-hosts- es...](http://www.probatelawyerblog.com/2009/08/new-jersey-hosts-estate-fight- over-14-billion-legacy.html#more)

I also found information about estate taxes being paid in Taiwan, but not in the US: [http://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xitem=54144&ctnode=419&...](http://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xitem=54144&ctnode=419&mp=9)

Incidentally, HN readers might be using one of Mr Wang's chipsets: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Yung-ching>

<comment><USER6> Thanks for amending it. I thought it will not be that popular for U.S. audience for his story so I simplified it. What I want to said is he is not a U.S. citizen and permanent resident. But he owns properties in U.S.

I wonder what will be the case for Morris Chang? He retired from Texas Instrument after he was sure his pension and stock was vested. Then he left U.S. to Taiwan to found TSMC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Be aware: reading Zero Hedge may be hazardous to your health.

<comment><USER7> I have to agree. It does have some good tidbits every now and then, but mostly spits out some derogatory non-sense. Does more harm than good.

It's somehow considered very professional and underground, but from what I've read by real pros in the field, the guy mostly doesn't seem to have any clue what he's writing about.

<comment><USER8> Can anyone out there recommend good econ blogs/sites? I'm an econ novice. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> \- I run an advisory over at investingwithoptions.com, but it's more short term and not econ.

\- Zero Hedge is good if you take it with a grain of salt

\- Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture

\- paul kedrosky's blog

couple others, but they interlink with each other

<comment><USER3> Your recent post on the education bubble is well written. I look forward to future installments. Since I assume you make financial decisions with hard numbers, I'm hoping to see some as this thesis continues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So the "article" consists of one sentence which links to another article and says I should read the other article. This is such blatant hit farming that even Slashdot would be ashamed of it. I am sure the other article is a fine and important one, but I am just not going to click on it out of principle.

I wish I could mod stories down. How much karma does one need for that?

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing you need admin access to the database to mod things down. Flagging is all there is so far as published info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "...over the last 60 years has unquestionably been one of the most aggressive nations in the world .... With breathtaking moral duplicity, the USA maintains enormous offshore havens ..."

Thanks to Noam Chomsky ... and almost _noone_ else ... I already knew all that.</comment>


Google Launches Audio Indexing - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/google-launches-audio-indexing/

<comment><USER2> This could be really good news for podcasters who are currently paying for transcription services.

Now if Google would just offer audio indexing as a web service, that would be rad.

</comment><comment><USER3> I bet you _THIS_ is why GOOG-411 was launched. I was waiting for an announcement like this.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly why.

 _"... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."_

[http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis...](http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/10/23/Google- wants-your-phonemes_1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There goes the need for my software to read subtitles on videos!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious what TechCrunch's article provides beyond what came out in the standard press release on the Google Blog. ([http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-audio- indexing...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-audio-indexing-now- on-google.html))

</comment><comment><USER7> Now to make this multi-language :)</comment>


My father's lecture on inventing and entrepreneurship  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9RYXqCtsZsc

<comment><AUTHOR> I just got around to uploading this lecture my father gave at the University of Waterloo. My father, Evan Koslow, is a very successful serial entrepreneur who has started dozens of businesses. I've always found his teachings to be pretty educational and inspiring. Even though it isn't the best quality video, if you have the time I would give it a watch.</comment>


Share Feelings on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://petrustheron.com/posts/facebook-feelings.html

<comment><USER2> What's the point of this? Besides the fact that you can type this in way quicker than the time it takes to select those options through the UI, it's another mechanism that devalues the average post content.

I think we could simplify this by replacing the entire post mechanism with a smiley button that you can click on, say every full hour, to let the world know you still exist. ;)

<comment><USER3> The point for Facebook is that it's machine-readable targeting data without having to do NLP. The point for users is it's a way of providing context out- of-band. It definitely adds value to posts for Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They should use this for "likes".

Death of a celebrity? 50000 people feel sad, 2000 people feel happy. I think that would be much more appropriate than 52000 likes.

<comment><USER5> Voting with emotion.

Psychotechnological (r)evolution, showing real human potential and portends.

One vote has more meaning.

Sharing raw feelings is a good sign, and language evolving, to really represent our system and society of mind and machinery, of emotionally diverse voting interest indication, with little technical difficulty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I saw this I was confused about why Facebook wanted to be more like LiveJournal. Is that a reflection on the userbase?

<comment><USER7> Livejournal added it to make it easier for depressed people to be found by each other. Facebook added it to make it easier for depressed people to be found by drug companies.

<comment><USER6> I don't recall LJ having anything like a 'search by mood'. I guess my memory might be hazy though.

<comment><USER7> No search, but when randomly browsing around you can see mood at a glance

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A similar feature has been available on other websites for many years such as livejournal (from what I heard at least, I haven't used it). Now that I see how it works on facebook, it strongly reminds me of journals on deviantART, it seems to ask the exact same questions.

<comment><USER9> MySpace had this in 2007.

<comment><USER10> It's a sign!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So apparently this is old news, but I only noticed it for the first time this morning.

<comment><USER11> It rolled out slowly I think. A few people I know didn't have it until very recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It not available here in India.</comment>


Intel extends JavaScript for parallel programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/17/intel_parallel_javascript/ <comment><USER2> Will in be used in node.js?</comment>