skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my small amount of personal experience thus far I have to say that a co-founder is tremendously helpful as a sounding board, someone that lives and understands the product as much as you do debate various features and discover hard to track down bugs or architecture problems.

At different stages so far we would have been setting ourselves up for big problems down the line if not for things we caught discussion the product with each other. So you can get a lot of outside opinion and advice but it doesn't really compare to having someone who spends just as long as you wrapping their heads around exactly how it works and where we are at.

To be fair I don't have any real experience as a single founder on something of a similar scale to see both sides of the fence.
If they're willing to buy a 160GB HD for you, appeal to them to just send you the original 240GB HD instead. For them to have their own 240GB+ HD installed may not be much more time/expense.
I can't help but wonder:

Can you look at the original email message & get the IP - then run some GeoIP? If he was irresponsible enough to do it from some public place like a University Library then you could probably look the exact address up & have a lead to give the police.

Secondly, depending on if you have chrome & a "trusted" website that you provide your location to, then you can run that bit on this fool in a reply email with a link that says something like "Do me a favor & just upload my pictures folder to http://mysite.com/storage/index.html - the user is: johndoe & the pass is: FML123" then wait & obviously log the lat/long & go to the police.

Third, if you happen to know the serial number, report it to Apple, then to the police. I say this because he is considering buying a 160gig drive & backing your data up to it - there is a small chance he would go to the Apple store to do this.

Next time, consider using http://preyproject.com/

Other than that I guess try to get what you can from this guy without paying.
That's quite a touching account. On a whim, I enabled VoiceOver on my iPhone (I'm sighted), and I must say I'm quite blown away.

I recommend you try it if you aren't aware of this feature. It's easily enabled in the system Settings app (look for Accessibility). Just remember that when VoiceOver is active icons/buttons will require double taps instead of single taps, and you need to use triple-touch to scroll in menus or between home screens.

I'm sure that as a sighted person with no context I'm completely missing any nuance in the way this feature is implemented, but even handicapped so, it is quite impressive.
Knowing which enemies cause the most deaths is a way to measure the 'deadliness' of an enemy, which is important for making it adaptive. It's a poor measurement, however, since the actual situation that causes a Mario death comes from groups of enemies.

Infinite Mario needs to work out some serious gameplay bugs before worrying about statistics. Enemies that come up from underneath Mario aren't supposed to cause deaths, the bullets aren't supposed to be affected by gravity (nor are they supposed to flicker), and the plants are found neither outside of their pipes nor walking/hopping around. My experience playing it was infuriating, since it didn't respond like a normal Mario game. I'd die multiple times hitting a hopping enemy from above, because I was coming down as it came up.

Then I looked in the code... there's a lot of copy/paste going on, so I couldn't be bothered to hack at it and make it less lame.
It could still be someone who wanted a cheap laptop, and won't give it back now that they paid a thief for it, but wants to mitigate the harm to the original owner. (I agree with lionhearted it might be the original thief extending the scam but wouldn't rule out a 3rd party.)
They're called TGPs (thumbnail gallery posts, although most of them include video now), and they have been around forever. They're the primary type of affiliate site.
All the best people are slightly different.
"... their lack of interest in people, their fascination with objects, their need for sameness, their keenness to be left alone ..."

which can be experienced when you are working on some code, trying to make bug-free and of course someone has to come over and start a conversation...

"... The rules keep changing on me. Every time I think I learn a new rule, you change it on me ..."

Psychology gives you the tools, observation the environment.
And yet, we have the same great-to-the-nth grandpappy as every other human on the planet.
Aluminum!
You move your finger over the stock chart, and it reads out the X and Y values to you. Eg: "May 28 10, 256.17" (i.e, on May 28 2010, the stock was trading at $256.17). You can scan the chart with your finger to get the whole thing described.
They would be unpopular on Reddit, certainly. I know this from experience...
I figured the same thing when I got the extended warranty on my first laptop. Laptops are fragile, they die often, it was only like $100 (that's your $9/month for a year...), and if the laptop was broken before the extended warranty ran out (5 years, I think), I'd get a new one, based on current laptop price/performance. I thought this was a great deal, since I thought it quite likely that my first one would die before 5 years and then I could get a much better one at no additional cost.

Problem was, when the laptop finally died about 3.5 years later, they made up some bullshit excuse about there being a "liquid spill" on it and refused to honor the extended warranty. (Yeah, Circuit City, no wonder they're out of business...)

Anyway, I found the whole experience of trying to convince the service company that yes, my laptop needed servicing so distasteful that I didn't bother with any sort of insurance or extended warranty for my second. And wouldn't you know, it lasted for 5 years, never needed servicing, and can still boot up and run today, though the network's a bit flaky and the battery is basically dead.

My point (and presumably webwright's, though I disagree with him in another thread) is that the insurance company has to be making money off this policy somehow - they've got lots of actuaries calculating odds to make sure they come out ahead at the rates they charge. If you think "of course my laptop is going to die within 29 years - I'm bound to come out ahead", I'd suggest reading over your policy very carefully. My guess is that they have some very strict conditions on how it dies, and there's a good chance they won't cover it for many mundane run-of-the-mill failures.

Buy insurance because you can't afford to cover the loss otherwise, not because you expect to make a profit on it.
Since it's supposed to navigate like a manpage/less, it would be clever if j and k worked the way they do in less.
Two more examples:

* Nvidia intentionally capping floating point precision on 1/8th on their GTX 480 cards, since they cost a fraction of their Tesla cards. Both based on latest Fermi architecture.

* In automotive industry: two otherwise identical cars, but with different versions of engine microcontroller driver, can have many thousands of dollars difference in price.
The monetary loss used to be $10,000.00 before they would lift a finger, but that was 10 years ago.
No, I'd still report it missing because I would assume it would be possible to crack even though it appears secure to me. I don't know enough about encryption to say how likely, but of course I'd still report it. The point is that unless the thief has my code as well, there are no charges to wonder who's liable about. Your answer seems to suggest that you'd prefer the current method where some of your money gets stolen but it's OK because the CC company picks up the tab.
Based on how much some of my comments bounce up and down, I don't think that the downvotes are done by only a few. But I think this is a good thing, and if anything we need more people eager to downvote poor quality submissions. I think the reason that HN has remained as usable as it has because it is actively policed for content quality.

I don't see a way to check, but I'd guess that my upvote to downvote ratio is about 3:1. I try to vote up anything that would want to see more of on the site, whether I agree or disagree with the content. I try to mercilessly vote down snappy one liners, purposeless profanity, and dumb jokes. If anything, I'd say I vote primarily on form --- I'll support just about any content if it's well written and well intentioned.
It seems most of the commenters here are overestimating the average consumer.

Excluding the friends I have in the tech industry, not a single one of my friends or family would be able to tell you the different between the CPU and software on their computer.

Besides, which is a better value proposition to the consumer (even if it is not a better value in reality)? Paying $50 for an online CPU upgrade that makes their processor appear 10% faster, or dropping $500+ on a brand new computer to get 40% faster?
The (Still-Evolving) Newsonomics of Digital Transition
My question is, how do you unlock/lock things on the processor via software? Does the CPU have a special instruction that the software triggers? I can't wrap my mind around it.
This actually sounds pretty good to me, at least in theory.

Upgrading the CPU is quite costly - you have to take out the old CPU and replace it altogether with a new one. With HDDs you can put the old one in an external enclosure and get some use from it (if the reason you're replacing it isn't failure), and with RAM you might have slots free, so you can keep using the old stuff in addition to the new.

Replaced CPUs tend to be pretty useless. The socket type changes all the time, so you have to eBay it off. Laptops are worse, the CPUs are often soldered on or you can't find replacements.

The only real problem I foresee is that the upgrades are likely going to be of limited use. Hyperthreading gives you a modest boost, anything more than that (clock speed, disabled cores, cache) will drive up power consumption and therefore thermal dissipation. Computers upgradeable in this way will have to contain cooling systems that can cope with the extra heat, even if 90% of people will never upgrade. Might still be feasible for the very low end (Atoms - especially as they're so slow even "normal" people might upgrade) or as CPUs become increasingly modular (either double your CPU or GPU cores in the same package, but not both).
As long as the manufacturer doesn't cripple your product after you bought it (think PlayStation 3) this should be perfectly OK.
Why hindsight can damage foresight
>Anyways, this doesn't exactly jump out to me with applications since the research seems so early stage.

The first thing I thought was that starving the cells of sugar could be an effective treatment. Maybe feeding patients something like the ketogenic diet for epileptics (ie lots and lots of heavy cream and not much else esp. not many carbs) would help. A quick pub med search turns up a little bit of work in this area but there might be room for more.
Facebook Is Secretly Building A Phone
I 100% share your cynicism with regard to this world.

Yet I am speaking from experience.

Here's how it went down last time:

"Yeah, so, I dropped it in the sink. I have this paperwork from the Apple store."

"Wow, okay. I'll start the claim for you. Someone will give you a call in a few days."

A few days pass. I get the call.

"You dropped it in the sink?"

"Yeah, right into the one bowl in there full of water."

"Okay. What did you pay for the replacement? Oh, I see it on the paperwork here. Okay, thanks."

A few more days passed. Then I had a check in my mailbox.

It helps, I think, that I'm going through a real, consumer-facing insurance company instead of an outfit that sells coverage through a retail middleman. Retail extended warranties are, indeed, bullshit, but the distinction here is that I'm buying real insurance, which covers accidents and liquid damage.

They also cover my car, my apartment, and a life policy I have to pay off my student loans in case I should meet an untimely end.

But they're the real deal and they haven't screwed me yet. I suspect if I made a regular habit of making claims on my policies, it'd be a different story. So far, though, it's all good.
"... His best bet is local law enforcement, but even this is likely a waste of time. What can they possibly do? ..."

Disagree.

The law has a long memory and criminals are stupid. Better to get a record of the events logged. Some time in the future this person/persons will try it again and a pattern emerge. In some ways, stealing laptops is like stealing cars in the past. Instead of a get-away car, the criminal now has a get-away computer with someone else's fingerprints on it.
Because as people have already said, doing a CSS hack so that your <menu> hack doesn't display in the page itself is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag.

Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the <meta> name option and the browser is not required to implement handlers for all names. Given that this is not display HTML, I think the <meta> tag is the perfect place for this.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attr-meta...
Cross-Browser Testing: A Detailed Review Of Tools And Services
For those of you who don't know .net, this is basically where all the site specific configuration files lie - think database passwords, email servers, admin passwords to bootstrap the system, etc.

So this is kind of a big deal.
This is an interesting idea, but it will properly end the first time some important persons cat eats them.
Well, if it was SAAS (software as a service), no one would have complain about that, right?

With every paid service, one can get a list of features for a fixed price, and then pay more to "unlock" features that that very software can already do.

I wonder why is it easier for people to pay extra for extra in software but not in hardware.

Does anyone have an idea?
And now we can have a big list of nostalgia which disappointed us. Like when I recently watched a Knight Rider episode for the first time after a dozen years and suddenly realize, how bad the actors and plots are.

German readers should probably revisit the TKKG novels for a particular disappointing experience.
This "interview" is as interesting as the back of a cereal box.

What a waste of a good opportunity
This doesn't seem like something worth worrying about to me.

In order for this to happen to your site, you would have to have CustomErrors turned off, or otherwise have your site set up to display stack traces to the general public. That's a quick recipe to get your site hacked regardless of technology, so the fact that it leaves you a little more open to a specific type of crypto attack is neither here nor there.

So basically, if you're following best practices (not just for ASP.NET, but web dev in general) and not displaying stack traces to your users, you're not in danger of this happening to you.
"Wall Street is like any other business. Don't over-glorify working for Google and not Goldman: tech companies are in it for money too; so are startups. At least on Wall Street people tell you they're doing it for the money. It's easier to detach that way and remember that what you're doing is just a job."

You may try to justify what you do that way, but it's just cognitive dissonance. "Wall street people" tend to make money in rent seeking ways, destroying or merely transferring real value. At least at Google you could be creating value, growing the economy in sustainable ways, and increasing real GDP.
And perhaps the initial aspect names and all other strings should not be hard coded in English into the product. Yes, it is pre-alpha, but it will be a pain later to replace all strings with the #t helper and keywords.
The recommended temporary patch is horrible. They want servers to return 500 error with exactly the same message no matter what the problem is. That means 404 and any other custom error can't be returned to the user. The user has no idea what just happened and why they're seeing the error.

A patch is on the way to eventually make this unnecessary but there's absolutely no ETA for it. Are we talking days, weeks, (gasp) months? They do deserve credit for responding to the comments but it would be good to have a better ETA.
If the place is empty, it’s easy to just pack up and take your stuff with you. If you’re at a university, I generally ask someone if they’d be willing to watch my stuff. If I don’t feel comfortable and it’s busy, I’ll put my laptop in my bag and leave a book or something where I was sitting.
I think this indicates a higher average quality than other online comments better than most other indicators. In most places the comment would get posted anyway, but here you feel your writing as part of an average standard which is much higher.

I know for one that I also pay more attention to use of words and grammar on here that I probably would other places because that is what the standard is, that is what we all like to read and comments not at that standard usually end up down the bottom heavily down voted.

You don't see a lot of well written and constructive comments down voted even if they are arguing a alternate and contentious viewpoint.
Can one do this and distribute a closed-source app this way? Is it practical to do so?

In addition to the feedback we got on our choice of distros, we also got a number of complaints about our offering a closed-source app for Linux.

Again, that's probably my ignorance of the Linux market in general, but I have the sense users are pretty evenly divided on this point.

(Thanks, BTW!)
Indeed, but if you're doing it right, you won't have any passwords there. The things you need to access from a web app tend to allow trusted user access, so all an attacker would be able to get from a properly configured site's web.config would be the name of the database server (or the fact that it's (local)).
I like the idea of offering a choice of syntax for the same language. Generally speaking, I don't see why syntax and semantics need to be as coupled as they are.
Sinon.JS v0.7 Released (Standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript)
Excellent point. There is no point about meta-complaining about HN. It's a superb community.
When my house was broken into the police told me that stolen posessions are typically sold within 30 minutes to 1 hour after being stolen. So I think it's highly unlikely that it's the original thief. I've had folks offer to sell me what were quite likely stolen goods on the street before. Probably what happened here.

At this point, however, it's wise to consider the guy who DID buy it a thief... and he is. If he's willing to provide you with a backup, take it and try your damnedest to track as much of it as you can (I'd involve law enforcement).
"I'm very pragmatic and try to measure the impact I've had by multiplying the number of people I've done something for by the average impact on them."

I think, deep down, this is why any of us get up and go to work every day. He's truly lucky to be able to help hundreds of millions of people- this is much more rewarding than any paycheck he gets from Google.
Friendly_Gummy_Bear on Bukisa - Share your Knowledge, Earn Money
The article is a bit vague there, bit I didn't read it to mean you couldn't distinguish 404s from 500s.

It seems to say that you shouldn't tell people which flavor of 5xx he got, since that's useful info to an attacker.

As I mentioned in another thread, this doesn't seem like it would affect any real sites, so it's not a case of waiting for (gasp) months for a patch while your server is in real jeopardy.

Security warnings like this come through for ASP.NET a couple times a year, but nearly all of them are of the "don't do the stuff you already shouldn't be doing, or bad things might happen" variety.
To a point, some of the most well know and respected members of this community and more generally the startup's community are often so respected because they do take alternate viewpoints and argue for them really well.

Sure you can preach to the choir on issues but if you do truly believe in an opposite viewpoint and make a well construed argument on it, good enough for the other side to at least see where you are coming from, that will earn a lot of respect.
Entrepreneurship as Disease
Google testing white space broadband in Ohio
Someone has already analyzed the security aspects of this.

http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf

Short excerpt:
Even at speeds of up to 40 MPH on the runway, the attack packets had their intended effect, whether it was honking the horn, killing the engine, preventing the car from restarting, or blasting the heat. Most dramatic were the effects of Device Control packets to the Electronic Brake Control Module (EBCM) — the full effect of which we had previously not been able to observe. In particular, we were able to release the brakes and actually prevent our driver from braking; no amount of pressure on the brake pedal was able to activate the brakes. Even though we expected this effect, reversed it quickly, and had a safety mechanism in place, it was still a frightening experience for our driver. With another packet, we were able to instantaneously lock the brakes unevenly; this could have been dangerous at higher speeds.
Assuming this is accurate, I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if it's based on Android. As it is, the bulk of people I see on laptops, iPads and iPhones in cafes are just using them as Facebook devices anyway. They might as well make it official.

On another note, if I see or hear the phrase "Web-based operating system" one more time I swear I'm going to lose it. Fine, great, it's a browser-based desktop: that's cool. Or, there is no desktop, there's just a web browser with a poorly debugged set of device drivers underneath[1]: that's cool too.

But a website does not an operating system make. ARGH!

[1] i had no idea my blog was the #3 result for that phrase on Google until just now. [2]

[2] I wrote the aforementioned blog entry four years ago when I still worked at Microsoft. I was dead wrong, at least for a lot of scenarios.
I've been waiting for this for years- it always seemed so obvious to me. Had Facebook done this a few years ago, I think it would have been a huge preemptive strike against the iPhone (and possibly Foursquare). After all, Facebook has the UX skills combined with massive amounts of data.

Now, though, it comes off more as a "me too" move.

Hopefully it's built on Android. Even if it looks and works nothing like Android, it's one less platform developers have to worry about when creating an app. I mean, imagine if developers had to create a separate version of their site for IE, Firefox, Safari, etc.

(Of course, my opinions are even more speculative than the original post- I'll wait until I actually see it to judge it.)
Building a phone, the solution to all of the modern software company's problems.