skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of the old PeoplePC which leased you a computer plus dial-up access for 20-25 bucks/month. I think it makes more sense bundling with internet access since people are not accustomed to renting PCs.
There's no magic that makes design professional. If you want a professional design, pay for a pro template or pay for a pro designer.
That is what I love about international travel. No phone, sporadic slow internet, no TV and $1 new release DVDs.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. -JL
I almost regret asking such a silly question already, but do you have any examples of marketing that is gender targeted so well that it's unnoticeable?
'if what we ARE telling you is this scary imagine the stuff we're protecting you from knowing.'

how fantastically polite.
Wow, that's not a very good way to use keys. ;-)

We have our own authentication mechanism that ties into our billing and quota machinery. So no such problems with Cloak.
Google updates their browser every 12 weeks, and they're making sure everyone upgrades. While IE9 is a nice upgrade, IE still lags behind the other modern browsers. Furthermore, to date they have no plans to support WebGL. Id gladly put Google in Microsoft's place.

Having said that, we should be converging on open standards.
Yale Collections Now Free Online
Same here. That part makes me question if the information from that "counterterrorism official" is reliable.
You've got a good marketing page/site for it so far, good work keeping the Mac-like look and feel. Having never paid for such a service your prices seem perfectly reasonable to me for what it provides. Great luck, guys!
We've been double checking bug reports and doing extra testing to make sure that Firefox is ready for World IPv6 day. If you find any problems with Firefox while testing IPv6 (or ever, really) please let us know at "bugzilla.mozilla.org"!
Didn't they ask for something like $75 trillion?
I've been digging into RailsAdmin for a project recently as well, and really liking it so far.

A couple things I'd like to see addressed from the author:

- How is Active Admin's approach different?

- Why would someone choose Active Admin over RailsAdmin?
Like this? http://beagleboard.org/

EDIT: sorry I was under the impression the hardware spec was open source, I guess I'm wrong.
Ask HN: Is there software for building software?
Do applications exist that allow non-programmers to create applications without coding? That are simple and have a friendly GUI?
Oh... Ok, I will introduce myself before saying that Active Admin is awesome from now on.
I think this statement is very powerful by itself for YC, TS and all other accelerators:

"From all apparent sources they have seemed be similarly aligned with founders after the same things, successful companies. If this trend continues of more accelerators, and more startups applying to them, and the primary benefit becomes out of reach of non participating companies, then it would likely have the opposite effect."

and this...

"It appears though that it is becoming more and more necessary to participate in these programs and pay the price of admission to gain entrance to the club. "

So will accelerators become the next Subway Sandwich franchise?
Thanks very much. We put the pages together pretty quickly (MVP!), but I'm constantly in awe of how fast Nick (our designer) makes things look... solid.
I think that whatever grounds corporations (and their customers) have to challenge these requests that those grounds have far more basis in the law than "it would be bad for business." If the grounds for challenge are baseless then a court will toss the case, but I think that would be highly unlikely.

People have a constitutional right to be secure in their papers and effects and the court should be the one judging where these rights start and end, and not the FBI.

Exactly what is so important that a warrant cannot be obtained from a judge before tapping these lines? Where is the justification that this is necessary to secure our happiness and freedom?

If it is necessary to repeal parts of the constitution then we should have a frank, open and honest discussion about it. The more likely case is that Augustus has no clothes.
Someone has to push the boundaries, it isn't like this is being done on an essential service.
Surely the lamest thing I read today. I was expecting some elaborate multiple encryption and obfuscation scheme involving proxies and anonymisers in addition to sneaker net in and out of the hideout.
ROME (Chrome experiments) tech showcase with WebGL
$2000 can be a great price or a very bad price. A project which has a budget of $250 is great if it only requires an hour of my time. A budget of $2000 is horrible if it requires 200 hours of my time.
I don't think Amazon, Netflix, and Google are the companies people are referring to when talking about this new bubble.
Kindle Books Become Variable Files
Its Tim Berners-Lee, of course he has a w3 email address. And yes, that is the real one.
This is a rather technical decision in a content piracy lawsuit. Distributors of The Hurt Locker and other films have accused BitTorrent filesharers of copyright infringement, and added a long list of potential defendants ('Does 1-1000,' as in 'John/Jane Doe') based on IP addresses.

A large number of people have filed motions to have themselves dismissed from the case or for protective orders that would prevent their future involvement, on a variety of legal grounds. These have been denied by the court, on the basis that the filers have yet to be named as defendants; although it's possible that that will happen in the future should the IP addresses in the plaintiff's complaint match up with the ISP customer accounts of the filers, the court decided that pre-emptive dismissal hearings would likely result in a colossal waste of time.

Most of the material in the linked opinion is civil procedure legalese that will only be of interest to lawyers. On pages 14-16, however, the court considers BitTorrent's method of operation, and specifically the plaintiff's claim that the nature of seeding is such that any downloader of a specific file via BitTorrent is by definition engaged in sharing that file for as long as the BitTorrent client remains connected to the network and the file has not been deleted. If I understand the court correctly, previous attempts to join large numbers of defendants this way failed because the plaintiffs were claiming that multiple copyrights were being infringed by all defendants - who reasonably argued that such a shotgun approach risked penalizing individuals for all possible crimes committed by everyone in a group. It was unreasonable for plaintiffs in those cases to join defendants en masse by pointing to the availability of multiple torrents of copyrighted works, because there was no basis to think that every defendant would necessarily have downloaded the same movies, and thus they could not be said to be acting in concert.

Here, by contrast, there's a good chance that people who downloaded a torrent for a specific movie went ahead and downloaded the movie, and if they were ever a seed peer, then they must by definition have been acting in concert with other seed peers to infringe upon the plaintiff's copyright. On that basis, the judge rejected the procedural argument for dropping defendants from the case at this stage and refused to guarantee immunity from future joinder. So the case will go ahead for the time being, and seems as if it will be based on a realistic description of how BitTorrent actually functions which is well understood by the presiding judge - a small victory for the plaintiffs.

IANAL, plus I have only read it through once - so some or all of the above may turn out to be incorrect. Don't construe anything I say as legal advice! Also, I'm highlighting the particular issue that interests me, so don't mistake this for a comprehensive summary either. In fact, don't read any of the above, and if you did read it just forget about it :-)
The message asking me to download Chrome on an otherwise empty page reminds me of those early 90s sites that said best viewed in Netscape 3 or IE5...

Plus it's of no use to me, seeing I'm on an iPad right now.
LimeWire Founder Settles with Record Labels for $105M
To me, this suggests that corporations have too much power in this country. This explains why the FBI is heavy-handed with their "do not disclose" style issuances to corporations. It isn't so much that the FBI is scared the company will tip someone off, but that people in general will become more knowledgeable about these activities. This poses a risk for companies as proponents of privacy will be very outspoken.

If anything, this is a great argument for why these things SHOULD be public knowledge.
I like your site, but I'm unsure how this would be better than simply using the built-in VPN stuff. I have paid VPN account configured and I use it when on public wifi.

Also, I can share my VPN account with my mobile devices -- can I do this with Cloak? I don't think OpenVPN is iOS compatible.
It will happen on 8 June 2011. I still have to configure my core access (routers, firewalls) to try to enjoy this day.
Statebox, an eventually consistent data model for Erlang (and Riak)
thanks for the feedback :-)

Is pricetack yours? Interesting concept indeed...
What kind of applications do you want to be able to build with such a tool?
it's important to remember that the W3C is dependent on working implementations for specs to become finalized recommendations. the fact that you can use the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features, even if their spec isn't finished yet, isn't some kind of nefarious plot to embrace, extend, etc., and vendor prefixes, as annoying as they are, just mean that we won't be burdened later if specs change before they are finished.

the webgl 1.0 spec has been finalized. even though this was built with some google employees and is featured on a chrome experiments page, it works just fine in my Firefox 4 and webkit nightly. I think we'll be ok.
Hi Rob,

What built-in stuff do you use (and who is your VPN provider)? While OSX is far better than most at making configuration of secure connections easy, we think there is still a long way to go. Cloak requires nothing but your username and password -- no alphabet soup anywhere.

(We also think our price/performance is substantially better than the average provider.)

As for iOS: stay tuned!
I couldn't have said it better myself. What I've witnessed is that companies are apt to lie down in favor of the FBI because building up a rapport with the FBI can be a good thing in certain business models. (don't ask).

The DoJ is well-aware of this, I'm sure, and is only too happy to throw its full weight around.
What's so hard about a kid selling candy. I sold candy in my Middle School and High School even though it wasn't allowed. I was the candy man and everyone knew it. Most kids aren't trying to build a Candy Empire or even know what they are doing takes guts. Some kids just wanted a better option like myself. Eventually I stopped selling candy to go into programming artificial intelligence for video games, which I eventually stopped doing because I was not a great programmer and decided to run my own business which is doing great.

Was me selling candy the only reason I decided to run my own business eventually or was the fact that I had the mindset to sell the candy just who I was destined to be?

I can't answer that but I will say that when you look back on it at a later time you can say hey, I was business minded even as a child and didn't know it. I think that is where these stories come from.
The advantage seemed to be the perception (based in reality or not) that Skyhook's services resulted in better (faster/more reliable) results than Google's offering. It's possible that Skyhook's sales team just did a better job of selling an identical product, but the e-mails seem to indicate that Google definitely had historically offered an inferior product (thought they felt their current offering was equal to or better than Skyhook's).
Living in Japan, I am familiar with a number of people who might try to use your software to make it appear as though they are coming from the United States, so that they could access Hulu or similar websites which are blocked abroad.

I know that, with AWS, you can choose a data center in Asia, so I suppose this type of action will not necessary work with Cloak. I am just interested if you have a policy for dealing with such behavior? It might represent a drain on bandwidth, for example.
Ask HN: Why Would I Write Web Apps In Anything Besides PHP?
I recently considered moving all my web apps from PHP to something else, mainly because I was bored and it was an excuse to get proficient with another language. However, the alternatives were not written with web scripting in mind. Python and Ruby were both designed as stand-alone programming languages with web wrappers added later. Beyond those two, I couldn't even think of a third language that was even worth considering. So I stayed with PHP because PHP was designed specifically for web scripting.

My question is: What benefits are there to writing web apps in any of those other languages that weren't designed specifically for web apps?
I believe the nature of software prevents such an application from existing. I would cite the complicated nature of all parser-generators as partial proof.

WYSIWYG HTML generators may be as close as it gets, and that doesn't end up creating much in the way of "code".
Which business models are you referring to?
Oops, I should have found that. I looked and thought there was some reason it wouldn't work. Interesting post, thanks for the fun.
I think I inderstand. I can now imagine it being sort of like watching a really fast paced and complex movie for the second time. A second viewing may enable you to peel off deeper layers of complexity (that you might have missed the first time around). Also, it can never hurt getting the YC stamp on your venture - again! :-) Thanks for the answer.
Hi gillygize,

Our full terms of service and policies are listed here: https://www.getcloak.com/policies/

There are a lot of shady looking (to me, at least) VPN providers that make a big deal about how you can pretend you're in another country, etc. To me, that's code word for "you can do bad stuff with us." We're not interested in that -- we think that security should be easy for everyone -- and so, yes, we get to decide where your back-end is located. There are other abuse issues unrelated to location that we've taken pains to prevent, too.
As a corporation that would like to resist any demands for my customers information & data stored on my servers what can I do? Currently the way the laws are written it is illegally in some cases even to notify the customer that they are being surveilled.
It's funny to see Mac advocates criticize Google for letting Android go wild and suffer fragmentation from it and then criticize them as well if they decide to enforce a few rules to improve consistency.

Damned if you do...
What do you call it when the CIA participates in the drug trafficking, is that acting with neglect or intent?
I use a pretty awful phone, and have a iPod touch that can get on wireless. I'd say I miss not having a smartphone about once a month, which is acceptable.
Citation needed for your assertion that VWAP is "REALLY easy to achieve".
And the other day I saw a HN comment for another one of these HTML5 demos that it kept crashing someone's iOS Safari browser. Apparently Flash doesn't just suck because Adobe are useless, but because interaction and animation is a hard problem to solve.

That said, this was pretty cool. The 3D was a bit "Money for nothing", and my Chrome gave me 10 seconds of beachball each time it switched from 2D video to 3D, but it's still showing that the web is moving forward (to CD-ROMs from the 90's)
Thanks for the reply.

I'm kind of torn. It would be nice to switch and forget about it, but Python is the language that works with absolutely everything. That's the biggest attraction. Libraries for everything, bindings for everything, APIs for everything. There are always purer and/or faster languages⁺, so why Python 3 over those if compatibly is poor?

⁺"There are only two kinds of languages: the kind everybody bitches about, and the kind nobody uses."
He said "don't ask" but I still would've asked if you didn't.
Well it largely depends on whether you want price stability or price discovery from your markets.

Please explain where the source of capital for the arbitrage comes from, it's not exactly clear to me who would be willing to take huge arbitrage losses from this market. (Maybe the fed could back it, they seem to like taking a bath on arbitrage)
Ironically, I have a Nexus S, one of the supposedly supported devices, running Cyanogenmod 7.0.3, and it refuses to let me watch anything because it says I have an unsupported device...
I was thinking about basic CRUD applications to start. I think it would be valuable for a business to be able to build a small, basic CRUD application to manage certain processes like QA, or any other basic data-keeping that's needed - in situations where ready-made products just don't fit the bill.
But hasn't the PR firm lost their face too? If the PR had an intent (expose FB's tactics), I wonder if they could have done it differently.
The Ballmer Days Are Over
I don't like that Coffeescript requires a compiler to create the actual javascript, but that they don't offer a cross-platform solution for this compiler. Yes, you can get the compiler working on Windows with Cygwin, but a better solution would be a windows compatible compiler that didn't make me go through the hassle of setting up Cygwin in the process.
Senate bill gives feds power to order piracy site blacklisting
A taxonomic tree of over 100 wondrous powers and 200 superheroes
No it doesn't. We're talking a few thousand bookmarks here -- I need search, not synch. (I use synch too, but for a much smaller subset (<20) bookmarks across many devices.)
HFTs aren't charging us long-term investors any "rent". They're actually giving us better trade execution. Some HFT algorithms might temporarily distort the market price of certain securities but over the long-term those minor inefficiencies get arbitraged away.
I think the basic argument is "use a one-time pad" but it assumes that an unencrypted but unique email account meets the same requirements as a cryptographic one-time pad, which I don't think I agree with.

That being said, I probably wouldn't use encryption anyway. I wouldn't do anything that might cause my correspondence to receive any further scrutiny whatsoever.
Not true.. the old Clinton era law states that after 30 to 90 days FBI has to tell someone that they asked for records.
But dude, to put it in perspective, I wish I were half as focused as you. Like I said, continually impressed. Mad props.
I didn't sell candy but I sold other stuff in middle school. (I'd burn custom CDs for a few bucks… those were the days!)

For extra quaintness, when I was 11 and change, I had a yard sale and sold a lot of my stuffed animals and all of my My Little Ponies (for $80) so I could buy a faster computer. :)
I keep SMS and phone calls making noise, but don't often answer them unless I'm out and idle. I just note that I have something to look at when I get back to my desk.
The only thing that's keeping me from switching is Django (currently 1.3), which is on Python 2.5-2.7. It might be some time before they migrate to Python 3.

Alex Gaynor mentioned that he'd like to work on porting Django to Python 3 this summer, noting that an end-of-summer port is not an official position of the Django developers (2nd link):

http://alexgaynor.net/2009/nov/28/django-and-python-3/

http://alexgaynor.net/2011/feb/17/django-and-python-3-take-2...

I don't believe Django has officially announced when they will move to Python 3, or what version of Django that'll occur with. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Currently though, I'm not sure if Django "needs" Python 3 all that badly. Eventually yes, but not necessarily right now; Python 2 is still quite popular.
Typo in title and url ("entreprenuer").
Think you are missing the point. I am asking 'is' it necessary, really? The trend is going in the direction that to be considered 'legit' a startup is compelled to participate.

The 500 check in hand investors at the latest demo-day speaks to the tail wagging the dog cycle that is beginning.
‘American Idol’: Is There a Twitter Curse?
You can build Android apps using a drag and drop interface with Google's AppInventor.
> Your rant screams inexperience.

So does the "M$" spelling...
The nuances that make an open source tool like GPG attractive to us are unlikely to make much of an impact on terrorists that believe in vast US/West conspiracies.
How long until there's a browser extension/plugin/app/thing, I wonder?
From what I've heard, the device restriction has much more to do with DRM and TPMs, in regard to supporting the silverlight stack, than actual hardware for video playback. There's a very real possibility that many newer phones (and tablets) won't ever be supported.

If you can hack that, you can enable other phones and tablets, and probably get it running on linux as well.
Blogger.com is down. Happen often?
I'm thinking of starting a blog on Blogger.com. However, the site has been down for a few hours today, off and on.

Is this a regular occurrence? Does it happen often?

Considering that Blogger is operated by one of the foremost players on the Web (Google), and in light of other recent outages (Amazon Cloud), the reliability and availability of service-based models is a technological issue of primary and general importance.

Should I post this query at Blogger?
I see it as two separate concerns. The first time around, folks criticized the result of the "open" nature of the platform (i.e. fragmentation). Now, these folks are criticizing the so-called hypocrisy in the "open" mantra itself.
You are very naive about the costs of migrating or rolling back, especially in the bank industry.
TMI.me: when you have too much to say...
Show HN: Carousel: The best way to experience Instagram on your Mac
We're working on a framework we hope to expose to our customers for just this purpose. It'll be made up of modules you can add and a GUI for field/form customisation. A bit like Microsoft Access but web based, is that what you had in mind?
> But this is why NK gets to go merrily about its way starving and torturing its citizens.

No it's not. There are 3 foreign policy "sticks" that could be used to end this situation:

1. Invasion

2. Sanctions

3. Shaming

Aggregation of frustration is not one of them.

They have differing requirements in order to be effective:

1. Requires a weak enemy military and existent domestic political opposition to the regime. Internal dissonance exists and your forces are not over-leveraged on other fronts.

2. Requires the entity to already be integrated in the global economy. There is something real you can withhold that will not cause additional mass starvation.

3. Requires high social proof. Those doing the shaming can easily deflect accusations of hypocrisy to rapidly build a global and regional (Chinese) consensus.

Notice that no conditions necessary for 1 or 2 are present. This leaves 3 as one of the most obvious routes to discuss. As the US currently has the world's largest population of prisoners, it makes it hard for the USA to end the prisoner problem in North Korea as effectively as it could. Discourse will necessarily gravitate towards how the US can improve its social proof by striving for exemplary domestic policies. It's not a matter of "moral equivalence", but of being open to moral improvement when others remind us of our faults. Unless we can think of a new kind of stick, this may remain the best way to help those in North Korea.