skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a pretty cool use for Kickstarter. The author gets paid, people who pitched in get something extra, and everyone else gets to benefit from the author's work. I like it.
Stop trying to track my every move online. How many people understand tracking cookies? How many companies make it clear that every click is being recorded and data-mined? How is this ethical?

This is ethical in same way that some one can record information about you walking down a private street.
There is nothing un ethical about data mining
Absolutely fascinating lecture. Very much worth watching.
He seems to be unfamiliar with the legal process, and really needs to get a lawyer. From the partial scans of the US attorney's letter, it sounds like a federal grand jury would like to subpoena him as a witness to testify about the gathering of AT&T subscriber email addresses and "electronic chip IDs" (I think the letter is technically incorrect). The letter informed him that if he failed to appear he might also have criminal charges filed against him.

This is a normal part of the process of a federal criminal investigation. What happens first is that a grand jury is formed. The jury investigates evidence, calls witnesses, and tries to determine if a crime has been committed, and if so, who committed the crime. Then, the grand jury might issue a federal indictment, or it might just determine that no crime was committed and drop the case completely.

If he or someone else is federally indicted, then he would be formally arrested and have to go to federal court to stand trial as a criminal defendent. It sounds like it has not gotten close to this point yet.

Edit: I also wanted to mention that you have no right to an attorney as a witness of a grand jury. You may choose to have an attorney represent you and be present, however, the financial burden is in no way the federal governments to provide one for you. IF you are charged, then you may receive a public defender if you have insufficient financial means to pay for your own defense.

Federal cases take months and years to prosecute. By refusing to participate with the grand jury, he might be opening himself up to the fact that another witness could implicate him and he might be indicted. Of course, there is also the saying "if nobody talks, everybody walks."

He really needs to get good legal counsel and decide if he wants to testify in front of the grand jury, and decide what he wants to say.

Also, he's not helping his cause any by speaking out on the web. Mentioning his past anti-semite ramblings is also probably not the best way to gather sympathy.

I also think he does a disservice to the security community as a whole to advocate black hat ideology at hacker conferences, and then talk about "responsible disclosure" and how he was just trying to protect the poor customers of AT&T. This seems to be rewriting history.
Return on Investment, a novel chapter by nmap's creator
I so agree with this.

The whole "does it make my life happier" is such a shallow consumer thing.

When I was younger I led an interesting life in many ways but I have never had the intensity of experience I have with and about my children. Another really surprising thing was finding out how much I connect back with society - I want to be part of society and change it and make it better - I get what it is for.

Children are not a lifestyle accessory and as the poster above says they push you into all sorts of aspects of your self in all sorts of interesting ways.

The mixture of a startup and three small children has certainly been entertaining and there have been times when I am so exhausted I have nothing else to give but then to go and do something simple - like bathing the children or doing something in the garden with them and it makes it all worth while.

As I frequently find myself telling my children: Things in life that aren't challenging aren't worth while (possibly hyperbole but you get my point)
Pretty sure I pay for my cable television, and for magazines, which are nothing but ads. I'm aware of the business models behind these, but unfortunately I'm not given a choice to pay more for completely ad free media.
MY own private India-and US. « Ramanan50's Blog
1500€ life stuff, 50€ business stuff (Germany).
Office/internet is at home, so i count that to life stuff. Heroku is used in a pre-release phase, the 50 bucks accumulate from various online services.
4-5 job applications per week you could manage while actually in full time work tho'...
please explain what is fyi?
Host it on http://heroku.com for free, or just get a vps man. You CAN afford $20 bucks a month for something like slicehost or whatever.
Don't instruct people to cut their burgers with a fork and knife! That's like the Seinfeld episode where George cuts his candy bar with a fork a knife. It's "fake" classy. No one actually eats like that.

As a side though, anyone want to start an online "finishing" school?
Recommendations on startup financing website/software
Anyone have any recommendations for sites or software that our small startup could use to control internal finances/accounting that would compare to quickbooks?
I'm amazed by the amount of money people are raising on Kickstarter. Seems pretty awesome.
Yep. I agree.

I love being a dad. I love that my daughter looks up to me and wants to spend time with me. It's tough sometimes but kids are filled with so much love they more than make up for it. They're also inspiring to be around. Their attitude towards life is fun and refreshing.

I invest heavily in my daughter and will invest heavily in our next child as well. By that I mean spending a lot of time with them. I work at home most nights but only after my daughter is in bed and my wife and I have some time to hang out.

What I have seen is that some people just aren't interested in being parents and are not entirely sure how they got there. Life is hard sometimes even when you have it easy like I do but even on a hard day being a parent is still great.
I graduated a few years ago, and a common worldview in my graduating class was, "I've put X amount of work in my whole life, so I should hear back from jobs when I apply." It's a flawed line of thought, but it's not common to question things you've been told your whole life. The truth is much more subtle - hard work is important, but working hard towards a goal is what gets you jobs.

It wasn't very common to find someone who tried to make industry contacts, or who helped out inside of their department at special events, or who spent large amounts of spare time trying to improve themselves. They just signed up for a whole bunch of classes and worked their ass off in the classroom. Which is good! But it doesn't translate well into job offers

The kid in the article lacks the fundamentals for getting a job he wants, but at least he seemed willing to compromise on his lofty ideals and MIGHT accept a lesser job in the future. He should listen to his grandfather! "“Scott has got to find somebody who knows someone,” the grandfather said, “someone who can get him to the head of the line.”"
If you don't know what a Horton test is, like I didn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine
How about "to prove he wasn't just making the whole thing up"?
His point is that the original warrant had no probable cause. So any evidence collected in its execution should be inadmissible.
You will need an attorney or accountant to help you open the bank account if you are not around to to do it. It may be more economical for you to to simply visit the US and take care of that while you are here, since you'll be able to identify yourself and sign in person, which will be simpler than temporarily issuing power of attorney to a lawyer who you have never met to do so on your behalf.
4 is an option until you know why it's not as simple as it looks, then it's not. It becomes an option again when you know you're capable of it.

Unskilled and unaware of it. Deadly unk-unks.
I disagree that source code release should not be required, but that's a side issue.

The main point I'm making here is this: the title of this article (and the report) is just not true. The CRU folks withhold source code and data, and the report even admits this.

Not only did they not respond simply because of the "number" or "tone" of requests, but they actively avoided releasing data. From one of their emails: "And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them [...] If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."
Excellent !!
Tag me.
All right ?
Thanks,
Also, though a lot of people won't admit to it, he's putting himself in danger by taking a mediocre job. He can very easily be typecast into that sort of role for a long time.
The examples seem misleading. You not only change the verb, you're adding a prepositional phrase to clarify things.

The originals would be almost as insightful if you added the prepositional phrase and left the verb alone. Conversely, changing the verb without adding the prepositions doesn't actually clarify much.
It's a lot of work, but not because of lifestyle. In reading the article you see that parents, now, spend more time with their kids than previous generations. But kids are coddled more than ever. Between shuttling them to school, soccer practice, and piano lessons it seems like the parents have decided to give themselves these tasks and are surprised! when they don't have anytime for do what they want.

If anything I learned from the article it's these parents are wimps. The kid almost takes the father's eye out and the strongest punishment is a timeout?! The mother has to ask her son to do his homework?! I guess my family is old school, but throwing anything at my mom would have my ass on ice. And if she has to ask twice, that computer would be gone.
"The conversation I’m going to have with my parents now that I’ve turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job,"

That's what jumped out at me as the giant, blinking, neon sign. You and I can't turn down an offer and still complain.

But a kid with that mindset absolutely will. He has absolutely no perspective. His parents and grandparents have raised him within Plato's Cave.
I have a pet project that is a personal finance app you can check it out. it's very simple and i add features as i can.

It does have an iphone optimized interface but it's in need of work.

you can play around here: http://www.phosney.com and the sources are here: http://github.com/ishmael/phosney_web/
Kicking someone in the face will damage them, might stun them and keep them off you, but probably won't knock them out. Knockouts come from moving the brain within the skull, and a blow to the face isn't the best way to do it (too soft).
Thanks for the extensive post. It sounds like you were really passionate about this website, but got a little carried away creating pet features you yourself would want. Great cautionary tale. At least you have a great portfolio piece, though!
Crack the Code in Cyber Command's Logo
Single page version: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/economy/07generat...
Is this more of a reflection of how much more selfish we generally are compared with previous generations, or evidence that raising children really is hard?
I wouldn't laugh. If you actually enjoy being employed, more power to you! It's ludicrous that you even feel the need to ask, to find out if the people in your community would mock you for not dreaming big enough, when you have decided what would make you happiest.

Note that I'm not criticizing you, but the attitude of many around here that you led you to feel like you either have to boil the ocean or go home.

I love being an independent businesswoman, but even my product is still only part-time. We've got about 580 paying users at http://letsfreckle.com and "we" is just me, my husband, and our new part-term intern-y guy. While we're picking up the dev/promo pace, I bet we don't put in more than 60 man-hours/wk total for all 3 of us.

Now, I do want to grow it (and our future SaaS projects) to a lot of revenue, but not a lot of people. My ideal company will employ 5-8 people. Just enough for a nice big family dinner.

I will say that if you put enough effort into the "mode" and interaction design of a product, that the customer support burden can be very small. We spend less than 30 minutes a day on emails. (Not counting work the emails might bring up, e.g. bug fixes, but that's not customer support!)

EDIT: I hate that phrase, "lifestyle business." We need a powerful term that doesn't conjure up the idea of giving us pats on the head because of our adorable little dreams. Any suggestions?
Wal-Mart Spends $1M Fighting $7,000 Fine in Trampling Case
If the data you need to reproduce their results is publicly available, then it isn't withheld, is it?

The purpose of the three separate inquiries was to separate fact from out-of-context quotes like the ones you're still trying to leverage.

I think the results are clear. The researchers should have been more open, but they didn't do anything unethical and anyone qualified could have reproduced their results using widely publicly available data.
A lot of people use Kickstarter as a shop rather than a place for receiving donations - see many of the (comic) book projects for reference. While $2000 doesn't seem like a guaranteed success, the donation rewards seem to reflect that the creator expected it to do so. The $2000 is probably a minimum rather than a goal, which the figure usually reflects on Kickstarter; making a profit on a project is not something you usually associate with Kickstarter.

Kickstarter only takes 5% of the donations, so it's a perfect digital platform - and physical if you can handle production and logistics yourself.

I submitted it as an equal service to HN users and Joseph Wain. As aforementioned, Kickstarter projects can be a lot of things.
"I'm assuming, based on long observation, that Microsoft with high likelihood fucked up the pragmatics completely, and that programming in C#, as opposed to reading about it, is deeply depressing."

I've not found that to be true - C# is a lot of fun to work with.
This sort of thinking drove government policy at the start of the Great Depression. President Hoover tried to maintain high wage rates seeing them as the cause of prosperity and not the effect of greater productivity. Henry Ford was probably the most influential person in this camp but most of American business at the time was on board with it as well.

Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" has probably the best analysis of Hoover's proto "New Deal" policies. It's very enlightening if you were taught as I was that Hoover did nothing while the depression ravaged the nation.
I speak only for myself here of course, but what I find so "icky" about C# is not the language, but the development environment. I haven't used the latest VS so it might be better, but even 2007 still felt years behind the popular java IDE's, and there didn't seem to be any real competition to it either. (Someone please correct my missteps here; I'd love to know more about it than I obviously do now.)
So, a review would NOT have found the error? It was disguised in some way? It was not obvious?

Simply being contained in a large document is not an excuse - a review includes multiple reviewers, each checking the accuracy of parts of the document. Given enough time, the error would be found, and in fact WAS found given a little more time - that's the point of the article after all.
not directly related to the newsletter but what do you use for to collect te emails and send the newsletter?
This is an entirely different country from what it was in the 19th century. Although early industrial America was brutal in a lot of ways that our society isn't, it was possible to "work your way up" then. Now it's not. The work environment in 1900 had a one-tier society-- with extreme inequality and brutality within that tier, but it was still only one tier. Line workers could become foremen who could become managers who could become executives. Now we have multiple tiers and it's nearly impossible to jump from one to another. The people who are running large companies today never worked "regular jobs"-- except during high school and college, maybe, where it doesn't count because career and lifestyle are not on the line-- they went into business school and, although they became "only" middle managers after that, they started on the inside track.
But things like paternity leave, maternity leave, requiring employers to consider flexible working -- these kind of things Europe is doing are far more family friendly than the republican party.

The family values line of "mothers should stay at home" espoused by Pat Robertson et al. probably is better than both parents working, however much childcare you can afford.

No reason it has to be the mother though. And the actual family values line is in conflict with Republican views on work. This conflict is partly historic (Protestant work ethic), but partly an interesting indictment of the hypocrisy of the religious rights' support for the Republican party. Their focus on only a few moral issues does a great disservice to the actual morality of the nation. They say mothers should stay home, but support a party who's economic policies make that impossible.
The folks in the picture don't look terribly happy to be following him around. The guy in the black jacket looks damn near depressed.

That said, I'm sure it's just the picture. I actually like walking meetings most of the time. And I find Justin's attitude inspiring.
New Private Social Network For Designers And Developers
> New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.

My only disagreement would be with this. The people being targeted by these new ad ventures are usually either newly targeted because the venture is newly allowing them to be targeted, or newly targeted because the ad venture allows the targeting of more people for less money.

If new people are being targeted, and more people are voting that wouldn't have before then people are possibly in office that wouldn't have been before these new ad ventures.

I get the feeling that if Obama wouldn't have aggressively gone after my generation (born in the 80's) using means that we understand well (internet) then he wouldn't be in office. But this is purely my gut feeling. I also live in Portland, OR. Which is about as Obama crazy as it gets.

On the flip side though, I'm a "church goin'/Jesus lovin'" dude, and I still don't know anyone my age that didn't vote for Obama. Maybe one.
Spot on.

If the NY Times want to write a story about an elusive American Dream they should write about us, the Dream Act students, who've been stuck in limbo with no job and no rights in sight because of our broken immigration system.

It feels absolutely devastating to graduate from college, hang that degree on the wall, and realize that you can't even open a bank account.
It's a lot of money, but Glyphish is not exactly unknown - particularly now when app phone development is so popular - and he's been hyping the Kickstarter project for a while.

I think he would have raised a lot more if he did a better job at getting the word out, but guess he's doing well with what he's done already.
Student makes his own Air Conditioner to beat the summer heat.
There is no doubt some ego-based confusion in his mind. It's evident from the first sentences: "...I’m sure you’re all familiar with from my previous excellent blog posts"
Which? tests show iPhone 4 proximity problems
Is that really the case? If the police is executing an illegal warrant, but comes across someone, say, murdering someone else, is that not considered evidence?

(This might very well be the case, considering the "Fruit of the Poisonous tree" doctrine).
Parenting is about showing the kid his boundaries.

And by showing the boundaries I don't mean canonically forbidding all nice things and always being "the bad guy". Limits and boundaries have a bad rap in some literature.

The concept of boundaries is universal: boundaries don't enforce anyone to choose one option over another: they just enforce one to choose. Showing the kid his boundaries is not an easy undertaking but on the other hand it is something we all do to each other everyday. At work, at home, with friends, with kids.

By letting one make choices—which is enforced by setting and keeping the boundaries—allows him to gradually learn about himself, and eventually grow to change himself.

Boundaries change as a person grows: first, with a toddler it might be about not gaining anything by hitting or throwing things, not merely being forbidden or removed from throwing things around. Later it might be about deferred gratification: if the child chooses to have everything right away now and the boundaries stick, thus enforcing proper consequences of the kids choice, he will gradually learn that in the long run he gets less by having everything immediately. In adulthood, showing boundaries might be about saying no to someone known to ask around for favours, rarely returning them. The refusal will force him to consider his options: he must either do this or that but no longer both, as he can't get other people to do work for him anymore.

A parent can't change the kid's mind nor himself make the kid a good adult. The kid is a person of his own anyway. A parent can only show boundaries and hope that he manages to be a mirror to the kid's behavior well enough so that the kid will learn something.
Interesting. I generally take 3mg, and I think I pretty much need it at this point. I may try and lower my dosage over time. That said, are there any negative effects from relying on melatonin? Sure, maybe I can't sleep well without it, but having access to it isn't much of a problem.
With the possible exception of the F#-using denizen of HN, the examples you mention are obligated, by the nature of their model, to exist on Windows. I would think that a better way to characterize whether they are on or off the radar of the relevant demographic would be to examine those cases where there is no such obligation.
I've used VS2005 and VS2008 extensively, and always enjoyed working with them, especially VS2008. I haven't used VS2010 much (read: at all) but am looking forward to using it.
Is it a bigger danger to work in a mediocre job than to have a two year span of unemployment on his resume?
He's working odd jobs and as a volunteer firefighter, so he is doing useful work. He's also sending out five resumes per week, which is a lot if he's actually researching the jobs and positions. (I know some people send out 200 per day, but let's not encourage resume spam.) It's not like he's playing video games 14 hours per day. So yes, he is sympathetic.

He's being selective about the work he'll take, but maybe he should be. Put yourself in the employer's perspective. Do you want to hire someone who'll leave in 12 months when something more suitable to his desired career path comes along, or would you rather that he "self-select" out?
We should get a book thread going. Shogun is definitely one of my favorites.
That's odd, I've never used an IDE of any kind* but all I hear from friends that have used C#/.NET is how great Visual Studio is.

* (well, Emacs counts, but not to people who normally use the word IDE in my experience)
Depends what magazine you read. Speaking of the ones I buy occasionally I actually like their advertisement and in some way to me it is as valuable as the content. How else would I find out of what to do on a Saturday night or which firm to send an application to for a job, or which college is better, or about the new cool car that has come on, or the very cool new iphone etc.

They do not annoy me. Adverts become annoying when they are repeated on and on and besides adverts are easy to ignore in most cases.