skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's Eric S. Raymond (widely known as ESR)[1], a major contributor to and early public advocate of the open-source community[2], originator and maintainer of much enduring 80s and 90s hacker humour[3], sometimes shit-disturber[4], and libertarian borderline crank[5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

[2] http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/

[3] http://catb.org/jargon/

[4] http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/

[5] ...not really, he's far more balanced than RMS. He's a guns-and-crypto nut, and defends his position well.

---

That he's so starstruck by contact with Knuth surprises me -- occupying, as they do for me, roughly equal mindshare in the category of "old-school computer celebrities", I figured they'd just know each-other. I guess I don't really have any model of intra-celebrity social diffusion, and that category needs to be more granular.
Actually, it's an example of when it's wise to sacrifice intuitiveness for an economic benefit. I don't see any reason to believe that "virtual" systems are somehow exempt and there is obviously a cost in making something "intuitive".

The answer to your second question is a first-year calculus problem: Voltage=acceleration to some limit, which you can plot as angles over time across time and speed. It might be fun to work a protractor and some graph paper to see how it would differ with more than three settings.
An "0-day" is generally any "non-public" vulnerability. Any "0-day attack" is an any attack that uses an 0-day. If only the security researcher and vendor know of the vulnerability details, it is still an 0-day. Once the vendor releases a patch, bindiff will (usually) point very rapidly to the root cause. Thus, the details are considered public, regardless of previous disclosure details.

These capture the imagination and frustrate system administrators because 0-day -- due to their unknown nature and nearly infinite possibility -- cannot be simply "fixed."

This has been a core frustration of mine in the network defense community for years: our procedures are too narrowly focused on protection -- keeping bad guys out. This is necessary but insufficient. We must assume bad guys will get in and focus on how we detect, respond and recover. Unfortunately, these last three steps get ignored too often -- resulting in bad guys never being detected once they're inside the gates.
they're a security company that makes a storage product, opposed to a storage company making a security product.

I laughed a bit thinking of extreme trade off in those two statements (so allow me to respectfully embellish [is that possible?]):

Security company makes a storage product: It's secure because they have no idea how to make a storage product and therefore your data is not actually stored anywhere that it can be retrieved in the event that you've provided the correct key.

Storage company makes a security product: The data is stored properly. It is then encrypted using whatever sample code was discovered in a search for the acronym "AES" with a bunch of redundancy in the event that something with the physical media fails. This redundancy is stored in the clear.

A vulnerability in storage results in inaccessible data. A vulnerability in security results in overly accessible data.
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I'm curious to hear your opinion of SharePoint, if you have one. I'm new to the C# world and I'm pleasantly surprised that it's not as bad as Java like I thought it would be, but I've mostly been focused on the language and core libraries. I think I like it for the reason you describe: it's libraries, rather than frameworks. But I've started getting into some ASP.NET code and the frameworkiness is starting to appear. In my case it's entity objects which don't seem to do more than structs, interfaces for classes which talk to the entity objects, implementation classes to implement the interfaces which just copy data from entity objects into their own properties, business objects which talk to the interfaces to get to the entity data, and UI objects/templates that talk to the business objects, probably through another layer of interface/implementation.

From what I can tell, SharePoint is another big layer of framework on top of ASP.NET, governing the way your application must be designed and function.
Thanks for submitting this. I have read Robert Baer's books but I was not familiar with his new projects.

The reason I have found Robert Baer to be of particular interest is due to his intimate familiarity with the middle east. It is rare that we come across someone of his caliber who is willing to speak out so vocally against the organization where he worked for several decades.

I strongly recommend his first book, See No Evil, which the movie Syriana was based on.
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Ask HN: How to drive non-paid traffic to an app landing page?
This question has probably been asked in other ways or answered in part in other threads, but I thought it would be useful to have a definite thread.

Scenario:

You have an SaaS app that isn't inherently sexy by nature. You have a good conversion rate on your landing page, but you have a top-of-funnel problem; not enough people are seeing your landing page.

You could pay for some CPC ads, but you're more interested in somehow getting 50,000 organic/free prospects into the top of the funnel, rather than a trickle of (albeit more qualified) prospects from expensive CPC campaigns.

How can you do this? Lets pool ideas.

- Get dugg or redditted. Thus, write some content that provokes or excites that demographic.

- Get blogged by big blogs. This could be done with some hustle, by cold-emailing bloggers and presenting an interesting story.

- Make a landing page with such an interesting design that people just want to pass it round for the hell of it, e.g. http://www.mailchimp.com/v5-2/

- Launch a new feature, tweet it and get others to retweet it.

- SEO that mofo

- Offer a downloadable freebie (PDF etc) and hope that others will link to you because of it.

- Promote your site on relevant forums (thin line between this and spamming)

- Put something helpful up on Slideshare.net and put your link in each slide (not sure if this will work, but a presentation I put up a while back seems to get a ton of traffic)

- Offer free accounts to blogs to give away in competitions.

There's tons more ideas than this - I'm just brain dumping right now. I'll come back to this and submit more later.

But for now... over to you!
Here's the source to one that doesn't require flashlight shenanegans:
http://wiki.github.com/tcurdt/iProxy/
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Yeah, it does only last two hours when I try to use it as an airport beacon.
Apple has bet a significant portion of their business over the last 12-18 months on a mobile strategy. A very significant portion of the WWDC this year was focused on Mobile. Any developer out there wondering where to direct their energy into a new endeavor (and news.ycombinator.com is a place where such developers congregate, ycombinator being a well known seed fund) would be very interested in seeing Apple's success as an indicator of both the popularity of Apple Products as a development platform, and the mobile environment, in particular.

This is big news for the Hacker community that is interested in creating new startups. Clearly, the Apple Ecosystem has both legs and inertia for another quarter.

I continue to look forward to Google's, and, oddly enough, Micrsoft's response. I'm guessing we're going to see a lot of Mobile and Tablet news in the next 18 months based on Apple's most recent quarter. Less so on the Cloud - until, of course, Apple has a blowout quarter based on the revenue from their new $1B NC Data Center. :-)
I'm calling your bluff.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=schammy

The single submission you've made has been a link to a picture of Jobs in a 1984 motif - clearly negative about Apple.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517087
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306919
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306321
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306314
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306310
NOTE: Those last two are the exact same comment posted twice on the same article! You literally copy and pasted an anti-Apple comment so that it appeared multiple times for the same article.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281192

So, looking over your past 30 comments here on HN, 20% of them are negative about Apple.

You wanted people to look at your history and your history shows a negative bias against Apple.
Yeah, personally I think his reaction at hearing Knuth reads his blog wouldn't really be any different from mine at hearing he reads my blog.

That said, Knuth reading my blog seems outside the realm of possibility, ESR less so.
How do you know you wouldn't be better in some other way if you had not pirated the software? Perhaps you'd be great in another field, and stealing kept you from finding that out.

I think that it is as possible to escape the negative consequences of bad behavior as it is to escape the laws of thermodynamics.
Being a police officer is a tough job. It should be a tough job, it comes with a huge amount of responsibility and an enormous capacity for abuse of power.

As it turns out though, there is an easy way to avoid the difficulties of police work, and that is choosing a different career.
I was aware of Facebook's profitability when I made the post. I still take issue with whether or not they've provided anything of value. When one gives search terms to Google one gets back search results. When one gives personal information to Facebook what does one get in return?

As for the retaliatory down-voting, way to stay classy people.
Have you read the writings of RMS and the FSF on why they created the GPL and what it is supposed to protect? What they say is nothing like what you say is the whole point.
Even if iOS devices completely eclipse the Mac lineup, it can stay around as a profitable business for quite a while:

All the big new features in Mac OS X recently have been driven by or also developed for iOS (Core Animation, OpenCL, GCD, Exchange support, etc.), so clearly it won't cost Apple much to maintain Mac OS X. The desktops and laptops have been a fairly slow-moving target lately, and particularly for the laptops they haven't been doing much in the way of revolutionary hardware design since introducing the unibody enclosures. Apple's relatively high profit margins also mean that sales can fall to a very low level before a product line becomes unprofitable. When you also consider how much easier it is to maintain Mac OS X as an iOS development platform than to make Windows a good development platform (due to the strong similarities between iOS and Mac OS X and Apple's control over both), and when you consider that Apple doesn't have any trouble attracting iOS developers in spite of the Mac-only development tools, it's pretty clear that the Mac can keep making Apple money, even if they don't put much work in to it.
Ah but XMLHttpRequest was introduced in 1999. I said, very carefully, over the last 10 years..
True, but if you are on OS X, most of the apps will use the System Preferences proxy settings, so most of your apps will Just Work.

Of course, you'll have to get tricky to use SSH via the SOCKS proxy, but it can be done.
I would use the heck out of your site if I could text ideas into it somehow (via twitter?).

Also if it recorded metadata about my location, that'd be pretty neat. (how many seconds/word I was writing, what the weather was like, astrological stuff, etc.)

The only ways I can think of making my journal.txt file better are text integration and useless metadata...because I really do want to know if I write more while Aquarius is prominent.
It's not quite that simple. All the proceeds to charity may be profit but the proceeds to the park are revenue. The printing costs of #3 are almost 17 times higher than #1, so that could put #1 in second place.
thanks, gmurphy!
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I agree that we should also be vigilant/diligent to preserve democracy, but that's not contradictory to secrecy being A norm in sensitive political or military circles. Although it is natural to doubt the sincerity of the checks and balances and oversight over these secrets, the fact is, they do exist. And they are pretty damn successful. Sure we have an occasional overstepping of secrecy but nothing that bad either.
I was able to get this app before it was removed. I followed the directions and it works perfectly on my Macbook Pro.

However, it only works with Safari. It does not work with Chrome, Firefox, or any mail protocols (POP / IMAP / SMTP).
One application, five screens
This may sound silly now, but a long time ago I bought myLite - an iphone flashlight app. And when the app starts it has a frustratingly long and dark splashscreen before you get the actual light.

Even as a flash light HandyLight outperforms myLite. When I start it - it's immediate white.
Good article on how Jobs seriously went all-in on the original iPhone:

http://counternotions.com/2008/07/16/bet-iphone/
I was talking about this conversation thread, not my posting history in general. Yeah I don't like Apple, but in this particular thread, I said nothing negative about them at all. That's what I meant. I was just asking a question, "why is this relevant to HN", and now have lost almost 100 points of karma.

What does that say about this community? Nothing good in my opinion. But obviously, anyone who doesn't drink the Apple kool-aid doesn't have a valid opinion around these parts.

I expect to lose another 20 points of karma from this post. Have at it, sheeple.

Edit: Ya know what, after all this, I just don't see the purpose of participating in this site anymore. I was asking a perfectly valid question and received almost nothing but hate in response. Obviously I'm not welcome around here. I will send an email to HN to have my account deleted.

So long.
Riak is also much easier to administer unlike cassandra. No need for rolling reboots for any changes.
I can't read that, I just get a gray box (and trying on Windows gives me a little red 'x' where the corner of the box was).

But, I thought there was a list of things that are normally works for hire (without that being explicitly specified), and a list of things that are allowed to be specified as works for hire, and that software isn't on either list?
I vote and I follow politics closely. I haven't totally given into the idea it's hopeless but I'm deeply skeptical about the ability for democracy to solve these problems. We have a progressive President who enjoys a majority in congress and he's still not able to enact a really progressive agenda. I'm starting to feel like the system is completely rigged. The people voted for change and all they're getting is Republican filibusters preventing most of it from happening. It's a subversion of democracy. Even if you win elections certain factions in this country are going to prevent progress.
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But the reverse is true. If you bought music from iTunes you can't play it elsewhere.

Since iTunes are a convenient way to purchase music, some of us ended up with large quantities of music tied to Apple's devices.
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The forum is extremely active and the channel #bitcoin-dev on freenode is really active. It already been slashdotted.
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Your contacts are pretty much completely unprotected as well. As an iPhone developer myself, I don't think it's unreasonable to have the device ask for permission to use this data (in a similar manner as location data access is approved).
Don't know with what I mixed that up (POE, probably. I know, libev is only an option there). Not that libev is a rather huge software, it's basically a wrapper around whatever the host OS provides (select, epoll, kqueue). From looking at it, eventmachines's C extension does the same. So my main point stands: A big part of the performance characteristics of node come from a lower-level C functionality. I guess that having an infrastructure that's mostly asynchronous comes second. Pure V8 speed won't matter that much for most tasks. If someone has counter-examples, I'd be pleased to hear them. As often with concurrency, better memory efficiency would probably win out.
Inversion of Control is a core aspect of any framework (Ralph Johnson discusses it quite nicely on "Components, Frameworks, Patterns" http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/users/johnson/cs329/2003/frame...).

Main points: two frameworks can be very hard to use together, unless designed to be (both keep trying to keep the control), frameworks are a lot harder to use than library, as they impose their whole world view, and frameworks encourage tight coupling (there are about 3 patterns from Ralph's book with Erich Gama, Richard Helm and John Vlissides that have this kind of problem to solve).
And, no, it's not possible to modify it to run in the background like Pandora because background networking/radio kills battery life.
Your 98 Boxster is 12 years old. They cost about $60k brand new. Holding 15% of it's value over that time isn't too bad, considering you're down to about 55-60% original value in the first year alone. You're probably at 30-35% after 3 years.

Not that I'm complaining - I picked up a 97 back in 2004 for about $13k (when I worked at a car dealership), drive it for 2 years, and sold it for $14k. What's nice about the Porsche was that a 97 looked just like a 2006 since they rarely change their body styles. I did have to replace 2 tires though which was like $500. Not cheap to own, but plenty of fun to drive.
His app just hit the front pages of multiple high-traffic websites. It could well have been an excellent idea.
Indeed -- any iOS developer ($100/year) can install this on their own phone, and give it to friends (by using one of the limited number of test-device registrations), without jailbreaking.
I wouldn't have down voted you, but anyway.

FBs value is in connecting people. Humans are social by nature and FB extends that social nature out many orders of magnitude. Like you, I do wonder if the value is being over hyped. Who needs or even wants 100s of 'friends?' Real friends take time and effort and I wonder if we'll see backlash where people get back to less friends, but closer relationships.
"Anyone Can Carry His Burden, However Hard, Until Nightfall."
Newspapers are failing because on average they always focused on low quality content and design quality (cheap to produce no alternatives at the time). Magazines have higher quality design and content which is why they've always been able to charge more. Its the same with books - an electronic book just isn't the same and so won't be valued the same until it's electronic distribution only. If I gave you Knuth's Art Of Programming as a collection of printed pages you wouldn't pay me the same premium the quality bound tomes demand.
Other than the spot where someone has written in something about a "web designer" this looks like the most general contract I've ever seen. This could be from anything. I would find it hard to believe that some judge is going to give a guy billions of dollars over this.
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For the savvy traders here on HN: would you buy AAPL right now? Did/does this report change your mind?
This whole thing is just... bizarre.

With Facebook now taking the "we don't know if he signed it, but if he did it's invalid anyway!" argument it looks like Zuckerberg may indeed have put pen to this paper.

My guess would be either he assumed it was contracting boilerplate and didn't read it properly (based on the memories of my behavior in my early 20's, fairly likely), or just skipped over the single paragraph with criminally bad English that referred to the purchase and design of "The Face Book".

This will be interesting.
Not directly, but -- if Pandora can make a fresh HTTP request out for each song-reload, could a not-quite-SOCKS proxy app make two outbound requests and relay traffic between them? Then, with some additional support on your laptop -- maybe just netcat in a loop -- things might work well enough for browsing.

Or could some novel proxy otherwise keep alive a tunnel to another machine in the background? The latest iSSH app says it can keep a session alive for 10 minutes in the background -- though it's not clear if it can relay significant data while backgrounded.
Did someone remove the post I put in there?

Just because it wasn't a "software" need doesn't disqualify it...

whatever.
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I thought this was just a boilerplate work for hire contract, but on pg 11 it surely says:

Second is the conditioned development of the software, program and for the purchase and design of a suitable website for the project Seller has already initiated that is designed to offer the students of Harvard University access to a website similar to a live functioning yearbook with the working title of "The Face Book".

It is agreed that the purchaser will own a half interest (50%) in the software programming language and business interest derived from the expansion of the service to a larger audience.

And goes on to say he gets 1% more of the business every day its not completed after Jan 1 '04.

Thats a pretty valuable piece of paper this guy has held onto for the last six years, their lawyers will make a lot of money on this if its not a forgery.
He started with an old phone. By your logic, if he started with a million dollar item, he'd be worth over a quarter billion dollars now, and he'd have been making a lot more than minimum wage.

So, rather than say his achievement is unimpressive, say "imagine what he'll do once he comes into some real capital".

Possibilities -- it's what HN is about.
So, there was an AP story about this that I think did a better job detailing the challenges for LightSquared (http://hosted2.ap.org/txdam/7d2a091809034418bf02b94fe7a8c4b9...).

Specifically, there are a couple of things I'd point out:

1. They have to put at least 1 satellite into service. That's a huge cost for something that you have no intention of making an important part of your service.

2. They're banking on the FCC changing rules surrounding their "satellite" spectrum. Current rules say that it can be used to create a terrestrial network to back up the satellite service, but every device they sell has to be able to communicate with the satellite. That would make it prohibatively expensive to provision customers with devices against companies who don't have that restruction.

The $7B contract to build and maintain the network also seems a bit light. Carriers like Verizon and AT&T spend around $7B annually to improve and maintain their networks and they aren't starting from scratch. $7B over 8 years comes out to under $900M per year.

Granted, 4G should be cheaper to deploy since the equipment takes up less space and there's no need for a lot of expensive and large things to support legacy phone stuff. Still, Clearwire (who is rolling out 4G WiMAX) had capital expenditure of $690M in the first quarter of this year alone. Although that probably includes more than just network expenditure, Clearwire has yet to cover most people.

If they're able to pull it off, it'll be great! If a company can reduce the cost of rolling out a network, it usually means lower prices for consumers (assuming adequate competition). So, hopefully we'll see a great nationwide LTE network from LightSquared in a few years!
> Even if he wrecks the thing, the company is only out ~9,000 or so.

Car insurance isn't expensive because cars are expensive, but because people are expensive. You can hurt a lot of people in a fast car, even if it's not expensive.