skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read that and I think Sony BMG's rootkit or SecuROM. Or maybe just examining the security implications of a game install without letting the manufacturer know about it by bypassing a phone-home feature.

Actually, ArsTechnica has a good article up about this too: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-...

They specifically mention this clause:

It turns out that the real target here is the DRM itself, specifically two controversial systems called SecuROM and SafeDisc. Professor Alex Halderman, a longtime security researcher in this area, begged the Library to let him investigate these kinds of invasive DRM without legal worries.
I similarly use we to imply that I'm not the sole decision maker when announcing new features on my various projects. In that case I feel we is more appropriate than I because I'd like to come across as a company and not a hobbyist. This nonspecific pronoun usage works both ways.
Thanks. I fixed the bug - I was failing to json_encode the string.

The user's thoughts were amusing, though I did design for an 800x600 display, which I thought to be pretty standard today.
I can't find any way to skip it with my player. And yes, I could mute the previews. Just like they could wear earplugs for my polka concert.
Google, Content Farms & Why This May Be Blekko’s Moment
A mighty fortress is our PKI
Do you think this could make a big difference? I've seen Hong Kong rank highly in economic freedoms whereas mainland China does not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom_histo...
What's the memory and cpu usage?
That's horrible. Instead of drawing graphs on the client side, you're pushing insanely large number of images to the browser. It makes sense for google maps, not for graphs.

Plus you can't do any animation, changes to the graphs on the fly.
In China, Baidu Fights Google for Control of Android’s Search
Saying its "legally protected" is slightly misleading. Rather, it is not prohibited by copyright law and the DMCA. However, the manufacturers are free to use technological means to stop you from jailbreaking, to refuse to provide service for jailbroken devices, and to use other legal means besides copyright/DMCA such as contracts to stop you.

Law is often tri-state. For instance, at one time it was not legal to sell property to black people in certain neighborhoods in the US, because of legally binding covenants. This is the first state: prohibited.

The law was changed so that such covenants were not enforceable. However, that didn't mean black people could actually buy property in those neighborhoods. The property owners were still free to refuse to sell to black people. This is the second state: not prohibited.

The law was again changed, so that discrimination in real estate on the basis of race was illegal, and a seller could get in trouble if the seller used race to decide who to sell to. This is the third state: protected.
Nice design, good looking site. In a mostly legal state (colorado) this wouldn't raise any eyebrows - denver or boulder.

FYI: The search doesn't work - I tried a couple of strains listed on the homepage - such as G-13 - and it didn't return anything. I also tried some partial word searches and got nothing back.
I think for most of us the better question is: How soon do you start forgetting all the required details about integrals...
You should absolutely start learning it. node.js already has a large amount of traction and is being used in production in numerous places:

http://wiki.github.com/ry/node/
UK slots? The British aren't even eligible to apply for the green card lottery program (except, I believe, people from Northern Ireland.)
The issues are basically correct on both sides, however there exists the problem fact that while prison populations are - and have been on the increase - actual crime rates have been declining over the past decade plus. This is indicative that while crime has been diminishing, arrests and convictions for existing laws have been increasing disproportionately.
The reason for the "peak" in the stats in the 90's is partially due to the discovery by private prison investors and private sector corporations of the federal PIECP program. This program allows partnerships between private sector companies and prison industries to use prison labor to manufacture their products or provide their services, which allows lower overhead and increased profits. In the mid 90's corporate America discovered the program and began to manipulate it. At the same time, prison numbers began to increase while the crime rate declined. This was a direct result of the realization of the amount of labor needed to fully exploit the program.To use the program to the maximum benefit, there had to be a continuous supply of manpower - whether the crime rate was holding steady or in decline.
How we buy plane tickets and why it's ruining air travel
I like it. Here's some feedback:

The sliders don't render correctly on chrome (they overlap the other elements).

Step 7 didn't work for me. I clicked it and it didn't do anything. I then couldn't figure out how to get 'back' or to restart the process. I then logged out and then logged back in and expected to see where I left off but didn't.

Minor - it'd be nice to be able to log in with either an email address or username. I used a gmail tracking email to "blah+edants@gmail.com" to see if I get spam and don't want to have to enter that every time.

Neat concept! I would have liked to be able to finish it though.
Cassandra has a lot more installations pushing hard on it in 0.6 than it did in 0.5, many of whom have worked with me and other committers to resolve their issues, so it's not just paint-by-numbers handwaving on my part.

Here are some of the changelog entries from 0.6.2 that are relevant to high-volume sites:

- improve default JVM GC options (CASSANDRA-1014)

- better defaults for flush sorter + writer executor queue sizes (CASSANDRA-1100)

- added Collections.shuffle(splits) before returning the splits in ColumnFamilyInputFormat (CASSANDRA-1096)

- StreamingService.StreamDestinations wouldn't empty itself after streaming finished (CASSANDRA-1076)

- Add option to turn off Hinted Handoff (CASSANDRA-894)

- split CommitLogExecutorService into BatchCommitLogExecutorService and PeriodicCommitLogExecutorService (CASSANDRA-1014)

from 0.6.3:

- add ability to lower compaction priority (CASSANDRA-1181)

... and 0.6.4:

- extend option to lower compaction priority to hinted handoff as well (CASSANDRA-1260)

- pre-emptively drop requests that cannot be processed within RPCTimeout (CASSANDRA-685)

If that's so much greek to you, I'll be doing explanations of these over on the Riptano blog in the next few days, like the one I did for 0.6.1 here: http://riptano.com/blog/annotated-changelog-cassandra-061

(sorry for excessive spacing. how do you get HN to format bullets?)
Agree that emulating browser type rendering isn't necessarily good in the long term, but why not build in support for a variety of different type rendering engines? Adobe is halfway there with Smooth, Strong, Crisp, etc... they could simply add options for WebKit, Firefox, IE...

Also, a web-focused app may not be necessary, but I think a digital-focused app is (well, I guess that would be Fireworks). Photoshop and Illustrator really are terrible tools for designing digital applications, for the simple fact that working with pixel-level detail is a pain in the ass (e.g. try making a 92px by 147px rectangle with no sub-pixel edges in one of those applications). Fireworks actually comes pretty darn close to what Jason is asking for, but Adobe seems to neglect its core functionality in favor of expanding on useless export options and plugins.
Yes, that's true. I guess my definition would be if you are at a somewhat open workplace that isn't actively blocking sites, then you can be relatively comfortable having it up on your screen and not need to minimize it when anybody walks by.
Er, bug report: you can login without a username or password. By clicking 'Log In'
1. If I quit my job then yea. I'll essentially be injecting cash to cover my own expenses. Plans on spending it are so I have some time to focus on raising seed funding and talking to customers.
2. I believe we've informally proven market validity. That's quite different than having enough users use the site to show numbers that mean something.
can someone please explain the purpose of this application? the demo isn't working and I don't want to register when I don't know what the website is suppose to do.

Kind of frustrating reading 10 comments and still having no clue what it does.
Just wanted to add one more voice to the "how's your sleep?" chorus. Sleep is so important to being able to focus.

One thing to check if you think you're putting in enough sleep time but are still groggy and have focus issues, is that you may potentially have obstructive sleep apnea. Have you been told you snore? Do you have a thick neck (17'' or larger dress shirt size)?

From personal experience, getting a real you full night's sleep makes a huge difference in ability to focus and get work done.
Great idea - after fighting photoshop all weekend I'd love to have a tool like this.
Tips & Tricks: GoogleLookup in Google spreadsheets
Could one consider protection of a certain action as prohibition of its anti-action, and thereby we recognize only two states? So, instead of the buying of property itself being protected, it's the refusal to sell is prohibited.
This is getting a lot of play in the MSM. TV news is even talking about it -- local, not just network (just like Consumer Reports and the iPhone 4 antenna). If this leads to a lot of people jailbreaking, I wonder if this could lead to a growing alternate market for iPhone apps vs the App Store.
There's already something called Hummingbird that does that: http://mnutt.github.com/hummingbird/
Ahh, found the bug. A bunch of blank space in TextMate caused a foreign character to appear in the source. Thanks!
I know :(. We used the bing API to quickly set up search but they appear to be terribly slow at including pages in the index. After approximate one month, they are still only showing the homepage. Working on an alternative now, users definitely getting stuck.
Innocent until proven guilty is for courts of law. In real life I don't go back to that restaurant that probably gave me food poisoning even though I can't prove it.

Anyway, the U.S.'s attitude to Pakistan is illogically friendly, for more see: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/10/whats-pakistans-secret...
The Appeal Of Wikileaks is rooted in geek dissent culture
Does anyone have info on the other DMCA exceptions that were granted? My googlefu only reveals Apple stories.
Isn't crime a big problem in Brazil? (BTW I have investment in Brazil and it has been doing great.)
Although it is 100% my responsibility to explain the site to you, it really only takes 20 seconds to fill out the 3-field registration form. (How could I make the brevity of experience more clear?)

Anyway, the idea of the site is that you list a negative experience that you had, and then you list some of your thoughts about it, and then the site helps you find distortions in your thinking in order to shift you to a more balanced and positive feeling in your mind and body
Hopefully this provides ammunition though to combat companies that continue to use technological locks. A decision like this helps to muddy any corporate arguments used to claim that locking mechanisms are ethical.
4chan is hacking the attention economy
i went for the first time this summer, and i can give a little advice; depending on your level of spontaneity, you may or may not really care:

as a visitor to japan, getting a temp. cell phone seemed ridiculously hard. there are no prepaid SIMs/phones; you can only do a rental. and no matter what plan you get, outgoing calls will be ~90yen/minute.

so: after two days in tokyo, i wound up renting an iphone (3GS), and it was immensely helpful. having maps + gps was really fantastic. i installed and used skype pretty often - it breaks up a lot over 3G, but again, it's far better than paying 90yen/minute. i highly recommend this company: http://jcrcorp.com. i have no association with them, but they were a pleasure to work with. (also note: an android phone may work better, as iphones are on softbank which is a newer and less well established carrier).

i also found that free wi-fi seemed to be very, very rare. you can find some coffee shops with wi-fi, but you have to buy a ticket at a nearby FamilyMart for ~500yen/day.

do you know any of the language? if the answer is no, it's probably too late now; but i found that using the japanese keyboard on iphone (just kana) was very helpful to mapping stuff out.

it's worth spending a few minutes to understand the addressing system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system. there are no street names, and it's generally very different from the US.

finally, i assume you already know this, but tokyo is not cheap; be prepared to spend a lot of money, and enjoy yourself.

feel free to contact me off-list.
I have a bunch of hacks, but nothing that actually works right on iOS yet.
It's an interesting question, and I think one that would have to be decided before a court. Certainly trademarks for prelaunch products have been granted protection before if there's a clear intent for usage (for example the iPad). Given this guy had a specific plan and turned down a substantial amount of money for the domain, that's likely to play in his favour proving that he both had intent and that the brand had value.

However in this case he doesn't even need to prove his usage was trademark worthy, the Groundless Threats doctrine just requires you to be threatened unfairly, which given it seems pretty clear from the interview that the trademark was registered in bad faith (knowing a competitor was going to use it) it seems likely to be covered. If a court finds he was made to sell his domain under duress from a groundless trademark threat then they could invalidate the sale and award substantial compensation.

(ianal)
The Futures & Trends of Location-Based Services (LBS)
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/caon0441
New Policy announced, Canada is ready to welcome immigrants in 2010
However, it's also perfectly legal (and in my opinion legitimate) for Apple to refuse to provide any further customer service for someone who broke their agreement with Apple by doing this.
Exercises in books will often have an amount of time that the problem should take you to solve listed with the problem. Work every problem while timing yourself. See if you are below average or above average after six months and a couple of books that are interesting to you.
This last sentence, from the article, indicates that this ruling is actually a step backward:

"On EFF's request, the Librarian of Congress renewed a 2006 rule exempting cell phone unlocking so handsets can be used with other telecommunications carriers. Cell phone unlockers have been successfully sued under the DMCA, even though there is no copyright infringement involved in the unlocking. Digital locks on cell phones make it harder to resell, reuse, or recycle the handset, prompting EFF to ask for renewal of this rule on behalf of our clients, The Wireless Alliance, ReCellular and Flipswap. However, the 2009 rule has been modified so that it only applies to used mobile phones, not new ones."
It saddens me to see the linked article taken seriously and its political agenda repeated as if the existence of an article advocating Open Source in an Open Source conference gave credence to the idea of mandatory Open Source for life-critical software.

The article "Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices" is weak. It mixes safety and security, which are subtly different beasts. Specifically, it justifies the idea of mandatory Open Source for safety-critical software with security examples. Unfortunately, while there are independent security researchers, I have yet to meet my first independent safety researcher, who looks for flaws in life-critical equipment for fame or money or ego…

The article also completely ignores the fact that DO-178B certified code, as found embedded in civil aircrafts, has a perfect safety track record (although some incidents have, no loss of human life has yet been attributed to software malfunction in a civil aircraft).

I work on static analysis tools for critical software. In this domain, the unavailability of examples is a big pain in the neck. My colleagues and I would love to see more examples of critical embedded code available to try our tools on. But in spite of this, I have to say that I find this article highly unscientific and so tainted by politics that it becomes distasteful.

(oh, and our analysis framework is Open Source. By choice, not by constraints based on unsound reasoning)

NOTE: I merely claim that the article is unscientific, not that it makes a particular unscientific claim such "that opening up software will solve all of it problems". But since apparently I need to be more specific, here is a paragraph straight from the article:

Other public sector agencies, such as the U.S. Navy, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have been identified as recognizing the security benefits of publicly auditable source code.20

There is only one reference for the four sources. Let's take a look at that reference:

20 FAQs, Open Source for America, http://opensourceforamerica.org/faq (last visited July 16, 2010).

How does that page justify the above paragraph? You tell me if you find it. This is not how references are supposed to work in a scientific article. The last time I saw this kind of "he said she said" reference, it was in a text trying to justify homeopathic claims.
I'm reading this article while staring at my confirmed boarding pass that reads, "Seat Request" right next to the shiny barcode.
It a strange mix of disappointment and excitement to find out someone has just released a better finished version of what you were working on. Oh well, I guess I'll finish it anyways.
Decent site. Probably not something you can raise money with or easily sell given the uncertainty surrounding marijuana laws in America, so I'd focus on revenue immediately and hope to make money out of cashflow.

Lead generation to dispensaries probably would work best - given the amount of first-time 'freebies' out there, I suspect they'd be willing to pay a fair amount for a new customer.
Great!

I've been a huge fan of F.lux on OS X for a very long time. The beautiful thing about the recent "gradual change" feature is that now I don't even notice it when I'm working late at night -- unless I have to turn off the application for some reason, and then I find myself squinting and fleeing.

Anyway, just wanted to take a moment out to thank you for helping so many people out.
That would depend on its business model. If Google Voice exists solely for the purpose of being a killer app, to differentiate Android phones from the rest of the pack, then there would be no reason to create a client for iOS. If however, the service itself is supposed to bring in revenue of its own, then I'd assume Google would try to make it available for every possible handset out there.

As Google has already made a Google Voice app for the iPhone, I'd say their business model is closer to the second scenario. However, given that the percentage of jailbroken iPhones is quite low, I doubt that they'll bother.
loses big! Whats apple's loses. Still its responsibility on jail breakers, apple isn't going to help. Actually jail-breaking is helping apple in same ways. That many less devices to support.
You should (I think) adjust the amount of karma received for reviewing negative thoughts downwards. In my experience people are the type of animal that likes to sniff others' poo and will gladly offer opinions on them even with a smaller reward :-(
This was a startup idea I had when I started Mibbit (I decided on balance webchat had more potential than multiplayer web games).

The idea was 'mouse games'. I had a similar setup where you could see everyones mouse cursor. I planned a whole load of multiplayer games where you could chase each other, complete puzzles, click on other people to kill them, draw circles round other players to trap them, etc etc. You could have messages show up like "First to draw a square gets a point". "Move to the left get a point". "Move as far away from everyone else as you can. Most isolated player gets a point". You could have objects being thrown at cursors, and you have to dodge them. Tons of potential to be a fun way for people to waste time :)

I'm sure it would have been great fun to make :)
Two thoughts come to mind:

1) I wonder if they would have got the domain via the first contact if they had offered $250k, or even $125k there and then (ie no trademark route). When people email me about domains "asking if I'm interested in selling" it's usually because they are looking to pay $500 range. If it's worth $250k to you, use a lawyer and then the other person knows you're serious. I would have thought almost all unused domains are for sale at $250k.

2) No one seems to be thinking about the risk here, which is that they invested a lot of time, effort and money into the Groupon brand (inc trademarking it) but they didn't own the domain.

That seems like quite a risk because, despite common assumption, you are not entitled to a domain just because you own the trademark (the other party could have other circumstances). Mr A R Mani legitimately owned and held armani.com until they had to privately buy him out and this dude could say he was building a community for roof-top gardeners (Gro Upon.com). Put up a dummy site for that and their case is tough.
I had a friend with a T-Mobile powered iPhone, got 3G and Edge no problem.
Actually to maintain a western standard of living your costs will probably be more in china, since many western brand name products are imported (despite being made in china). For example an apartment in shanghai can cost more than one in NYC, iPhone costs more, etc.

Whatever you do, avoid street food.
The wikileaks reports do not seem very damaging to the U.S. Both U.S. and international news seems to be focusing heavily on Pakistan and Hamid Gul.
Thanks!

1) Can you please post a screenshot of the sliders on chrome?

2) I fixed the bug with Step 7. I like your suggestion about saving progress... I will try to work that in (added a TODO).

3) You can now log in with your email address -or- username. :)
I really like this idea. I can even imagine signing up. But before I sign up I need to see clear 3rd party validation from 3 or more reputable sources (e.g. Harvard Psychology Prof) that this approach is effective. In a perfect world this would be specific to your site but I would settle for a strong linkage between the theory your site is built on and the research that backs it.

Why? Because I'm too lazy to do that research myself so I need you to beat me over the head with it. Without that proof I just find myself thinking, "Hmmm good idea. I could use this. But does this work? Why should I trust this site? I could look into it but... too much work". Then I click back button. If you have that info somewhere on the site you need to put it front and center. You have about 10 seconds before I give up and bail.
For some of these, I've found if Disc Menu on the remote doesn't work, then fast forwarding does. But it isn't 100%. There are some DVDs which are truly a pain :-/
Interesting that an article on how to focus, which I read in Readability, contained 28 links. I wonder if this was an intentional assualt by the author to prove his point.
Even In Good Neighborhoods, Roaming Teens A Recipe For Violence, Says Study
amusing: http://i.imgur.com/qHWYm.jpg