skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference between digital forensics and "the virus scanner says it's clean, let's start loading the credit card data". As a forensics statement, this makes perfect sense - and note that they (say they) have reset all passwords, so it's not like they rely on this.
Just an update to say Skype have responded saying they will fix the bug in an upcoming release. Hopefully we won't have to wait long.
Githood: A minimal GitHub client for iOS, Open Source or in the App Store.
Congratulations Jacques! That's a very good decision. We will stay in touch privately, but I agree, it's best to get hooked on more useful things.

Cheers!
How Does Cross-Site Scripting Become Arbitrary Code Execution?
Does anyone think Apple is actually satisfied with OS X's market share? Apple has competing interests in that it wants high margins and market share, but they did it before with the iPod. And I'd argue the iPad is an even better contender for iPod like dominance than the iPhone/OS X. Apple values control highly, but pretending it doesn't infuriate them that Windows is the leader (and Android is posed to be the phone leader) is a bit much.
I actually found your blog via HN and have since too become a regular user of the network.
What a great ending: "For everything that could have been, Well at least we took the ride."
Ask HN: Leaving current job but may need to do some contract work
Hello,

My situation is that I am leaving my current job to pursue something a bit more challenging. In my current job, I have the lion's share of the knowledge for a legacy product. This has all been documented but my skillset and previous experience made me somewhat uniquely qualified for supporting this product. When I leave my company, I would like to give them the option to hire me as a contractor should a problem arise that they are not able to handle inhouse.

This is very new to me and I was wondering if anyone could offer advice, direct me to a book or site that walks me through what I need to do in order to protect myself and be legal (I live and work in the US) In particular I have the following concerns:

- Protecting personal assets should anything go wrong while contracting

- Do I need any kind of insurance?

- Correct structure to receive payment and pay taxes

- Potential problems you may see that I am not even aware of?

Depending on the cost in time and money to set this up I may or may not go through with it. Thanks for any help you can offer.
How was it debunked that 55 saves gas? I'm interested in this, as I sometimes like to drive in such a manner as to economize, and according to my instant and average mpg readouts cruising at or below 60mph consumes far less gas than cruising at or above 70mph.
London, UK (no remote) -- Distilled

http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/distilled/introduce-awesome-...

Apply:
http://www.distilled.co.uk/company/jobs/search-consultants.h...

We are hiring SEOs (the good kind). If you want to help our clients deserve to rank better, come work with us.

If you know someone, refer them and win a frickin' quadricopter!

[If you are in Seattle, WA, there's a good chance we'd like to speak to you too...].
Location-Based Services are a Bonanza for Startups
I would go one further: Aiming for the top of the corporate ladder can have a bigger impact on your personal life than doing a startup. For example (from my own experience) I work more hours in my startup but the fact that I get to do it when and where I want it (in the middle of the night sometimes) makes it much less demanding than being away from your family because you're out of town.

Of course, it depends on the type of startup versus the type of business and your ambition level inside the business, but in my case the startup "feels" more relaxed than any business I've been in.
If we're going to internalize externalities, men who get women pregnant should pay for half of all of her maternity-related healthcare expenses, and for half of the income she would have made if she hadn't had a kid. Do you agree?

I totally agree that smokers and daredevils and adventurers should have to pay higher insurance rates. But making women pay more simply because they get pregnant when they have sex without birth control (or their birth control fails) seems to be punishing them for being born with the wrong set of organs. Pregnancy is a much bigger deal for women than it is for men, yet men have at least as much agency in the process of causing a pregnancy.

I think the big issue is you're conflating healthy people with people who take care of themselves, and sick people with those who don't. There's certainly a correlation there, but there are a lot of sick people who are sick simply because of bad luck. I, for one, wouldn't like society to turn its back on me if I got too sick to work. And I would happily subsidize unlucky sick people in exchange for the promise that I'll get covered if I get sick.
Or ARM.
Thanks for commenting ... When we discussed it in #documentcloud, that was the consensus we came to as well -- it's a bit silly to slightly tweak your JSON in this fashion, when browsers are still opening holes to make it executable in other ways:

http://directwebremoting.org/blog/joe/2007/03/06/json_is_not...

Doing a `while(1);` would be much more robust.
They're not the victim - they're guiltier than anyone who grabs their customer data.

When you provide an online service that gathers consumer information - particularly sensitive consumer information (such as that which you might find on, say, a dating site), it's your responsibility to secure it. If you get hacked, it's your fuck-up, your responsibility, your culpability.

And no, that's not my opinion, it's objective fact - read, for instance, about PCI DSS, and the associated very steep penalties for information leakage.
>very sophisticated, very select group of acquaintances

I meant in the context of HN. That's a beautiful way to describe this place :)
To be fair, Beom Soo Park just posted a follow-up comment correcting his mistake in not calling it a bug.

"I have to rectify the term I used before, this issue found to be a "bug", not "by design", We are working on the issue and will be fixed in future updates. Sorry for making confusions.

Thank you"
How YouTube's Global Platform Is Redefining the Entertainment Business
I find it interesting that my original comment started at -3 and is now +7..and that the "so blame the victim" went to +3 and is now at -1. Not sure why I find it interesting, but dang it'd be nice to see who up/down votes.
Hi, nice to meet you. Btw, try anything funny on me, and I'll set the Russian mob on you.

How to explain? Yes, strictly logically speaking it is "OK" (no funny actions, no Russion mob). But psychologically I don't think it would be a good approach to human interaction. It establishes an atmosphere of distrust right from the start. You approach somebody and say "you might be a criminal".

Or imagine you meet somebody on a party and he says "Hi, my name is soandso. By the way, I carry a gun". How would that make you feel?
What sort of startups/work have you been doing? When I'm talking about disincentivizing, I just mean that making the conscious decision of working more seems like a no-brainer. Your personal reasoning behind this may be different, but overall, fewer people will do this if they only get paid for 70-80% of the extra hours than if they get paid for all of them.
What a great last contribution on HN! Hope you change your mnd and get back on HN someday in not so distant future :)
Must be a slow news day if this makes the front-page.
In the reports I've seen the satisfaction levels are nearly identical, within the margin of error of the survey done.
Hi all. I curate the NYC StartupDigest Jobs list -- email me if you'd like to see your posting included.
It would be great to see programs like this across the country.
Distance Learning - Does It Work?
You said 'You don't have anything'

Which is false. You have the copy your hard disk wrote.
Funny, quick question though why are you tracking every input value? just out of curiosity? I just kept typing in random letters can't see why it would be useful other than maybe the occasional laugh.
Why I'm Eating Dinner for Breakfast
i can verify that i received a password reset email from sourceforge on saturday, that explained there had been an attempt made to get at the passwords, and that rather than wasting time speculating on if they had been compromised, they were just doing a system wide password reset.
I understand what you're saying, but do you have any information that this is how the site owner began the conversation?

I imagine we're seeing a small snippet of something larger.

I also see the security company guy doesn't dispute that his revelation the site was cracked began with a push for payment to remedy the situation.
The occasional laugh is all (and to see if it was possible - turns out it's not really, at least the way it tries to do it). It's quite broken (see note in code about how I'm not really a developer).
I don't know why silly shit like this gets upvoted either. I come to HN for good content (less and less of it sadly) not silly cry babies about how they can't sell their fail product.
Using Maxima Output in Octave
What, noo! OK, here's the deal, nobody upvotes this submission so he doesn't go over 50K karma :-)

I never corresponded with jacquesm personally but in my relatively brief time in HN came to enormously appreciate his thoughtful and knowledgeable comments, his calm, anti-flame tone, but most importantly his generosity with ideas.

I am perplexed by this decision, though. I spend one to two hours per day on HN on average, assuming he does more, it's a good chunk of time. Yet, isn't stopping contributing altogether somewhat drastic?

I think HN needs all the mentoring it can get and hope that this does not become a trend. As they say: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!"
This is just an advertisement for this software. The woman on the right looking straight into the webcam
I joined reddit when I was supposed to be writing my MSc thesis; my karma soared to a few thousand pretty quickly.

Karma is an odometer, counting up how much time you could have been spending doing something else.

It does pay to take a step back from time to time. Fare well, and I wish you all the best.
Who is hiring in San Francisco?
Will The Religious Outbreed Us All?
I look forward to reading the follow up memoir about your time on HN, 'Mostly Harmless (Assuming Time has no Value)'.

It is tempting to downvote some of your old comments to keep you below the 50,000 limit. But as others have pointed out, there will be plenty of other opportunities to connect and learn from you. I'm sure the productivity boost that awaits you will be a boon to us all.

For specifics, I found your sharing the experience with ww.com and video in the early days of the web were incredibly interesting and edifying. Thank you for that.
Study cognitive neuroscience. Much of the reason that $500 meal at Per Se is such an amazingly memorable experience is because it's so expensive; evolution has taught your brain to feel good about signalling status.
wouldn't it be possible for the attacker to alter the meaning of 'while' beforehand?
Kongoroo.com is offering a Business Development co-founder role.

(About us, quickly: Kongoroo is the front-page of the web for kids. Parents submit sites, which are vetted and filtered for age and interests, and popularity bubbles sites to the top.)

The site still has work to do but we should still make the soft launch date at the end of February. We need help to execute this right. If you're interested or experience in Bus. Dev. please contact me at the email in my profile. We prefer if you're from the SF Bay Area, but we're open to other locations.
I bought a Motorola Droid (Milestone) last year because it was only a little more than half the price of an Iphone (unsubsidized in europe spring of 2010 around 400€ vs. around 700€).

Now the price of the Xoom is rumored to be around 800€...

If there is no decent Android tablet that will be noteworthy cheaper than the Ipad it will be pretty hard to catch up any time soon.
Location Labs (http://www.locationlabs.com/jobs.php)

Emeryville, CA (super short/BART ride from SF--No remotes)

Back-end devs (Python, Java, Ruby), Front-end devs (JavaScript, CSS, HTML5), Mobile devs (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, BREW), Product Managers, UX Designers

And more... Company is growing very rapidly in an incredibly exciting space.
Free from the consequences of my actions?
How do you know how I voted in the last election?

If anytime you travelled abroad you were treated like a hard-core Iraq ware supporter and Halliburton board member you'd get sick of it too. Or if every time your country vaguely became a topic for discussion things immediately devolved to view you and your nationality as not much except native american murderers and subjugators and ask you to answer for everyone else's actions in the history of your country. And when you have a well articulated answer explaining that it's more complicated than an archetypical narrative, or anything slightly well-written, they dismiss you as a highly-trained PR spokesperson lurking on forums instead of a human being with an opinion.

Yeah, it gets tiring.

As a result, you don't really want to get into details because it doesn't really sound like anyone's too open to hearing what you have to say, just looking for a fight. And then people pre-empt you by saying "stop calling me an anti-semite" and "I'm sick of you people saying ___ " while at the same time completely ignoring other important human rights abuses going on in the world, you begin to wonder why you bother engaging anyone, and instead just resort to asking to talk about it elsewhere, not when you're trying to read Hacker News.

And yes, snarky one-liners that gloss over the entire region's history evoke all of this.
I never claimed to be 'not a heavy internet user'. Of course I am. I simply claimed that my data consumption is legitimate, and not caused by illegal hoarding of software, movies, etc.
Heh, going cold turkey to kick the "addiction", probably the only way. Wishing you luck with it. The place will be weird without you :)

Thanks for all your contributions Jacques, drop me an email any time :)
I love my old M3, but I wonder if it falls in a special category distinct from other luxury items--as Aldous Huxley said, "speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."
Jacques, you are one of my favorite commenters. I'm sad to see you go, but I definitely understand your reasons, this place is way too addictive. I've added your blog to my Google Reader list [1], I hope you'll write there often. I especially love the monthly idea dump.

Het ga je goed.

[1] For those interested, the RSS feed url is: http://jacquesmattheij.com/blog/1/feed
Hi! I'm the developer of Githood, and this post means a lot to me, so thank you!

Githood is my first experiment in having software be commercial and open-source at the same time. The idea is that anyone who is capable of compiling it can do so, and have it for free. My hope is that these people will help to improve it. For people who don't want the hassle of compiling and provisioning, the App Store makes it super easy to install.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the HN community on this licensing model.
Their Desktop/Laptop market share is higher now than it's been in decades. While I'm sure they would like it to be higher, I would doubt they're disappointed. They are selling plenty at margins that Dell and HP could only dream about.
"FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers."
>feel free to nick it

And this, ladies and gents, was the original intent of BSD licensing.

:) thanks!
i totally understand the sentiment. i just set my maxvisit/minaway to 20/1300. one visit per day is healthier. perhaps no visits per day is healthiest for me as well...
Registered users only. Here's a free alternative with the same source, I believe:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/31/android-sym...

This is the interesting part, IMO:

(...) the smartphone market itself (...) grew by 88.6% between the fourth quarters of 2009 and 2010, from 53.7m phones sold to 101.2m.

Almost two times the number of total smartphone from last year, meaning the platform is still expanding very fast.
What do you want to do with this knowledge? We could recommend ten types of hammers when what you need is a screwdriver.
The assumption is that a browser won't let you re-define the meaning of low-level constructs like "while" and "1". The assumption is somewhat reasonable, but it could be violated in the future, which is why the Browser Security Handbook advocates against it.
Borders would great indeed.

I opened up the Google Map to check whether the dot around Central Asia could've been "mine". Zoomed out the Caspian sea, equaled it to size in the picture, then estimated the distance towards east... :)
Well, that's too bad. I don't know if what works for me will work for you, but I find it very hard to check the news sites (or the web) when I'm working on something very interesting.

I'm guessing you wouldn't have to go if that did work for you, so thanks for your help and support over the months I've been here.
Great URL: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/quora-quora-quora-quora-quo...
You bet! I spent 3 years of my life consulting with these folks, helping with architecture, coding the network and voice components, recruiting for the UI and server-side.

It started being useful two years ago. We were our first users. Our productivity climbed, and our travel bill halved immediately.

Its nothing like Skype. No "phone call" model at all. You're instantly connected, can see everybody in your group at all times, you can tell who they're talking to, when they're done.

The map feature is more useful than it might seem. You can tell what your team members are doing, who they're talking to, whether the staff meeting has started, if Bob is in today etc.

I didn't call out my involvement this post, I've done that on half a dozen posts before, sorry.
Ask HN: Did Google made a mistake by making Android free & open source? 
Right now, Android is a success. Obviously, much of its success is attributed to the fact that it is free and open source. However, I'm not so sure whether it is a good long term strategy or not. I'm wondering what hacker news community thinks of this. Here are the pros and cons of current Android strategy:

Pros:
1. Free
2. Open source.
3. Low barrier to entry for any hardware manufacturer.
4. Support & evangelism by Google.
5. Google apps.

Cons:
1. Loss of "license fee" revenue. This can be huge, since it is projected that smartphones and Tablets are the future and millions of devices are getting activated every year.
2. Low barrier to entry for competing search providers (Yahoo, etc) & other web services providers (consider Facebook, Amazon). There have been rumors that Facebook is working to implement its own Android implementation and it could very well replace google search with Bing or facebook version of search. Amazon has already started its own Android Market and it already has a successful device (Kindle) under its belt.
3. Patent issues (law suits from Oracle, Microsoft and Apple).
He got a better offer from Quora over Google?

That's a nice development for the future of internet.
Tips for Writing a Descriptive Essay
Description essays require providing detailed accounts of what is being described. This needs to be written in a certain manner which allows the reader to envision what is being said. Understanding the significant aspects of descriptive writing will help students to do a good job.
Research a loss leader? That's sort of true but there are already a couple of sites which are doing just that and charging for it: www.morningstar.com, www.fool.com and www.quantumonline.
Why not boning and vomiting? I think the college years are probably the best time to get lots of boning in, college or no. However, college does provide a more target rich environment than say... working at a cubicle farm housing programmers.
For the love of god just give us the tools for effective persona blacklists. With Google's constant changes to the search site and the difficulty in efficiently and effectively monitoring live search results via browser extensions, it's been at best hit or miss. Whether that comes in the form of some API that can be tapped to make a good extension or having it built into the browser, I don't care.

Google of all companies I would have thought would understand and respect the important of giving people the power over their own technology experiences.
http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/

Many of these openings are remote
Almost any running application on your computer can use your web cam and your microphones. The only question is whether they do.
You're a good guy. Good luck. :)
Even if thats true, it depends what they compared the OS vs OS, or the iPhone hardware to Andriod OS, or the other way around, these reports are by far complete, there are a dozen of android device, and they all do work great or less than than, so ... its hard to compare them .
If we're going to internalize externalities, men who get women pregnant should pay for half of all of her maternity-related healthcare expenses, and for half of the income she would have made if she hadn't had a kid. Do you agree?

If we accept the legality of abortion [1], then no - men should be able to terminate their rights/obligations within 3-9 months of discovering the pregnancy for a lump sum payment equal to half the price of an abortion. Equal rights and all that, right?

I think the big issue is you're conflating healthy people with people who take care of themselves, and sick people with those who don't. There's certainly a correlation there, but there are a lot of sick people who are sick simply because of bad luck.

I'm not conflating anything. I'm distinguishing insurance from redistribution. Insurance protects you from bad luck - it just doesn't force other people to pay for your choices.

Raising the price of insurance based on people's choices protects them from bad luck while forcing them to pay the average cost of their choices.

[1] Which I do, but only until the baby grows a brain. Not going to debate that here.

[2] Again, insurance which covers the normal cost of maternity. Insurance which covers maternity costs in excess of 3x (or some such multiplier) the cost of a normal birth makes perfect sense.
Mass transit? Kidding,right?

I've had to use mass transit before, in my poor student days. Misery. Standing at rainy bus stops hoping the bus might come, half-hour connections, taking 2-3 hours out of my day for a 15-minute trip each way.
I just freakin' told you. Just told you.

Edit: this is why I'm always irritated

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2161059
khanacademy.org - Mountain View, CA - remote is a possibility

Hiring full-time devs and dev interns. Non-profit trying to change education. Backed by Gates Foundation and Google.

ben+HN@khanacademy.org for more info
Not only does POF store it in plaintext but they email it to you every few days when they send you their "new matches" email. So basically they're sending probably about 1/4 of their member base's passwords in the clear over the internet every day through those emails.
It does not matter. Both are suitable for beginners and have widespread support within the programming community. I can add "php" to the list, which also falls on the same level in terms of resources available on the net.
Nothing like hearing reports of security issues to make one remember the adage "There but for the grace of God go I." Humility may be in order: substantially none of us are capable of delivering a system without at least one game-over bug in it.
This looks like a great tool for starting up a project. It would be nice to have it run the same thing again without going through all of the menus.
Thanks for the kind words about my nic ;), and good luck to you.

Perhaps one of these days someone will succeed in inventing the optimally addictive HN experience, and we'll look forward to seeing you then...