skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PC makers made extra money on each PC sold by bundling other people's apps for them. Until recently, this was a reasonable business strategy, since users didn't have much choice and had to put up with the poor experience, so why not make extra money at the minor cost of frustrating your customers?

For wireless companies, the custom branding is how they hope to be considered more than just a dumb pipe by providing additional "value" to users. This is why Verizon bundles their Vcast music store, and AT&T includes their custom Navigation and Yellow Pages apps. They desperately want to be seen as content companies. This is not a reasonable business strategy though, because the more they frustrate their customers with this nonsense, the more those users will flock to the pristine shores of iOS, where carriers have even less control, thereby cementing their position as a simple utility.
What's the cunning part? I skimmed the article and it seemed to have everything other then the technique.
Maybe because it wasn’t really practical to download music from the web? What you could get was of obviously inferior quality and it was just not possible to download a lot of it. I think the music industry would be quite happy with a world in which every music file is a 32kbit/s MP3 and it’s not possible to download more than three or four songs per week.

It was no threat to anyone. The reaction at the time is not all that surprising, what might be surprising is that no one seems to have predicted the development.

I’m not even sure whether Frauenhofer’s (then still relatively new) MP3 encoder was already pirated in 1995 and quickly spreading through the web. That might not even have happened at that point in time.
great!

how can I choose to deny access to my data?

heh heh. the silly article made it sound as if that wasn't an option. trust the journalists to stuff things up.

so how do I do it?

Edit: I dont use Firefox, so AdBlock is out of the question, and I have no idea what websites do this. Is there a list available somewhere?
How can I discover whether or not a website does this without visiting them in the first place?
In 1993 it was, anyway
But here's the problem - on a whole, no one is paying marketers to solve these problems. Marketers make their money by shilling for products that are the opposite of the issues you listed above.

For example, a newly minted MBA in Marketing needs to pay back school loans. Who has the money to pay them? Who has the job that will bring the most prestige and future earnings? The local farm selling grass-fed beef and organic products or P&G selling highly processed foods that are destroying the environment?

The marketer is going to take the P&G job and then spend their time and brainpower convincing people to buy even more processed crap.
Aren't companies legally required to act in the vest interests of shareholders?

Overpaying for production out of patriotic racism doesn't seem to fit that mould.
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Bullshit. If it was used to improve a product, they wouldn't use a tracking method that tracks me between sites. They can track what I do on their site, but if I'm going from goat-sucking-maggot.com to hulu.com, then Hulu has no business knowing that and knowing that doesn't improve their damn product.

This is entirely just an attempt to get competitive analysis about their competitors at the expense of user privacy.
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This one is great for both files and buffers: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984 FuzzyFinder
There is lots of evil in the world.

As a nonreligious person I just don't agree with that statement at all. The idea that there is some sinister force flowing around the earth is bizarre and medieval.

More accurately, non-insane people behave as they do in order to achieve a goal that they think will bring them happiness. Unless there is a motive of revenge or bad PR then there is no way that the degree of vandalism done in this case could possibly make the vandal happy. Anyone who would go to great lengths to destroy all traces of a stranger's personal property is mentally ill.

Mental illness has a material cause, not a supernatural one.
Heh, speaking of crusades: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yanw
The problem with multi-billion defensive patent portfolios is: You cannot counter-sue patent trolls.
I find this approach interesting compared something like OpenCourseware. If I understand correctly, this is a very similar approach, with a graded portion not typically offered at something like Khan or Open Courseware?

I'm curious about any enrolment caps and what's next for this approach.

EDIT: missing word.
How to solve the hacker/pundit schism
Java is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result
And so trillion dollar changes to a major world economy of 310 million people are made by last minute bickering.

It's boggling.
She said look for a spreadsheet prefixed with "Username and Password Assigment".
Business is supposed to be positive-sum, and when it isn't we should consider changing the rules.

Positive-sum isn't sufficient. With that said, I don't know if that's generally true. There is almost always winners and losers. And in SW it tends to be a bigger gap than other industries where things like geography will let a regional player still do quite well.
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Because my friend who picked up street Italian from her boyfriend in Rome helped me do the first translation right before Italy passed the law. She probably screwed up a little, but she gets an A for effort =)
<pedantic-nitpicky-internet-comment>
Thats not technically a paradox
</pedantic-nitpicky-internet-comment>
If there is nothing wrong with what they are doing, why do they force it on me?

Actually, given what you said in that post, why do you force it on me?

Don't bother deny it -- you wouldn't know if they are getting traction if you weren't working with them.
You too Integer? (Tricky java puzzle)
I don't think it is so much that the work has no value in their mind, but rather the whole system is held up by legal contortions, manipulation, abuse and corruption via purchased legal protection in the form of legislation. The cost of this victimization to both the artist and the consumer is then passed on to the consumer and only a fraction is shared with the artist.

To be clear people that argue for downloading non-purchased copyrighted work being morally right, are basically arguing that two wrongs make a right. I don't personally align with that view point. I do align with the view point that the work is protected by a system of victimization to both the artist and the consumer and that society as a whole would be better off without those leaches.
Is this the worst thing you've seen him do because it personally affects you?

All the times that you said he was just being harsh, I'm sure the people who were impacted thought he crossed the line as well.
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Surprises: Zero.
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They've been saying the same thing about Vorbis for the last 10 years and never found any patents despite millions of games shipping vorbis every year. Now they were supposed to form the patent pool by March and they still have nothing by July. Not holding my breath.
My understanding is that its not the gene that is patented, but the processes surrounding the isolation of it, or the actual isolated product.

There would be no patent infringement if you sequence an entire genome (including BRCA1 and BRCA2), as you are not dealing with the actual chemical processes or products covered by the patent.

They have a monopoly on their specific test, as it uses the chemical products covered by their patents (although the test aspect of the patent appears to have been thrown out).

Creating a different test based around, say Illumina or SOLiD sequencing is not going to infringe on this patent.
The point is every bit of software is vulnerable and it's not helping anyone.

If your "invention" could be recreated by another programmer independently, often inadvertently, it's not really much of an invention now is it?
I glance at the 5 star reviews then head straight for the 1 stars.

Reviews aren't really ratio based - a single counter of the right kind can completely disuade me. I really don't want "low revie anomalies" culled.

I watched the Benoit Mandelbrot TED talk earlier, he had a graph of S&Ps stock market index normally compared to it win the five most anomalous daily trades removed - it was very different. Stock market models, he said, try to smooth out the rough bits which are hard to handle, but that's really where the meat is.
"Binary file Fuck FBI Friday III: ManTech/Username and Password Assigment IDS Waiver - Final_15 Aug 05 GWB.xls matches"

If only I'd read till the end...

Thanks for the tip. They appear to be default u-p pairs, that one would hope would be changed upon first login. Still, strange to see that lying around on a computer at a firm that provides security contracting for LE and the military.
Spot on.
Heat -> electricity
beats
heat -> mechanical motion -> electricity.

But this is heat -> light -> electricity. Unless you are claiming that the conversion from heat -> light and light -> electricity is lossless.
I won't argue that companies are still trying to reduce taxes through transfer prices. However, any company that tries to avoid US taxes through transfer price schemes is not going to get very far. I have no doubt that Google is funneling a lot of revenue through the Bahamas, but they must have setup the off-shore corporation in such a way as to fall outside the jurisdiction of the IRS. To say that they are only paying 2.4% on "foreign profits" means nothing. If that's what they are supposed to pay, then nothing is wrong right? Google is an international corporation.
Chalk it up to self-selection bias, then optionally recruit them. Not a problem.
"You know all that awesome content that exists on the web? Well the people that make and distribute that content need information to make your experience better."

that's funny, most of the web content i use most heavily was 'made' and 'distributed' without any input from the marketers / advertisers / trackers whom you are defending. not all tracking is evil, but the evil tracking offsets the good stuff by a wide margin. not all gun owners are evil but if you're running a company that uses that defense to justify business practices that require an invisible gun owner to be in my living room, i'm not going to be caring about how much my living room experience has improved.
Though I dig how these guys are exposing gratuitous waste at the government level, I fear that the gov will respond not by fixing what's broken, but by imposing higher levels of control and monitoring of all internet users in general (in the US).
Some people think hiring hitmen to whack their enemies is part of the game of business too. This attitude bothers me.

Hitmen bother me too. But there's a big difference between hitmen and saying, "I have a strategic play that I'm not going to tip my hand with."

Do you equate hitmen to Apple not showing off their new iPhone until weeks before shipping? That's a form of FUD. I've heard people say that they don't want to get a new phone until they see it. Apple knows what the iPhone looks like, why don't they just show everyone so people can make their buying decisions now?

Mozilla embarked in FUD when they said that IE wasn't modern. It was an attempt to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in IE users ability to use their browser going forward.

A business not disclosing information is not at all equivalent to hitmen. First, it's not illegal. Second, businesses do it all the time -- businesses that most people love. Third, the legal responsibility of due diligence is actually on the shoulders of Google. Admittedly not very tractable given the amount of patents, but its the responsibility of the patent holder to warn you that you maybe infringing.

My point -- FUD is a pretty normal part of business. Most people judge FUD less on the actual tactic, but more if they agree with result of the FUD. If Mozilla does FUD against IE -- well it's "just the facts". If MPEG-LA does FUD then it's like murdering people.

And don't get me started on the FUD associated with the insurance, drug, medical, food, automobile, education, cosmetics, cleaning, and gardening industries. These industries are all much worse than the SW industry with respect to FUD. And their FUD is much more targeted at the consumer.
I think the idea is not so much, "look at the bombshell we uncovered", as "your security is a joke, and you're the people providing security services to the government".
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As others have alluded to, it's trivial to photoshop an ID with different info and photo. You could use a stolen credit card and a modified ID to make a reservation.

That said, I'm more concerned with "email a scanned photo ID". Are they seriously having users send scanned IDs through email? Email is completely insecure and should NEVER be used for sensitive information such as an ID. IDs should be treated in the same manner as credit cards. Would you ever ask a customer to email you scans of their credit card? You'd lose your merchant account faster than you can say law suit.
Follow-up: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/retrospective-on-seda...
The main subtlety is that they took personal information when they charged for their content (the decision specifically says there's no squashing of freedom of speech, since they could have screened out people from TN).

Someone signing up with an account from TN is therefore analagous to someone mail-ordering porn from TN, which would also be illegal under this law.
Either don't use websites that use this (what the grandparent was suggesting, I believe), or block KISSmetrics in your hosts file. Apparently it's also blocked by Adblock Plus if you're subscribed to the right lists (which are linked to elsewhere in the comments on this story).
Interesting. I would have guessed the opposite - that the insurance companies get a "volume discount" of sorts.

What about with prescriptions? Is it better to pay cash price via HSA, or can you get a cheaper rate through your provider?
1) change name of site to redd1t or d1gg.
2) Do something like Wikipedia has where people can vote in integrity/quality of source/story.
Normal customers don't care that a phone is 'open' any more than a non-gearhead cares if a car is user-serviceable. They don't even really know what that means.

Tech folks need to stop thinking of 'open' as a selling point when it comes to consumer products and focus on the actual experience for a consumer.
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Ask HN: Like-A-Little style hacker houses for hackers on a budget? 
A few months ago TC Cribs did a piece on the Like-A-Little hacker house, which is basically a bunch of guys all sharing a place to eat/code/sleep and repeat in order to save as much money as possible and get a product built.

Here's the TCCribs place on the house:

I'm building a startup with some buddies, but due to visa issues I've been forced to moved back to the US and work remotely with them. Because of this, I'm planning on making the most of a bad situation and find the cheapest place(s) to live and work. I'm basically looking for a place just like the one that Evan Reas (emreas on HN) set up for the Like-A-Little founder and fellow entrepreneurs about 7 months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079246). I tried contacting Evan about the LaL house, but they are completely full and he doesn't know of any other places.

Does anyone know of any hacker houses like the LaL house that may be able take in a fellow hacker and hustler for very very little. I don't care if I live on an air mattress for a few months if need be. I just want to find a place with fellow hackers and entrepreneurs where I can spend as little as possible and code for the next few months.
Not if you know what to look for. I came across code that implements the metaphone algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone) and used it for a sample project I started, but never finished, years ago (http://boston.conman.org/cgi-bin/location/location.cgi). It could be modified to allow free form text, instead of the text field for the city, pull-down for the state, but that's an implementation detail.

But the point is---code to check for misspellings already exists.
Ask HN: How do we monetize our free app without getting on users' nerves?
Our simple app has more than 11,000 users currently and so far everyone has given us rave reviews about the app. Given our huge user base, we're now considering monetizing it.

Of course, we aren't going to start charging users for the existing app. Instead we were thinking of building some of the frequently requested features into a paid version. Is this a good idea? If you are a user, would you like the fact we are charging for the features you requested?
Here's a clickable link to the app: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/offpaifnchmpbnjhjb...

Though it's a Chrome App, you can also visit it directly on a HTML5 browser at http://scribble.wreally.com
My rule of thumb for stuff like this is minimum 3 years and generally 5-10 years. It has so-far seemed to be true just from about 20 years of reading about cool new technology X.
Linus is a native speaker of Swedish, not Finnish.
I'm going to guess that you might be surprised at the number of startups that actually do rely on some aspect of AI, if you were to dig deep enough. Even if they're not "an AI startup" lots of companies these days are using some sort of machine learning, data mining, collaborative filtering, etc. stuff, which are aspects of AI. Look at any company that's using a recommender system of some sort... that stuff is one element of AI.

Aside from that, I think it's just that hackers have always been fascinated with AI. And lot of what we know as "hacker culture" to this day, dates back to people and events that happened in the AI research group at MIT, decades ago[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)#...
My goal in writing that was to illustrate the opposite of the original. The correct approach is probably somewhere in the middle.

> Do we really need to soften everything?

It sounds like you're trying to create a strawman. No, we needn't soften everything. But we should probably soften some things. One could just as well ask, do we really need to be brusque 100% of the time?

> Are our egos so fragile that we can't take a little bluntness

Again, I'm not talking about "a little" -- reading between the lines, I can't help but wonder if the boss is like this all the time, if his reign is so brittle that he can't suffer a dash of kindness even in the memo that provides his first impression to new employees.

One of the hardest parts of leadership is knowing when to be harsh and when to let up.
So by that argument, the invention of calculus was not a big deal, since Newton and Leibniz arrived at it independently.
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Ask HN: What are the best books, tutorials, and references to learn PHP?
I am new to PHP with little background in other languages and I want to learn PHP from scratch. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Whats next.. tracking users using browser exploits ?
If, as the article implies, the same user gets the same identifier across all KISSmetrics customers they ARE (implicitly) sharing customer activity between customers.

As the article states, customer A and B could simple put the information they each have about identity XYZ together. Without KISSmetrics having to be involved any further than in providing and maintaining the unique identity to each customer separately.

Even if it was not the intent of KISSmetrics for this to be possible (which I've a hard time believing), the chosen implementation makes it possible.
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Either that or there is a shortage of available AI engineers, so they are using this to identify and cull potentially good people that for one reason or another cannot or have not attended a Stanford caliber school.
[Opinion|Idea] Using the Social Graph as an Artifical Neural Network (ANN)
So the basic concept behind artificial neural networks is to have a graph with input and output nodes. You send logic through the graph, as a series of pipes. The logic within the graph (each node serves as I/O) processes the input values and provides output values based on the graph structure. You create the graph by training/conditioning the neural network - thus creating the logic.

What would come of applying this theory to social networks (and other occurrences of graph patterns throughout the internet)?

The reason that neural networking works is that the structures in the graph fundamentally represent patterns outside of the graph; effectively their logic mimics external mathematical patterns - they are a simplification of the information that the network digests as it is conditioned.

Extrapolating from this fact, shouldn't the patterns (and hence the logic) within social networks hold meaning? What would be the equivalent of running "pulses" through the social graph?

There would be two ways to do this.

1. Internally - create a simple algorithm that uses the logic held in the social graph to process inputs and outputs. For example, you might send an array of integers through a subgraph of Faceboook and get some other integers out from different end nodes within the subgraph. (With internal graph processing, you'd need access to the database, so only the social network would have the ability to run analytics like this.)

2. Externally - literally send a piece of information (an email that get's forwarded from one person (node) to the next, a tweet retweeted, or a hyperlink referenced) through the social work and follow it's path through the network. It's ending point would effectively be a function of it's starting point, and it's ending quality (for example, if the email was somehow changed by the end), would also be a function of it's starting point.

What could be made of such analytics? Are people already doing this? (I assume they are... I can't be the first one who thought of this.)

Btw, this is only my second post, so looking forward to getting familiar with the hacker community and hello. Let me know if this post was too long to be enjoyable.
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but the tab bar is within apple's design guidelines. it also makes navigation a whole lot easier because you don't have to go back to the springboard.
I think it's quite interesting to see google go the same route as MS did with Windows and Windows Mobile which is allow the OEM to customize to make money, while letting user satisfaction drop. At the same time, WP7 is a total different strategy to tightly control the hardware and give a much greater user experience while the OEMs have less and less control.