skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the 3+ years I've been with Linode, this is the only significant outage I can remember (and my Linode is not affected). It's not exactly cause for alarm and switching providers. Everyone just relax a bit.
Spoiler-free links (Thanks, palish):

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blancha...

http://stephenjdubner.com/journalism/silverthief.html

Speaking of spoilers, suspend your sense of physics and go see "Another Earth", fascinating if you forget about the plot blackholes

( http://www.foxsearchlight.com/anotherearth/ )
I'm wondering how many people actually take this as purely entertainment and not a show where they can glean useful information about new cars on the market.

I've never watched the show, but it seems like they're trying to blur the two lines. When they get called on it, they use the excuse "it's just entertainment" as justification for misleading their viewers.
Because they're the ones who generally break the law.

Allegedly. The courts have not yet decided whether the allegations are true or not.

Google is like the guy who says that in a free society, everything belongs to the people. And then breaks in my house to steal my stuff.

I can't believe I even try to have a conversation with you at this point. You're such a ridiculous extremist that your arguments don't even make sense.

Are you actually a software developer or are you a "business guy"? I just don't understand how a programmer could have such screwed up notions of IP and believe in such bizarre analogies for IP law. Copyright infringement is not theft. It is copyright infringement. Patent infringement is not theft. It is patent infringement. IP and physical property are very different concepts with very different case law defining them, and it's disingenuous to conflate the two.

The next step would be to open their search algorithms and make use of them free.

This is a specious argument, and I assume you're smart enough to know it. No one in this discussion is arguing against trade secrets, or insisting that everything anyone ever thinks of be Open Source.
Enough already, no one cares.
Says an article on APPLEINSIDER.com...Yep, I'll believe them. Suuure. Apple fanboys, not.
According to Tyler Cowen - http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/the... - the earlier massive productivity increases were chiefly due to plucking of low hanging fruit:

1. Big scientific discoveries on 19th century took a few decades to lead to huge technology improvements. Now the easy improvements are gone.

2. There were lots of smart, healthy but poorly educated kids. Now everyone completes high-school. No easy gains left.

3. Land was very cheap, not so any longer.

But the question begs - why hasnt computer/IT revolutionized productivity as much? Perhaps the real big changes - machine learning/robotics are still around the corner.
27" imac + lion + playing video = crash
In fairness, hindsight is 20/20, and it's very easy to look aghast -- or in smug condescension -- at the failed predictions of yesteryear. But how many of us would have called all of the shots on that list correctly back in 2006?

Furthermore, it is human nature to suffer from an anchoring bias when looking at a list like this one. We immediately assign more weight to the 2 or 3 "disastrously wrong" predictions in the list of 10 than we do to the other 7. Hell, we probably assign 99% of the weight on that list to the Facebook prediction. It's the most visibly and obviously wrong. So it anchors our perception of the entire list.

I doubt there's anyone out there who gets his predictions right 100% of the time. And I bet there are plenty of highly successful prognosticators with at least one or two hilariously bad calls on their track records.

I'm not defending this list or its author, per se, but just pointing out that everyone gets it wrong sooner or later. Throw enough shots at the hoop, and you're going to miss a few of them. Granted, you could certainly argue that tech journalists should shy away from the predictions game and focus solely on reporting. But where's the fun in that?
doesn't change the point, that you are royally screwed if you run out of charge outside your driveway
Is it against app store policy to release a free app, then lock it down after 30 days (or some other time period) if they don't pay (purchase an in app payment or subscription)? That is a traditional "free trial" approach, but I don't think apple even let's you do it.
Anyone have a measure of their uptime?
their Ford Fiesta review was pretty practical
To give you an idea of ethically challenged Groupon is:

In the recent SEC statement mess Groupon attempted to pull a fast one by subtracting employee stock compensation. in the USA we have the accounting standards board which governs the accounting rules that accountants follow.

In fact you cannot get a state accountant license without committing to those rules and standards. Guess what one of those standards is never using a basis to subtract employee stock compensation from costs.

Which begs the question where did they get an accountant to sign off on that given that if it went through he or she would be subject to losing their state accountant license?

There is more here that we are not hearing..

I feel bad for Lightbank having such a bad shadow cast on their Startup incubator work by some of the founders.
Just the Facts: S&P's $2 Trillion Mistake
The 80% who can't code are hired by companies that don't test their skills, and there are lots of companies like that. Then they realize how much they suck, and lay them off whenever they get a chance. Most of these "bad" programmers write crappy (often insane) code that then good programmers have to deal with. Many of them delegate. I've even seen one guy outsource his work.

Most of the programmers looking for a job suck. If you're truly good and have a reputation, you don't need to interview (unless you want to work for a very specific niche where you don't have connections).
He discusses aging and longevity of Kinesis keyboards; I can contribute a bit here.

I presently own two Kinesis Advantage keyboards; one I got in 1999, the other in 2000. The one from 1999 has run since then with absolutely no issues, and I have not been gentle on it in the least. The keys are still accurate and responsive, and the only trouble I've ever had with it is when I spilled a bit of water into it (it dried out and everything was fine).

The other Advantage hasn't quite been perfect: one of its keys drank a bit of soda early in its life, and since then it's been problematic. More recently, another keyswitch started to die, either being unresponsive or bouncing badly (3-10 detected keypresses for one actual keypress). I sent it back to Kinesis and they replaced basically every key on the keyboard (replaced the left and right main panels and the left F-key panels; the top right panel was fine). The cost for this repair was $80.

Now I have basically one brand-new and one 11-year-old Kinesis, which gives me an opportunity to feel how they wear over time. The new keyboard takes slightly less force and the keys bottom out more crisply, but on the whole I'd say that typing on the new keys has not made me at all dissatisfied with the feel of the old ones; in fact, the one with the older switches is on my desk at work, and I use it at least an order of magnitude more than the one with the new keyswitches.

On the whole, my experience with the Kinesis has been excellent. Comfortable to type on, amazing position for the modifier keys, respectable longevity, and excellent customer service will keep me a Kinesis customer for the foreseeable future.
this just proves how fast things can change in our industry. don't be afraid of the criticism, because you never know what will happen in 5 years.
You have to become vendor of record and that part is expensive (bleh)
B) Remove all intellectual property laws period. Not just patents for software, but all patents, and copyrights, and trademarks.

You might think at first this would lead to chaos. I don't think it would. I think it would make the world radically better. I can show this would work if you're curious.
It is the idea of the combustion engine, and the fact that it became technical possible to build them that changed the world. It's not any particular combustion engine, but the combustion engine industry as a whole.

Yes, the combustion engine is very important for a car, but it became a commodity.

Yes, DVCS changed the world. Git maybe more than others because of its popularity, but slowly I think they are becoming commodities. Github could function with any other DVCS and practically all major DVCS (git, mercurial, darcs, bazaar) are interoperable one with another, making the choice more personal than technological.
"...but you have to be aware of some edge cases"

There's the reason.
Here is the top gear video saying the tesla was a failure in the real world:
http://www.streetfire.net/video/top-gear-reviews-tesla-roads...
But it's almost impossible and quite expensive to get a criminal verdict. That it was interstate makes it even more difficult.
In my proposed solution, since I am already getting the feeds, I would only charge the incremental cost for additionally redistributing the data :)
Ask HN: Is there a site similar to HN for brick and mortar entrepreneurs?
I love reading HN articles but a lot of the tech startup stories are not directly applicable to me. Does anybody know of any similar sites that are geared toward entrepreneurs working on starting a business with a physical presence?
well said, frustrating.
You're mistaken. There is no certainly such "abandonment" clause under international copyright law (which binds most countries), and I doubt any individual country as such a law either.

There are countless examples where copyright has only been defended in specific cases long after the copyright infringement was known of. Notable examples include the song "Happy Birthday" and the Amiga Kickstart ROM.

Feel free to provide any evidence for your opinion if you believe otherwise though.
I think people can take what they want from Top Gear, it's entertainment, not factual TV.

Part of the entertainment is that it's presented as though it is factual TV. Sure if you look at a lot of their antics you can tell they're staged but a large portion of the viewing public doesn't realize this and their impressions of the car will be tainted by what is essentially a misrepresentation of the facts.
If that data is available on the website, you could write a perl or python script to scrape the site.
man docs have a specific format, a followed by b followed by c, etc. Examples are towards the end, near bugs and author.

It may not be how you want it, but at least it's consistent. shift-G will take you straight to the end, with hopefully some examples.
tl;dr Reality TV show fails to meet basic journalism standards.
That just seems incompatible with the necessities of hiring many particular, high value people. This is at least if it's total compensation, not just a nod to actual cash salary.

Looking at Spolsky's other posts on stock options, it isn't a complete picture I think.

(Spolsky's particular federal-type pay scale. Not public salaries at all).
If you read into the Tesla incident a bit more you find there's a lot more to it and Tesla have also lied (claiming that the brakes didn't go when their own engineers confirmed it on the filming day).

A hundred mile trip is not an extremely long trip, my Dad used to regularly commute that for example. You seem to be forgetting you need to drive back.

Also this article's extremely biased too, quoting from Tesla's press releases and not even mentioning any of Top Gear's rebuttals.

So an article complaining about editorializing to make a better story is, shock horror, editorializing to make a better story. I mean what's all the nonsense at the end about boy racers dying.

But 'Of course I'm not blaming only Top Gear for this'.

Only? He does actually blame Top Gear? Even though the Tesla's a sports car. The guy's a bit of a plonker.

The Guardian's a very left wing paper in the UK, don't think that this is a balanced piece.
A tiny trapdoor opens a new way to date the past
Cuban wasn't specific but I'm pretty sure he was referring to just software patents.
And how do you test for all of these things that you listed during an interview? I've been in charge of technical interviews for a large corporation for a year and a half, and there have been many truly shitty developers who couldn't solve even simple programming problems, but they knew how to bullshit, and they would totally ace your questions.
How would they know the car was driven in loops for 10 miles in Lincoln unless the device was recording {the GPS coords, engine state, battery state}.

This sounds like spyware. I'd love to know if that data was being periodically fed back to Nissan wirelessly or read at the time the car was returned.

I'd love to know if this tracking is fitted in all their cars of this model, or just ones they hand out for review.

Such fine-grained tracking doesn't sound like a good thing at all.
Then why don't they show gasoline powered cars stuck on the side of the highway? Maybe even a broken timing belt or one of the litany of other things that can leave you royally screwed if driving an internal combustion powered vehicle. What they have done with EV reviews is just plain dishonest.
The first generation of 27" iMacs (Snow Leopard) also had a lot of trouble with Flash video playback. An update from Apple fixed this later.
I think it was a poorly-developed: "things can change fast on the internet these days".
While I do agree with his assessment of G+'s circles invoking the paradox of choice, I find the subsequent hypothetical situation and anecdotal usage scenario all too easy to poke holes in. And the implication in the final paragraph is that he, and he alone, understands why Facebook has been so successful, which is irritatingly self-assured.

In short, really? You're basing estimations of G+'s success on your dating experiences?
Falling Skies Season 1 Episode 9 10
It’s not about the invasion – it is about resistance,” co-executive producer Mark purity (“Heroes,” “Battlestar Galactica”) to the Hollywood Reporter Monday premiere in West Hollywood. “It’s the other hopeless circumstances hope. “
The Coming Education Revolution
In my experience, it's from some GNU folk who like their god-forsaken abomination that is info docs.
The point of the article is that Python has very similar edge cases yet nobody advocates the use of semicolons in Python.
When you watch Leno on the Tonight Show and he demonstrates a product, do you use that as your factual news source? Do you let his silliness bias you? Or do you realize the type of personality that Leno is and filter everything he says/does?

Top Gear to me is like the Tonight Show of cars. It's entertainment.

Top Gear shows like two practical cars per season among all their other silliness (which is what I actually watch it for, the silliness because it's entertaining).

Ironically isn't the fastest car around their track an electric car? The electric version of the Ariel Atom?
How To Fly Hydra Plane or Jet Plane- San Andreas Game
Google is making money by providing support and utilities for Android? This is something new to me. They never told anyone except you?
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=zedge
Remember, debtors prisons in our own culture predate things like central credit reporting bureaus and garnisheeing laws. Without these things, what's the disincentive to not pay back your loans?
Being a good hacker is more of a marathon than a sprint. Three weeks in a coding cave is good, but even better is devoting an hour or more every day to hone your craft every day.

What to focus on? That depends on what you would like to build. I can't tell you what you will enjoy building.
Force of habit and clarity. Sometimes it's necessary, like "return i++" is ambiguous.
I could never find Coca-cola again.
I agree that it is not a balanced piece, and I also found the ending overwrought. That being said, if the facts are as Nissan suggests, I am happy somebody called Top Gear out.

JM2C, of course, we have voting and discussions precisely so that everyone can express their views...
It's possible doing a study abroad in Europe may change your life. One in safe Singapore, not as likely.
Dominating the mobile OS doesn't mean the same for apps
For the other 50% of smartphone users that are on Android (as per this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855717 ): you can use OpenVPN and certificate authentication, Cyanogenmod supports it natively. Tunnelblick is the OSX client of choice for OpenVPN.
I'm guessing they've managed to annoy somebody with a very petty sense of humour. I've personally annoyed several, as the graphic at:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=902213

will attest.

It's sad, it's pointless, and I sincerely doubt it's going to stop anybody using Dancer. shrug
Interestingly, my two Kinesis keyboards were also purchased in 1999 and 2000 respectively. One is a Classic and the other is a Professional since the Advantage didn't exist yet.

Both keyboards are still going strong with very heavy usage. Like you, one of mine drank som soda several years ago. I disassembled it, cleaned it as well as I could, and reassembled it and it's still doing great to this day.

People look at me funny when the see the AT connector on the keyboard attached to a PS/2 adapter, attached to a USB adapter but I wouldn't trade my Kinesis keyboard for anything at this point.
Why the downvotes? I did not say it was not criminal, just that it wasn't something that law enforcement would likely pursue.
No--cmd.exe is very tightly tied to the underlying command line infrastructure. This is a large part of why alternatives such as Console are so bad--they can only access the command interpreter and infrastructure as a stream, which rules our most character-mode applications. (Cygwin/rxvt get around this by not using the Windows infrastructure at all; curses can be built for Windows and works in cmd.exe, but character-mode code written for cmd.exe will break hard in rxvt.)

Sadly, for most definitions, cmd.exe is the console and the interpreter.
I use this template to create my wireframes
Ask HN: Does anyone know how to do incremental multiset hashing in practice?
I have been working on synchronizing databases using a Merkle tree and up until now I have used XOR to incrementally update nodes in the tree.

Now I want to split the single Merkle tree into several trees that can be updated on separate nodes and recombined at a later stage.

This introduces a problem with XOR: if an item is included in two of the Merkle trees its XOR hash will cancel out. So I think I need to be using additive multiset hashes and there are several papers on this approaching the subject from a mathematical point of view but some pseudocode would really help.

Also, what are some of the peculiarities of XOR or OR hashing to be aware of?

Does it help if the hash inputs are of identical length, and strictly unique? How well do XOR or OR fold entropy (if the inputs are well distributed or not)?
What's next for Instagram
The problem with this Idea is that it requires higher education institutions to make a change that could have drastic effects. The proliferation of BlackBoard should tip you off to how stubborn most of the system is...
I've just gone on the App Store and there is just one review saying it's rubbish...

Wonder if they've cleaned it up...
Looks like they cant translate Advanced search and Language tools into Klingon.
> Since there is no authentication

This is mostly solved. You can't just connect to any server, because your "end-user" IP is likely to be in DUL/PBL or other policy-based blacklist.

Open Relay is now forbidden and SMTP from end-user to mail server requires authentication.

For server<>server communication you need to use SPF at least. Although authentication is theoretically optional, in practice you won't be able to reach many servers without any.
You might consider the Nook Color. $250 gets you a very capable android device (it's an official CyanogenMod device), although it lacks some of the usual bells and whistles one might expect in the tablet space (front-facing camera, gyro, etc).

But for that price, it's a great buy.

Previous HN discussion of Nook Color + CM : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798050
Thanks for the warning! I read the comment as "You have to give the guy credit for <avert eyes! /> <click link/>"
Can one at least expect them not to lie?
It's anecdotal at best, "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein and Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene", based on quotes from Torvalds.

Too bad, a real list from Torvalds could have been interesting.
Perhaps because there's a gas station every 10 feet, but electric charging stations are much fewer and further between.
A two question survey on loyalty Joyent, AWS, Rackspace & CloudSigma
From TFA:

> Here’s why I picked PPTP and I believe using it with very long passwords/passphrases is acceptable.

Bear in mind that the author is looking to use this in open hotspots such as coffee shops etc. I would not advise that people implement this.

As the author points out, there are a number of vulnerabilities in PPTP, the most serious of which is that the initiation protocol is susceptible to an offline brute force attack using tools like asleap[1].

To be clear, the attacker does not need a rogue access point, nor association with an access point for this to work. They can just passively sniff away, then at some point later go through the pcaps, crack it offline and do what they want. There's an episode of Hak5[2] covering this as well as this useful straight to the point video of asleep and THC pptp-bruter[3]

[1] http://www.willhackforsushi.com/Asleap.html
[2] http://revision3.com/hak5/asleap
[3] http://blip.tv/g0tmi1k/cracking-vpns-asleap-and-thc-pptp-bru...

The solution is to use L2TP and IPSec if you can and aren't jailbreaking, or to use a TLS VPN if you have jailbroken or don't have iDevices.
A lot of people wouldn't like Coca-cola scammers. They'd want the real Coca-cola. And these people would be willing to pay a small premium for it. So stores would have an incentive to sell the real thing. A lot of stores would probably refuse the sell the scam Coca-cola.

But a lot of other people wouldn't care, and they'd happily drink the scam Coca-cola which tastes just like the real thing, but is made by somebody else, and is cheaper.
I dunno. I think Clarkson made using the Fiesta for storming a beach a platoon Royal Marines seem a lot easier than it actually is.
Public access OpenVMS cluster
Nothing nefarious in telemetry when a car is being road tested by journalists...for reasons which this story illustrates.

<snark>Maybe Nissan just left their iPhone inside it.</snark>
HQ Mila Kunis Wallpapers
Good question. Many cars used in specialty markets are outfitted with incredibly detailed diagnostics. For example, when exotic cars are rented for TV and movie shoots, the fine print includes hefty surcharges if the cars are driven faster than the speed limit and so forth. The data is downloaded and checked when the car is returned.

A test vehicle supplied to journalists might have similar diagnostic capabilities turned on. Then again, perhaps every Leaf has this, it's hard to imagine building a modern electric car without including sophisticated computing, and logging data is part of what computers do.

I doubt it's malicious, but as cars get more sophisticated, the possibility of leaking privacy through your onboard diagnostics does become an issue.

Thanks for raising the question.
Trying to track every car they sell would be ludicrous. I'm guessing they put this on the review/test cars. Which makes sense.
Which is perfectly fine by me, a right wing libertarian who fits right into the target demographic of Top Gear.

As long as electric cars are not practical enough to sell themselves, I will enjoy Clarkson's rants about them and everything else PC.