skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft claim that the customer is in control of their PC. That's true, if by "customer" they mean "hardware manufacturer".

Isn't that always the case? Today I'm not guaranteed the ability to do secure boot. Today I'm not guaranteed the ability to use certain types of RAM or certain types of video cards or certain types of data adapters (e.g., Thunderbolt), or have touch support, or etc...

But what the customer is in control of is the ability to pick a PC which conforms to what they want, or the ability to build it.

There's never been a guarantee that a specific computer will allow a customer to do whatever they want. All secure boot disabling is is simply one more item in the matrix. And almost all these items are defined by each individual OEM.

The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor

This I hadn't heard of. So with UEFI secure boot you're saying that you likely won't be able to change graphics cards? I hadn't heard that.
Totally agreed with: While you can argue that "normal people" don't care, who recommends such services to family and friends? It's us.

So, I am telling friends/family now that the folks at Spotify are a bunch of corporate tools. Whereas I used to tell them how incredibly awesome the Spotify service was.

I am not a lab rat to be analyzed. I do not want corporate data miners pawing through every move I make. My god.
Well, they would need to be simulated.
Right, because the products Apple makes don't need designing... ?
>OSX isn't prevented from running on commodity hardware though a secure boot process though.

Windows 8 will run on any BIOS and UEFI, regardless of secure boot, there is nothing in secure boot preventing you from running it anywhere.
Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I found a place to stay!
Really, I'm being downvoted into troll territory? Does it help if I say I'm a paying Dropbox user? The community is definitely changing here over the years...
The ability to disable it is in the spec, but it's not required by the spec. Equally, the ability to override security decisions on a case by case basis is in the spec, but the Microsoft certification requirements forbid it.
I saw this on paul's G+ and rolled my eyes.

Oh guffaw. The time has easily come where we are allowed to say "no" to several browser versions, or at least ignore them. Even Google has dropped support for IE6.

Supporting several browsers does not mean that a website has to look perfect in all those browsers. My sites will look good on the latest version of Chrome, IE, Opera, and Firefox.

Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience, why should we care to cater to them? They can have the website I display, but I'm not building the site for the past.

I don't care if previous browser users see the Best Of All Possible Websites, as long as they see something. And since I'm developing Canvas apps, I don't care if some of them see anything at all.

I imagine IE will reluctantly take the road of Chrome or FF and be more insistent about updates, especially outside of the corporate world. I also think that in the future the consensus will be that there isn't anything wrong with dropping support for aged browsers, and just displaying one "simple" site version to them.
How real are you?
What's new in Firefox 7
It seems like half the startups are taking this Launchrock-type approach these days, I'm not sure I'm a fan either but presumably it works.
I suppose this varies, depending on the companies involved, the size of the acquisition, and the reasons for doing the deal. If it is a talent acquisition, I would imagine the goal would be for you to stick around as long as possible (say, years?). If it is a technology acquisition, they likely only want your tech, code, or patents, and wouldn't mind if you just stuck around for the transition (say, months?).

When I worked at Internet Brands (née carsdirect.com), we would see maybe 20 acquisitions per year. These would be income-generating websites acquired for an average of $1 million each. Generally, IB only wanted the site, the community, and the impressions. They would usually keep the founder, a lead dev, and a webmaster from the original company around for 6 months to a year while the site was transferred in-house. We would rewrite the code in PHP whenever possible, move the site onto our standard LAMP stack, hosted on our servers, and migrate any blog to WordPress, static sites to MovableType, and forums to vBulletin. Then the founder would stay on as the public face of the site with up to a 3 year earnout based on maintaining similar or increasing levels of traffic and revenue. After that, they usually disappear as soon as the last earnout check clears.
Goldman Sachs haven't Canute-like powers, they simply have better tide tables. So anyone claiming they "rule the world" should be viewed skeptically.

That said, we've had several decades of large and various constituencies "financially and emotionally invested" in the government absorption of risk (via Freddie / Fannie, Greenspan Put & Too Big Too Fail), and in the excess stimulation of demand via deficit spending.

The linkages between fiscal policy preferences and political ideologies, of all stripes, really shouldn't be that hard to figure out. I mean, it really shouldn't be that hard to think about what, say, a Paul Krugman believes to be ideal long-term policy, and what that might imply for his forecasted outcomes of various short-term initiatives. Or for your standard issue right-wing think tank circa fall 2003.

By all means, let's inspect this yo-yo's motives and their influence on his opinions. But if we're symmetric about it, we'll overturn a lot of rocks far larger than needed to hide this wannabe.
He is telling the truth.

Startup:

Record Number of Companies Pull Back on IPOs
http://www.newsmax.com/InvestingAnalysis/ipo-offerings-compa...

Europe:

EFSF - 133% Of German GDP To Cover All Of Europe's Bad Debt
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/explaining-how-just-announced-...

Germany rejects idea of further EFSF expansion
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/germany-rejects-idea-of-fur...

China:

Chinese growth could slow to zero in 2012
http://www.iii.co.uk/articles/18948/chinese-growth-could-slo...

Cash Crunch in China Picks Up Momentum; Chinese Economy "Teetering On the Edge"
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/09/cash-crun...

Japan:

Japanese economy contracted more severely than previously reported
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190328570457655...

Japan auto lobby cuts 2011 sales outlook by 10 pct
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/27/autos-japan-idUSL3...

US:

Consumer Confidence Stagnates Near Two-Year Low
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-27/u-s-economy-cons...

Food stamp use rises to record 45.8 million
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/04/pf/food_stamps_record_high/i...

Overall:

Are We Headed Into A Recess/Depress-ion? The Answer In 9 Simple Charts
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/are-we-headed-recessdepress-io...

All signs point to the second dip in the global economic depression.
Yeah, they may be using the XHTML metatag and relying of divs, but that doesn't mean they're not using some more modern tech to get it working. CSS3 fonts are used in the slides for example.

HTML5 is pretty much an umbrella term now and I think this fits neatly into that
Hmm, then I retract my assumption that "Scrolls" was clear, I was under the impression that to some extent it was similar in clarity to saying "Warcraft" and people generally knowing what you mean, or saying "Warhammer".

Thanks for the clarification.
Scientists Successfully Implant Chip That Controls The Brain
I use djbdns / tinydns.

So really, I don't have to do any of that.

What you really would do, given your list above, would be

- Buy hardware from vendor, ship direct to colo.

- When racked, they hook up a KVM/IP device that has virtual media support to the system.

- You install your OS from your desktop machine.

- Turn off all services except DNS and public key SSH with hosts.deny and hosts.allow setup appropriately

- Use automated scripts to move zones from current setup to djbdns format .

- Tweak Makefile for djbdns (included in the distribution) to use ssh to move both the datafile and a text-version backup of the file, to each system. You can keep your original files on a machine local to you and push the changes via SSH that way.

- you should have a machine or two outside your facility to run e.g. smokeping or other measurement/monitoring tools anyways; so run smokeping etc. on the same machine and if you are paranoid, run the webserver on 127.0.0.1 and use SSH tunneling to view the pages.

Usually for $100/month per server, you can get outage monitoring and 30 minutes of remote hands per month, included.
Just to echo the other commenters here, I've only ever heard the series referred to as the "Elder Scrolls" games.
Zynga's having a hard time getting new players, according to this - http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/09/27/zynga-herding-...
To reinterpret this reporter's vignette of Jobs, to me the encounter with him shows a man with an enormous level of intention and focus, and a brief view of the techniques he might use to deal with the hugely complex decisions and situations that must come with being Apple's CEO.

It seems certain that Jobs was meditating just prior to the interview, drawing deep within himself to clear his consciousness, re-center, and get back on track with his plans.
I agree that it should be fought. Running around panicking about how evil MS is will just waste time.

Talking to hardware vendors to ask them what is needed to get Linux to run on their systems is the most productive course of action at the moment, I believe.
Desktop highlights:

* Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases

* Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems

* Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync

* The 'http:// URL prefix is now hidden by default

* Added support for text-overflow: ellipsis

* Added support for the Web Timing specification

* Enhanced support for MathML

* The WebSocket protocol has been updated from version 7 to version 8

* Added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox

* Fixed several stability issues

* Fixed several security issues

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/09/27/mozilla-firefox-sign...

--

Android highlights:

* Android-style Copy & Paste

* Ability to quit

* Use Firefox in your language

* WebSocket API

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/09/27/firefox-for-android-...

[Edit] Updated the list of highlights
Speaking of cabs in Beijing: how come I can never get one? I see empty cabs drive by constantly (and not just foreigners, locals too). Or they sit around not wanting to pickup fares. The whole cab system seemed broken when they didn't want to drive people places. Anyone have any idea what sort of incentive system these guys have or try and explain this behavior?
Raleigh Lawsuit Funding Solutions
>"Have you played Scrolls?" most people would realize you were talking about ES.

False beyond imagination. You're clearly not a gamer or a fan of the series, I've been playing it and involved in the community for the ES games since Daggerfall (1996).

Not once, in any forum post, usenet post, or BBS have I ever seen someone refer to the series or an individual game from Bethesda as "Scrolls", nor has it ever been part of their marketing or branding.

This is like Microsoft claiming you can't use the word "soft" in your product because someone might once have referred to their brand as "Soft" without the "Micro".

Just ridiculous.
What am I saying: end to end encryption isn't there, just in-flight encryption. Encrypting the payload before it leaves your network is the only way to do that, not relying on intermediaries.

It's a shame we can't sign it for you as it leaves our network, but that would defeat the point.
It took me years to finally upgrade from Firefox 3.x (to 6)

Then it only took me a week to upgrade to 7, which was 100% painless and added some nice abilities.

Check out this FF7 extension which finally allows you to see what fonts are used on a page including font-face:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fontinfo/
How much do you charge for a website?

is appropriately answered by "What do you want it to do?" then a conversation talking about their project.
>Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience

Don't assume users have a choice. Even if they do, don't assume they understand the choice.

>why should we care to cater to them?

If you want to ignore a % of your users, that's fine. Some of your competitors wont. That's your choice. Just realize you can be losing potential users/customers and that lesson about updating their browsers will be lost on the customers that went elsewhere.
But Google 'gives everything away' (with indirect monetisation), both the products that succeed and the products that fail. So in that sense this is just a list of failed products which are the byproduct of innovation at such a scale, rather than an indication of what has worked and what has not for Google in the past. Surely in this case, going up against a competitor that needs to charge, Google would be at a massive advantage (legality aside) by not having to charge?
"PAUL GRAHAM JUST SAID INSANE THINGS AT YCNYC"
Same here (different country, different phone companies).

Everyone is obviously pushing hard to sell their iphone4-stock now, before Joe Sixpack gets told by the news-anchor to delay his purchase for the iphone5.
The 'Worm' That Could Bring Down The Internet
Facebook launches new feature: Political Action Committee
Facebook Let's You Increase Security, If You Don't Use Chrome
None of those things have ever been said. Cf. my other comment.
That caught me off-guard as well.

But from Wikipedia/Yellow_Pages:

The term Yellow Pages is not a registered
name within the United States and is freely used by many
companies.

AT&T ... never applied for a trademark on the logo. While
they eventually received a trademark on a different
version of the logo, the version with the three fingers was
not considered by AT&T to be proprietary and they in fact
allowed any telephone directory to use it.
How is this supposed to help anyone exactly? Many commands simply don't work (^ or $ to name just two). People: skip this and use vim's :help.
Nice to see Web Timing support make it into this catching up with Chrome and IE.
I thought the point of Mozilla's new release scheme was that we don't have to download anything anymore. The updates just come to us, as if by magic. https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Updating%20Firefox
Wouldn't someone employed by realtors be one of those vested interest parties, who can't make a rational prediction, because they'd loose their job if they did?
Apple does something very similar (or at least used to). They give a difficult algorithmic coding problem and a few days to complete it. Then they grill you on it at the on site interview. There is no way you could fake explaining it - you have to really understand what you did.
They're not on the server any more. I tried uploading a ROM on my own webspace and editing the script to load it but I get a XmlHttpRequest error:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://home.scarlet.be/~umeerts/NES-XR.nes. Origin http://fir.sh is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

I know very little of this stuff so this is were I stopped.
Here's the official release notes:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/7.0/releasenotes/
Facebook disconnect is a worthwhile extension if you're using Chrome. There is a FF equivalent as well.
What’s new for Web Developers in Firefox 7
I'll never understand why people pay so much money for jeans with holes in them, when you could simply just rip the holes yourselves.

But I won't hesitate to pay a bit more for a quality Apple product.

Some things just don't make sense. :)
Is Dropbox's business model not dependent on customer acquisition?
I've tried to learn vi for years. The simplicity of this tutorial is the first thing that allowed me to "get it." Maybe I'm just ready at last, but the quick tutorial gave me just enough beyond what I needed to know before (i/r/:wq) to grasp its power. I've tripled my vi knowledge without being intimidated.
Completely agreed. Right now the most requested feature is "watch any folder". It received the most upvotes by a great margin (30%). And it was suggested 2 years ago.

Yet there is no indication of development at all on that front (or any other for that matter.)

I really like Dropbox, but seriously will look into GDrive too.
Free FaceBook Training To Become Famous In 60 Days
There seems to be an assumption here that ecosystems are friendly places but they really aren't. Nature does not know best. The vast majority all species in history have been wiped out by their natural environments, many by their own genes.

All actions that we take to try to fix problems go on to create new problems. It's expected.

And, of course, this doesn't mean we shouldn't act, unless we have a good explanation now as to why the harm of a proposed course of action outweighs the benefits.

The alternative is to follow some kind of 'Precautionary Principle', which, as David Deutsch has pointed out, can only damage our ability to handle threats which we do not foresee.

Meanwhile, people's lives are in known peril from malaria.
Go to Help > About Firefox and click Update. It should update automatically after some time anyway.
My personal privacy was magically changed to "friends of friends" on my newest posts, so I don't know that it's been phased out!
>There is almost no downside to requiring this, except for the fact that it can only serve to hurt their business. I'm not sure I blame them from a business perspective, but it feels awful par-for-the-course-Microsofty.

I think your energy will be better served railing against the alleged OEMs that won't include the option, instead of against MS. They're trying to clean up rootkits that load before antivirus to make their OS more secure.

>(I don't mean to be rude or presumptuous, but your other comment seems to indicate that you're not fully understanding the technical workings or implications of a non-disable-able UEFI secure boot).

Care to tell how?
Whenever I hear doomsayers like this I try to remember Warren Buffett's advice, "Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."
To be fair, we can also do that without source code

You can, but it's not the same.

With an open source programme:

* it's much easier to find & disable the DRM checks

* I can (legally) distribute a version with DRM disabled

* I can legally distribute a (probably small) patch that disabled the DRM, it's much easier for someone else to verify that my patch disabled the DRM, and doesn't have a trojan than if I give a binary diff.

* With open source programmes, I could submit my patched version (that disables the DRM) to a very freedom loving distro (like debian), and campaign for it's acceptance into the package index (making all Debian users not have DRM, etc.)

These things are technically possible with propriaty software, but you don't have the advantages above.
The drivers for any hardware used in the UEFI environment (so graphics, input, storage, potentially network) have the ability to compromise your system, so they have to be trusted as well. For hardware that's built into your machine, that's fine - the drivers will just live in the firmware volume in flash and can't be replaced, so they're trusted. If they're on a plugin card then it's a different story.

There's a few obvious options here. The first is for Microsoft to sign the drivers. That would work but would slow down driver deployment. The other is for the vendor to have a key. That means that systems would have to carry the appropriate public key. If you buy a system with the AMD key then you'd be able to run a Radeon, but unless it also carries the Nvidia key then you won't be able to swap it out for a Geforce.

It's also possible that Microsoft will issue vendors keys that have chained trust back up to Microsoft's key. That would avoid the requirement to distribute individual vendor keys, but it means that any vendor key is now trusted by all systems with the Microsoft key (ie, all of them). At that point it's no longer about compromising Microsoft's key, it's about compromising any hardware vendor's key. Succeed in that and you're able to produce malware that'll run on any system. Stuxnet demonstrates that this is a real risk. And once the malware is out there and signed by this leaked key, the only way to fix it is to revoke that key. Which then instantly stops all of that vendor's hardware from working.

It's still unclear which of these deployment scenarios will be followed. All of them have downsides, and one of them may well be to restrict your ability to choose which hardware you want to use in your (otherwise compatible) system.
The problem here is that the number of intersections scales quadratically, as the square of the number of roads. Each intersection cuts the capacity of the roads and represents a potential cause of gridlock and accidents.
Read up on the Kondratieff Cycle, should guide you in what asset classes to have a look at.
This so very much. Although I'd like one that does the same to twitter and G+ buttons...maybe I should take a look through the code for Facebook Disconnect and do it myself...
This is somewhat misleading because it makes the false impression that these frameworks are mutually exclusive.

PhoneGap, for example, could be combined with Sencha Touch to get native functionality.
I would guess that Bitcasa is just not notable enough to be brought into Google/Dropbox thread. Not that it justifies downvoting you below 0.
Apple proved him right long before this. But there was no outrage against Apple, since they make shiny things that everyone likes. And people actually liked the security that this gave them. The battle was lost then.
Inetdxtra - extra inetd services
Wow, nice work. As someone making the same transition for a large Flash app I can attest to how hard this is, especially for accurate font rendering. I've seen a lot of comments on HN along the lines of Flash sucks why don't you use HTML5? As the post points out it's not a trivial switch, canvas is extremely low level compared to Flash's Display List.

edit: HTML5 = abs positioned divs and CSS3 fonts in this case, plus some text rendered as part of background images, still it's really difficult to go from PDF to HTML no matter how you do it :)
No, I was not sleepy. In fact, I was very focused as I wanted to make sure all the tasks for my day job got taken care of so I don't have to take work home.
It was the drive that kept me going. I wanted to make something. I really wanted to bring my idea to the market. And after a while, I just got used to it.
In USA, you have a law permitting to take a photo in a public place.
In Soviet Russia a law permitting to take a photo in a public place has you.
Useful regexps for Google Analytics
Chris, your point was strong enough without the bile.
Like a boss. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Pete_in_garden...
After Firefox 4 came out I had to install so many extensions to make it feel like 3.6 that it became unstable and incredibly slow. Because Firefox apparently tries to be more like Chrome I decided to switch to the original and I haven't looked back yet. I only fire up Firefox when Chromes built-in developer tools lack functionality compared to Firebug, which is rarely the case. The way Firefox decided to take makes me really sad, as I was a big Firefox supporter, until they screwed me over with the new UI. I hope this is not too off topic, but I never got the chance to comment on the changes.