skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Circumventing government DNS seizures with alternative DNS root servers will only be a temporary stopgap.

It's only a matter of time before the governments will mandate (by law) that every router should have a way to block certain IPs and MACs, and also offer a backdoor for government agencies to configure the router; hardware which cannot comply with this will be outlawed and illegal to operate.

With that in place, government agencies can block any IP or MAC they want, without having to deal with DNS.
Yammer's desktop client is written in Adobe AIR which is the normal web stack. It runs in an embedded WebKit browser.
Whats worse for Apple, "Kleenex" was so dominant at one point that it came close to being Genericized [1]. If the public doesn't think of a word as referring to a specific product but instead they think of "Kleenex" as a name for all soft facial tissues then in the US at least the "Kleenex" trade mark can lose its legal force.

It might be that Apple invented the term "App Store", but as long as members of the public would tend to refer to application repositories from Google or Amazon by the same term, even without Google or Amazon using it, then "App Store" isn't serving a useful purpose as a trademark and doesn't have the same legal force as a word that was in practice only specific to Apple.

I, personally, love the fact that the law around trademarks corresponds so well to their purpose - preventing consumers from being confused. This is one of the reasons I don't like the term "intellectual property", it takes three things that are very different legally and lumps them together in a way that sometimes causes people to think that the rules governing one apply to others, or that the attitudes they have towards one form should apply to all of them. Personally I'm pretty ambivalent about whether we ought to have patents and copyrights at all - but I think that trademarks are awesome and we'd be much worse off without them.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to put in the reference:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark
This is a pet peeve of mine as well. Obscurity in your crypto scheme or your SSH server's source code is obviously bad, but applying that phrase to changing an SSH port fundamentally misunderstands what the slogan means.
That's already covered, along with use of ~~ for the same purpose.
Search for images in Twitter
january 2004
Ask HN: Do you use OmniOutliner?
I'd love to know if you're using the new OmniOutliner for iPad, and if so, what do you find it useful for? I've never used it on any platform, and am curious what benefits it provides over, say, just writing notes in Simplenote.
I'm sorry that this happened to Tammy Camp, for her, for the other organizers of the conference, and for the attendees.

Regarding many of the HN posters here who argue that Camp shouldn't have blogged about this, or that she must be lying: why assume that it's about you?

As another comment notes, what happened to Camp is attempted extortion. If you've not done this to someone, Camp's blog post is not about you. Presumably, you're able to read about someone's experience of burglary, non-sexual assault, or other crime without immediately impugning the victim's motives or truthfulness, arguing that the crime was an isolated incident, or requesting that the victim just shut up. Camp deserves the same respect her, unless you can demonstrates she is lying.

And for those who doubt that Camp's blog post can achieve anything: it's not about HN. This thread demonstrates, mostly, the same tired back and forth. But there is a whole world beyond HN (really).

In that world, if you've experienced something like what Camp went through, you've just discovered an ally, and maybe the world feels a little less lonely. A win.

And if you have ever been the perpetrator of this kind of extortion, you know not to try this with Camp - a win for her - and maybe the world feels a little less safe for you and your crap. A win for all of us.

Not bad results for a simple blog post.
Oops, sorry. I must have misspelled 'floor' on my CTRL-f
To approach your points individually:

- The wider middle-class in the US are used to paying for quality. It's not so ingrained in the UK mindset, where we have been used, up until recently, to government subsidies.

- The UK market is still emerging. Note that charging $14k is only available as of next year - and will most likely continue to rise. As it does, fewer will go to university and the 'value' will drop.

- US Faculty do have higher salaries (~x1.5 - x2.0 in my experience), but good people are deserting UK universities in droves because of massive cuts in salaries, conditions and facilities. My own research group had seen 4 people from 25, including 2 faculty, leave in the past 12 months for better-paid positions abroad. I expect that we'll see another 5 go in the next 12 months. None of them have been replaced.

- Typically, a college degree in the US has been worth the outlay. It's only the last 3-4 years that people have been questioning the worth of the college degree as an investment en masse, i.e. the US market is not currently stable and won't be so for another few years as people begin to reconsider what was previously a no-brainer. This will eventually translate to higher social status for a degree (as used to be the case) and cheaper prices (and so less debt necessary).

- In the last 10 years, in the UK we have begun to view a university as a business. We're asked about cost centers, what we can sell commercially and requested to make PR material for wide circulation. As a business, we are forced to charge what the market will bear. But because there's not a huge amount of competition between universities (at least on price), that doesn't make for a particularly healthy market.
The “Careers” of College Graduates
Good lord, I'm pretty sure no-one is suggesting you use these in production. In fact it says at the top you shouldn't.

If you are writing mobile apps you should check out XUI instead of jQuery. jQuery (even jQ Mobile) is super heavy. XUI is jQ like, but it is by the Nitobi guys (of PhoneGap fame) and they really get mobile and did it right.
I always thought that universities charge overseas students a premium as it's the only chance to make money?
Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation of QM
You're confused here. Trademarks dont' apply globally like patents or copyrights, they only apply within contexts where there is likely to be consumer confusion.

Microsoft can have "Windows" brand operating systems. I could create a chain of "Windows" restaurants. A company that sells windows absolutely could not create a "Windows" trademark and expect it to have any legal force.
Do you have a reading disability of some sort? That comment was...you know what, you clearly lack the rudimentary reading comprehension skills required to grasp what's going on here. And my time is far too valuable to waste in giving you a lesson.

So if it helps you sleep better, go right ahead thinking that. I am done with this nonsense :)
The author kind of mentions this but not explicitly. When you want to use obscurity always make sure it is layered on top of security. In other words, if you are hiding some piece of information that you think helps in security, always make sure that it is still secure even if you do not hide it. So go ahead and obscure your SSH ports, but make sure you are using the latest version.

The problem with being complacent about obscurity is that sooner than later people think that obscurity implies security and fail to ensure that their systems are secure underneath the layer of obscurity. Then the system is only secure so long as what you've obscured is obscure. That is dangerous and must be avoided.
That mostly speaks to the quality of node's MessagePack implementation, nothing more. Benchmarking data format serialization is hard, because one poor implementation throws things off.
You're hitting on a point that I've touched on before. For the most part Facebook's search is pretty weak, but I've had a number of times where I have specifically searched for keywords within my friends (e.g. who is going to a certain festival).

Hashtags are a great thing that came out of Twitter...and now I'm just surprised twitter hasn't implemented a way to sort/recall certain mentions in your feed. Anybody want to step up?
No, but Google should.
So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree.

Wow, is putting words into another's mouth a standard HN move now?

Getting into college is not an insurmountable barrier. Find a professor who is genuinely interested in the work you're interested in. Start learning the background information required to do the work. Between the two of you, you should be able to figure out a way to work together. This works for both financial and admissions barriers.

There are also many kinds of substantive work one can do without a college degree.
Six Key Principles of a Successful Acquisition Strategy
I think it is wise to be cynical about zero sum games such as status and government and optimistic about positive sum games.

as for achieving goals, many of the "conflicts" fall away when you directly consider the goal of increases in standards of living for all sectors of society rather than an endlessly manipulated parade of sub goals.

If aliens came to earth and you told them about our problems, they'd probably first ask why everyone isn't studying the regions with the highest standards of living.
Bill Gates backs battery built for clean energy
This is also a best practice in CouchDB - in Couch as long as you use the UUIDs that Couch generates for you (via the /_uuids API endpoint) you'll get keys that are designed to minimize the work the b-tree has to do, to insert them.
I agree with @stcredzero , the password hash thing is nonsense.

If you expose the hashes to allow other people to authenticate your users, which I think the author suggests, 3rd party sites can simply cache the password the user provides for crunching and have BAM stolen their password.
It's misty-eyed woo-woo, but it's still fun to think of this as bad karma from "One-Click" coming home to roost.
Twitter is still coming to London despite super-injunction row
Agreed about the ugliness. A simple inductance-based charger would do the trick, but I'm not holding my breath for Apple to adopt that.
Yes, it's only $5. A good cup of coffee is only slightly less than that, and it takes all of minutes to create. It's not like we are talking about $1000 enterprise software here.
Dropbox is mixed web and desktop, as a large part of its functionality is exposed (only) through the web interface. Its desktop parts are probably born more out of necessity than desire: a web app simply cannot "sync a folder".
Check out my startup, Futureproof: http://iamfutureproof.com

Our goal is to build a large collection of small software products, including a mix of desktop and web apps, that help people form sophisticated relationships with technology. We also want to build "hardware" to support people in making healthy changes to technology habits.

Our first product, Awareness, is a C# app for Mac and Windows, already distributed through the App Store.

I'm actually looking to bring another programmer onboard, so send us your resume!
Square-anoia: your check-ins + san francisco crime
WordPress display youtube video with embed shortcode
That's kind of cool, if a bit perverse. A much more practical solution is a headless Virtual Box running Ubuntu, which you SSH into and can install anything via apt-get, etc... I recently started using this on OS X (via Vagrant) and it's super useful, for instance having access Linux LaTeX packages instead of having to deal with MacTex (MacTex is probably fine, but the 1.5 gb download was crawling for me, while `apt-get install texlive` took a few minutes) For Windows I would imagine it would be even more useful, since fewer Unix tools are immediately available. I think I would probably prefer this to Cygwin, which was always a bit weird for me.
I was excited about this at first, but I have come to think a filesystem that does away with the tree structure would be rather difficult to deal with or get used to. I will probably end up with loads of files under similar tags and it would make files rather difficult to locate due to the sheer number of them. Maybe the idea just needs a bit of refining?
Are they actually competitors? Band-Aid sells bandages for people and other people have band-aids for bicycle tires. Apple has an App Store for iOS devices, while Google and Amazon have app stores for Android devices... I'm not saying its obviously one way or the others, but it doesn't seem clear cut to me.
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wealth isn't zero sum or mercantilist. you can easily destroy wealth right now by smashing your monitor.
That's a valid point, and an impressive list - but perhaps they are able to be the best in the world because they are able to charge so much.
A lot of these tricks _are_ used in production, the result of uglifyjs/closure minification of otherwise sane code. This is just a guide for hand-tuning.
I find most of what you say here fairly uncontroversial, but this raised eyebrows a bit:

This will eventually translate to higher social status for a degree (as used to be the case) and cheaper prices (and so less debt necessary).

That seems to violate a fundamental law of economics to me: If the demand for a good increases relative to the supply, the price will increase, which will reduce demand. If the supply of the product increases then the price will fall, encouraging more people to buy the product. Prices adjust up and down until the demand matches supply. So cheaper prices for degrees, by allowing more students to enroll, would seem to me to decrease status, not increase it.
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Hundreds of movie celebrities come to mind.

I would reverse your question and name people who, even though they could have lived more, they chose not to do so: I will name a heavyweight: Albert Einstein
It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek comment to demonstrate the irony of "exposing it doesn't matter". I should probably have been more clear that I wasn't actually serious.
> Thanks to external constraints a big player is going into the right direction (for a certain set of applications where native is not really needed).

While 'not really needed' is a literally true statement, the same could be said for running water and in-home heating.

Native applications are 'needed' if you want to provide the best possible user experience; Playboy is simply doing the best they can given the constraints under which they're forced to operate. This isn't the "right" direction, it's simply the only one available to them.
If they could get equal adoption without the App Store, they'd be making a LOT more money on the same number of customers. That's the key advantage.

These app stores, the Mac App Store, Android Market, the App Store, they give you very little considering the gigantic margin they take from you. It's almost intolerable. It seems it is intolerable for at least one major enterprise, Playboy.
The link seems dead. The following works though:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/08/just-in-time...
JRuby. Windows, if you don't have the compile stuff installed.

This could be alleviated with Ruby FFI on top of a really good C implementation, but FFI is tricky.
London Is Gonna Be Pissed, But We Prefer Berlin for Startups
Some of each of the above.

In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more

True for a lot of places. Last I heard you could get Harvard for free if your parents make less than some reasonably large amount ($70K or so)

US faculty receive massively higher salaries.

True, especially compared to the UK. There is in general a lot more money floating around the US university system to make life easier. My officemate recently moved from a postdoc position here at Big-Name American University to a lectureship at Mid-Ranked UK University and was bitching about how he lectures two and a half courses per semester (as opposed to the usual one course in the US) and has to do ridiculous things like taking out his own garbage because the university won't pay for cleaners.

In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay

Well if we're comparing to the UK, then the UK is if anything more concerned with the status conveyed by education. The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school.

The main reason, in the end, is that the US is the only major country where the higher education system isn't primarily an arm of the government. Great private universities just don't exist in other countries. There are upsides and downsides to this -- the upside is that America has most of the best universities in the world (can you imagine if it didn't?) and the downside is that they can be pretty darn expensive.
I think the end user gets a lot more with a native app. However a company using a web app effectively gives apple the middle finger. It might be worth considering in the future as current web technologies such as local storage become more mainstream, at which stage it's plausible to say that apple's dominance may be overshadowed by the many vendors producing android devices.
Ninite http://ninite.com (YC W08 too!)
Making integrated devices out of graphene is problematic for all the reasons the other responses have pointed off, but it might prove a workable alternative eventually - well after Moore's law has run out in silicon due to atomic size issues.
Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them.

The more they raise the prices for those willing to pay the more money they'll have to subsidize brilliant students who can't.

"normal" people should be studying practical skills. It's a product of our egalitarian mindset that we regarded the status of research institutions as everyone's right, and then used subsidies and legislation until the elite institutions were so watered down that their degrees became a joke.

You can't give away status, status will just flee and look for darker corners to hide in.
I have never once used Dropbox's web interface (I haven't even bothered to look at it). What part of the functionality is missing from the desktop application? The only functionality I need or use is dropping files into the Dropbox folder and knowing they're not going to be destroyed if a hard drive fails or the house burns down.
What sort of state is said library in and what licensing do you plan for this? I have a need for something like this (and we have implemented a working hack to get past our current problem).
You can't use SHA-512 by itself as a secure password hash. SHA-512 is plutonium. You need the reactor to do anything but kill yourself with it.

None of those "obscurity" measures do anything meaningful to improve your security. People just do them to make themselves feel less powerless.
> - Consistent used experience, the same app can be built for every device, not duplicated (at least) 3 times which will lead to inconsistencies.

Unfortunately, this also means that every application will offer an inconsistent UX to their users, as there is no adherence to any platform standard.

> - Intercommunication, I can right now, open a web app on my mac, start using it, then send my current screen to my phone

The ability to save state on a server is not constrained to applications running in a browser.

> - Availability, I have an app on my phone with my data that works offline, I still want to be able to access thing same thing using someone elses computer / phone.

You can do this with native applications as well, however, one of the significant market shifts that has occurred is that you don't have to.

Logging into websites from public computers was always a significant security risk and a trade-off between user experience and convenience; it was simply an inefficient solution to the problem of not having your own, locally trusted hardware.

With the introduction of lightweight, high-performance mobile computing devices using always-on internet access, the need to access your Yahoo mail from a 3rd party's computer has all but disappeared for a large (and growing) percentage of the population.
> It "compromises in some areas of the user experience" but you're saying open web technologies present the best user experience possible? How?

First, that's now what he said. "My arguments for using open web technologies are purely based with the end users in mind," and "but that doesnt mean we arent arguing for the best user experience possible."

Basically, you want to know this: "So exactly how will open web technologies (existing now, or in the future) be a better experience for users than the App Store?"

In context, it allows app makers to build the apps they want for their customers without requiring Apple approval that could/would prevent said app from being deployed.

Any discussion of iOS development and native v.s. web apps must include the app store and it's conditions. If your app cannot commit to those conditions, then you cannot release an app.

You could ignore the answer, but then you are faced with answering the question: How are native apps a better option for all cases? The answer, of course, is they aren't. Any argument otherwise is being dishonest.
I'm not entirely sold on that theory, though it does make some sense (sunset is a different color than daylight). I use f.lux because my screen looks better, and it definitely reduces eye strain for me.
I think your first and last points are probably most accurate.

Rich people will pay, and poor and middle class students will use grants and loans to get through. The problem with that is the loans seem like a great deal, because of the racket, and only when students get out of college and are still waiting tables to they realize that the coming out of school with tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of debt, debt which you cannot escape, is a bad deal.

Perhaps I'm jaded because I funded my education with student loans that I used to receive a B.S. in Psychology and wish I would've studied engineering. I tried to move into post graduate studies, but I couldn't afford it - by that time I had a family and couldn't afford the time away from work.

The military paid off my student loans, but my degree has been useless since.
Show HN: JoystiCC Turns Friends into Game Pieces
http://joysti.cc/

We built JoystiCC at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon over the past 24 hours. It is an open source game platform that uses human beings as the pieces in the game. You can see a video of our real-life Frogger game in action at our website http://joysti.cc/

What do you all think, how could you see this being used?
While I'm sure it depends on the person, I no longer suffer from insomnia since I installed F.lux.
It's free. Why not try it?
> If they could get equal adoption without the App Store, they'd be making a LOT more money on the same number of customers. That's the key advantage.

Apple started high at 30%. If competition dictates, they can lower that percentage at any time.

They're also free to renegotiate a lower rate with specific content producers.
Soluto is (http://www.soluto.com/). They won TC Disrupt last year.