skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean."

Eg, be naughty, not evil. Whether they crossed the line or not, dunno. It's a far cry from Microsoft intentionally leveraging their OS monopoly to destroy companies and corner industries back in the day.
The same scheme has been run in Manchester (England) at the Victoria Station car park for as long as I can remember. Luckily my Italian accent and angry face is enough to keep thugs at bay, but I bet they're tolerated by local police as long as they don't threaten the locals too much.

In order to fight the scam, ticket machines now print your plate number on the ticket itself, so if you buy one from the thugs, you are risking a fine. The fact people keep doing it shows very clearly how parking charges in central Manchester are unrealistically high.
Interesting comments, thanks everyone.

So, is it that generally start-ups just don't patent?

We've discovered two main things: Generally when companies start getting traction, they become a target for patent suits (i.e. Foursquare). Secondly, for start-ups that do have patents and end up going under, their IP is often sold to trolls and eventually can circle back around to hurt other start-ups.

We want to help stop this by building a crowd sourced defensive patent pool, where everyone who does have patents comes together and agrees they will not assert against each other. Assuming start-ups have patents, is this not something they want? Or do we not have the right model?
Hey that's one of my favorite pieces of software too! I moved to Glasgow to work on it with Arthur. The Glasgow School of Art rocks on Friday nights! ;) And you are correct about PdB's true meaning.

The Wee Man says...
Here You (that'll be right):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scNLfr1EP08
How To Get My Job - Becoming a writer, by Jerry Pournelle
You certainly can put those saved hours to use in a side project or consulting. They're hours of "work" time you get to keep for yourself. If you just use them to watch more TV then you're right, it's not a useful way to measure.
And add to that a rapidly increasing average age.
I think the "vote" recorded in the link is from a long time ago. Looking at the php.internals mailing list from today, this is what Rasmus is saying:

"Other than a couple of grumpy old-timers, I
think we are in agreement that we should add a short array syntax.
Whether we should extend that to also add a short object syntax is a
secondary question." (http://news.php.net/php.internals/52597)
Where they really cleanup is overtime. And on the last year on the job, they work ridiculous hours, perhaps sleeping at a desk a lot of the time. Pensions in California are based on the last year of pay.

Yes, they do put their lives at risk and for that I am appreciative. But I'd appreciate it a lot more if they were a lot more responsive to the citizens who pay them.
Because, potentially, it can be used by Google to increase site rankings.
I think it makes more sense to have the button match the language of the page content. It would be a bit jarring to see a single Japanese button on an otherwise English page.
To the tune of probably 1 or 2 cents. Not saying it shouldn't be mentioned, but let's not scare people away here.
> Another problem with stopping and restarting with every mistake, is you learn to stop and restart when you make a mistake.

The key is not making mistakes in the first place! Do slow practice on short passages. If you make a mistake then decrease the tempo (or play a shorter passage) until you can play it correctly. Repeat it until you can't do it wrong. Then increase the tempo.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~schuring/Oboe/practice.html
Lott is also the guy who predicted that Australia would become a lawless wild west with stricter gun laws in place after the Port Arthur massacre. He overlooked the point that we never really had guns anyway, and the laws were only restricting automatic rifles and requiring guns safes at home, and that after a one year slight rise in crime (crime is cyclic), crime has dropped markedly since that point (for reasons entirely unrelated to guns, because guns don't really factor into our society).

This wouldn't be so much of a big point, except that he did spend a lot of time trumpeting about this single year of slight rise in crime. If you read his studies at the time, he also grossly misrepresents things like doing that trick where you report going from 4 to 5 incidents a year as "OMG! 25% increase!" (can't remember the exact number)

Kleck is another guy with crazy stats. In one report he
mentioned that concealed handguns saved 230k lives per year in the US. I crunched the numbers to see how that would translate to our 'lawless', 'gunless' country, where criminals 'have free reign', and it would mean we would have 15k deaths because we don't do concealed gun laws. Turned out that our annual murder rate from all sources combined is about 300. Part of the pro-gun propaganda is the implicit assumption that every crime involves death or rape.

I've spent a lot of time looking at gun issues over the years and started out from a total anti-gun perspective, with the exception of farmers and security. As I've examined it, the problem really seems to be handguns. Rifles don't seem to be so much of an issue - anecdotally at least, it's hard to conceal a rifle. The armed Swiss that's so often reported are armed with rifles, too (interestingly the 'armed society is a polite society' people always seem to leave out west Africa...). When you start looking at the statistics in the US, it really jumps out at you how bad handguns are there. I've also never, ever, seen any pro-gun argument make note of the role of the startling increase in US incarceration have an affect on crime rates. It's an interesting topic and blinkered passion rise on all sides, that's for sure.
This is unbelievable. Great app...I wish there was something like this for my bike, but whatever "that" would be, would probably get stolen.
I have no idea what this is about. Can someone enlighten me?

And before you ask, yes, I know what event driven programming is, and how to tie callbacks to actions. I've written large (>1M process) systems that work by callbacks, events, and message passing.
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/billing-changes

On June 1, 2011, Heroku switched from billing for “dynos” to billing for “dyno-hours”, which is more clear. This brings pricing inline with the new process model, wherein you can run one-off processes as well as manipulate the dynos for each of your app’s process types independently.

The vast majority of apps will see a 1% - 10% reduction in overall monthly dyno charges.
Previously, Heroku included “1 free dyno” with each app, which is equivalent to between 672 and 744 dyno-hours (depending on the length of the month). With this switch to dyno-hours, we are converting the included free dyno to a fixed 750 free dyno-hours. This makes more sense, is more consistent, gives all users additional free dyno-hours, and allows the free dyno-hours to be used for any kind of process (web, workers, one-off admin process, or any other Procfile process).
How is spam an existential threat to email? Spam filters have gotten exceptionally good, to the point where I find it hard to believe that anyone using a decent filter receives enough true spam in their inbox to make them stop using email altogether.
Yeah, I decided from the start that I wanted to stay on the right side of the law on this.
Plus it was stolen from my house, so the guy knows where I live.
I understand promising riches but "hot Groupon girls"? What does that even mean?

Brought to mind recent news about Munich Re, a big insurance company that admitted that it rewarded workers with sex parties (http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...)
> For wrong encoding, it may stop and signal error

You can't tell though. If you get data with the wrong encoding it's almost impossible to tell.

At a minimum you'll need to know what language, and from that you may be able to check. But in that case what if the language is wrong?
Porn has also been somewhat instrumental in affirming individual freedom and occasionally pushing the boundaries of civil rights. Similarly, illegal p2p helped shaping a debate on the limits of current copyright legislation (which is far from over).

Not all innovation is technical.
Detailed slides here (pdf): http://www.lucenerevolution.org/sites/default/files/Lucene%2...
Video:
http://vimeo.com/16063395
Your solution is bootstrapping in the very literal and very impossible sense.

You can't use bitcoins as votes to verify transactions, because until you verify the transaction chain, you don't know how many bitcoins anyone has.
I keep thinking about whether this will spell doom for the photo services, but then I begin to remember that I use TweetBot and not Twitter for iPhone - and why. :)

I look forward to how the increased competition will force the photo service providers to prove their product.
No, they don't care. I have heard them say to college interns that they should stop spending money on school so they can work sooner.
Gruber hints at deep Twitter integration in iOS 5
It's fairly temperate for sub-Saharan African, though, isn't it? I have a mania with Mediterranean climates they are so habitable yet rare in the world, and startups seem to congregate around them- Silicon Valley, Google's forays into Cape Town with Umbono, and Santiago de Chile being Latin America's startup capital seem to indicate that good economic opportunities follow good weather.
I wonder what one has to do to get them to respond. Perhaps calling an attorney and getting a search warrant?

People that steal without being punished are going to keep doing it. But preventing crime really isn't in the best interests of big city unionized police forces. Most have effectively insulated themselves from the demands of the average citizen.
Wild Wild Web Development
Actually UTF-8 is both an encoding and a character set. The character set happens to be "all of them".

UTF-32 is a very bad idea. You have issues with nulls and byte order. And on top of that it's basically useless since it solves no problems at all, while wasting space.
Lodsys sues app devs: mostly iPhone/iPad but also Android and Mac apps accused
For people who care more about the experience of what they buy than their actual purchase, specs really don't matter. You can't force someone to value substance over style once they've made up their minds.
Nissan, Renault Debut Almost Identical Electric Car Ads
I don't think Apple expected Lodsys to back down - they were in negotiations with them afterall [according to Apple's letter]. The letter was intended to encourage developers to continue to develop for Apple's platform. If they had been serious about stopping Lodsys, Apple would have been in court seeking an injunction. However, the downside would have been Apple potentially setting a precedent that established greater obligations toward developers than currently exist - and that has such severe downsides to their business model that they won't do it.
I'm the owner of the tumblelog, This Guy Has My MacBook, and the one whose MacBook was stolen. All I can say is that it's not a marketing stunt, and I'm not collaborating with Hidden in any way. I'm simply mentioning Hidden because it's the only reason the tumblelog is possible.
My only usage for a bookmark bar is for javascript bookmarks such as readability and HackemUp
Webian Shell: A Minimalist Browser With ChromeOS-Like Ambition
This is a modern day wanted poster. I think it's completely fine. He hasn't been convicted to any material degree: He's still free, unhurt, and in possession of the item.
Hi Jason (since you're reading this!)

* I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate & undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so.

* Interns at my company get paid, and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship.

I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools".

edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is working to make all schools expensive.

My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.
Ask O.J.
You're right. To me, it's not their use of (effectively) plaintext that is worrisome. It's that the developer characterizes base64 as "encryption", which tells me that they don't even understand the security implications. As an example of a non-worrying response, here's Pidgin's documentation on their choice not to encrypt passwords: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords
super slick
Every secure password storage scheme is randomized. None of them need explicit salts; salting is built in. If you have to provide the salt, you are doing something wrong.
My brother took a Python class his Senior year of high school

The best I got out of high school back in the early 90's was an "Intro to Computer Programming" using Turing[1], of all things on a Macintosh Classic. Of course we didn't have the internet either back then, but I digress.

You guys are so lucky to be growing up post internet. :)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language)
NTLM is not difficult to crack. It's basically md4.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I have C++ code that will turn an ASCII string into its NTLM hash here: https://github.com/16s/NT_Hashes
Either you know what the character set is or you don't. If you know then convert it into something sane and PHP functions work on it just fine.

If you don't then you are stuck in any case, and PHP doesn't hurt anything since it's binary safe. And presumable since you don't know what it is you avoid using any text functions, and treat it as binary.
As they did with DabbleDB and Values of N (I Want Sandy). Both cool products, neither had overwhelming traction, both shut down when the deal closed.
Don't forget with AWS offering GPU instances, this stuff is also becoming close to "cracking-as-a-service".

While unethical (perhaps, to be debated) you could even create a startup in this arena just to do this.
in-app purchases, no?
I would guess the most likely next step is integration similar to what is seen in Android with contacts existing on the phone.

I could also mean an almost de facto replacement of text messages.
Nice hack in there. But the "bad guys" are already using the .htaccess for a while as well. Posted about it here:

http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/05/understanding-htaccess-attack...
Google's I.P.O., Five Years Later (2009)
Ahhhh that would be why, I didn't notice the 'future' billing change that is supposed to happen tomorrow.

I'll edit my original post to clarify.

On a more serious note, thanks for the great work Heroku! Very excited to see you guys turning into a generic service platform with a strong API based addon presence.
Dropbox is preloading crap on android phones... will this company just hurry up and die already?
Skype pushes gaming software down users throats
If iCloud is about iTunes, why isn't it being announced in September with the iPod family updates, instead of at WWDC?

My guess would be that this is an integrated component for iOS/OS X (more then just iTunes) which seems to be the main focus of this show's releases.
FFmpeg receives legal threat from ex-dev over disputed logo
Of course, is there any alternative? Heuristics aren't a good solution.
Around Greater Manchester, reg-tracking ticket machines are still the exception. It might have something to do with costs -- i bet they break more easily (they need input buttons) and cost more upfront.

Or it might be that local authorities here are still somewhat sympathetic to the little guy... It's supposed to be Old Labour territory after all.
Interesting. How will it scale, though?
Continuous Client: Our multi-device dream but how do we build it?
Exactly what I was going to say. This is only acceptable if the website is a setup, otherwise it's just criminal to put that pictures with those accusations on them.
Given the current scope of the problem, this is an appropriate solution.
The only thing I don't like is that the URLs seem "dirty." IE I don't like seeing kajillion digit IDs with no human meaning.

Anyone have any solutions to that?
IANAL, but I suspect it would still cost the targeted developers more than $1000 worth of lawyering to fend of Lodsys in the meantime. Expecting to collect on that requires you to believe that either a) Lodsys won't make good on their threat to sue, or b) that Apple will somehow both intervene and win before they do. It's still going to be easier and cheaper to just give them the money.
Groupon is mostly a sales organization (not a technology company), and is supposed to have a lot of attractive female sales professionals.
Hm. I don't know that this is a defense either - but this design decision was at least made deliberately, with awareness of the trade-offs involved.

" The find bar is presented as an overlay in order to prevent page relayout when the bar is shown or hidden. If the text the user is looking for is under the bar, it will scroll the page, or slide out of the way."

http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/find-in-page

There seems to be a consistent, understandable aversion to pop up windows within Chrome. Excepting the Downloads bar, there also seems to be an aversion to shrinking the display area of the screen. Putting the Find in Page UI overlaying the site causes the browser to show more of the page than if it shifted the page down, something that is clearly a high priority for them (see the Status bar for an example).

Every design involves compromise. I think I prefer the way Chrome went on this one.
There's some more information on the project homepage - http://www.ffmpeg.org/. The news entry isn't anchored so I couldn't link to it directly.
Do real humans send out advertisements to strangers on behalf of websites? Making sure to cite pageviews?

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he confirmed his suspicion before blogging about this. But even one e-mail like that is suspicious.
Not when you consider how a large number of PHP programmers "program" on a day-to-day basis.
Given that they bought 'future' license rights to a patent and not previous entered into patent license rights.. what other laws factor into the case?

I do not think RICO applies here just yet. Certainly filing untrue claims against a party that will not be a party to any patent claim is not too bright as a business model.

In any case both Apple, Google, MS, etc would be the ones acting on legal cases to remove or keep an app in the market not the individual developer. I AM NOT A LAWYER.. however would it be wise to see whether Apple, Google, MS, etc fight this at the DCMA/case level of when a court tries to request a take down?
This quote needs context.

Wolland goes on to say 'they will make the offer and they will give of their own accord,' and then, once he's made the offer, he encourages Margarita to ask for whatever her heart desires.

In other words, when someone offers to help, take them up on it. Which is what FlightCaster did.
Do you trust CACert enough?
Here is a metric that should be measured, reading level: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

In the 16 or so years I've been online I've watched many communities grow, expand, and vanish. For better or worse a large community never functions the same as a small one. Beyond theories and conjectures, it would be interesting to know why.
If you need a firearm to deal with an attempt at mild intimidation in a carkpark, you should take a look at your self confidence.

In these situations, a cheery, "Nah mate, I'm alright" combined with just the right amount of eye contact and a swift exit is more than enough to resolve the situation.

Do you really think its part of these guys business model to actually attack people who don't give them their parking tickets? How long do you think they'd be able to continue this scam if they that was their policy?

These people aren't totally stupid. They are perfectly capable of realising that its not worth spending the rest of the day dealing with the repercussions of assaulting someone in a carpark in broad daylight, when they could let you walk off and wait for the next "victim," carrying on the scam as normal.
The law hinges entirely on the term "expectation of privacy" so what you do you mean by "somewhere private"? You mention a sofa so if your friend invited you in somewhere like the living room (ie. no bathrooms, weren't filming his naked kids, etc.), my understanding is you would be fine. Your friend might not like it, but legally similar situations happen daily, it's called Facebook.

Imagine taking a picture at a party with intoxicated people in it, do you get everyone's consent before snapping the pic? What about being filmed on security cam driving past an ATM? So those are two examples of where although you might not actively expect to be filmed, they are still protected filming locations.

edit: typos
It seems to me that this is going to be a bit like the Pipes tool from Yahoo, except instead of a data mashup coming out of the combination of multiple services you will instead have some kind of "action" taking place.

From the article: "For instance, you can use Google reader starred items to share images on your Tumblr blog, or customize how and which photos from your Flickr stream show up on your Facebook wall."

So, I guess that ifttt will allow you to define workflows such as:

IF "I star a Google Reader item" THEN "post it to my Tumblr blog"

I can actually see this kind of thing being useful to some people.

Edit: They actually have a WTF page which says what I just said: http://ifttt.com/wtf
You may want to if you're being stalked and you used your real name as your username, and there is personal info attached to your submissions that could help the stalker locate you. Not saying it's likely but it's possible.
I am in a similar situation, and while this is not a pay cut - it is lower than I wanted (I took a 30K pay cut for my current position, which I am leaving).

I will be working from home, and the pay will be roughly the same - but I wanted to see how others valued the working from home.
Favicons in the bookmarks bar are great! You can remove all the text and have just a bunch of favicons for lots of sites.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uofn7m4kbppks5v/kirigin%20%3C3%20f...
The Invisible Ladder: Social Networks vs. Social Mobility
"You can't make money from helping underprivileged kids" isn't just market prejudice or fortuitous laziness; it's a deficit of imagination.
What time does the Super Bowl start? Or, Internet journalism after content farms
Posting pictures on the internet is a great way to get a lynch mob going. Those people assuming this man stole the laptop can cause real harm as a result, and I'm not convinced that a smug "I never actually said that this man stole my laptop" should be an acceptable defense for the provocateur.
Apple’s Stock Gains 3% on Jobs & iCloud News | Apple Stock Watch
Not if they don't actually go after the criminals
Americano.coffee: MVP on Coffeescript
I've seen a few of those, too.

I've seen one "print a ticket" lot, in a beach town in southern CA; I haven't seen any others when living in MA, PA, VA, GA, or the Bay Area.
I think BART cops have that rep; Oakland PD can't hold a candle to them.
California Assembly OKs bill to tax online retailers
Pussies, not going to bat for their developers. Apple has scores of billions in the bank. Give one of them to a posse of lawyers and tell them "We want to see the Lodsys rubble bounce."
Oh no, there were plenty of them. They didn't stay on youtube for long though because they were pretty graphic.