skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is you putting a knife in someone considered attempted murder in one case and assault in another and an accident in a third?

Why is computing an algorithm that undoes DRM illegal and one which predicts weather not?

Why is building something electronic and selling it legal, unless there's a bit of paper in an appropriate office somewhere in the country describing what you've built?

We don't legislate things based only on the precise actions of what people are doing, but also the social and mental contexts in which people do them. And listening to an FM radio station is a different act in a different context to listening to a police radio station or a privately owned laptop's WiFi card.

I'm not saying I know it is a criminal activity, just that it's not as simple as saying "well it's like listening to public FM radio so it must be legal.". It isn't like it, and that conclusion doesn't necessarily follow.
I think there's a risk that you're underestimating the scale required to make those things work. Not only are cars and their engines pretty big, but they need a huge amount of infrastructure for their construction (think about where that all that metal came from, never mind everything else), maintenance, feeding (the whole oil economy), roads, signals, piloting, etc.
I just looked at this and thought "Boxee. Yeah, I have that already."

OK, so they've jumped into a market that's already got a few players and since they are so big they'll bring it to the masses. That's not all that exciting from where I sit.
Probably Hulu.
I get a sort of "spin doctor: feel from this move, with the big glaring eyes looking at me as I make my way to the message on the zendesk blog post... Maybe not so well handled since one could think Zendesk is trying to turn a difficult situation into a PR blitz: why are you posting here, rather than just emailing your customers?
I was using Google Apps for my outgoing emails and switched to SendGrid a few months ago. I usually send 500-600 emails a day but with Google Apps I was hearing a lot of complaints about never getting the email.

It's been a lot better with SendGrid and SendGrid also tracks bounces so you dont send more emails to invalid addresses, which hurts your reputation on mail servers.

I'm on the 10,000 emails/month plan and go over every month but the overage charges are very reasonable
So when do we get dinosaurs?
For the record, I'm not and have never been a customer of ZenDesk, nor any of their competitors- so there's nothing I could have "wanted" out of their apology.

So perhaps I am one of those people that wouldn't be okay with any apology.
HN: Help me formalize computer security practices for companies?
I'm currently drafting a semi-formal document on data security best practices for businesses. It was prompted by concerns at one of my clients, a government-funded research company, but I'm setting it up to be a generic set of recommendations for most businesses.

So, if you were concerned about keeping your proprietary information proprietary, while still being able to develop your product, what would you like to see in such a document? If you were an employee, what would you find frustrating, and what would you expect to find in a semi-secretive company?

I've divided the recommendations into a series of stages, appropriate for differently-sized businesses, and into two "arenas" -- "internal" security, and "remote" security.
I actually just had a chat via email with Greg Brown (author of Ruby Best Practices). I updated the blog post to get to the point quicker and I included his take on the matter...
What, can't the border guards find their own?

The question had to be asked.
Legally, probably not. They aren't demanding that you not redistribute, just asking. And asking politely. They are banking on the good nature of people. Good for them! And us.
HorryCountySchools
>(The "world's most secure operating system" uses sendmail!?)

Their FAQ addresses this and says that the Sendmail upstream has been a bit more receptive to security issues than Postfix or others. In addition, they claim that Postfix hasn't been the cleanest in recent years.
I scanned the comments for the dead item, and I definitely found the topic interesting. It might not be in the Top Ten Interesting HN Posts Ever, but it was significantly more interesting, for example, than many of the dull, repeat-articles about, say, Facebook or the iPad, that do not provide me with any useful information re: hacking and startups, nor satisfy my intellectual curiosity.

But that's just my opinion.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1340492

Different source, some discussion.
The marginal utility to someone at his age between 2 billion and 10 billion is functionally identical.

I'd contend his switch was very logical and turned out great for him.
>Instead of our intended result, many of you read my Tuesday e-mail and thought, “You want to send me a big bill for something that I didn’t order and haven’t agreed to? WTF?”

The above line makes no sense. The apology never actually mentions what the "intended result" was. The intended change was exactly what the customer thought it was. Zendesk intended the result to be the customers just shut up and take it. Zendesk just couldn't cope with the customer reaction.
Thanks for the tip, just turned it on and now I can see the question. There must be a lot of HNers like me who don't know this, though.

I cannot understand the point of hiding deadened questions while still keeping the comments?
It's more of a mixed list, but something like "make backups" is definitely a sysadmin thing.
Also http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/
You describe a Mac Mini. Quiet, small, inexpensive and not fugly!
Good try, but still not good enough. My media startup will destroy them both.
Microsoft just keeps missing the mark with Media Center (MCE). It's been around since 2002-2003, but has never gained any significant traction.

It's actually a pretty nice product. The UI works well and is pretty simple to use; if someone can use a Tivo, they can figure out MCE's interface.

The problem has always been the hardware and the marketing. When it first came out, you needed a dedicated PC to run it (unless you wanted to watch it on your monitor, thereby missing the point of the whole application), which was expensive (if you wanted it quiet) and painful for the lay-person to set up, especially considering Wifi wasn't quite up to the task (802.11b was what was primarily out there).

To get around this, MS had a good idea with the Extenders, but again, the execution was horribly flawed. You still likely needed a spare PC and a fast network connection to stream data to the Extender. Additionally, the companies that made extenders tended to be Linksys and D-Link... not exactly companies busrting with consumer friendly/simple UIs. Plus they were another $200-300 addition. Plus, Extenders were never marketed well either because the manufacturers didn't have the money, or they just didn't care.

Fortunately, MS did also build Extender functionality into the Xbox. But again, it is still some separate, hard to find mode on the Xbox. You have to pair it to a PC like you would a bluetooth device, and can be confusing for a non-techie. And once you have that done, now your Xbox has two different ways of playing music/video: One with the MCE mode and UI, and one with the native Xbox dashboard UI. Plus the Extender has to "connect" to your PC every time you want to use it.

Perhaps the most damning experience I've had with it came when I showed it to a friend of mine. He's about as enthusiastic about technology as you can get, but didn't know about MCE. Back in 2007ish, after looking at it for 5 minutes he said:

"This looks awesome, why haven't I ever seen this before? Good job Microsoft."

Hindsight is 20/20, but they really should have made it 100% native on the Xbox, or released a similar device that didn't require a PC sync.
ASCAP running racket against small coffee shops.
Exactly!

Here's another nice indictment of the term "consumer" as it is applied to humans / citizens / creative people.

So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Power swung so decisively to the supply side that "market" became a verb: something you do to customers.

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html
As I have commented before here, mathematics is a skill and needs practice. If you don't work examples and problems you won't learn math, at best you will learn about math. I taught myself first-year calculus twenty years ago, but didn't keep up with it. I have recently started reviewing it, and because I sat down and worked things through, it is actually coming back pretty easily (more so than I expected at least).
You raise an interesting point... Google could potentially turn advertising on it's head again if the popularity of these individual networks perk up!!!!
The underpants gnomes were way ahead of you.
For me, it's just gotten to the point that I'm tired of the exercise itself.

The current idea seems to be "Do whatever the hell you want", and if enough people get mad "apologize profusely and come out looking like you really care about your customers." Facebook has practically turned this into an art.

If you really cared about your customers, you probably wouldn't have done whatever you're apologizing about in the first place. At this point, having seen this play out over and over again, the whole thing does seem to lack sincerity.

I'm tired of people thinking "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" as a properly moral way to conduct business.
If the VC ends up paying the CEO to eat Sushi while I eat Ramen, I don't care how I'm spoken to, there's a deal there I have to take or leave.

It's unwise for a VC (or anyone) to assume the person they are talking to is this objective.

Calling the founder "just a founder" is a recipe for resentment, and it's totally unnecessary. There are about a million ways to tell the founder that they can't get paid the same amount as the CEO, and this is pretty close to the most potentially damaging way I can think of.
I think these two ideas go hand-in-hand. The server would track all new data and assist you in maintaining your meta information.
Guido's Python Object
Because they are apologizing for the wrong thing. "We have also been reaching out to our customers to truly understand the heart of why you are upset" suggests that it never even occurred to them that people would be mad about this. I mean, really? They knew very well what they were up to; businesses don't do this sort of thing on a whim. I'd bet you anything this guy has a spreadsheet showing revenue shooting through the roof as a result of the new pricing.

This is an apology for carelessness, but the real issue is greed. That is why it strikes me as insincere.
I agree, the hardest parts of calculus are the algebraic manipulations required, the basic ideas are relatively straight-forward.
Opera has had a torrent client built in for about 5 years:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/07/opera_does_bittorren...
The help link on the edit post page comes first in the tab order following the TextField. I find myself hitting <tab> <enter> excepting to post the updated comment, but instead I end up on the help page reading an explanation about post formatting.
Do music stores even matter anymore? Selling DRM-free MP3 downloads is a commodity business if I've ever seen one. The only trick is getting labels to sign on. Besides, syncing is an essential part of buying MP3 music: you don't want your music library only stored on your easily-lost cellphone, do you?

Anyone know if Google's music store lets you re-download songs? If not, I imagine there's going to be more than a few people who have to re-buy a bunch of albums because they lost their never-synced phone.
frankly i don't care about hours of continuous use. what i care about is that i can look up a restaurant and read their hours and menu. it takes 2 minutes. the iphone can't do it.
http://gear.ign.com/articles/108/1088942p1.html
How do you spend two and a half years "putting your customers first" and not realise that a 300% price increase would annoy them?

for those customers who took action this week to convert to an extended billing cycle, please contact us if you would like to revert back to the billing cycle that you held as of Monday isn't putting customers first, it's putting employee convenience first. Find the customers who converted to an extended billing cycle, contact them and offer to revert them even if it's inconvenient. That's putting them first. Which they claim to be doing but aren't.
They asked everyone to please turn off our phones because the wifi was interfering. I'm pretty sure they said "wifi" and not "bluetooth." I thought that was strange because you'd expect a keyboard/remote to be bluetooth.

Theory as to what went wrong: they pushed out an update to the GoogleIO conference Android app earlier this morning. I'd already upgraded before the keynote started; some of the people I was there with got it & some didn't. The app now uses wifi for inside geolocation. I wonder if a lot of wifi devices coming on swamped the system a bit?
The Engineering Behind Flash Player 10.1
"Can they sue me if I do that?"

Ask an attorney or for self-help try something like Nolo press' web site.
Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day
Barely be described as a paradox? What does this even mean? Is the state of paradox not binary? As was stated it could lead to great discussions, the foremost of which in my mind would pertain to GEB and fans thereof. It was a Socratic approach to initiating discussion, and in your mind this warrants flagging?
That's not a lot of warning for folks who are using a product like ZenDesk. The whole point is that a tool like this is embedded into your companies work flows. To leave ZenDesk means that you have to find a new product. Figure out how to move all of your data into that new product. Figure out how to handle tickets that are still in process on July 1. Train your staff. Change any customer facing UI or other automated bits that utilize ZenDesk.

The product is the type of product that inherently has a lot of lock-in. Giving me a month and a half to change all of that is more or less equivalent to making the changes effective tomorrow.
When I first studied calculus I was lucky to have a job that gave me lots of free time. I spent about four hours a day, almost every day for about 4 months to cover the first two semesters of calculus (I started getting tired of it and only read the book for the third semester's worth, which is why I don't count myself as having learned it).
Before, back when they complained in the first place - that was completely awesome. But to gripe about having wasted time evaluating other solutions? This is something everybody should do. No matter how happy you are using any product, be it software, hardware, utilities, daily transportation, you consider evaluating costs/benefits of a "Plan B".
I can't decipher which English-speaking reader of the New Revised Standard Edition post 1989 you are referring to, how elusive!
Interesting - I never thought of it before, but does it even make any sense to apologize for something that you did intentionally? It is what we force children to do, but mostly because it is a part of a sound upbringing.

If you spill coffee on someone, an apology makes perfect sense. You caused someone harm and you acknowledge that, but it wasn't intentional.
However, if you steal from someone, saying that you are sorry is not as simple; why did you do it in the first place, then?
> I cannot understand the point of hiding deadened questions while still keeping the comments?

It's all about removing the visibility. If the story is hidden, so are the comments, and so there's no reason to [dead] all of the comments too. The only way to see those comments is if you have showdead on anyway...
Before I write long pieces these days, I will usually email or instant message with a buddy of mine and work out the ideas in realtime or near realtime. In some ways, my longer stuff is a collection of these short blurbs.
Luddite^2
You're probably getting negged because you appear to be disparaging the accomplishment. But yeah, they did copy over an existing dna structure, they didn't create one from scratch.

However, the scientists did (according to the arstechnica article, posted above) have to remove a section of the DNA (something to do with the bacterium cutting DNA originating in yeast into small pieces... sigh, wish I understood this sort of thing). So they did actually make modifications to the genome, I think...
I agree that the path to insight goes through a lot of work, including memorization and repetition, but I know people who have taken that path and ended up with little to no insight. For example, my sister had "no head for math" but got As in high school calculus through sheer hard work and repetition. She worked and reworked homework problems so much that she could solve almost any test problem by remembering the homework problem most similar to it and using the homework solution to guide her. To this day she insists that she never understood the first thing about it even though she was one of the better students in an honors calculus class. She went on to do the same thing in college calculus (and got As once again) but she felt lost the whole time and said that if any test she took had come back marked "F" instead of "A," she would not have been surprised in the least.
Your dog is genetically engineered. Your tomato. Your children. And I don't mean in the lab, but the usual way, by using your intelligence to choose suitable stock and then breeding until you get what you want. The shortcut in the lab is just faster and cheaper, not different in any basic or ethical way.
List of Facebook alternatives
> but this is also the fatal conceit

I think considering the possibility that removing gradual iteration as a constraint, or considering the big picture, could lead to improvements of some natural designs, true or not, is unlikely to be fatal!

I don't see how anyone would just dismiss this point a priori. Both of those things seem, intuitively, to be fundamental constraints in evolution. Human biology plus technology leads to us out-competing every other similarly sized animal in any land niche we choose. The question is whether bacteria biology plus human ingenuity could have any similar advantages over biology alone. If you trust your snap judgment without extremely careful consideration, I just hope you're not in charge of the relevant policy decisions!
Hotspot Shield redirects traffic through spyware
Keep in mind that VoltDB targets the OLTP market, where datasets tend to be not that large. If you build a small cluster of 50 nodes with 256GB RAM each, you have about 4.3TB of storage (with a replication factor of 3).
Yeah, Apple never demos products several months before availability. They're so awesome!
More than that: an OS is millions of lines of code. The hardware is a hundred thousand. But cells! They have orders of magnitude more wiring than all the bits of DNA put into them. I liken it to a vast machine that can create either 1) a man or 2) a mouse. The dna programs the switch: man or mouse. Pretty trivial in comparison.
Building interactive Wireframes for Web UI
You can read a bunch of posts here about a techy, clueful, Mac savvy guy and the many woes of trying to use a Mac Mini as a mediacentre:

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/tag/mediacentre/

He seems to finally settle with beaming media to his PS3 via DNLA and buying an AppleTV to achieve his aims.

Key quote on the Mac Mini:

When it works, it’s great. The trouble is that 15% of the time something happens – EyeTV crashes, iTunes has been updated and won’t let you play anything until you’ve accepted terms and conditions, or another app is telling you that an update is available.

For these times, I don’t have an easy solution, other than to screen share and sort it out with the MacBook. Sometimes (like in the instance of EyeTV crashing) you just have to restart.

There's few good answers in this space at the moment. I've got an Acer Revo running Ubuntu and XBMC that's doing great for me but it required me to climb a major learning hump to get it all into shape. I didn't mind that, in fact I enjoyed it, but there's few good, easy options for non-geeks, or even geeks with less time to spend. There are lots of mediocre options but they're all flawed in a variety of ways.
First, there's a more detailed report here:

http://www.viewnews.com/2010/VIEW-May-18-Tue-2010/Henderson/...

Second, I don't understand giving in to these threats. The ASCAP cannot shut down a business.

Third, I think he has a legitimate claim that this not just felt like extortion but was extortion. You cannot ask someone to pay for services which they are not making use of.
You may want to look at some sites that present great web design like http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/tag/crisp or http://cssmania.com/topics/business/technology/ (i've copied links to really cool designs in your area of interest).
The moment flash was announced for the Android I realized that my next phone won't be an iPhone, but a nexus one.

Sad. History is repeating itself.
It was a whimsical observation; a welcome break to my day. To censor that post was cynical, anal retentive and a total waste of a mouse click on the part of the censor. Shame on them!
It is my understanding that very few of those devices are developer devices, where the user is allowed to install their own OS. Otherwise you have to root the phone, which is a violation of the increasingly international DMCA-style anti-circumvention law.

I haven't checked this info in a little while though, if most Android devices are sold with root I'm very happy to be corrected.
Like it--the content was already out there but this is a cleaner presentation.
Data Access Layer, the endless obsession
And I wondered why my brilliant answer got ignored: "use a weighted 4-sided die that comes up "B" half the time. So B is correct."
Caffeine: Effects on Memory and Learning
I completely feel where this guy is coming from. My first startup had a small seed round of funding, in which the investors took less than 10%. They claimed to be investing in us (the founders), because they trusted us to do what it took to succeed.

However, the "you're just founders" attitude kicked in shortly thereafter. When we wanted to launch our MVP, they wouldn't let us, for example. They wanted to run things "their way", despite the fact that we had the majority of shares (and they threatened us when we brought this up). It turns out that these people didn't actually trust us at all, and actually looked down on us for being young adults trying to build an idea. (If you haven't guessed already, the project failed).

If they had only given us the respect we should have earned from the start from our previous hard work, we just might have succeeded doing things our way.
For those of us who aren't as handy with a soldering iron, it's pretty easy to hook up an "Ambient Orb" to CruiseControl.net

http://www.agileskunkworks.org/Articles/TheOrbBuildIndicator...

http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/articles/169058.aspx
It's an excellent OS for (most C) development: it has fantastic documentation and is very good at crashing buggy programs (even better with some malloc options set). It also actually installs headers, unlike many Linux distributions.

(It's also an excellent firewall, server, desktop, ...)

[EDIT: ... for most stuff at least. Ubuntu is shinier, and Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD is better for multithreaded number crunching.]
I would even go so far as to say that Linux users might even LOVE the challenge of tinkering with their non-standard distro to make it work.
I like BeautifulSoup, but these days I'd suggest using lxml (http://codespeak.net/lxml/) instead. Unfortunately, BeautifulSoup is on the slow side, and development seems to have shifted into maintenance mode.
Philosophy Helps Start-Ups Move Faster