declan

Teslas are in line with other luxury sedans (of course you may view all of those are insanely expensive). The 60 starts at $64K, cash price counting tax credits, and the P85 is $96K.

Compare that with the starting prices of the BMW 5-series, $50K (base) to $94K (M5). The Porsche Panamera is $78K to $180K starting price. The Model S has been tested against the Mercedes S550, which starts at $94K.

If you look at the performance of the P85D, especially its horsepower and torque, you arguably get far more for your money than you do with any petrol-powered sedan. It's even quicker than the Panamera Turbo.

I prefer lighter vehicles -- the P85D is 50% heavier than my RWD manual transmission'd sports car -- but if I needed a sedan Tesla would now be my default choice.

>How is 7% close to a rounding error?

I didn't say 7% was a rounding error. I wrote "a quarter" of 7%, which is rather different.

<tptacek>: Yes, we've been around this circle before, and I don't think we're going to change each other's minds.

As for Aaron Swartz's attorneys, they would have jumped at the chance for probation. They explicitly offered it as a deal to the Feds, who rejected it. Prosecutors held out for a felony plea and prison time: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/15/aaron-swart...

So because of the combination of federal overcriminalization (thank you, Congress) and prosecutorial overzealousness (thank you, Carmen Ortiz), this is what Aaron had to look forward to:

If he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years... Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-l...

Well, the mere fact that a jury convicted someone of violating Federal Law X doesn't mean that Federal Law X is a good, just, or sensible law. Aaron Swartz may well have been convicted of violating Federal Law Y, but that doesn't justify his prosecution (or the existence of Federal Law Y).

Here's a better description of the case:

Seafood dealers were prosecuted and convicted for importing lobster tails from Honduras because they allegedly violated an obscure Honduran regulation requiring that frozen seafood be shipped in cardboard boxes instead of clear plastic bags, and because about three percent of the 70,000 pound shipment consisted of Caribbean spiny lobster tails that were less than 5.5 inches in length, which allegedly violated another Honduran regulation on size limit...

Because the seafood was shipped in clear plastic bags instead of opaque boxes, they were also charged with "smuggling," even though the shipments regularly went through Customs inspections and testing by the Food and Drug Administration at the port near Mobile, Alabama...

There was just one problem with the Justice Department's case: the Honduran regulations that served as the predicate for the charges were later declared to be null and void, repealed, and otherwise of no legal effect by Honduran courts, the Honduran Attorney General, and other high level Honduran officials, including the Honduran Human Rights Commission. The Honduran government took the extraordinary step of filing a brief in the court of appeals, and again in the Supreme Court, providing the official views of the country that the regulations were invalid.

Source: http://www.wlf.org/upload/022404PK.pdf

It sounds like you owe Harvey, who wrote Three Felonies a Day, an apology (he was EFF's first lawyer, I recall, and I wouldn't be surprised if he reads HN occasionally). But I have no brief to defend the book or talk at length about lobster tails; my point was overcriminalization is real.

80 percent of the developed water supply in California is used by agriculture. About 6 percent is industrial and commercial. That leaves 7 percent residential landscaping, and 7 percent residential non-landscaping (showers, washing machines, etc.). Source: http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/where-we-...

Even if residential landscaping or non-landscaping water usage dropped by a quarter immediately, which seems rather unlikely, that's close to a rounding error compared to the amount of water to turn our near-desert into an agricultural breadbasket. Put another way, more water is used for almond farming alone in California than all residential landscaping or residential non-landscaping: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

The drought is real, but I would take op-eds like these more seriously if they acknowledged the above figures. And the fact that some cities like Sacramento still don't have everyone on metered water -- flat rate! -- and meters won't be fully installed until after 2025. Source: http://portal.cityofsacramento.org/%20Utilities/Conservation...

Welcome to the wonderful world of federal overcriminalization.

Aaron Swartz faced 13 federal felonies (the Feds upped it from 4 to 13 at some point) and a possible maximum of 50+ years in prison: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-go...

Then there's the No Electronic Theft Act, which Clinton signed into law. It made not-for-profit copyright infringement -- think sharing on P2P networks -- a federal felony. Previously it was a civil matter.

Now <gvb> is correct that there are sentencing guidelines that will make the likely sentence less. But even the outside possibility of a young man or woman leaving prison when they're 70-80+ years old for a non-violent crime is remarkable. (Note I'm not defending Paul Ceglia, who may well have committed fraud and should pay the price if convicted; I'm merely saying that the punishment should correspond to the gravity of the offense.)

These are DOJ stats for the year 2000, but it gives you an idea of the range for violent felonies: "The mean prison sentence for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter was nearly 20 years and 8 months." http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/Fssc00.txt

Harvey Silverglate's book "Three Felonies a Day" is an excellent resource, and I separately wrote about the overcriminalization of federal law here: http://www.cnet.com/news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartz-how-u...

I once tried to interview Warren Buffett and was connected to his personal secretary, who very kindly said it was unlikely to happen. No phalanxes of PR folks, just her. Maybe she updates the site for him. :)

To respond to your spartan web page point, let's compare the page load times vs. Apple.com, which most of us might agree is beautifully done.

Berkshire Hathaway speed (Google PageSpeed): 99/100

Apple.com speed (Google PageSpeed): 62/100

Berkshire Hathaway speed (via Pingdom): 476 ms

Apple.com speed (via Pingdom): 1.68 sec

There's something to be said for a 3.4KB web page...

<nikcub> is certainly right about the dangers of raising venture capital as a media company. Few news organizations generate outsize returns.

In terms of companies sold, there's also CNET, which was sold for $1.8B to CBS in 2008. That was after an operating loss of $6M in 1Q 2008.

Here are some stats on advertising cost per thousand views (CPMs) from mid-2014, which may be relevant: http://monetizepros.com/blog/2014/average-cpm-rates/

Some excerpts:

Average CPM for business & finance: $6.15

Average CPM for technology: $4.56

Average CPM for style and beauty: $1.48

So at $4.56 per thousand views, assuming one ad per page, even if an article does 20K views, that's only $91. This is why news organizations look for differentiators; it's what we did when I was at Wired and CNET, though I was on the editorial side, not advertising. Unfortunately not all news organizations succeed; Gigaom did events and had a paid research arm, but that wasn't enough. I'm also still mourning Dr. Dobb's, which I first read as a teenager. :(

I've taught as an adjunct or equivalent at three universities. Two public, one private. Two gigs were during the school year, and one was an abbreviated summer program.

I don't remember the summer program rate, but I recall the school-year rates were around $3,500 per course. That was fine if you had a full-time day job, as I did, and the classes were in the late afternoon or evening and your employer didn't mind your moonlighting.

I taught the classes because I enjoyed the experience, not for the money. I've met plenty of people in the same position: Peter Thiel presumably did not teach his now-famous Stanford course for the salary. So to that extent, the Trinity administrator quoted in the linked article is correct.

But I suspect most adjuncts do not have non-academic careers. So they're struggling, especially in expensive metro areas (in part because they're competing against people like me that might be convinced to teach a single seminar for virtually nothing if we get to pick the topic). But it's a bigger problem than that: as <bloataway> suggests, it's middle management bloat, coupled with an oversupply of qualified instructors, government-subsidized loans, etc. Not a simple problem.

You are correct that U.S. policy is in some ways broken, but incorrect in assuming that warrant canaries serve no purpose or firms can be compelled to lie. The far better arguments are that such an order would be unconstitutional -- look at the NSL 1A litigation for a good parallel.

That's why CanaryWatch.org is run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, NYU's Technology Law & Policy Clinic, and the Calyx Institute. I moderated an event at HOPE X last year with Nick from Calyx (and Ladar from LavaBit) and they have spent quite a bit of time thinking through this.

The sole purpose of a warrant canary is to say something akin to: "We have received no warrants or NSLs."

The Silent Circle warrant canary has no such statement. It says the opposite: if "no warrants have been served," such a declaration will appear. The declaration does not appear. The most obvious conclusion is they have been served with some a warrant or similar compulsory legal process.

I think it's unlikely that the wording was accidentally unclear. This came up in the HN thread in December, with <StavrosK> saying: "You're right, it looks like the wording is a bit unclear. I'll talk to the guys to see if we can get it updated, thanks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796912

On the other hand, on January 6, 2015: “There is nothing to report via warrant canary or otherwise because we have never been served with a warrant, subpoena or other legal requirement to provide anything.” https://support.silentcircle.com/customer/portal/questions/9...

It's really quite simple to get a warrant canary right and eliminate ambiguity. Look at rsync.net's example:

No warrants have ever been served to rsync.net, or rsync.net principals or employees. No searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on rsync.net assets... http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

The one we're using at http://recent.io/ is similar, and possibly more explicit:

As of [date], we have not received any legal process or demand from any federal, state, or local government. We have received no National Security Letters, civil subpoenas, search warrants, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders, grand jury subpoenas, or any other form of compulsory process.

As a community, we really need a way to keep track of status changes in warrant canaries. I wonder if https://canarywatch.org/ keeps archived copies.

>How hard is it for a site to setup a simple paywall linked to a low-cost payment processor?

Well, it depends on what the cut is -- I don't know and the linked page doesn't say. But news organizations that are good at reporting may not have much expertise in technology tasks like this. (By way of background, I've worked for a bunch of them before founding http://recent.io/ )

Also I don't believe Google Contributor is intended to be an implementation of a paywall. It's a way to avoid having to implement paywalls, and the problems those can cause for news organizations.

I think <guelo>'s advice above is sound. I learned this lesson myself after testing early versions of http://recent.io -- there's a high barrier to convincing users to type in an email address and password, even if it's for personalized news recommendations across multiple devices. It's not necessarily a trust issue -- it's simply a hurdle. Fortunately there are other ways to do it...

I think the post above by <grey-area> is on target. I suspect there is a large market for very easy-to-use app building environments (though, because I know how to code and like doing it, I don't know what the competitive landscape is like).

I remember seeing Steve Jobs giving demos of Interface Builder at NeXT -- hey, drag and drop connections between objects! -- and, years later, nobody has solved it yet.

But as <grey-area> says, there may be many reasons why people could be reluctant to switch to your environment. You created a new programming language? I don't care about programming languages as much as having a good collection of libraries -- will I be able to find or convert the ones I need? How about the equivalent of ones like Beautiful Soup, or PIL, or even massaging UTF-8 strings? For reference, CPAN has over 144,000 Perl modules available.

Do I need your build servers to create an app, meaning if your company goes out of business, I'm out of luck? If Apple changes APIs, how long until you support them? Etc. Open sourcing will help.

I understand you're pre-release, and that the site is a placeholder. But you may want to address some of these questions in a FAQ. In any case, I applaud your effort. You're trying to create something new and powerful. Very few people have the courage and fortitude even to try.

UPDATE: I watched part of the video and it seems very GUI-based, so my question about programming languages and libraries doesn't seem relevant.

I agree the article is favorable to Yahoo, but it strikes me as likely that the author conducted interviews, reviewed the facts, and wrote what he thought was the truth. Some folks on this thread may disagree with his conclusions, but that by itself does not make it bad journalism.

Disclaimer: Steven is a friend, occasionally a competitor (before I left to found Recent.io), and someone who once approached me to work with him.

One of my favorite answers to this question comes from a federal lawsuit that ended with a ruling that source code is protected by the First Amendment. Here's an excerpt:

Programs written in source code also share many of the linguistic elements of texts written in natural languages, like German or French... For First Amendment purposes, the use of language is highly significant. Languages are made up of conventions, regular ways of expressing and communicating thoughts and ideas shared by a group of speakers...

Language can be technical, and even arcane, but that does not make it any less like language. A native speaker of English, untrained in medicine, might have difficulty understanding the discussion of a cancer patient's progress. The vocabulary is different even if the grammar is not. Musicians use artificial notation for writing and reading music. Mathematicians and scientists do the same to express concepts important in their fields, with grammar and other conventions that may be wholly incomprehensible to the uninitiated...

For every shared language, natural or artificial, however, there is a community of speakers and listeners (or readers) for whom the language is both comprehensible and for which the language is its conventional form of communication. To belong to a community is to speak its language...

That's from a brief submitted by attorneys for the late Peter Junger (http://louisville.edu/faculty/ddking01/cecs311/cases/Junger%...) in an effort to attack FedGov encryption export controls.

If source code can be expressive, and it is, then it can be art. That doesn't mean that all code is art, of course -- I've written my share of single-use utilities that aren't -- but some subset does deserve that title.

This is a fair question. In my two posts on the HN thread last month, I wasn't defending the proposal on the merits; instead, I made a narrow point that the headline was unsupported by the August 2014 source document and should be changed. That is still the case. Others, I recall, went further and can speak for themselves.

(Put another way, it's possible to have misleading headlines about even wildly unconstitutional proposals extruded by Washington officialdom! Best to be painstakingly accurate in our criticisms.)

I did note that "the more interesting section (to me) on page 340, which is the fact that warrants could authorize 'remote access to search electronic storage and seize or copy electronically stored information' via the Internet."

And it looks like, from the linked National Journal article, this is what Google is alarmed by. I've talked a few times with the Google lawyer quoted in the news article, and suspect he would not make bold claims without good reason.

But I haven't read Google's submission myself -- http://recent.io/ is keeping me too busy right now. That's why I submitted only the linked article. :)

When working on an early version of http://recent.io/, I added a physics animation of bouncing/falling balls during the network request to the server. When the network request completed, gravity pulled all the balls off the bottom of the screen.

Some early testers liked the animation, but it turned out engineering effort was better spent on getting the backend tuned for better performance. Now the request for user-specific news is down to around 500ms on WiFi, and the physics animation has gone away. :)

This is well-known, I think, in economic circles. If you want another, arguably more accurate measure based on the government's previous (pre-1995) methodology, check out Shadowstats.com: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

It shows the real unemployment rate, counting short-term discouraged and marginally attached workers, to be around 22-23% today. That's up from around 12-13% before the 2008 recession.

On a related note, I submitted this article with an HTTPS URL and HN parsed it as a blank page (but http obviously worked). You can see that blank page here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982899

My guess is that HN doesn't support the SNI extension to HTTPS, so it's unable to parse certain sites. Y'all should fix this.

I should note that (assuming the SNI theory is correct) that HN isn't alone. My understanding is that Twitter didn't support SNI until last month and some other major sites still don't.

I could just as easily write:

"It's worth remembering that one disadvantage left-side politics have is that they are defending the status quo, and mounting such a defense is trench warfare, not a campaign that captures the hearts and minds of the next generation. By comparison, right-side politics are passionate for change. And it's when people are passionate that they get into disagreement. But because the right is so far away from achieving its goals, the passions inside the movement aren't as heated. Also, the right tends to be suspicious of political correctness and ideological litmus tests."

I suspect if you hung around Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage, Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, etc. for a while, you'd find that they want to overturn the status quo on taxes (perhaps a flat tax), government spending (reduce significantly), third-tier government agencies not mentioned in the Constitution (abolish), abortion (overturn Roe v. Wade), obscenity and indecency (remember the horror called the Communications Decency Act?), religion (erode church/state barrier), United Nations (get U.S. out, or reduce dues), federal regulations (dramatically roll back), Obamacare (repeal), Second Amendment (enforce RTKBA post-Heller), voter ID, marriage, home schooling (defend), public schools (vouchers), and so on.

Look at the 1968 Democratic Party platform. It talked about Head Start, Upward Bound, more federal spending on education, Medicare expansion, creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more regulation of industry, increasing Social Security spending, etc. [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29604]. It's been nearly half a century since then, and all those policies have been enshrined into law; the question today is not whether to eliminate them, but how much budgets will increase year-over-year.

Liberalism has won the culture war as well, as both conservatives and liberals have acknowledged for quite some time: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/14/1291965/-Liberalism... http://theweek.com/articles/469079/culture-war-over-conserva...

Because the correspondence comes:

(a) in the form of a valid court order hand-delivered to and served on your CEO at his home at 6am by two very grim federal agents who don't really like getting up this early, or

(b) if you're represented by counsel, it comes in the form of notification to your attorney by the court clerk that a court order has been issued (or perhaps notification from an AUSA if the clerk's office is slacking).

This could happen in the U.S. as well. Our esteemed politicians and federal police have proposed a new law with exactly the same approach. I disclosed some of these efforts in this 2012 article:

"The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law...requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly. 'If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding'" http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites...

Here's another article from 2006 talking about Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado). She had originally proposed legislation imposing data retention requirements on ISPs, but then wanted to extend it to Facebook, Xanga, MySpace, etc. (to be fair, Rs have made similar proposals): http://news.cnet.com/Congress-targets-social-networking-site...

I can't easily find the link to another piece I wrote, but DOJ/FBI reps have also talked about including photo-sharing sites. This is in addition to the FBI wanting to force ISPs to keep track of every web site that customers visit (not just IPs assigned): http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-wants-records-kept-of-web-sites...

So far these proposals have not become law, meaning that the types of companies well-represented here on HN don't have to keep records of their users' activities for future police access. I've been critical of AT&T/VZ/Comcast/etc. over surveillance here before, but I'll give them credit for this: Those of us working on social/email/etc. startups aren't targeted by all these regulations today because of ISPs' defensive DC efforts over many years. They're doing it because of self-interest, true, but the spillover effect is real.

>Blackberry is asking for recognition that they can not compete in their own industry.

If Blackberry merely wanted "recognition that they can not compete," they could put out a press release.

Anytime you write a letter to Congress that includes the phrase "must be mandated" -- as Blackberry's CEO did -- it's abundantly clear you're asking a new law.

Apple develops iMessage, and gives it away for free on iOS, as a way to make its own platforms more attractive.

Let's say this hypothetical "API neutrality" proposal were to go through -- note the actual letter from Blackberry's CEO never mentioned the phrase "API"[1] -- then Apple might simply stop developing iMessage. Unless your hypothetical law forces them to make the API available and keep it available indefinitely to all comers, effectively subsidizing their competitors out of their own pocket.

[1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...

Well, his actual letter doesn't mention the phrase "API," so reading such a request into it seems like a stretch: http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...

I did read the letter and his position is extreme: the BBC captured it accurately.

Anytime you write a letter to Congress that includes the phrase "must be mandated" -- as Blackberry's CEO did -- it's abundantly clear you're asking for a new law.

Now, I admit the question of whether or not this particular proposed law is extreme or not is a judgment call, but forcing programmers (at gunpoint?) to develop for other platforms seems a bit extreme to me. Also not a recipe for very good code. :)

Exactly right. I noticed this many times when living in DC. There's even a study that puts numbers on the ROI for politician-purchasing:

"In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits." http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forget-s...

As a fellow driving enthusiast, I agree. When shopping for my last car, the manufacturer's outgoing model had a sport exhaust setting but did not pipe exhaust noise into the cabin. The incoming model did. (Note this is an actual mechanical opening or tube, not BMW-style synthesized noise.)

I ended up with the special-edition outgoing model for other reasons, including greater horsepower, but wouldn't necessarily object to piping in exhaust noise. Playing back recorded engine noise, on the other hand, seems just wrong to me.

Tangentially, a neighbor one street over has a pair of Ferraris that he and his wife track at Laguna Seca. I can always hear when they drive by (rarely, they have other cars they use on a daily basis) and it's a splendid exhaust note.