skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is about as bad an analysis of a DVD content protection scheme as can be offered. Publishers are trying to protect the release window, immediately after the publication of a disk, where they make the majority of their money. A scheme that costs rippers weeks-to-months to crack a disk is a spectacular success for them.

The "break" in BD+ will be when someone finds a way to write a ripper that seamlessly handles BD+ refreshes, just like the players do. It'll happen eventually, but it hasn't happened yet.
I have a house in the woods and never lock the door because nobody knows where it is anyway! What's the problem?

This is definitely not an ideal setup, but it's hard to improve. The only solution I can think of is having an application server serve the pictures after authenticating the request. The picture servers would need to be connected to some sort of database to do that. Serving a single image would incur multiple times the current cost.
EDIT: Yep, I see the message now in Firefox and Chrome. Should I disable? I'm not sure I see the problem with reminding people who came to the post from HN to vote for the story if they think it's worthwhile, but what do others think?

I thought it was a pretty obnoxious message, and that it should be disabled.

Honestly, I find the whole tone of this discussion pretty obnoxious. The thing that can destroy HN is when the front page stops being filled with the stories which people find most interesting and starts being filled with borderline-interesting stories from the best self-promoters.
Cruft and legacy support. Windows machines are generally expected to run anything from the DOS era to modern day without a hitch. Windows APIs, up until the .NET era, were very leaky abstractions that require a lot of legwork to properly sandbox.

Unix systems, on the other hand, have infrastructure for recompiling and reconfiguring applications for new architectures with very little effort from the end user.
I agree that micromanagement (especially of employees whose job is creating things) is a really bad idea. If it's necessary, then you made a bad hiring choice and need to start looking again.

However, if a developer came in "high and wearing a chicken suit" I wouldn't care how much he got done. The chicken suit might be passable if it were casual Friday, but high - not acceptable. There should still be an element of professionalism and respect when you're working with other people, getting paid well, and clients are depending on you.
Downloading Google Books
Is it Love? or Infatuation?
A button on another site that casts my vote on HN rubs me the wrong way. And asking for upvotes sets a bad precedent.
If you want to see photos of someone with a private account just find the name of someone on their list that has an open facebook account. Look through their wall (or whatever) and if you see them commenting on the persons photo just click that. You will not only see the photo but all the photos the album is housed in.

Much faster than trying to figure out URLs.
The book is quite approachable for people who are curious about ML and don't necessarily have a strong math background, though. After reading it, other ML literature has been quite a bit easier for me to follow.

In its defense, I think the Python code was written to be readable, rather than necessarily idiomatic. I started doing the exercises in Lua, and haven't had a hard time translating them thus far.
In Microsoft's case it comes down to direct experience. Office 6 was a major flop on Mac because it didn't conform to Mac interface standards--ever since, Microsoft's had a separate business unit for their Mac products.
This isn't exactly what you are looking for. But this is what we use to handle our tagging and deployment to staging/production. http://github.com/apinstein/git-deployment. It's a capistrano multi environment recipe that automates a lot of the tasks.
This is a related tangent that I'd like some input on:

One of the characteristics of "bad management" that's shown here is Dick constantly hovering. At my company, we've arranged the cubicles so that they still offer privacy (walls are about 6 feet high), but that anyone walking by can see what's on the computer screen.

Would you qualify this as hovering? We generally have no issues with casual gchatting, facebooking, stock picking, and have never really reprimanded anyone for that. We also don't do any sort of Internet monitoring.

Two of our employees, however, have taken it upon themselves to re-arrange their desks so that no one can see their monitor. One of them flipped their whole desk setup around (probably spent a good morning working on it), and another employee has turned his monitor 45 degrees - to compensate he has to crane his body at such an odd angle for 8 hours a day that I wonder if I'm going to get a workman's comp claim soon.

Is it bad management if I insist that they go back to their original configuration? I wonder if they think they're trying to pull a fast one over me - do they think I'm an idiot and do not realize what they're doing? Am I a "Dick" manager for wanting to know what they're up to whenever I walk through the room?
Sounds like security by obscurity to me, which in my book is bad.

On their way through the web (unencrypted, mind you), the urls are visible to anyone. Any proxy server can start farming image urls. And what happens if someone reverse-engineers the number generation algorithm?

This is industry practice because it's cheap and the risk for exploitation is low. That doesn't mean it's secure or good. The OP is not missing a point.
Exactly what I wanted to say. We use GDAL/OGR many times every day, it's an open source library that can do much more than this "startup". Frank Warmerdam is a hero.

http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html
ASP.NET and F# - Creating MVC web applications in F#
If there were similar named numbers for co-founders or co-investors who should be given a number of zero?
Commonwealth Games: Corruption and Pride, a debate
All of our educational methods are built around simulations and constrained, simplified problems. We don't ask first-year undergraduates to go out and start working on real-world projects immediately. Some of them can manage with sink-or-swim methods, but there's a lot of benefit to be had from a trivial context - it's like the difference between learning to trade stocks on paper(risk-free intellectual challenge) and putting real money out there(psychological stress, real world consequences). If you raise the stakes immediately, you may defeat the learning process.

And most of the people doing these kinds of things, are, unsurprisingly, around college age.
Math, Computer Science, and Economics Books for self-study « A broader view
You know, NT was developed on the i960, a RISC chip from Intel that is now mainly found in printers, and once ran on AXP, PPC and MIPS in addition to x86. There was even a SPARC version. The decision to target only x86, ia64 and x64 now is purely a commercial one - people just didn't buy NT on anything else. And ISVs weren't interested in cross-compiling their software.

I actually used NT on AXP in the mid-90s. Kick-ass platform for SQL Server. But ultimately the momentum wasn't there.
Is it not only what you say but what you release? Are companies interested in the minimum viable products (Show HN:...) that bloggers and hackers release? I have been looking for a job for months now and I am wondering if this could be a point of entry.
Weird Japanese Street- Fashion
Many Japanese teens are trying to stand out from the crowd since there are so many of them that look the same. These guys are maybe taking it just a bit too far, aren’t they?
1) I would like to point out that clear separation of functionality in implementation doesn't imply being slow or bug-ridden. And there are levels of abstraction you can take. No need to go Java swing path and abstract gui components, but you can abstract parsers, layouts, js runtime (at least large portions of those).

2) Firefox & Opera are quite good on all major OSes. Of course Linux/OSX versions may not be on the same level as Windows versions (I really don't know, haven't made any tests recently), but they're still pretty good.

3) I'm not advocating that Microsoft makes feature-by-feature compatible ports (for example, activex comes to my mind), but I would like to see the basic stuff, namely layout and js engine. And that would be much easier if they followed what I've said in 1) paragraph.

4) And no, I don't need IE only to test for bugs. I would happily switch if they made a better browser than Chrome which is my current default browser (Firefox used to be my default browser, but I switched earlier this year).
At some level Microsoft know's they're not ideally cut out for doing this type of dynamic marketing. Which is why they put the reddit team in charge of the campagin in the first place.

The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster. If they didn't do that convincingly enough, that's their fault.
This is a very popular undergraduate book which I hated. I simply hated how the work is represented - instead of having good mathematical examples (and a clear notation!), they have a lot of text and a bad/substandard notation.
How to Start a Hedge Fund
A real democratic community where muscle flexing doesn't work and people can't exclude PHP from a package because it is "impure". If their big idea gets accepted they can collaborate with others to make it.

Wouldn't that be a better way to do things?
I think two things need to be done:

1. Encourage more people to monitor the "new" page, and

2. Slow down the submission of crap to the "new" page.

For instance, why is there no karma threshold for submitting new links? I just had a quick look, and there's several new links from someone trying to sell holidays to Vietnam with an account that was created eighteen minutes ago.
With regard to the "if you like this story, please upvote" thing, I understand your point, which is why I asked for feedback. But as to the original topic of this blog post, I think we're on different pages. I don't see anything wrong with the fact that I tweet my blog posts to my followers and some of them happened to find it interesting and submit to HN. Should I stop using Twitter and RSS as promotional tools because it might somehow be unfair to the person who doesn't use them but writes better content? This seems akin to arguing that startups shouldn't worry about marketing and sales and self-promotion and should instead just make something awesome and then people will flock to them. I really (truly) wish the world worked that way, but it simply does not.
> I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP.

Keep in mind that many (most?) large businesses (aka "the enterprise") are still running XP so MS is only continuing the pain by not making IE9 XP compatible. This is particularly annoying given that both Firefox and Chrome run perfectly fine on XP.
If you can "reverse-engineer" (you mean "break") any common cryptographically secure random generator --- such as is provided by every mainstream operating system on the planet --- you can do far worse things than see Facebook photos. CSPRNGs are the font from which all real crypto keys spring. Viable attacks on RNGs are devastating to real cryptosystems. So relying on a CSPRNG isn't going out on a limb.

As for the rest of it: if you can capture the ID, you can capture the photo. See other comments on this thread for why that is and why it matters.
Total time to create the app itself was about 6 hours. We spent more time on the web site and the video than we did the app. :)
Compared to Twilio, Tropo has an awful API. Also, a few features Tropo publicizes (esp. to do with IM) just don't work - you end up going to another Voxeo company to get semi-working functionality (IMified), but then some of that IM functionality doesn't work either, and IMified support is non-existant.

Personally, I hope that Twilio goes all-in on the "communications" part of "cloud communications". I'd gladly pay for working and supported IM endpoints with a sane API.
I'd recommend you don't start with EC2, it's too expensive for what you get. Go to Linode or even a VPS provider. Look for the least expensive thing you can use while still operating.

Second, use something like Chef to define your operational environments so that later if you do need to move to something else you've already got the automation to do it with as little effort as possible.
Off the top of my head: that plane had a jet engine, so they could just route their air lines near the engine for heat, or siphon air from the jet directly. Then just constantly 'leak' some warm air from all the holes on the wing surface when in icy conditions.

Or just electrically heat the metal around the holes, like is currently done for the pitot tube (speed indicator).
>Of course I can always ask on the web, but having to break off from coding, pose a question, and then wait for it to get answered before I can continue really breaks up my learning curve.

You're skipping a vital step. Searching for the answer on the web. Most of the time the question you want to ask has already been answered.
Motorola Droid Shadow Coming to Verizon Soon
It's junk, badly watered down, silly, and shows how really bad computer science is at mathematics, even the mathematics they might need.

Stay far away.

It has some logic: When I was a math grad student, I taught about the same in a course 'Mathematics for Elementary Education Majors'. Anyone who has done much in proofs already knows this stuff.

It has some watered down versions of some topics commonly taught in a college course in 'abstract algebra' or a 100 year old course in 'Theory of Equations', but take a real course in abstract algebra instead.

It tries to do some probability theory, but this effort is the worst: Not even a junior level high school course should do probability so poorly.
How is this different from a FB Like or a Retweet button on a blog? Or do those rub you the wrong way as well? Not trying to be snarky; I'm genuinely curious.
Interestingly, there are three people who have co-authored 50 or more papers with Erdos. The most prolific is not a graph theorist, the next is also not thought of as a graph theorist.

The third is listed as having published exactly 50 papers with Erdos, and is a graph theorist. More, there is a female math professor with the same surname, also in combinatorics and graph theory.

Now I can guess where you did your university work.

Fun game to play ...
Mainly performance and options. Page turns, navigation, zooming are all faster. iBooks is my favorite eBook reader but GoodReader is noticeably better for reading pdfs. A mandatory app for iPad, along with Dropbox, SimpleNote and Instapaper.
Asking clear questions will help you learn. You can ask on Stack Overflow (or #python) - make sure to credit the source of your question[0] and at what point you are stuck. Often by trying to explain the precise thing that you don't understand, you will have a moment of zen.

[0] People will be a lot more helpful if they know you are trying to learn, rather than posting a "send me teh codes plz" request. Also they will hopefully give you just enough of a hint and not spoil the whole thing for you.
Agreed, and once those are done, I think some exposure of new stories on the homepage (similar to Reddit) would also be helpful.
Being other
Tech Entrepreneurs Discuss “The Social Network”
Maybe the New York Times should throw out its much-vaunted style guide and adopt the smiley as a sarcasm indicator...
You'd be surprised how helpful people will be if they don't think you're trying to sell them. Make a list of 10-20 companies that might possibly be users, search for their developers (search Google, look for a blog, look for a Twitter account, search LinkedIn), and get in touch with them. Say something like "Hi [name]. I see you're a developer at [company]. I'm building a service for people working with GIS data, and I'm trying to learn more about the space. Could I pick your brain over phone/Skype [or coffee/beer if they're local]?" You won't get a 100% success rate, but you'll learn a lot from the people who are willing to talk to you.
Thanks for the explanation, I've been hearing about these F-ducts on Formula 1 cars (I follow F1 vaguely) and wondering what the hell all that was about. Is this the technology that Brawn pioneered last year?
Interesting, it does work on the "basic HTML" version of Gmail. For me it seems like the "keyboard shortcut" functionality gets in the way of controller the "ship"
I was looking forward to reading through this until I found out that I will go insane.

--
It was a joke.
By the way, you saw in the reddit thread that some guy offered the kid a job, right?

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dk1au/hey_rgaming_i_...

Just saying.
No. This does not use OGR as the backend.

The idea was to have something out there and then build based on customer feedback.
Yes, but I believe those were all desktop systems or servers, weren't they? I was thinking more about limitations that make it difficult to adapt in resource constrained environments such as we find in today's smartphones. We do see Windows used in places such as ATMs (I got a great photo of one rebooting on me the other day, Windows icon and all!). But even Microsoft don't seem to want to use it in their portable gadgets. I for one do not have a good understanding of the issues that make this type of adaption difficult on Windows, or even if it's not a technical question, but rather a political one...
Build in a module to include upsells in the receipt email and then increase your monthly price by double.

When I worked for an e-commerce shop, I started including upsells in the order confirmation emails and got something like a 12% increase in revenue.
I'm not sure about that 45 degree guy, but for turning your cube so that you face out, that's sort of natural. For some people (me...) sitting with your back to a door or an area where people are generally walking is really uncomfortable. I don't like having people behind me without knowing they're there. It's not about slacking, it's just about comfort.
Equivalent headline:

"Tell HN: Every encrypted message is somewhat publicly accessible*

*if you guess the key/password"
I don't know how your software works, so this may or may not be appropriate, but:

Open source the software. Promote it via a technical blog, Hacker News, meetups, and conferences. Become a thought leader in the GIS space. Keep running your service for people who don't want to worry about installing/running the software themselves. "Open Source for free, SaaS for pay" is a very valid business model, especially when selling to developers. Think of companies like Twilio or Sendgrid; I could set up my own Asterisk or SMTP server, or I could pay a low metered fee to have someone take away the headaches for me.

If you don't care enough about GIS to blog and speak about it, close up shop.
> I think it's funny that one comment on this post says that Bose "forgot that there is an entire range of frequencies between the 'highs' and the 'lows'" and another one that says "No highs, no lows, must be Bose." How can both be true?

Have a look at the frequency response graphs and associated comments here. Both statements turn out to be true.

http://www.intellexual.net/bose.html
While I may agree with you, this type of meta conversation is getting really old, it seems to be happening more recently on HN. I would honestly rather see the comment stand alone or see a decent rebuttal than half a page of useless chatter about it. If people upvote it, you are free to ignore it. You can take this to Reddit, too.
Kauffman Foundation Partners with Startup Weekend to Help Educate Entrepreneurs
It isn't just your disk drive.

They keep a copy of all your data on their servers. Not just a copy, but the change history of every file so you can revert to previous revisions of individual files.
Thats True.

I am a big fan of Steve Blank's book. However, often in the past I would analyze, research, analyze and then ... nothing. I figured this time I would just get something up there - and then figure out what I'm building along the way.
David Simon (The Wire) wins MacArthur 'genius award'
It has to be down to your personal preference.

My company runs AndAppStore and, although we don't force anyone to integrate our purchase checking system into their paid apps, I know we'd still appreciate a heads up from anyone who thinks they've found an exploit for it (not necessarily giving a full fix, but a heads up to how the exploit would work so we can look at addressing it if it worked).

In your shoes I'd ask for the DRM requirement to be dropped. You know it's not secure, they've shown they're not paying full attention to the DRM solution, and so even if you spent your time coming up with a totally secure solution there's no guarantee that they wouldn't modify it at some point and inadvertently weaken the protection it offers.

One thing to remember though is that if your app is available through multiple channels you may end up with lower sales across the board if the problem isn't addressed. The reason for this is if pirates get a way to create a DRM free version of your app then it doesn't matter how secure all your other distribution channels are, the pirates have an easy route to create a cracked version of your app they can redistribute.
Review my hackathon MVP - Amazon instant search
The marketing challenge for startups (Indinero interview)
There is no technical reason that you couldn't run NT on anything you could run Unix on. It was architected from day 1 with a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) specifically for that. In theory, port the HAL (assembly language) then the rest is just a recompile. There's more to it than that (the SPARC version suffered severe performance issues due to endianness) but that's the general idea.

I expect Dave Cutler remembered that VMS (at the time) could only run on VAX, the OS and CPU were developed in tandem and VMS relied on some features not present on other CPUs (I don't recall exactly what offhand). It was a huge engineering effort to get it onto Itanic.
Note that the first code he writes on the page

awk "{print $0}"

does not work. Awk programs need single quotes to prevent bash expansion.
Unless I misheard him, he made a working implementation of the Hack ALU, which is magnificent all by itself.

Hack is a virtual fully working computer that students build completely from the NAND up during a semester: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/video-lecture-from-nand-to-tetr...
Who are those users? Are they mostly the type that frequent Hacker News?
George Lucas to release Star Wars in 3D
Or, why the best numbers to choose are just 1,2,3,4,5. (Or really, 33,34,35,36,37 (so you don't have to split the money with people choosing dates).
Hi HN community

Please check out my lastest pet project ShelfLuv - an implementation of Amazon instant book search I made for the midVentures hackathon. It won Best Overall App.

I'd love to hear what this community thinks of it and how I can make it better.
Off topic, but you're building a like-system (I have a part-time hobby one I've been sort of working on too) and I just wanted to wonder how you decided to go ahead?

The biggest concern I had was that the market is saturated with solutions that don't work because of disinterest, and anything I made could be beaten well-enough by Facebook in a good week's work. Sure I had a couple of edges but I couldn't spot the edge that would fix everything, and when I found a local competitor (I live in a pretty small city with minimal startups) I was convinced that everyone must be working on this.

So.. long story short I'd love to hear how you decided this was the thing to work on and how (without giving too much away) you hope to overcome the problems for your product's sector.