skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your example was the subject of a famous lawsuit as well, so whatever your feelings about the issues, Apple has acted consistently over the years in going after those who they see as copying their products:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
And if you fail to protect your wi-fi they could claim negligence. "I have heard other lawyers compare leaving your wifi open to leaving a loaded gun lying around." (http://torrentfreak.com/are-you-guilty-if-pirates-use-your-i...).
I think it would ironic if WEP became popular again because it could protect negligence and is trivially hacked.
>What is the outcome one could hope for by not investing in promising companies? Waiting for lower valuations? Weeding out the riff-raff?

In a nutshell, not losing money. Sometimes doing nothing has a higher expected payoff than doing something. Even promising companies are vulnerable to a financial crisis of this severity.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848041
There's absolutely a distinction. Reversibly encrypted passwords aren't ideal, but it does at least make a database dump less useful to someone who manages a SQL injection exploit.
I also thought exactly this until I read "vim plugin".

Clearly this is just a start, a way to have something running and make people talk about it, a way have real users testing their technology... And being a YC startup help having a relatively large audience even for this kind of launching with an uninteresting product, so the real world technology testing will work, and I'm pretty sure that's all they care about for now.

When they start developping plugins for other apps using the same already-tested-and-approved techno, it will get interesting. This seems to me like a case of "launch now, code later", which in this context may be a good idea.

Oh, and by the way, I'd like an Emacs Lisp implementation and an open protocol (and a unicorn).
I worked at a credit counseling service in high school (circa 1995), and numbers in that range would not surprise me at all. This is a navy town, and I couldn't count the number of young enlisted sailors that would come in with wife, kids and over $50k in unsecured credit card debt. Also, it mostly wasn't on normal credit cards. They would typically have a card for a dozen or more different retailers (e.g. Sears, Express, Limited, Target, etc.) all maxed out.
The 'discussion' and 'support' tags only apply to the meta sites, not the main Q&A sites. When you post a question on a meta, you're required to tag it with one of four tags which help the mods/admins filter the purpose of the post - bug reports, feature requests, open discussion, and support requests.

If you've ever made a post on meta, this would have been made obvious since the tag input box comes prepopulated with a list of these, and the submission fails if you don't use one. If you don't post on meta, however, these tags are meaningless to you.
For anyone who is looking for some code to read with I would recommended BSNES. It isn't a huge code base and worth the trip. Read through most of it last year after finding it and found it most enjoyable.
slightly off-topic, but why does the quoted press release refer to real time? "...advanced visual and sound effects to give the people coming in the park a real-time feel of things".

No idea what that could mean.
I'm proud of the team on this one. They've done a great job launching such a polished experience.
Ah, so that's what's happening!

Several times now, I've accidentally Cmd+Q'd Chrome because I didn't realize that TextEdit or Preview was no longer the application in focus.

This happens mostly if I just closed the last of the application windows, and accidentally expose'd the windows back and forth. If you "Show Desktop" and then bring the windows back, TextEdit and Preview will now be closed.

I don't think I like it, but it might just be a matter of retraining myself.
Lessons from a failed startup (devotee)
New Website Posts Photos of Rioters, Will Forward ID’s to Police
I'd like to see these questions added standard to VC pitch meetings:

1)How do you store passwords in your datastore? plaintext?

2)When users login to your service and provide their credentials is it over SSL?
> Instead they use some sort of stone-age technology called "footnotes", stuffing all supplementary material right into the book as a couple lines of tiny text.

A bit OT.

I got tired of clicking on the footnote links, and click to come back to text, and wrote a little Greasemonkey script that shows the footnotes on mouse hover. Makes reading the text a bit easier.

It's available at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109690 in case anyone's interested.
Playing devil's advocate, but this still prevents lots of web-based attacks. Provided you store the encryption key on the filesystem, or in memory and the encrypted passwords in the database usually you'll get access to only one part.

But it gets better! If you have access to the encrypted passwords, but not the key, then they're safer than hashes, since the attacker cannot try to bruteforce them (he could try bruteforcing a very very long encryption key of course...)
Price is the best metric I've ever seen for value. Sure emotion, hype and misinformation can make price diverge from value for a time, but it inevitably converges to value.

You have something better?
No, it means that getting the actual raw passwords is now a fun little puzzle for anyone who gets SQLI.

News flash for the (hopefully small) collection of people who may be kidding themselves on this point: unless you've gone to significant lengths to mitigate this specific problem, if you give up the SQL for your website, you've probably given up the box, too.

How likely is it that you're THAT company, the one that hardened their database server and app architecture so that it can survive someone who compromises SQL, and that you actually have SQLI? And, if you're THAT company, how likely is it that you're storing reversably encrypted passwords? And if you're THAT company, how likely is it that you're simply mailing them back to customers on request? It's not likely.
Doesn't always end that poorly, either:

>But earlier this year, the judge found [$1.92 million] to be "monstrous and shocking" and reduced the amount to $54,000. Following that, the RIAA informed Thomas-Rasset that it would accept $25,000--less than half of the court-reduced award--if she agreed to ask the judge to "vacate" his decision, which means removing his decision from the record. Thomas-Rasset rejected that offer almost immediately.

At least she's principled. I wonder if she has a means of accepting donations...
Maybe it's just me, but I love the login screen for Messenger. They made the application simple and unbelievably clean; kudos to their team on it.

I really hope they start to bring this type of experience to Facebook for iPhone.
Why should it warn the user?

Either the user is using the same password on multiple sites. Then this would be a real security issue, independent of the fact if some of the sites store the password in plaintext.

Or the user is using different passwords for different sites. Then you don't really need to care how a single site handles your password.
Court Says Sending Too Many Emails To Someone Is Computer Hacking
I think both would have a good laugh. Dell was wrong, Jobs not only saved Apple but turned it into one of the largest companies in the planet.

Being slightly wrong is boring. Being so completely wrong is fun.
I experienced intermittent issues. It tried retrieving the content to stream and failed. This lasted for about 20-30 mins. Was using wii streaming during that time.
The fact that they sent it in an email in response to a user request means that they are at least storing it in a reversible format. Given that they sent the password in plaintext via email, I see no reason to believe they are competent enough to set up a reversible system that is more secure than plaintext (e.g. rot13 isn't more secure but isn't technically plaintext; storing an encrypted password with the key isn't more secure). In all likelihood, they are storing in plaintext or an equivalent.
Everyone has to start from somewhere though, and stealing a bat from someone who's rioting doesn't seem like the best option when Amazon is perfectly willing to send one to you.
Celebrity endorsements harmful for Education Reform
I have some rough thoughts on how to implement guards, nothing concrete, but I don't see any obstacles to integration with our compilation strategy.
That's what I don't understand about banks.

On 99% of all websites I can use special characters in my passwords. The only exception are my online banking sites, where I'm forced to restrict myself to [\d\w] one one of the sites and to [\d] on the other site.
The problem with tooltips is discoverability. The idea of this change is to make the wiki descriptions plainly obvious to even brand new users who wouldn't know such a thing exists.

My suggestion would be to only show one of these descriptions at a time as a sub-element of the first suggestion displayed in the old-style list (with other suggestions displayed as well, but without the description). This would make the description plainly obvious to a new user, but without the information overload presented in the current tag suggestions.
To curb high frequency trading, a dollar per transaction would also work. For large trades, this would be neglegible, but if you're doing tens of thousands of them a day, it would add up.
crunchbase has a nice list of competitors: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pingdom Watchmouse appears to have some pretty high end customers. (including twitter, AT&T and verisign )
It really depends.

The convenience of something like apt for quickly assembling or installing your machine with all software automatically updated is hard to beat. Mac OS also tends to ship with older versions of software and rarely gets newer versions without a full OS update - meaning they will get older and older with time.

OTOH, there are many scenarios where a Mac is the only option. Any development for iPhone or Mac is painful on other platforms.
Computer resources are so cheap that the idea that, for most user applications, the openness of an application is a "state" should be obsolete. For apps that start up quickly and auto-save, why should the user care if they're open or not? The desktop is just playing catchup.

The only loss is that you can't tab between applications without paying attention, but I suspect that many users don't do this anyway.
"The result is too far in the future, and we easily become unmotivated, and demoralized when we can't see the result as quickly as possible."

This isnt a problem for me if I am acting from my 'core values' and doing work that I believe to be leading me towards a goal. Aligning my actions with my internal beliefs is far more effective than climbing the ranks of the leaderboard.
I really like the look of this. I developed http://kayali.sf.net (Maxima/Qt based) and achieving such a clean look is very difficult. Having a web based app makes a lot of sense these days especially for students.
The taxicab metric is useful here because if you compute the components of a distance in the square metric, you must max() them together, while under the taxicab metric you can add them together. We can add a pair of large sums together to get the large sum of pairs, but we can't max() a pair of large sums together to get the large sum of max()es.

One way to get to the taxicab metric verson of the problem is to take w = x + y and z = x - y. From then on all the distances you calculate in wz-space under the taxicab metric will be precisely twice the distance between the same points in xy-space under the square metric.
Being brought up in a certain culture is a pretty powerful influence on who you are and what you like.

And people who choose to immigrate to a country may do so for a variety of reasons; I know a number of anglophones who hate living in Germany and are only here because of work.
Sorry this is off topic, but did you ever analyze the results of your google spreadsheets survey here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932 ?
I'd be interested in seeing the correlation between return on investment and level of basic security-related competence at the point at which the company first attempted to raise VC money.
I don't think that's true at all. I suspect the vast majority of people emigrate for economic reasons, not because they like another country's traditions.
> There is much much more suing going on in the US than in Europe

This will be an unpopular opinion, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. How many wronged plaintiffs in Europe end up never having their day in court because of the threat of paying the other party's attorneys fees?
This probably happens more than we think.
One would hope that the encryption key wouldn't be in the database.

The point remains - there is a benefit to reversibly encrypted passwords versus plaintext ones. It's certainly not ideal, but it's better than nothing.
I think you might be right in that... unique humor is rare enough that it certainly doesn't threaten to overwhelm a site, and it might even represent an increase in overall conversation-intelligence.

Memes, on the other hand, are repeated endlessly. Perhaps still funny, but it's the repetition that drives people away and dumbs down threads, because it contributes literally nothing, but it does distract. It also turns the place into an echo chamber - others were very likely thinking the same thing - and group-think is dangerous.
MS Is Still Ruling The Desktop: 42% Of Machines Will Run Windows 7 In 2011
Why on earth would you compare these to the human genome, instead of the smallest archeobacteria? Evolution adds complexity over time, we know this, we just need something to replicate first.

A better analogy than the Linux kernel might be a quine.
Shrug

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t resemble an iPad to me. You know, at some level of abstraction you can show that any two designs are the same, but I think the level of abstraction you have chosen goes too far.
It's probably negative. A dollar spent on security is a dollar not spent on customer acquisition. Don't put security in your slide deck.
To be honest, this sounds like a worse allocation of resources than making pirate hats out of hundred-dollar bills. Why would Google ever want to do this? What's the business case?
"You have no application configured for removing red-eye. Please select a photo editor for removing red eye from these 1000 choices."

Isn't that better than just not displaying the possibility for removing red eye? Also, if you don't like the choices, you can do as you normally would and navigate to a website that removes red eye (or use desktop software).

I'm sure there will be privacy concerns, but "nightmares"? really? They'll just make it so that no data is sent unless you explicitly give it access. That doesn't sound like a nightmare.

Where you see all these "nightmares", I just see engineering problems that they're trying to solve, as with every new inventive piece of software.
People have referred to Bitcoin as a "Wild West". You think people in the Wild West didn't get shot?

If you want stability, wait a hundred years, earn your money the traditional way, and then buy a condo in BitPaloAlto.
A few days with Windows Phone 7 Mango
If every user used different passwords on every single site, this submission would be hardly newsworthy and barely discussion worthy. In a perfect world, sure, every user would have a unique 14+ character password for every site they register on. In a perfect world, every site would implement basic password encryption. Unfortunately, reality != perfect world.
Startup.com is a good one. It's about a dot com that failed back in the 2000 internet bubble.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/

Also, "We Live In Public" is a good one too.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/
Protected messages and photos, yes. You do have the option to toggle the protection on and off in real-time.
TimThumb Security Vulnerability Affects Many WordPress Themes and Plugins
For $1.5 billion I hope it has a holodeck, transporter, and a take-home-pet-android named Data.
Price is the best metric, but a metric is a standard for measurement, not an accurate measurement. Apple went from $392 a share on April 4th to as low as $353 just before yesterday's close. Are you telling me that apple lost $36 billion in value over a period of 5 days, or that it gained $5 billion in value today?

The market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long run. Saying that Apple is now the world's most valuable company is a stupid statement because it's based entirely on today's market cap.
I took two things away from what patio11 said.

One is to do things start to finish. Tests, deployment, faqs, code, marketing, polish, etc. You learn to appreciate the people and teams around you. You also gain useful skills.

The other is to emphasize learning the most for areas that have the largest payoff. For most programmers this means stuff that isn't programming. This dovetails nicely with an idea that CrossFit points out: Pullups make downhill skiers better. That exercise has no direct functional application to downhill skiing, but improving your big weaknesses in fitness often pays off more than perfecting your strengths.
While I wouldn't be surprised, it would be an interesting case-study of how a behemoth in a particular field failed to fully adapt to and leverage the web. On paper one would think that Walmart's supply chain, and massive physical footprint would give it an advantage in this transition period, but it seems that those same things may be preventing it from truly taking advantage of the opportunity.
With a note that the SR71 was a semi-stealthy reconnaissance plane, not a bomber. I don't think it was actually that stealthy given that it was shot at regularly, it just flew high and fast enough to get out without harm.
Is Anonymous Linked to the Norway Shooter E-mail Hack?
She still lost, and she really got lucky that the judge was both sensible and not in the RIAA's pocket.
Or... The user usually uses the same password, but seeing this warning and gets alarmed, making him use a different password or not use the service.

I love this idea!
Are the margins on those phones that low?
One reason is that if they are storing the password in a recoverable format, it tells you something about how much you can trust the security of that site in other ways. Even if you're using a different password, you may be much more hesitant about what other information you are willing to put into a site that doesn't take security seriously.
Apple has about $76 billion in cash after the last quarter. Not sure where you got $28.4 billion from.

Also, I'm not sure why you say that Apple is unlikely to maintain it's advantage in the smartphone and tablet industry. I'd say they are very likely to maintain an advantage, especially when it comes to profits. No other manufacture has an entire ecosystem in place for it's customers quite like the way Apple does (digital stores, iCloud, Retail stores, etc).
I loved Etherpad and am excited to read this. Are you guys using Ace for the editor?
Poll: Do you think that Apple or Exxon brings more value to society?
Either the user is using the same password on multiple sites. Then this would be a real security issue, independent of the fact if some of the sites store the password in plaintext.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of users do - and that's unlikely to change in the near future. It's just too easy.

Many users (the majority? I've seen no statistics for this, but everybody I know falls into this group) do, however, keep several passwords, and assign them to sites based on a combination of 1) how likely the site is to compromise the password (sites that email out plaintext score very poorly) and 2) how much the user cares about the security of that particular account. Which suggests the following use case for fourk's hypothetical plugin: user wants to know what password to use, sees that fooneti.cs is one of those sites that stores easily recoverable passwords, and chooses to use one of the disposable ones.
I can assure you that this issue is not specific to immigrants or immigrant communities. The problem is much more general. Multiculturalism, I believe, is a good thing but there also needs to be a positive common culture. Unfortunately there isn't one to speak of. Britain is full of parallel societies and recently the main divide, that is being that is being highlighted recently, is the divide between normal citizens and those that happily and deliberately choose themselves above others. This is merely a dramatic and serious symptom of a problem that has been growing for some time.
Cryptocat Creates an Encrypted, Disposable Chatroom in a Web Browser
Companies should make security a priority!? Wow nobody has said that before. Thank god arstechnica has come along and told us security should be a priority.
Clearly indicated by others already, this is about the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and not phones.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is very generic and the interface is pure honeycomb.
If they're going this route, then the user shouldn't be able to tell that an application has been closed behind their back. The application should just be restored when they try to switch back to it.

If the openness of an application should be obsolete, then the user shouldn't be able to tell without explicitly poking through 'ps'
Except that it at least prevents the discussion devolving into a long chain of jokes, like you see on Reddit, and generally keeps this kind of thing to a minimum overall on HN.

There's a place for those chains of jokes, and that's mostly on Reddit (which I enjoy browsing often). But I would prefer to keep the discussion here on HN a bit more meaningful.
Yes, that's from the creditor's viewpoint.

Its a statement of the economics accounting identity I=S.

Actually, it's even more fundamental than that. If you wish to have (different, or perishable) goods/services tomorrow by forgoing them today (i.e., increase savings) you must find someone willing to do the opposite (who'd then be in debt to you). Money functions as an abstraction to hide the vast majority of this complexity.

When you lend your money to a bank (deposit it, buy a CD or bond, etc.), you become a creditor to the bank; the bank a debtor. They then lend that money to others; this the economically central function of a bank to match savers and borrowers.
Because it's poor security, and the user might care. I don't want to use a site that is so lax about security that they store passwords in plaintext. I don't want them to have any of my information, because they're clearly not competent enough to keep it secure. Whether I'm reusing passwords is irrelevant here.

Also, it's a fact that a lot of users reuse passwords. Pretending that it's not the case or claiming that it's the wrong thing to do is pointless. Good security should address the real world, not some silly idealized one.
Tsunami caused Manhattan-sized iceberg in Antarctica
Looking forward to trying this! There's a lot left to do in collaboration, and a commercially-backed piece of software will be able to achieve some remarkable things.

Collaborative code editing, in particular, is really an unsolved problem, so I can't wait to see where this goes.
Respectfully, who gives a shit if it's in the database? If you lose the database, you lose the box. You're done. Whatever information you were storing reversably anywhere in your data center, you are going to lose.

Don't store reversably encrypted passwords: full stop.
The computer vision part might be related to polynomial texture mapping: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/