skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A guy I knew in college had a rootkit installed on one of his servers. FBI and GBI took his drives (I was his RA at the time, definitely was law enforcement, not a 18 year old's exaggeration). They brought them back around a month later after the crime lab made copies.
I like how people think vim is vi, and talk about vim-specific features as though they are in all vis.

Incidentally, I sometimes use vim as $EDITOR when dealing with perforce, because if the editor dies (or fails to start) for any reason, all changes are committed by default with no commit message... and sometimes I don't have an emacs for emacsclient to connect to. (The result is 30 minutes of work trying to get perforce to uncommit my changes. Usually I fail and just comment out the tests, commit that, and fix the code later. Ah, perforce...)

Anyway, I recently discovered that C-p, C-n, C-b, and C-f work as they do in Emacs. They just need to add C-a, C-e, M-m, C-k, and C-y, and normal mode will become unnecessary. (And I won't need to install mg on so many machines.)

And then vim will almost have as many editing features as my bash prompt ;)
HBase performance testing Adobe
Prior legal discussions, to avoid reinventing the wheel: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1289252
I wish the best of luck to Jason for getting his stuff back. Forensics/law enforcement is notorious for not returning your stuff in a timely manner (think years) without a lawsuit.

Hope he has an offsite backup.
For when it gets fixed: http://yfrog.com/69xg5p
Yes, but in those instances was the person who received the stolen goods loudly boasting about it to tens of millions of people?
Yes. Based on the terminology users used, and the types of threads they commented on, who else commented on those threads, etc.

There was a fair amount of discussion of the tool here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046301
How is that relevant or matter? (I mean that in the most polite way for arguments sake)

Action is action. Theft is theft. Evidence is evidence. I can understand if you mean because the iPhone became "high profile", but that shouldn't make a difference in how our system works my friend.
You happen to have interested an iPad developer who thinks this is an excellent idea. Please send more details on this idea to the address in my profile, and I'll see what can be done to make it a reality in a quite moment one day :OD
To me, nethack was useful for hjkl...
Because the thing is, it's not about the grievance they say it's about. There's an infinite supply of grievances, and even if there wasn't, if you leave the decision about whether you've discharged the grievance in the hands of the terrorist they can always decide you haven't done enough.

Brilliant.
Ah. In Emacs, bash, and conkeror, it does something useful.

(I've never really understood why there are keyboard shortcuts for things like "quit program" and "print". How often, if ever, do you want to do those things? Do they really need to be one keystroke away!?)
Buying an item that is not blatantly restricted (e.g. is not marijuana), on claims of the seller that it is legit, is good faith. Further, upon request from the original owner, it was returned. This is also good faith... aka "oops my bad". What they did in between is called "I do stuff to my property", and perfectly ok.

Note: this was my thinking before I found out CA has weird laws about this (see other replies in this thread).
My house got broken into a few years ago, they took everything I owned except furniture and one tv. I later found my anime collection for sale at a local used dvd store (complete with my name written inside the cases of all the DVDs). I talked with the owner, he had photocopied the guy's drivers license who came in with them. Despite this, and my continually pinging the police, nothing ever happened. He got away with it scott free. I guess you need to be a multi billion dollar corporation to get justice in this country.

EDIT: And just want to add, lesson learned. I didn't have renter's insurance at the time, dumb mistake. I'm now always fully insured, and so should you be :)
Dissolvable devices make better medical implants
Not necessarily. Even though average people are generally not creative themselves, you can have a social arrangement where such people respect and admire creativity.
Just to stick up for the Forensics guys - it's not usually our fault unless there is actually evidence on there. Turn around times (at least in the UK) for actually processing evidence is less than a month.

It's the police/prosecutors that cause all the hold ups.
Desktop Safari and Chrome are also based on webkit but they still have names.
Big Growth In Geothermal Energy
What would have happened if Chen did all his work in Google Docs? The Police have to execute a search warrant on Google as well as Chen's house?
Thanks for the info. That is a pretty awful law imho...
Section 1070 California Evidence Code protects sources of information from discovery by the state. It does not protect evidence related to the commission of a crime.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=evid&#...
While there are less "start a thread without a URL" discussions on the HN front page these days, I still value greatly the HN discussion about the links.
sigh yes. By stating something that no one's going to dispute--myself included (I mean, who doesn't want to learn and have fun at the same time?), it diminishes what I was getting at.

In the case of dilbert comics, it was fun, but didn't learn much. That's what I'm against. Sure, there are other things that are also learning and fun, which is great.

If fun is sugar and learning is fiber in cereal, all I'm saying is beware eating sugar-only cereal. If you want sugar-only, we've got reddit. Important thing is to have the fiber, regardless of sugar or not.
Well I'm a bit surprised. I thought the police would casually investigate just for form and then move on (and let Apple pursue it in the civil courts if they wanted).
As Derbyshire points out, it's illegal to seize computers used for journalism

Except that's not a carte blanche shield. If a computer used for journalism was also used to store, say, records of a drug-running ring, would that computer be inviolable? Or seizable, with a warrant, as evidence in the commission of a crime?
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Part of my explanation would be that you can only insult a person with their compliance. If they become offended or defensive then they are implicitly conceding that you have a point.

So, although nerds are consciously unaware of their denial, it lurks beneath the surface and effects their emotional response in ways that other people can detect.
Prizes for Free After Buying What You Want
I'l send you something a bit later today when I get some time.
As a Muslim, myself, I don't understand the stances these fringe groups take. Ultimately, we have two issues. Portrayal of the Prophet is a big big no no in our religion, yet Freedom of Speech/Expression is a pertinent human right in most of the civilized world.

Does it offend me to see any portrayals of a man we don't like to have portrayed? Yea, of course. But I'm pretty sure it offends me more to see the reactions from the people involved.

If someone caricatures the prophet as a violent person, how can people [angry extremist Muslims] think that VIOLENTLY rioting and giving death threats will make the person recant that?

"You think Islam's violent!? No, it isn't. And to prove that to you, I will kill you."

I'm offended every time I see things like this - even if I'm a fan of South Park - but I do the sensible thing, I don't watch it. I can go more, say, write to them (sans death threats), or not buy from them anymore, etc. But this response just makes no sense at all.
Why do people automatically assume this has anything to do with journalism?

What if it's about one company illegally obtaining the trade secrets of another and then releasing that trade secret to a global media?

The whole thing smelled fishy to begin with. I honestly can't say what I believe. However, if this was some kind of setup and they find evidence that Gizmodo intended to steal that prototype then that would definitely explain the police raid.
See, I'm not sure he actually tried to return it.

He didn't give it to the establishment he found it at. He didn't even contact the bar to see if the owner has been around to claim it.

He knew the full name and Facebook profile of the owner, based on the app on the phone before it was bricked. No attempt was made to contact this guy, despite the fact that he's dead simple to find on LinkedIn, Facebook (!), Twitter, etc.

He didn't turn it into any sort of law enforcement or other lost and found service.

What did he do? He called a few numbers where it's practically guaranteed people wouldn't believe he had a prototype iPhone. Any avenue where the phone had a reasonable chance of being actually returned was ignored. This looks highly suspicious. I would argue he is legally culpable for the phone's theft (but IANAL), but in either case I do not think this guy can claim that he tried to return the phone in good faith.
Dyson swarms and dyson spheres
Lauren Weinstein is quite concerned about the political reaction to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's attitude towards privacy and how the usual overreaction might hurt all players, good and bad:

"He appears to be unapologetically reveling in taking advantage of many Facebook users' naivete about privacy risks, and shows no signs of backing down."

http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg03450.html
Individual versus Conforming UI design
The data on the drives and the cameras are evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation. Law enforcement needs to establish and maintain a chain of custody of that evidence, and ensure that it's not tampered with.

They will likely pull the physical drives from those computers, image them with special-purpose hardware, then keep the original drives in secure storage until the case is resolved.

It's not just a matter of copying over a few files. They may need to look at data remanence that aren't visible to the file system.
The solution is better education, not increased punishment.

Without commenting on the question of a person's criminal liability for drunk driving...

How do you think education will help? Do you really think that today, in 2010, there is anybody who hasn't spent at least an aggregate 24 hours hearing the "don't drink and drive" message?

It seems to me that too often, people attempt to address problems with a knee-jerk "we need more education". But at least here in the USA, I've got to believe that we've all heard the messages about drunk driving, your brain on drugs, AIDS, domestic abuse, etc., ad nauseam. What more education do you want?
An important New Jersey appellate court decision, interpreting New Jersey law, just came down ruling that bloggers are not journalists and are not entitled to the protection afforded by the shield laws. (See the write-up here: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202451742674&No_R...).

Regardless of the legality of this particular search, this confirms that the authorities are likely looking at this as a felony investigation, with all that this signifies for Gizmodo. Should Gizmodo be worried? Without question. With the REACT unit on the case (which specializes in these types of tech-related crimes), and with a potential violation of the Espionage Act of 1996 being provable and punishable by as much as a $5 million fine and up to 10 years in prison (see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1289741), they are no doubt taking this very seriously at this point.

Of course, I cannot help sympathizing with Mr. Chen - what a horrible trauma to go through. A very ugly scene for him and his family.
It seems like these are ALL items (and very basic ones) that should have been in place before a site dealing with financial details is launched.
Why is it nonsense? The person made the decision to drink and drive. Someone is dead or injured and the person causing the pain needs to be punished.

Education doesn't really get us there, people know it is bad and do it anyway. Look at the repeat stats on DUI, suspended licenses don't deter as much as people wished.
Sorry—definitely didn't mean to frame you guys. Definitely aware of that, which is why I mentioned law enforcement in general.

The whole thing kind of makes sense (holding equipment to make sure no potential evidence is released without a final decision)—but it's still frustrating and it doesn't seem like there's a good solution that makes it easier for both parties.
Oooh more than 3 months ago. Wish I could have played it, people on the thread had fun.

Anyway, congratulations on the execution. Now this submission which we're having this conversation makes more sense :)
Apple has cops seize all of authors computers, phones, etc.

IIRC Apple cannot do that, DA can.
Dear tech journalists: please announce a one-year, self-imposed Apple embargo
This was no ordinary police raid, but apparently some kind of special task force designed to deal with computer/high-tech crimes, trade secrets violations etc.

Google cache link (they seem to be getting a lot of attention right now..): http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:ZibyEs1nEGwJ:www.reacttf...
I use 3.5" (DD) disks in my 1988 sampler, an Akai S950. Each song uses 2 or 3. Luckily I have about 20 disks.
My plan to combat this in any future interviews (and a couple of previous ones) is to bring my laptop with me. If there's any development questions, I'll do it on my laptop. If they become offended that I want to develop in my preferred environment, on my preferred keyboard layout (Dvorak + capslock->backspace), with my preferred editor... they have failed my interview. It ought to be a plus that I came that well prepared.

Incidentally, having been on the interviewing side, I do not see this often enough. Bringing your own laptop ought to be something you always do. I can provide "a" coding environment but it won't be "yours". Unless you always develop in a completely uncustomized standard Visual Studio environment, maybe (in which case frankly I'm still wondering a bit...).
From another viewpoint, it only seems to give events more exposure if you deal it with it this way.

Take the Cartoons incident. It was a fairly small newspaper that wouldn't have been seen by tens of millions. In protesting over the Cartoons, the people that were against the cartoons helped show them to tens of millions of more people.
At least it was the real police and not the Apple secret police.
I've got extraordinary mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, people shouldn't feel like it's okay to buy stolen property for their own gain at the expense of the people it was stolen from. But then there's reasonable search and seizure...

Hmm, I don't know, I think I'm going to lean slightly towards stolen-property-bad side of the equation. If the editor wasn't a journalist, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all - if the head of engineering at another company bought a stolen trade-secreted device we'd be calling for his head. Buying obviously stolen property to profit from it is a bad thing and ought to be criminal - should there be exemptions made for doing it for journalism?
This is the crux of the issue. The warrant wasn't issued to determine the source of a trade secrets leak. It was used to procure evidence for the buying and selling of stolen goods. Trade secrets are a civil matter. The fact that the police sought a warrant implies that they're pursuing the criminal case regardless of Gizmodo's publication.

IOW: Running a blog or being a journalist doesn't protect your computers from being impounded when you break the law and happen to also blog about doing so.
As has been observed by many, it's not simple theft. If this was about an expensive cashmere sweater belonging to Steve Jobs, I would agree with you completely.

But there is a strong argument that the acquisition and subsequent publicity in this case infringed heavily on state and federal laws which protect trade secrets. You might or might not agree whether those laws apply here, but enough qualified people think they do that it explains the intensity and speed of the investigation.
There is a difference between being informed and being educated. Someone who has lost a friend or family member due to drunk driving is more educated about the risks than someone who has been informed about the risks from seeing the ubiquitous TV commercials.

I'm not sure exactly how to best go about educating people, or I would be out doing it.
Friendly reminder: Everyone should always have an offsite backup! (one which they've practiced restoring!)
not with Apple...the guy is lucky he didn't "take a walk" off a 12 story balcony

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/22/on-the-apple-suicide/
The taking it to the bar at all was likely a reveal of the secret.
I am not sure that's true and here's why: If I book a BA flight on Expedia I can use BA's online check-in and sit anywhere on the plane I want, if no-one's got there first obv. There's no bit of the plane that's "Expedia class" all together.

I suppose any travel agent could do that on-spec, but in normal operation travel websites are just brokers sitting on top of the same API the airlines use for their own sites.
Hey, no offense intended, but according to your profile, you're a postdoc at NYU.

That's more than a "slightly different" human experience than giving $20 blowjobs in order to get through to next week. We're talking about something that's entirely alien to your (and my) cushy existences here.

Personally, I had more of a head start by age 5 than anyone in the projects is likely to ever have. I realize this. It's humbling, but it's the truth -- I'm not that special, mostly just lucky.
"Gawker founder Nick Denton has tweeted about the situation, saying it will show whether or not bloggers are considered journalists."

I see grellas has also posted a reply on this point, with a legal citation. Most definitions of "journalist" boil down to a definition something like "a reporter who writes for an editor," (a definition, as noted by the journalist who proposed it, that excludes Matt Drudge and most other bloggers). I wouldn't expect the typical blogger to be regarded as a journalist, legally, because the typical blogger doesn't maintain the standards of professional journalism.

(Note: I was a minor-league journalist, a reporter for a trade magazine, years ago. Big-league journalism is MUCH harder than blogging, by at least two orders of magnitude, and much more constitutionally important.)
for those who don't know what he is talking about:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/22/on-the-apple-suicide/
Heh, no worries :) in many cases illegitimate delays are simply due to incompetence, so it's good to complain then.

Turn around is pretty good; we serve a mid to large police force in the UK (around 5000 computer investigations a year). Average return time for evidence where no charges were brought last year was about 2 1/2 months. Complaints over delays were in the 10's.
screen + vim is all the IDE I need (and want, for the most part).
Super, super awesome. Just a few niggles:

- The pi marker on the x axis stays fixed. As far as I can tell it doesn't really refer.

- phi is increasing, but the construction of the graph makes it look like phi should be decreasing. Seems like the circle should be on the right, with the line moving leftward and the phi values marked on the x axis receding in that direction as well.

- I'd like to be able to drag the graph around.

No one likes a whiner, so I tweaked a bit: http://doormouse.org/trig
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Killing Innovation: Does Your Organization Have Moats?
Could you please from your perspective explain the reason why a culture which has never historically had any rules about drawing pictures of historical characters should not continue to allow drawing pictures of historical characters?

It's drawing pictures for goodness sake. Who on earth can it hurt?

Drawing pictures, and indeed riduculing and condenming is something very important in a free society.
That seems to apply to undisclosed information or refusing to disclose sources. Neither of those apply to this case, presumably since it is about stolen goods or disclosure of trade secrets. Gizmodo is grasping for straws here.
well, it's not that this is overkill... it's that the usual response is too weak. I wish this happened every time something of value is misappropriated.
Count my name in the bucket! Great to hear :)
That law seems to be written to say "journalists are allowed to protect their sources". Which is not the same as saying "journalists are allowed to commit crimes in order the get a story".
Any website that has eyeballs has sustainable ad revenue. It's just a matter of how much.

Targeted advertising is just icing on the cake.
>So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular?

That's been my experience.

Not to say there were no unpopular smart kids, but I never noticed a higher percentage than dumb kids. Though even then most of the smart people I knew who were unpopular globally were popular locally (that is within what ever group they ran with).
No such thing as bad publicity. Imagine gizmodo's ad revenues for today!
I am impressed that he said that they did very little damage during the search. The last time I saw a search and seizure, it made a tornado look like a minor incident.
Yeah, it is a bit awkward. After reading this article a few years back, I wrote a simpler implementation of curry that transforms the function itself, rather than being called from within it, e.g.

var add = curry(function(a,b,c) { return a + b + c; });

You can find the code at http://ianhenderson.org/curry.js if you're interested.
Theft of trade secrets is a criminal matter, actually. Google "Economic Espionage Act of 1996." It may well violate similar CA laws.
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The amusing bit is that we all see, and probably laugh at, so many stories of people posting evidence of their crimes on Facebook or YouTube and then being surprised when they're caught. Gizmodo basically did exactly the same thing, but on a far larger scale.
A scholastic or religious or political elite isn't "chosen by God, genetics, and culture" either--it's chosen solely by culture, more precisely by whatever power system happens to exist in that culture. Most of the time, it's hereditary (so I guess genetics play a role). But there's no "talent and culture" involved in choosing that elite--they're a self-perpetuating parasitic class at best, which is why many countries had the whole lot of them killed.

In fact most elitists in effect define "high culture" as the culture consumed by the elite class. On a purely artistic and creative level, this is absolute horseshit--some of the best culture was historically created for and consumed by a mass audience. A vulgar, tasteless merchant elite will gladly subsidize that, but a snobby "high-culture" elite won't. Some of the greatest music produced in the West since the 20th century originated from American blacks. The "natural elite" gifted by "God, genetics, and culture" wasn't about to let "Negro music" be popularized or even adapted by white musicians, but even the racist corporate merchant elite realized people would pay money for jazz and rock-and-roll records.

And, in fact, when you talk about an elite that's "chosen by...genetics", you're talking about the functional equivalent to racism. It's possible to get into a vulgar merchant elite if you're clever and persistent no matter what, but a blue-blooded elite you have to be born into, just like a white-skinned elite.