skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but I do think it seems to have a limited appeal within urban areas, then tunneling connections between server nodes in other cities over the regular internet. The tunneling between cities is still vulnerable, but when it gets cut off there will still be a way of communicating. The nice thing about this when localized to large urban areas is that the cost per capita shrinks. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too expensive to set up a bunch of routers that weren't online. Quick Google seems to suggest that a router tends to cost around $1-2 per month in electricity, plus an up front cost. Create a Kleinrock ecosystem in a section of a city would not necessarily require a large number of people adopting it, but rather a manageable start up cost plus maintenance, which seems almost reasonable.

Of course, if a few people are paying for it, you'll still need people to actually use your wacky science project, which may or may not happen... If you build it, will they come?
My major was CS and math for undergrad:

(1) in-depth knowledge of math, which has always been an asset. Those that don't go to college have issues here.

(2) met like-minded friends that were inspiring and most are quite successful now.

(3) allowed me to go to grad-school and specialize in machine learning. This specialty opened doors that ultimately resulted in company ownership (yes it ended well)

(4) personal satisfaction in knowing that I can finish something with long term vision. College is only four years, but when you are young it seems daunting.
Cool; I suppose you could get the same results with a webcam and a little image processing.
My guess is they're looking at the HTTP referrer field in their server logs. Normally, a CSRF exploit shows up as an HTTP request originating from a different site (i.e., other than mtgox.com). I think the referrer can be spoofed, though, which would disguise the exploit in the logs.
I am very well aware that a flash memory performs wear leveling. However this does not prevent the flash cells from failing, it merely ensures they all fail as late as possible. Wear leveling does not prevent wear it only ensures that wear is generally even between cells.
Thank you. Yes this space is definitely very busy. Ping Brigade started as a way for me to do my own monitoring. Pingdom has a lot of features and is huge, but they are also more expensive. I also do not like their interface: they ask too many questions. But getting traffic has been challenging: the CPC for things like "web monitoring" is in the $6-9 range.
> "I would argue that ideas can't be stolen - only the execution can."

The legal definition of theft in most countries is based on someone (A) depriving another person (B) of a given entity. It is fundamentally the transfer of the entity to A which removes it from B.

It therefore cannot apply to an idea, for which A getting his hand onto the idea will not make B forget about it.

For copyrighted works, creating a copy is is not depriving someone of the original entity, so it is not stealing, but counterfeiting.

Along the same vein, you can't steal something from someone if he has not acquired it in the first place. Creating a copy of an entity and selling it or giving it for free might cause monetary grief to the original owner (which might sell his entity for less, if at all, than if the copy did not exist), but it is not stealing either.
An equally likely situation is that users are migrating from IE to both Chrome and Firefox. Now there are also users migrating from Firefox to Chrome. Thus Firefox has remained stable, while Chrome has had immense growth.
I think they're both very valid metrics -- but of different things. For example, I spend about 50x more time online than my parents do, and I think we need a metric to capture that. But we also need a metric that points out that people who open up their computer once a day for 20 minutes to check email, pay bills, and read the news -- may have very different browser characteristics.
That's a pretty big problem, considering bitcoin is partly designed to prevent proving such things. There's no way to identify who that other address is. You can't even prove it's not yourself making a false theft claim.
The alternative internet will take off like wildfire when the existing internet is locked down, and you can't do what you need to do on it. It's only a matter of time before we lose our Internet. We must make a new one that cuts out the middle man. If not then we will usher in a new era of slavery, and our children will curse our generation for allowing such a powerful instrument to be destroyed.
> Theft means you take something away

Counterexample: theft of services.
Since Instant, it had become really useless. As soon as you start typing it disappears.
I don't think more people in jail indicates the sky has fallen.
I was thinking lately that it seems that in time new companies appear that have the incentive to move things forward.

For example, Google has the incentive to make the web as fast as possible because they are mainly a web company, so it's in their interest to do that, while for Microsoft and Apple, the web might not be their first priority, and at times they might even try to restrict it, so it prolongs the survival of their own platforms.

In the same time, I was thinking about Facebook's Project Spartan, and how they have an incentive to create a webstore that works on all platforms, while Google's incentive is to have it work only on Chrome, or more recently to have some of their services work only on Android. In this case it would be both's Google's and Apple's incentives, to keep us as locked in as possible on their platforms, while it's Facebook's incentive to liberate us from the locked platforms.

And this is where I wanted to get. I think there will be companies that will appear in the future, that will have the incentive to make a fully decentralized P2P Internet work, and once again none of the "old" giants, whether it's Facebook, Google, or even Apple and Microsoft, will like this idea. For example, both Facebook and Google would hate the idea of a completely anonymized Internet, because that goes directly in the opposite direction from their profit incentive. But, like I said, I think there will be companies that will be able to make that work in their favor, and thrive from it as it becomes their main profit incentive to support it.
"Switch your router into open mode (no password or encryption)": I feel like the lack of encryption really needs to be addressed here. I'm not going to use a network where anyone on it can see my information as they pass it along, and I think many other users would feel the same way.
> You should make it work or go back to your OS of choice.

I'm not sure that's even possible. If the complaint is a lack of drivers and poor support for hardware, how is the average developer supposed to deal with that?
I can see waiting a year but you should definately go. You will never again meet as many women as you will in college. ;-)
Ask HN: NBack and other cognitive tests in HTML5
Hi HN,
Here is the initial version of some cognitive tests that I have built in HTML5. I plan to add tracking your progress, timing and other games/tests to this along with an android app.

http://bodhi.microangels.in

Please let me know your feed back on what will be useful for you an any other suggestions on how to improve this .
With most existing hardware, sure, but it's not as though we haven't had the ability to communicate wirelessly across large distances for many decades.
At the risk of sounding like a complete cynic, isn't this nothing more than a shameless PR plug? And I think the bigger villain here isn't said company or their PR agency, it's CNN for carrying this crocodile-tear-jerking piece.

And if you're considering the "every little step counts and must be lauded" counter-argument, spare a thought for every faceless, deserving non-profit that's doing genuine, sustainable, long-term grassroots work and doesn't receive a shred of credit / support, let alone a mention from the mainstream media.

To quote from the article:

Story Highlights:
The residents of Shiv Nagar changed the village name to SnapDeal.com Nagar /
They wanted to show their gratitude to the online coupon company /
SnapDeal installed 15 water pumps so that villagers could have potable water /
SnapDeal's founder was tossed from the United States after his visa expired

"Tossed"? Really? Yes, immigration laws suck (I should know, I'm Indian), but I'm certain it's a lot less dramatic when your visa expires. Let's not trivialize the effort to improve the immigration status quo by dangling insinuations that extol pseudo-philanthropy.

What hurts me most, though, is that this hit the front page of HN.

</rant>
This comment and the GP suggest that the article is wrong. Is it? Can anyone confirm a JS implementation that manifests the described behavior (the Array constructor being called when parsing top-level [] in JSON)?

It obviously worked this way at some point (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2668888), so I'm guessing the older IEs, at least, still have this flaw.
Everything you listed actually has nothing to do with Javascript as a language. These are new frameworks for the and clientside APIs, not language features.
The Week in Privacy (Just Between Us)
Except those people are all buried in debt from student loans and their extravagant spending.

You kind of dodged a bullet there.
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You still have encryption at the application layer.
Well, you also have the bias of wasting several weeks of your life trying to set up a laptop.

Yeah, I said waste. Most people will counter by saying "but I learned linux!" No, you didn't, you learned to futz around with a bunch of conf files. I remember trying to make Pulseaudio work with my USB soundcard. Several hours of dicking about with asoundrc later and I
a. still had a nonfunctional sound card
b. still don't know how pulseaudio works

Not that it isn't an accomplishment. Just, while it may be a source of personal satisfaction, don't expect people with less time than you do to feel the same way!
If we're talking about the term theft in the practical sense (and not the legal sense), I don't agree that theft necessarily have to take something away from those you steal from. Theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's consent. This doesn't have to be physical stuff, it can also include digital properties like copyrighted material.

> You contradict yourself when stating innovation is improving current executions of ideas. Too much of this, and suddenly it's something called theft?

No, you got it all wrong. I argue that too little improvement of current executions is theft. I can't clone Facebook completely, change the logo, add a dislike button and then call it my own. That's theft, not innovation. However, I could take all the best ideas from Facebook, from Twitter, Gowalla etc. and create a unique social network I could call my own.

> If you merely copy the execution of the competition 1:1, you won't win over your competitor. You need to offer a key advantage. That's where the innovation takes place: the small step differentiating your execution from the original. In doing so, you don't steal, but add something. Adding something can never be stealing.

Well, you actually don't necessarily need a better and improved product. The only thing you need to succeed as a clone is better marketing.

I think we actually agree that innovation is just improvement on the current execution.
Dense arrays are coming in Harmony, thanks to WebGL. (JS.next)

CoffeeScript incurs no penalty when compiling to Javascript; in fact, in many cases it's faster than handwritten code.
Despite iPad being "a computer, not a mobile device"
That's like saying Shakespeare knew about concurrent programming because he used the word "thread".

Let's see a usage of "introvert" before Jung that has anything to do with personality types.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22introvert%22&tbs=bks:1...
Why do you think it would not happen for years? As I mentioned in a previous post there is a trade off between price memory size and failure rate so some of the higher density memories will have much lower life than what you may be used to.

And no you would not be able to read from it. When a flash cell wears off the ability to read it degrades or disappears. Depending on the memory you still may be able to recover the data using ECC or the like, but this ability tends to disappear as large numbers of cells start dying.
I think the execution of native code from the browser is slowly creeping in, in such a way that you'll be free to choose your language as you are in non-browser areas. Google native client, webGL and the ultra-new webCL are glimpses into the future. Javascript has served us well, but if we can avoid unnecessary computation as well as make use of existing code bases, then I am sure we will, eventually.
Source-level stack traces are coming, to Firefox first. I would imagine WebKit will follow. IE perhaps not, but, personally, I intend to ignore IE in future web apps, until it mostly catches up with the front runners.
If you're serious about global wireless mesh networking, you need to switch to different tech for inter-node links. Offer WiFi taps into the network to support the commonly available hardware, but use HF or VHF to link nodes.

Sure, the bandwidth will be really poor, but you have to make a few sacrifices, and the robustness of the network explodes as the range of each individual node increases. Besides, in that kind of doomsday scenario nobody will be using a darknet to watch Hulu.
that's why we came up with http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408179 in 2004 (one of the co-authors here)

announcing the bases in public isn't a great idea
I thought it was very well written, a rare phenomenon on the internet. Don't let perceived bitterness make _you_ bitter.
A piece on software written by mere mortals.
Connected Television & IntoNow Poised to Disrupt Integrated Brand Advertising
It's an experiment. I don't know where it will go.
Android certainly is successful _because_ of Linux (the kernel), because that let Google concentrate on the upper layers, being able to use a mostly finished kernel.
Google to Launch a HTML5 App Store to Compete With Facebook's 'Project Spartan'?
Yes, that was normal in Italy too during fascism. Protectionism has always been a great popularistic argument and that's why I am surprised to see it on a geeky product like that. One would think that the user of battery powered cufflinks wouldn't care about that.
Since we are on the topic of google search, let me nominate google instant for the worst piece of UI implementation ever.
Part-time Saturday Entrepreneur: Time Management
sure, just type wisdio.com, leave your e-mail, and follow instructions. Then, we will send you an invtitation
My two complaints are that the keyboard isn't the sort that I like, it's of the chiclet variety, and they only offer shortscreens (16:9 rather than 4:3). On the first complaint, this is really just my preference on keyboards. I'm a dvorak typist and so I'm a bit picky about keyboards; from my point of view, every laptop keyboard is bad, but I'm holding out hope for Thinkpads. On the second complaint it seems, unfortunately, that no manufacturer makes 4:3 laptops in 12"-15" sizes.

I have one of the ultra-thin models "Lemu1" and the body is plastic while the inner chassis is metal. It reminds me of the build on an iBook G4. It does feel a bit flimsy, but this model is about the size of a MacBook Air and so I figure some of the flimsiness is partly just physics.
Looks like a great product.. Obviously you should have a more informative start screen. Also simple things like enabling the enter key for the sign up process or simply giving FBConnect as an option.
For a mesh network like this to succeed there has to be a killer app built on the platform. And I'll tell you what it is -- a free wifi telecom network. A complete replacement for the telecom networks run by megacorps could be the technology disruption of the century.
If you (do not believe what this guy wrote OR will try to forget it) AND (still develop software) == You have already failed and (should find another job OR find a good psychiatrist)
Phantom protocol and Freedombox projects want to use encryption. So far, I think the Phantom protocol is the best designed and most bulletproof, at least in theory.

http://code.google.com/p/phantom/

But I haven't seen the creator say much about making it work on Wi-Fi mesh networks, though he did say it's pretty flexible and could be easily upgraded to work with new technologies.

Freedombox is pretty interesting, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7IpqrtC2lk

I also like the ideas behind http://mondonet.org/ , but so far I haven't seen anything technical about it. They're supposed to launch it next month, last I heard. There are actually a lot of related projects:

http://www.quora.com/What-projects-and-initiatives-are-under...
I simply love and embrace ideas like this.

But why creating something new when there are projects available like OpenWRT or DD-Wrt or Freifunk Firmware wich creates a Mesh-Network that works quite good? The only thing you need is standard Wi-Fi routers and those firmwares.
These days a lot of it is due to localism. A lot of people would rather avoid buying stuff that's already circumnavigated the globe three times before it reaches them.

It applies more to food I guess, but the principle is the same.
I would like to see some sort of mesh network which is built into firmware like Tomato, with options to opt in of course.
The attack worked in an older Firefox, at least.
Does anyone know if it's possible to override constructors for the global "Object" in Javascript? The author's assumption is that it is not possible and therefore the best solution to this is to wrap all your JSON with {} instead of []. My intuition is telling me that's not the fix. Can someone verify?

It seems the best solution is not to use a top level object but (as mentioned below) Facebook's solution to prepend for(;;) to all JSON and strip it before parsing or Google's to prepend 'throw' and strip it pre-parsing.

Update: This conversation says it's not possible, but I'm still not a believer: http://sla.ckers.org/forum/read.php?2,35337,35337
> The irony is that none of this might have happened had Bahl's H1B visa had not expired. The special visas granted to skilled workers are good only for six years. Bahl graduated from the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

I don't know much about him but just taking a guess that if he could have extended his visa, he could have worked at some large financial/tech company as an analyst, like most people on H1Bs. If startup-visa existed, he could've moved to SV to create something big instead of moving back home. It worked out well for him and India that his visa expired.

I don't claim to predict the future but the world might have got something better than a Groupon-clone if people like him could be enticed to form/work-on startups in SV instead of choosing between large companies that can afford to sponsor H1Bs or going back home.
A few days ago I asked, "Ask HN: Best Approaches to Prevent Session Hijacking?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663293) and presented a technique I'm experimenting with that uses session timestamps as tokens to validate that each request is authentic and an attacker hasn't stolen the session key.

It works by updating the token (timestamp) on the server and in the cookie on each request and they both have to match on the next request. A short buffer (say 30 seconds) is permitted to avoid false positives from click-happy users on slow/flaky connections.

Has anyone used this technique in production?
I don't see in that wiki references to similar projects, for example http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk which is used in areas of Germany. I heard the traffic in such networks can slow them down until barely usable.
Vadim Makarov's homepage: http://www.vad1.com/
On that tangent: I've always wondered how things would have turned out if my parents had been savvy enough to provide me with the right book, when it turned out I couldn't understand enough of the English (not my native language) BASIC manual that came with my dad's first PC somewhere mid-to-end-eighties (when I was < 10).

However, I don't think any advantages in that regard detract from this achievement. Even if our parents had nudged us in the right direction, we may have been content doing many 'half' programs. Technical abilities are independent of the persistence required for a larger project such as this (or beginning a startup, for what that is concerned!).
This could be a real problem, because for example in Germany it is illegal to have a WiFi connection, which is not password protected. The idea is that if they catch you downloading pirated songs, you cannot say - it wasn't me. Stupid but...
The major problem with this proposal is scalability.

"Repeater mode" is usually WDS or a logical client bridge+AP. This is entirely layer 2, has no routing, no useful path metrics, and is completely unsuited for a network larger than a few nodes if you want any sort of reliability/usability.

True meshing algorithms like 802.11s or BATMAN can optimize the mesh topology, but you're still on one huge broadcast domain. The proposal needs to establish a means to restrict the size of these domains - convert each node (or a subset of supernodes) into "routers", and roll out a routing protocol which is optimized to this type of ad-hoc, organic deployment.

The other problem with scaling (no matter what your meshing algorithm does) is the half-duplex nature of RF - if you're doing this with single-radio SOHO routers, you're going to lose half of your throughput per hop. I run two 500-node muni WiFi nets, and we try never to exceed 2 hops between a node and its backhaul gateway - any more and you're in the sub-1Mbps range on 802.11g rates.

Fix these problems and you may be on to something. Of course you also need to bridge geographic gaps somehow.
Alas, nowhere near the centers of IT, but South Florida...
Wisdio "social wisdom" started in closed alpha mode. Anybody willing to test?
I ran my (slightly profitable) side project on mono and ASP.NET MVC2 for about 5 months before switching to a Windows server on EC2.

Best thing I ever did ... sure it costs 3x what I was paying for a VPS, but it has been rock solid compared to a number of resource leak issues with Mono, and the fact that I can admin a windows box with googling everything I need to do.

If you are developing a for-profit venture and the cost of deploying on Windows vs Linux is a breaking point for a .NET project then I'd suggest you look at the business plan again and decide if it has enough profit in it.
I agree with you on the legal definition of theft.

I meant theft in the normal way it's used in the language - as taking/copying something that doesn't belong to you.

However, you're absolutely right that counterfeiting/copyright infringement is not theft in the legal sense.