skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're talking about a major corporation here. They can pay for and hire the appropriate security experts (even more than one firm) and find something like that out.
Any other mirrors online?
I disagree with the statement that there's no way Facebook will go the way of MySpace. It most certainly can.

Indeed there are all sorts of strong arguments for that, from FB no longer being cool, to reaching the top of the mountain (only one way to go), to Facebook's failure to build good mobile products (leaving them weak there), to the need to substantially boost monetization of the platform (likely pissing off users in the process), and I'd also argue their core product is getting worse as they clutter it up.
Must-have libraries in a modern Android dev toolbox
Right, so let's reinforce the idea that a good education is for people who can pay for it, not for people who are smart enough to benefit from it...
anyone found anything interesting in the emails? it just says they're evil, and the download's slow.
Cool idea.

Slightly tangential, but I've often wondered why more websites don't do a hash "pre-pass" on the client-side in JavaScript, anyway. That way, they never actually see your raw password on the server, they end up storing a hash of a hash (plausible deniability in case of a leak?).

For the people that don't have JavaScript, the server could always just do a double hash if the first one fails - although maybe there is some keyspace-reducing insecurity introduced here that I'm not mathy enough to immediately see.
Ah, well, I can dream.
I'm just sad that a professor is the one proposing this. There go my non-existent beliefs in academia.

Most textbooks are written by professors. Or to put it another way, a tiny minority of professors write textbooks. This particular asshole appears to be a textbook-writing professor in a fifth-rate university (University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, anybody?) who writes things with bullshit-sounding titles like Amazonia in the Arts: Ecocriticism versus the Economics of Deforestation.

The vast majority of professors, of course, don't give a whit about increasing royalties for their textbook-writing brethren. While there's a few good textbooks which are worth having, I'd certainly never go out of my way to make sure that my students actually need to own the textbook in order to pass the course; that's just stupid.
Unfortunately Google's policy doesn't cause only malicious extensions to be removed from their web store. For instance, All Mangas Reader, a combined reader and management tool for online manga sites, was removed from the store for "copyright infringement", although it's the sites that are hosting the mangas doing the infringement and not the extension. Additionally, the copyright problem does not apply to all jurisdictions where the store is accessible. ChromedBird, a Twitter client extension, was also removed because Google didn't like that it contained the "chrome" string (at least this problem was easily alleviated by changing the name to SilverBird).

As long as it's still possible to install non-webstore extensions I'll learn to live with that restrictions as it's not an activity I perform often in the first place.
Just another reason for not hiring people based on their grades.
>The purpose wasn't so you could get insanely wealthy off of an idea

Agreed, although getting wealthy off an idea isn't inherently unethical either.

> provide an incentive for people to create and learn.

Agreed. Rewarding people for adding "useful" pieces to societies knowledge base should be rewarded.

> Copyright and patent laws are now doing the opposite.

In the aggregate? I don't think so. The professor in the linked article for this thread is obviously doing the opposite. In undergraduate academia, 95% (made up number) of the actual knowledge in the materials being used to educate are or should be in the public domain.

The fact that the market for calculus books didn't completely collapse with the advent of the laptop (let alone the ipad) is a sign that there's a deliberate effort in the academic world to force students to pay for intellectual property that has no value beyond what is already freely available elsewhere.

But to generalize and claim that all copyright and patent laws are doing more harm than good is specious. Are you saying we should get rid of all IP protections? Completely?
Seeing him be so smug makes me want to close my LinkedIn account.
That goes both ways: I respect the amount of work it takes to make a company financially stable and to strategically position it in the marketplace. It seems to me that the engineers running businesses have been successful only because they picked up business skills along the way, but perhaps it is more efficient to partner with someone who already has those skills.
Hidden Data in The Spanish Economic Crisis
This is a very bad luck
This funny picture decribes a situation when only 1 "wrong" word and everything is OVER!
I've had to use the Mastering Physics site. You could purchase access the the site by itself, or get it for 'free' when you bought the required textbook. Mind you, this was no bargain - buying the book was a $280 investment.
For those of us that have already-deployed off-store extensions in the wild, what options do we have for migrating our users to the new, Webstore-powered versions? Or will their extensions just silently stop updating (or, worse, working altogether)? If it's the latter, your claim that this change will have minimal impact on developers and users is patently false, since you'll be breaking currently-released and -deployed applications that used to work and met the previously-documented requirements, with no warning whatsoever. Further, the suggestion that this is justified because it was committed to a public repository is absurd: are all developers of Chrome applications supposed to follow every single commit to Chromium's repo to ensure that our extensions won't break? What happened to Chrome's supposed immunity to breaking extensions with new releases, which you claimed made your extension model superior to Firefox's?
I think he's referring to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E
I'm very curious about what sort of work was involved in such a project. Presumably there was some sort of relatively low level compatibility layer involved, since Marklar was kept updated to run 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4, apparently with a small team (Quora post said the guy needed a project he could do alone).

There were at least two other successful ports of MacOS to x86 back in the pre-Steve days, both described in Jim Carlton's book "Apple." Presumably those ports were trickier since they were porting code originally developed specifically for 680x0 chips rather than originally developed on a portable Unix-like operating system. Still, they were able to get things up and running remarkably quickly. Performance and bug fixing and third party compatibility were another matter.
Exactly. The ideas are already out there. Charging for information that's out there when you have a semi-monopolistic hold on the market through the collusion of most higher institutions of education is unethical.
that is a lot of data. i think journalists will sum it up for you, if there is something interesting.
Up-front and clear fees, directly based on the product or service offered, are the most efficient way for a market economy to work. In this case, this should mean simple fees for the classes, and book prices based on the original content in that version divided by the number of people who demand that original content.

This patent describes a means to make the prices of things -- like a class -- much more obscure and indirect, which is obviously a perverse market. It's not really about piracy though; it more closely resembles a toll booth on the door to the classroom, or charging students to keep the lights on so they can read the chalkboard. This just happens to resemble a copyright issue, so it triggers that particular response from people interested in copyright.

So why are such perverse systems so common? Because we demand them. It's not some conspiracy. We like to play games with prices, and overestimate our ability to outplay our opponent, and think we can get the best of them (in reality, practical matters take over and we just end up paying more on average).

Take cellphones. You can buy an unlocked google phone for a simple, direct price based on the quality of the hardware and the support that you expect to receive from google (or the manufacturer). Then, you can get a prepaid service plan for cheap (I pay $30/mo for a good smartphone plan) that is based on the level of service you expect from the carrier for as long as you feel like being their customer. I will save hundreds per year over getting a contract and a discounted phone (let's say a typical smartphone plan is at least $60/mo, so I save $30/mo or $720 over a 2-year contract, but lose at most $400 from lack of a discount, netting me $320). I also have greater flexibility and choice.

Yet almost everybody in the U.S., including those reading this comment, are under a 2-year contract right now. Why? I don't know. Economics is about what people actually do though, not what they should do. And given a choice between clear pricing and obscure pricing, people choose obscure pricing.

EDIT: And after people get predictably tired playing pricing games with a large company, and end up just paying more, they complain.
Its fine code once the design its settled, but while you're changing the schema, the backend java code and the frontend javascript, having to change all those classes gets tedious.
The last college I taught at had a similar set-up for Introductory Biology with McGraw Hill's Connect software. I was very unhappy about the cost to the students, but felt obligated to make it worth points, since students who were forced to use its adaptive learning system in previous years performed better than those who weren't.

I really wish there was a free or open-source adaptive learning system for biology courses, in the same way that the Khan Academy has one for learning math.
Because Java sucks. Please, for the good of our industry, please stop using it.
How soon we forget... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQmK1CnwOUI
The colour of creativity
The provided link is 100% blog-summary spam to begin with so you're probably better off going here instead:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2182710/intel-claim...
The Empty City of Ordos, China: A Modern Ghost Town
He also wouldn't be allowed to read your comment either.
Its unfortunate that they were not distributed via bittorrent and/or a tor hidden service. The files are large enough that downloading them with the "free download" option is a terribly long wait. I do not understand how this has so many upvotes after being up for such a short time. Have that many people actually downloaded the files already?

Does anyone have any guesses about the string at the end of the announcement? Is that something Anonymous normally does?

6693b5c82009cdf9a2abf2fc80d0aeab25aa8a3a5d5d33ec24dd1c5a3038fee0b10a8460d4b3cf922ce77e2abda13ca6d3fd0c18081be3c7626587c767fb7d7b
I can see why this wouldn't directly apply to most people:

1) Most bootstrappers don't have the money to pay someone else full time.

2) Most bootstrappers don't have enough experience to know what to build themselves, much less be able to communicate to someone else to do it.

3) Most developers without years of experience are overconfident in their ability to communicate and manage people.

Glad it has worked for this guy, though.
I call this 'primary authentication' which means you're in an environment where you can't execute code (staring at your xfce4 desktop log on prompt for example). Password managers and generators are only useful after you've logged on. Form there, you can execute code and use a password manager for 'secondary authentication' (websites, email, etc.).
I'm sorry. This is NOT a meaningful channel. And this is NOT appropriate communication. But to be honest, what I find most scary about this is the fact that you think it is.
Technically, my outrage would be at being forced to pay to do homework on top of being forced to pay to learn.
Very cool, I appreciated especially the detail that the OP goes into.

I also liked the way he phrased the problem...he isn't outsourcing because he hates developing, but because he loves it too much. Never thought about it that way but on reflection, that is why I haven't outsourced the things I like to do.
I wonder what the general opinion is on legal protection (such signing a contractor agreement) when working with someone in another country. I figure it must be hard to enforce, and you'd mainly be working based on trust. But, it seems like having some sort of legal agreement in place, regardless of how difficult it would be to enforce, would be prudent.

Anyone have experience with this?
It's none of these things. We're talking about financing a commercial enterprise by people far wealthier than myself. What we have here are rich people trying to set up a system where they are rewarded for their part of the investment, but the little guys are not. That is cynical profiteering. I'm saving my $25 donation for a worthy non-profit cause, thank you very much.
<joke>
Well with more people increasingly dropping out of college, salaries have to come from somewhere
</joke>

This has been going on for years in many institutions, he has just managed to make it legal.

Instead of limiting his works to his classroom only, i think he will make more profit on his work if he pushed sales and adoption of his books in other institutions, to other professors/lecturers, even than he can ever make charging a class of +/-100 excessively. And forget about the stupid patent.

The main confusion comes in when you realise: Hey he's an economics professor, you'd think he'll understand business better.
That is a strange philosophy/view-point for HN...
Shiva Ayyadurai told the world he invented email. Not everyone agreed.
Ideal Forms: easily build awesome responsive forms with "on the spot" validation
ARM is now a fully supported target platform for GHC Haskell
This is a BIG problem for my use case. Worrying.

I applaud the motivation but am very disturbed by the unilateral way this has been sprung on us.
Having a country being run as a Mafia state is better than living in a real estate bubble?
I'd like to know your opinion of my comment above:

"Please elaborate on how you feel that security for linkedin would be better if they talked about the new specific security measures they've implemented."

My feeling is that they would have a better outcome by hiring the appropriate experts rather than being public about anything regarding how they operate.

Keeping in mind of course that linkedin in particular is a mainstream site and it doesn't really matter whether hackers in particular of any type like whether they are open or not. Your thoughts? When you consult do you advise companies to publicly disclose anything (other than misinformation possibly).
A (brief) retrospective on transactional memory [2010]
Developers understanding the importance and value of outsourcing development only benefits the entire startup scene.
Twitter Pushes Hashtag Pages
Experimental support for ECMAScript 6 Map and Set objects in Firefox 13
It's important to note that Cloudfront also supports custom origins, so it doesn't even have to involve s3 these days.
That question is not germane to this kickstarter. Considering their level of funding and the large amount of time and money that they have already sunk into the project, it's patently obvious that it's going to get made anyway. They're just trying to collect some free money from suckers because hey, why not?
I've considered outsourcing part of development before. But always gave up after thinking how hard would be to find someone who is actually good. And to be honest, after reading that the author had to first hire two girls just to look for a developer. It doesn't really gets me any more excited. Just thinking about all the useful developing time that I'd wasting looking for a good developer. It just doesn't seem worth it.

The author having found a great guy after 1 week for only $20 sounds to me like he got lucky. And that's not considering the side tasks he gave to the developer just to test him. And the other guy he hired before but didn't like. Summing all that, I'd assume that on average it would take at least two months just looking for someone good and finally get started working on a real project.

Does anyone else got similar good experiences like the author and could confirm that it's actually not that hard? Or did the author just get lucky?
I don't get it. Is there a reason for some sites to actually do that? (considering that they don't store your password as plaintext)

I guess if someone stole their database it would be impossible to know your real password, but still...

Or am I missing something here?
From the discussion it looks like the chrome devs want to support this use case. I think the idea is that you can add more trusted installation locations.
To risk being viewed as that crazy paranoid commentator: Scientology is no stranger to lawsuits. They may well discourage publishing such at risk of expensive, drawn-out legal action.
It’s not straightforward to distribute via Bittorrent anonymously.
i mean, has anyone even gotten a chance to look at what's in the folder?
Xpwallet Launches First-Of-Its-Kind USSD Based Mobile-Survey Product
WallaBee is a Finalist in the Startup2.0 Competition
Au contraire. Journalists are highly motivated to plough through the data for the scoop. ("Data scoop" is certainly an interesting development in our 21st century, btw!) I'm happy to let a highly motivated person do the ploughing, and give me the highlights, especially about a subject as marginally interesting as Scientology.
We need a discussion of why medallions--which he says started simply as licenses--are being limited.

Manhattan's streets already heave with traffic. Allowing unlimited cabs would make that worse, and there's no free market trigger that would solve the problem.
Some of the emails can apparently be read at [1], [2] - via [3]

[1] http://pic.pwny.biz/x/ed_at_scientology.co.at/

[2] http://pic.pwny.biz/x/buchladen_at_scientology.co.at/

[3] http://blog.esowatch.com/?p=8247

(in German, of course)
Thank you so much for ESK! It's really helped me get started in emacs. Also, could you think about adding undo-tree as a default for ESK? I really feel like that would be a worthy addition.
Very clever post, but this is little more than very well crafted marketing material. This IS his marketing effort, and for some reason I'd be surprised if he didn't use outsourced labor to build his outsourcing site.

He wants this arrangement to be successful, and he's going to blog about its success whether or not the code is any good at all.
A good idea in theory, but if it gets tied to a 6 week release cycle it won't be as effective.

Also, I'd rather not have my browser slowed down at every startup because it has what is essentially a built in anti-virus.
Firstly, congrats on making a webapp - as someone who taught himself web development, I know how much work it takes. So well done.

A few comments, in the spirit of honest feedback:

(1) Your problem isn't making it more social right now. Your problem is the product itself.

How do people solve this problem right now? By writing stuff down on paper, or in Word Docs, or even making a Powerpoint deck. Your problem here is that the solution isn't much better than these alternatives - even if you offered me free 'chits', I'd still prefer to use a Word doc, just because I'm comfortable with it, and I don't see how the thing you're offering makes life any easier or better for me. Indeed, it just looks like a version of Powerpoint.

(2) The text isn't rendering correctly in Chrome. Specifically, the 'want to improve your interviewing skills' line is overlapping with itself, which means a bad first impression.

(3) The name isn't great. Little 'chits'? Everytime I say that, it feels like I'm saying 'little shits'.

(4) The 3 steps don't make sense. Place my order and then what? Is this a physical product? (It is, but I had to think about it - bad.) Decide whether I want a call with you guys? Why would I want a call? Is the product not easy enough to use on its own? I don't want to waste my time speaking to people... and so on.

Try and make the 'steps' thing compelling, and use images.

Again, congrats on deploying the app, and I'm sure you'll continue to iterate on the design etc - but I would strongly recommend reconsidering the product first. If you've spoken to many customers already and they REALLY WANT these things, and if you've already got orders (do you guys charge money? Again, not clear from the home page) then I'm probably wrong - but I doubt it.
So, before you start with learning Rails, I recommend learning HTML/CSS. It shouldn't take more than two weeks to get a basic understanding, and by doing that you avoid the huge hassle of building a web app while barely scraping by with the formatting. Also, you might want to drop both learning javascript and vim, because you can build a solid web app without js, and it's very hard to learn multiple dissimilar things at once.

After that, a great resource is http://railsforzombies.com/, and codeschool in general. It's a series of incredibly well made video presentations, which you are then tested on. Once/before you finish that, you should work on actually building an application, maybe following http://railstutorial.org/.

Once you have finished that, you are well on your way to proficiency, and probably have enough understanding of rails to build your application. Some great resources are http://guides.rubyonrails.org/index.html, http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies-2, and http://api.rubyonrails.org/.

If you have done that, and you still want to learn more, then I would learn more about javascript, and read The Rails 3 Way:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321601661/zenruby-20.... Finally to learn more about Ruby, read Eloquent Ruby: http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Professio....

Once you have done that, you should have a pretty solid grounding in Ruby, Rails, and web development in general.
I love how polar opposite HN can be regarding Steve Jobs/Apple. When it comes to Steve saying something is revolutionary and fantastic everyone trots out examples saying he is wrong or that it was already done, but when something he says can be used to break an argument it is used as gospel.

How about we chalk that up to marketing. I don't think the original Mac OS X ran on X86 nor would I be inclined to believe it.
Why Doesn't Our Government Actually Do Anything?
I remember nearly shitting my pants when I heard the rumor of Marklar's existence. Yeah it makes sense now but it was amazing that it actually existed at the time.

This engineer did an amazing job of porting the laptop version over considering it probably needed power management and most likely support for Sony's proprietary garbage. That is something even linux has trouble with nowadays!
XFCE 4.10 on Ubuntu 12.04
They found me again at

enum Cell<T> { nil; cons(car : T, cdr : Cell<T>); }

class List {
public static function mymap<A, B>(f : A -> B, l : Cell<A>) : Cell<B> {
return switch(l) {
case nil: nil;
case cons(x, xs): cons(f(x), mymap(f, xs));
}
}
}

Some of the Java heritage does seem slightly unpleasant, but interesting features like ML-style tagged enums and structural subtyping for record types mean I'm not going to discount the whole thing just yet.
How about we link directly to the content: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2182710/intel-claim...
I hadn't seen that initially, but I agree that makes it seem a bit suspicious. A testimonial to the benefits of outsourcing by someone running an site advertising "frictionless outsourcing" is not exactly a disinterested analysis; sort of like a whitepaper on outsourcing from Accenture. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but does, I agree, mean that he probably intended the writeup to be positive, even before starting.