skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a biased article as it doesn't highlight any of the reasons why the judge did it.

In fact skimming the judgement the Judge seems to have an exceptional understanding of technology and how it relates to law. IANAL, but he seems to be saying if he allows WiFi to be called a 'radio communication' then it will suddenly be legal to wiretap a lot of things that are presently illegal.

Quite specifically the judge mentions:

Section 2511(2)(g) makes it lawful to intentionally intercept any radio communication that “that relates to ships, aircraft, vehicles, or person in distress,” without reference to whether such radio communication was readily accessible to the general public and not scrambled or encrypted. Should the Court interpret radio communication so broadly within the Act to include such technologies as wireless internet and cellular phones, this exception could lead to absurd results. Specifically, pursuant to this interpretation, an unauthorized intentional monitoring of a cellular phone call could be lawful should the content of the communication relate to vehicles or persons in
distress, but unlawful otherwise. Further, Section 2511(2)(g) makes it lawful to intentionally intercept any radio communication transmitted by “any marine or aeronautical communications system,” which could lead to equally arbitrary results when applying the exception to
communications technologies other than radio broadcast technologies, e.g., a Wi-Fi network aboard an airplane.

Note the any radio communication and that the act actually doesn't prohibit that interception even if it's scrambled or encrypted.

His problem is that if he allows Google to call Wifi radio communication suddenly it's legal to wiretap people's encrypted wifi traffic as long as it relates to vehicles or if it's aboard a plane or boat.

Basically, in my brief scanning, he seems to be saying 'Congress, this could open an absurdly tricky loophole if I say yes, please do something'.
Ask HN: Whom to follow on Google+?
So, I started "Following" Fred Wilson in one of my Circles

https://plus.google.com/103112588675637065591/posts

Do you have more interesting accounts to follow?
You can't just not tell us more. How was his mind "broken".
The underlying problem is that the people that wrote the law weren't technologically sophisticated enough to properly define what the law was meant to apply to. 'Radio communication' is incredibly ambiguous. They probably meant any data transmitted using electromagnetic waves as the physical data carrier, but we can never be sure, because 'radio communication' is also a specific application of that class of technologies.
Competition is good. Facebook hasn't shown to be a proponent of users rights, made convenient because of their dominant market position. If they had a serious competitor, their attitude of forced acceptance of new features would likely change.
Are airport body scanners a radiation risk?
i have come to realize that his domain expertise/obsession is the key to finding the right founding teams to back
Help My newsletters are flagged as spam. 
Recently, my out going email is sent to spam and junk folders. Why? What can I do to prevent this from happening?
It's definitely really cool that this can be done, but what advantage does this give over my native development environment? Do people really find themselves developing on random machines enough to justify switching to a cloud-based IDE?
No. If you were to repeat an experiment a million times, the standard deviation should (quickly) limit to zero. That does not mean that the value compued is correct, however. Due to how round-off is specified, the estimated error will increase with every floating point operation.
The bid was on Thu 6/28 as well (Tau day)
Use a service like MailChimp.com for your newsletters, but be careful - they will ban you if a lot of users flag you as spam.

One thing you can do to avoid being flagged is make sure the people actually want your newsletter - they signed up to your service at least semi-recently.
There was a multi-million dollar contract in Japan a few years ago decided by a single hand of Rock Paper Scissors.
If I read correctly, they actually bid up to 4 billion before dropping out.
Terrorism at Orlando's Lake Eola Park
The USA makes one request per 66726 citizens. France makes one per 61328.6 citizens, Australia one per 63405.5, and the United Kingdom is at one per 54216.9 (The best estimate I found for the population was 63 million; using the figure from census data in 2001, it's one per 50593.1). The absolute number of requests does not give much useful information except when you also take into account the relative populations of countries; using requests per citizens as a metric, the USA is in no way the "snoopiest govt".

Edit: While I haven't gone through these really systematically, I think that Mexico might have the lowest ratio, at one request per 3159742 citizens.
Wow, there is so much wrong in your comment I don't even know where to start...
My favorite part is that it even works on my (android) phone!
The site could really benefit from a designer, and your pricing really needs to be more clear (think I mentioned this over at the Mochi forums a while back) - people aren't going to know how many "cpu bursts" or "keyvalue anythings" they need, those words just don't mean anything to "my game".
Yeah the law seems badly worded..we also have situation of GPS not being exempted when used by non vehicle entities..ie the Police can ask cell carrier for gps info without warrants whereas if its a vehicle gps than they have to have a warrant..or did I understand it wrong?
There are really three roles in a startup: funding, selling, and building. They're all important. If a business co-founder doesn't have funding, he/she has to prove they're good at selling. Unfortunately, a lot of business co-founders with ideas haven't actually spent much time selling, and they don't have much money either, because if they did, they'd be looking for a technical _employee_, not a "technical co-founder."
Growing up on a farm meant I learned very early that you could do a massive amount of work, and earn very little from it :p.

The first startup I worked for was in 1993, and it was an amazing experience. While it's been fun watching the Internet change over the last 2 decades, it's been just as much fun watching how much of it stays the same (like DNS, is DNS configuration ever going to be anything short of magic?).

I'm proud to say that first startup is still going: http://www.yourlink.ca/
It wasn't until I had g+ that I tried the web interface so maybe it's always been the case for gmail and other google services, but I have to say their interface in mobile safari is a joy and far better in UI/UX terms than some native apps I've used.
False choice. Why roll your own when either porting bindings to bcrypt or porting the bcrypt implementation to your language is easier and safer?
An obvious use of BitTorrent would be to build a supercomputer on top of it. The biggest barrier to ad hoc computation is getting at the data. (John Carmack: "It pains me to have hundreds of cpu cores across the office idle, but data transport precludes most computation of opportunity" - http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/61076521640665089). That is what BitTorrent is good for.

Especially for problems where all you need to do is divide your data into slices, apply some function, and assemble the results, BitTorrent already solves the hard part of this. (Edit: because the hard part is getting at the data in the first place, not computing over it and assembling the results.) That's what you're doing when you download a movie, it's just that the function is "identity" and the assembly is "concat".

So HN, how would you build this? has it been worked on? what am I missing?
web applications: http://applicake.com
Is privacy policy strong and convenient in Google+?
I have not seen any privacy setting in Google+. How is it going to address the issue of privacy?
Startups don't die, they commit suicide
Paul Buchheit

https://plus.google.com/111732375221065535359/posts

Harjeet Taggar

https://plus.google.com/110400433392368673860/posts

Michael Arrington

https://plus.google.com/102178700954286324866/posts

Chris Sacca

https://plus.google.com/114790574178411061829/posts

Chris Dixon

https://plus.google.com/105400903062771750089/posts

David Lee

https://plus.google.com/111138510438291281890/posts

Fred Wilson

https://plus.google.com/103112588675637065591/posts
Startups added daily for your guilty pleasure.
Partially because there hasn't been user demand for it to date. Such a change will require the programming community to start clamoring for tools to make things secure. We want speed, easy to use syntax, things like that.
E-Commerce: Beyond The Metrics
I guess I'm old. I consider a bad mistake corrupting the disk!

http://www.losethos.com
Ideas, where do they come from?
Are there any resources on the net where people post ideas for software?

Together with a friend we have over 10 years of software development and business experience. We can not however come up with a problem to tackle.

We are not doing this to get rich, we don't even want to create a company we just want to build something that people find useful and maybe say thanks ;)

Any ideas?
When assembling the data set, anything that was clearly 404'ing or unresponsive was pruned out (one or two might have slipped by, do let us know if that's the case). Fresh data is of course harder to gauge.

Frankly, I was surprised -- and impressed -- that the number was this high. Great stuff.
Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental)
Competition is great, but I don't think Google gets especially high points for "forced acceptance of new features", either. After all, they're pushing google+ by putting it on every other property they own.
I have been hoping for a web-based IDE so I can hack from my Chromebook while on the road.
Per citizens online is probably a better metric. Then I'd guess that Canada will be close to lowest.

Note also that Switzerland apparently made no requests in this time period, so I assume will be lowest, and I guess there are countries who have legal jurisdiction over some part of Google but have never filed a request.
Quick, easy-to-understand tips for using Mercurial
He supports privatizing airports and airliners (both already are so I'm not sure what he's on about) and the 'airways' (presumably he wants to abolish the FAA?). He implies that government intervention in air travel can't make us more secure. It's pretty clear what his solution is, and it isn't a well-regulated air travel industry. It's a not-regulated air travel industry, or nearly so.

Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out.

He's not talking about regulation here. He thinks solid airline security will just happen.
Laws are usually meant to be ambiguous so that they can be interpreted by courts on a case-by-case basis and be somewhat future-proof. If politicians wrote more specific laws, then we would have to create new laws for every scenario. Sure, eventually the laws should still be rewritten once they've been sufficiently outdated, but until that happens, courts have some leeway in applying existing laws to new situations.
Jailbreak iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3
1. Rather flaky; I've seen many "The server could not return a valid response" errors

2. Where is source control? This feels like editing code live on the production server.

3. I hope online IDEs take off. It's a much-needed change in the way software is written. Awesome.
This seems like a lot more than an "IDE in the cloud" -- they have this great monetization angle of letting you publish your apps directly into their "App Store" (something like Google App Engine but also a store front for customers?) and apps that people "purchase" through the app store have the added benefit of allowing you to automatically roll out updates to them in this controlled fashion.

If these were client-only JS apps, the idea of auto-update makes no sense, but given that this is all geared at client/server apps all written in JS, deploying that into an app-engine-esque execution environment that also doubles as an app store... that's a really creative idea.

For example, imagine if Amazon had an "App Store" front end for all the commercial apps on EC2 that wanted to integrate with it? Or Google App Engine did?

Would make for a very cool discovery method for customers to find cool apps and add a level of convenience for both the developer to notify/communicate with their customers as well as the customers to learn about new apps, get notified in a unified way of new features in their favorite apps, etc.

ASIDE: When I first heard Apple was doing a Mac App Store, I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. After using it, I can safely say I am an idiot and it's fantastically convenient.

I've come around on this whole app-store-for-all-sorts-of-crap idea... when done right, they can be a really nice thing. That being said, I am not looking forward to a future where I juggle 10 of them, 1 from each major vendor and one for each cell carrier. There is a limit.
Ten Years of Advogato (2009)
Detroit’s resurgence
Do you have reverse dns records set up?
Proving a Point with a Fantastic Open Party
I'm glad Dj Woooo forked Coding Soundtrack; now I'm more likely to get into at least one of those rooms.
For me at least, (an evil) Google could reconstruct most of my facebook information from the email alerts facebook has sent to my gmail account. This doesn't change your point, though.
Good point, that's definitely a valid use. But these browser IDE's have been popping up for the past couple years, long before Chromebooks were announced, which makes me feel like there must some other need or use case that I'm not thinking of.
Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds
I sometimes wonder what will happen to all these programmers when they're 60, 70? Will we all wind up manager?
> Didn't they just map SSIDs to locations for their geo database?

No, that's the problem. It was discovered that Google recorded a large amount of data beyond just SSIDs.
Flatiron Partners was a legendary NY-basd VC fund during the first dotcom era[1]. Most remember them for the Kozmo.com investment

Fred wrote a post about moving from Flatiron to USV[2]

[1] http://www.vault.com/wps/portal/usa/companies/company-profil...

[2] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2005/02/flatiron_partne.html
tl;dr:

dashes separate words, underscore is word character -- in common interpretation by, for example, Google Search.

When implementing any text search or matching, there's matter of what constitues word boundary. Obviously whitespace does, as do some punctuation; but exactly which punctuation should be considered word boundary? There is an document on the subject by Unicode Consortium:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/

There is one important case where punctuation and whitespace do not constitue word boundary: the hyphen, as used for breaking word in hyphenation. In Unicode, U+2010 Hyphen, U+2011 Non-breaking hyphen and U+002D (Hyphen-minus, the usual `minus' character from keyboard, for backward compatibility with ASCII / ISO8859-*)
I hope that was sarcasm, but if it was, it's wasn't a good execution.
why is multi-iteration sha-2 less ideal than bcrypt, even if the work factors between the two are calibrated to require the same amount of computation?

the only argument i've heard is that sha-2 can be implemented in specialized hardware (well-funded attacker) that is much much faster than CPU/GPU, whereas this is not as easy for bcrypt?

however, with multi-iteration hashing, you can strengthen the hash further w/o the user having to log in again.
Worth re-reading every year, the good stuff is at http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/index.html (but don't read number 25 because it will get you riled up (their advice doesn't go anywhere near far enough))
apparently happens a lot during spectrum auctions which is why they refined the auction system
Google Bid Pi-billion for Nortel’s Patents
Canada has one per 887892 citizens, so Mexico is still lower (I would rather live in Canada than Mexico, though). Of course countries which don't make any requests would be lower still, but I neglected those as it would cause divide-by-zero errors (I've just been dividing the population of the country by the number of requests).
I have been eagerly waiting for a good web-based text editor and dev environment since it is the only real desktop app that I still use - but this isn't it

I wish somebody would just write a vi port in js and put it online with a simple file store and git/hg. I started that project a while ago but gave up on it
Article dated August 25th, 2005.
Dr. Barski, you just blew the mind of my four year old son. I wish I'd made a video recording of his reaction. Automatoon is seriously cool.
And Google products generally allow you access to your data quite easily using standard formats where appropriate (for instance, you can export your gmail contacts).

I say "generally" because there are weaknesses. For instance, I don't think you can export your search history or the archive for a google group. You can export your "contacts" but not all of your social connections (at least I haven't found a way). I also haven't found a way to export saved maps or other geo data.

If they expand this policy to all (or essentially all) of your data, they are pretty much immune to anti-trust. And more importantly, it's just better for users. Google has nothing to fear giving your data back to you, anyway -- the only companies that are afraid of that are the less competent ones.
So damn clever... releasing an SDK for the Kinect[1] was one of the smartest things Microsoft could have ever done and I think has gone a long way to contribute to it being the fastest selling piece of hardware in history[2] (did anyone know that? I sure didn't, and barely believed it reading it).

This reminds me a lot of what Johnny Lee did with the Wii soon after it was released with head-tracking 3D[3]

Part of me wants to stop using a computer and take up beet-farming because the cool factor seems so much less than what these guys are doing.

Anyone on HN actively toying with a Kinect and want to share some video?

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kine...

[2] http://www.vgchartz.com/article/83375/kinect-is-the-fastest-...

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Apple's Intel-based products are quickly becoming a hobby compared to ARM-based iOS devices.
Go Daddy Sold At a Valuation of US$2.25 Billion
Ask HN: What methods do you use to pitch bloggers about your startup?
There are a lot of search results for a Google Search "how to pitch bloggers", but it seems that most of the articles talk about hiring a PR firm, which I've discovered practice the "spray and pray" method of contacting bloggers. Which annoys the bloggers and isn't efficient for startups.

In what ways would you suggest to pitch relevant bloggers about your startup?

Any feedback helps :)
Dropbox TOS Includes Broad Copyright License
العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 
العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 العاب تلبيس بنات 2012 العاب تلبيس بنات 2012
This article makes the all too common mistake of confusing input validation with correctly escaping things. The solution to preventing SQL injection, XSS and so on is NOT preventing "harmful" strings from being entered in to an application.
> I'd rather that Facebook dominate the space completely than give Google any more of my personal information.

I feel differently, but see quite a few (mostly non-technical) people agreeing with you - at least, here in Europe. Google already owns most of the data you've given facebook, and treats it a lot better than fb imho (e.g. allowing export/deletion). I don't see why giving Google access to a bit more of your personal data will somehow decrease your quality of life.

The reason people are foaming at the mouth, as you call it, isn't the exceptionally good technical execution, but rather how Google handles consumers (giving them more rights over their data) and developers (they're the underdog, they have to). This is another reason I like Google entering social - Facebook has been behaving rather arrogantly, and it does seem like they really own the social web [1]. But with Google acting as a threat, perhaps Facebook will be forced to soften up on some of its policies. Competition is a good thing, and I really doubt it will result in the rest of us getting squashed - In fact, I really believe we'll profit from those giants having to compete.
For other reasons why G+ is anticipated highly, try http://www.pcworld.com/article/234825/9_reasons_to_switch_fr...

Lastly, IANAL, but I doubt promoting one of your products on one of your products is in any way illegal. The Google homepage has been showing us links to Docs, Reader, Gmail etc. for a long time without anyone getting upset about it.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/13/its-a-facebook-world-other-...
yeah, definitely kindrid spirts, app-wise!
Thanks for the kind words on automatoon!
Obviously whitespace does

This has been the beginning of many hilarious conversations. (My first love was natural language processing. My second was Japanese, which treats every whitespace as a tragic waste of a place where you could have fit twenty three strokes.)
sorry- now fixed.
I have to agree that the article is very biased. The judge also says that if he interprets "radio communication" to include all technologies that transmit over radio waves, then it contradicts existing 9th circuit precedent that classifies cell phones as "wire communication". It seems like the judge understands the technology well enough, but is struggling to come up with a legal interpretation that makes sense.
What company besides Microsoft (out of fear/legal obligations) doesn't do that? It is nice and all to say everyone should start on a level playing field, what is wrong with a company advertising to their well earned and legally obtained users?
I'm a bit disappointed in Google for not thinking this through

Presumably they ran the numbers and figured that the expected costs of defending against lawsuits based on these patents was around $4 billion, in which case they're better off not bidding higher.
Not 3, but 4 or more: 6.03 Group Travel. MIT strongly discourages travel by groups of more than three faculty or staff members
"For example, you can download your entire profile as a .zip file from Facebook"

Do you get all of your connections (by what identifiers?), all the messages you've sent, and everything else?
Residency Hour Limits: On the Clock
I'd be more creeped-out if Facebook dominated the space completely.
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This is inspiring for SpawnFest, which is next weekend, and which is the "Erlang Equivalent of Rails Rumble" - http://spawnfest.com.
Have you observed what is happening to the mobile space?

Apple & Google are competing and they are trying to outdo each other. What resulted is more advanced phones and cheaper prices. Consumers win.

Can you imagine if nobody challenges Facebook? Did you know that what Facebook released recently (better Photos, messages, etc) is a preemptive response to Google+?

We have seen time and time again that monopolies are bad. Internet Explorer did not innovate for some time when it was in 80+ of computers. Microsoft started paying attention to IE again when Firefox and Chrome came out.