somenomadicguy

> Is this due to Assange? Or due to the war on whistleblowers? Given the resource constraints of WL, Assange must choose between publishing unredacted information and not publishing at all.

Again, your argument is yet another conspiracy theory. You can't argue against this, because no matter what, it's the Cigarette Smoking Man in the background. And the resource-constraint argument is an excuse for sloppy, irresponsible journalism.

The argument that wikileaks is not at all affected by Assange's emotional and mental state seems to be an attempt to make him out to be an altruistic, infallible god, not a human .

Major news caters more towards the people that give them money, and they base their content choices on their sponsors.

It seems that every time Assange has a bowel movement, all of the major news sources write about it as front-page news, and immediately every comment is about how no major news outlet is reporting on wikileaks.

> Are you arguing that the information revealed by the DNC emails is not a reflection of very significant character flaws in Clinton?

I haven't read them all, so can you clue me into what they exposed about her directly in contrast to what they exposed about the DNC organization?

And were you aware of my other point, his attacks on Zeynep from the New York times? She pointed out the danger the leaks put women in. Instead of saying, "hey, that leak wasn't our fault, but mea culpa anyways, we're sorry". Then when she pointed out that if he'd had some Turks read the emails they'd have laughed and said "don't bother", he again went into a campaign of character assaults against her?

I think this is newsworthy because wikileaks does not maintain the journalistic integrity we expect of them, they never retract their mistakes, nor do they apologize.

OK then. The AKP leak exposed nothing, but rather added to an incredibly stressful and precarious situation in Türkiye. It carelessly aided in doxing most women in Türkiye. It helped spread malware. It was a good opportunity to co-opt the press around the coup.

To answer this honestly, I don't know. It would depend on the quality of the data he leaked, and which hostile foreign enemy he sided with against him.

On one hand, I have daughters, and don't want misogynistic defenders of rape-culture having any power over them.

On the other hand, I care about fairness and justice.

On my third hand (yay radiation!), Clinton is an evil sociopath who is bound to be largely ineffective as your president thanks to a republican legislature. Trump, however, is an incompetent demagogue who I think will cause a massive amount of un-needed suffering in this world.

So my honest answer is, I don't know. It probably depends on if I'd taken my meds that day and how emotional I was feeling.

The first 1/2 of your argument: CIA. Let me be clear, I don't support Clinton, Trump, or anybody else, I feel you have to be an evil sociopath to even want to be a world leader.

I think he is just playing sides. Trump doesn't give a crap, but Hillary knows he's after her. Putin has shown an eager willingness to give asylum to Snowden, him, and anybody else. I just think he's a sociopathic narcissist who watched too many thrillers and wants to wield power against governments.

   - Strong willingness to work with mainstream news outlets to create high production quality investigative journalism (Assange has done all he possibly could).

In the beginning, sure, I'll admit you were right on this. The past year or two, however, wikileaks has failed to produce anything of substance. It's "leaks" (of Turkish dessert recipes) have been sloppy at best, irresponsible and dangerous at worst. Not even Fox would be as careless as he was with the personal data of millions of women in an islamist country. Sean Hannity isn't exactly Woodward and Bernstein.

  - Resilience to meddling by the many enemies one makes (Assange has done well with this).

Has he? He seems to be attempting to wield his power against his enemies. Is that resilience, or vendetta?

   - Reinforcing the strength and bias-free nature of the institution (Assange has made clear that he finds Trump and Hillary both despicable, yet this comment is ignored by many such as yourself).

His actions state otherwise. I'm not sure who posts more anti-clinton rhetoric, Trump or Assange. Lately Wikileaks' feed has have been emotional responses to criticisms and perceived sleights, and heavily biased character attacks on his perceived enemies. There hasn't actually been any journalism that I can see.

Assange has a problem with women. His character assaults against Clinton and journalist Zeynep Tukfeci are pretty good indicators of this.

Assange is absolutely a criminal for breaking the terms of his bail. The sexual assault charges, however, are unproven, and he really deserves his day in court, whether he is guilty or innocent. I hadn't heard the anti-semite bit before, however.

There might be a much simpler reason for all of this. Being stuck in the embassy for years has severely taxed his emotional stability, encouraging narcissism, paranoia, and victimhood. At the very least, his journalism is sloppy, irresponsible, and ever-decreasing in integrity.

I read through about 1/2 of the AKP "leaks", it was a tremendous waste of time for anything but improving comprehension of Türkçe.

At a point in time, I truly believed Assange's goals were justice and transparency, now I am beginning to feel like he has his own political agenda, and is making sophomoric attempts to affect political change.

In 2016 Wikileaks's agenda seems to be:

  - Anti-Hillary
  - Anti-Hillary
  - Pro-Trump
  - Pro-Putin
  - Anti-Hillary
  - Opportunistic

The AKP leak falls into that last line. The coup happened, it was frightening (I watched two F-16s fly over the city at mach1+ for six-hours, and the helicopter which landed at BJK was so close to us at a cafe we could see the faces of the guys inside when it banked), and they capitalized on that fear to increase their own credibility and to demonize the ruling party here.

Unlike previous leaks Assange and his gang didn't put ANY effort into vetting the "leak". He didn't have to, because within certain crowds Wikileaks is an indisputably trusted source. His perceived persecution makes him beyond reproach, and now any criticism can be blamed on a conspiracy theory.

Rapist? CIA/Sweden persecuting him. Bail jumper? CIA/Mi5 persecution. Committed the crime of jumping bail? CIA/Mi5. Hiding in Ecuador for years? Illegal CIA detention. His best buddy Jake Appelbaum is a rapist? CIA.

This amount of trust and credibility would certainly make it easier for him, or a foreign agent, to spread malware. It's probably just a slip-up on not scanning the emails before publishing. But if it isn't, what are the odds that they are traced back to Russian hackers?

(Edited for typos and formatting. )

I'm curious why should you expect them to have a two-word name written in latin letters? You are the most diverse country in the world, every language, nationality and tribe is represented there.

At least in the states, legal regulations on names vary from place to place. In the state of Texas, if you're a lawyer, you are legally required to tell people this, most commonly done by adding the Esq abbreviation for Esquire at the end of your name. I have a friend who's official name (of course I've obfuscated this) is "Dr. Firstname b. Lastname PhD, Esq.".

Oh man, I really feel for her. Dealing with the various immigration agencies must have been a nightmare. I bet they ended up officially changing her name to "Firstname Firstname", which is what we tend to do in the states..

This bugs me, because if a name is supposed to be a unique identifier, then part of it's existence is to feed the ego. "This is ME! I am Jean Valjean!"

When you then you change somebody's name to fit your short-sighted database constraints you're pretty much saying, "You don't matter as much as our programmers' decisions matter, now move along 9430"

I have a very, very generic name. I lived in a hacker warehouse a lifetime ago where there were 3 of us with the same exact name, so yeah, the address part alone isn't that important.I always make up a fake address, often a police station or a garbage dump, and treat that address as a throwaway.

Sure, that's a reasonable corner case to be concerned with. But, what if you forgot what fake name you gave them? Or what if your name is John Smith and so are 50,000 others in their database?

While designing or refactoring an app, ask yourself, "Do I really need her name or address? Will I risk their privacy and security if my database is compromised? What will I do with this information? Will I sell it to advertisers, or will I ignore it? Will I alienate any potential customers by following the first-name last-name standard?

Really, this has me thinking, WHY do we have a last name? It's basically nationalism for families. "I am Eric, the son of John Smith!" .. So what? Who cares what your family's name was? Think about it. The only time anybody has ever addressed me with my full-name it was in a government context. Are two names really required for a UUID? Why only two? Why not four?

Immigrant officials at Ellis Island used to give people last names based on their father's first name, or the name of the city they come from.

Also, Armenians didn't have last names until recently, so you'll meet lots of people with names like "Gevork Gevorkian" or "Ohan Ohanesian", or their name will be shifted to the right, adding an "ian" to the end (think the prefixed O' in irish names), and give them anglicized names.

One could change #40 to: You need your customers' names. I look at a name the same way I look at a username, more frequently than not it's a hassle you don't need to solve. In many applications a username, or even better, an email address, is the best UUID for a user.

We design apps to collect names by default, even when we don't need them and will never use them for any purpose, or at worse, the purpose we use them for is violation of privacy.

Here in Türkiye there's a lot of frightening nationalism, most of it centered around the first president, Atatürk. Some of it is valid and inspiring, a lot of it is very effective PR.

I could care less about the nationalism, but Atatürk gets some props for reforming the education system through replacing the Arabic script with a phonetic Roman alphabet to reduce illiteracy, and personally translating scientific/mathematic terms/concepts into the new language, and even translating a German geometry textbook.

Imagine if we followed-suit and hired education-oriented mathematicians for our leaders, instead of lawyers and businessmen.

I used to date a woman whose hippy mother decided that last names were slavery, she's the person who turned me onto this list. The experience really opened my eyes into the anglo/usa-centric nature of most app development best practices, and how complicated it must be to work as a localization engineer.

She suffered quite a bit, any call to a government agency, especially FASFA student loans (btw fuck you FASFA, fuck you), would often end up in tears after hours of pleading to them she was a real person, or explaining "just freaking search me this way, it's how they did it the last time I spent 2 hours on the phone with you). The only benefit is that having only one name makes it rather difficult to google/facebook stalk you.

tl;dr: Not everybody has a name like yours. Don't use "first name", "last name" for somebody's name. Just give it a 512-byte or larger UTF8 field, and move on.

I guess it's hard to be relevant and get attention when your business model is Yet Another Chat System. This sort of Bro- marketing, however, tends to linger in the back of my head as a telling sign of how usable the product will be, and what customer service will look like.

(edited for clarification of comment)

There was a time when this would have been leaked on Wikileaks and sensationalized for weeks. Snowden seems to be able to maintain his composure, grace, and professionalism while in exile in Russia, he's still an inspiration.

Assange on the other hand, not so much.

(Edited for typos)

Around a decade ago I consulted for a company, funded by In-Q-Tel (because the CEO used to work there), whose entire product was essentially a blog to tell your life story before you died and leave it behind for your family.

Clearly more CIA Evil.

This article is somewhat confusing. Are they replacing the engines with new engines, or refurbishing the existing engines with new blades?

How can you be 100% sure it's the sugar? Perhaps it's a new set of chemicals and bacteria in the water supply of her new home? Perhaps it's the tea itself, the temperature of the drink, the cream, new molds or pollen in the air where she now lives? Or the stress of moving?

I mean to imply more that every time we have a new paradigm shift in titles, job responsibilities get increased. For example, it's not enough to be a backend developer, now you must be a full stack developer, so that we can hire fewer front-end devs. It's not enough to be a DevOps engineer, now you must be a FullStackDevOpsEngineer. There's this concept that out there is some superman engineer who can somehow be an expert in everything.

Security is hard. Conforming to security best practices is one thing. Being a security expert is in itself an entire career field.

After they pay their taxes, I imagine they will post some billboards like this:

Dear EU,

Please use some of the €13 Billion in taxes to keep art in schools.

Love, Apple.

Or we will remember 2016 as yet another year where our salaries remained stagnant while expectations and responsibilities were increased by 100%?

I've hit subscription model overload at this point. I've long-since stopped using most of the software and services in my life which are subscription based. I'm likely to just go back to an encrypted text file, and cutting & pasting passwords.

You are not netflix, and I am not your personal ATM.

Sanitation work like Septic is far more important than any cute software start-up, that's for sure. I think my last honest job was cleaning out chicken-stalls on a farm when I was 12.

Perhaps Thiel offered a minimum return on investment to Hogan? "If you win, you get 100% of a 9+ figure reward. If you lose, I give you $25m, either way we exact our revenge".

Quite simply, a bank would have done a risk analysis and quickly pushed for a settlement, whereas Thiel was motivate by hatred, and the kind of entitlement which comes from power and wealth. He was to happy to carry all the risk and let Hogan reap the rewards give the reward to Hulk out of pure hatred for Nick Denton. Decision makers at banks always report to somebody. Thiel knows that being a billionaire means that he doesn't have to justify his actions to anybody.

"when the truth is Thiel provided financing and likely got an economic interest in the final judgment/settlement but he still had zero influence on the case itself"

Zero influence? Wasn't his $10m incredibly influential?

Perhaps I'm just too cynical in my old age, this feels like at best it is about turning the legal system into a market opportunity, not seeking justice. At worst it can be a tool, as with the Thiel case, to profit off of exacting revenge. There is no market opportunity for investors to join in on a defense.

The timing seems to be an opportunistic response to the Gawker lawsuit. Thiel has validated this sort of a marketplace, and being who he is, it's caught the attention of our opportunistic, objectivist start-up community.Of course the next step is to make this sort of market opportunity accessible to less wealthy investors. Version 2 will be crowdsourced for-profit lawsuits. 5,000 people each invest $2k in a lawsuit against Facebook and see a 1400% return in two years.

I feel that this is a direct result of Thiel validating this marketplace, so let me respond to your "If" argument with my own.

If Peter Thiel weren't a cult of personality type associated with our community, but rather he were the CEO of Fox News, Donald Trump, or Martin Shkreli, he would have been absolutely demonized in the HN! community.

We are going down a slippery slope that can use "might is right" to destroy competition, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. You should see what this same mentality has done to the business world and to the press here in Türkiye.

Class-action lawsuits are already the protection of the poor against mercury poisoning, done on contingency by lawyers who stand to reap huge profits. Now this takes the risk away from the lawyers and turns that risk into a high profit opportunity for a smaller subset of investors.