skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that's going to play an ever greater role in Google's expanding plans. They're pissing a lot of established companies off by competing with free, and mostly, quite simply better products. This is great for consumers because it kicks competition up a notch - but it could lead to the other companies, now having a common enemy, to partner up against Google. We recently saw this in the Nortel case.. FB comments include Yahoo, Bing includes Facebook, Nokia includes WP7, the list goes on and on. Lots of turkeys do make an eagle - Even if Google alone is better than all the other players in the market, as long as they're alone they'll quickly face pretty serious resistance.
Not a concern for me, since I will be running 3rd party ROMs on my phone to both upgrade to the latest version of Android faster and remove any excess cruft that the manufacturers and cell networks like to cram in there.
Zuckerberg vs Google (Comic)
There's nothing wrong with your comment and yet it is downvoted. What's going on?

Anyway, I think Google+ will stay around and replace/fulfill communication needs for a lot of people but it won't beat Facebook. People LIKE seeing everything their friends post - even if they complain about it.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketin...

everything you need is in this
I'm capable of exhibiting great levels of stupidity, but I can't imagine ever being dumb enough to sign a petition to amend the Constitution without seeing a specific proposal.
You can still set it to boot at a certain time with OS X, and if you set up auto-login and have that as a login item, it'll accomplish the same task.
A way to view people's personal profiles as dispassionate statistical data that can be used for all sorts of lucrative applications? It's like Zuckerbergvision!
indeed. this whole article seems fairly naive.

if you want to stick with the article's war analogy, google isn't fighting a six-front war. they're fighting a single-front war (advertising) with six weapons. if all six weapons work exactly as they're supposed to, google will be sitting pretty. if even five of the six turn out to be failures, google still wins.
For reference, to set the volume, one would use something like:

set volume 10
I don't follow.

How is this a justification for JavaScript crypto? It might be a justification for some form of crypto, but if that's the case, why not stick with SSL + server-side encryption?
Where is this magic 1.2GB number coming from?
Very neat, but someone built a web-based one.
No, it doesn't. JS implementations suffer from all the same flaws that everything else does, plus a few more, and it offers no protection from any flaws that anything else is vulnerable to.

"You can never be completely secure" is not a good justification for security theatre.
Insurance is only zero-sum if there is no value in certainty, which is just plain false (huge amounts of money are spent managing and trading risk).
Rework Book Review
This is easily shut down by anyone with a modicum of introspection: "or maybe he's just a self-important ass?"

Is this asking too much of people?
that was really interesting. lots of good advice here
That was my thinking initially. I went to Android to create the first fundraising app for my competitive fundraising platform because i figured after some research that it would be easier to get people to try it out.

The app was never intended to be paid so making a free app with the ability to use a proprietary in-app payment mechanism (PayPal) was what lead to a really easy decision (PayPals Android Developer Challenge was another nudge into the Android direction).

The next step will be a webapp to which i'll redirect the iPhone customers. I didn't start with it initially because from the little research i've done, "wizard of oz"-style, people didn't find iPhone webapps stable and trustworthy enough to Donate Money via them.
Just for fun: WebQuery is YQL in Python
Nobody is getting the phones for free, of course. Samsung makes the same amount of money on the phone whether you pay $0 and the carrier pays $529 or you pay $529 and the carrier pays $0.
It is not significantly different to a lawyer.

Is dropbox's target market lawyers?
"While #2 isn't a very effective leader, their heart is usually at least in the right place"

You know what they say the road to hell is paved with. Lots of people have great motives, but end up achieving nothing but destruction.

Yeah, I definitely agree that for the hardass and the in-between leaders there's a lot of ego involved, and they're trying to "ride" the team to achieve personal ends. The thing is, that frequently tends to work well. It's not necessarily a pleasant environment to work in, but it's kind of like climbing a mountain. It's no fun while you're doing it, but once you've achieved it you can be proud of it for the rest of your life.

I don't think Steve Jobs was trying to make a fun work environment for people - he was trying to push the creation of great products. Conversely, the Michael Scott type boss who tries to be everyone's friend has no personal motives (beyond being liked) and thus no incentive to push for great results.

I guess ultimately building something great is really really hard work, and it can often be really unpleasant.
Deploying on the weekend before July 4th...feels good to be productive
Why are you protecting against the server never seeing plaintext data? In case the server is compromised? If the server is compromised, then so is your JS!

The difference between traditional compilers, chips on motherboards, and so on and so forth, are that you aren't downloading and using a fresh copy every time.

If it were possible to securely store some JavaScript in your browser (trust-on-first-use), or otherwise verify that the JS hadn't changed since the last time you used it, and if that JS weren't accessible from the DOM, and if that JS were well-written and used standard practices and had been reviewed by cryptographers, then maybe it would be OK to use.

...But then again, you've just reinvented SSL.
An "absurdly high" price is $15?

Also I'm not so sure the DRM has much to do with the app's success. I found pirated versions easily.
The reason people screw up password storage is because they don't know they are supposed to think about it. If they flipped the "oh, this is important" switch, the result would be better. But at the end of the day, their bosses are asking them for shiny widgets, not a secure backend. So they are doomed to fail.

The same goes for the non-security things I've listed. The problem is much deeper than getting crypto wrong -- most programmers today get everything wrong. That's why I think if you're the type of person that can think about programming, it's not too unsafe to implement AES in Javascript and use it. You know what the weaknesses of Javascript-based crypto are, and you know how to implement crypto. In that case, why not do it?

Remember: most non-crypto software is massively incorrect. If we can trust people to implement crypto, why can we trust them to be programmers at all?
This is just the beginning (A Facebook employee who worked on Google+ speaks)
It’s probably nicer to schedule this with iCal instead of crontab. Create a new iCal event, and add an alert for that event that runs your script. You can easily and visually configure the event to repeat only on weekdays, and the best part is that you can simply delete or modify single instances of the recurring event to deal with exceptions like holidays.
I did this for the lulz and I'm not sure if this would ever be useful, but here is a locally-hosted imitation of YQL that can be used from the shell or imported into Python programs. It's an abstraction layer for interacting with various API's in a uniform way.

As of now, it only supports SELECT and does not do any caching. It's also slightly different from YQL in that it's actually SQL, and it uses a different definition format (it would be nice to support the Open Data Tables format, though).

What do you think?
> and they can be deleted by the Overlords for no reason
> whatsoever

Please, name a few deleted for no reason.

> Despite the extremely high risk, people do it anyway

Extremely high risk of what? 400 000+ approved apps is an indicator of extremely high risk, I guess…

> but since there's no Kool-Aid to drink,

Only money to be made.

> there are more people wasting time on iOS apps

And getting more then $2 billion paid.
I think you are overestimating how likely someone is to make note of such a thing when they have no reason to expect a ruse in the first place. This thing isn't meant to stand up to close scrutiny, but rather just quick glances of a screen as you walk by. I'm intimately familiar with the differences between Win7, MacOS and Windows XP UIs, but I'm also fairly sure if I saw that running on someone's desktop, even a Mac or Win7 box, I'd just think "Excel" and not really mentally nitpick based on the verisons of various other things running. Unless I had some other reason to believe something was amiss in the first place, I wouldn't give it enough thought to note the discrepancies and I doubt there are many people out there who would.

For those of you that are convinced you'd still know something is up -- there are also all sorts of reasons why XP Excel running on other systems would be totally legitimate -- could be running in a virtualbox window, could be running in a remote desktop window, etc.
No, I think they completely missed the issue. Which is

* dropbox's customers are not lawyers
* serving up people's files without passwords one week reduces people's confidence when the read new TOCs next week.

No, nix that, the real issue is standards of blogging. The author made a claim about what caused the furor, including a quote, and that quote, regardless of whether or not you believe it to be legally equivalent, was not the TOCs that caused the furor.

Had the author made all the same points about, after quoting the original TOCs, then a) I would not have posted and b) you would be right.
Here at Grubly, we're escargot-profitable!
I gave up on getting freelance clients through craigslist a long time ago. Most are bottom-of-the barrel clients that want a ton of work for very little money. Either that or they don't want to pay you after you've finished (and want a ton of features for the same price).

There needs to be a site that not only has a rating system for freelancers, but one for the companies paying them.
That graph is bizarre. The variable x-axis causes the peak to appear in the AD 1-1800 section, whereas the rest of the article explains that "the current era is creating history faster than ever before".

A more suitable graph would just be the population of the world.
Firefox 5 - Completely irrelevant and totally pointless
Nobody Understands REST or HTTP
I believe it was changed because the first version caused a massive furor.

I don't believe that dropbox has any intention of screwing people over. Nor do I believe that they had any intention of allowing users to log in to any account without a password. I do believe that the latter incident, and the TOCs, are huge gaffes, and that the 1password guy misrepresented the TOC issue with incorrect facts.
I think there aren't many offices that have macs but block fb out even frown upon it
Thanks for taking my (excessively harsh sometimes) comment with a smile. I apologize if the load of value judgement there hurts.

Usual response I have for my friends who work and travel in South-East Asia is in the vein of "make sure you don't postpone to start your career until when you 67 -- it might be too late already". No more no less.

Someone's willingness to work now and travel later, just like doing the opposite, deserves equal respect. That's the story :)
I have a project that's kinda along those lines, but it's not based on the 6502: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako
And had the 1password article stated that, then I would not have needed to post.
What enterprise (and by that I mean a business with IT staff that wear khakis, have a cell phone holster, and call the business an enterprise) is ever going to use Dropbox? The question answered itself even before the authentication, um, issue.

Dropbox is a disruptive product. It's a product that the little guys discovered could help them be tremendously productive with their collaborators. If anyone is using it in an enterprise setting, it's without company sanction and is being done people outside IT who were told how to use it by their teenaged children. In the eyes of IT people, Dropbox falls in the same category as the labyrinthine Excel worksheets and Access applications: infections to be stamped out.

The reality is the these enterprises would fall over and cease working if all these unsupported-by- and despised-by-IT things did not exist. IT opposes anything they cannot control. They will spin elaborate scenarios where using one of these things will result in the failure of the corporation. They will bikeshed to death anything that does not bear their imprimatur. Dropbox represents a loss of control.

An IT person will for example object that DropBox doesn't allow IT to control who has access to data. What happens when we lay that person off? What happens if that person shares files with unauthorized third parties? What happens when…

All of this scaremongering occurs despite the reality any employee can walk into the office with an SD card or five and walk out with every bit of sensitive data they have access to. I had to deal with issues like this when I consulted for pharmaceutical companies. They had a staunch policy against cameras but then pretended to not notice that everyone's cell phone had a camera. They didn't allow people to have access to writable media but there are iPods-as-harddrives, thumb drives, and CD cards that they studiously avoided thinking about.

You're right: the author is an idiot, and his audience is other idiots more concerned with having a self-serving and self-aggrandizing opinion than having any real perspective on reality.
TIMING is EVERYTHING:LOVELY WRONG FACE
I'm never able to understand why businesses cannot accept this fact and incorporate it into project management. It seems that they'd rather throw 20 average engineers (using average technology) at a problem and just spend more money and time on all sorts of official-looking artifacts such as meetings and design documents. They often strike me as signalling devices to show that responsibility for the problem is being distributed among everyone in case something goes awry. They're certainly necessary, but they're almost always done to excess. Really, the heavy emphasis on 'collaboration' always seems hellbent on forcing ideas to fit some safe notion on how things should be done instead of just trusting individuals to figure it out for their own.

What's the motive here? Fear? If so, why do we allow people in charge to project this?
nice thinking seth ;)

we're already 'workin' on it...
And how do they define "to make history"?
How Wayra hopes to create many Silicon Valleys across Latin America
Thank you for posting. I'm so incredibly sorry for your loss.
Excellent guide, but it doesn't cover how to attract press other than guest blogging. How do you contact press? What roughly to say?
There are a few advantages to writing apps for iPhone / Android, one lots of people are looking for consultants, when people hire consultants they want to see a portfolio, so you can increase your skills and possibly make some money building a portfolio while there is the chance of making money. It's much better than doing spec work.

So what you do is to write trivial apps, when you get consulting gigs you can say "30 apps in app store", and have a portfolio of apps that look good, also, you write apps around features so you teach yourself the feature, etc, GPS, Gyro, Camera, BUMP API,FB Connect, etc. This is also an important part, spend time making your app look good. Customers can't see code quality, but they do see graphics. To customers good graphics == good code quality.

Now if you have 30 apps and one happens to hit a niche you've got a great way to promote your other apps and don't have to do consulting BS anymore, and because you have lots of apps in the app store and lots of experience writing against the various features you can justify a much higher hourly because you'll be delivering their app faster.

I definitely agree with you that writing a single app to try and strike it rich in the app store is foolhardy, unless you already have people signed up to buy it.
This is an excellent article on this subject. The author (Nate Lawson) is thorough in his argument. His conclusion is "I am certain JS crypto does not make security sense."
Good point - that is why I don't support IP rights for ideas so simple that other people would come up with them independently. This includes many software patents. I do believe in IP rights for creations above a certain level of complexity. For example, no two people would come op with the same novel or symphony independently.
https://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=500467612

I met Len in 1999, he was a kid. A cocky kid who thought he knew everything and I wasn't impressed. I think we were arguing about K of N keysplitting. Rodney Thayer said "Yeah, he's like we were at that age." Rodney was gracious and patient, accepting and loving towards Len and I felt obliged to follow his lead. This is a highly improbable description of Rodney, but it was the truth. I became friends with Len and we were coconspirator cypherpunks at a time when that was a wild frontier. We were reimagining our world, riddled with cryptosystems that would mathematically enforce the freedoms that we treasured. Anonymous remailers to preserve speech without fear of retribution; onion routers to ensure nobody could censor the internet; digital cash to enable a radically free economy. We have schemes to decentralize & distribute everything. We imagine complex and esoteric threats to problems we might someday have - we architect futuristic protocols to insulate against those threats. All this is a highly academic geek utopia exercise. I tend to keep it that way, but Len wanted to get his hands dirty. There were times when Len got visits from various Federal agencies over remailer abuse. At first Len would get scared and I'd get him out of the house which he assumed was bugged, and drive around for a while. Especially in those early years, Len was trying to impress us. We invited him to join The Shmoo Group, where I'm a fringe radical, and Len became the lunatic fringe. I'm sure we helped temper his apocalyptic tendencies and at times he even bordered on diplomatic. But it isn't in our nature to acknowledge prowess directly. You only know a hacker respects you if he's willing to waste his time shooting holes in your ideas. I have thousands of messages to and from Len spanning the last decade, and I doubt a single one of them offers any direct praise.

Len got his hands dirty. He committed himself to building the stuff we imagined. I play it safe and remain blameless, but I get to stay balanced because courageous guys like Len fulfill the extremes.

Len, you are, in fact, an inspiration to those of us who inspired you. You made something great of your life. You left a lot behind for us. Thanks for letting me be a part of it all.

Cypherpunks write code.
Google+ and Privacy: A Roundup
by the way, there are theories that everything ancient really occurred not that long ago. if true, the graph may be less steep.

if curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29

(i think its bullshit but who knows? :))
Unfortunately the main problem is that Android devices allow arbitrary packages to be installed. There will always be someone willing and able to crack and distribute any given app that relies solely on client-side security. Your best bet is to roll your own obscure anti-piracy and hope you get most of your sales in the first few days, or look at a solution based on IAP receipts.

The same problem exists on iOS, but jailbreaking is an extra inconvenience that only 10% or so of users will accept.

Also I doubt many users think twice about downloading a pirated app nowadays (and they should, due to the very real threat of trojans). It's been over a decade since "don't copy that floppy" was replaced by the music/film industry's crusade.
I think I see where you're coming from, but I still disagree: I've seen way too many examples of otherwise competent programmers still stuck on, for instance, the notion of using salts with fast hash functions for password storage. Hell, MtGox had a post just the other day about their all-new triple-salted SHA256 password storage! Somewhere that day, there was a faint groan from the dismally small set of people who are knowledgeable in password storage and are interested enough in Bitcoin to have read about that.

The difference between bugs in non-crypto software and bugs in crypto software is that bugs in crypto software can have much more severe and far-reaching consequences. So, while I might trust a programmer to write decent non-crypto software, I would prefer not to trust them with writing crypto software.

edit: actually, there's more to it than that, on second thought. Crypto also requires a greater depth and breadth of expertise. The math knowledge required for general programming is trivial by comparison; about the worst it usually gets is vector-based math, or simple calculus, or big-O notation. But to understand crypto well enough to implement it correctly requires a much greater knowledge of mathematics -- something which most programmers don't have.

> You know what the weaknesses of Javascript-based crypto are, and you know how to implement crypto. In that case, why not do it?

Because I (the rhetorical "I" in this case) know what the weaknesses of JavaScript-based crypto are. :-)
نتيجة الدبلومات الفنيه 2011 جميع محافظات مصر( زراعى - صناعى - تجارى - فنى )
> 400 000+ approved apps
> And getting more then $2 billion paid.

Which is an average of:
2 000 000 000/400 000= $5000 per app since 2008. How is that a good source of revenue again? It's the same as Android, only a very small percentage make a descent living out of it. It may be a bit more for the iPhone (for paid apps only because android apps make more on ads on average) but it's still very unlikely you'll make enough money to survive.
I am astounded! It appears that the issue of corporate personhood was not established by the Supremes but rather by a court REPORTER.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern_...

The actual decision said that that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations. It was the reporter that said it made them persons.

Does that mean that all of the foolishness leading up to Citizens United was due to a reporting error? I would welcome a comment by a real Constitutional lawyer.

EDIT: I also dislike the idea of the unintended consequences of such an amendment. Better to right the error of the Supremes by other methods.
Either will work for the given scenario. The only difference I see is that with client-side crypto you can't accidentally write the key into a server log file, where as with server-side crypto it is possible.

But then again at some point you will add some logging to client-side code as well, so the point will be moot - you will have to sanitize logs at point of production.

Another thing is that it makes much better messaging - "the encryption key never leaves your machine".