skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google already has advocated for orphan works legislation. You can search for David Drummond's arguments on Google. The settlement was entirely consistent with Google's previous statements regarding legislation.

As for your "orphan computer" analogy, in fact, there _are_ abandoned property laws that give the owner a reasonable opportunity to make claims to the property. In my state, you're supposed to bring property to the police station, and if no one claims it for a few months, it's yours. The proposed nonprofit registry was supposed to be similar for intellectual property.
The problem with pressing charges as a detterrent is that it is fundamentally unjust, because the punishment is set up as a detterrent and is disproportionate to the crime.

Example: imagine the country of Dictatoria where if you jaywalk you are publicly tortured for a couple of weeks and then put to death. "As a detterrent"

A little extreme? Well, consider the 10-20 (or more) year sentences for cyber-terrorism these teenagers are going to get if the FBI throws the book at them.

That kind of law enforcement agency doesn't understand the concept of restraint - they are set up to go for the kill, for the maximum charge, for the maximum sentence every time.

You can lay charges thinking to give them a slap on the wrist, but the steam roller that gets set in motion is designed to crush them flat with no mercy.
This was a fun (and distracting) challenge. After a lot of iterations, I' think I've squeezed about as much compression and performance as I can. You can play with the Trie/DAWG generator here:

http://lookups.pageforest.com

Source and format documentation here:

http://github.com/mckoss/lookups
You're judging a point by the way it was made rather than its ultimate goal?

I mean, I'm all for praising gymnastics, but if we're trying for truth here shouldn't endgame be valued over execution?
I'm sorry to see that the owner of promosthatrock.com has let the site they set up at colindevroe.com fade away (presumably the domain expired).

It included a full archive of his email exchange(s) with Colin Devroe, chronicling the frustrating experience of paying a developer thousands of dollars and then getting the runaround for months and ultimately getting nothing for their money.

If you have the patience to use the wayback machine, give it a look. Perhaps the customer Colin ripped off will see fit to comment here as well.

[I'm a longtime HN user with a handle connected to my real name - I don't want to get into it with Colin, but I know him (he took me for a couple grand also) and it bothers me enough to see him on the HN homepage giving advice to a community I respect that I'm posting this]
you are watching a car which has been pushed over the cliff and while it is falling, you are telling us that the car is still looking fine...
I promised myself I'd avoid another analogy but...

If I give the bank my money and the next day I get an email saying "Sorry, we didn't feel like locking up last night and some kids looted the vault." I'd have a hard time calling the bank the victim.

And something concrete:
PHPFog knew the holes existed and were negligent. I would say they even have some contributory negligence (IANAL). Especially after admitting they knew they were vulnerable.
I live in Tokyo dude.

Not that it improves my chances to escape an earthquake though.
FYI, when I found about an open ASP.NET padding oracle at Subway.com, all I did was to run PadBuster to exploit it without damaging the servers in any other way. Eventually I reported it to feedback@subway.com, and only after a week of no response only then I finally posted it to reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/g9crj/open_aspnet_pa...
This actually was a really, really good interview. Lady GaGa is very well spoken. She is comfortable talking about herself and explaining her music without snubbing at anyone. Thx Google, Marissa, and Lady GaGa.
This article is kind of the equivalent of saying if one aspirin is good, ten must be great.

The better logic for follow, when cleaning code, is the concept of technical debt (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch10_Manage_Debt.php or http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/paying-down-your-te...). Essentially the concept is that quality code is an investment, and hacked code is a loan. Too many loans and you'll file bankrupty, too much time on quality and you'll not be able to build fast enough - balance is key. This idea is easy for everyone, from noob to pro to manager, to understand and establishes a common lingo.

As a manager, if I found a fresh code monkey doing nothing but assuming they had the aptitude to pay down my standing code depts, I'd promptly show him the door for grossly undervaluing the abilities of his peers.
Sure it is expensive, but once you make Google the 'owner' it's over for a lot of things. That's too high of a price.

And it wouldn't hurt Larry and Sergey to give a bit of money back to the society to scan these books without Google holding the copyright ;)
Panic produce some amazing content, The True Story of Audion is my favorite: http://panic.com/extras/audionstory
While I agree with the concept 100% - doing this could land you in trouble if you're billing for your hours.

My approach is different (I run a consulting company): when we take over existing code base, I always talk about it upfront with the client: "we're going to take 10% of the time to clean up the code and do necessary refactorings". I then explain to them about technical debt and broken windows theory. Works about 95% of the time - and funny thing is, clients that don't agree with it, end up not working out anyway ...
Hmm, a large multi-billion dollar wreck is a success story?

that's a nuclear powered reality distortion field.
Consumer Apps? There really aren't many out there. The ones that are fall into the new content/entertainment segment of news/music/video, primarily. Everything else has been made free so it can get pretty tough to get people to open their wallets. I know a few who pay for Flickr Pro, netflix, and that's it.

Me - Carbonite, some skype minutes here and there

What could your app possibly do for $108/year ($9/mo) that would be "really useful" to me as a consumer?
This isn't a wave knocking over a sandcastle or a dog shitting in the house. These are 16 year old kids, old enough to know right from wrong, and with the knowledge and skills to exploit the system. And once the exploit worked, they didn't then responsibly disclose the problem to PHPFog; they started vandalizing, changing passwords, and the works.

This is like someone finding an unlocked door to the apartment building's maintenance office, taking the master keys from there, rifling through a bunch of people's personal belongings, sticking signs in the windows saying "this building's landlords suck," and changing the locks on some of the doors to make it hard to clean up the whole mess.

They absolutely are the responsible party; you should never blame the victim of a crime just because the victim didn't take adequate steps to defend themselves. If I accidentally leave my door unlocked one day, that does not make it suddenly OK to come in and take my stuff and it's my fault for not having locked my door, instead of yours for taking my stuff.

Now, in this case PHPFog does bear some responsibility, because they have a duty to protect their customers as well as possible, and from reading about how this happened, it sounds like they were amazingly sloppy and irresponsible about it (passwords stored in the clear on the server, passwords shared between various accounts, leaving unsecured shared systems running after beta launch, etc). But that doesn't reduce the culpability of the attackers; they acted maliciously, with full knowledge of what they were doing, vandalized systems, changed passwords, and bragged about it.
SHOW HN: Take a look at my startup; Show off your vocabulary prowess
Hello HN,

Introducing VocabGenii.com, my online vocabulary game. It is the first product from my company, Genii, Inc., that brings innovative, engaging new learning experience to the market by leveraging web 2.0 and social networks.

Currently, we are running a 10K Challenge -- anyone scoring 10,000 points before the contest ends (March 24 04:00 GMT) will get 3-Month unlimited play. Exceptional performance would also be recognized in our 10K Hall of Fame with limited edition trophies!

We're hiring! If you have disruptive ideas on language learning and online education, and possess extraordinary skills in game design, RoR, UX, web design, bizdev experience in the education industry, come impress us! Contact info below:

Company sites:
(1) http://vocabgenii.com;
(2) http://geniicompany.com;

FB pages:
(1) http://www.facebook.com/geniicompany;
(2) http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=190671694293877;

Twitter: @vocabgenii

Email: info@geniicompany.com

Thanks!

James Mak
CEO, Genii
Believe it or not, but $3.00/hr is a decent per hour wage in some countries. Congrats on the first employee and good luck with your project Rob!
This needs a Fark.com photoshop contest: Where else has this little truck been?
Wow, that is quite the list of security measures that they had almost but not completely/correctly implemented, or hadn't got around to yet.

I guess the real moral of the story is to finish what you begin, or don't keep putting security off until it is convenient for you.
You are quite privileged. I pay $60 per month for one tenth of that in San Diego (not exactly hillbilly country).
FYI: I can't speak for other batches, but the spreadsheet here has a few companies from the S10 batch that were missing from citizenkeys' list.
Standard practice should be to refactor as necessary as part of any major code change and to always leave a code base cleaner than you found it. With that you only need a few targeted dedicated code clean-up projects.
You're right, we're not using the same definition. That doesn't mean I don't have a point.
11.0.696.16 dev played back an H.264 video. Yes.
I think the author brought that up to to the likely mentions of Chernobyl. I don't like his numbers though, for reasons similar to yours. The numbers are WHO numbers, and not from Soviet HQ, but the predictions by other groups are all over the map. The WHO one was before there could be solid population measurements, and I don't see evidence of newer data from anyone.

One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the (rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal) and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and concrete production, like he does for wind power.

To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above are small corrections to the gross numbers given.
Ask HN: Should companies blame a third-party for a defect/problem?
WakeMate once blamed China when the power adapter shipped with it damaged the WakeMate. Later another Hacker News thread talked about whether Reddit should blame Amazon for the outages. What do you think?
According to the NY Times[1] the area, as designated by the Ukraine parliament is 15,000 square miles. Switzerland is 15,937 square miles.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20chernobyl.h...

edit: Your figure is for the exclusion zone. That is the area currently unfit for human habitation, and is defined as the area in a radius 30km around the plant. The area that was, and still is contaminated by the accident is significantly larger than the exclusion zone.
I attended the alumni preview of demo day along with a bunch of other founders from my batch (Summer 2010). We were told after our demo day that we were universally acclaimed as the best YC batch ever. All of us were completely blown away and humbled by the quality of the startups in this current batch; we were outdone and then some. Congrats to all the W11 founders, now go conquer the world.
Extract data from MySQL and scrub personally identifiable information (Python)
'Entrepreneur powered YC clone'---an apt description!
A possible interesting investment option would be instead of investing $$$, startup owner can swap 'shares' in their startups.
E.g., I have a startup in security but I love somebody's music startup and vice versa, so share-swap can be done.
Details that need to be ironed out include trust, valuation of shares, accountability (how do we know that the person we swapped shares would continue to work hard), etc.
I've mentally checked out of this place for quite a while already.
Funny, I googled for it and got a few hits where it was spelled both ways in the same page.
You know what we call kids who loot bank vaults? Bank robbers.
I'm glad you helped out all the socially deficient people who were confused by this submission.
I use it all the time. Long press the search key from any app, say "Call Papa John". Does a GPS fix, search, lookup and call all in about 3 seconds.

I didn't know you could use it for alarms. That's brilliant and would be great for one-off alarms.

I also use it for short text messages if I don't have a second hand free or can type it out for whatever reason. It works reasonably well, but I've been letting it adapt to my voice pattern so maybe it works better for me than others.
Chrome has had that for over a year (nearly two years?) now.
That jolly roger truck looks like the perfect icon for a BitTorrent client.
Gut reactions
- is chiefs-skincare.com available? I'd get that and forward the current url there as it's more clear. I was seriously confused what I was geting into while the page loaded, almost closed the tab, not sure if people would be dismayed from clicking because of this.

- Lotion photo says 2010 on it (minor nit) _unless you meant Established 2010, in which case I'd use that or est. instead.

- Clean layout is nice, visually appealing -- I like the use of whitespace.

- Couldn't care less about the stereotypical "be a man, buy X product" copy, but I understand for some reason that goes with the territory these days. Maybe stretch the hyperbole even further / incorporate the chief in there somehow to stand out.

- I'm guessing with the domain (skincare) and the phrase "launching soon", you aren't only going to sell "Citrus Gel Face Wash". I'd reference this somewhere, because as it is now, it looks like a landing page for a single product, which is less interesting than a new line of products, or even better, a new philosophy to approaching the men's skin care industry.

- emphasize the "order now, get a 15% discount option" (I've only now noticed it on my 5th tab / back and forth)

- Get rid of the Arnold quote, I'd only use actual testimonials here or at least if it's going to be comedic, make it relevant. "Chief Face wash saved my marriage" or "Chief's Products give me so much energy, I don't sleep. Ever." that type of stuff. The girlie man quote is too large, prominent, and irrelevant to make sense to me.

- Final message - get rid of the "take off your dress" as the ending quote. It's funny up front, because you're "catching" the consumer in the act of using girly face wash, and "correcting" their mistake. However, when trying to presumably capture their e-mail, _ending_ with that quote is overly negative, and the fact you are repeating yourself doesn't help. I would end with positive copy here, like "So {ditch the dress}, and get energized with Chief's. Sign up right now and we'll take 15% off your first purchase with us! [email input].

- Speaking of "take off the dress", this is also a minor nit and a bit of a silly point, but doesn't "take off that dress" sound at least a little bit sexual to you? I understand the sentiment, but there has got to be a better way to say that haha.

Hope this helps, and remember it's just 1 dude's opinion. Best of luck.
Yes, because of pentadactyl.
No, we call them juvenile delinquents and treat them like children.

And we certainly don't call the bank the victim.
Of course. I guess I'm not clear what your point is though.
Hacker News style seems to be more verbose than this content, either post your link with an non-sensational headline or post a comment asking the community to live to a certain standard. IE: you used a caption to illustrate your point while the target of the link has nothing to do with the caption. This feels like a reddit type post, which I do not prefer IE: "if you do this, I hate you".
A crane fell. Not radiation. (unless there's been a recent change)
It has nothing to do with coding, software, or any other facets of tech startups

I'd be quite interested if it turns out you had a hand in making the product yourself, as opposed to just branding someone else's product. Did you?

My notes:

- The product photo links to a photo hosting site.

- The heading text image is a link that goes back to the same page, which is irritating. No need for a link there.

- I suspect you shouldn't be misquoting a real person (Arnie), even as a joke.

- There's no closing quotation mark, at least not in Chrome. The text renders a bit awkwardly wrt horizontal whitespace.

- Apart from the colour scheme, there doesn't seem to be any connection between the style and branding on the product shot and the style and branding of the page.

- I have NFI who your target market is, but faux-insulting me with poorly written copy was a complete turnoff in my case. I found the premise somewhat offensive. It did remind me that I need to buy some more of the brand of face scrub I use, though (which is marketed at men but the only real marketing gimmick is the usual all-natural-aromatherapy-blah BS).

- I don't normally respond well to targeted "men's" advertising so maybe my dislike is not a good sample, but IMHO you should put some more time into (a) deciding who your target market is (b) deciding what your message to them is apart from "nah ne nah you're a girl" and (c) putting together some smoother written copy.

My 2c, anyhow.
My impression was that was the equivalent of turning on gzip compression on a website.. reduced bandwidth but didn't affect what you were actually sending. Could be wrong.
The Motherfucking Manifesto For Programming, Motherfuckers
> This need to shift some responsibility to a bunch of kids is nauseating.

They aren't shifting responsibility. The kids are responsible for their own actions. They did something illegal. They are responsible for it.

Now, PHPFog is also responsible for protecting their customers; they are supposed to provide a secure hosting environment. PHPFog is a victim here, but has also acted irresponsibly with regards to security (not criminally irresponsibly, but if harm did come to their customers due to this, there could be possible civil liability). The fact that PHPFog bears some blame for their security practices doesn't take responsibility off the kids who broke in and vandalized their systems.
> Also, "one start-up did not present because it already had a Series A term sheet with a 'no-shop' clause.".

I'm confused. A "no shop" clause isn't a "no advertise" clause, so why not present? "We're not talking with any other potential investors, but here's what we're doing."

As PG says, deals are always about to fall apart, and often do, so it's silly to act as if they're done before they actually are.
It isn't quality that stops you from building fast enough, it is yak shaving in the guise of quality.

Programming is a weird thing, unlike almost everything else higher quality almost always translates to lower costs and faster delivery.

To explain this counter-intuitive phenomenon, partly this is due to the exponentially increasing costs of fixing bugs.

E.g.

fixing a bug at design time = $1,

fixing it at coding = $10,

fixing it during testing = $100,

fixing it once it has been deployed = $1000.

----

Also, the phrase "code monkey" is no longer politically correct. The correct phrase is "software simians" :D
How to Track Conferences Virtually
Can you explain your "1% are sellouts" comment? Are you saying that top-tier crackers that accept money for their services are sellouts?
I made this quick demo of using it for wikipedia search using a bunch of different public APIs: http://bodytag.org/perch/
I recognized it instantly and wondered how they were able to use it for a commercial video. I thought the licensing was too expensive to use a major label group?
My point is that you must treat intrusions as an inevitability when trying to counteract intrusion. And anyone who builds a sandcastle should be aware of the ocean. The kid's breaking into this account is embarrassing.

Just because we can hold individual humans accountable (and should) doesn't mean we shouldn't have the perspective of "CONSTANT VIGILANCE."
Collection of rock and roll t-shirts
This section consists of a large selection of Band T-Shirts including Concert T-Shirts as well as, music t-shirts, rock and roll t shirts and many more.
Google releases gingerbread for Nexus One, ignores critical battery life bug
Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?
If so, what are they and how long did it take to make your first dollar?
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Netflix Original Content Could Shift The Industry
>They aren't shifting responsibility

Yes PHPFog is. The only reason these kids are even mentioned in the blog post is to shift blame. Their part in the post serves no other purpose.

The entire event could have been recounted without a single personification of the hackers in the blog post.
You shouldn't ask permission for it because on most of the time you shouldn't be doing it. It's like going to the grocery store hungry, without a shopping list.

I'm a big believer in:

1. You don't modify code without intent to change it's behavior. You're there to fix a bug, or add a feature.

2. You leave the code you better than you found it. In fact, you elevate it to your/the-team's standards du jour.

3. That's the cost of doing business. There are no multiple estimates. It's not "Well, an hour to just fix it with a hack but it really deserves a day". That's a day. Deciding on the team's values and coding standards is a group-decision. Deciding on when to apply them isn't.
I hope you meant batch there...
Can anyone in the web-based software realm back up that scaling costs mythos? I get it in the hardware realm, and to a lesser extent in the distributable software realm... But having worked with everyone from Salesforce.com to Facebook to Amazon, I've never seen any indication of exponential costs from coding to testing to deployment - at worst I would say it is linear.
What is Bitcoin? (Video)
via FTP.
Sounds like a hacker's spin on Dan Savage's campsite rule.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Savage_Love#....
What is the reason to use them vs. Microsoft Azure? (I know very little about .Net, Azure, or AppHarbor, but Microsoft seems to position Azure as the .Net hosting solution). I agree that if that isn't the case, they're the top of this YC batch; otherwise idk.
I think an important corollary is whether or not disclosing the source of a problem outside of your organization automatically assigns blame to them, intended or not.

In my opinion, however, the most important trait of a press statement regarding defects/problems is who outright says "I (we) accept full responsibility" or "I (we) place full responsibility on X". If that isn't ever said in some way, shape, or form, and it's just implied, I think that shows less character than at least making a call one way or the other, and accepting the consequences.
The Wilhelm scream