skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The rest is just software."

And the reason the iPad is the only tablet that sells well is also "just software". In consumer electronics, the quality of the software makes or breaks the user experience.

"you are missing the gist of GP's point, which is that this device suggests that Apple could make something smaller than Apple TV."

Agreed, I'm sure they could. However, Apple wouldn't make a dongle that sticks out of your TV, simply because it looks ugly. And given that the HDMI and USB ports are placed differently on every TV, I foresee that many users of that dongle will also have a USB extension cord dangling from their TV.

I do see a use case for this dongle in situations where you want to temporarily turn a TV into a useful device (showing content you actually want to see) in a setting where you usually don't have an extra power outlet. The French guy in the video showed this well, plugging it into a TV at a Best Buy and in a hotel room.
I was going to point this out as well. Between the "Preview Pane" and "Nested Labels" labs I'm very happy with Gmail.
Alternative Investments
> Knowing what the hell you're doing is, sadly, not required.

This sentiment is exactly why they can keep doing it.

It reflects an implicit (and unfortunately, widely held) assumption that they're trying to get elected to help their fellow men, constituents and otherwise do good.

Sadly, there is no supporting evidence for this assumption, and endless supporting evidence against it.
Show HN: Firefox add-on for HN to see newer posts in the first page
I created a simple add-on to see which posts / entries are new in the HN first page that is the posts that wasn't there when last visited. This is different than /newest page.

note: I am new so sorry if title is wrong.
Was there a place where he gave a 'fake' reason? or any statement at all regarding SOPA and a veto.
The author has the right idea with the first item. Time, trust, and communication are essentials in hiring.

But flying this under the banner of "talent" is bordering on link-bait. Look at all the points he makes about hiring a "talented" individual:

* "...we’re asking whether you have the mettle to be part of an elite team."

* "A new hire won’t come up with something mind blowing if the team doesn’t bring the new hire up to speed quickly."

* "I don’t necessarily expect a new hire to do something amazing while he or she works with us."

* "A new hire won’t do something amazing, now or in the future, if the organization he or she works for doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain."

None of this is about talent. It's about a supportive ecosystem and cohesive team.

"Talent" is just a label that HR applies to people they think will succeed in an organization, and an after-the-fact definition when an individual has found success in his or her role. And it's been my experience that those two groups are far from congruent.
I'm with on most of that, but what do you mean by "FAtkins" diet?

Severe carbohydrate restriction may be to difficult for most people to stick with, and therefore not optimal for keeping the weight off. But there is is irrefutable evidence that carbohydrate restriction will result in weight loss.
Not available OTA where I live (and I just set up my powered antenna yesterday), but I do get some ESPN programming via xbox live gold.
And previously discussed already here (albeit with a ~misleading~ title):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3401888
It is a great utility, thanks for taking it over and giving it more stability.
Deployments with Virtualization
I'm not exactly sure what grandparent is implying. Health care in Slovenia is actually pretty nice (you most certainly don't need to bring your own food or anything else in the hospital) and covers most of the situations you might encounter in your life, with one ugly exception: queues for some non-life-threatening operations and/or examinations. Most notorious being orthopedic surgery. It turns out that what isn't life threatening today, might become very dangerous for your health in the timespan of several months, before it's your turn to be operated on. So many people who get stuck in queues pay additionally from their pockets to get the necessary examinations/operations as soon as possible in privately owned medical establishments. Another funny thing stemming from this fact is that many doctors/surgeons work in public hospitals four days a week and then privately a day a week or some similar arrangement.
The country of Hungary is almost broke. It's big, bloated government and corruption that's the cause. Hell, the guy's post reads like Atlas Shrugged and he's John Galt. He's "stopping the motor of the world" If you haven't read it, have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
We can do it more or less anywhere, it's just a question of population density. A tribe that needs a few hundred square miles of tundra could live as well off of a few dozen acres of tropical forest.

Here's a bit of trivia for you-- the most "abundant" place on the planet, the place once home to the highest density of exclusively foraging peoples, is the area now known as Northern California.
Three ways to improve your InterviewStreet CodeSprint solution
The title is just a meaningless game of semantics, and the article doesn't contain a single shred of useful information that wouldn't qualify as common sense. Trust, communication, personality... are these really things anyone needs to be told to look for in job candidates? If so, the tech industry (and humanity, in general) is in pretty dismal shape.

And how does it help to ask ambiguous things like "In four to six years, will you be doing something amazing?" That's just asinine, not to mention lazy. It's the interviewer's job to glean that information from answers to more thoughtful, deliberate questions.
I use U-verse, which is a hybrid of fiber optic and cable. It costs substantially less than Comcast. I can stream stuff just fine.
Did anyone actually bother to try this? it seems to be uTorrent.
Anonymous expose email addresses of British military staff & Nato officials
Well Rush Limbaugh is comedy too, in a "Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood-want-to-throw-up-in-your-mouth-it's-so-bad" kind of way.
I would recommend "C# in Depth" by Jon Skeet also.
Show HN: Check for web application security issues.
I use The Glif from Studio Neat (http://www.studioneat.com/products/glif-for-iphone-4), which was also a kickstarter project. It's a stand and a tripod mount, very elegant and small.
Actually, you can access the servers that host the youtube flash videos. For example, using a VPN start loading a youtube video. Then disable the VPN. It will continue loading.
The reason why they want employees to work more is because they have skills and experience related to their job and they'll get more productive work done if you just get them to work 8 hours a day instead of going through the cost of hiring someone new for 4 hours a day. Each employee has a fixed cost in recruitment, training, management, turnover, per person costs and more that doesn't go away.
It will be gr8 if you can add OAuth signing support to hurl. Testing urls that need to be signed with OAuth is a major pain point.
State of Technology #40
A few thoughts...

I rolled my eyes when I first saw it. Another silly gadget when my Roku does just fine. At some point it just becomes too stupidly small, right?

Then I watched the video where he plugs it into the hotel TV and it all made sense. As someone who probably rents overpriced hotel movies about 4 times a year, this device may pay for itself relatively quickly.

Built-in Bluetooth you say? I wonder if I can pair a keyboard to it...

Also -- come to think of it, Google's best marketing strategy for GoogleTV might be to get widespread hotel adoption for it. It'd be a huge convenience for me to be able to, when I get to a hotel, simply auth myself into GoogleTV and have my whole experience personalized.
>>The point being argued against I think is that you shouldn't tell people who are writing useful code that solves real problems that they shouldn't call themselves programmers because they haven't hit the 10 year/10000 hour mark.

I understand your point. That is not what the essay is doing. It is telling you that to be a true master of your craft it takes years.

Anybody can call themselves an artist if they are practicing art, but only very few get to showcase their work in art galleries. That is how the essay is using programmer in this essay. In the broader sense I agree with you, if you can code then you are a programmer.
Linux Will Eat Oracle's Lunch in 2012, Says Analyst
These days, why not use GCD and blocks for this kind of work?
Akamai seeks to bring UltraViolet to every device
The music is entirely composed of samples from commercial songs, remixed together by Girl Talk, who re-licensed them as Creative Commons Attribution / Non-Commercial.
Yeah, Bachmann stood out to me, too. Really shows that even a broken clock is right sometimes.
Sprint uses Clear for their 4G service, and I have a Photon (which is known for good reception). Service is awful.
Square Expands Retail Partnerships; Now Sold At OfficeMax And UPS
But a return to the "bad old days" is exactly what the education establishment wants. I think the reporter here buried the lede. This was the most interesting paragraph for me:

"People were stunned because they were always led to believe that things were going fine in this particular school. And the fact of the matter was, for huge numbers of students that was not the case," Miller said. "That led to a lot of anger, disappointment. That led to embarrassment. In many instances, the schools were being held out as exceeding in their mission, when it fact they were failing many, many of the children in those schools."

Test scores are hard to argue with so they repeat this "teaching to the test is bad" mantra endlessly. Of course, when they start talking about other countries school systems as being better what's the first metric they cite? Test scores. I have
yet to here an alternative way of measuring performance that didn't amount to "trust us".
Agreed. I skipped around looking for the part where he explains the product.

Why octogons instead of squares?
Sports CoachTube
If anyone can learn about sports at home and if anyone want to be your ideal sports coach videos. every thinking on Coachtube uploaded or Related your interest sports game be there. like football,baseball,hockey, Etc Coachtube mission is to help people and entertainment videos also on there.
FUD. Flagging.

The relationship between industry groups and Congress is a very complicated multi-dimensional relationship. A given member of Congress often receives significant funding from conflicting groups, and any given group is interested in a variety of legislation.

You can't draw any useful conclusions from the submitted simple list.
Box: Mobile Adoption Is The Gateway Drug To The Cloud In The Enterprise
Also see ActorKit from the inventor of Io: https://github.com/stevedekorte/ActorKit
Great initiative. I just looked through my old updates, and there are lots of fun stuff there. Would hate to loose all of that just because Google can't properly run a microblogging service.

I used the script at https://gist.github.com/1562129 to archive all of my updates (installs a couple of ruby libs, I'm fine with that).
You are absolutely correct, SOPA is totally different in concept for the blocking of sites.

But there are lots of sites and companies that are not alive because the government doesn't allow it. Want to start a video site? sorry, that is regulated. anything to do with online payments? need a license. social network or any communication website. Yup, need a license.

As a foreigner here in China a blocked or crippled internet is zero effect or relevance on daily life. We just VPN out to the "real" Internet daily.

But if SOPA is approved, there may be no more real internet. Not because facebook or big sites will be blocked however. It will be because the government will have the ability to cut innovation and entrepreneurship off by seizing sites at will.

China doesn't allow social networking sites. What will America and Co. not like and allow?
A lot of these people start renting out the extra space.
Not validating user input should have nothing to do with SQL or XSS or any other kind of security pratice. Validation of input has to do with business logic. Sanitizing input is another thing altogether. trying to do both at once is usually pessimal. For example, if you use input validation to prevent SQL injection, you might prohibit the ' character in input fields. This is guaranteed to annoy everyone named "O'Grady." Likewise, if you use input validation to prevent people from entering <script>, you will be shocked when you discover the entertaining ways people have of routing around your homebrewed "filters." Far better to make sure your display layer knows how to display any user input without inserting it as raw HTML.

And of course, if you're composing SQL queries by catenating string stogether, you do not need to validate input, you do not need "best" practices, you need basic training. There's a difference.
Again this depends entirely on the model which depends on the end user of the product and their incentive for buying it.

If you take redhat as an example they will contribute freely to the Linux kernel and other projects but will charge a support fee for their enterprise software. This support fee is justified because configuring Linux systems in an enterprise is a technically complex task and failures can come with a hefty price so having the support of an expert from redhat will be good value for money for a FTSE 100 company.

Another example to consider would be 37 Signals , who sponsor allot of development on rails but do not release the source for their profit making services such as basecamp etc.
There is an economic advantage to them for making rails open because 1) publicity , 2) It's in their interest to have a good framework to use , so by releasing the source others can improve it.

Let's imagine for a moment that 37 Signals released the source code to basecamp under a GPL or LGPL license, what would stop a competitor from simply taking the source and uploading it somewhere else and then charge 50% of what 37s charge (because they don't have to employ developers)? What would be the incentive to use 37s service rather than the competitor?

Now we come to games, most games don't (and shouldn't) really require technical support services. So trying to finance development of a game from having a $1 a minute technical support helpline is unlikely to be a good model unless you deliberately make the game buggy (if it's open source the bugs can just be fixed and re-released anyway).

If you have an MMO with a monthly subscription you get the same problem as 37S that I illustrated above.

The only people who seem to do OSS well in games and still make money is id software who release the GPLed source for their older games so that people are free to release derivative free games (you have to create your own art assets) but this is only after a period of time (usually 3 years or more).
If you want to make a commercial game with an older engine you still have to pay them , albeit at a reduced rate.

Another example might be Valve who release the source to some parts of their game logic but not their core engine, this allows people to create their own "mods" that override some parts of the game behavior but these mods will not work for someone who does not have a copy of the proprietary commercial binary.

I think an office suite would have largely the same problem as games unless you can think of some support service that would be worth the payment.

Obviously this is not 100% true because open office exists, however the original work for this was done by Sun Microsystems (as Star Office) who (I guess) mainly built it so that they could sell expensive Sun workstations with a working office suite that was at least partly compatible with MS office.

Joel Spolsky wrote about the same basic theory.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
I did watch them, though. I was careful in writing my comment about iOS and iTunes Store support, not about gaming and video content in general.

The dongle will definitely not run iOS games and apps, and it probably won't play video from the iTunes Store. The doubleTwist app mentioned by another commenter can't read iTunes FairPlay DRM. AirPlay from an iPhone or iPad would need a third party app, and is currently limited to just audio.
This reminds me that in Argentina in primary school we would make an improvised football (as in: soccer) by crumpling some paper and then wrapping it in scotch tape. It was of course much smaller than the real ball, but it worked surprisingly well (and broken windows were not an issue). Now I know why :-)
This is good advice if you choose to contact someone in congress about this issue.

http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-have-a-conversation-with-my-Se...
This is like reading a newspaper article on computing ten years ago. The author is not a domain expert.
Debugging at the edge of huge, scalable systems - a story (video)
I've been waiting on approval from legal for a diff viewing tool. It has been under review for over a year now. On the one year anniversary of the ticket I pasted in an ascii art birthday cake and there has finally been some progress. It is among the many reasons amazon loses great devs.
Resources to Hack Design
I think depression is an issue among people in general. Perhaps people on HN are simply more willing to share with the (psuedonymous) internet at large?
I so frequently find myself needing to hold an iPhone between my shoulder and ear while schussing down snowy slopes, I can't imagine how I didn't invent this myself!

(To be fair, the headphone windup is probably the most useful feature for those who listen to music a lot.)
It's not hard to imagine that hard money can be used as a proxy for soft money to some multiple. For example soft money is 78x what the hard money is.

Hard money donations are often given by corporations through PACs as well. The reason this is allowed? Corporations have personhood. Your other post is correct and I'm not down voting you, but if you really want to understand corporate money in politics you need to understand corporate personhood.

If anything the numbers are misleading, because all it really tells you how much people who identify their employer are really giving. That's just demographic data, not proof of a particular policy.
This is true. But those of us in the comfy armchair can only throw out the ideas. It's up to the players on the field to decide which are useful.

I would hardly second-guess them whatever they chose to do.
Show HN: Unique Social Search Engine
Because Public Domain is complex, the BSD license is pretty clear and applicable in the whole world.
12 EssentialEducation Conferences for App Developers in 2012
Great list of tech / education conferences in 2012
It is true that things are rarely as simple as we'd like to draw them. It is also true that the current system we have for political contributions breeds corruption, not just in one party or the other, but in our political system in general. Getting into power and staying there is expensive, and it is naive to think that the gifts come without strings. So lists like this are not conclusive evidence of anything other than the raw numbers, but saying you can't draw any useful conclusions is also misleading.
While I value competence and indeed vote with it in mind, it has not proven to be a prerequisite to getting elected.

Understanding the problems is an important first step towards solving them, but understanding alone is, obviously, not enough to fix the problems here.
Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
Also, former Senator Christopher Dodd is now CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/201...
Older and better (a point of opinion):

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

Since October 1999, actually.
> Please create a "webscan.html" file with the content "scanme"

I advice you to make the contents of this file unique for each website, otherwise:

- i can check 1000s of sites for the existence of webscan.html

- enter the sites that have such a file

- see the vulnerabilities of sites I don't own.
The last one of those links is a bomb factory.
The public domain doesn't exist in some places like it does in the US. SQLlite takes a different approach where it is all licensed under the public domain but you can buy a license for $1,000.00
Configuring the prefix key to C-z is quite harmless, C-z C-z for suspend is quite ok.

(As a bonus hint, binding subkeys with control it's faster to send commands: C-z C-n is faster than C-z n, you just keep control pressed during the command sequence.)
Haha! What an awesome video, I want to contribute because of the video alone (don't have an iphone)
I'd be interested in HNers' views on whether I made the right call.
I upvoted your comment. I hope it makes you feel better.
> The answer, in some cases, is nothing.

And, in many cases, everything. SQLite users have had this issue in the past: http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
Firstly, it's not a position; it's the fact of how communication works and how word usage evolves.

About liking it or not -- well, I don't like it, I care deeply about clarity of communication, and I despise how many debates on subjects like evolution, abortion, and all things political are derailed by (sometimes intentional) muddling of words' definitions.

So certainly, if you can convince everyone to re-adopt the original, more useful definition, then you have won and I salute you. Certainly you have the right to try -- sometimes it's very important to try and wrestle words back from the brink of uselessness.

But if you can't, then you are the odd one out. If everyone says "hacker" and means "someone who does stuff I don't like using computers", when you use the word with another meaning in mind, you are failing to communicate.

And the dictionaries will eventually start putting "archaic" after your definition.
I suspect it has to do with the kinds of status competition/display that are possible in the online area, the personality types that thrive under such a constrained domain, and the side-effects of necessary policing/self-defense.

There are some similarities to the observations about leadership in realspace organizations made by (sci-fi author Jerry) Pournelle's 'Iron Law of Bureaucracy' and (sociologist Robert) Michels' 'Iron Law of Oligarchy'.

One of the clearest ways to demonstrate 'authority' in an online site is to say and enforce a 'No', so No's may be oversupplied.

At some point it starts to resemble an auto-immune disorder, a mis-calibrated system attacking itself.
It's certainly more enlightening than arguing about cryonics or libertarianism or feminism or education for the billionth time.

Any forum has reposts, it's just that some of them are literally resubmitting the same article and others are rehashing the same stupid arguments that the Internet has hosted since time immemorial.
Good point. I'll fix that.
Thank you.
Doesn't work. I add the webscan.html file then scan again and get an empty response every time. URL is https://www.webscanservice.com/index.php/startscan as well I don't know if that's correct or not.
I expected more something like a case that says "I'm an iPhone" he says that this proves machine can be self-conscious.
What MIT hackers were up to (1958 - 1985)
Binary content and non-ASCII characters are almost always base64-encoded, and base64 never produces a From_ sequence (because of the space).

Anyaway, I'm not endorsing the leading-space technique. I'm just observing that it's out there in the wild.
it just opens a blank page...(https://www.webscanservice.com/index.php/startscan)