skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Selection bias? People concerned with facebook privacy aren't making status updates any more?
I once owned an Air [1], I now own an iPad, and this article is completely correct: The iPad is great, but it is not an Air, and it would be a shame to lose the Air. The Air a great machine for what it is: A full-fledged computer with a big screen, a real keyboard and low weight.

---

[1] I only sold the Air because work bought me a Macbook Pro. Which is nice, provided you rarely carry it any farther than thirty feet. I tend to regret the loss of the Air whenever I travel.
Can we have fair use without fair use technology?
Ask HN: Startup people are narcissists?
I was reading a book on narcissism(http://www.amazon.com/Narcissism-Epidemic-Living-Age-Entitlement/dp/1416575987 ) and I realized most of the entrepreneurs I know are in some way very narcissistic.

I was wondering if it was possible to want to change the world and yet not be influenced by narcissism?

Wanting to change the world is narcissistic?

Adding value to peoples life is not?

As a startup is it important to brand outrageously like most of them do. "Change the world" "capturing peoples life"

Is sober the new outrageous?
As somebody who's not already a crypto expert, I found those slides next to worthless by themselves. I suspect that the speaker put a lot of extra explanation into them during the talk to explain why TLA1 is better than TLA2, but it doesn't come across at all in the text.

As an example, I'd read an article about timing attacks, so I knew what the author was getting at in the slide about rewriting that loop. If I saw the slide without any background, I'd have been left scratching my head since it doesn't make any attempt to explain the actual issue.

Let us know when the audio is available. I'll keep the slides around until then.
Is max klein actually mark essien?
is max mark's pen name? Compare:
http://www.facebook.com/maxklein
http://entitycube.research.microsoft.com/p/mark_essien.htm
http://twitter.com/markessien

so are the qubikle apps the ones max references?
I like it. This could give me a lightweight way to provide help to users that are having troubles on the site. Signed up!
I like the project but I think you definitely need a new description for it. "The easiest way to reply" doesn't mean anything to me. Reply to what and to whom?
Patentable? The Issue of Software and Business Methods (nice update)
Sequencing the captures as shown in your video is a great idea--allows the person making the screenshots to stay in storytelling flow.

After that, I find the easy publishing, commenting, and one click round trip annotation features of Skitch to be extremely compelling: http://skitch.com/

For the part that comes after taking the screenshot, Skitch offers a particularly slick workflow without the separate Preview app.

Since both your app and Skitch allow one click capturing with a history of captures, perhaps you could emphasize the storytelling aspect of your approach. Maybe they own the mindshare for annotated image discussions, but you own the category of screenshot sequences.

Ideas: Eliminate subsequent capture button clicks until clicking Done. Drag to select and snap, use a key to switch between marquee rectangle and gui control? Show frames as a filmstrip while capturing. Flow the other commenting and annotation steps.

PS. It's a different situation, but just yesterday I had to crop a dozen very high resolution JPEGs into 3 or 4 separate images each, and was disappointed that Preview couldn't just mark all the crops I wanted at once. Maybe yours could allow multiple rectangles at once, then "screenshot" them all at once.
Yep! This is one of the use cases I made Storyteller for :)
I'm not saying I don't like to get out of the .NET box; I do.
But the point was within a single framework you have multiple languages that work well together.

I'm fairly language agnostic, but out of curiousity, what language doesn't .NET have that you want to work with? All my (language-y/syntaxy) needs are pretty much filled between IronRuby, IronPython, C#, and now F#.
The primary problem is that I've been developing in Java and everyone else is a PHP developer. They did recently hire another Java developer but they are right out of school and are going to struggle with having to be the sole person responsible for some large and rather critical applications.
I disagree with the assertion that SSL is a bad protocol. It's an ugly protocol, but that's because things that are elegant are rarely secure.

And, of course, I disagree with your reasoning about authenticated encryption. You're saying, "you're exposing your block cipher to direct attack by overloading it to both encryption and authentication". But it's probably exposed to side-channel attacks either way. Meanwhile, the implementation flaws that people end up with in naive HMAC systems break far more systems.

I suspect this is another example of the impedance mismatch between your academic approach to this and my "having to slog through people's terrible crypto on a monthly basis" approach.
It's not like opt-in polls on newspaper websites are particularly statistically valid anyway.
I really like the idea, but I would make it even more general. Granted one could use it right now for absolutely everything, but the title says appointment reminder, I would personally use it to remind people interested in e-sports related streams.
Here's another idea, having the ability for this to send me IM messages or URL callbacks would be even better.
You should be looking for someone who shares your passion, whatever it may be - and what the business is based around. So look in relevant communities to your business.
...which was only added recently to Android. The Blackberry's been around for a long time, Flash has been around for a long time, and they still haven't added it.

There are a lot of consumers who are perfectly happy using a smartphone without Flash. I'm willing to bet it does not give RIM or Google any major advantage in the market.
Are the Chinese gov officials nuts?
Come play with some of the technology I've been working on for my Burning Man project this year. We'll have some giant touch screens to play with, as well as many of the artists and engineers who are working on the project.
If you're paranoid about this, consider driving a classic car.
NIST releases the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
Was just planning an achievements system for my website and was thinking that there really should be a service that makes this easy. Looks like that's exactly what you're working on.
In my opinion, you have to be narcissistic to want to start a business. It takes more than just having confidence and believing in yourself - you have to have the attitude that you will succeed for XYZ reasons, and you have to execute on them with the same attitude.
Beware of building a business around an obvious missing feature to an existing product. Especially if said product has an active team that's constantly churning out new features, and even goes as far as to have a "labs" section.

So yeah, if you did this for Outlook instead, you might have a viable business. For Gmail, you run a very real risk that your feature may simply appear for free inside of Gmail itself one day, leaving you out in the cold.
The same tool is available on Facebook itself. Type a query in the bar at the top of the page, click on More Results, choose Posts by Everyone from the filter on the left.
I agree, that companies should be prepared for developers to leave.

I maintain that developers and engineers should leave their work maintainable.

I know I'm going to get downvoted, but this needs to be said. With great programming power comes great programming responsibilities. And you and I know this power doesn't come from silicon or management.

We all bitch about crappy products, and fail to see the developers on the other leave their turd piles for management to "manage".

Or we bitch about crappy code left behind by the prior owners -- spitting at the sky playing musical chairs.

If you need to leave your job, at least offer to maintain your shit. Don't leave them trembling in fear. Save us greedy monkeys.
Patrick, how did you hire the voice for the premade recordings?
Bayesian filtering is based on word frequency, or in sophisticated forms, Markov analysis.

I'm not confident it could reliably discriminate between useful categories. It'd be more likely to pick up on individuals' different vocabularies than useful categories such as client companies, contracts or projects.

To be useful, It'd have to have > 95% accuracy (post training). I'm just not sure a Bayesian model could do that reliably.

Unless, of course, it heavily weighted features such as "sender domain", but by that point you might as well be using explicit filters.
Rally HN: help build an independent Privacy Scanner for Facebook
Right now I have some code started for a bookmarklet that runs on Facebook and scans some of the most common privacy holes that are enabled by default. It shows a summary and has "one-click fixes" to lock down those privacy settings. Check it out here:

http://www.reclaimprivacy.org

I started this project last weekend on my flight back from Michigan to the Bay, and I just don't have enough free time to really make it solid. The bookmarklet needs better cross-browser testing (I works well in Safari 4, and mostly okay in FF3), and there are plenty of important privacy checks that it still needs to do (wall-post privacy settings, photo privacy settings, etc). A few of the checks can be wonky at times, especially the ones that scan the privacy dropdowns.

So...join in! If you want to contribute, just fork it on GitHub:

http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy

...I'll check pull requests periodically and redeploy the latest patches. The project is contained in an AppEngine app since that was the easiest thing to throw up on a Google domain this morning.
Some small businesses certainly have appointment scheduling systems. One thing I have heard a few times from folks is that they're using Pencil and Paper v1.0. I plan on listening to my customers and iterating appropriately. If it is obvious that their needs include interop or importing, then there will be interop or importing.

In my wildest of fever dreams, solving a revenue-draining pain point is enough to establish a beachhead in the B2smallB mini-enterprise environment, and then I get to eat the elephant from within. ("Since you're already using me for scheduling..." Basically, a 37Signals style approach where each additional product adds synergistic effects from existing customers plus marginal revenue.)
Google admitting defeat in 'direct to consumer' model phone sales
If you send a message asking if the customer is coming, I'd bet they'd be more likely to cancel. "Not showing up is an acceptable option? In that case..."
No, I already use automated labeling based on sender, and the amount of mail that doesn't fall under these filters is generally 1) small in volume, and 2) spam.

This sounds like a whole lot of work for something that already works well enough. In my experience, Bayesian filtering works well, until it doesn't. I then find myself frustrated because the filter is essentially a black box to me. I could keep trying to train it, but I already have two children and three pets. My patience for teaching things to a computer is usually nonexistent.
Frighten me.
You should try to tell the story of Storyteller using the product itself instead of the video.
If you're already a java developer, you should probably be able to jump in just from the official docs: http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html

Follow along with the tutorials, then download some of the sample apps to work with. I've also found that downloading the source code to the Android project itself is pretty worthwhile. You can look at the source to almost all of the apps included in a default installation (dialer, camera, music, browser, etc.)

Last I checked, most of the books are being outdated pretty fast. Don't even bother with any book that doesn't cover 2.0 at least, 2.1 preferably.

For most apps, covering the broad range of devices isn't very difficult. The emulator that comes with the SDK will let you emulate different display resolutions. You can also run any version of the Android OS on the emulator to test your app under different OS versions.

The "unholy mixture of XML and GridBagLayout" is actually pretty easy if you've ever worked with an HTML CSS grid framework like Blueprint, 360Grid, or YUI grid. At least, it's made pretty good sense to me so far. It would be nice if there was a good visual layout tool available... but oh well.

I'm not aware of a CoreData like high level persistence framework. App data storage is usually done with the built in SQlite libraries. I believe you're on your own so far in building higher level abstractions on top of that.
But, for instance, you recommended CTR-mode AES-256, but didn't discuss:

* How to set the counters so that counter/IV can't collide and destroy your security

* What metadata your messages need to include to make them not replayable

* How to canonicalize your messages so that the process of packing, authenticating, encrypting, decrypting, and unpacking doesn't change the intent of a message.

I think that may be what the grandparent comment is getting at.
Very cool. What you do best: providing actual value to real people from customer #1, not fancy high-tech services. I do wonder about your marketing plans, though. Are enough small business owners actively looking for this kind of service that AdWords is going to be a viable option?

And one tech question: what are you using for the calendar? It looks beautiful, like a simple iCal.

And lastly: international phone numbers don't seem to work. I'm sure that's intentional, I just hope I didn't freak out some random person in Iowa reminding them about a fake appointment.
I suspect that the speaker put a lot of extra explanation into them during the talk to explain why TLA1 is better than TLA2, but it doesn't come across at all in the text.

Yep. There's a practical limit to how much text you can put into slides and have them still be useful; I decided that it was more useful to have the recommendations in the slides and the reasoning orally than vice versa.
Good for you man. I liked your bingo card deal and this looks like it has even more potential. Nice job of identifying a market need that can be made easier through your app.

I wish you the best of luck.
I recommend a contract type relationship for a couple weeks or month, something where you can actually see their work, how they work and if they are a good fit for you. Just arrange it so you own all IP if it doesn't work out.

As far as finding co-founders, you can hit up various Hackers & Founders meetups. If you're the technical type then finding user groups or whatever can be a good place too.

Startup Weekends can also be a good place to look, but don't be super pushy about it (or you'll just be like everyone else there).

Also, this is a great article on the topic: http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder
Good idea, if it were mine I would make text message to cellular the standard notification feature with a fallback to e-mail only if the text message did not go through, or if the customer opted in for it instead of text.

I would also try offering a 15 day free trial for the businesses and sell packages on a quarterly, 6 month and yearly basis vs monthly.
Introducing Apps for µTorrent
I was hoping someone would ask that. Remember fiverr.com, the Mechanical Turk for people with talent, where every task is priced at $5? Somebody was offering to record a phone tree. I paid her $5 for half the job, liked what I got, paid her $5 for the other half, then got her email for ongoing work at a more appropriate wage.

God, I love the Internet.

Incidentally, the total cost of getting this project this far has been about $450, including $250 put on deposit for Twilio. (Better to have too much than too little, right?)
They're orthogonal issues:

To be relentlessly resourceful is a great quality in anyone. You get things done.

To be a sociopath means you have lack of empathy or remorse, usually with an inflated sense of self worth.

You can be a resourceful sociopath, or you can be resourceful but empathetic and socially responsible. The former implies you're likely to screw people over and not care about it.
This idea has a larger than usual chance of being crushed by competition.

Normally I wouldn't be bothered about the risk of Google/Microsoft stepping into my market. (In fact, Microsoft are already in my market.)

But in this case:

- They have access to more data than you. A lot more.

- The product is bang in the middle of their core competence. They love automated data analysis. One of their engineers would probably hack up a competitor at the weekend for fun.

- They already have a low-friction way of trying out ideas with Gmail (labs) which would help counter the usual large-but-slow competitor disadvantage.

I've been considering building things on top of Gmail, but because of the above I have decided that if I do it'll be limited to products that Google doesn't seem to like. (And/or hobby projects for my own amusement.)
OK, let's be realistic here - this a little bit like saying that since there is GNUstep and GCC, you don't really need a Mac to develop for the iPhone. The bulk of Flash content online is developed with Adobe's authoring tools. That's why they are so protective of Flash.
I disagree with this to the point of saying that the Artima book is one of the most well written technical books I've ever read and the O'Reilly book is rather a mess. The Artima book is written by the creator of the language and while it is a couple of years old the information is still 95% relevant to the latest language changes.

I would recommend getting a copy of both of them, but you might want to check out the online version of the O'Reilly book before buying it:

http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/

The Pragmatic Programmers book is not bad either, but it's only a short introduction to the language compared to the other two books mentioned.

All three books have nearly identical titles: Programming (in) Scala
The calendar seems to be this one:

http://github.com/robmonie/jquery-week-calendar
This article has zero credibility. Aaron Greenspan tries to dress it up as some sort of analysis, but it's actually just more of the same: sour grapes. To Aaron:

Aaron, I don't doubt that Zuckerberg screwed you over. Unlike many, I'm willing to take you at your word. You should have written your book, profited from it to the max, and then relegated the whole thing to cocktail party joke. There's no reason to cling to this story; it can only make you look bad.
Isn't not showing up always an acceptable option? For most of the cases I see this being used in, the customer is the one who wants the appointment in the first place. No one is forcing people to get massages.

I see Appointment Reminder as a way to eliminate no-shows from people who forget their appointment (which I tend to do more than I'd like). Personally, I wish every business I made appointments with used this.
Nice. Is it only available for the Mac? (and if so, why???)

The creation workflow looks really good. Pretty much everything you need without any excess features that nobody would actually use.

The presentation piece looks like it's still under construction. I'd expect to see a powerpoint-style slideshow instead of a simple HTML dump of the whole thing.

I also liked the irony of presenting the workflow for your screenshot workflow tool as a video!
The current state of the art in remote measurement (which is in its infancy; the first papers to apply basic signal processing on measurement over IP networks are just coming out) suggest that the timeable thresholds are in the tens of microseconds over a WAN.

But that doesn't matter, because over switched "local" networks (read: from one end of a data center to another), the thresholds are in nanoseconds; everything is timeable. Attackers will spend the $30 to get a machine in the same hosting center as you as soon as the other attacks get less trivial.
My comment about Hibernate was wrong. A while back, I saw a thread on StackOverflow about ORM's on Android that linked to another thread about Hibernate. I just went back and looked and the linked comment was suggesting "lightweight alternatives to Hibernate."

Threads in question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371538/any-good-orm-tools...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/296587/light-weight-alter...
Probably because they don't have the incentive to out themselves. Remember it's effectively admitting that they're evil. But on the Internet it would be safe, assuming you believe this guy. He's pretty convincing:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a5xvv/iama_diagnosed_s...

This was posted several months ago, looks like he's still taking questions.
I have the idea of "screenshot sequences" in mind when I made Storyteller, but I wasn't sure how best to highlight the concept, so I used 'step-by-step', which may not be good enough, considering you highlighted it, was hoping creative HN folks like you could suggest some :)

Yup, continuously taking multiple screenshots without having to click the 'Capture' button, can be achieved by a global shortcut key (I've set it to Cmd+Alt+s for my current build).

I like the idea of floating previously capture screenshots like a filmstrip while capturing, I'm considering using a semi-transparent HUD for that, thoughts?

I'll be keeping Storyteller simple and easy to use, so I won't be implementing simultaneous image crops anytime soon .

Good thoughts! :)
dupe - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335911
I made my own facebook status search as well at http://searchthebook.us

It's pretty basic for now, but it doesn't have the privacy concerns the webapp this article links to.
The secret of google
Agreed. I was confused at first. Maybe just call it "the easiest way to create step-by-step screenshots"? Or maybe something like: "Show them exactly what you mean: The easiest way to create animated, step-by-step screenshots".
Apple probably loves choice as well. They should have the choice to design their products as they wish. I have the choice to buy Apple's products if I wish.

If you need flash on your phone, don't buy an iPhone. Choice is great.
I totally agree. I perhaps should have clarified. It's not unmaintainable due to the code, its unmaintainable due to the lack of people capable of maintaining it. This is largely due to hiring me as the sole .NET developer (where their other devs who are primarily PHP devs felt somewhat comfortable with C#) and then deciding that I should be the sole Java developer instead (yeah, I was REAL happy about that), in case they ever want to put these apps on Linux machines or something else.

Now, C# and Java are pretty close syntactically so hopefully they'll be OK. There is a huge difference in libraries and core API structure as well as deployment though, so it's not just an easy step to take. Having marginal .NET skills does not translate to marginal Java skills though. We do have a brand new Java dev, but it's really asking alot to put all of this on their shoulders with just a few months out of college.
I agree. A read-through of Cialdini's "Influence" should give us a better idea on how to phrase this. Something like "looking forward to seeing you" is less suggestive of a no-show.

That reminds me, I need to finish that book. I believe it's on the Personal MBA list if that interests you.

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert...
Why would you take GCM over OCB (apart from patents)? Or, for that matter, OMAC/EAX?
Good point, I was thinking:

"Easily reply customers with step-by-step screenshots"

but would I be boxing myself in, because I think it's good for regular sharing between friends, family and co-workers too?
It wasn't really that hard:

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Bastard-Autobiography-Sociopath...
Google’s Nexus One Store Is Going Out Of Business