skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you, like me, have heard "NaCl" mentioned but don't really know what it is, the article has a decent description.

If you're not going to click through, it's "Native Client" -

"Native Client, often called simply NaCl, is a plugin technology that runs inside Chrome browser, and hopefully in the future, all browsers. It enables applications written in C/C++ to run natively inside a secure sandbox. This sandbox is there to protect users from malicious or buggy applications. In a sense it’s similar to ActiveX, but other than native execution, other similarities don’t exist. Actually with the amount security concerns put into the whole Native Client, it’s not even fair to compare it to ActiveX technology."

More here:

http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient
https://developers.google.com/native-client/overview
Free trip to China for iOS developer
We have a very cool opportunity for the right iOS developer: Our startup Kindara was just accepted into Haxlr8r (www.Haxlr8r.com) an accelerator located in Shenzhen, China. The program runs March 1st - mid June.

We're looking for the right iOS developer to join our team to come with us to China and help us bust out our technology while we're over there. We're offering a 4 month all-expense paid trip to China and some equity in Kindara for the right person.

About Us:

We’re a group of entrepreneurs, doctors, fertility awareness advocates and engineers committed to producing better results for women around their fertility.

We believe in doing something useful and leaving the world better than we found it. We believe that design is as important as function and we believe in The Lean Startup and Getting Things Done.

We’re looking for someone passionate about our subject matter. We think fertility (the ability of our species to reproduce itself) is one of the most amazing powers in the whole world.

If you're crazy enough to read this far and have good iOS skills, please get in touch with us at team@kindara.com

Here's an intro video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W80_oTW7JTk

Angelist: http://angel.co/kindara
It's OK if you don't read books anymore
Yes, this to me is the most disturbing aspect of the story. It's one thing that the mistake was made in the first place; no one could be completely sure what would happen. But to then ostracize the people who warned of the possible catastrophe -- that's a corrupt culture.
Exactly. GOod luck enforcing IP rules in China. Your only choice is to out-innovate, not out-sue
>And there's not much money in suing small companies, so it's not worth it.

This is too simplistic. The patent system is the way it is because big companies like it that way. The reason they like it that way is they can strangle any nascent competition with patent lawsuits before that competition has a chance to grab market share.

And it doesn't even matter whether or not the claim is valid - small companies can't afford to defend themselves, whether or not they win in court. The point of suing a small company for patent infringement isn't to collect money, it's to put that company out of business.
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Jorge Luis Borges in a book of memoirs told that when he worked in the library in Buenos Aires as a clerk one day one of his colleagues barged into his office to show him an encyclopedia (or list of famous people, or something like that) that showed another argentinian named Jorge Luis Borges, a famous writer at that, who was born on the very day that Borges was born! (of course, it was an article about himself)
As long as they target other software patent trolls like Microsoft and Apple I'd be perfectly fine with it. They could become the batman of the patent world.
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Correction: crappy, inadequately-redundant sensors fail.
The points in consideration of fair use are just that.

Fair use is an affirmative defense. That is: it's not a right to copy, but a defense against copyright infringement.

There are four points to be considered. Generally a successful defense will hinge on at least one, but it may very well fail at others.

And there are other defenses which will also succeed. In Sega v. Accolade, copyright infringement was not supported, because the role of the work in which infringement was alleged was functional: Accolade were copying a verbatim string from Sega in order to provide game-cartridge / player compatibility. Copyright protection does not apply to facts ... or to functional aspects of a work.
The relationship between the Empire, I mean, Google and Mozilla is disturbing the force.
> More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives.

100% agree, but incentives and benevolence are not necessarily exclusive of each other.

An acquaitance wrote a trillogy. She posted all three books on Amazon for a standard price of 4.99 per e-book. She worked hard on this trillogy and deemed that it was a fair price. She sold ~10 copies of each book a month and generated revenue of $150.00 a month.

Then she made the first book free and dropped the price of second two books to $2.99 each (minimum Amazon will allow). The next month she sold 10,000 copies of second and third book generating a revenue of $60,000.

Had she stuck to her guns that she should get paid a fair price for all three books, she would still be the starving artist indefinitely.

Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down. I believe that it will come from the ground up. Because the revolution (much like the rebels) are not organized, but they will hopefully sway the trends for the better.
Your comment should be illegal; it gives advice on how to go about this process.
I'm curious why Apple allows this also, but making this an excuse to render a blame and bash Apple article is misguided.

I say misguided because there are many ways that your personal information, behaviours, interests and usage history can be fettered away from you all outside of Apple's control, this is a privacy and transparency issue.

Not only should there be some level of respect for the information you possess (especially information you possess on others), but many countries already have legislation that address these privacy concerns specifically.

This means that there are real legal consequences to this address book saga, but contrary to the article's spin this is again not directed at Apple.

In short: Apple can do more to protect users, but shovelling them with the full blame over apps that are deliberately designed to gather and produce results from your contact information to provide is misguided.
This single comment taught me more than the original article.
Central Europe Backs Out of Copyright Deal After Protests
Why are you agonizing over which stack to build it on?

When the finished product is rendered in the browser and your users love it, they don't care what tech you used.

Just use what you know and and focus on the product!
Glad to hear these guys are going to make a NaCl option available.

The interesting thing about NaCl long term is that in order to compete with mobile and desktop for developer attention any browser that supports it will likely require an app store / ecosystem the way Google has done with Chrome (to collect payments). This could make the future browser landscape look a lot different, as it would introduce a lot more "lock-in" than we're used to. If I have games and apps installed in one browser, I'll be far less likely to switch at a later date.
"the Apple 'walled-garden' and the perceive strictness of the app approval process"

I wonder if Apple's tight control over app approval has made them actually legally responsible for this kind of thing. Not that it would absolve the app seller/author, but it seems Apple might share significantly in responsibility.
We've found microbes almost everywhere, and they make up the vast, vast majority of life on this planet.

In Lake Vostok's case, the first reports were in 1999,[1] and yeast and fungi have been isolatef from ice cores collected at depths more than 3500 m below the surface.[2] Exciting stuff, no?

*: Posting from school, so sorry if these aren't free.

[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5447/2144.short

[2]: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1728/474....
So imagine how far ahead a company would be if they were first with a fairly priced product.

I believe that this is why price is not a competitive advantage and you need more substance to beat out your competition.
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> the harder they troll, the more obviously broken the system will be, and the more likely it is to get fixed

You're betting that the fix won't be to do something that effectively restricts patent protection to a fixed number of companies, maybe restricting patent litigation to those companies in a patent collective that, no, you can't join.
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Interesting... Thanks for the tip. I will have to update my post accordingly.
The people who built your house also "allow" thieves to break in your house rather trivially. Would you hold them responsible in the event of a robbery?
Redesigning the mouse by thinking *inside* the box
That's just sheer excitement!!
The story has been around for a few weeks.

As far as I know, his exact role at Kuma has not been publicly confirmed. But everything I've read indicates that he was hired for his military background and knowledge of Iran and Farsi to work on DoD-sponsored projects at Kuma Reality Games. That only make sense if it was for propaganda video games aimed at Iranians. Kuma previously made an episode of its Kuma/War first-person shooter based on a what-if scenario of the US invading Iran. All this does not in itself prove that he did anything treasonous, but it gives Iran good reason to believe that he did (and they no doubt have more information than we do), so in either case he's reckless for returning to Iran.
> It is novel in that they couldn't interact that way before, and now they can, but that novel behavior isn't an invention its merely an implication enabled by the real work of doing the connecting. Its like patenting the idea of driving your car to Grandma's.

I'd say the proper term for it is 'discovery'.

Connecting computers together in a network and creating the infrastructure (ethernet, routers, DNS servers, stuff like that) is all actual invention. If someone creates an ethernet that is 200x better than what we currently have, or a much better way of routing packets etc, they should get credit for that invention and be able to patent it.

Once you have the physical infrastructure, anything else that you do with it is just discovering a neat property of a system which has already been created.

It is like patenting gravity, the Pythagorean theorem, or a certain chord progression. (Imagine if someone had patented IV-V-I, we wouldn't have had nearly 60 years worth of music!)

In this way, I would say that Berners-Lee didn't invent the web, he discovered an extremely interesting and useful property of combining computer networks and hypertext.
Why GroupMe kills the battery on your iPhone
Impressive Augmented Reality on iOS
Thanks, Greattypo! GWU is a great product for sure, but you're right, there's always room for improvement. Even with my own blog, the main content area needs to be larger, photos need to be easier to view, etc.

I think critiquing some of the leading startups really forces us to 1) appreciate best practices 2) think more critically about how to be better designers beyond picking the low hanging fruit.
Yes, I was selling prior versions. But also yes, they went usually to Puerto Rico or Russia.
point taken. :)
I'd only look to animals for ideas of where rights come from if I saw no distinction between the humans and animals.

There is evidence that suggests humans are born with moral intuition. There is a natural aversion to killing others (that can be overcome by conditioning) which suggests there is at least one natural law. There is also research suggesting that human babies have a sense for fair play and justice. I'll have to cite this at some point; I believe I read it a Malcom Gladwell book.

You also still haven't explained how society decides what is desirable and what is not. If you keep asking why, it will eventually lead to a natural right or fundamental good.
The BBC commissioned a study [1] that claims the Charles Dicken's brand brings in about £280m/year to the UK's economy. This from a public domain "brand". Meanwhile companies like Disney lobby for perpetual copyright to protect their own interest at the cost of all the lost opportunities that will never exist.

I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Is Disney going to stop producing movies if their copyright was only 20 years? Drug companies only receive 20 years protection and their products are ridiculously expensive to produce yet they're still very viable businesses.

I wish we could turn the argument against long copyrights to be one of the damage they do to the economy.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16914367
I think it depends on what you are trying to do. If you want to build this as a prototype for a business, then clearly PHP is the choice.

But if you are building this as a learning/practice experience, take a chance and learn something new!
Fun discussion here, guys. I've posted my thoughts on it at TechCrunch here:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/08/is-a-hash-of-hash-of-a-torr...

Hope the community doesn't think I've hijacked the thread for my own purposes. I just thought it was an interesting little discussion and wanted to point it out.
Ding dong, the white MacBook is dead—for real this time
Can't they just hire two people for half the price and make them work normal hours?
>iOS doesn’t prompt the user for permission when an app tries to access their address book information.

It seems a little ridiculous to me that we don't completely blame Apple for leaving the door wide open for developers to do whatever the hell they wanted with your entire address book. Think about that for a moment. Any application you've ever downloaded on the app store could have archived your contacts.

Apple has already demonstrated they're capable of securing sensitive user details, yet the faint calls from informed users and ethical developers to expand that security to cover the address book has been conveniently ignored (to the benefit of "guilty" developers, questionable iPhone UX, and of course Apple) for years.

Not cool Apple.
Is there a change log or something of the sort? I am actually half way through chapter 4 and looking back I see some differences between what I've already done and what is presented on the site, just want to make sure I'm either not missing things or what I've already written is ok to continue with.
Is this true if they were salted with a very long phrase?
I agree with you 100%, and have no idea why your comment is not at the top.

This is a non-apology apology. It's a "you caught us, and we don't want our company to die" apology.

If they actually cared about your privacy, they wouldn't have stored all your personal data on their servers without your permission to begin with.
Bought the previous version of your book and, like several others here, just wanted to say thanks and great work!
Do you consider Idiocracy science fiction?
I understand the point you are trying to make - but the devil is in the details.

I don't think a Article and a Book can be properly compared. I also suspect that Harry Potter won't be out of print (digitally or otherwise), and as of now has a clear copyright holder to which you could ask (likes like original Times article includes interview with original author and may have their consent for what thats worth).

Each case is on its merits, and this is far from clear-cut. It is my opinion that this is very well fair use but there are plenty of opposing view-points here.
If you compare premium non-Apple brands, they compare favoribly to Apple.

Since I'm not aware of a single Android phone that sells for more after two years than the full price two years prior, I'm not sure how any can compare "favorably" (limited run developer models excluded).
That's irrelevant, since this isn't crypto.

This is matching user email addresses so they can spam you and your friends and grow their company on the back of dodgy practices.
If you wish to do business in the USA, you cannot ignore US patent law. Therefore moving out of the US is a hardship for you with absolutely no potential upside.
Get rid of patents. Simple, effective. Nothing convoluted about it.
This isn't an online class at MIT - it is just a course webpage for a class that is offered at MIT this term.
You are learning when you read blogs/twitter and news articles but as stated in an article here http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/, as opposed to a blog, a book takes time to write. When you first write about any topic, the first things that come out are almost always someone else's thoughts at first. Only when you delve deep do you dig up original thoughts on the subject.
A good book is usually an author's lifetime experience encapsulated into a few hundred pages sold for <20 bucks. That is a good deal. I don't think books will never go away as being a source of information. The only difference is now we can carry a million books with us everywhere we go (digital format) as opposed to one time, we'd have to allocate space for every book we have.
Wow...nice work Sahil! Looking forward to seeing more great stuff from you. We should plan another Saturday brunch.
TL;DR: As I enter my twilight years, I know that Star Wars will continue to comfort me long into my dotage.

raganwald: 50's nothing, get back in the game.

America: The Cold War is over. There is no Death Star to blow up. You can't fight for freedom anymore. You can only create it.

---

To be clear: I don't mean to ridicule the point of the post. Bad laws are bad. But the status quo cannot last forever. It is a peculiar feature of the current discourse around IP law that it is the so-called entrenched interests (e.g. holders of large copyright portfolios) that are disrupting us and the way of life we hold to be normal, natural and good. It is our failure as a populace to get over the shininess of our new technological toys and actively build the futures we want, that allows these people to portray us as reckless children in need of a firm hand.

Hackers are, by definition, exempt from this generalisation. We know the world is messy. We like it that way. We want what doesn't exist yet, so we make it. Vague appeals to stale, simplistic and belligerent pop culture allegory should be beneath us.
Tim Schafer opts to try out Kickstarter for his next game
This patent covers program objects embedded in HTML displayed in a browser. Client-server programs and X desktop apps would not be prior art for these claims. That's why they're suing Internet companies, not software companies.

Prior art would have to be something interactive that ran within a browser before the 1993 filing date. Lots of interactive network applications existed before then, but that's not what the patent claims to cover.

> I've been using it since you were probably still in elementary school.

This kind of quip does not add to the discussion or strengthen your argument. It just makes you sound arrogant and grumpy.
All of which costs millions of dollars.

Alternatively, Apple could spend a few thousand dollars and properly secure their MULTI billion dollar platform so the problem couldn't occur in the first place.
I'd expect most european countries to fall in the same category. Actually, I'm surprised it's not illegal in the US.
Possibly correct. I thought it was still interesting as a concept.
How did you manage to automate transferring money to peoples bank accounts all over the world? I'm very interested in how you managed to solve this.
Checkout Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html
You know... I think Google uploaded my entire contacts list to its servers, and I don't recall being informed very clearly about that either.
Congrates Sahil!! Couldn't be happier for you. Guess your decision to do your own thing turns out to be a right one? :)
It's a good shibboleth to distinguish posers from people who actually know how the web works. I wouldn't lose respect for a clinical researcher merely for not knowing better than the general public, provided they aren't working on electronic medical record-keeping. But as an author I'd be offended if an editor tried to make me look kind of clueless when I'm actually not.
And if I lived in the US, where my daily internet activity would be considered a felony, I would consider it a grave injustice that I had to pay more than companies' cost +10% for the internet service.

As it stands, I don't pay for the TV service, so I have no problem paying going rates. (I'll let you deduct the rest and plead the 5th).
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From using it myself, and in discussions with friends who both travel and host, "I'm sorry, it's not available those dates" is the polite way of saying, "I looked at your profile and don't want you in my home."