skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia for your iTunes
Wikit displays wikipedia articles about your artists and albums. Read detailed artist' biographies and fun trivia about your songs and albums as you play music in iTunes.
True, if you are incompetent enough to expose your most sensitive data on the internet yourself, why do you expect others to come to your aid. Even if Google does not index it, what is stopping other search engines from indexing or hackers to get access to it directly. There are lot of tools which will automatically index all the content of a website with the click of a button. So I think it is best to put the onus on the website collecting the user data to protect it. If they cannot, then maybe they should just use some third party authentication and minimize the amount of sensitive data that they need to keep on their servers.
Firefox 5 beta download
firefox , 5 , beta , download

firefox 5 beta download
nothing is gonna happen to Groupon (or the indian subsidiary). OTOH, Dropbox just got hit with a class action lawsuit.
as we are currently groupon bashing, take a look at groupon.de (germany) http://www.groupon.de/deals/berlin

scroll down ... down ... down ... there it is (gray text on black background), the crappiest example of SEO i have seen in a long long time. keyword stuffing is so 2004.

"Berlin ist als Hauptstadt der Bundesrepublik bekannt für seine Sehenswürdigkeiten und das umfassende Angebot an Freizeit-Aktivitäten. ... ... Berlin Deal ... ... Rabatten ... ... Geld zu sparen... ... Gutschein ...bla ... ... Angebote des Berlin Deals ... ... Wellness-Angeboten ... ... Restaurantgutscheinen.... ... .Freizeiterlebnisse, Events und Dienstleistungen in Berlin ... ... Shopping und Online Shop. ... ... Berlin Gutscheine ... ... "

i would have guessed that a multi billion dollar company could at least hire a decent SEO guy.
A friend of mine was a corporate insurer.

Whenever a large firm like dropbox made a clanger and got sued, the insurers would work out how much negligence there was involved.

The insurers discussed the issue with the company and said "you were negligent here, here and here" therefore "we're only going to cover you to X<100% of your public liability"

So negligent actions are not covered by insurance, and some portion will still have to be coughed up.
10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing
I got an email notification from Dropbox on June 23rd as follows:

Hi Lance,

On June 19, 2011, we had a software bug that caused authentication issues. You can read more about it in our blog post. Our records show that your account wasn't improperly logged into during this time.

We are writing to you because one or more users you share a Dropbox folder with logged into their account during that period. We have no reason to believe that the login was improper, but in the unlikely event it was, there could have been access to the information in the following shared folder:

foldername

We are very sorry as this never should have happened. We are implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again. If you have any questions please contact us at support@dropbox.com

- The Dropbox Team
Ok my mouth is literally a-gape at the number of database dumps indexed by Google. I guess I just never thought of searching for something so simple and now I'm floored at how often this seems to happen. How does anyone possibly allow a data dump to come anywhere near somewhere Google could index it?
I wonder if the developer who caused the bug got fired. As a developer, this is one of the few nightmares I get at night :) (making a small change and bringing every thing down)
I think he was comparing life generally in the US and other Western Countries to life in Russia, China, Iran, etc. Western Countries are no angels, but by and large their is far less repression and corruption.

BTW -- the Government is made up of people. Citizens. People become politicians because they are voted in by other people. I find it unusual that people talk about "government" as if it is something that is detached from the citizens. People are the Government. People determine the direction of Government.

If you forget that people are the Government then you've pretty much given up on democracy.
rather bad lol
most of it is a Chrome and Android advertisement also.
That's 00:01 on the 23rd New Zealand time - anywhere else it would have been the 22nd.
Who uses QuickTime anyways? Nobody cares about it. Quite frankly, I haven't noticed it while looking at this page an hour ago.
I did really love the hit on 'something'; http://cl.ly/7z3B (jpg)
Yeah. I had one for CineWorld.co.uk for several years. If you went to the cinema at least twice a month it was cheaper to buy the unlimited card.

$50/month is about twice as expensive as it is in the UK and has been for years, for unlimited films.
It was explained to me that big companies can't simply copy ideas/concepts. Example: They ask for an expose of work and then don't hire the original artist but reproduce it inhouse. Also think publishers or even Hollywood: Scripts are advertised by their authors to many producer (like the proverbial taxi driver who tells every prominent passenger of his movie idea) but this only can work if manuscripts are protected. The other example is something like GNU: If you kill copyright the GNU Public license would cease to exist.
Location:
Coffee Day Indiranagar
100 ft. Road
Bangalore, India

Time:
1830 to 2130 (Thursday, June 30)
Heads outta roll for this one. The dev, the supervisor, his supervisor. Probably all the way up to VP.

It's a stupid, boneheaded mistake, but one of those that could only be made in an environment where security is extremely lax. Easiest way to fix the environment here is to just fire everyone involved.
Not every founder is motivated by material success.

Some people are born entrepreneurs and can't imagine working in any other way. If you are one of those people then I'd suggest that you first find out what it is that you love doing, and then build a company around that.

That way, you will be living a life which you find worthwhile, irrespective of the financial outcome of your venture. You will work harder than ever before because you'll be doing what you enjoy. And you will find it much easier to persevere through all the ups and downs of startup life because your business will be aligned with your personal values and passions.

In short, founding a company in no way excludes mindfulness, humility and reality. It's all a question of finding the right motivation.
Excelbook is launced, a Facebook UI looks like Excel
WeScheme (web IDE)
It's out now.
I can't help but feel like most of what you're saying doesn't really matter with respect to getting sued or not.

Does it really matter whether advertise that they are secure or not? If security wasn't listed all of their site, would that have mattered?

Does it matter whether they wrote a lessons learned blog post?

And as far as communication goes, Drew did respond and I thought the response was pretty good [1]. It was not immediate, nor should it have been. They had to determine the extent of the breach, consult with their lawyers, devise an appropriate strategy, etc.

It's not as simple as immediately notifying every account holder. That's what... 30 million people? Less than 100 accounts were actually exploited--why create mass hysteria when you can simply notify the small batch that were actually impacted? As bad as this situation is for them, awareness is mostly confined to the tech elite which in the grand scheme of things is a pretty good outcome.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/dropbox-breach-fewer-than-1...
Nice that they have add ons and pricing for them but I wish they'd sort out their own preliminary prices first...

http://appharbor.com/page/pricing

Until there is solid pricing and a decent story around support it's very hard to use for anything that matters.
Disclaimer: Subjective, no offense intended.

This is once again proving that, while I understand the language, probably shop the same things, the USA is a strange place for me. This 'just sue' culture seems weird. It seems that the whole point is to run to the court and claim 'He did something wrong. Please spend a lot of time to check that I actually have a point and if I'm lucky, please define a grossly exaggerated sum in damages'.

I _know_ I'll take flak for this, but it warps my mind. The nation that always, even if it hurts, defends the right of free speech, seems to severely limited elsewhere. It sure looks like you can _say_ anything, but _doing_ anything could lead to a nightmarish jungle (political correctness/discrimination, braindead users don't get the concept of 'hot coffee' and it's your fault, chocolate eggs with toys inside are mightily dangerous) of potential problems.
Coverity's Prevent[1]? I use it for C++, and while it's not free, the pricing is /very/ reasonable.

[1] http://www.coverity.com/html/prevent-for-java.html
Also: https://shouldichangemypassword.com/
When you can have a 50 inch screen at home for $500 and no people talking or texting, no overpriced snacks, no incorrect brightness, no bad audio - the only reason to go to a movie theater is for new releases.

But if you ignore new releases and just wait for the six-eight month cycle before they are on DVD or BluRay, you don't need a theater.

Haven't been in one in years and that's even with having free passes on occasion.
I remember when Kanye West could not license the THX sound, used it anyway and got sued. Can't really remember the internet outrage back then.
You may also want to read:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665398

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665463

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2688332

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2690257

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691452
Sales people do it faster than most - if they cant get the commissions any more as the market is saturated they will go and sell something else.
I think it's a win-win scenario in the cases you describe. YC model works the best with these who are technically savvy but lacking business experience due to their young age. After being acquired they become real entrepreneurs who have more potential for a bigger venture in the future.
Am i the only one who doesn't understand why someone should use a memcache/redis instance hosted by a third party?

I've never used this kind of services but the first impression is that just the RTT between your server and the third party's one will have a huge impact performance-wise, removing every advantage you could have from the use of these DBs.

And what about security? Are memcache/redis/mongoDB/etc... made to be exposed to the public internet (requests content and format are carefully inspected by the server and during development, the implementation have been tested carefully with fuzz testing or similar techniques) or these hosted solutions add an additional layer that increases security/safety?

These issues could be mitigates (not resolved) when both parties are on the same platform, but not everyone is on EC2/Heroku.
I tried "hello" and "god" and both are safe, apparently.
You have a point about the music. The songs were handcrafted by musicians and still needed a license. It is logical that the same is true for the cover, even if it was handcrafted by a painter.

That said Maisel is still a jerk.
This is true at the moment but outfits such as Agilent and BK have been making inroads with cheaper, feature-packed kit and agressive marketing. I'd rather have a Fluke TBH. A Fluke won't kill you.
use your email address.
Try this Hello world:

(js-big-bang 0 ;; initial world
(on-draw ;; the dom tree renderer
(lambda (w)
(list (js-p '(("id" "myPara")))
(list (js-text "hello world"))))

;; the css renderer
(lambda (w)
'(("myPara" ("font-size" "30"))))))
Accountancy firms
Accountants Ireland, Accountancy Firms - BM Boland is leading accountancy firm which has specialized Accountant in Ireland, Limerick, Dublin,Cork,Galway,Clare.
Assuming the HTML spec doesn't change and browser isn't buggy.

Neither of those claims have proved true in the past.
Yes, but what the hell is a QR code? Hehe. Or rather, why do I want one?

I have no idea what this is used for. I'm 1/5th of the way down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code and still have no idea how this applies to websites. Most people who don't know aren't going to take time to go research it.

In a sentence: I have no idea what value benefit this has for me.

I'm telling you this because I want you to succeed, and if you want to gain traction outside if the HN bubble, then you'll probably want to appeal to regular people.
How to tame java GC pauses? Surviving 16GiB heap and greater.
> If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need
> to write code.

Or use Amazon S3... some config needed, but no need to write code: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-...
So in order to have syntax highlighting for a language, you have to fork Pygments, write the lexer, issue a pull request, then finally fork Linguist, add the new language/lexer, then issue a pull request?
Sugar Rush: The progress of a disease over thirty years
Google hacking is truly awesome and powerful. In fact there is some pro material already on the web such as http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb/

There is also a pretty good book from a spanish Microsoft MVP (yeah it sounds bad but still its an important award, :\)

http://www.informatica64.com/libros.aspx?id=hackingBuscadore...

It's a shame they decided not to translate it, anyone is up to it here? It contains everything that you'd ever wonder and much more.
Seeing that people are downvoting this, perhaps it wasn't obvious enough.

Proof that the starting digit in numbers is not base invariant:

In base 10 not all numbers start with 1. In base 2 all numbers start with 1. Hence, the distribution is not base invariant. QED.

For an explanation why you get the right thing if you substitute "units", I refer you to the Wikipedia page on Benford's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law
There are many pictures of Miles Davis but all are different to the one on the kind of blue album. That was the point of the OP.
Unhappy with HNSearch ...
OK, I've really been trying to get along with HNSearch, but I've always felt the results are inferior to SearchYC. It didn't bother me so much, but now that SearchYC is going off-line, I thought I'd air at least one grievance.

It doesn't do what I ask.

Here's an example. I asked for "stories" with "billion" and "almost".

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=billion+almost&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0

Six of the top ten hits results don't have either word in the title.

OK, so maybe when there isn't a link it considers the entire "Ask HN" text.

Two of the top ten hits are links, and still don't have either word in the title.

This is really annoying me, and I'm finding HNSearch pretty near useless.

Which is a shame.

</rant>
Ask HN: I've got 3 months of long weekends.  What should I build?
Hey,
My wife and kids are taking an extended trip overseas. I have organised to take 1 day a week of work so that I can spend some time on personal projects. My current idea is to try building 3 small projects, spending a month on each and blogging the results. Each project should:

* Be capable of producing a small, continuous income stream, with only minimal extra investment once it is complete.

* Be small enough to complete in a month of long weekends.

* Have some easily measured metric, that I can track, and use to iterate and improve my work (pageviews, downloads, purchases, etc)

* Require only a small upfront investment in cash.

As for my skills I have 10 years experience in software development, can design, write and take photos.
The current projects I'm considering are:

1. 1 month of stock photography, uploaded to a site like http://www.istockphoto.com/

2. Creating themes for magento, or some other e-commerce or CMS platform

3. I have an existing website that sells products over the net ( http://www.grafting-tool.com/ ), however it gets very few customers. Spend a month trying to increase the pageviews and page rank.

4. Android application to allow people to sort through their photo collections on their phone.

5. A solution to link Google analytics conversion tracking with paypal buy now buttons. I spent ages working on this on my own website and there is no easy off the shelf solution.

What are peoples suggestions and experiences with side projects? Is there anything I should be looking at? Or avoiding?

I hope to share my experiences with HN, so in just over a month, I will have my first success, or failure to report.

Edit: formatting.
Reusable vegetable bags
Beautiful cloth napkins made from premium organic fabrics. Cloth napkins add luxury to meal time, while helping to save our precious trees. I offer FREE SHIPPING and PLANT A TREE with each order.
Clickable:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=bil...
Just bought the Kindle version. Now I have the book on my Kindle and iPhone Kindle App (Looks really crisp on my iphone and has anchor links to each chapter, although it could use a better table of contents)

Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00586LJ2O/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Firefox and Ubuntu: making sure that no-one ever again is confused whether or not FOSS might be usable for people who have other things to do than updating their software.
If you ask me, this is a pretty open & shut case: he copied the photograph exactly, as much as exactitude was allowed for the medium. Baio brought barely anything new to the table at all. A tie pattern? That doesn't seem like enough to me to make it a true derivative work, and moreover, it was for a commercial purpose.

It is telling that Baio got permission for the music but not for the album cover.
Why change their passwords? Isn't that FUD?
> political correctness/discrimination, braindead users
> don't get the concept of 'hot coffee' and it's your
> fault, chocolate eggs with toys inside are mightily
> dangerous)

All this looks like vicious circle to me: more and more common sense, simple thinking and moral judgement is "outsourced" to laws and people not bothering to think for themselves are becoming weaker and weaker at making this kind of decisions themselves :(
PC for some reason irritates me greatly, I am not even sure why. Society moving towards total PC looks like Universe moving towards thermal death.
SCTP anyone?
isn't the main benefit for deployment over browser a fast update process? So when you don't want to update often you miss the point
A Comparison between Personal and Traditional Bank Checks
If you are using traditional bank checks then you are losing the chance of promoting your business through personal checks. Personal checks not only fulfill the purpose of financial transaction but they also help in promoting your business. Therefore , if you want personal checks then you can contact Personal Check Fast company for them.
Quirksmode is seeking to raise € 2,500 in donations
This keeps reminding me of that Daily WTF article where a sysadmin sends a warning about phishing spam with an example of one and gets hundreds of UN/PW pairs back... I think email should be taught is school.
Let's not gloss over your success with soft (useless) phrases like "hard work" and "passion."

You launched Pinboard to a crowd which already knew & loved you, at a time when everybody thought Delicious was about to fall over and die. Furthermore, you had novel marketing features - the "the price increases per user" thing, which was clever enough that people checked Pinboard out JUST to see it in action.

That is marketing -- and if you subtracted how much those early customers paid from the amount newer customers pay, that is your advertising cost. A discount is still a marketing expense.

And as for the Bedbug Registry, it's not a product - it's free. Furthermore, you serve desperate and angry and frightened users. They are much more likely to seek you out by Google than any other kind of customer. There is no equivalent level of desperate users for most software.
According to the TOS, which all drop box users claimed of "reading and agreeing with" he's got no case ($100 at most)

see https://www.dropbox.com/terms#terms

Cloud brings risks, one shall be aware of it, and do the math of advantages/disadvantages.

I will keep my dropbox account, despite that incident, and know deep in my heart that such glitch can happen to me as well, no matter how well my develop/test/deploy routine is designed.

Having say that, I will never have anything high sensitive on any hosted machine, no matter who the provider is, unless it is strongly encrypted (that includes, pgp for sensitive mail (gmail) attachments, etc.)

I really hope dropbox will learn from this and continue improve their service as they have been doing since day one.

from the terms page:

IN NO EVENT WILL DROPBOX BE LIABLE TO YOU OR TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING,
WITHOUT LIMITATION, DIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, PUNITIVE OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING LOSS OF
USE, DATA, BUSINESS OR PROFITS) ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THIS AGREEMENT, OR FROM YOUR
ACCESS TO OR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO ACCESS OR USE, THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES, OR FOR
ANY ERROR OR DEFECT IN THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES OR SERVICES, WHETHER SUCH LIABILITY ARISES FROM ANY
CLAIM BASED UPON CONTRACT, WARRANTY, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE, OR
ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, WHETHER OR NOT DROPBOX HAS BEEN INFORMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE,
EVEN IF A REMEDY SET FORTH HEREIN IS FOUND TO HAVE FAILED OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE. YOU SPECIFICALLY
ACKNOWLEDGE THAT DROPBOX IS NOT LIABLE FOR THE DEFAMATORY, OFFENSIVE OR ILLEGAL CONDUCT OF OTHER USERS
OR THIRD PARTIES AND THAT THE RISK OF INJURY FROM THE FOREGOING RESTS ENTIRELY WITH YOU. FURTHER,
DROPBOX WILL HAVE NO LIABILITY TO YOU OR TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY THIRD PARTY CONTENT UPLOADED ONTO
OR DOWNLOADED FROM THE SITE OR THROUGH THE SERVICES AND/OR THE FILES, OR IF YOUR DATA IS LOST,
CORRUPTED OR EXPOSED TO UNINTENDED THIRD PARTIES.

FREE ACCOUNT HOLDERS: YOU AGREE THAT THE AGGREGATE LIABILITY OF DROPBOX TO YOU FOR ANY AND ALL CLAIMS
ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES IS LIMITED TO TWENTY ($20) U.S.
DOLLARS. THE LIMITATIONS OF DAMAGES SET FORTH ABOVE ARE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF THE BASIS OF THE
BARGAIN BETWEEN DROPBOX AND YOU.

PREMIUM ACCOUNT HOLDERS: YOU AGREE THAT THE AGGREGATE LIABILITY OF DROPBOX TO YOU FOR ANY AND ALL
CLAIMS ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES IS LIMITED TO LOWER OF THE
AMOUNTS YOU HAVE PAID TO DROPBOX DURING THE THREE MONTH PERIOD PRIOR TO SUCH CLAIM, FOR ACCESS TO AND
USE OF THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES OR SERVICES, OR ONE-HUNDRED ($100) DOLLARS. THE LIMITATIONS OF DAMAGES
SET FORTH ABOVE ARE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF THE BASIS OF THE BARGAIN BETWEEN DROPBOX AND YOU.
Lawsuit is also a good tool so scare others from just trying to do something useful—just in case someone sues on the first mistake.
The "brand name" investors are exactly the ones that don't "chillax". Casual angel investors usually lose money. The ones that have strong deal-flow don't get that by just occasionally showing up in Mountain View with a checkbook. Also note that most of the "super angels" at this point are really just mini-VCs. Conway, McClure, Sacca, et al are mostly investing other people's money.