skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that we have a fundamental misunderstanding here. My stance is that the wrongdoing is not "fraud" because the passes which were sold were in fact valid passes for which the MBTA was not compensated. You seem to be interpreting my statements as claiming there was no wrongdoing, which isn't my claim.

Law is not a magic, unknownable realm populated by wizards who have the sole ability to understand what it means.

Law is not magic. But I am not a lawyer, and I don't think that many lawyers, let alone those who specialize in criminal prosecution or even intellectual property read Hacker News. Hence my claim that this is a complex issue for "us" to engage in, for which "we" are not fully qualified. My interest in this stems from the notion that we should be informed of the society we live in, and that Hacker News comment threads are places of philosophical discussion. Also, the Hacker News article uses the term "forged" instead of the article's "fake", and I think that both of these are incorrect. The passes produced were clearly valid, but unauthorized.

If one hypothetically believes that this case does not qualify as "falsely makes" or that the bad actor here didn't have "intent to ... defraud", one is wrong. One is not just a little wrong, or arguably wrong, or sort of grey area wrong.

I apparently lack your swagger. Given that the MBTA could not differentiate these passes from the ordinary pass, I claim that these passes are not "falsely made". In every way they behave as stolen passes, but not fake ones. Why does this matter? I suppose that I care because the headline "Forged Subway Passes" is the only reason this article belongs on Hacker News. But given that these are more "stolen" than "forged", there is nothing technically interesting about this event and it doesn't really belong here.

But our discussion has been interesting, because you have presented compelling arguments that this is actually fraud. I still believe that it is not, but the process of arguing has made me develop my intuition of something that I wouldn't normally have cared about. I certainly wouldn't have realized that I thought the event was theft and not fraud.
If you can, you should always push quickly and iterate, looking for scalability later. That is fine for products/parts of products you can easily update or replace at low cost (e.g. software), but not for those you can't replace that easily and cheaply (e.g. hardware.)
Hot Trends in Web Development
What makes the work of the web developer challenging and exciting at the same time are the ever-changing trends!
I was being sarcastic, but that's actually a pretty fair point. Snark hereby retracted!
Don’t Check-In for Offers, Just Wait for Them to Find You
So, um. These all sound like issues in the way we construct our web of trust, and not in the actual cryptography underlying SSL/TLS. I'm not seeing any alternatives or fixes proposed, just lots of criticism with no actual direction.

"Encrypt everything," is what this researcher is saying; isn't the entire point of SSL/TLS to encrypt everything? Am I missing something here?
Try Jasmine JS testing framework in your browser
What I would like to be able to do with this tool is decorate a conventional HTML site with little animations. I want to add polish without breaking the RESTfulness of the site. Flash can't really do that. If this tool can, that could give it a real edge.
Surely, if it's Important to understand why Dave left BankSimple to understand the health of the company, it must also be Important to know what kind of offers Dave has on the table now. Surely this isn't just drama!
No, he produced real tickets that he didn't pay for.
yes, it must be the government's fault that the people don't have jobs. it couldn't be that they have priced themselves out of the market with the prevailing wage in Spain vs. China. and, of course, they couldn't possibly start a company to employ themselves. it must be the government's fault. let's protest.
Clone Factory uses 3D Printers to turn you into an action figure
The U.S. Cyber Policy Blitz
What's wrong with a github account? Give them some love. Their private option is cheap. Over all once you start using github it's hard to go any other route anyway.
The Commonwealth saddled the MBTA with its transit debt at the onset of the MBTA's current incarnation. It's a poster child for dishonest representation of public expenses.

Hiding mass amounts of state debt in the MBTA (along with effectively losing every negotiation with its union and failing to timely increase fares to market value as compared to other major US cities) has sandbagged public transportation in Massachusetts.
It would appear that they do. http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/80
True. I hadn't even posed that doomsday scenario. Imagine if MS made Windows and Office FOSS, what would happen? Exactly as you state, Google would build it and make it a free binary download and offer free support of it (probably replacing IE with Chrome, and Google as the search default). This would effectively kill MS and Google wouldn't have to worry about MS funding Bing through Windows and Office.

EDIT: And to be clear, that's largely what Google's Chrome/Docs strategy is. The total revenue from it isn't very large, even if it is a success. The real win is chopping down the core revenue of someone who wants to chop down their core revenue (search revenue). But today Google has to build this all. If MS did FOSS, MS would be handing Google the keys.
Sony Subsidiary's User Accounts Hacked
I wonder if the Kindle will ever add something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Liberty Dollar is listed under "failed". As far as I've ever heard, it was just a private currency based on gold and silver, not a cryptocurrency or anything similar.
Dude, I learned so much from this one blog post of yours: http://flyosity.com/tutorial/crafting-subtle-realistic-user-...

I will definitely be grabbing some of those tutorials this Summer :)
Elections aren't the only requirement for democracy. The people who get elected also have to represent the interests of the people who elected them, not just the people who financed their campaign.

It's a problem that's widespread in the US, too. We just don't have the same level of rage about it because our political parties are good at using issues like abortion to differentiate themselves and distract from their shared support for things like reducing civil liberties and protecting corporate interests.
Other people may use their own git server or a different git host.

Anyways, since git is decentralized, why go through github? What about pulling/pushing between the user (or any arbitrary git client) and pagoda box directly?

Edit: I watched the screencast, your deployment process is a bit different than I expected so I guess using github is probably a good idea.
"I think this idea that the dietary advice of 20-30 years ago (low fat) is the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the result of a desire for a dramatically satisfying narrative."

Again, you're arguing against a claim that isn't being made. The anti-carb claim is that the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the vast consumption of sugars and other simple, processed carbohydrates. A contributing factor to this dietary problem is that even people who try to eat well have been led to believe that cutting out steak and replacing it with whole wheat bread would help them, which is wrong and was backed up by bad science.

If you are having trouble believing that people think that the obesity problem is caused by nutritionists telling everyone to drink six Cokes a day, that is because nobody is claiming that. They are claiming that the problem which already existed was exacerbated by bad advice, and that lots of people who tried hard to do something about their own personal problems were frustrated and gave up because they were told to do counterproductive things.
good remark. we're working on a new home where there will visible parts of 4-5 'featured walls' and a list of 'trending walls' to increase our conversion ratio
How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America
Making statements of fact that are true is not cowardly.

True. But stating an undesirable reality as a retort to a philosophical question is to step past the starting point.

"Accept everything just the way it is." - Miyamoto Musashi's first principle of the Dokkodo

A good thing to keep in mind.
now do i make it one?
by limitation, I was thinking in terms of the number of instances of that code out in the wild.
if we're naming competitors, here's another: http://cloudcontrol.com/
> If everyone kept their software under wraps, their [sic] would be no giant's shoulders to stand on.

There would be shoulders to stand on, you'd just have to pay for it.
our home was made in a hurry. we're going to fix it asap
Nothing wrong with github, I spend WAY too much time there :-), but I prefer deploying my personal project from my home web server. It's just adding another layer where something could go wrong to my deployment process.
videolla currently generates between $1-2k/month. we spend more on development (its still in active dev) so not reached breakeven, but growing..
It clearly does prefer infobullshit over real information, which is why the top of the BankSimple thread is about Dave Fayram leaving the company and not about BankSimple.
My beef is that nutritional "experts" tend to reverse their "advice" every 5-10 years.

- X is bad
- No, actually X is good.
- No, it turns out X is actually bad after all.
- No, actually it's Y that's causing all our problems.
- Wait, no, it's Z.

And then along comes the marketing blitz.

"No salt", "Sugar free" "glucose free" "gluten free" "made with cane syrup" "cholesterol free" "fat free" "no saturated fat" "no trans fat" and now "carb free", no doubt.

And then the vitamin supplement and herbal crowd come out to flog their latest crackpot diets and exercise regimens and trans-yogic-meta-druidic-ninjutsu-meditation.

Yes, I rage much :P
Under the GPL, the number of instances of that library, when linked to and distributed as part of a proprietary application, is limited to "zero".
Interesting survey. Although avoiding vendor lockin is about open formats and data, not open source. For example, SaaS, may create more lockin than closed source code (though not necessarily).

With that said, when I look at the hot enterprise software I see a lot of closed source software. Is this wishful thinking or something that is actually beginning to happen?
It's no longer offered, but I have a credit card from Schwab that gives me a flat 2% cashback every month on every purchase, no opt-ins every month, no tiers, no limits. The cash gets ACHd into my checking account. The card has 0% foreign exchange fees, free concierge service, 90 day price-drop match guarantee, doubles every manufacturers warranty up to 5 years (aside from things like cars), and has $0 annual fee.

And the Schwab checking account isn't half bad either.
Sure, it might be fear, uncertainty, and doubt on the part of adopters. But rightly so -- if there's one place where people are going to be conservative, it's with their banks.

The very first thing I did when I hit BankSimple.com was CTRL+F "FDIC". One tiny mention in a blog preview 2/3ds of the page down. That doesn't cut it.

It's BankSimple's job to inspire confidence in their offering. Their front page seems to spends more time talking in vague terms about how their service is going to be mobile centric, and how they're going to put me first. What their service is all about, and how it works -- the things I care about -- are buried and quite vague.
That's how you end up with the testing box on 10.4.253.2 (no DNS), time tracking at 10.3.53.234, and an Excel sheet full of these and other addresses.
They should put big red X's over each member that left, Battle Royale style.
Why submit an article about an article?
I worked at an open source startup once.
I was -shocked- to repeatedly run into the misconception that because the code was open source, anything -using- the code was open source.

I saw several potential sales get tanked because the customer had an advisor who believed that if they used open source to develop their website, they would no longer own the content. For example, a furniture company thought they would lose control of their pictures of the furniture. Another blog style site thought they would lose control of the blog posts they wrote. Literally, I am not making this up. It's like believing that Microsoft owns your document because you wrote it in Word.

No amount of discussion, examples, or logic would dissuade them. I can't imagine how this idea survives, but I saw it as recently as a month ago in a comment here on HN (which of course I can't find right now), so it's not completely isolated.

I'm not sure open source was a net win for the startup I worked at. Due to complicating some sales and assisting a few competitors, it wasn't a clean slam dunk.
'Where are you now?' question as mobile service
Pattern Shooter: tile-able patterns made easy with iPhone
Yep, it should be no problem at all. You can just use the slice tool in photoshop and export the PNGs by saving for the web.
There is no such thing as 'metabolism': just body mass, muscle mass and activity.

Big people burn more calories even when still. Active people burn more than still people of the same size. Muscular people burn more calories than the non-muscular as they have to feed their bigger muscles.

In sealed room tests fat people use more calories than thin people.

Skinny people who can eat anything they want without putting on weight tend to be very fidgety - they never keep totally still. Just wiggling a leg all day can use a large amount of energy.
Egyptians Use Twitter to Criticize Revolutionary Leader
Sensing dearth of Web porn, Playboy puts entire collection of magazines online
I remember they were planning some sort of digital currency but it seems I've confused it with Liberty Reserve. I first got involved with e-gold and other digital currencies 6-7 years ago and with so many of them coming and going, I guess my memory is a little hazy on the area.

Good catch.
Great Firewall Founder Gets a Boot Upside the Head
I feel like Hype is targeted at advertisers but they're not ready to admit it.
Except when someone on your games forum points out how players can get a 25% increase in graphics quality (By going from 80% GPU power to 100% GPU power) by stopping a certain process (your BitCoin miner). Hardcore games are going to care about that kind of numbers.

I think miners also need to download a lot of data initially (i think 500GB). Mining might require network access which has a negative impact on network latency, and a negative impact on most real time MMOs.

i.e. there are also a whole pile reasons why running a miner would pissed off your paying customers.
You articulated my opinion of rms much better than I've ever been able to. I've always called him a counterweight for the discussion.

In letting these DRM schemes take hold and become commercially acceptable, I feel that as a profession, we have failed the general populace. (I am certainly not innocent here. Although I've not developed anything, I've bought quite a few DRM'd games.)

Only a few groups (such as the FSF) have stood up and tried to raise awareness of what's going on, but it's not been enough.

Observation: I don't think the FSF's tactic of renaming everything helped (iBad, iGroan, Treacherous Computing, Digital Restrictions Management, ...), as it adds another barrier to explaining things to Joe Public. I can see what they're trying to do (make these things sound less friendly), but for the nontechnical end user it just muddies the water.
Yeah good points. Anyway looks like here's a more straight forward reason: http://guides.pagodabox.com/getting-started/git-github
"...the feature-set available in the Admin Panel and the Pagoda Terminal Client are directly tied to Github's API"
Dollars to donuts, I bet its because of the GPL license. People hear about it and then extrapolate. If you're not GPL then you need to make it clear that you're not a copyleft license. If you are GPL then its trickier because you have to call out what sorts of assets and distribution mechanisms are covered.
git aliases > bash aliases, since completion still works.

Here's mine: https://gist.github.com/916019
Radio Preacher Predicts End of the World, Web Plays Along
Learning Productivity With The Navy SEAL Team Six
Some quick usability comments after 5 minutes on the site:

The first thing you see on the homepage should be a map and list of parks in your area. Don't require a search, triangulate the location via IP or something.

Use a map to show what's nearby. Also have a (ranked by grade) list to show what nearby parks are the best.

I think the park recognition needs some work!
http://i.imgur.com/XVFKF.png

Searching for "Seattle" or "New York City" don't return any results, I can only get it to work with zip codes.

You often have to tap the "Enter" key twice to get it to actually search. Annoying, I kept thinking it didn't have any results for a term but it in fact never searched at all.

I don't know what the little spinning circle thing in the search bar does. Just seems to get in the way of me pressing "Enter".

When I type "98101" it shows "98101 (Seattle, WA)" in the autocomplete box. But clicking that doesn't add the extra info to the search box. It the autocomplete actually helping clarify the query?
For 1 - it's expensive how I have it setup. I have dedicated servers and am running full-server backups nightly with 5-day archives. It takes more dedicated machines to do this. I need to find another solution.

With Rackspace Cloud Sites, they say they backup regularly for me, yes. They recommend MySQL backups on our own etc, but it's got me covered for the catastrophic situations I believe.
Yeah, let's not make it meta
Chinese Laborers Killed While Making Your iPads
Could this be said Twitter account?

http://twitter.com/#!/InjunctionSuper
I personally could care less about his offers. I honestly don't even care about the person in question (no offense, heh). And for most startups this type of stuff wouldn't bother me. If this was a twitter clone, I doubt anyone would care. But when it's a startup whose sole job is to handle and store money, I think it's worth being a bit more paranoid of the goings on within the company.

You may disagree, but that's my line of thinking on the subject.
This seems like one of the best "right answers" to the "doesn't scale" problem. You can sell a product over and over. If it's critical to someone's business or well being (according to some definition of well being) then you can sell it OVER and over.
Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that prehistoric man was optimised for a much shorter life-span than present day man has? In that case, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that pre-historic diet isn't good in the long term?
Yes. I would say email is the #1 headache by far. Going with Rackspace Cloud and their email solution is helping A LOT. I'm moving my biggest accounts over, and they seem much happier, and I get virtually no support requests from them anymore regarding email. Amazing relief.
Regardless of where it actually stands in their ToS, I suspect that even if they wanted to start enforcing it (which they seem not to want to do based on the article), some group like the EFF would be pretty quick to mount a court challenge. The iTunes ToS[1] says, "You agree not to modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute, or create derivative works based on the Service in any manner," but I think if there was ever a challenge on people loaning their iPod (with iTMS music on it) to a friend, it would get struck down pretty quickly.

[1]http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html#SERVICE Under Intellectual Property
Open source has nothing to do with good will. It is simply a request for help. If you are perfectly fine with your workload, there is no (economical) reason to open source your product.
Polar heart rate monitors give you an estimate of the burned calories based on your pulse. That can't be too accurate though, because some people have bigger hearts which pump more blood per beat.
> Opening the source does not instil the knowledge that went into making the product.

I should have phrased my statement to distinguish the two better, but I agree with your statement.

> From which perspective? The user or the programmer?

From a ISV (handful of people making software) perspective. Why would I provide a service for free when I could do it for cash? I know this will boil down to some altruistic argument. The goal of (most) businesses is to make money, not improve the welfare of others through good deeds.

> You can also get the ingredients and recipes yourself and make food yourself. As can you do with clothing. Or numerous other things. However, people pay for service.

We are talking about software, not food or clothing. Digital goods are not physical goods so the comparison is irrelevant.

> Except for the fact that the software engineering profession is built on the back of open source.

That is purely conjecture.
This thread may sound silly, but there's some truth here. Time you spend waiting for the idea is time you waste actually implementing an idea. PMF doesn't happen in your head, it happens when interacting with the market. Get something together, pitch it, refine it, repeat. You'll get there.
Reading through these really makes me want to do something with startupstories.com (I've owned it since 2006), perhaps something similar in format to folklore.org. Anyone interested in collaborating on something like that with me? If (y): sean@uxforum.com
Are you filtering on the server side for cheating?

(I am testing it with this very comment)

Edit: No

Double Edit: well it was 99999 for a moment, back to 1, so you are doing something. gg.
Awesome... I will tell my coworker who is always complaining about my fidgeting legs that I'm exercising ;)
I'd also like more info on this - I find that the hardest part of launching anything is connecting my super-cool app with interested people.
Give me a break. You don't have the slightest clue who's doing dev work at the companies that handle your money today. PayPal probably loses a lead dev once a week; nobody writes threads about that.

This is just a nugget of drama small enough for people to get their nerdy little hands around and hacky-sack across HN. It doesn't help that Dave's someone a lot of people here know.

This isn't as big a deal as I'm making it sound, but I don't like arguments that insult our intelligence.
Poor site design. I can't read the vision statement. White out. Fixit. Simple
Hipmunk CEO: Yeah, Entrepreneurs Think It’s Getting Wacky, Too
If you buy my product with good money, you're entitled to my best support. If you download it for free, you're on your own. If you're not satisfied with my support, you're free to employ someone else. What's hard to understand? This is freedom. I want to be free, therefore I want others to be free, too. I find your attitude striking and detrimental to human need for cooperation and trust.
Ah, gotcha. We're both well versed in Mac development and are very productive in Objective-C/Cocoa, which is why we chose that platform. The App Store was also a factor, as is the popularity of Macs with designers and web developers.
I agree, If you have a credit card, it comes with the same limitation for obvious reasons.