skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why do foreign CAs have the power to make .com SSLs?
This is the second or third time in recent memory some foreign CA has been caught with a bad SSL. Why is a .nl organization able to produce .com SSLs? In the world of domains a .nl registrar can only make .nl domains, but in the CA world they can make whatever TLD they like? That seems like a fundamental problem here. Can this be fixed or addressed somehow?
Or [soulless corporate moochers bribe] politicians and vice versa and for some reason we accept it.

Most politicians are lifers. After practicing (and failing) law, of course.
It doesn't seem to actually say that anywhere on the web page though.
No, I know that, I get it. This is a service that gives people the ability to create these pages I hate so much.

I'm sure many people who are slaving away to try to produce a service will love that they can produce these "teasers that waste time and have no content but harvest your email" pages.

I'm sure that this will be considered a valuable asset to help potential startups save time.

I just wanted to point out that in some quarters these sorts of pages create real animosity and may have a net negative effect.

Feeling my age today.

</rant>
How Steve Jobs got the Internet to pay for content
You could check out the Reddit photo class -http://www.reddit.com/r/photoclass/ lots of people there do it together to get a better "learning experience".

There is a version 2.0 going on right now too, currently on lesson 4 posted Aug. 12 - http://www.reddit.com/r/PhotoClassRedux/
I think Colin's note was about the people you're providing the service to, not you specifically.

I agree with him about using pre-launch pages extensively as 'market testing' when you're not sure about whether you're going to build the product or not. As someone pulling together a product and wanting to use a pre-launch page after commiting to the build and during face-to-face research, I found your article most useful.
A Faster Internet (DNS)
> ", thing is, Linear Algebra isn't matrix manipulation. Matrices are just one aspect of Linear Algebra - it's like saying that symbols such as 'x', 'y' and 'z' are 'Algebra.'"

Well, I see your point, but to many, x, y and z are algebra. When public schools teach solving strategies like substitution, polynomial factoring, or concepts like linear equations, series, and exponents, these are labeled "algebra" and are basic extensions of solving for some variable(s).

So it seems you are arguing that the public understanding of "Algebra" and a mathematician's understanding of "Algebra" are different. (And the same for "linear algebra".) ... because the public's understanding is based largely on a shared experience in public schools.

I'd be surprised if it weren't so, and I suspect the problem of a different interpretation of terms is the case in many fields.
Apple Hires iOS Hacker 'comex' (the jailbreak guy)
Where's the go-to place for high quality (e.g. FLAC) pirated music now?
My bamboo fun tablet is one of the best purchases I've ever made. It was 80% of as good as using a real pencil and probably 90% of as good as a paint brush or air brush.

I absolutely love Wacom and will be in line to buy one of these as soon as I can scrounge up the money to do it on my meager Chinese salary!
Paul Polak is the father of this mindset, IDE. thanks for the link.
The death of books has been greatly exaggerated
iTunes Match adds music streaming surprise to iCloud
It is a tempting mistake to make.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Anything that increases the cost of energy will decrease the ability of a civilization to advance.
She never said she doesn't want an interview, can you quote that on her site? And of course she would send her resume/portfolio to a potential employer. I can't imagine anyone is that cut off from reality.
What is Hacker News Worth?
This is exciting! Thanks for sharing. I wish I'd had this last week when I had 25 new Macbooks unboxed in my office, downloading updates from the web for each one.
I agree with you only because Communism is a well thought out theory. A theory that most (at least in the United States) feel has failed but a well thought out theory none the less. For example, every manifestation of Communism has established a monetary system. That system just happens to be centrally planed.

This proposal doesn't provide any real structure as to how society would work. It proposes abolishing almost everything we've established the world's societies on but provides no adequate replacement for that infrastructure.
My understanding is that what Mozilla is going to ship will not block PKIOverheid. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682956#c17
One concern I have is the potential privacy aspect of this.

From the how it works page:

"If using OpenDNS or Google Public DNS, your complete IP address will not be embedded. Instead, the DNS server will only include enough information for the CDN to know your general location. For instance, if your IP address is 67.215.80.23, the DNS server will only expose the first three octets, so 67 – 215 – 80 instead of 67 – 215 – 80 – 23. A reasonable analogy would be only showing the prefix of your phone number in caller ID. If your number was 415-555-1234 then only 415-555-XXXX would appear in the Caller ID. Not enough to identify you, but enough for the receiving party to know the area code and prefix of the caller."

For a Class C, this is just 253 addresses to test which is trivial. Given the disturbing actions of ongoing governmental monitoring in say Iran, I'm not sure if people understand that by adopting the "faster DNS" that they are leaking more information now.

Maybe there should be a way to signal an opt-out.
a number of domains, including Google.com

But nowhere do they appear to include a list of these domains...
http://voxforge.com have been collecting a big speech corpora over the last few years, under GPL license. That should be the way to follow imho.

Training a speech recognition engine is quite a sophisticated process, and usually requires at least a clean (not noisy) set of samples, which you can't find in dubbed movies and surely not in music.
Why 'gamification' will boost workplace productivity
Telefono espia con activación por voz
Scarcity of smartphone app developers stifles a growing industry in Michigan
Colin, sorry I misunderstood and that you've been burned by so many would-be MVP test pages. Hopefully my little tutorial is used for projects that actually get released ;)
Seems like a great idea. If there's some way we can help support your effort please let me know. Please contact me directly.
Barnes & Noble's NOOK Bet Paying Off: Digital Sales Quadruple
Why VCs rarely back "family" founders
HN post to the original site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941991
> I don't think that letter R is to blame. Letter O is culprit.

That's what the disagreement boils down to, I suppose: if we agree that there's an object-relational mismatch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...), then is the solution to drop the 'O', to drop the 'R', or to find a way to bridge them?
"VASCO does not expect that the DigiNotar security incident will have a significant impact on the company’s future revenue or business plans."

Anything less than termination of the DigiNotar business and paying for a real third-party equivalent SSL cert of equivalent length for all affected customers who have ever been issued DigiNotar certs, plus compensation for the cost of rekeying, should result in action against VASCO (the parent company). It's obvious they don't take the SSL cert business seriously, and it's a small part of their revenue, so they need to just exit it.
i'm not too worried. if it happens it happens. This isn't even my best performing app by a long shot. Besides, it already has a ton of visibility in the app store so competitors would naturally arise whether I posted any numbers or not.

From my experience most successful entrepreneurs don't worry about competitors that much. They just focus on building the absolute best product they can.
This passage seems relevant as it points at the contours of what I take to be the underlying 'problem' that the OP hints at with the litany of questions. It's also an interesting background from which to approach the writings of people like Kurzweil. There is, it seems, a deep desire to escape our bodies. The drive is present in many religions and it is present in futurism of diverse sorts. Lastly, the final sentence seems especially relevant at a time when it seems that most 'misfortunes' get transformed into 'moral failings'.

From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:

In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:

What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts
known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to,
put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is
assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside envi-
ronment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored
contact as potentially the source of death.‘

Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay ﬁrst appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our ﬁnitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.
Story behind our company name
My apps look ugly as sin. How do I improve my design skill?
I've been working on apps where packaged themes don't quite cut it due to UI requirements. I've never had technical trouble implementing ideas, but my layouts, colors, and general UI leave a lot to be desired. How do I improve my design know-how?
Whilst I don't disagree that there is a widespread culture of fear in many communities, I'm not convinced that this has manifested in a significant trend of parents not allowing children to play outside. Do you have any data for this?
After reading comments here I read more deeply into the mojang/notch vs open tools stuff, and I rephrase my "good on ya" to a "nice delivery/flamewar avoidance in yer announcement".

To clarify my original comment, I was referring to the open playground approach of Minecraft, but making an unfounded assumption that the open playground model extended to the code. I made that assumption because of second-hand knowledge that mods were making it into the game. Mea culpa.
I love tech, but if I went to a restaurant and they had that, I honestly wouldn't go back.

They gained 10% from those who stuck around and points to them for working the up-sell on side orders, but how many left never to return? To quantify the value of tabletop ordering systems is not as simple as saying "oh look, a 10% gain in average order value" it's much more complex than that. And without the customer numbers and order value variance it's hard to truly analyze the success of the proposition.
Does ChromeOS use Google's DNS by default?
I'm buying into his thesis, but heck, I really expected to see some causality explained. The title began, after all, with "how did...."

It would be great if somebody could provided an insider's account of why the academic publishing industry maintained those margins from 2000 to 2010. Did nobody propose legislation to stop them? Were there no criminal investigations? Who are these people connected with politically? What sorts of causes to they contribute to? Just how is the status quo maintained? The guy made a point I was already predisposed to agree with, then kind of went on a rant about how bad it all was. Hey, I'm with you. I'm just not sure my useful knowledge of the issue has increased any.
That's a good point. I still think that evil spamming/tracking sites will only be able to get aggregate data, not track or spam individuals.
Any ISP or country which sent bogus routes like that would get away with it briefly, before getting blackholed. So, sure, if you just needed a window of a couple of minutes and you didn't mind it making international news, you could do this.

Also, any entity trusted only to receive traffic but not to route third-party traffic will typically get limited to routes that lead to its own IP block, making this only an option for entities trusted to actually route third-party traffic. And if any such entity pulled a stunt like this more than once, they'd have a hard time arguing that it occurred accidentally.
Why should they have to? Why would anyone expect them to do so? The job market is pretty great for good developers right now.
I thought folks that had already put an email the first announcement would be emailed by now to let us now sign up is open, but I got none.
How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance
A dozen operations may be more than enough for 80% of users. Designing for the remaining 20% is a common UI design mistake.
Except the "old anti-open source argument" has proven to be largely true. At least 82% (roughly) of Linux development is corporate sponsored (it could be more since not all contributors disclose).

Beyond that people who like building robots as a hobby probably aren't going to work very quickly or enjoy building the same robot over, and over, and over, and over again.
I saw similar interactive menus in Japan, esp. for Yakiniku. Their systems are relatively crude, but more than adequate. Press a button to summon your server, choose items off the menu, etc. I actually think you'd want more durable, and less fussy (and expensive) than a tablet for this application.

Either way, I hope this takes off.
They do do this? Or they could do this?
Inspirational iOS Application Icons
I would be less worried about proving them safe ex ante than maintaining the safety of those around them. Regular monitoring for leakage and exposure would be a great start. The reason gate agents are not allowed to wear monitors is political. If there is any problem found I think it that workplace rule should be considered malicious.
Petition This American Life to use Ogg Vorbis
Intel Forms ‘Federal’ Business Unit To Sell Supercomputing Service to U.S. Gov't
Yeah, I've seen lots of users who won't even leave Facebook. In fact that's what prompted me to post this question here.
This comment would be meaningful when Minecraft has been out in the market for 3+ years.
Odd, my OS X machine has 2 of them listed. I don't see it in firefox though.
They're probably right. VASCO's core products and DigiNotar's appear to be separate BUs (they don't even share IT infrastructure according to the press release). And even within DigiNotar, the SSL CA appears to be an afterthought; VASCA says it did less than $100k EU last year.

Yes, this does beg the question of why an organization like DigiNotar was allowed to be a browser CA root.
Entering reCaptcha looks like too much work do just download a single file.
An easy first step is to focus on spacing and alignment. Make sure everything is consistently spaced with equal distance between items. This will make even a mediocre layout look better designed.
Review of 5 Speed Reading Software To Choose The Best One
This would be more exciting to me if there were a Linux client, or signs that they were using some open standard (SVG paths/layers?) for storage. :/
This is not for everyone, but there are times when this is perfect: Happy Hour, Lunch, Dining with "Cheap" friends (splitting the bill).

This would never replace "regular waiter service" but for those who want faster service, with no questions, it's a win-win.
Awesome and funny video.

- but am I the only one that feels bad for Chris and wants to learn him how to use git? :D
Derek Wyatt
Your games go unfinished because you’re building the wrong games.
> haven't they been pretty clear about that previously?

News to me. I've seen a lot of ads and reviews for them and I don't see this mentioned at all, or at least prominently.
Top Fat Burning Foods To Help You Lose Weight
Can any cloud catch Amazon Web Services? Part 1
That is very strange, but sadly not unexpected. There has been a lot of noise lately, with the websocket draft changes in new browser versions.

Would you mind sending me a dump of whatever error messages the chrome console shows? If there are none, could you perhaps send a screenshot of the last page of connections from the chrome network tab? I'd be wickedly grateful!

My username at gmail.com is my email.
I was in your position a month or so ago, I've been working through Derek Wyatt's videos and have found them very helpful: http://www.derekwyatt.org/vim/vim-tutorial-videos/vim-novice...
> Disarming the population is not an option here.

Sure it is. Replace general purpose computers with centrally and permanently connected (It's a feature!) computing devices that only run signed apps. Then whenever someone does something too clever you just revoke their developer ID and everything they've written stops working. Justify this control with "piracy" and it'll be accepted.

It won't really work, but it seems like it would to an authoritarian, so it's pretty likely where we're going in such a hurry. Like all false security it just opens us up to a bigger attack, but reality never won an election so government will never handle this properly.

We talk about how nasty Iran, Egypt, Libya, etc, shut down communications preventing the people from changing things, but what measures do we have against our own governments doing the same things? I imagine we're totally screwed. Our government has the resources to do things thoroughly, and as the BART incident recently showed, the willingness to deny service to the innocent to inconvenience protestors.
Lodsys Scrambles in Effort to Keep Apple Out of Court
Firefox users:

RequestPolicy users can disable Link prefetching and DNS prefetching from the Advanced tab in the RequestPolicy preferences. Everyone else can search for "prefetch" in about:config and do it from there.

Also, Prefetching is disabled by default if the page containing the link is opened over HTTPS.
The problem with implementing this idea is which technology would actually have to be built, and in which technology the real value would lie. Once the technology is established, scanning videos, tv, radio etc for any source of spoken audio and building up a database of indexable dialogs would almost be the easy part.

Building a speech reconizer is not only difficult, it has also been attempted many times before and unless a speech recognition guru could bring something new to the world, the best we could do is what is already available - so probably best to use existing technology, which often is not cheap to get a license. This is also true with voice print technologies.

The key to getting this up and running lies in finding or building a really good speech recognizer and voice print generator/varifier...

Maybe this is something Y Combinator would be interested in funding? I am based in Europe (Spain at the moment) and I think it would be really hard to convince people to fund this type of technology over here.

If anybody is up for the challenge, I'd love to be involved!
Just to add a note of thanks to all the people who have commented in this thread. Wonderful to see the thoughtful reactions from the HN crowd. Much to think about.
That doesn't really fulfill the "quality signal" aspect of journals, though -- the replacement would be some sort of open journal that still had peer review.

There was an Elsevier math journal where the entire editorial staff got fed up, quit, and then simply founded a new journal on the same subject. That's the sort of thing most likely to bring the big journals down, not self publication by individuals. (Well, that or direct government intervention.)
.com is not for the exclusive use of the USA!
Another article to toss in the gloom and doom pile of Michigan software industry.

Since when have rates, which are competitive in the industry, become a bad thing? Shouldn't we be praising the fact that our industry is competing with firms across the globe?

And which industry is this "stifling"? The developers, or the idea-man?
the Internet's most popular mail server

It is my understanding that gmail is dwarfed by both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Since Facebook is already mainstream, this isn't a surprise.
The p2p thing is a good model. On the one hand you have services like Youtube which come up with all kinds of innovations to PREVENT you from using too much bandwidth- but Spotify is focusing its efforts in a more user-serving direction, encouraging you to go through as many songs as you can/want and finding ways to make it happen.
Isn't this essentially what list comprehensions are for? For instance, here's the Pythagorean triple example using a comprehension:

[(a, b, c) for a in range(1, 11) for b in range(1, 11) for c in range(1, 11) if a ** 2 + b ** 2 == c ** 2]

I understand that the semantics are slightly different, but I'd argue that the benefit of using a built-in, idiomatic Python construct instead of reinventing the wheel is pretty clear.

Or am I missing something?
JavaScript and crypto
Seems like I've been defending Windows Phone on here so much lately, maybe it's time to balance it out.

I think this is hideous crap UI design. Fortunately, it can be shut off (at least in the leaked betas).

I'm not aware of anything good that's come out of Microsoft and usability tests. Apple didn't seem to use them and it turned out well for them.

Microsoft, go with the Windows Phone paradigm, full force. It is your (successful) future.
In all this discusion there is an assumption that I disagree with: that the people that has no idea about using computers should dictate the UI.

I don't think its people with no idea, but rather people who aren't power users. I suspect almost all of us on a site called "Hacker News" are likely power users in our OS of choice.

When Windows changes, I'm inconvenienced for an hour or so as I relearn where various things are. But as a power user, I relearn these things pretty quickly (if I'm so inclined). "Oh they've added something called a registry. Let me take a look at this... Hmm... so there is where the files are registering this data. What if I..."

This is what we do. We're going to figure it out. And to be honest, I find Win7 way more user friendly than XP. For example, with multimon and the ability to quickly snap windows into place with Win-L and Win-R -- that right there makes me feel naked on XP (or Vista).

So you make look around and say there are 250,000 Windows power users out here (and you're probably surrounded by them)! There are 300 million who aren't.