skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Review my service (track your computer, remotely wipe browsing data)
I'd like some feedback on a project I'm working on, https://www.firefound.com/ It's a Firefox add-on that allows you to track your computer's (or mobile phone's) location and optionally remotely erase your browsing information if your machine is lost or stolen. (The first version of the add-on won the latest Extend Firefox contest, but I didn't get much specific feedback on it.)

I'd also appreciate comments on https://www.firefound.com/premium/ It's an upgrade to the add-on that users will (hopefully) pay $1/month for that gives them more storage space for their location history, more control over email alerts, and the ability to back up data to the central server before it's erased remotely. (It's "live" but not advertised yet, as version 2.0 of the add-on needs to be approved by Mozilla before it's completely functional.)
This is hardly new, but I agree it is an issue.

The answer to this security issue is either:

1) The bit.ly route - store off-site urls your organization wants to link to as a value and give the user an url with just the key in it.

2) Create a secret salted hash of the url and include that with the url in the args. Upon request, the receiver would re-hash the url and compare it to the hash given. Unless someone reverse engineered your hash this system prevents someone casually manipulating a url.
Clickable links: https://www.firefound.com/ and https://www.firefound.com/premium/
Neither. The policy is an interesting topic with many facets. Having lots of articles about it is not a bug.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
I've been using http://www.wesabe.com for a lot longer than I've known about mint.com

The main reason being that it supported UK banks, while mint.com was turning me away!
Being a "copycat" seemed to work well for Apple with the original iPod, which was a long way from the first handheld MP3 player.
How many journalists do you already have signed up?
My Motorola Milestone (European version of the Droid) actually is user update-able. I did the 2.0.1 and the 2.1 update myself. I had to use Windows and RSD-Lite to do it. I got my 2.1 image from here: http://and-developers.com/motorola_milestone:sbf

I had to do this because the OTA update and the official Motorola Updater for Windows were unable to install either 2.0.1 or 2.1_update1.
Final Fantasy --> "Contains a "ff1psp" ROM file"

Ha! That make me laugh
Sorry about that. I'll be cleaning up browser compatibility in the next few days.
He already said, kinda, what the salary was: with bonuses and whatnot, he expected to be getting $200k per year.

Given what he's possibly done to their reputation (I don't know; perhaps everyone already thought they were corrupt and dishonest anyway) that he wouldn't have been able to do if he'd signed the NDA, I don't see that an explanation in terms of salary is required: getting everyone to sign the NDA greatly reduces their exposure to this kind of bad publicity.
Personally, I've considered, being long time Linux user, purchasing something with OSX on board.

Thankfully, Mr. Jobs corrected my path. And, probably, some people other people too.
This is exactly the thinking that Apple doesn't want going into App Store apps: "I'll just put up this good-enough piece of crap because that's all I have time/money to do." They've got a ton of businesses wanting to be on iPhone so they're willing to lose those businesses that will only put out crap. I agree with you that putting out a piece of crap might make the most sense for your business. But it's not what Apple wants for its platform.

A key thing to understand here: the existence of a platform controlled in this way increases diversity, since there are several other prospering platforms that do things differently.
The dev phones are fine unless you want to install "copy-protected" apps. They do not appear in the market if you use a dev-phone. At least not for the ADP1. The reason is that you can easily gain root access and copy "protected" apps off the phone.
I certainly hope so. The Nexus one is an absolutely awesome phone. Not to mention it completely re-set the expectation bar for the various Android handset manufacturer. (witness how most of the Android handset's announced post-nexus one have snapdragon processors and specs very similar to the nexus).
> Apple's new TOS which takes the MS lock-in to a whole new level.

Since the days of the Mac, Apple has always been about maximizing control. MS won because the 'settled' for the OS, whereas Apple wanted to control both the OS and the hardware. We probably wouldn't have things like Linux and FreeBSD easily available if that sort of locked-down environment had prevailed.
Ask HN: Find Partners or Learn more?
I'm a designer first and foremost, but I've taken classes in C++, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and I'm self taught in Ruby and ROR. That said, I've even developed an app or two in rails, and I've muddled around a great deal in PHP.

I am by no means an expert developer, I just really like getting my hands dirty and making my designs come to life.

An issue I face from time to time, is having an idea for an app that is just clearly out of my scope. Dealing with things such as API's, connecting to third party apps etc. just seems to be one thing I'm too afraid to approach tackling.

My question for other hackers (like me or not) - if I have a great idea for an app, would you consider it more beneficial to find a great coder as a partner, or to just buckle down and get to the point where I can at least build out a prototype (and heck - at least it'd look good)?
You're comparing apples vs oranges ... Rails is an open-source web-framework. If you don't like its directions and you'd like to change that, you can always fork it without gettings sued ... and forks/clones in other languages have happened and are thriving.

His merits are that he's a contributor to an open-source piece of software that changed people's perceptions and he's also a founder of 37signals, a small business that's quite profitable (which is a lot more than I can say for myself).
This seems really interesting. One question - from your FAQ: 'On the site, content is organized around the journalist's brand, with a list of their stories organized by popularity, controversy, etc. Each article has links to similar stories on the site, links to similar topics, and comments. The main page is a list of recent trending topics and recent stories. In time, this will become a personalized news page. '

Are you guys aware of True/Slant? They seem to be working with a similar model: 'True/Slant is the digital home for the 'Entrepreneurial Journalist.' Knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on True/Slant using tools that enable them to easily create content and craft stories filtered through human perspective (not an algorithm).'
Bye-Bye from Flash CS5 app, Alchemist, in AppStore (See under Description)
In particular, markets with several large, slow-moving, and undifferentiated competitors (e.g. telecom).
The Crazy Adventures of Joe: A novel
So if I understand your witty reply, what you're saying is that if you give your work product away, you are entitled to do as you please with the fruits of your labour.

However, if you develop a proprietary product, you are not entitled to do as you please with it and must accommodate the needs of those who want to do something else with it and are unable to do so because of your licensing terms.

Is that what "git clone rails" amounts to suggesting?
My First Taste of Freedom
The strangest thing for me is that I'd love to have a touch screen as my desktop monitor or as a replacement/augment to my keyboard and mouse (I like the clickieness/feel of my keyboard for touch typing, however). That would be totally killer, and definitely useful from a UI perspective...

But no one is interested in offering me this. The focus seems to be on mass-market 'consumer electronics'... apple and google and such are trying to make big bucks with 'the next ipod/iphone etc.'

Which, while an interesting and fun application of the technology (possibly profitable), might not be the most pragmatic application of it.

I guess the example would be if Apple had come out with a version of OS X that was designed to be used with a touchscreen monitor, and then seriously marketed it as an improvement/innovation over windows.

I mean, right now it seems that there is little real innovation within the iPad as a product. It is a gigantic iPod touch. It may very well be a beautiful piece of hardware, and useful to a certain demographic, but I can't help but feel it isn't really the big step forward it has been marketed as.

I think from a hardware perspective an analogous product might be the Sega Nomad. (Although from a marketing perspective there is no analogy there).
Godspeed, gentlemen. Looking forward to what you guys come up with.
Lua is not an acronym.
It depends on market segment: among teenage girls, I don't think the blackberry is the device to own. Of course, it is for corporate users. Overall, I don't know what the breakdown is, but a chart would be enlightening.
I doubt that makes a noticable dent in the total tally, though!
And it prevents RoboForm (and presumably KeePass?) from filling in my credit card and such. I guess I just can't buy with it.
Technology trends on the web
Creating Custom Glossy Gradient Buttons Programmatically
I'd recommend maven and the maven-android-plugin (http://code.google.com/p/maven-android-plugin/) to be IDE-independent.

I would recommend an IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ IDEA) because you then have the advantages a statically typed language like Java gives you. Code completion and instant feedback in the editor that your code still compiles.
3D Shade Effect in Photoshop
There are some real premium titles in this list.

This really is Apple turning against its self.

Rolando is a particular shocker, because the developerss, ngmoco, are funded by the Apple-endorsed iFund.
They still exist, but the situation is no longer the same as it was when the iPhone was announced. I believe that RiM and Symbian have improved since then.
cwilson said "touch enabled Tablet"

Touch enabled the TX1000 is not, it uses a stylus.
How to Make Photo to Vector Illustration Effect
Sigh... more of this? Quite frankly, it is getting tiresome how people seemingly willfully misunderstand this. Apple has every right to approve what goes into their store. It is very questionable if they have the right to tell you how to create the product initially. It would be like saying the conceptual sketches, done in private and only for the engineers designing a product, must be done in red pen -- no pencils or other colors. It has absolutely zero bearing on the quality or ethics of the created software so a comparison to other processes is questionable. Apple & Jobs do not owe anyone anything but that doesn't mean that they can overstep their ethical and legal boundaries, which they may very well be doing.

In my opinion, not uncommon, they are behaving unethically -- especially since enforcement will be selective at best. In the eyes of the law... well, we shall see but I cannot see this going through. If a company were to say that software developers must originally write their code while wearing baseball hats? Suits? Only between dusk and dawn? By vegetarians? Each rule seems as arbitrary as the ones Apple has put forth. I would think that the law wouldn't allow irrelevant terms to carry meaning.
Do You Strive To Be Distruptive?
Astrology for dummies = Social Networking
"I don't know what the probability of having a psychotic break on shrooms is. I bet it's low, but it seems to happen"

That's the point. Although the relationship between psilocybin and psychosis is unclear, it's already very well established that alcohol aggravates mental disorders and causes psychosis. On top of that, all available evidence suggests that psilocybin is very physically safe, while all available evidence suggests that alcohol is very physically unsafe.

There is absolutely no rational reason to believe that psilocybin is anywhere near as dangerous as alcohol, and it's a gross disservice to even entertain the myth.

Furthermore, alcohol isn't the only legal substance that is connected with psychosis; a number of prescription drugs and even caffeine are linked to it.

"That's what I mean by "acidhead", "e-tard", etc. and that's a terrible road to go down"

But do these stereotypes really provide any value to this discussion? For just about any thing there is a subculture that indulges in that thing and people who hate that subculture. Should we ban plush animals because people find furries intolerable?
Designing for iPad: Reality Check
Has anyone really, seriously argued that Apple isn't "entitled" to do as they please? They are, and developers are entitled to be annoyed when their seemingly artificial and arbitrary limitations cause them problems.

And we're all entitled to post our opinions about it, but you should maybe try and give the opposing views a little more respect. :)
It's a free market... anyone can create their own platform from scratch. Even you and me. But it's hard, right? Anyway, it's not as if Apple had a special license to address this market.

By the way, IP is far from being the only cost involved in building an ecosystem around a platform (as ESR has explained ad nauseum). So the "Rails is OSS" argument doesn't really apply here.
Yeah, some sort of major improvement on net newswires, eg http://www.prlog.org/
They may not be dominant, but they've certainly carved off a sizable chunk. Recent figured I saw had RIM with 40% market, and and iPhone with 25% (just smartphones, not phones overall). I imagine the iPhone has an even large market when you narrow the demographics (teens and twenties, metropolitan areas, etc).

Even though the iPhone may not be dominating the market, they've carved out 25% of it in 3 years, while RIM has been in the market for far longer. Not to mention Windows Mobile being in the market for longer and accomplishing not much.

I'm not saying iPhone/iPad is the future of computing, but they've innovated in ways others haven't. Until someone 1-ups them, they'll continue to grow their share, in and outside of silicon valley.
Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink-Behavioral economics
All these arguments would be valid if Apple was in the 'being a nice guy' business. But they're not.
Apparently in private beta.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=18111&replies=12
The GitHub East Coast Tour
Let's check in with reality for a minute. I know it's fun to rage rage rage when you're potentially slighted, but nothing has happened yet. Nothing at all. Nothing except hundreds (thousands?) of people whining online.

Apple changed language in their dev agreement for an unreleased platform. They have the right to selectively enforce the agreement at their leisure. I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines. I see them targeting Flash/actionscript to ARM translation (made possible by Apple's own LLVM, by the way) from being distributed in the official store.

How can we harness the creativity and energy put in to empty internet rage rage rage into something useful?
No, what I mean is that the comparison of DHH and Apple falls flat. While DHH doesn't implement every feature he is requested to implement, everybody can just clone Rails and implement all features they desire (or pay people to do so).

You can't just clone the iPhone and it's OS.

Therefore I don't understand the claim that DHHs comments are hypocritical.

And nobody is disputing that Apple is entitled to do with their iPhone whatever they want. They are just not entitled to people being happy about it.
Trivial, with jQuery!
YC’s NewsTilt Aims To Help Journalists Create A Business Model For Content
While I think putting marketers in that list is a bit trollish, I think you've hit on something that's broadly true. Developers reacted with rage to Apple's app screening process and are reacting with rage again to Apple's banning of intermediary layers/languages. Whereas Microsoft's slogan is "developers, developers, developers..." Apple's is decidedly not.

Apple prioritizes the end user experience over the developer's experience and aren't shy about rubbing that in. More than that, Apple prioritizes having control over its own fate, and if developers using intermediary layers have to suffer for Apple to retain its relative autonomy then so be it.

Microsoft's philosophy has the logic: if we have all the developers, then the end users will flock to us, so we're going to cater to the developers. Apple's philosophical logic is: if we make something that 'just works' and that all the end users lust after, the developers will come to us, so we have to retain our ability to push things forward.

I'm not sure which philosophy, if either, is better overall. But it seems pretty clear which one angers developers more.
Personally, I find Zoho.com to be a lot more feature-complete than Google Docs. There are times when the document editor in Google Docs is downright infuriating when trying to get the right formatting, but Zoho just seems to work.
Could you really name a touch enabled Tablet to me without searching?

I don't know the name of it, but I know that everyone at my doctor's office has one.

is also that nifty little stat about Apple being the worlds largest Tablet seller after their first day, so when it really comes down to it, they are the first.

Huh? Being bigger than those preceding you makes you the first? What?

Apple when someone tells them "well Google has been working on this for 2 years!" and simply remember that Apple did it first...

I guess you're really a fanboy and believe this. But for those of us who have been watching the computer industry, tablets have been around for quite some time. Microsoft had a version of XP -- a now-discontinued OS -- for them. If you Google for "tablet pc windows xp", the first link you come to -- at Microsoft -- is a page that says it's been retired. Apple has missed at least one whole product cycle already.
That reminds me - I never got around to replying to your email from a couple of weeks ago, oops, I'll try to get around to it soon !
And yet we daily send our children off into the world in, amongst and behind the wheel of automobiles, when cars have a far, far higher incidence of causing property damage, permanent debilitation and fatality.

The risks of drugs are certainly real and some concern is absolutely genuine. But the dangers of drugs are treated completely out-of-context with any number of other aspects of modern life.

Secondary objection: I don't think it's ever been convincingly shown that criminalization decreases drug use. Last I'd read, the opposite seems to have been occurring in areas that have legalized drugs.
> if you develop a proprietary product, you are not entitled to do as you please with it

Of course you are entitled to do what you please. You may make your product less useful, or even eliminate it. The point is, your customers have no alternative between keep consuming and stop consuming.

To reify the point: Apple should be worried about the latter.
In case you're wondering who Jaron Lanier is, he's one of the early gods of 'virtual reality', he's in to just about every aspect of technology and culture. A very interesting person indeed. It's been really quiet around him in the last years.
I wonder if in the end the irony of having that slogan and being acquired by Conde escaped any of them. Or the irony that maybe the press is not the darkest master to which to be enslaved.
I just use http://kuler.adobe.com It's great!
I'd imagine you are right, primarily click-tracking. Secondarily linkjuice control I expect.
+1 for text files. The number of people I know that have had horrible experiences with using just text in Word is frightening.

For LaTeX, I preached about it in a recent thread that has tons of suggestions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173438 .

With Amazon publishing, you also get automatic listing in their catalogue IIRC. Perhaps you can use them and self-host?

Have you thought about DRM? I'm not saying do it (on the contrary), but prodding you to see if you've made a concious decision.
Just an aside, because I happen to have encountered this recently: if the scroll wheel problem is in Firefox 3.6, it's probably because the Firefox dev team had one of their now-infamous "we know better than our users" moments and screwed up event propagation to embedded content so it works differently to all other browsers and all previous versions of Firefox. That change has messed up quite a few popular web sites, and affects Flash, Java applets, and any other similar plug-ins. For once, Adobe would be right to claim that this one isn't their fault.
Yes, but it's not hard to get an SSL cert for some random domain. So user clicks a youtube link, ends up on "centralised-video-authentication.com", sees SSL icon, all good?

I agree with you in general, but youtube shouldn't be making things harder for security.
you need to watch out, certainly, however you should also encourage webapp providers to write secure code.
Given Google Docs' recent move to allow the storage of any file, I'm expecting them to come out with a Dropbox-like client that syncs to the Google Docs cloud.
This is linked at the bottom of every page.
I am remembering See No Evil by Robert Baer, a CIA veteran.
I should nitpick in the main article's discussion, but:
"The U.S. probably has the best disaster emergency resources in the world. "

Really? They looked downright incompetent as seen from here when Katrina struck. I'm trying to find a credible disaster preparedness / emergency management metric, but skimming the Google results seems to point out that European countries and even Australia are better at disaster preparedness.
Microsoft unveils Sidekick's next of KIN
>I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines.

Would you bet your company on this?

The wording of section 3.3.1 could not be more clear on what will be tolerated and what not.
Is this better than bottle?
In college, I used to debate with myself on which career was better, ibanking or management consulting.

In the end, I chose to pursue management consulting, which I've been doing for the last 2 years.

Now, I debate with my friends on which career is worse, ibanking or consulting because frankly, after sifting through so much corporate BS, I've come to realize that all these jobs need to be prestigious in order to get ivy league grads to pursue them. In reality, we're either glorified excel junkies, or overpaid powerpoint formatters.

I'm crossing my fingers now hoping that this start-up I'm working on takes off... I really do want to leave the corporate world for good. The realization that the preparation we had in college is absolutely useless in the real world, and that any semi-intelligent high-schooler could do our jobs is a depressing thought.
You know what would be funny? If someone makes a fully fledged javascript flash player - http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/
I can't really make soup of your description, the camera runs a browser ??

Or do you mean indirectly ?
Alcohol can kill you. Psilocybin can't, but it is at least possible that it can lead to mental illness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis

"Alcohol is also a common risk of causing psychotic disorders or episodes. Research has shown that alcohol abuse causes an 8-fold increase in psychotic disorders in men and a 3 fold increased risk of psychotic disorders in women. Alcoholic psychosis is sometimes misdiagnosed as a mental illness such as schizophrenia."

The people I'm talking about are the party types who are using these drugs all the time, to the point that drugs are the only things in their lives.

That doesn't seem a very strong argument. I would argue that everything is subject to psychological addiction. Gambling, World of Warcraft, the Internet, sex... it's physical addiction what should be controlled. I could see the point on banning, say, crack. Or alcohol. Or tobacco. But hallucinogens?