skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was at an event in NYC several months back where a mid-stage VC said the same thing (blanking on his name) but specifically regarding the NYC community. It was an angle I hadn't thought about and initially had the same negative reaction to as someone in the midst of an early stage company.

For later round investors it's undoubtedly in their interest to encourage these engineers to join larger firms rather than being on their own. In NYC it's especially competitive given the competition between more mature companies, early stage startups and the money wielding finance industry. The combination could lead to a 'glass ceiling' of sorts for larger companies because of the inability to attract talent; that is, until some of the smaller companies fail and these individual engineers likely end up at a larger spot.

It mirrors the consolidation of an industry. It just takes longer than some investors (like Parker) would prefer, which is the inspiration for statements like this.
Duqu: New method of injection
When I released an exercise-tracking app for the iPhone I got contacted by a zookeeper who wanted to adapt it to manage animal's feeding schedules.

I didn't take him up on it, but you never know what under-served niches are lurking at the fringes of the market.
Oh, there's a video. Does that help?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cmxoSmOxU
Xen-powered Virtual Private Servers. That don't assume you are stupid.
It's funny, you can put "Yegge" at the top and people will complain about it being too long. Even his tweets are over 6000 words.
That's an awesome summary - they should use it on the site.
Why would you want to add 100-500ms of latency to every single DOM manipulation? Realtime means I click on something and something else happens, immediately, not a 1/2 second later.

All this to just save having to load jQuery in the client? Not sure I get the advantage.
OS X backdoor Olyx
The powers that be have been saying for about 20 years that IP addresses are not assets, cannot be owned, and cannot be sold. That's why people are talking about black markets.
> This isn't really the solution we were looking for

What? Yes, yes it is. Please don't take it away now!
I agree about NeXTSTEP, but it doesn't matter. Only geeks care about that stuff. Do you think Isaacson's goal was to simply tell Apple geeks what they already know?

The real value and insight that the book provides is the access to Jobs during the last years of his life, as well as the people who played important roles in Apple's resurgence during the last 10 years. To nitpick the minor technical details in the book is to completely miss the point.
At the telecom company I work for, this is called 'System Integration'. It takes most of our time.
Companies only exist to minimize transaction costs.

I think this is a bit of an overstatement. Another purpose of companies is to provide the benefits of a command economy (e.g., the ability of a great leader to jump from a local to global maxima) with less of the dangers of a command economy (great leader robs/kills you, poor planning screws everyone over).

E.g., central planning in the food supply can work reasonably well, but this is hardly guaranteed. Market discipline gives us the benefits of McDonald's 5 year plan, but a McBankruptcy rather than Soviet Union style food shortages if the 5 year plan fails.
Like cooldeal, I really can't tell if this is a troll or not, so I'm not going to even bother picking apart the dozens of inaccuracies.
The Newsstand & Shutdown Slider bugs still exist after iOS 5.0.1 update w/video
A General Model for Hiding Control Flow
Job Opening: "Frequent travel may be required"
So, $7.5 million for 666,624 IP addresses. Now the question is, how much is the 16,777,214 IP addresses that Apple owns worth? (Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0 Class A subnet) Was this factored into Apple's valuation?

I would love to hear the story behind how Apple got the 17.0.0.0 subnet.
Yeah, I agree actually, I wasn't claiming it's "just a few bad apples" when we just had a throw out the bums election and the new bums are just as welcoming to anyone with a check to sign. IMO the bad apples here are the lobbyists who seem to be a permanent fixture.

So, 2 steps:

1) Call congressmen to directly remedy problem in this particular case (I haven't done this but should, they do listen).

2) Address the problem of lobbying generally, that's a bigger discussion and every idea I have to fix it could have unintended consequences.
>they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact)

I have always thought Xerox had a GUI at the time and didn't know I was being misled.

Someone help with more info or references on this?
Derbycon 2011 Videos
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

This is interesting. Could it be that at more selective schools, when students encounter difficulty in STEM courses, they are less hesitant to switch to an easier major because they figure that their degree will still have value due to the name recognition of their university, while their counterparts at less selective schools don't have that luxury? That's one hypothesis...
I can't believe I never thought to do this myself. I have always wanted a Kaossilator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3_yXmIfmYg
Siracusa's chief complaint is that Isaacson doesn't have enough insight into the tech world, or technology in general.

I'm just speculating, but maybe that is the reason why Jobs chose Isaacson.

In the same way Apple products are designed not for nerds, but the "rest of us", perhaps Jobs wanted the same for his biography.
So they're paying for the rights for other people to access their systems via a set of numbers. And how is that not making arbitrary numbers artificially scarce and collecting payment for them?

IPV6 really can't come soon enough.
I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more "tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and I don't really see anything wrong with that.
Correct me if I'm wrong here. But why is this company valuable long-term? Sure short-term there is a lot of 'magic' that goes into SEO. That said, a lot of people in search are slowly coming to the realization that SEO data is a lot like cryptography was in the past. While it was secret (DES), it could be broken in secret. Once it was public (AES), the difficulties it faced could be acknowledged and worked around. Companies like Blekko, which run enormous search engines/databases, are giving away SEO data for free. Say what you will about their search product, but they are giving the SEO away for free. Unless ginzametrics starts to run its own search engine, I can only ever see it successful so long as they can 'guess' what google and Bing are doing. But as entrants like Blekko, force google and bing to become more open, Ginzametrics has less of a value proposition. my 2 cents.
How is it any different than writing a check? All of the same information is there, namely ABA routing number and account number.
Although now is not the time to be picky (to be thankful, rather), why not simply let logged in users default to literal search, while still displaying the "did you mean" suggestions somewhere on the page...?
OMG Finally. This will make one IT Guy's day job much easier, and the same guy's weekend/evening programming life easier too.;
Cartier Watches Black Friday
Joe here - I am unaware that USB/SD sticks are fast enough to run as my system drive. Ok, cool. I haven't used a stick in years (ever since this new thing called the Internet showed up).

Yes, agree with Mr Binary - in a perfect world, computer hardware and software are completely divorced. The hotel wouldn't worry about viruses, because there would be no storage on their computer at all - I provide that with my stick. All I need is a 'kiosk computer', hardware that I can repurpose.
Its anecdotal, but I know a few people who definitely claim to have taken 'Computer Science' as opposed to 'Computing' A levels.
FWIW, I too refrained from replying because of the same reason - felt too much like trolling to fall for the trap.
Agreed. I have never been in debt in my life (not even student loans), and I really REALLY don't want to start now. That said, it still remains to be seen whether I can make enough money to afford to buy a house without a loan when the time comes that I decide that's what I want.
4chan hit by DDoS attack, struggling to get back online
"Hypercritical" is a great name for that podcast. Over an hour of nitpicking was more than I could stomach. I haven't finished the book, but what I've read wasn't that bad.
There is very little content in this article.

A real discussion about Frege, Russel, Curry, etc and how that lead to what programmers use today would have been truly interesting.
Adobe donates Flex to foundation in community-friendly exit strategy
Entrepreneurship and the NDA
> So you're saying people buy consoles based on how much RAM is in the machine because they all basically do the same thing?

No, I'm not saying that. I would say with consoles since the use cases are so similar the specifications are inevitably very similar in terms of performance (between Xbox and Playstation at least the wii is arguably in a different market altogether).

Since these are games consoles it's pretty obvious they are going to have powerful graphics hardware in the same was it is obvious that a ferrari will have a powerful engine.

The issue comes when you have a computer intended for a larger variety of use cases.

The apple devices mentioned do have relatively similar hardware but this is largely because they are all aimed towards the top of the market, it is more important at the lower end of the market where you have to make more trade-offs and you need some way of telling at a glance what those trade offs are.

One example of a difference would be if I was choosing a Mac that I wanted to run games on along with other use cases where the portability may be useful.

If I buy a MBA I get an Intel HD Graphics card whereas with the iMac I get some sort of ATI GPU.

The 3dmark06 score for iMac is 20915 whereas the score for the MBA 4185 (I found these numbers online so I can't vouch for their accuracy) this is going to make a monumental difference if you want to play the newest Call of Duty.

I suppose you could make an argument that instead of specs you should provide benchmarks but then the problem is that these need to be comprehensive and consistent.

Quoting specs is certainly far from ideal but if gives you a rough idea as to what the computing device will be capable of doing if that is not inferred simply by the name or appearance of the device.
Best Way tо Lose Tummy Fat
No, it's just that Berkeley STEM courses are harder.
Bakken formation
Make them mandatory if you can't pass a screening test.
I'm a little confused on how blocking ads is stealing bandwidth, but blocking flash ads and scripts is not. Flash ads may be the most profitable for a given site, and the scripts may well affect revenue for marketing, analytics, affiliates, selling viewer personal information, etc.

It would seem to me that if you hold the belief that ad blockers are stealing bandwidth then so are flash/script blockers to a lesser extent. If you don't like a site (and their flash ads and scripts), don't go there.
I think he's right, for the most part. It's also interesting that a lot of these startups end up with "successful" exits where their technology isn't used at all (ie talent acquisition for FB/Goog, etc). I don't know if there should be a correction for that, but I sometimes feel that it leads to people building for the sake of building until they get acquired.

Interestingly, we (http://feefighters.com) had 2 of our 4 interns leave us in the past week because they got accepted to YC (2 different projects). I guess we should feel good because we're picking smart people who want to work for us, but we'd rather have them with us!
Sounds idyllic; but what are you going to run? The latest Office suite? Photoshop?

Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power.

So, we're talking about teaching kids to use some special kid-computer with software/tools they will never encounter ever again. What tools are these? A BASIC interpreter?
> Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap?

If you have JavaScript disabled, or these particular event handlers somehow blocked, the href is never replaced.

> Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar

That's disabled by default in most browsers (see in FF about:config, dom.disable_window_status_change -> true). Look at the mousedown handler of links to see that the href attribute is changed on mousedown.
yeah, what he / she said! :p
Updated with the entire quote. He seems to have a decent handle on it there.
Joomla 1.5.25/1.7.3 Released (Security Update)
Just tried on mintty, doesn't work there either.
More effective web crawlers?
I recently did Invisalign, and when I got my set of aligner trays I noticed that they clearly had been produced on a 3D printer (you could see the layers made as the laser scanned across the piece).

On looking into it, I learned that the impressions my dentist took are sent off to be CT scanned and then put through Invisalign's software to generate models to be 3D printed for every iteration of the treatment. This just seemed pretty awesome to me that this was possible.
He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

I think you've just summed up modern mainstream journalism.
Generally speaking, seizure doesn't require any adversarial hearings beforehand, and possible procedures afterwards are used to justify the "due process" requirement. This has been a big deal going back decades with the police finding people with large amounts of cash on them, and seizing it on the grounds that only drug dealers use large amounts of cash. This has caused all sorts of problems:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/police-i...
Actually the Roku also has wifi, IR, and of course a power supply. For +$10 you can get bluetooth as well.
I answered that.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239600
I disagree. If Isaacson can't get these details right, which other details are wrong? And if he doesn't know the facts, does he know the right questions to ask?

I'd argue that because Isaacson doesn't understand OS X and how much different it is than OS 9, he doesn't understand how important it is to the company. Without OS X, there is no iOS. I'm not asking him to write a technical book, but I do feel that if he understood some of these points better, he might have asked Jobs about them and pushed him more on these topics.

The end of life stuff is certainly interesting. I do wish on that front as well that he would have asked more questions of professionals about whether or not it would have made a difference if Steve Jobs didn't act like Steve Jobs. It's sort of implied that Steve's diet (and at times lack thereof) may have inhibited his ability to fight the cancer. Isaacson doesn't really push Steve on this or consult with professionals on it either.
Holy hell, vendor prefixes aren't hurting the web, the 6.5MB of fonts that that page downloads to display a single blog post are. That's not a flash of unstyled content, it's a financial quarter of unstyled content. At first I thought that the blog post was some clever demonstration of how things are broken because of vendor prefixes, when really it was just the browser blocking for 20 seconds while it downloaded the fonts so that it could display 25kb of text.

Now, on to the post.

It sounds an awful lot like the author is sad that people are using -webkit browser prefixes rather than -moz browser prefixes, because most mobile browsers run webkit. The author seems to work for Mozilla, and this reads an awful lot like bemoaning that people like webkit prefixes over Mozilla prefixes. He seems to be asserting that a developer must use one and only one vendor prefix, and completely ignores the possibility that you can actually have each browser render its own version of the same CSS effect by specifying multiple rules with multiple vendor prefixes.

> Engine-specific content is bad for users. If a site uses CSS with the -webkit- prefix, users of Firefox, Opera or IE get a worse experience even if they implemented the same feature with their own prefix or without a prefix.

CSS is not content. CSS is presentation. Say it until it makes sense. If you're serving different content to the user based on CSS vendor prefixes, you have bigger problems.

Even then, pixel-perfect presentation across all major browsers shouldn't be the goal. Very few people will care that things render the exact same everywhere. What you should care about is a consistent experience per browser. When you're looking at a site in IE, the site should be consistent in IE. When in Webkit, the experience should be consistent with itself, etc. If you insist on demanding pixel-perfection, then I invite you to look at your site in, say, Webkit on a Windows machine, an OS X machine, and a Linux machine. It's going to be different; the use different font rendering engines, which dramatically affects the look-and-feel of the website. You aren't going to achieve Grand Unified Omniplatform Pixel Perfection. Get over that expectation and start designing experiences that are self-consistent per platform.
It actually makes sense. You're thinking of credit rating like it should be a blacklisting system, penalizing people who abuse it. But instead it's a whitelisting system, giving more privileges to people that have demonstrated trustworthiness. If you never play the game to begin with, then you have no credit rating, and therefore nobody knows if they can trust you.

A while back I interned with a company called Rapleaf that was trying to do the same thing for the internet, by tracking your social footprint (based on your email), figuring out information about you and, more interestingly, how long that information has been on the internet, as well as figuring out your social graph. I'm not quite sure if this is still the same stuff they're doing these days (they may be focused more on just providing data about people rather than providing "trustworthiness"), but at the time the idea was the longer someone's identity has been on the internet, and the more trusted friends they have, the more trustworthy they were. The example as to why this would be useful is a photo sharing site. If you build a new site that allows people to upload photos, you're going to need to impose a cap on the number/size of photos, or you'll very quickly end up being used as a storage provider for porn sites. But if you have a way of rating the trustworthiness of a new sign-up, you can offer them much more space because you're pretty sure they're not trying to use your site improperly. A blacklisting mechanism would be completely useless, because people would just create new accounts to get around it. But a whitelisting mechanism completely prevents that.

Like I said, I'm not sure if Rapleaf is interested in the trustworthiness thing anymore. I suspect they've found that simply selling information about people is a lot more lucrative. But the original idea was and still is a worthwhile concept.
JQuery Mobile RC3 released, 30-50% faster than before
I think a point that got missed in the discussion: The reason that this situation is occurring is that money is flowing into the sector at a fair clip.

Make hay when the sun shines. It will start raining in the future, and there might not be a lot of warning.
This is not at all what the criticism Gruber linked to is about. At all. Not even a tiny bit.
Yes, he's right, but let's put this in context. There are probably a lot of talented engineers who are doing startups now who shouldn't be. The problem is how do we know who is going to be a good entrepreneur and who is not? We don't. The only way we know is by doing it, which is what a lot of talent is doing. I think many startup founders are a bit grounded in reality and know that they face real possibilities of failure. Just as long as they keep this in mind and don't become obsessed with caviar dreams, then I see no harm done. Being an entrepreneur is one way for an engineer to develop non-technical skillsets and learn something about himself in the process.

Let's not forget that this entrepreneurial activity is forcing the big guys (Google, FB, etc) to be more innovative than they would otherwise be - either to attract talent or to compete with startups.
Awesome advice. Thanks!
Android Malware Analysis
I have no idea, but I think it is even more ridiculous that Ford Motor Company has 19.0.0.0 At some price, I am sure Ford would be willing to sell, but I am not sure it would be worth the hassle for $150M.
Could it be that + is used by people who just don't know that Google treats it specially? Syntax of Google search is rather not common knowledge among general population. This might be a case especially when searching for books, songs, movies, magazines, etc. with '+' in title.

Example queries (random ideas):

- 18+ movies
- children + fire proverb
- 2+3D magazine
- C++
- ++ operator

Personally I often just copy-paste general things I'm looking for (like song titles) from websites or IM conversations, with whatever characters they happen to be containing.

EDIT:

There are plenty of queries with + signs in autocompletion hints in Google search - like 18+ clubs, 2+2 forums, 0+ blood type, NaOH+H2SO4, etc.
Ah, that's reassuring!
I was worried I would be relegated to the HN 'slow readers class' :)

I'll try and listen to it later, although I've never read the book. Reading stuff about people usually doesn't interest me, besides the obvious computer stuff is jobs really a particularly interesting guy? I know he did allot of drugs but so have about half the people I know socially.
I use a debit card. Why is that a mistake? The only real reason I can think of is that I don't believe debit cards are covered under the consumer protection laws that credit cards are. Unless you mean because I'm missing out on the reward points that a credit card would offer me?
OS X Lion Artifacts v1.0
This is true for Common Lisp libraries as well - if they don't offer restarts and just throw exceptions, it looks like it does in any other language. Developing a good protocol for signalling and handling errors takes work.
I think he's being "hypercritical" literally, I also think that Gruber and Siracusa are more like jealous that they didn't get to write the book (not that they qualify for that job).

The book is not perfect but we (the tech community) are not the target.
You mean that Haskell has one of the most complex of the practical type systems known to man. For example (correct me if I am wrong) but the Haskell type system does not allow specification of dependent types (though dependent typing can be simulated after a fashion). Haskell with extensions does have a Turing-complete type system though (I actually don't know what this means, but the internets says so -- perhaps someone can tell me the difference between Haskell and Haskell with extensions).