skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I saw the title of this piece, I immediately thought it referred to the companies' lackluster ability to patrol torrent sites.

I haven't torrented in many years (no, really...I didn't see the need for it after I got a real job and after the advent of usable streaming services) but isn't it still the case that the majority of users expose their IPs when downloading/uploading? That is, most people aren't using some kind of Tor solution?

I may not have a very tech-savvy group of friends...but the few people who have said they torrent are almost always unaware of how public their downloading is (and yes, these would be the same people who would be vulnerable to Firesheeping and other such hacks) and are shocked when I tell them of the risk they're at.

But in reality, it seems like a very small minority of easily-findable torrenters face any kind of action. And yes, I'm accounting for the infamous RIAA/MPAA lawsuits in which hundreds or thousands of people are named. That's still -- AFAIK -- a very small percentage of domestic torrenters.

Which leads me to believe that the RIAA/MPAA's enforcement capabilities involve an intern using some craptastic proprietary program to copy-and-paste IP numbers and hand-enter them into a database, which is then used to hand-send out cease-and-desist letters, and all of this happens very sporadically (and with little effort/ability to verify accuracy, apparently).
Hospitality norms around the world
They're just talking about affordance[1], but it's a pretty good example. Anyone interested in this might also like the book The Design of Everyday Things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
I’m not too familiar with Rails (and this is unrelated to the point of the article), but is this code vulnerable to a session fixation attack (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Session_fixation)?

I notice that it doesn't destroy the session when you log in/out, just changes a session variable.
Here's what pg had to say on the subject when he relocated YC in 2009:

"We never tried to claim to the startups in the summer cycles that it was a net advantage to be in Boston. The most we could claim was that we could mitigate the disadvantages sufficiently well—for example, by flying everyone out to California to present to investors at our Mountain View office. But we did worry that the Boston groups were losing out. Boston just doesn’t have the startup culture that the Valley does. It has more startup culture than anywhere else, but the gap between number 1 and number 2 is huge; nothing makes that clearer than alternating between them."
Side question about ios I wonder about. If you buy an app and install it, but then find it needs to use some permission you're not comfortable with can you get your money back or are you just out of.luck?
Read Refactoring.

http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-...

In my view it is the single most important programming book in existence. Yes, other books will teach you other, incredibly important things. Other books will teach you the specifics of one technology or another. Other books will open up your mind on the very nature of programming (especially learning functional programming). And other books will teach you all of the incredibly important stuff that isn't siting at a keyboard and typing in code. But personally I'd rather work with someone who thoroughly groks refactoring even over someone who thoroughly groks functional programming.
Financial Literacy is pretty dismal these days
Startup Sperm
Thanks! That made a lot more sense.
Thanks! I loved that book when I read it a few months ago. One of the best examples they give of this concept is a VCR. There's only one way to put a tape into a VCR, and it isn't done with instructions or symbols, it's done using affordance or physical constraints. It doesn't fit any way but the right way.
I can't agree enough. The biggest victory of the intellectual property movement is the term "intellectual property".

[Edit/rewording] The information covered by copyright and patents is not property. It literally cannot be owned. All that copyright law does is grant temporary control over distribution of information; all patent law does is grant temporary control over use of information to produce products.

If you're serious about this issue, don't use the terms theft, steal, or so-called "intellectual property", and don't tolerate it when others do -- call them out.

Alexqgb's post, while very insightful and interesting, is fundamentally flawed because it accepts as a premise a lie and a falsehood -- that it is even possible to "own" information as "property". This literally cannot be done. It is a broken metaphor designed to distort the issue.
I think this letter is silly, but it is a partly a problem that Apple helped create.

The closed nature of the App store leads people to think that apps purchased through it can never be malicious, they probably think Apple check every line of code (if they think about it at all).

I am not suggesting that it is Apples fault, but in a closed ecosystem higher security is expected.

Basically this is the same problem we have been dealing with since the rise of Windows, users have no clue about security.
BlackBerry OS also had a granular approach to permissions, much like Android.

iOS seems to only care about your location when it comes to permissions which worries me a little.
This can work if your app is an impersonal one like CraigsList. It doesn't if it's a social one where you want people to use an username, or their full name to interact with other people.
The author points that SFO is not using the TSA. Having used SFO often, I have to say that I sadly would have never guessed that. So I think not using TSA is not going to be a competitive advantage, as long as the private companies are indistinguishable from TSA. Actually, if everything is just the same anyway, I'd rather them do it instead some random private company who is in it for the cash.
I am with you in not installing apps asking for too many permissions.

But since you're asking: I expect the permissions to be more granular.

And I would like to be able to revoke some of them if the developer allows it.
The iPod Nano has a radio built-in, and have for a few years.
I figure Emacs ⊂ Unix :)

Besides, some of the tools I listed (e.g. Scion and Ensime) are not part of Emacs but rather stand-alone IDE daemons.
But my phone number doesn't have a dash in it!
Please no political activism on HN. There is not much interesting on the linked site so I assume this was submitted as call for participation.
I don't read lots of fiction lately but the one thing that bugs me is how clumsy sharing (of short passages, memorable quotes etc) is.

Imagine you could just share a memorable sentence or passage to twitter or FB or whatever directly from within your ebook app. And the quote should have a link to a source, for example Google Books or the Kindle web app, such that your friends or followers could see an excerpt of the source if they clicked on it. If you were so inclined, you could even turn the generated link into an affiliate one.
Design: $2k, coding: $5k, convincing Louis CK to use you over everyone else in the world for the most important moment of his career to date: $23k.

And honestly, given the results, they undercharged.
> I'd like to see a two tiered approach where developers could mark which permissions are optional and users could decide which to grant the on the first or each time these permissions are used in addition to the current method.

This would be SO useful!

I have an app that I want to be able to collect crash reports for. This means I need the "READ_LOG" permission. Thing is, the log CAN have other potentially private information in it, so there's a scary warning for that permission.

If I could ask for READ_LOG permission at run-time, and Android would pop up a box saying "This app is requesting access to the log to: 'create a complete crash report and send it to the developer'" or some such, then only the very few people who are actually sending me a crash report would ever have to "reveal" their log data to my app.
http://janestreet.com/minsky_weeks-jfp_18.pdf
I am not suing the state of California because their failure to use bcrypt is costing me money. In fact, I make more money when people don't do what I say on HN. My attachment to crypto discussions is not comparable to what Greenspan is doing with HN.
Under what authority are they demanding this response? And what happens if Apple just ignores the letter?
Nope, meant the documentation tool this thread is about :-) Though agreed that more comprehensive formatting might not hurt HN either
"Our children have been taught to steal"

No, they have been taught to share and that anyone can create a movie or a piece of music and distribute it for free. Those are two wonderful lessons, which I believe will make the future a better place.
"After a week of silence, Apple has finally responded to reports..."

"Better late than never..."

Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

These are complex issues and tough decisions that need lots of thought and discussion within the iOS teams at Apple. These things take time.

Remember, iOS is deployed to how many devices now? 100 million? Do you think they can come to conclusions in between two tweets?

Honestly, having an answer ready in a week is not bad at all I think.
That limits functionality quite a bit. Say you want to write an email or messaging client (K9, Handcent), your solution prevents you from doing name/address autocompletion in the To: field.
Perhaps Isaacson does not explain why because it is rather impossible to do so. The most honest type of journalism is to let people speak for themselves.

On the other hand, someone like Gruber would be the absolute worst person to write a biography. He idolizes Jobs and Apple and is the farthest thing you can get from an unbiased observer. The only truth you would find in a Gruber biography of Jobs is the truth of how Gruber himself sees the world.
SaaSy supports multiple currencies - http://saasy.com However, their fees is comparatively high.

The other option is PayPal.
Perhaps the site in question only allows US visitors ;). But good point! I guess there's always the danger of over-constraining possible inputs, but the general principle still holds that more guidance is better than less, and the more you can give that guidance without resorting to text the better.
I'm curious why there is a problem with making "the file look messy?" Your users will likely never look at it (unless you are building something for JS developers) and the compression should really only be a step in your deploy (save, compress, run tests, deploy to server). So theoretically no one should ever look at the compressed files. That being said if you have a lot of JS it can really improve load times of sites but thats about it.

As for the 2 options you listed, there are 2 benefits of option 1 over 2 (given that no one is ever going to look at the compressed files). First, some JS compressors do a better job when they have all the files together as one large file. Second, consolidating them all down to 1 file significantly decreases the number of requests the client has to make to your server. This reason alone will probably have a bigger impact on your sites performance than compressing the files alone so I would definitely recommend you look into it.
Hence Cory Doctorow's recent talk, "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation":

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...
I wouldn't have guessed that either. I flew for 9 months at my last job, which included 6 outbound flights through SFO. SFO was one of the few places where I actually was patted-down instead of scanned (not by choice). So, what is the actual difference between the TSA and the security companies that are emulating the TSA?

Overall, the headline is (unintentionally, perhaps) misleading. I thought there might be some network of airports that don't have TSA-like security procedures. If that were the case, yes, I would use those instead if the prices were close. I guess that is a (libertarian?) fantasy though.
One thing I've not seen yet is a list of books or online resources to take someone from beginner to expert in computer science. I've just seen lists like the submitted list or the lists in the Stack Exchange discussion that phillmv linked to, which are suggestions for books or articles or papers that everyone (in someone's opinion) should have read.

Anyone seen a CS equivalent of either of the following?

1. Gerald 't Hooft, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, maintains this list: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html

That list gives an ordered progression of links to online material meant to take a talented and ambitious person from high school to research level quantum field theory and string theory.

2. The "How to Become a Pure Mathematician (or Statistician)" list here: http://hbpms.blogspot.com/

That list starts assuming high school mathematics, and gives a series of stages to go from that to advanced graduate level, giving for each area of mathematics at each stage lists of books and online material appropriate for that stage.
Thanks for mentioning that Knol has been shuttered. The TechCrunch link you kindly shared announces the launch of Knol, but I found the link

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-s...

that mentions Google abandoning Knol.
Going with the majority opinion, even when wrong, is an excellent way to maintain errors in thinking and in fact.

Wikipedia is an ok MMORPG but a failure as a reliable repository of useful knowledge.
Am I the only one concerned with how these services can be used to funnel money to Mexican drug cartels and terrorists?

American Used Car Dealers Funding Terrorists: http://abcn.ws/yGdGGv

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs: http://bit.ly/xR3Uxa

I understand why everybody wants to have their privacy, but there's a reason why these services are under a lot of scrutiny by a lot of governments.
"Obama Weak on Airport Security, Charges GOP Rival" sounds like the headline that results from this course of action.
It's about time. It is their platform, their OS, and their users. It is their responsibility to respond to potential threats accordingly. This is the right thing to do.

Good decision Apple.
Nothing explains this philosophy better than Pike and Kernighan's Unix Programming Environment. Worth reading even if you consider yourself fluent in the Unix environment.
Granularity comes with a cost: complexity. Complexity which would be foisted on the end-users. It's a slippery slope - you can quickly end up with android-style permissions, where the user has to understand (and usually doesn't) dozens of options.

I doubt Apple will go this route.
I disagree. Having travelled extensively and been used to elevated threat levels throughout most of my life, I can attest to the fact that the average retail TSA employee is about as backwards, disorganized and inept as one could expect from the day-labor source pool.
Totally ridiculous letter. Instead the DOJ should be going after the companies that are illegally stealing user data, and take them down hard.

This letter to Apple is pathetic. Congressman obviously is a tool of the corporations that steal data and is working on their behalf to distract attention from their crimes.
This would work only if the legal content is easily accessible, as well. Otherwise, this is going to happen:

"This may be illegal... let's go to the licensed site".

"Oh, I have to register, OK...",

"Fill in personal information...OK,

"password needs to be stronger... well my mypasswordisthisoneandnooneknows seems strong enough, but OK"

"Confirm email... OK"

"Can't pay by Paypal, use credit card... eh, fine, let's get it...done"

" - This movie/single is not available for direct download in your region, but you can find it in these nearby stores/theaters -"

"....FUUUUUUUUUUK !@$)(&#)&^!!!"

"This site is illegal - FU, I need that song on my PC and I need it now!"

Patience is definitely at its weakest point nowadays, especially online. I've had a bad experience recently, signing up for OnLive for Android ($10 monthly for over 100 games - awesome!): you can sign up with your Google account, BUT you can't PAY if you're outside the country... My only thought was "THA FCK!?"

I used a VPN (if you use a third party one it's a security risk, by the way) to login and pay... how stupid is that?
If they forgot to add "read contacts" in their application manifest, then the code that tried to read the contacts would ALWAYS fail. Even on the simulator, which is rooted.

It would be nice to allow or deny an app "optional" permissions (selected as optional BY the app) at run-time. It would NOT be nice for users to be able to do this willy-nilly. With the dozens of possible permissions, you'd have millions of potential combinations a particular user could enable or disable, and you'd need to be sure your app worked with any combination.

But worse than that is the fact that a lot of apps are monetized by ads, and disabling "INTERNET" permission would prevent ads from downloading. If I'm trying to make a living off of my app, I don't want to make it easy for people to get it for free. Some people will anyway, of course, but no need to make it easy.
"Better late than never" is saying that this protection should have been in the OS from the very beginning, years ago, rather than being tacked on now. It's not related to taking a week to respond to the latest fluff.
> If anyone did go to the voting page them subsequently not vote, I’d be very interested to know the reasons why- let me know

This is why I didn't click: http://imgur.com/6ktsH
Xamarin.Contacts - a cross-platform API for accessing the addressbook
While showing which permissions are used is great, it's not a cure-all because they're all or nothing permissions. My background is in network security, I consider myself a security-conscious person, but I am continually guilty of tapping INSTALL immediately without expanding the permissions list.

The SMS permission in Android seems the most egregious to me. For example, an Android app you install requires SMS permission. However, in Android as it stands right now, the app does not need to notify a user when it sends an SMS - there's no requirement (nay, not even a widget to pop open and require the user to "Send" the way you see on other platforms like iOS--you've got to build this into your client yourself) to do this. So, you install a third party SMS client thinking you'll use it to send SMSes, but the app can send SMSes on its own, without you even seeing them. See also: http://www.cs.ncsu.edu/faculty/jiang/RogueSPPush/

Personally, while not perfect, I like Blackberry's model here (Cyanogenmod has implemented something similar) - the user can block out certain functions, knowing full well that the app will break - but can then decide to re-enable them if needed or once their trust level is raised.
This ad hominem post doesn't belong on HN. "Perverted thugs"?

And 500 complaints out of how many millions of passenger flights?

I'm no fan of airport security, but this sort of Fact Light bashing of TSA employees is not useful.
Never. The author of the article doesn't understand how "opting-out of the TSA" works. Opting out of the TSA just means that your agents are hired through a private agency. The TSA still regulates them, sets their policy, and determines what screening devices are in use.

Airports using private agents will not be distinguishable from airports using TSA agents until the law changes, just as how SFO is indistinguishable from any other airport now.

http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/airports-who-opt-out-of-tsa-scre...
Some examples of how an iPad/PDF saves me time vs a Kindle:

-Let's say I'm looking up how control flow works in a programming language I have little experience with. I can skip to the index, find control flow, and click on that in a few seconds.

-The current chapter covers a new technique that I think could be applied to a previous example, and I want to check that example out. With the iPad/PDF I can easily move back and forth, with a Kindle I can't.

-The current page references a technique from a few pages ago where I don't remember the exact details. I can easily scroll back and forth with an iPad, not so much with a Kindle.

-I want to see if a book covers a relatively obscure topic. The iPad or my computer let me do a search through a PDF for keywords and preview each section containing the keyword, a Kindle doesn't.
Don't forget Sublime Text 2.
The rules already prohibited this behavior. The rules were ignored and not enforced. Clearly they were not effective. Adding more rules isn't going to make it any more effective. What we need, and what we're finally going to get, is actual technological controls on access.
You have to have a lowest common denomination coin. Otherwise when I give $1 to the 99c store, what will they give me in change?

Or is the idea that every single business in the entire USA will change their pricing structures to multiples of 5? Good luck with that!
> the domain knowledge needed to grow and scale a technology startup

This is a common enough claim that it could be considered "common knowledge," and I wouldn't be in a good position to refute it even if I could figure out what exactly the claim is.

Is the claim that it takes specific domain knowledge to convince people with money to invest in a business? That it takes specific domain knowledge to scale up a sw/hw infrastructure to handle top-tier web application workloads? That is takes specific domain knowledge to hire teams of engineers?

All of those things are true, of course, but in what way is any of that domain knowledge particularly concentrated in SV or the Bay Area?

The concentration of already-exited former-founders is higher, and that's real, but at the end of the day we're still talking about Software Businesses. Is the problem of converting value-laden software to revenue streams really all that exotic and complicated, such that only people in a particular social network have cracked it?

> the gap is growing every day

Again, a) by what metric, and b) even if true n-1 of the last n days, it's a big world out here and a lot of it writes code and attacks problems.

Cheers-
Thanks for the recommendation. That was one of the text books that I looked at but the sticker shock steered me towards free MIT course notes.
You mentioned dependency management, I've got a bunch of different client projects with different versions of ruby + gems managed with rvm.

Does RubyMine respect those settings or is there some voodoo that you have to do to get it working?
Great post/point.

I would love to see a lawyer in a courtroom ask the jury if people should be allowed to copyright or patent a number. Then show them a written numerical representation of the work in question (preferably compressed).
Then let us help him.
I figured as much. The drawback of appealing to a tech-minded audience :)