skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Hotz incident was followed in February by a German police raid on the apartment of Alexander Egorenkov, another hacker who had distributed software that let PlayStation consoles run homemade games. Other technology companies have found ways to channel hackers' energy without resorting to lawsuits. Microsoft (MSFT), for instance, permits hackers to unlock its Kinect gaming device and invites some of them to its conferences. Google (GOOG) pays white-hat hackers who help identify bugs. Sony is far more uncompromising, says Robert Vamosi, a senior analyst at security firm Mocana. "Hardware manufacturers like Sony just aren't very good about listening when a security researcher presents them with a flaw," Vamosi says. "

That paragraph I just quoted up there is some of the sloppiest journalism I've ever seen. The analogy being drawn is completely without merit. Microsoft is "hacker" friendly because they allow people to fool around with the Kinect? And Sony is hacker unfriendly because they removed a feature (the Linux install option) that they feared would lead to massive piracy? And Google is just great because they offer bounties for security flaws? In what way are any of those facts similar? None of them are even referring to the same sort of "hacking." If Google made a game system that made its money based on licensing fees from software sales, it would do everything within its power to prevent piracy. Microsoft already does this. Running homebrew was not what Sony was trying to stop.

What I'm about to say will probably be very unpopular here. Anyway, the "hacker" (I hate their usage here... they should say cracker) excuse that they are just trying to enable homebrew software is utterly laughable as well. As soon as Geohotz was successful, numerous other companies capitalized on it and went to that next (tiny, tiny, tiny) step to enable running pirated games. Should Sony have sued Geohotz? Probably not. But what did Geohotz honestly think people were going to do with his developments? Does he want people to keep making games for the PS3? Did he honestly think that people wouldn't immediately turn around and use his progress to pirate games? The ethics of this supposed "hacker" community leave a lot to be desired, and I truly wish we could return to the old usage of the term, and stop applying it to people that are really just safe crackers and thieves.

Our laws are completely inadequate for addressing this kind of abuse now, and I dread to see what sort of draconian measures will be put in place in response to this sort of shortsighted, unethical, and lame "hacking." If you don't want a closed system, then don't buy it. This is what will give us more open systems in the future, not enabling pirates.
Stephen Levy: How Google Shapes our Lives (podcast)
It's known as "pulling up the ladder behind you".
Please see http://crawlingroad.com - 9.8% over the last 40 years is more like it if you invest wisely.
Honestly SUCKS.

And I'm not saying that to be a troll. They are so dishonest and spam-y, and from what I gather, offer very little redeeming value. I don't trust Honestly at all.
And we’re back: Sony’s Playstation Network is now online in U.S. and Europe
Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking with Einstein", actually met Kim Peek and makes a lot of interesting observations about him. Regarding these competitions, what's incredibly interesting is that all the memory champs have always been trained... people with naturally strong memories have never been able to compete with them. The same holds true for the world mental calculation championships too.
Sorry, we don't have those in the U.S. Our equivalent is called a Certificate of Deposit (CD) and those have just finally climbed above the 1% range after a few years sporting near 0% ROI. Put another way, they weren't even worth the time it took to go down to the bank to buy one.

Now...if you have something over $100,000 USD burning a hole in your pocket that you won't need to touch for a while, you can purchase something called a jumbo CD, and the 5-year instruments will just break 2.3%.
UC Berkeley Engineers help paraplegic student walk at graduation
The video of the device in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4FH2LcLtYc
Here's an excellent blog on some of these techniques and training by Nelson Dellis, the current US Memory champ: http://climbformemory.com/blog/

His older posts go into a lot of interesting detail.
> Conservative financial instruments that make 6-7% return? In the past few years?

This will obviously not be accessible to you - but just to illustrate that they do exist for special protected classes of individuals.

When I heard this from my co-worker, I was flabbergasted.

Her relatives, senior citizens in India, get +9% interest on their personal savings. Call it subsidized, but there is no risk.

She is really annoyed when they harangue her about her middling 1-2% interest rates.

http://www.bankofindia.com/rupeetermdeposit.aspx
There were a lot of people in the deal, so it is not like he sold the company himself.

Further, flip is extremely negative. VCs who do this for a living don't get very far.

I remember being lectured repeatedly about this. "are you building a company or a burger?"

Your use of terminology gives me the impression you have gathered your understanding from blog posts.

Standard disclaimer: I am both an investor in a16z and invested in them. Along with a number of other firms on both sides.
http://kotaku.com/5794533/playstation-outage-makes-some-capc...
The OP has since changed the article but IIRC `buffer` was an array of `int`s, in which case the `sizeof` operator would return 512. Generally you'd want `(i >= sizeof(buffer)/sizeof(buffer[0]))`.
PSN Restoration Begins Now – PlayStation Blog
but don't have kids :)
Khan Academy has a nice web app that auto generates solvable problems for various subjects. But even those kind of lack the quality of regular problem sets.

Yes. I am sure this is something that the Khan Academy people expect to be working on for quite a few years, building better sets of problems that are amenable to online scoring. One current attempt at that (which works better than Khan Academy, in my opinion) is ALEKS.

http://www.aleks.com/

See an earlier HN comment in another thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515796

for quotations from mathematicians about the distinction between exercises and problems in learning mathematics.

As for your thought about a "Wikipedia of course material," there is already Wikibooks,

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

but it is the backwater of Wikimedia Foundation projects (often becoming a hang-out for editors banned from other Wikimedia Foundation projects) and has few active editors. It's tough to get good-quality academic work out of unpaid volunteers.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...
milliseconds is pretty readable. What's not readable is "9.7" and 100 because I am not sure if that's in seconds, milliseconds unless I know the default.
Ask HN: What is the line between Ham and Spam in Viral Apps?
I was reading the thread on Honestly.com ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548874 ) and their Spam e-mails and wondered where the line is. I'm planning on launching an Application where others can create information about you, what would be acceptable behavior?

What frequency is ok, vs spammy?

If you get an e-mail every time someone comments about you that feels spammy.
Once a day?
Once a week?
In aggregate (all comments by many users) once a day? Once a week?

What about requests from someone to comment about them?

What is the line between Ham and Spam in Viral Apps?
Google Reader is awesome
It's meant to provide a compatibility layer between various browser automation tools like Selenium, Windmill, etc.

To the poster - it's a neat idea, but I know of very few people that are writing tests with more than one of those tools. And if that's the case, what you've written is just another layer of complexity. It's a nice fluent interface, but there are enough eccentricities to each testing tool that I don't think it would be worth the tradeoff.
I'd be interested to know where did they obtain your wife's photo, and under what sort of terms/agreement are they using it?

Does Facebook allow third party sites to use images for any use (I'm assuming the pic was from Facebook)? How is this (using a pic of your wife and claiming she's a member) not outright deception?
Don't listen to siblings. :) If you can afford to _free run_ (which google for) your sleep just do it.
I think I've taken care of this by making the sections fixed widths. Thanks again for the feedback.
Forget iOS. Forget Android. This Is Microsoft’s Market, Baby
The U.S. is becoming a 'server nation'
Ask YC: Starting today, how would you most quickly earn $1M in profit?
I know this is not the typical direction for YC startups. You'd normally want to build an app or service that could eventually generate tens of millions of dollars. But what if you could be satisfied with just one million?

i.e. would it be a new SaaS website, an iPhone app, an Android app, a multiplayer game, or what.

The more details the better, but if you have an idea that you'd like to keep on the downlow, maybe just mention the app/service type. Thanks!
This could be cool, but I'm wondering how many people would want them separate vs. together?
I helped yank a motor from a wrecked stock car when I was 3 (I was running the crane while dad and his buddy had their fingers in there). I got to play with the drill press, grinder, and welder before I was in school.

No, I didnt grow up on a farm. But dad DID, he was overhauling tractor motors at 10, and driving at an obscenely young age (first ticket at 12: no license).

I knew how to drive a car before I was in high school, and was playing with carbon composites at 15 (left over b2 bits, whee).

It IS a knack for these sorts of things, but also having someone around to help get you started, combined with an interest in what ever you're working on.

This is no different than how most of you learned to program. Well, I guess it is: you're not sitting on you butt while you do it :)
Dr. Moira Gunn is great! I only wish they spent about another hour on the subject...
It's simple. It works. It's free.
I think what you've done is cool, but lets be clear that this is not really a testing tool, per se. It's just an interface that is compatible with several browser automation tools.

Cucumber, FitNesse, and robotframework are testing frameworks. xUnit frameworks can act as one. If you look at Robot's architecture (http://robotframework.googlecode.com/hg/doc/userguide/RobotF...) what you've written would occupy the "Test Tools" tier.

A nit pick - 'acceptance testing' really refers to the purpose of the test, whether it's automated or manual. Splinter is a test tool - it would work equally well for regression testing, smoke testing, etc.
The Realtor lobbying group (the National Association of Realtors) is bigger than Exxon's, number 4 on the list: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

Getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction would probably be the best thing to happen to the US since the Constitution. Especially for people in less than desirable neighborhoods. Slumlords wouldn't be able to function. Housing prices would go down, rents would go down, people who wanted to own could own affordably, and renting would be insanely affordable.

The U.S. Tax Code is one giant game that steals short-term investment power from the majority people (low to medium income people) and gives it to the wealthiest people for them to write new rules of the game.
Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder
Quick review: Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1.
The reason what you're saying is unpopular here is because it is fundamentally incorrect.

What difference do you see between hacking your PS3 and hacking your kinect? How is hacking your ps3 "cracking"? In my opinion, and I suspect that the vast majority of technologically literate people would agree with me, what happened with the PS3 fits the classic definition of hacking perfectly.
Please flag this article. Why do we feel the need to discuss how much C/C++ rocks/sucks repeatedly? HN should frown upon bikeshedding more than it does.

If I wanted an echo chamber, I'd be on Reddit.
Start my own religion.

No, really.
not really a fan of all of these "magic bullet" posts lately. everything you mention can be turned into a real business, do some homework first before asking for the time and thoughts of people who have their own lives.

i guess my first piece of advice would be to stop being lazy. nothing you mention will come before that.
Amazon must be so happy that this happened. It started right at the end of the AWS partial downtime, and has completely recontextualized how badly a service provider can screw things up.
You could think of it as an alternative API for Selenium WebDriver. It uses Selenium to be able to drive Firefox and Chrome, although the idea might be to add other back-ends in the future. Splinter's API may or may not be better, but Selenium's major advantage is that many test cases can be written with little to no code using Selenium-IDE. QA can generate test cases without programming resources.

Splinter seems to inherit some of Selenium's weaknesses. There's no way to test HTTP status codes and headers, so you can verify that the user sees the error but you can't verify that the user agent sees it. You can't test that static resources are being properly cached (or not).

It also seems to add new limitations. Selenium has complete support for drag-and-drop, moving the mouse around, etc. I don't see equivalent functionality in Splinter.

Timeouts seem to be handled worse than Selenium. There's a default timeout of 2 seconds for requests. I guess your test is expected to assert that the content is there after each request, to fail on timeout. Since partial content can be delivered (on rendering errors and possibly on timeout during rendering), I guess you need to check for the footer's presence. Timeouts seem like such an exceptional condition that I'd just throw.

Perhaps because of the version of Selenium they're using, the sample sleeps for 10 seconds after doing an asynchronous file upload because it can't wait for the IFRAME to load. This means that the test case can't finish faster than 10 seconds (a problem for large suites) and the test can fail (if the file is large enough or the network is slow enough) even when the application's behavior is correct. Selenium (in trunk, at least) has waitForFrameToLoad/wait_for_frame_to_load that looks like a better solution.

None of these are fatal problems, especially for a young project. A good API can be a very worthwhile thing.
The website looks fine, but the service seems kinda shady.

They are "not a bank" so that FDIC insurance doesn't apply to you it applies to whatever bank account they are using to hold everyone's money. If they go bankrupt I am not confident I could get my money back.
At what point is the physical need for an artificial substance considered an addiction? Not criticizing, just honestly wondering.
Having said that, hopefully the team who created this reads HN and will respond to this and save some face.

I've worked at this company. Not honestly.com but I've worked at the type. The people at the company who read news.yc have no product decision power. The company is quite obviously run by the marketing division.

Also, while this practice is indeed deceptive it's also fairly benign and common. It is however just the gateway. When a company starts doing this they're just going to slide further and further downhill.

First comes the backlash like this blog post and then the effectiveness of the spam starts dropping because you've hit a good % of the population you'll be able to dupe. The rest will start reporting you as spam and your email delivery rate is going to plummet.

Next comes the desperation to keep up the growth numbers. Things are going to get much spammier and much more "marketing black hat" soon for honestly.com if their CEO doesn't have strong opinions against it and reigns in marketing. They'll likely end up like classmates.com and any other number of spammy social sites that didn't and won't ever go anywhere.
Http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art201105154213321
Work hard and show up enough times to get lucky.
Oh, like that. When I read the title, I imagined something somewhat more Futurama. How very disappointing.
I envy all of you people who "choose" how many hours of sleep they will have (or not have). After you have kids, especially if their sleep pattern is very inconsistent for no apparent reason, you just take whatever you can get.
Unfortunately, you may not be ready to sleep at 10pm that night that your child will decide to wake up at 1am ready to go about her day...
Don't pay attention to me. Just another rant from a sleep-deprived parent... ;)
Anyone notice how all the comments, regardless of who posts them, are marked as from 'jitender'? The posters are riffing on it, it's hilarious.
If you are satisfied with 1M, here are some good bets:

- Take up a high-paying corporate job. I would join a pre-IPO company such as LinkedIn where you'll get a competitive salary, stock options that will likely be in the money and probably a good deal with the employee stock purchase plan.

- Join one promising startup per year as an early employee. Vest enough stock to be over the cliff, exercise your options and leave. This is essentially similar to what an angel investor does, except that you cannot do it in parallel.

- Start a "traditional" business. In the US making $1M in 5-10 years of running many kinds of businesses is pretty straightforward if you're willing to make the effort and can stick to it. I actually did this: my former consulting business made seven figures over four years.

If you want to create a new product or service, 1M is a completely arbitrary number. You should aim to build a business first, and once that's done think about ways to keep growing it until you're satisfied.
So does Kevin Rose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLyFUyZJ5ek&feature=youtu...
(Which not many people do.)
When left to my own devices I simply sleep when I feel tired. My normal cycle will be something like sleep for 6-12 hours and stay up anywhere from 16 to 20 hours. Sometimes I'll take a nap for an hour or two somewhere in there. As far as I can tell there's no real pattern day to day but on average I drift a couple hours or so around the clock every day. Every couple of weeks I'm back to a "normal" schedule.

When I have a 9-5 job though I end up tired one day and fine the next. I end up getting up at 8 or so and going to sleep at either 11 or so because I was really tired or 3-4 am because I wasn't.

f.lux actually did help a lot. I was much worse when I didn't use it (I could never get to sleep early so I was always tired.)

Anyway, I'll do some research into melatonin supplements, thanks for the lead.
You start with two million ...
The initial cost of a phone seems to be subsidized by the carrier's data plan contract; a phone that calls and texts for "free" would look more expensive up front than its competitors. And if AT&T is even slightly telling the truth about the "load" phones create on its precious network, a Skype-only phone would have to impose a significant tax on any WiFi network it passed through; so how long do you think there would be decent free WiFi in areas that become bogged down by phone Skype traffic?
By that logic, you shouldn't use any dynamic language, because someone could monkey-patch every function and you'd have no guarantee what exactly was being called.

Also, you forgot macros in your list of gripes, as they can stomp on literally ANYTHING indiscriminately, despite being declared far away from the actual invocation point.
I'll give you a hint: renewable and power grid technology are not stuck at where they are now. But they will be if we don't invest in it. Which is less likely if we build lots of present-day fission stations.
I have to disagree with some of the "warts":

operator[] adds a member to a map if it does not already exist

The main theme of this article seems to be "C++ gives you too much flexibility," but this is a case where C++ is enforcing a default behavior and limiting your flexibility. In Python, for example, understanding code that queries for a key in a dictionary requires you to know some context about whether that dictionary has a default value for missing keys. For all the quibbling the OP does about operator overloading, I'd expect him to be grateful for the predictable nature of map's operator[].

local static initialization is not thread safe

This is just wrong: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1270927/are-function-stat...
Probably when it causes withdrawal symptoms?
The Kinect hacks consisted of using the Kinect device for reasons other than originally intended. No laws were broken. The intent is basically pure. The hackers (because they are real hackers) just asked themselves "what else can we do with this hardware?" They broke no laws. They did no economic harm to MS, and if anything, helped them.

On the other hand, the PS3 hack will primarily be used to enable piracy. That's it really. Did it initially enable homebrew games? Yes, but is that what the vast majority of people will use it for? You're deluded if you think otherwise.

The problem I have with non-ethical non-consequentialist crackers like Geohotz is that they are not solving a legitimate problem in the first place. If you want to make open systems, then stop providing monetary support to closed systems in the first place.
I see nothing deceptive at all about the quiet car claim, as you've worded it. I immediately assumed they meant quieter on the inside. Why would I care if my car is quieter from the outside? I'm inside it when I'm driving.
I honestly can't imagine feeling good about that kind of work.

"With great power comes great responsibility."
- Uncle Ben
How successful is Plaxo, really?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/plaxo.com/

I think they had their greatest moment when Joseph Smarr negotiated the OpenID+OAuth hybrid protocol with Google. Google subsequently poached him. They don't seem to have any other aces up their sleeves to survive.
Trollbusters looks at the Lodsys patent
I was thinking about a system like this when reading the article. Does something like this already exist?
The Number 42:More than just the ultimate answer
Just go into #bitcoin-otc or #bitcoin-pit and act like you want to buy A LOT of coin on Mt Gox, and be a little blasé about it!

Perhaps the reverse is true for lowering the price!
Ask HN: Searching for information with fine granularity
Hi everyone,

I've been a regular reader here and I just registered today to ask my first question to hopefully get some feedback about the problem that my startup is trying to tackle.

The Problem: Wouldn't it be nice if web searchers have the ability to find information with fine granularity?

E.g. Let's say you're looking for a person, then you would be able to do a search such as:

I want to find a single 21 year old pasta-loving female with green eyes who graduated with a Bachelor's Degree from Harvard in 2010 and is working as a Software Engineer from 1 January 2011 to April 2011 under the supervision of a 30 year old be-spectacled married male, of three siblings, who has been working there since year 2000.

Is this a real problem? Are there any startups already doing this?
I can't believe I read two of his books and all of his New Yorker articles before I realized that he was sputtering diarrhea.
Do geeks make better adults?
My 3G is still on 4.2.X so this may only be for 3Gs and newer devices.

You may be able to un-brick it by downgrading if you are a developer, I know I've switched versions several times, including recovering from scary notices like the phone only wanting to say 'connect to itunes'.