skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is my best story about business consultants...

I was contracting at a big three automaker and they had retained just such a firm, possibly even BCG, to "restructure" the IT department.

So they had a team of overpaid consultants come and perform an analysis. I won't even get into the pointlessness of all that. However, the leader of the pack, the alpha male of the consulting team, would physically walk his laptop over to a printer near the admin's desk to print because the information was too sensitive to print over the network.

In true hacker fashion a buddy and I had recently discovered that you could telnet into the printers and with a carefully crafted command actually set the text on the LCD readout on the printer itself. (The spot where is usually says "Load Paper") So we actually wrote a program that would allow us to send any text we wanted to any LCD of a printer.

So of course, this self important consultant became our first victim of the prank. He hooked up his laptop and we starting sending text like "Loading Virus" to the LCD. It actually became a little frustrating because he wasn't noticing the LCD.

Finally, he looked at the LCD and we starting sending text like "Downloading files from computer". This guy just went into an absolute panic and after the first few seconds of frantic inactivity he got his act together and closed the laptop. Of course, that didn't stop the printer from "Downloading files", so he finally ripped the cable from his laptop to sever the connection.

He was in a panic for what I'm sure were some of the longest seconds of his life, but by then we were doubled over laughing just a couple of desks away and he caught on.

I will give him credit for taking the joke well and he never tried to push it up the food chain or anything to involve any management.
There were complaints before that approval of apps seemed forever so that might be one of the reasons but considering they made revisions to their OS policy then they might not approve it at all.
Actually, John Deacon wrote one of Queen's biggest hits, "You're My Best Friend."
So you pivot. Implement a feature that a niche will really like, but that the official Twitter app won't implement because it complicates things for those that don't care and fills a fairly small niche.

For example, I'd love to have a client that lets me filter extremely powerfully. I should be able to filter by any field (for example, filter out whose source is Ad.ly because it's all ads), use regular expressions, etc.

I think some apps come close, but I don't think any are quite as powerful as I'd like. Even if one is, there are plenty more niches to fill. An iPhone client that's not as pretty or feature-packed, but which loads instantly, for example.
Adobe Brings Flash to HTML5 Canvas
Maybe the presumption of connections is all that is needed. Managers have connections. They need to hire people with connections because connections are important.
Best viewed with Page Style->"No Style", unfortunately.
I was sitting next to Reg Braithwaite at the first startup school when one speaker (pg?) said something about startups being for young people so they can focus 100% on the company without worrying about kids. Reg stood up and said, paraphrased, "I'm starting a company _because_ of my kids, so they can say that their dad showed them how to follow their dreams instead of doing the safe thing like everyone else."

Respect.

My oldest is 7 now, and I hope he'll be able to say that his father showed him that living with a clear conscience is worth even more than a top-notch education.
I have a feeling that the word “official” connotes “authentic.” E.g., I would trust the “official” version of a music video to not having any surprises, while the unofficial versions are less trustworthy.

I think Twitter realizes that using the word “official” to describe their apps makes it seem like other developers create unofficial apps, when in fact the developers are using the same officially-sanctioned APIs.
Lessig: How I Lost the Big One [2004]
Theseus and the Zipper (a Haskell adventure)
thanks for this, tried looking for them after the little footnote but their website had no links to them that i could find.
Could there be a more laughable distortion of a thing into its opposite than Zen as tips-and-tricks for the achieving self?
It's a funny comment, but not really true.

The ctangle program would just strip the comments (both C/C++ comments and TeX commentary) out of a .w file and re-arrange the C/C++ code to the order that the compiler would need to see it. While many other tools would leave tell-tale traces of machine-generated code, the C or C++ files generated by ctangle are really indistinguishable from human-written code, because they are the original human-written code. So Apple couldn't tell that you used Literate Programming, nor would it violate the spirit of the rules. Now I wonder how many people use Literate Programming to program for the iPhone. My guess is zero, which is too bad.
Online business models: 1998 revisited
Hey, glad you like my games!

I'm using Haxe with FlashDevelop currently, which you can find at:

http://haxe.org/
http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Pa...

Everything else I've written in house, so that's about all there is to it. If you have any further questions, my email is in my profile...
In the case that the house owners take the pictures themselves, I wounder how many people would actually be willing to do that.

1% of the population, 10%? I am thinking of hardcore twitterers combined with half of all facebook users and all of the foursquare/gowalla users...

New guess: 50% of all people
From the little I know about Knuth, while he is a bit of a joker, he doesn't seem like the type to make an announcement to hype people up. That either leads me to believe this will actually be something huge, or it's just a joke of some sort.
I think a large part of that was the growing popularity of Twitter, the low barrier to entry for creating these clients and that Twitter.com took a rather minimal approach. Most of the Twitter clients early on were built just because the creator wanted something other clients or Twitter.com didn't have. But over time that changes and you begin to serve a section of the Twitter audience. So this begs the question; has the string of recent events changed the way Twitter client developers are able to server their market. If it has then Twitter should directly address that. If it hasn't but has confused people then it is important that Twitter is open about their policies and ideologies.
So what you're saying is this: Maps are hard to make, so don't criticize them.

Just because something was hard to make doesn't mean it should be immune to criticism. Cars, movies, skyscrapers, Windows Vista, etc. are all hard to make, but they are also criticized, and legitimately so. (examples: Ebert, Walt Mossberg, etc.)

How dare a user criticize a product!
Consistent with the USGS's automated estimate of 0 people exposed to damage greater than "none": http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/pager/events/us/2010u...
I disagree this is "their turf."
Interesting, but off-topic. I'd prefer to use Hacker News for technology-related news and other news sources to find out about earthquakes.
Quote the article:

To be clear, we are going to work hard to improve our product, add new functionality, make acquisitions when it's in the best interest of users and the whole ecosystem at large. Each one of those things has the potential to upset a company or developer that may have been building in that space and they then have to look for new ways to create value for users.

The message isn't just "don't build apps with similar functionality to twitter.com". The message is "if you build apps that provide value to the ecosystem or the users, we might decide to buy you (at our price) or copy you (and hence crush you) and you'll have to find something else to do."
On a similar topic, Mark Suster (with GRP in L.A.) talks about how his blog (http://bothsidesofthetable.com) has impacted his deal flow in this video from the inaugural show of This Week in Venture Capital:

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-venture-capital/twivc-01-wi...
WebKit nightlies: http://nightly.webkit.org/

And they probably enabled or disabled some features, based on what they're working on.

For awhile (or, a few days, at least), Safari release was faster than WebKit nightlies on SunSpider, since they were working on strings in SFX (or something like that. Point I'm making is, release was faster and the slowdown was in the strings test).
Moglen: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing
Anticompetitive actions? Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE. Why wouldn't Apple get in trouble for actively prohibiting competing browsers?

This is Europe, after all, not the US. The average consumer actually has some rights over there. (In the US, we basically have "if it blows up and ruins your face, Apple has to buy you a band-aid" and "you have the right to not buy it".)
Unfortunately for Opera, some of what their "browser" does is within their own servers. So, Apple can never have complete visibility into what the application (service) does.
"I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual."

WOW that is dead on. I get the feeling half the world is like that.
"Readability" has been around a while, but it indispensible, IMHO. David Pouge (NY Times) called it the best single technical idea of 2009. I'd call it an absolute necessity to reading postings on the Web.

Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/technology/personaltech/31...

Discussion:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/1...

Both best viewed with Readability.
Special request of Homeland Security. If terrorists don't know where NYC and Washington are, then they can't harm us. I can't believe anybody wouldn't be aware of this in these days of heightened awareness.
If you view this in the context of a shopping mall, then its certainly their property, and within their rights to choose who can have a presence within their property. That's how I think Apple views the Appstore.
I guess Welcome the Real World, is the best response I can give. So sorry that the real world is so non-idealistic and disappointing to you, and that your wonderful skills and knowledge aren't being prized and utilized.

In other words, you're experiencing the reality shock _everybody_ experiences when engaging with, and learning about, the corporate world.

It seems you'd be happier in Academia, a research institute, or perhaps creating something on your own.
I suspect (some) people misunderstood what I was trying to say.

I wasn't trying to say that I thought free markets were immoral, or that they were not moral. (And so we should find a different economic system, or something).

I was trying to say that you cannot replace your personal morality, your moral system, with a free market (whatever that even means). That is, I was trying to say that markets were amoral, without moral content.
Pitch - manage and streamline your customer development emails
There are about 152 earthquakes of magnitude >6 each year. That averages out to about one every 2.5 days.

So far this year there have been 60 earthquakes with a magnitude >6. It doesn't look to me that anything unusual is going on.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqsta...

EDIT:
It just occurred to me that perhaps the media is just reporting on earthquakes more? Remember "shark summer" a few years ago?
Funny that is exactly how Microsoft viewed Windows/IE.
Will the iPad Kill Reading?
I thought this example was well chosen. Downloading mp3s is a familiar thing that's very easy to do, but may not be ethically defensible in the final analysis.

If you want to have a discussion about copyright though, you're poisoning the well by calling infringement stealing.
Setting the pop up position on a Spark PopUpAnchor control in Flex 4
Blame observer bias. http://geology.rockbandit.net/2010/03/01/has-there-been-an-i...
I would start thinking badly of him if he referred to his retirement announcement as "earthshaking".
Seeking UI/UX Expert With NYC-based Web Project
I'm looking to collaborate with a front end designer or user experience professional in solidifying an overall design

a quick mockup below:

http://imgur.com/n5mlx.jpg
Via Andy's blog: http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/11/slouching-towards-be...
Finally a balanced analysis of the iPad developer agreement. Screw you, Adobe!
Is this supposed to be a shocker? My submitted prediction is still 66 days out, even though I think an answer of never is still very likely. Though I'm just betting on Opera cutting features to get an approved app.
I've worked at so many of the largest companies as an employee, contractor and even overpaid consultant and this is completely true. These companies are completely mired in their own structure that there is nothing they can do to get out.

Everyone is protecting their turf and their headcount that you almost have to have "Bob and Bob" come into, even though they don't know anything themselves.

When I was working for a professional organization as a consultant, sometimes I would go into gigs where I literally knew nothing about the product that I was supposedly an expert on. I remember specifically one case where I spent a frantic weekend learning about a tech that I was supposed to help this company plan a rollout for because I was the expert. The worst part was these employees had been preparing for this rollout for weeks, so they already had a good grasp of the core and I was still trying to learn all of the acronyms.
And when all there fancy bits fail them...they're still in the middle of the desert.
Virtual Credit Card
Embedding local system fonts in Flex 4
Two complaints with the linked "local root kernel exploit":

1) The linked page says that it's a local DoS bug. Being subject to denial-of-service from local users is hardly critical.

2) Even if it were, as the link text seems to imply, a local privilege escalation vulnerability, it is my understanding that that sort of vulnerability is generally not considered critical, because an attacker needs to have compromised a local account to use them. Of course, if you're a shared hosting service, I suppose you might beg to differ, depending on how you're set up.
Yeah. It's going to have to be reworded ... or, at the very least, a statement issued clarifying what's meant to be included vs. what isn't (a Steve Jobs "executive signing statement").

I'd sure like to hear ideas of how that could be worded. I strongly doubt they'll back down and allow the Flash compiler at this point. But they obviously want to keep Monkey Island, and perhaps even Unity 3D. How could they possibly word a new version of the clause to make this distinction clear? Can a formal distinction be made?
No it's not. The factoring problem/RSA problem have never been proven to be NP-complete. Shor's algorithm shows that it's NP, but not NP-complete (or hard). I think it's also in co-NP.
I'm probably wrong but I thought Microsoft got in trouble for that because of their market position? There's plenty of other phones for Opera to run it's browser on.

That "50 million iPhones sold" from the event was a world wide number wasn't it?
I think sometimes we are a little too eager to attach labels to people. There are a couple of problems with labels:

1. A label is a heuristic. It's a quick way of getting an approximate picture of a person. If somebody introduces you to Rick as "a former Republican senator from South Dakota" your mind is already filling in lots of blanks about Rick with categories like "male", "senator", "Republican" and "South Dakotan". Our mind gives us a head-start in knowing about Rick. The problem comes when we don't allow ourselves to revise this rough-draft picture of Rick. Perhaps we think all Republicans are like X, so Rick is like X. Therefore, we don't bother looking for information about whether Rick is like X, because we already know. Labels can get in the way of actually knowing somebody.

2. A label often carries the implicit assumption that the aspects of the person in question are immutable. In other words, people don't change. It's different to say someone is a "psychopath" instead of "going through a psychopathic phase".

"In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human."

This quote really bothered me. This completely dehumanizes "psychopaths." They are officially "the other". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other
I'd love a link to your app, if you're comfortable sharing.
Microsoft, apple, adobe
This definition of a 'platform' is bogus. There is nothing like a platform. I want to buy a device that I own and not a 'platform'.

When I buy a house, I don't buy a platform where for the rest of my life, every newspaper that I read in that house will be delivered by Apple? Because that's the platform restriction. I get a lot of newspapers, but not all. The newspapers all look great, but some pages are missing, because Apple does not like them. Some images are blurred because Apple does not like them. I bought a platform, instead of a house?

I don't buy a car, but a platform? The BMW 5 series is a platform? I can only travel with it on BMW licensed roads and the petrol comes from a BMW petrol station where BMW gets 30% for every gallon? I can get only a BMW media player in the car and the distribution channel for music and news is also owned by BMW? BMW knows which music you have in your entertainment system? I could have bought another platform, from Mercedes, but then the petrol station would be a Mercedes-licensed?

Definitely not. If I buy some piece of hardware&software it does not mean that I want to buy a whole exclusive media distribution channel.

The whole idea that somebody owns a 'platform' that runs this deep and wide and this is just natural is just WRONG. Remember we let a single company influence what media we consume, what information we consume, what applications we can use and also what NOT - just by buying a computer from them and because they call it a 'platform'?

The infinite number of ways thought is also wrong. There are multiple infinities and Apple now controls the infinities. Some dimensions are not available at all. On some other dimensions there are still infinitive amounts of things, but they are all EVEN. The ODD ones are not supported by Apple.
Flash Now Importable to HTML5 Canvas
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Current OSes, protocols, and practices all conspire to destroy any guarantee of complete security.

But 99% of the time for 99% of people, a complete guarantee of security is overkill. With a few exceptions, as long as breaches are quickly discovered and fixed, the damage is relatively minor. Stolen credit card? Report it to your card company. Charges are blocked and you get a new card. Website vandalized? Shut it down, clone the disks on any compromised machines (for postmortem examination), restore from backups, blah blah blah standard panic procedures.

In areas where security and reliability really matter (basically: medical devices and avionics software on planes that carry people), software is expensive. Certain software development processes are required by law (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-2167 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B ). Greatly increasing the costs to create and use software kills new ideas in the womb. It becomes impractical for startups or small groups to build stuff.

So is Internet security a failure? Yes. But really, I'm glad we're not so risk-averse as to paralyze ourselves with more draconian measures.
No, no, you've completely misunderstood the situation. Apple haven't actually rejected Google Voice. They've just not approved it yet, but will make a decision any year now.
Errr... This really is a slippery slope. Personally, python all the way. But, YMMV depending on what you need to get things done. It's perfectly fine to use a combination of both (since you know them both).

Yes, sometimes I love python just because it has helped me enjoy reading other's code, something that I just cannot do as easily with Java (C anything or even lisp flavors) without reading comments or looking it up in the library.

I guess these days, go with the one with libraries/frameworks that come in handy to you the most. If you love Rails, stick with ruby. Want an event-driven server, a decent web framework, math tools, visualization engine? Python has great frameworks for those and I love it for that. Mind you, I am sure ruby has much more to offer than my limited knowledge, but for me, code readability trumps over other things.

As about future direction in terms of community support, I would bet on python just because of the sheer fact that so many of Google's projects are glued together with python and the benevolent dictator works there. He must've done something right to get the Googleplex's attention.
Ask HN: Legal costs for a enterprise software web startup
I'm putting together a proposed budget for an enterprise software web startup I'm working on. I'm pretty clear on all the development and marketing costs, but I'm not so clear on legal costs and insurance costs.

On legal, do any of you have a rough estimate of what it will cost to cover employee agreements and to build an enterprise software license? I know the enterprise space loves to have one-off licensing for large customers; how much can I expect it to cost to close a single sale (remember, just the legal aspect :)?

As an enterprise software provider, is there any kind of insurance I should have that I may be unaware of? I'm sure our legal counsel will cover that when we get there, but I don't want the budget to be too surprised. :)

Thanks.
Fine, but even then he does a wonderful and passionate job articulating that 'universal' reality shock.
Its fairly common for programmers to dislike excel (at least in my experience). However, it provides a lot of benefits:

1) Its actually pretty powerful. Since the cells update in real time it provides a nice way to do "what if" analysis pretty quickly.

2) The solver is pretty good.

3) Most people in business can read excel so it provides a good common ground.

4) Since all the intermediate steps in a calculation are in a cell somewhere, its pretty easy to trace through logic.

I certainly wouldn't use excel to handle huge amounts of data, but its a good tool as long as your computational requirements aren't that big.
I'm sorry if you didn't like that specific link -- I am happy to provide others:

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/36901
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33412
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33412
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37806
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34405
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37036
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37806

those were just from 2 minutes of googling, and only ones for 2009.

Regarding your second point, security is all about having multiple layers, but the truth is the effectiveness of having code run in non-root users is a useless precaution in this day and age.

My point is that people always talk about their great uptime on their servers, without realizing how insanely insecure modern kernels and operating systems are -- unless you are upgrading every month, there is most likely a well known local privilege escalation vulnerability on your machine.

Once they have root, hackers can do all kinds of fun things, like replacing your SSH binary and logging all your passwords. As Luke mentions above, if a sysadmin's workstation is ever hacked into, the implications can quickly become immense.
Local root exploit + vulnerability in web app/framework/server/etc = remote root exploit.
Few people make over $100K so even if 100% of those who make $100K can use a computer, that's still a minority.