skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone tried to buy an app "manually" using their own device and your account, they would need to know your email address and password. There's plenty websites out there that store password in plain text, some of them even email it to you so everyone can intercept it. Other sites use some encryption, but could be still be compromised.

The possibility I hinted at is that someone just "pretends" they have an iPhone and communicate with the Apple server directly. I don't know how their algoritm works, but it may be the case that they only need an Apple id and some secret key that is stored on the device. In that case asking the user for their password is just a way to protect the user when they lose their actual device. That would be pretty insecure from Apple's side. They should at least use the password to generate a key pair. (This doesn't necessarily require anyone to steal secret keys from Apple I just realize)

I completely agree with your second more general point. See also my comment on the Paypal thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2880194
"Finally, one thing I’d like to know, is if rvm was loaded, would another script be able to override cd in the same way that rvm does, and would both script’s hooks be called?. I suspect that the answer is yes."

I'm not a shell expert but I played around with the code in this SO answer from Wayne Sequin and I think the last script to be loaded would win, in other words another script might break RVM. At least that's what appeared to be happening in Bash 3.2 on OS X.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5605277/how-does-rvm-dete...

btw I use RVM and find it pretty useful.
In my experience with our app, prompting for reviews is worth it. Our average sales have gone up about 3x and I attribute it mostly to having more reviews spurred by prompting. Especially with a low number of users you just don't get enough reviews otherwise. Prompting doesn't have to be too onerous either if the app waits until it's been in use for a while. Also if it lets a user dismiss the prompt permanently how annoying can it be? If someone likes an app and uses it, giving a review is a significant way they can help ensure it survives. If it takes a little prompt to motivate them it's worth it for both sides. Prompts have gotten me to review apps positively in the past that I otherwise might not have bothered.
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Shh, you can't say that, he's a YC guy! He'll quote some PG to justify it, I'm sure.
On a side note there is Cybersyn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersyn

The Chilean attempt at realtime computer controlled planned economy.
It's not exactly the same. Ignorance can be corrected. Willful ignorance cannot be, except by making the thing that is being ignored too obvious to be, possibly by painting it in neon pink and yellow stripes - of course, that works as a way to correct normal ignorance too.
"MongoDB offered me most of the features I needed with the API I was looking for, but it crashed unrecoverably early in testing..."

Just curious...were you running the version that supports the recovery log with the durability option enabled? If so, are you implying that the recovery log feature does not work as advertised?

"fling it at the wall and hope that it sticks, with a recovery log tacked on since 1.7."

MongoDB's recovery log is "tacked on?" how do you differentiate "tacked on" verses being properly implemented and integrated?
Only one way to find out; go through all your accounts and try that password. Let us know...

Even if the password was unique to iTunes, a key logger on your computer could have intercepted it.

Does Apple always use HTTPS? Otherwise it might have been intercepted when you were on an insecure wifi network.
In the 50's the managers of GM and other successful companies paid over 90% marginal tax on income. I am sure that had an effect on their decision making process; i.e. Should I pay myself a $1000 bonus and be able to spend less than $90 of it? - or should I re-invest that $1000 in the company?
We could have a freer market and near full-employment if we replaced all our social welfare programs with a single minimum living stipend (you apply if you make below it, and if you qualify, get a check for the difference), and abolished minimum wage.

I disagree. A minimum stipend, at least in the way that you described, would create a perverse incentive. Let's say this stipend is $20,000/year. Why should anyone who makes $5,000/year and get $15,000 free want to work harder to earn the same amount?

A slightly better take on this is to have some sort system were it always pays to earn more. For example, you get 1/3 of the difference between what you earn and $30,000. Under such a system, if you earn $10,000, you would get $6,667 for a total of $16,667. If you earn $15,000, you get $5,000 for a total of $20,000. Thus, it always pays to earn more/work harder.

Personally, I don't like either idea. In my opinion, things like the minimum wage only serve to create unemployment. By making it more expensive to hire workers, companies find other means of being more productive, such as automation or illegal labour.
I think it's nice to see. It means the spec is probably pretty close to being finalized, because in order for that to happen, there needs to be at least two browser implementations.
Yes.
I think the pixelation was his attempt to make the logo blend into the QR code as one design. There are lots of QR codes out there which has no
> one of the main reasons people don’t buy a Mac these days is because they can’t buy one for less than $1,000, pricing your Mac alternative well above that price doesn’t do you any favors.<

I'm not in the US, but isnt the Air $999?
Not much less than 1k, but an odd statement considering the focus of the article. Am I missing something?
Are we ready for a true Cloud Phone
Which is exactly why it's a terrible idea. There is no "super" mechanism in Bash. Imagine if the Perl, Python and Node equivalents of rvm overrode cd -- they'd all have to be aware of each other's existence in order to play together nicely.

Overriding cd for dependency injection purposes is like killing a fly with a machine gun. It's completely inappropriate for the task at hand, and it's precisely the kind of problem that $PATH is designed to solve.

Furthermore, rvm breaks the expected behavior of the cd command by prompting you with security theatrics the first time you enter a project with an .rvmrc file: https://gist.github.com/34c251a56e83c61c667e This kind of thing wreaks havoc with third-party programs that attempt to interface with rvm. I've had to deal with far too many bug reports in Pow as a result of this messy behavior.

This is not some theoretical concern. It's just bad design.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/liquidity.asp#axzz1UscLt...
I've been using a Dual core Atom Netbook as my portable computer for 3 years. 120GB SSD, 9 Cell Battery, 2GB RAM.

Total Price: $450.

Granted, not sexy looking at all. Not particularly thin.

Runs Windows 7 Ultimate like a champ. The only time the low processing power ever bothers me is when I'm unzipping large files.

It's cheap, made of plastic and plastered with stickers. I carry it in my man purse, and bounce it around with me pretty much everywhere I go. I've been doing that for years.

Everything is backed up to DropBox. It's so cheap as to be disposable. If it breaks, I don't care. I'll buy a new one. I have a full set of USB / Network, VGA ports, and I don't have to worry about buying extra dongles to connect things to a projector. The little brute has been stable as a rock. I can't remember a single crash in 3 years.

It has enough battery life for me to be able to Code from Barcelona to SFO on one charge, and I typically charge the little beast about once or twice a week.

Yup. PC makers just can't keep up.
I'd like to ask a couple of individual freelancer questions. Do I need to go through HNOfficehours or could I contact you directly somehow?
Didn't Obama recently sign a bill giving him and any future president power to shut off nationwide internet during times of "crisis'?
I don't buy your logic. If I, as a researcher, leave a car in a bad neighborhood overnight to see what happens, the guy who smashes the window to steal the radio is still a bad guy whether or not that's relevant to my results.

Science doesn't concern itself with morality, but that doesn't mean it exists in a moral vacuum.
There's a difference between someone using your creditcard to buy stuff on iTunes with a different iTunes account* and someone using your iTunes account to buy apps. In your case I'm guessing they did the first thing.

* = possibly not their own; they might own the apps that you're buying or make money through affiliate networks. And of course they could buy gift cards with your cards and sell them on eBay through another payment account.
I believe that is precisely the point of it.
Wireless alarm system information
Missing E: How a Troubled Tumblr Add-On Was Reborn
They could do something similar to what Facebook does: as soon as they detect a new device using your account, send an email.
If the new device is not in the same country as your other devices, don't allow purchases until you've clicked on that link in your email.
Am I the only one who doesn't see a problem with this?

They provided a cel phone repeater as an amenity/courtesy to their passengers. It's not part of their charter to provide cel service.

Their goal is to keep their passengers moving efficiently. By no longer providing that cel service, they disrupted the wannabe disrupters.

Their freedom of assembly wasn't interfered with, they just didn't help it.

If the protesters relied on cel phone coverage to perform their demonstration, then their strategy failed, and they'll have to come up with another way.

They increased the presence of police in the area, so the "how will I call for an ambulance" concern is a bit melodramatic; there were emergency personal already on scene, with non-cel communication capabilities.

Personally, I feel the right to assemble/demonstrate has been extended too far into the area of "I demand the right to fuck up everyone else's day", and applaud BART for doing something about it.
I'm just starting MongoDB, and I really like it. It's got nice documentation, and a nice culture.

But it does have weaknesses, and having just been bitten hard by one.

I had a schema something like "db.post.insert({'tags'=['python','mongodb']}).

One tag just couldn't be reliably deleted (via "$pull:{'tags':'immortal tag that will not die'}.

It turns out, I had made "tags" unique, but somehow managed to get a duplicate tag in. (Before the unique index? After? I forget). Trying to delete the tag would "throw" a E11000 error, but since mongodb doesn't check errors it would just result in this immortal tag sitting there. Smirking.

Apparently, using a unique index on an array is the wrong thing to do anyway (does it mean different posts can't share tags? or that you can't have 2 posts with exactly the same set of tags? I'm not sure), and you are just meant to use $addToSet. I'm not sure how you are meant to clean an existing array with duplicate elements though. Perhaps you just have to check in the app layer, then update: db.posts.update({'_id':post['_id']},{'tags':set[post['tags']}.

Lesson 1: if something is failing a lot, or might fail in an annoying way, use db.error() (in Python ... or whatever the last_error command is in your client).

Lesson 2: don't try to use unique indexes on array elements.

Otherwise, it's a very nice db.
Google + introduces Games, for limited users now.
My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is the credit on the gift card could only be transferred to another gift card using a PIN. If this is true, Sam Odio must have brute forced that PIN which was clearly not part of the experiment. I'd call that wire fraud. Even if there was no PIN Jonathan himself stated that he didn't want this to happen, that the experiment was in sharing change between Starbucks customers.

At the end of the day I find it hard to defend Sam Odio's actions no matter the scope of the experiment. As is often the case, I think he had a potent mix of greed (for money) and ability (to siphon money out of the gift card). Ultimately he ended up with over $500 and gave himself a reality check - anyone in their right mind would feel they have been at least "very surreptitious" if they were in his shoes. Sam wanted an out, and donating the stolen money to charity is the easiest way to spin his actions in a selfless view. From the wording in his blog post you can see he's no better than the so called yuppies he's trying to teach a lesson. The first thing going through his mind was "This is enough money to buy an iPad". Spoken like a true materialist? Not a single mention of the people who contributed that money in the first place.

And finally, just what lesson was he trying to teach here? That sharing spare change is greedy? Let's not forget that Sam treated himself to a coffee with his loot.

I can't help but feel he's getting what he deserves by having his name plastered on CNN and other media. When we dig beneath the surface his actions are truly revealing of his shady character.
There are 30 apps that are installed in almost every laptop by OEMs, what is preventing them?
The issue isn't access, it's injustice. Don't let the topic change to some bland consumer access issue -- Why does BART mandate its officers carry lethal force?
Cell service usually drops between 16th and civic center (I frequently see people get cut off). And 3G service on Verizon seems to drop off for at least 50% of the way between 24th and montgomery (personal experience, iPhone4).
140 Simple Steps to Building a Successful Startup
The cluster is interesting, but not as interesting as the giant corpus of SWF files Google got to use. Do you think the government has a crawl as complete as Google's under its hat? How? People notice when the Googlebot does new things. Wouldn't we noticed the Fedbot?
I don't think they can, or would want to, kill the idea— I think (assuming it's what happened) they shut down Jonathan's Card, which we know is being actively skimmed, to nip the negative press in the bud, secure in the knowledge that copycat projects will (and already have) swoop in and pick up the torch.
> In Hanselman’s case, though, he admits he was using PayPal,
> not a credit card. Perhaps it’s therefore safer to use a
> credit card instead of PayPal for iTunes Store payments?

I don't see how that makes a difference if your iTunes account is compromised. Or perhaps it's because your creditcard company is more likely than Paypal to alert you to suspicious activity?
I have read the implication that this experiment was killed off because it affected Starbuck's revenue or profitability. I don't really understand how that would be the case at all. Can someone speculate?
this appears to be blogspam.
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Keep in mind this is a year old and MongoDB has since implemented journalling (although afaik it's not on by default yet).

It's not specifically a response to this article - But you can read 10gen's view on durability here:
http://blog.mongodb.org/post/381927266/what-about-durability
Strange, he was asking about the wiki article.
Sony Files Wireless Power Transmission Patent
Meanwhile, my main system is an Apple laptop which is not much older ... and my OS is now two versions out of date, since Apple stopped supporting it. The set of software I can run on it is becoming more and more limited, as more developers give up supporting my terribly antiquated operating system and hardware, and move on to the current thing.

This is the third time this has happened to me.

I don't care if PC makers can or cannot keep up with Apple. All I know is, this is my last Apple.
How the London riots started, and context
If that's true, I expect it's a case of the left hand not talking to the right— the positive buzz and in-store traffic has got to dwarf any marginal loss in profitability by an order of magnitude.
So I guess my comment made it sound like I am defending Sam Odio.

I am not. What I am saying is that he (or, more precisely, "what he did") is part of Jonathan Stark's experiment.He never said he set the card up so poor people can drink coffee, he set it up to observe how people will "utilise" it and test if such a thing can actually work.

It's not like it's the end of the world either, if all these people that LOVED the card can't live without it they can sure think of a way to replace it. Prepaid coffee is one.
In it's present form no. But I do believe that if someone was to build an application with a correct work flow and focus on helping the crowd (by creating tutorial etc.) something like this could definitely work.

We would love to talk to developers who want to build innovative applications on our platform. We would also help in setting the right work-flow and improving quality.
I have testing this out and must say that the communications from Prayag have been very very helpful. Thanks so much for clear line of communication on and about your product.
I know it's not the point of your comment, but I'll point out that one of the major reasons I don't buy Apple products is how uncomfortable I am with the idea of Apple having more control over the tech industry...I simply don't trust them to do right by consumers when given a very strong market position.

Sony is one of the few hardware companies that I trust even less than Apple; actually I have a pretty strong dislike for Sony, not merely distrust. So, I'd be more likely to buy an Apple product than a Sony product if all other things were equal (and all other things aren't equal; Sony products look pretty ugly to me, while Apple products are beautiful).
As I mentioned in another comment, you don't have to go as far as verifying before usage (although in some cases you should), but at the very least alert the user of any new device, just like Facebook does.
Even if you have invested time in MTurk, there is no reason you have to continue spending your time dealing with spam, dealing with task starvation, optimizing quality rather than focusing on your core competency.
Congrats Anand!

I've been working in the crowdsourcing field for several years now (our workers are from Vietnam), and can understand that the profit margins can be very thin for some of the more basic tasks.

Drop me a line if you're interested in branching out to Vietnam.
BART exists to transport people safely and efficiently. I think they do a fantastic job of it. They manage to make BART travel reliable, fast and safe. The presence of a strong and armed police force is necessary and fundamentally a good thing. If disrupting cell service protects riders, then it is the right course of action.

Or would you all prefer BART to protect people's right to tweet at the cost of lives and injuries?

BART rides trough some extremely violent neighborhoods, and carries all kinds of people, rich and poor. The fact that it works as smoothly as it does is a miracle already. Compare it with some of the trashier public transport options out there. Even some MUNI lines have some really creepy things going on on them.
lol - ok, well thanks for sharing! :)
Here is a direct quote from Jonathan on the matter:

"It's obviously not in the spirit of the experiment, It's not what the money was put there for. The point of this is to be wide open and trusting, and to expect the best of people. If [Odio] thinks this is good, and that people will see it that way, it's up to him to decide."

- http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/08/12/jonathans.card.ha...

As I see it, it was meant to be like a spare change tray. Not a slush fund for someone to steal and then donate to charity when they realize what they've done.
Building a power monitoring system for our customer base
This is my first post. Just want to share my experience in building power monitoring portion of our solution. We already have the environment monitoring part done will 2 paying corporate customers. I would love to hear feedback from people! Especially on how to take the business to the next level!
C#/.NET Little Wonders & Pitfalls
It's a numbers game; it would help people without an @me.com account or with a secondary email address.
Submitters. One category per post.
How would you get the same behavior of project base .rvmrc files without hijacking cd?
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How? ATT and Verizon control the spectrum.
You don't need to turn to start-ups to give PayPal and Authorize.net a run for their money. Merchant e-Solutions is pretty good, and is a big established company, rather than a start-up. Good rates, easy to use API, they support the VISA and MC updater services, and you can use multiple business names on one merchant account (many places require separate merchant accounts for each name).

Edit: why was this down voted?
Howabout this one https://www.peopledock.com/404
Maybe OEMs could present a more designy shell experience, the possibilities on windows are vast:

http://windows7themes.net/windows-7-mac-theme.html

Or maybe you mean some other way OSX is innovative, besides aesthetic?
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As long as spectrum is controlled by the government (FCC), ain't going to happen.
I don't understand your comment. I'm typing on a MBA running Windows 7 like a champ...what is it about Windows that's causing the problem?
As I would put it:

In the event of a single server crash, Mongo may need to be restored from backup, or another master. CouchDB handles this much better, and can just restart where it left off. But in the worst possible single-server scenario, there's smoke coming out of your server and the hard drive is toast. CouchDB and MongoDB perform about the same - if you had replication or a recent backup, you are fine. If you didn't, you are f*cked.

CouchDB is better for small servers which crash a lot and can't use replication. You can run it on a mobile phone. Mongo is better for logging (where you need fast writes, and don't care about a couple of lost records). Most uses will be somewhere in between, and you need to know the limitations of the stack, so you can work around them.
By using a shim approach, like rbenv.

1. Maintain a directory of shim binaries with the same name as every Ruby binary (ruby, irb, rake, gem, etc).

2. Put the shim directory at the front of your $PATH.

3. When a shim is run (as in typing `rake` from the command line or running a script with a `#!/usr/bin/env ruby` shebang), check for a version file in the current directory or any parent directory, map that to the right path, and re-exec the corresponding binary.
Yeah, on AT&T I pretty much give up on using my phone once the train starts moving, even though we're supposed to have service from Civic Center all the way to the Oakland end of the transbay tube.
What brand and model netbook are you using, exactly?
Labeling it an experiment or a "hack" doesn't change the fact that there is a large group of cooperative participants on one side, who feel violated by one or a few non-cooperating rogues on the other.

Imagine something similar happening "in real life". Imagine a group of 1,000 people who have come up with a cooperative, good-faith system for some shared goal - say, setting up and decorating a fairground. The group is happy with how things are going. Now one person comes along and takes it on himself to subvert their system, in order to make a point about the frivolity of fairs, and in the process frustrates the goals of the group. What do your ordinary social instincts tell you about such a person?
I know rock stars. Rock stars are friends of mine. Programmers are not rock stars.

Seriously though, whoever started the whole rockstar/ninja thing should be punished. This is programming. Forget sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and throwing stars. I want to work with people who always know where their towel is.
Thanks. I can't believe I didn't notice that.