skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe there is a complete, one sentence explanation that would ring true for most developers, but is not being offered for one reason or another.

My best guess: It would have been easier to get 1.0 back up and working, but this was viewed as an opportunity to finally push out the 2.0 and convert over the vast majority of the existing user-base in short order. The release was not tested well enough, and so this was a bad plan in hindsight.
Interesting.

What if you flip it around? Instead of making it something for researchers to use and competing with tipping point et al, how about making it something for open source projects to use to manage the process of handling security bugs? I'm not aware of anything in that space, but there may be some mileage in exploring it.

I could see this working in a SaaS model a la github - free if you keep everything open. Paid for if you don't.
So, block spam and identify people to avoid is what you're saying? Done. Now what?
AT&T Buying T-Mobile Won’t Matter. Innovation Is Elsewhere.
http://nestoria.com
I think for the people in general to respect copyright, they need to have something to respect. 100 years is ridiculous. And it's unrealistic. Basically it gives certain companies a right to print money. It's particularly egregious that Disney built up a huge pile of their "intellectual property" by stealing stories that, in this day and age, would cost them a fortune to license.

Copyright used to be for 25 years. In this day and age, that is an eternity. Back when it was implemented, it was probably a little more relevant - with the distribution of media being a lot slower and organic.

If copyright was for 7 years, with the option to renew for another 7 years (for a period of time - say up to 21 years total), that would protect the rights of content creators, whilst letting work that is deemed worthless to fall back into the public domain. And NO ONE could hijack our culture in perpetuity.

What is this COICA going to do for the consumer? For society?
Robin Williams' (not that one ;) The Non-Designer's Design Book is a great introduction to "design for the rest of us".

You can preview it online: http://books.google.com/books?id=n1AuwXafMO8C
Faux vulnerability reports might be slightly harder to spot than your average Nigerian Princess.

Will you validate my exploit for IBM RACF on OS/390?
Seriously, You dont even need a security attack for losing the changes with this model. A nice little "harddisk" failure would do the trick for you. :)
If a vendor bothers to fix a security patch, the ad/disclosure is already signed, most of the time. Harvesting the keys from i.e. the bugtraq archive seems convenient enough.

But yes, I also like the SSL idea, now if only verisign and comodo would be more trustworthy than the WOT...
I believe mortgage brokers were also encouraged to ignore the word 'subprime'. Nothing bad happened there.
Technically, Yammer created Facebook groups outside of Facebook. It's a bit strange, but I think he chose a nice tool to facilitate the group.
What if you just... email him and ask for it?
How is it fundamentally different than heroku? (Not trying to troll, genuinely curious.)
This is hilarious.

2 days late.
Be sure to look at the date of the article.
grellas, many thanks for the submitted article. It's good to know about the case, but I have to admit that reading about patents on genes, living organisms and medical treatments is disturbing. We need a better system; one that rewards research and innovation with incentives but without granting the disincentive of monopoly.
Also it's inconsistently applied. Should fashion companies have quotas for straight men?
You know you can just double click on a tab of the ribbon and it will hide, right? I'm a sort of ribbon lover by the way! :)
Griddle.it - Web page alignment made easy
It's a generous offer in either case, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just wanted to point out that without some price guidance, it can awkward telling someone how much you can afford to pay for fear that they will consider the low number insulting. I think explicitly telling him that you will do it for free but asking for money if he can afford it is a great compromise. Good on you!
>No, that doesn't actually solve this problem because then it just turns into a he-said-she-said.

then I fail to understand what you plan to do with the encrypted stuff that you get from the researcher since the only one able to decrypt it would be the vendor.
At that point the scenario is: researcher says this is vulnerable, vendor denies it, somebody needs to decrypt the content of what the researcher has sent to the vendor.
In contrast what happens without having the encrypted content is:
researcher says this is vulnerable, vendor denies it, the researcher can publish the un-encrypted original advisory on your website if he feels like it.

Regardless the SSL trick is a nice one I just don't see the point of the third-party involved and I somewhat doubt that a website like this can be useful to the end-user or to put pressure on the vendor.
Surface [WebGL]
To be fair, I believe this behavior was just copied from Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, and ML.
I have heard elsewhere that people gnerally say that they would be "wealthy" at twice their current net worth. So, I wasn't surprised to read that the average net worth of the 1000 head's of household in the sample had a net worth of $3.5MM.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579
I believe they are using a custom interface from Braintree. Pretty sure living social is the same.
Top Strategy Browser-based Games
Yes, due to the problems of health care here in the US, you're forced to choose one or the other.
I don't have one but maybe this: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos
Mac OS X Lion and Ruby (or even NoRuby)
It's starting to look like doing this for open source projects is a good start. They seem to be less capable at this, try to hide the vulnerabilities more, and reporting to them is much harder and well organized. Also, based on my experiences with how the Ruby projects does it's bullshit security, the users could really benefit.

Thanks for your input Thomas.
Etoile: Or why this whole Unity thing is irking me
Is 3 summer semesters of internship or summer research that different from 6 semesters? When I graduated from college (right after the dotcom bubble burst), I didn't observe any real gap between coop students and regular ones.

The coop office also refused to publish any numbers (in spite of being asked repeatedly), so I suspect there wasn't much of one.

Caveat: this was 9 years ago, and not at Waterloo. But even a few years ago (back when I had students), it seemed like the only people who couldn't find work were the people who weren't very good. Will internship experience help you if you bomb a technical interview?
I'm mostly thinking about the arbitrator scenario, or key escrow for each report.

Your current scheme suffers from the fact that once the report has been generated, the only person that can verify that a given document is the same as the submitted report is the vendor - who may not be inclined to cooperate.

It's admittedly a little far-fetched, but if there is a dispute as to the contents of the report and the vendor refuses to disclose the secret key, it ends up being the vendor's word against that of the researcher.

This can be solved by keeping the random key around or by sending it to multiple recipients. Or both. Your current strategy of immediately deleting it is pointless while the original plain-text report still exists but leads to the conundrum above.
Possibly the majority of people would know what it was before clicking, because the search engine description would tell them. In that case they're just fulfilling their curiosity, which can only be good.
No advertising is a given.

In their defense, I think we have the PC manufacturers to blame for this one. I do agree that Microsoft should push hard to minimize that stuff though.
I think that's what's meant by "changing settings". It's unnecessary overhead.
Very nice, as always.
Haven't had a chance to take a look at the code yet but will do that to, of course.
It may be great. But the title should be 'RoR' apps and mentioned earlier in the article. It sounds much more revolutionary until you learn that fact.

All apps are not Ruby or Ruby on Rails!
Wow, this is pretty amazing stuff. I sincerely hope this guy makes a pile of money off this.
Just for the record... this is an April Fools joke.
Is this Germany (judging from your username) ?
Sorry, there seems to have been a misunderstanding; I completely agree with you. I thought you were asking "Why bother using sessions keys, rather than encrypt the whole message using RSA?". My bad.
I have often suspected that virus scanner companies funded some secret offshore teams to write viruses. Until the recent spam zombie botnets, most viruses were surprising benign (but scary enough to garner media hype and virus scanner sales). If a virus writer was truly malicious, it would be trivial for their virus to delete the user's hard disk (after first propagating itself, of course).
The asset classes of 'privately held VC funded tech startups' and 'residential real estate' are orders of magnitude different in their valuation, if valuations for every company in that asset class dropped to 1/10th it would make approximately zero difference to the economy as a whole as the risk is concentrated to those with enough assets to make risky investments.

Honestly, tell me how Facebook being valued at $7 billion instead of $70 b will tank the global economy? The reason the economy tanked because of the real estate bubble is because consumer spending was largely fueled by increased liquidity of equity and that we lost about $12 trillion in asset valuations. There isn't $12 trillion to lose in the tech sector, let alone $12 trillion from a 25% price correction.
No, not all; just the good ones :)
I'd extend that line of thought a little to say that the government likely needs to be less involved than it is right now.
Stow the politics, this is NOT the place
I don't know about "major" but off the top of my head I can think of a couple hardware vendors who make one-way-transfer appliances who not only won't accept vulnerabilities from researchers, but claim that testing their product for vulnerabilities violates their terms of service, and opens you up to legal action.
Ask HN: Creating a website to swap comic books
Hello Friends,

I had this idea today and I wanted to share it with you and get some feedback and suggestions.

Every week I buy a lot of comics, I read them and then I find that I am not really interested in collecting 30/40% of them. I enjoyed reading them but I don't want to keep them. Selling them on eBay is a pain in the a, as you have to take a picture, create the listing, etc. You can try to sell them to some comic shops but they will give you just pennies. And in the end you want to give them away to get money to buy more comics...therefore you want to give comics to get comics.

I am sure a lot of other collectors feel the same.

This is the idea: I am going to create a website where I'll post weekly releases, with cover pics and info. Users will be able to login, click on the comics of the week that they got and did not like and the comics that they did not get and would like to have.

I will then match the wants and gives and ask users to ship me the comics. I will check that their grade is ok and ship them to other users.

What do you think?
The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11.4 (GNOME)
Sequoia Israel: $100m, 4 exits, 1 month
Here's the original source, which has the raw data with less editorializing: http://www.fidelity.com/inside-fidelity/individual-investing...

And here's the same survey from last year for comparison: http://www.fidelity.com/inside-fidelity/corporate/fidelity-s...
Hah ;)
For what we're showing today, the main difference is: No account required to launch an app.

We'll be showing more and more over the coming week or two as we start to share developer stories, but I'll give one hint here... http://locomotive-engine.heroku.com/

If you're looking for answers right away or want to try the beta, shoot me an email at s@bushi.do
How is the Unity Launcher like Gnome-Do on steroids? Maybe things have improved, but the Launcher of the Unity that's included in Ubuntu 10.10's repositories is really limited. It doesn't have any keyboard shortcut to load the launcher (at least as far as I can tell; it seems like super is the shortcut in current releases, but that does nothing for me in Unity 2.46), and opening things is _nowhere_ near as snappy as quickly typing "term" and then hitting enter, since it requires waiting a second to populate the list, and then you have to use the mouse to select the item.
I would love to see a video of these robotic arms working.
All this talk about minor changes that are easily dealt with through configuration feels more and more like a form of bikeshedding to me.
I've been playing around with node.js and express a bit lately and can't find any resources or examples of a project using sqlite. Does anyone know of any?
Great call on going w/ Yammer
Quick tip – How to get back RSS feed button for Firefox 4.
And I still think its awesome. I'm trying to try it out right now but seems overloaded. But as an Erlang web developer I feel left out when tools claims to do things like 'deploy almost all apps from github!' :)
Awesome article! Thank you for posting this. I just recently started really looking at Hacker News (mostly because of my Y Combinator application), but I have been really impressed with the breadth of stuff posted here.

I am a molecular biology major and used to do lab research in this area, so I find it fascinating.

I will say that the U.S. Patent Office really needs a refresh in terms of who it hires. Both in terms of software patents and molecular biology, it is pretty clear that the people issuing these patents don't understand the core issues.

The isolation of a DNA sequence should not be patentable, any more than reading data off a disk drive is patentable. Both these technologies relied on years of publicly funded scientific research and a myriad of different technologies. This company has merely built on those findings.

If they have discovered a novel way to analyze the results of a specific sequence, and determined a provable correlation between a specific sequence variant and getting breast cancer, then perhaps this is an invention that deserves patent protection in the form of a commercializable product. In no way should this restrict further research in the area, however. The entire point of the patent system is to trade disclosure for protection. These guys seem like they want to prevent anyone else from researching these genes entirely, which in my mind is just plain selfish and goes against the spirit of the patent system.

I agree that there needs to be some benefits to companies that produce novel discoveries in the area of information technology (which is really what we are talking about regarding molecular biology and software patents). Patenting genes is not the way. Patenting software algorithms is not the way.

Bottom line: Our legislators need to get off their asses and adapt our laws for the 21st Century. Or we need to find new legislators who will.
Which is presumably what Microsoft means when they say "The next PC is the room".
> There are certainly other potential issues with closing over mutable variables.

I don't really like your use of the word variable here. Do you mean objects or bindings?

> However, if Python's variables were immutable, it would have to create a new scope for the for body

(I'm guessing bindings) Sure, but it's not like immutable bindings are required for that, just go the internal iterator route and you're set for most cases.
I don't get the comments here saying this is an April Fool's joke. What are you folks basing that on?

Daniel Castro (who's giving the interview to Ars Tech) is:

[..] a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He is also a co-author of a 2009 paper on Internet piracy, which was influential on the development and adoption of the U.S. government's Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) legislation.

Just because the article was posted on April 1st, is it automatically an April Fool's joke? Or are these comments an elaborate ploy to laugh off and discredit the article and the contents of the interview?
I guess a lot of this could be attributed to the fact that the TinyGrab developers are volunteers (at least according to the article). Like many open source projects they probably focused on the glamourous work of actually coding the app and not the boring stuff like backups. I'm not saying this is acceptable, I'm just suggesting an explanation.

I could sort of see not having a completely bulletproof backup strategy in place, but with all the options available, I can't imagine not working with source control.
More screen is better for productivity, studies show
The title was based on this paragraph. Only those that did not already feel wealthy contributed to the $7.5M figure.

among those who classified themselves as not feeling wealthy, the investable asset level needed to begin to feel wealthy is $7.5 million.

Of the 58 percent of millionaires who say they feel wealthy -- up slightly from 54 percent in 2009 -- they began to feel so at $1.75 million in investable assets,
Man steers R/C car with his hands, not to mention an HTML5-based web app
Does the economy affect the type of comedy that gets made?
The only people in the universe who use those one-way-transfer appliances are big companies. The only reason you'd ever audit those appliances is because the big company told you to. Vendors say a lot of dumb things to contracted researchers (I've heard it all!), but they back down real quick when the guy who owns the budget for the F-500 bank tells them "fix this and shut the fuck up."

The only case I can think of in which a vulnerability researcher could run afoul of a vendor in this scenario is if after they did their gig for the big company, they also wanted to post advisories on their website. We tried to thread this needle back in 2005 and gave up pretty quickly. The fact is, if a big bank pays you tens of thousands of dollars to whack a vendor, everything that happens afterwards should benefit the vendor; they, after all, paid for the work. The advisory on your website doesn't help the vendor. Why fight for it? Most of the time, your NDA and MSA strictly prohibit you from publishing anything anyways.
Coming soon: Better Ads in Gmail
Not exactly.

Firstly, the average London salary is £33,187; in Birmingham it's £25,273. An average middle-class household income should therefore be somewhere in the £30K-£60K range.

The 40% marginal income tax rate does indeed kick in at a very low level compared to the USA -- at £37K -- because it has barely risen for about 20 years. But inflation has pushed a lot of regular workers into that territory, and far from a high tax payer being one of the "hated rich", it's just another burden born by the middle class. (For "hated rich" status you need to aspire to the 50% marginal rate, which kicks in on income over £150,000 a year.)

Meanwhile, the average home in the UK costs £232,628, but that's heavily skewed by London and the South-East -- in the West Midlands (Birmingham) for example, it's £177,690.

What we've got is a situation where the marginal rate of income tax rises steeply much earlier than in, say, the USA -- but there is (or was) a much higher level of social services. For example, that tax rate includes free healthcare and primary/secondary education. And property taxes are much lower than in the USA, because education comes out of central government funds.

Source: http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Country=United_Kingdom/S...

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/uk_house_pric...
Do you have your DPI set right for your monitor? Maybe the OS assumes a 100 DPI display, but if your monitor is actually 150 DPI, everything will be 2/3 the size it should be, e.g. 12-pt fonts will be 8-pt.
What about invite only with periods in which the site was opened to new members?
Sleeping Barber: Clojure x Scala
Would love your feedback on our startup: justnear.me
Well the shipping to yourself seems kind of an unnecessary middle man if you can build some sort of reputation and review system.

Other things:

- Can users ship comics easily?

- Can users ship comics safely (minimal damage)?

- Can users ship comics cheaply?
Don't really have a project, just curiousity...
Exactly, I've even seen some articles here on HN that were about this, but a quick googling seems to say that the jury is kinda out on that one. If you look at wikipedia the incomes for the lower percentiles are pretty flat, but not really declining.

shrug
> ...it takes a lot of pixels...

Just want to point out that you can hide it so it looks like a normal menu bar until you open a menu - seems a lot of people aren't aware of that feature.
So brad is asking us to ignore the irrational exuberance that surrounds funding and acquisitions in our sector? That sounds like bad advice. Business is not done in a vacuum and if you ignore the weather you risk freezing to death or dying of heat-stroke.

The example he uses of the 2008 economic crisis is a bizarre one because the only short term effect it had on startups, since we don't use the money markets, is that we all made sure our money was below the FDIC deposit insurance limit. Other than banks going under, it had little short term effect on us. [Longer term it resulted in a recession and less customers]

Not being able to raise money has a profound effect on cash flow planning and the competitive landscape. Asking us to ignore that is not good advice.
Great Article. I have been experimenting with reading content on the web with http://www.readability.com. It's a browser plugin that grabs web content and formats it in a easy to read layout.
There is no bubble. Move along, citizen. Do not look at the man behind the curtain.
Boo, which has both JVM and CLR backends.
I've always put the low-end cutoff for "wealthy" at "can I comfortably live on interest, assuming a reasonable annual return?"
Barring mutually consensual exchanges?
Why not build it in pure AS3 instead of a .fla? This means people who don't have access to the Flash IDE or Flex Builder can't do diddly squat with it.

Pure AS3 would enable use of the free Flex SDK instead.
if nobody could show their portfolio, then nobody would get an advantage from doing so.

but since people can show it in the programming world, you are at a disadvantage if you don't.

if a civil engineer had some way to show what they could do, I'm sure it'd give them an advantage.
That is certainly true, and it does seem to be on the side by default. I have a netbook-like Vaio with Wubi install that will provide quite a good test before upgrading my main PC - always lacking on the vertical. For me it doesn't take away from the ugliness: Ubuntu was starting to look really slick and "pro" with its black bars and smart new font. Those garish icons always screaming at me bring to mind a laptop covered in stickers and a keyboard so riddled with extra rubber Interweb buttons that you're scared to touch it. Of course, everything should have it's chance. I just wonder whether the switch to default status is warranted.

Glad to see the downvote-disagree is becoming ever more prevalent! Obviously an opinion on the aesthetics is totally unproductive. Here we go again... k--;
IPhone + iPad combined sales are higher than Android
"the risk is concentrated to those with enough assets to make risky investments." Meanwhile, Zynga raises $500 Million from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley. With 401k money from ordinary folks.

"how Facebook being valued at $7 billion instead of $70 b will tank the global economy" You're right, it won't. But the continuing culture of extreme risk taking will ultimately bring down the global economy.