skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way to do reverse engineering legally is to have one team reverse engineer the target and completely document how it works. Once it's documented, another disconnected team writes a new implementation from the documentation.

So you'd Skype's co-operation to do this? They are able to prevent reverse engineering by not writing the documents?
They also spend roughly half the year at school (remember weekends, holidays, summer), so you should divide by six.

So, you're now at less per prisoner than per child.

Not that this strikes me as a valid comparison; makes more sense to me that the cost of each should be compared to its own benefits, and to the costs of additional taxation.
"Its difficult when you're independent of platforms and have to read literature written by those who are limited by their sole choice of one platform."

I couldn't agree more.
Jonathan Ellis talk on Cassandra(Video)
Isn't it hard for Funny Junk to automatically give attribution if users upload images (say from their hard disk)? I'm wondering what would be ideal solution for proper attribution.
> In fact, teachers are often treated as if they aren't part of the professional class.

They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice.

> fire the youngest members of the profession first

That's what the teacher's unions demanded in negotation, so if you think that it's wrong....
HN has gone to the dogs I think.

What in my idle wondering was so deserving of down voting?

It should be impossible to downvote below 0 without an upvoted response.
I think the superintendent's letter qualifies as something of a clever hack.
Azkaban for Workflow
But his problem right now is that he's not getting attribution while asking for it. Even if he did put it under a CC license, if his content is being reposted with the license and attribution stripped out, and the other party isn't playing nice when being asked nicely, then he's forced into the same situation as he is now, except with a stronger case if he attempts to sue (which he doesn't want to do anyways).
Amazon rolls out Groupon-like daily deals site
Getting Past Agile Advanced Beginner
What's your social integration like?
I heartily agree with your first paragraph. It is precisely the same logical fallacy as a "god of the gaps" argument that we need to watch out for here, but in the guise of a "naturalistic theory of origins of the gaps" argument. We don't know how to explain something so we resort to our pet "explain all", rather than continue doing good science.

On your second paragraph, I am not sure I agree. If evolution happened as posited by the "concensus" view then it happened over many, many generations. I don't think growing wings on a giraffe is possible in reproducible experiments that anyone could feasibly carry out. Also, are mutations always caused by environmental parameters? I guess radiation may be an example where they are. But I don't know if it has been established that they always are. Sometimes mutations seem to be encouraged by the very mechanisms of the cell itself, within certain parameters.

So I would have to differ with you on your second statement. I think it is in general very hard to establish what the restrictions are on systems that evolve. In rapidly reproducing species, such as fruit flies or certain bacterial colonies it is much easier to test the boundaries, and in fact this has been done.
If he indeed bought it off CL, then why would you say "he got what he deserved"?
Remember BountyQuest?

Everything old is new again. Has it been 10 years already?

http://oreilly.com/news/patent_archive.html
That would of been a great idea, alas this is not what they are doing now.

They are connecting people who HAVE space with people who.. HAVE space. (just in different locations).
I like turtles!!! Oh wait, wrong line. =p
search text field works pretty nice to avoid going through the collapsed list
Maybe they could use Tineye, somehow?
this is simply false, and that's why it's FUD. the volume can rise as they are traded more often.
Ten Things the New CEO Needs To Do
I would hope Apple doesn't get involved. This is just a bit shocking :\
What flexibility? According to Microsoft, WinMo7 is allowing less flexibility than Android, that being one of its selling points (less fragmentation).
This is an issue right now because it's much easier to go long on BTC than it is to go short.

Since virtually everyone in the market is long BTC, they desperately want the price to go up, rather than down. This creates an incentive to do OTC (some might say "under" the counter) trades rather than go through MtGox, particularly if the true market rate is less than what MtGox is showing.

However, if it was easier to go short BTC then you'd have people who wouldn't be afraid (and would in fact very much like!) to see the market price go down, and would be more than happy to see declining prices show up in the public order book.

There's a lot of strange behavior in the BTC market and I think a lot of it is because you can't trade it like most currencies or even commodities. You can't easily go short, you can't trade futures, etc. Allegedly MtGox and others are working on those issues, but it's hard to do significant margin and futures trading where everyone is anonymous.

But the sooner they make other forms of trading available, the sooner I think we'll see the unrealistic bullishness calm down.
I'm lost; is there a way to see available spaces?! It seems that the only signup is to offer desk spaces..?
This doesn't just affect mobile usage of social networks. It.s basically just FireSheep running on a mobile platform. Any one accessing those social networks over a network with someone running this is vulnerable.
I guess grandparent usually does "vim <something>" or uses scripts that clear the buffer (such as opening NERDTree on the current dir) which effectively make the splash screen never appear.
Wouldn't you get faster speeds if you upgraded to a Business class internet provider?
Agreed. I like that this approach forces you to consciously commit to capturing those (and only those) one or two steps in a product.

I also liked the fact that the author uses existing/established players to complement rather than compete with your product by drawing the end line there -- a solid MVP strategy.
> This line of reasoning has never made any sense to me -- why does everyone blame the public employees and want to take away their (hardly that great when compared to the rest of the country) salary and benefits?

Oh really? Public employees are far more likely to have pensions than the rest of us. Public employees earn significantly more too and have greater job security.

We blame them because they have a huge effect on who gets elected, which directly affects how much we have to pay for them.

> If you want someone to blame for this, start with the No Child Left Behind act that forces schools to waste their budgets on meaningless standardized testing,

What's your method for determining whether children are learning? We tried trusting teachers and schools - that didn't work.

> Or you could just go back to the root of the problem and blame the robber barons who, through well-paid lobbyists, have convinced the federal government to dismantle itself and its services year after year since 1980

Education spending steadily increased (after inflation) during that time, so if services went down, it wasn't because of spending.

Note that the US Department of Education was a shadow of its current self in 1980, so if you're going to argue that the federal govt has dismantled itself wrt education, you get to explain why it's much bigger wrt education.

The US govt collects about as much in taxes per person as the "high tax/high services" countries. (The US actually collects significantly more per person than Canada.) Yet, we don't get the services. More money can't solve that problem.

Before you start about rates, they're not the only term in the equation. The US collects a smaller fraction of its economy, but it has a larger economy (per person). And, even with much higher rates, the US has never collected more than 22% of the economy in taxes. The sustainable max appears to be around 20%. (People "adjusted" to the 21.9% and got the number back to 20. That's going to happen when the tax code is used to encourage/discourage.)
"powered by GNU Emacs" is a funny endpage note
When Competition Stifles Innovation
and if you look at the transaction graph for bitcoin it could just as easily be the start of the twitter graph.
On one level, FJ doesn't need any 'technical' means for enforcing attribution. But they do need to expend the manpower to investigate reports of misattributed content, and to actually correct them (either changing the attribution or removal). I mean, this mechanism should exist anyways for dealing with 'internal' attribution disputes (some user reuploads another user's actual original content from FJ). Other user generated content sites (like deviantArt) have proecsses and mechanisms set up for this.
Lots of people (that I know, anyway) know what Pastebin is, and don't know of any of the other, similar sites. If they need to paste some output, they type "pastebin.com" into their address bar and that's it.
Yes, thank you. I meant to say median.
I hate working remotely. I hate working with people who work remotely. One-on-one communication is inferior but acceptable over phone or chat, but trying to have a group technical discussion with one or more people working remotely is glacial. The tools just aren't good enough yet and may not be good enough in my lifetime.
I'm of the school of thought that says there should be a giant (but not too giant, mind) chasm between academia and the real world. The whole bloody thing falls apart when universities make feeble attempts to offer vocational education.
> The correct way to do reverse engineering

You should always emphasize that its the correct way _in the US_. As somebody already mentioned, HN readership is international, and said restrictions on reverse engineering do not apply everywhere. Also the author, judging by his name, doesn't seem to be a US citizen.
This is a really excellent writeup. It's light on technical details, exploring much more the motivations behind why things have evolved the way they have. But, Bram does show the project file layout with brief descriptions of what each file contains, pertaining to Vim.
Very good. Informative, interesting and maybe even a little motivational.
While it seems self-evident that a willingness to plow thru obstacles is a good trait for entrepreneurs to have, I think the specific example selected for the article is a poor choice. I have a word for the kind of person that would voluntarily attend and then disturb the religious observances of dozens of people because of a minor, fleeting, personal inconvenience, but it isn't "entrepreneur".

Bulldozing through a velvet rope to gain entrance to a club or restaurant is one thing. Bulldozing through a velvet rope because you were late to the opera or because you want to skip out of rabbi's sermon is another.

(Also, the title is misleading. The point of this article seems to be that there is only one type of entrepreneur.)
That is, if you know what you're searching for.
A Chinese cyber-attack on a jumpy America
it was one of the few quantitative things he said the rest was emotional and obviously fear based.
Particularly, the CEO pay reports. Why should I donate money to pay someone richer than me?

Lead by example, charity CEO.
From Paul Newman to Paul Graham with Alexis Ohanian
I found it worthwhile to read the erlang books concurrently. Other than a few misalignments, they present topics in roughly the same order, but the way they explained the different topics were different enough that I found myself learning something new.
I like most of your post a lot, and upvoted it. But under no cicumstances should apple send this kid stuff. It would be publicized and there might be copy cats. "Sell your organs. Get money + shiny Apple objects!"

I debated with myself about posting this, because the copy cat concern kind of sounds like FUD when I read it back to myself. But then again, I just read a story about a kid selling one of his organs for an Apple product, which sure sounds like a sensationalist what if scenario. It's always a little depressing when what sounds like FUD is perfectly true.

*edited many times to get the wording better.
The hardest part of development, and any human endeavor, is typically communication. Working in an isolated environment can be extremely productive for some people some of the time (e.g. A dev knows exactly what to do and needs to just crank) but even that is oversold: having someone to bounce ideas off and to talk us off the ledge can prevent a lot of malinvestment in code.

Email, text chat, even video chat just ain't the same as having a guy next to you that you can interrupt at a whim to discuss things with. In particular the ability to recognize that someone gets what you are saying is severely hampered with remote technologies, making technical communication much less efficient. Then you have the informal and overheard communication that takes place in a (sanely laid out) office. Then you have lunches. It all just piles up.

I work remotely and I hate the inefficiencies it introduces.
You're just supposed to use this page: http://api.jquery.com/browser/ It formerly used to be accessible at api.jquery.com but then they changed some things around to confuse developers...
Seems like your classic win-lose situation to me. The rich get their organs faster, the poor die when their one remaining kidney fails because they can't afford market rates.
Thanks for posting here and on Quora. As someone with an economics background, it's nice to hear a sane explanation based on fundamental theory.

I'm just surprised people aren't considering Bitcoins from a supply-demand standpoint. Why purchase Bitcoins in the long run unless you're laundering money or hiding from the government?
I am surprised he is not worried about getting slapped with an epic lawsuit over this. The guy in the pictures has had his reputation absolutely destroyed, complete with pictures of the inside of his home, pictures of him half-naked and pictures of his sleeping child. If it turns out he had been acting in good faith all along... ouch.
Indeed. One boss said to me once, working from home is a privilege not a right. I snorted in derision, me working at home is a privilege not a right for him, I expect the office to be an optimal working environment and if it's not he's not doing his job.
These points are weak - there are other weaknesses of BitCoin, but these aren't really them. Almost every issue he raises attacks BitCoin as a medium of exchange (which it doesn't need to be) rather than as a medium for storing value. Taking them one at a time:

> Severe Problem Number 1: Seeding Initial Wealth

He doesn't really explain why this 'problem' is a bad thing. There is a limited supply, and there needs to be a distribution system. While this one may not be perfect, it doesn't cause any systemic weakness in the system. Early adopters will do well, yes.

But the degree to which people mine or buy bitcoins now is the degree to which they think they'll be valuable in the future - bitcoins already have a price. People who have mined them will sell them to you. Nothing stops you purchasing bitcoins now if you believe the price will go up. This is how markets work. Hearing someone complain about it is like hearing someone complain that people who buy assets cheaply on the stockmarket will make a significant return.

> Severe Problem Number 2: Built in Deflation

A bad thing if you're trying to replace a country's currency system with it, and excellent thing if you see them as a store of value. This is the same as people complaining that any other asset deflates over time.

> Severe Problem Number 3: Lack of Convertibility

This is the closest point he has to being right. Lack of convertibility is a current problem, but economics should solve that. All you need in order to convert your bitcoins is a person who is willing to trade. To have an efficient market, you need an exchange. Here's the crux: bitcoins have a value as long as someone is willing to buy them off you.

His key point here seems to be that 'no one is completely invested in the long-term success of the system' - yes. This is also true of your MSFT shares. No-one is guaranteeing that they will be worth anything in the long run.

> Severe Problem Number 4: When Something Goes Wrong, It Will Die

Perhaps. I went for dinner with some Fx quants last night. One of them brought up this point, and then they all laughed and said "And that's when you invest heavily in it". All assets change their prices based on bad news - most recover again and people who doubled-down at that point make money.
Raphaël Musical Instruments – Guitar & Keyboard
Where I live at least, there is no other option. I have 512kbps up and can't get anything else.
My issue with this approach is that those senators or whatever level of representatives won't be punished by doing so. A common technique I observed these years is that they will initially propose a shooting-for-moon bill/bylaws/regulations, then everyone gets concerned and asks them to undo it. They will tone down and pretend to listen to the public, but counter-argue with some "authoritative" proofs given by certain professors or whatever scholars/lawyers/domain experts (often bought out by the same lobby group), then they concede with lesser intrusive proposal but still achieve their hidden goal. They will always look calm and charming, that on the contrary makes the angry public look irrational and ignorant. Most of the time, they can get away as the winner. Even if they didn't pull it off, they didn't lose anything. It is like they are playing an "I'm not touching you" trick to the public.

If you follow the recent Internet UBB issue in Canada, you will see how it pans out. Nobody in CRTC is going to resign for doing such a ploy.
This the difference between introversion and extroversion. While you enjoy the company of your teammates, others may prefer to work independently.

The freedom to work from home doesn't mean you have to be cooped up inside your house. You can work from cafes, parks, anywhere and everywhere with wi-fi. Sick of the same restaurants and bars? Take a weekend flight to Europe and work from there. It's the sort of romantic nonsense that some of us find appealing.
I really understand you point of view, since I guess I work in a similar manner.
Now, I may find the downloadable version of this project really useful when I have to work offline, which happens more often than I would like to.
I'm old enough to remember Syquest disks and motorcycle couriers as being the way you uploaded :-)
Last modified: Jan 15, 2002 according to the footer on the page.
What's in your clipboard? - Ruminations on a "simple" feature
Improving our tools is part of our birthright and responsibility; being able to modify and learn from software is a natural outgrowth of that. We of all people should not respect work intended to discourage collaboration by anyone who isn't "established" (granted the privilege of relating to software as a human being, not just a consumer).

Thank you for the insight into your field. Now I'm sorely tempted to try my hand at decompilation.
Another explanation that I derive from the last time I saw flashy UI take a front seat in tech (1999-2002): we are in Yet Another Bubble, and Sizzle Sells (overvalued companies to sucker VCs.)

_ducks_
This isn't a new law, but an addendum to an existing law that makes it illegal to leave a restaurant without paying or steal cable television.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110602/NEWS/306020033/22...
Teachers Unions are a part of the problem. We need more advocates like Michelle Rhee who both know it's wrong and are in the position to do something about it.

>They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice.
I'm not sure where this definition is coming from. By that definition a software engineer isn't a professional.

At least from Wikitionary (better source?) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/professional_class

1) A social and economic demographic, commonly identified as part of the upper middle class.

2) (plural) the groups in society composed of highly educated professionals
And ebaums since...forever.
By definition fiat currency relies on governent regulation (and an internet protocol cannot be considered representative government, unless you create a committee to oversee the protocol, in which case we're back where we started).
hadn't thought of that.

Although, seeing as they are able to delete/ban all his content, you think they have a way of identifying it.
If it is done correctly, co-operation from skype is not required. The team that does the reverse engineering will write the specs and documentation from what they learn by examining and analyzing the executable binaries.
Sez BusinessWeek: "[Elop] tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. 'It just didn't feel right,' Elop says to the crowd [of Nokia engineers]. 'We'd be just another company distributing Android. That's not Nokia! We need to fight!'"

This is, at best, a half-truth --- Nokia would have the same freedom to tinker, reskin, and add their own apps as any other Android maker, which has so far been considerable. With Windows Phone, being able to reskin is a special favor, but with Android, it's part of the package.

What's believable here is that Nokia wanted _some_ kind of special favors from Google, and Google didn't want to play that game. Microsoft did. And it isn't clear from the outside what all those special favors were --- we'll have a clearer view, perhaps, when the first devices ship, though we still probably won't know the size of the "marketing payments" --- or how the other manufacturers will react, long-term, to being relegated to second-fiddle status on the platform.

Bizweek quote from here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
Best Customer Complaint Letter Ever
He presents himself somewhat as just some geek who happened to write about it - you know, one of us - I think as a marketing thing. So now it's biting him back. I think that's OK; the main thing is it worked.

But apart from his weird material, and although it's a matter of personal taste to some extent, he is really really good. He has a great voice; the melody and guitar are effective folk/pop; the bizarre lyrics at times are a vehicle for guerrilla poignancy. e.g. I Crush Everything http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RFEzpUsUBk
(starts at 0:30)
My chief gripe with sweeping analogies like this one is that they glorify the irreverent, "disruptive" entrepreneur. It's probably the evocative nature of the word "disruptive" that serves to create and perpetuate this fallacy. And while there's something to be said for seeing opportunity where no one else can, I'm not sure asking entrepreneurs to be "bulldozers" (proverbial or otherwise) makes for great advice.

While the concept of "naughtiness" or that "gleam in your eye" itself is quite subjective and open to much debate on where the line is to be drawn, it would augur well for the community if we tempered our effusive praise for the brash, maverick stereotype with words of caution. Every gatecrasher hasn't had the good fortune of staying until the party was over.
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Please drop me a line.

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