skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it pretty despicable they made no honest attempt to get the prototype back to Apple. Until they posted actual information they could've returned it to Apple and I'm sure Apple would've reimbursed them the $5K for the phone and possibly given them future preference for the good deed.

This is "Finder's keepers, loser's weepers" hiding behind freedom of press. It isn't by any means in the territory of whistle blowing. And you certainly don't have to steal in order to post an opinion. Suppose I find someone's credit card and I want to laugh at the silliness of the design on the card, do I really need to post pictures of the card along with the 16 digit number, expiration date, and security number before giving it back to them and hiding behind "Freedom of the Press"?
That you are friends with strange people?
I can top this. I'll try to keep it down to a summary.

I was moving from one unit in my building to another. I had confirmation on the phone that service would remain on in both units for a month.

Tech shows up, no work order, doesn't identify himself, disconnects the old unit, doesn't connect the new one, leaves. I call and complain.

Next day they go out and connect the new unit. They say they will not reconnect the old unit, but they will gladly bill me for the month anyways. The day after that, they disco it again. This is confirmed because I have no signal at my patch panel.

I call. They say it's obviously my modem. They claimed they tried to send it a new bootfile, and it failed. I asked them what my serial number was because I had no signal to my apartment. For if they could connect through the power of magic, they can tell me my serial number. Awkward silence. I ask to escalate to her super.

I get her super. He tells me to buy a new modem. I entertain the idea and do so.

I call back. Liar rep gets me, recognizes its me. Hangs up. At this point I start bitching on Twitter. Within 2 minutes I get a response, and a number to call.

I call back. Get a VP of customer service. He apologizes for everything, and authorizes a truck roll for the next day. He can't explain why I was lied to by a technician and two customer service reps, nor why it took me bemoaning my situation to the internet to get a shred of service.

I still got billed for both units. And I took 3 days off from work. However, I have no other serious alternative in Boston until mayor Menino and Verizon kiss and make up.
I have some occasional complaints, but I like it how it is now, and it seems to be handling growth reasonably well. I vaguely remember reading it when it was Startup News, but I feel like I've absorbed most of the "common startup knowledge" already, hence those articles are ones my eyes drift pass. There was also a lot more overt pg-fandom in the early site.
At the top it says "JASON BAPTISTE notes:"

If you click on 'notes' it links to the comment on HN
From Varnish Cache.
> I find it pretty despicable they made no honest attempt to get the prototype back to Apple.

Apparently they did, and were ignored. Nobody has come up with anything that refutes this so far.

I look at it as: someone made an innocent mistake losing a phone, someone found a phone and called a company, Apple's bureaucracy fucked up and didn't respond as soon as it should have.
If you like this, you might also like NewsTilt: a curated list of excellent journalists, who want to engage their readers: http://newstilt.com.
Except that Apple hasn't had anything to do with this case. Criminal, not civil.
Hm, you are probably right - I'm used to thinking about things from a civil suit perspective.

http://volokh.com/posts/1197670606.shtml
Not at all. You do not reduce your oil dependency by buying a car with good mileage. You'd rather keep your gas guzzler and find a telecommuting job. Then you take the money you saved from the car loan, and stop buying shit made in china (by finding properly priced local substitutes). That's pretty much it.

Oh, yes... and forget about that vacation across Europe. Cheap air travel is going to be an early casualty in this ride. :>
It shouldn't take a month to copy hard drives.
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A few happy prison owners, a few happy cartel kings, and a lot of happy DEA agents and police officers who will never be out of work.
As a person that came from a technical background, I followed the 'built it and they will come' heuristic.

It's certainly effective for getting something done and out there. However, I considered nothing about market or even who I thought my users are, or more importantly, where to find them.

In this list, I probably would have benefited from the talk to customers bit. Too bad there's no iteration of the business idea in the list.

Any of you out there ever get this badge?
How Arrington Would Have Handled The Stolen iPhone Story
That's what I thought when I saw the guest bed in the bathroom.

(Incidentally, I have a friend who calls a jar in a spare room his "downstairs bathroom". I guess you can "install" a "downstairs bathroom" when you have a guest over...)
Don't put off college. Go now, while you will get the most out of the experience. Even in the hypothetical situation where you learned nothing that you couldn't have taught yourself, that piece of paper will be incredibly important to your future. There is also something to be said for the life experience of being around professors, other students and the environment and energy of campus.

Find a part time job through your University. Apply for work-study, check out bulletin boards, talk to your school's career center.
Thanks. I tried Nautilus, but then my (Ubuntu) desktop shows up, but all other windows are gone and cannot be recovered with the typical keystrokes. Launching a new terminal doesn't work either. Further, if I double click a folder on the desktop nothing happens.

Not that I plan to do much mouse-based file browsing under xmonad, but it would be nice to have it handy.

Finally, yeah there are other forums, but HN just rocks!
Interesting & upmodded. I didn't know that knowledge acquired by accident was protected from disclosure by those to whom the info has been revealed. Consider me educated.
This is interesting. I like REST for its URL resource name-space idea, but less so for its lack of specificity/standards for choosing media types and doing security. Concerning the GET limitations specifically, what problems were you having with size and character encodings? This makes me think that the REST verb-structure-as-hyper-media-CRUD model is broken from the start, in terms of scalability.
I think Dave is confused about the difference between a protocol like RSS with many producers and consumers (very hard to change, just look at SMTP!), and a service API like Twitter's with a single producer (it changes, some apps die that were unsupported already, big deal).

"None will make it through this transition without being reconceived."

Say what? I can't imagine many apps will require reconcieving because an authorization API changed.
Pretty cool, but ultimately pointless for a few reasons.

No external controls, no external effects or synths (I know reason doesn't have them either, but everyone else does), no ability to sync to an external clock, etc.

While perfectly fine for putting together some beats, as anything other than a toy, it'd be hard to take it very seriously.

(PS. I wrote audio software back in the early 90's, including the first pattern based sequencer for Windows).

EDIT: I should add that I do think this is really cool and a nice app, BUT for what purpose? If musicians can't incorporate this into their workflow, then it's really just a toy from most musician/dj perspectives. And, they really haven't done anything that hasn't been done before, except for that it's targeted to the Flash runtime then where it really belongs: the desktop. I'm not certain an AIR version would even allow it integration via sync, rewire, etc.
Whatever your favored labeling, the distinction is valid. If people in general don't distinguish between "nerds" and "geeks", then people in general are suffering from a misconception, and encouraging usage of two distinct terms is surely a good way to combat that misconception. No?
Wonder if sjobs@apple.com with attached pictures would've worked. An honest effort isn't "Oh, we called and employee # 1034434393 was clueless." It's on par with a lost wallet. They had all the information.
I think if Gizmodo hadn't decided to publish the engineer's information more people would be up in arms about this.
No, they should sell the contents of his hard drive to the highest bidder. After all, I hear police departments tend to be underfunded.
Just to let you know I think we're in a point where the medium doesn't help either one of us to convince the other of anything, so I really would have some additional stuff to say (I do have the modern judicial system on my side, after all ;)) but I'm going to choose not do it right now, here on this board. Agree to disagree?
That doesn't help git-bisect which is really the most significant of the three issues.
"Use Lotus Notes"
I live near Seattle.
No, like all humans, they're self interested. They just want to be seen to do a good job protecting one of the states biggest earning and most well known companies in a high profile case.

I personally also pay more attention and go beyond the call for higher profile projects. That doesn't mean I'm involved in some kind of conspiracy.
Heh, yeh good reminder.. I actually never thought it would spurn such a big thread. My fault.

I suspect I've just not really put my idea out there very well. It happens.

> Agree to disagree?

Done.
What's nerdy right now might be the next big craze.

Heck, it's now less nerdy to be on Facebook than not.
I felt slightly conned, as you say "stunningly good link bait" but not deeply disappointed, the article was interesting, well written and clued me in on a web analytics provider I didn't know of.
I found the % of interesting stories the same as is today.
I love it. I think people involved in boy scouts are more inclined to make their own path and explore entrepreneurship. Many of the leaders involved with my specific troop had interesting backgrounds in business and would have been valuable assets for anybody interested in working toward this badge.
Michael Arrington suffers from the worst possible case of selective memory imaginable. It wasn't that long ago that TC was involved in their own scandal when they gave a kid a Macbook pro in exchange for an article that at least three quarters of the tech community debunked as fud.

Then this happens, and he actually grandstands and says "I would never have done that", and tries to tell us he'd actually be an ethical reporter?

And the Oscar goes to...
PokerPirate, an open-source pokerbot
Article in the times this weekend about a similarly sized (though differently decorated) apartment in manhattan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/realestate/25habi.html
Given the extreme rhetoric I've seen voiced by various "Christian" groups and individuals in the US over the past few decades, I'd be surprised if there haven't been death threats against Parker and Stone. That we haven't heard as much about them doesn't surprise me either. Right-wing domestic terrorism gets some coverage, but is typically downplayed.
I never buy video with DRM, but I love Netflix's streaming service. I think the DRM backlash is getting so rabid that people are blinded to an actual, legitimate use for it, which I think in Netflix's case it is.
To be fair the kid asked for the laptop without Arringtons knowledge. They fired the offending employee and removed all his material from Techcrunch. They were very transparent about the whole incident
I disagree. Can you name something we've completely run out of?

Believe me, if gasoline costs you $50 a gallon, you'll be walking everywhere by choice. You'll pay $10 for a bus ride and love it.

R&D will be in overdrive.

This is not the first time human beings have encountered a scarce resource.
Don't forget that's quite a tightly controlled space (they know the 2 screen layouts exactly and editorially control the content).

So for sites like that I imagine it would work well (less so for sites with widely varying content etc.)
Stephen Wolfram: Singularity Summit 2009 
Some Wolfram Alpha discussion, but really Stephen discusses 'Mining the computational universe' and continues his thoughts from 'A New Kind of Science'.
Thank you for the clarification on this.
I stand by my point that Arrington isn't exactly the most scrupulous tech blogger out there either, and this article just reeks of self-importance and conceit.
FWIW in the UK (and Europe I think) there are database rights too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_rights

Where copyright is termed so as to protect a unique arrangement of data then an ordered listing would appear to be protected.
Web Performance Tips from Yahoo Search
How a new bill would reduce the number of angel investors
You must be joking.

The church's excommunication back in the day went far beyond that.

For example, when the Catholic church excommunicated Martin Luther, "It also made it a crime for anyone in Germany to give Luther food or shelter. It permitted anyone to kill Luther without legal consequence." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther)

Many excommunications were of the form "vitandus", where the excommunicated was to be shunned by fellow Catholics. That's a pretty severe penalty when _everyone_ was Catholic.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was probably in 2nd grade and took Adderall, Ritalin and Concerta. I stopped taking them about 3 months prior to finishing my Bachelors of Computer Science. I have now been 8 months with out it and have been working at my new job quite well. Prior to that for the last 2 years of my education I would only take my medication when I needed to study hard or had a test.
Honestly, I don't think the police or Apple care too much about the guy who found the phone. Yeah, he failed to comply with the law and and instead pocketed $5000. Maybe he's sweating in terror right now, wondering how much of an attorney's time he can buy with whatever he didn't spend; maybe he was clever and used a throwaway email address, a false name, and didn't show any ID to the Gizmodo staffer who gave him the money (cash? check? who knows?).

He is a petty criminal...but probably just an opportunist rather than having malicious intent. Paradoxically, it might have been safer for him to set up a blog called ifound-iphone.com and post pictures in a 'LOL it came from the future' fashion: naivete might be a mitigating factor.

But Gizmodo/Gawker has no such excuse. Their whole business is the exchange of reader attention for advertising. They are leaders in their market sector, with a deep understanding of the tech industry and its role in the economy. and they have already been warned by Apple's outside counsel that offering money for hot information is an incitement to criminality.

With all this knowledge and experience, when they got hold of a prototype - which they themselves say was well disguised with a 'very ingenious solution to protect future designs from lookeyloos', they chose to disassemble it and publish detailed information about its manufacture, with a completely reckless disregard for anyone's business interests but their own.

If I were an attorney on Apple's or the DA's staff, my approach would be to forget about the seller, because his testimony isn't even necessary to bring suit against or prosecute the Gizmodo/Gawker folks. In fact, if they do offer to give him up, and I bet they will, I'd say I didn't care.

(I'm not an attorney BTW! It might be professionally unethical to behave like that if the information was being offered.)
It's one thing to suggest that the police will pay greater attention to high profile cases (with which I'd agree), and quite another thing to imply that the raid happened because Apple requested it.

Beyond that, could you point out the source of your assertion that Apple requested this? I missed it in the article, and that's the conspiracy you've raised.
I think a properly run Eagle Scout project is 10x more beneficial than this merit badge, but I appreciate the idea behind it.
The Next Mainstream Programming Language: a game developer's perspective
This is actually getting really scary. A short while ago a cartoonist from Seattle suggested to make May 20 'Everyone draws Muhammad' Day worldwide. Her cartoon went viral, a Facebook page was created, the exacerbated mix of anger/resentment/stupidity in the air fueled the whole thing -- and now both her and the creator of the FB group want out:
http://guyism.com/2010/04/creator-of-everybody-draw-muhammad...

I can absolutely understand the heat they must be feeling -- it's especially chilling since she's clearly not famous enough to require protection, but might become just enough so that she actually pays the heavy personal toll of constant fear of reprisal.

It's very sad to see this lifelike Prisoner's Dilemma happening -- we would all like to see people of goodwill the world over to show some spine and make a respectful but clear and strong resistance statement. But no one, absolutely no one can afford doing this anymore in an age of exponentials, viral growth, annihilated privacy and geocoded checkins broadcast to the world, where you can rise to (unwanted, in this case) virtual fame in a matter of hours. Anonymity is not a protection anymore.

I sincerely hope that being the first globally connected generation will somehow help us avoid tearing this planet apart over religion in the next 20 years...
> The entire "Eastern Europe" lived under Soviet oppression for decades, too.

Well it's not empirical evidence but Eastern Europe is colloquially known for it's vice in general - not specifically a drug problem, perhaps, but other similar issues.

However I would tend to agree with you it's possibly not a major cause. I suspect there was a sex/drugs revolution in a particular area of society - and this is where the gp's experience comes from.
Our focus is on Asian<>European language pairs. The next to appear will be Korean<>English, Korean<>Japanese, Chinese<>Japanese. But other European languages like Portuguese are coming soon too. A full roadmap is in the works.
"But without those white earbuds, how would you have signalled your trendiness?"

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I'm a bit tired of comments like this, implying that Apple is successful mostly because people are blindly buying its products to be "in" and signal how cool they are.
I went to Slashdot recently and there were a bunch of upvoted posts defending the Enterprise Robustness of JavaEE and sneering at those Ruby-using fools, so I'd say HN is (fortuantely) not quite Slashdot.
Same here. I always hated the stimulant medications but Adderall had the greatest effect. I haven't had medication since college and only used it when I really needed it then!
So what about photos of a new car prototypes? There are a bunch of magazines devoted to those.

Or reviews of to-be-released movies?

Or photos of celebs in public?

Not terribly happy about companies using the Police to break down doors to manage their PR.
embargoes don't work.

they don't work when we try them on other countries.

Embargoes really only work when we help those that are embargoing us by setting price controls.

We did that in the 70s and it worked like a charm. Normally, the price we would pay would just go up and third countries would sell us the commodity or cartel members would cheat themselves.

The 70s embargoes wouldn't have worked if the US government hadn't shot itself in the foot. We even had shortages of natural gas and ALL of it was coming from the US!

The market works. The law of supply and demand functions, unless the government decides to break it.
My memory could be off but wasn't it the guy who found the device and sold it to Apple that supposedly made the effort to return it?
Caveat: a trademark protects the owner from you attempting to confuse the public into buying your product because they think it comes from the trademark owner. Using typos is attempting confusion. Thus simply relabelling things as "dinsey" doesn't avoid a potential trademark suit.
A couple weeks ago I saw a phone falling off a biker's girl back pocket. I stopped and picked up, but the girl was already gone.

We called a couple numbers on her cell trying to get her to call back. Eventually she did - turns out she was running away from her family with her ex; and we "ruined her life" by calling them. She never came back to pick it up.

Next time the phone will remain on the ground.
We already protect one and not the other. If the seller had only provided Gizmodo with the information they published (photos, teardowns, etc.) instead of the phone itself, Gizmodo probably wouldn't be in any legal trouble and the seller's identity would likely be protected by the shield laws.
As a life long "scouter" (so far) I have to say scout badges are pretty hit and miss. It depends on your troop and on the badge whether you learn much on it.

(example; this would be useless in my local scout troop who's focus is generally on water sports [canoing] and hiking/camping - i.e. the physical stuff.

They would probably award it based on little effort (and yes, I did use this "hack" to amass a huge quantity of badges in my time :))

Not that I'm dissing it :) just seems unusual for a Scout badge.
Ask HN: is there a Twitter hashtag reach vanity metric?
Let's say Subway does a Twitter campaign using the hastag #hooraysubway. Is there a site where you can input a hashtag and see everyone who has tweeted it and sum their followers?

This campaign "reach" number is mostly a vanity metric, but could be useful for justifying costs to brands.
Glad to see they've finally updated the merit badge pamphlets--maybe I'm getting up there, but I seem to remember that in the late nineties when I was pretty active, most of the content seemed to be 10-15 years out of date.

I never got this one, but I wish I did (considering I got such gems as coin-collecting and basketry).
Amazon Grows Kindle Titles by +20% in
This depends on your jurisdiction.
Wow... Pretty airtight if you're a non-scientific lunatic that can't tell the difference between physical assault and non-violent political satire.
firefox, in which ctrl-w closes...

It's very useful in situations like this to know that Ctrl-Shift-T reopens the last closed tab, and you can press it repeatedly to continue opening less-recently closed tabs.
Apple returns the favour
We also give protections to trade secrets for a reason.
Didn't he just say Travelocity owned the tickets? If the airline's not directing the stranders to where they can actually buy flights (or the flights are too expensive on e.g. Travelocity), there will be empty seats.
I wasn't suggesting not trying it on other countries. I think it's a good move but my post was all about the reasons why drug use was so high 30 years ago.
I agree. If they just would have blocked the guy's name out they would look better in the public's eye.
It's very easy to say things like this after the fact; "I would never have done that".

However, despite my vague dislike of Arrington I believe he wouldn't have actually paid for it.

I disapprove of his conceit in posting this though...
I earned Eagle Scout in 2000, one month shy of turning 18. I agree with your comment 100%. Earning merit badges is akin to preparing for standardized tests; it's simply regurgitating ideas and concepts to fulfill a list of requirements. It was the non-merit badge activities that I gained and learned the most from, where there was less structure involved. Running an Eagle Scout project introduced me to budget constraints, solving problems creatively and managing a team. I don't know much about the Girl Scouts, but if they are similar in spirit to the BSA I'll definitely encourage my daughter to participate.