skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, when placing a piece in greater context, mentioning the source and the tendencies of a source, is not an ad hominem fallacy. (It is ad hominem, just not fallaciously so).

A part I noted in the article that is subtly trying to conflate two things, is that privacy guards are injected as a first amendment violation, in an article over the absurdity of computers being an independent actor in free speech. They may be related topics, but suggesting privacy protections are silly because they are obviously first amendment issues akin to computer speech is a bit questionable. Further the article presents some strawman arguments with regard to that particular issue - for instance the issue of hand compilation suddenly being ok for everyone worried about computer speech wrt privacy: well no, that particular issue has been hashed out many times in pre-computer eras, with things like city directories and telephone books.

Second, just because someone criticizes the left and the right both, does not matter when characterizing the things a particular organization cares to publish, particularly when that statement doesn't support the characterization of the group as a right leaning group. Plenty of "liberal" groups criticize the left, even though no one would disagree they are liberal (e.g. socialist groups regularly attack the democrats for not doing enough, bowing to centrism, whatever).

Finally, it was worth mentioning in that without such a warning about strong political leanings, one may not be inclined to be on the lookout for the above mentioned types of issue conflation. A warning about this is fair, whether you agree or disagree with the conclusion, it doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention for it and understand implicit biases in a piece.
No, that's not how iOS or Android upgrades work because those companies specced out their platforms before launching them to market.

You can't just "add native support" after the fact. That's a major addition which should have been there from day one.
I'm in a situation where a user-submitted content driven site I'm about to launch is going to be in need of a lot of content to get it kick-started. Has anyone had any experience using services like Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) to do this?

Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case.
New Samsung Galaxy S III burns into flames, melts through casing.
It's not implied, it's explicitly defined as part of their business model. Spotify's tagline for their catalog is "something for everyone." "Something," not everything, means it's a limited selection.
Out of this world kickstarter campaign
Apple have absolutely no taste..I would at the insides of an animal if I wanted to see shiny things.
Scientists Identify Protein Required to Regrow Injured Nerves in Limbs
> WolframAlpha is one of the nearest things we have to the "advanced Artificial Intelligence" from the article; in a certain sense, it actually does create new content.

The conclusions one draws from the article is that it creates new content in the same manner as a web scraper, calculator, or printing press creates new content. Wolfram Alpha cannot be said to possess independent agency because it does not possess its own set of intrinsic preferences which it seeks to maximize. Rather the preferences are extrinsic and determined by humans, classifying it as a tool rather than agent.
Secure boot provides no way of knowing that you're screwed. It's not a measured boot. There's no independent confirmation that you're still using the same root of trust as you were before. If someone is able to compromise the key database in any way then they win.

Of course, the point is that this is only supposed to be possible if the attacker has access to your firmware. You can password protect the UI, but if they've got an SPI programmer and enough time to pull your machine apart you're still going to lose.

A fully measured boot has the root of trust in the hardware rather than the firmware, and that protects against most of the technical attacks. Someone can still stick a hardware keylogger in somewhere, but then no level of computer security is going to protect you against a camera stuck to your ceiling.
Fake it until you make it...
1) Yes, one can (are you concerned about ability, rules?). 2) If there's any overlap in mandate now (debatable), it will likely lessen now that Thiel has this vehicle.
> I also posed the question here a while ago: http://www.quora.com/How-does-ifttt-securely-store-passwords...

And you appear to have received an answer there, as well. Anything using OAuth doesn't need to store passwords, and for anything else ifttt stores the password in an encrypted (but obviously retrievable) form. I don't see how they could do otherwise; at most, they could refuse to interoperate with any sites not supporting OAuth, and I don't see the benefit to that.
>The idea would be to make mediawiki itself automatically preform reasonable redirects when pages don't exist.

Mediawiki does do it automatically, it's called having many thousands of users.
Obviously you didn't write the paper, it was merely the result of the ink choosing to stick better to some chemicals rather than others, and the resulting pattern being adhered to the paper.
By the same token, private businesses who pick their own business models, especially when they all pick the same one, shouldn't be surprised when those models provide, shall we say, less than perfect coverage of the market.

Not only that, but this story is a perfect illustration of someone who has exercised their right to simply not buy music provided under these models. She has a right to this just as much as rightsholders have a right to feed a market failure by not being reasonable in adapting their business models to reality.
> There is no incentive whatsoever for manufacturers to give people control over their computers, and that is the crux.

The incentive is that the Microsoft hardware certification requirements demand that they do (point 17 of System.Fundamentals.Firmware.UEFISecureBoot). Whether that proves to be a good (or even enforced) incentive is hard to know until the hardware ships, but saying there's no incentive is inaccurate.
I'm pretty sure it's not a matter of liability--it's simply against the law to sell a car without certain safety features (like airbags). Moreover, there are good reasons for a customer to not want airbags--they make the car heavier and that kills acceleration and handling.

So there is plenty of precedent--just because a customer would be fine with something (like less safety) does not necessarily justify it.
Yes I think this is a big news. Developers were afraid to commit to windows phone as a platform citing low installed base. Now with ability to target PC and tablet's suddenly the reach of your app explodes.
That history is irrelevant since we're talking about Windows Phone and not Windows Mobile.

Did HN get over-run by MS employees or something? What the hell is going on! :)
The easiest way to handle this would be to enrol keys on initial OS boot. If the user wants to wipe the preload then they can do that.
"Creating an army of fake accounts and doing all the initial seeding would be quite a heavy burden in my case."

You don't need to actually create the accounts by hand, you just need some sort of admin mode that lets you submit content and then attributes it to a different account each time.
This one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanai
Oil Company Sues ISP, Kills Greenpeace Protest Site Against Them
> Also their burgers are pretty gross.

Some people must think they taste "good enough", given their popularity. Convenience and price obviously play big roles here, but they are also likely choosing McDonalds over other options on at least some basis of taste.

> But make no mistake that McDonalds is a business that is, if not as harmful as Philip Morris, gradable on the same scale. For the most part it's a company whose core business model is "leverage unfathomably vast marketing resources to coerce large numbers of people into making the least healthful dietary choice available to them at any given moment".

In Australia, they actually [no doubt due to social pressures] a large range of "healthy options" that are actually half-decent. I'm not sure whether they offer this stuff in the US, but compared to the numerous fried chicken, roast chicken and Burger King restaurants here, they are leagues ahead.

Note that I'm not defending their past behaviour-which I think we can agree was abysmal-but they have at least tried to reform and for a business of their size and brand, is no easy feat.
Researchers Crack 923-bit Encryption, Set New World Record
I think you mean doubleplus ungood.
You know that a lot of people do buy a new Android phone that can't be upgraded to ICS. Don't you?
X11 wasn't deprecated in 1987, that's when it was released. So far as I know, X11 hasn't been deprecated.

Side-note: Win16 (called "the Windows API" back then) actually predates X11 (though not previous versions of X) since Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985.
Can't we say the same things about just about any business?

> "but there's a difference between an occasional indulgence"

Indeed...

> "and the business model that depends utterly on persuading the most persuadable people to harm themselves, for no other reason that they were persuadable"

You've lost me. You compare McDonald's to Philip Morris - even though one produces a highly addictive substance and the other produces (crappy) hamburgers. Last I checked, burgers are non-addictive.

In what way is McDonald's core business model dependent on something more than "occasional indulgence"? If we are to play the game that a business can only succeed if people are mindlessly, constantly, repetitively consuming its products, then we should be beating down the doors of, say, Redbox. After all, their business model works best if everyone sat on their asses all day doing nothing but watch movies.

I do not see the argument at all that McDonald's business hinges on the abusively high consumption of their foods. They are in no way worse than any number of peddlers of less-than-healthy foods. Where is the outrage for Ben & Jerry's? Frito Lay? Campbell's?
I found these two lists:

http://speckyboy.com/2010/02/25/50-amazing-personal-blog-web...

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/personal-websites/

I found Andrea Mann's website (http://www.andreamann.com/) to be especially clean and to the point.
LOL.

Native languages do not "require more advanced hardware", since you can already use native languages on iOS and Android hardware.

Are you people brainwashed? WP7 is dead.
Isn't this true about applications/games with dependence on hardware capabilities also? How's this different?
Cloning Amazon Is a Dead End
Yet another example why we need the Startup Visa.
I'm not sure I follow you. Or rather I follow what you're saying, but don't see how it relates to my comment in any way.

I don't think a rational mind should just stop and give up trying to explain things. I believe in science, which is why I believe in evolution, or rather the evidence for it.
The Fearful Bodily Unity
> It's similar to asking if people could write a portability layer atop Win32 to support Win16 to support old DOS system calls--anyone can do a subset of that and complain that "Hey, it's easy!" but to do it right (and you must do it right, or else somebody else will complain!) is very nontrivial.

Didn't Microsoft actually do that? Isn't that how we have Win16 support in 32-bit Windows 7 today?
Tell HN: FlirtTape is now HipTape. 
Just a little heads-up. You can now share your playlists without any awkward feelings.

clicky http://hiptape.com/

Disclaimer: I'm not involved with the project. I met one of the developers who built it.
Thanks for the input. So you can do cross platform if you use these portable class libraries from start. How about about porting win32 code from the .net era? I would guess that most of today's windows applications are running on those libraries, don't they?
Mturk is great for menial tasks in my experience. ie. Click here, look at this page, and write summary. Even then a portion of users dont follow the instructions properly. I cant imagine using mturk to seed a site with quality content that other real visitors will be looking for. Your better off seeding the content yourself imho.
The problem with Mechanical Turk is that you tend to get a lot of low-quality content. If people don't have an emotional investment in the site's success, they'll usually just write drivel and collect their fee. That sets a whole tone for the site which isn't really sustainable.

Common approaches I've seen for seeding a UGC site:

1.) Create lots of sock-puppets yourself and write/find the content that you yourself would want to read. Or get your friends to help. Example: Reddit.

2.) Write for your community. Don't worry about being big, just build something you and your friends would want to use. Once they start using it, they'll tell their friends, and you can get big later. Example: LiveJournal, HotOrNot, Fark, many niche sites.

3.) Scrape the hell out of your best competitor and then either provide a better user experience or SEO your site so you rank higher than them. Note that this is almost certainly against their TOS, is probably copyright infringement, and will get you on Google's shit-list, so you're in for a fair amount of pain if you're caught. Examples: Facebook, About.com, YouTube.

4.) Contact a couple celebrities in your field and see if they're willing to let you host their works, or if you can license their works with a revshare/partnership/whatever. All it takes is one really popular author to endorse you, and you'll get the halo effect of lots of less popular authors signing up because they want to be that one. Alternatively, be that celebrity yourself, so that people want to contribute to your site to bask in your reflected glow. Examples: JoelOnSoftware, Hacker News, StackOverflow.

5.) Be an aggregator first, nail your user-experience, and then once you have the visitors coming in, start adding your own hosting as a value-add. Examples: FriendFeed, many Google products.

6.) Throw money at the problem. Examples: Google+, Bing.
Output Stumbling, Fed Takes a Modest Step
You are assuming that the brand are business are done. At the end of all the investment Microsoft has a great consumer brand name and a beachhead in living room. What is that worth to you? To call it a loss, what makes you assume that the business will at best run at break-even and won't make any profits, or Microsoft won't be able to leverage the existing xbox brand to sell additional Services/products?
Embrace prototypal object-oriented programming
Nobody lives on Ben & Jerry's.

Frito Lay is possibly even more morally fraught than McDonalds, since a large part of their business involves marketing themselves into kids lunches.

I'm not sure where Campbells comes into this. It's not great soup, but it's soup.

Obviously, there are people who think there's nothing wrong with a particularly successful marketing campaign for an unhealthful product. There are plenty of people who think there's nothing immoral about selling cigarettes.

I don't think less of those people, but I strongly disagree with them.
Why is Ellison the only billionaire that does the type of things that kids say when they say:

> You know what I'd do if I had a billion dollars....
Men and Women - Do We Work Different? Thoughts from inside a startup.
Well, who should get paid more, the getaway driver, or the guy who orchestrated the bank robbery?
Pry for ruby gives me great dot completion and isn't batshit insane. Most diehard dynamic typists live in their repl. When I use java with IntelliJ I miss my repl. I do gain some things from the IDE, but I feel hamstrung compared to my repl.
Could he technically start a new country? XD
Singapore's Entrepreneurial Journey(Video)
Sounds like Sensu (https://github.com/sensu/sensu) fits the requirements. It's a small monitoring framework that works in conjunction with Chef or Puppet, PagerDuty, Librato, Graphite, and others.
Cheap Tickets to Jeddah
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How to Prep for a Presentation
http://goo.gl/maps/wHTS - Google Maps
IFTTT will never catch on with "normal" people because as cool as the tech might be it's a Internet-geek power user feature.

Someone might buy the company to offer as part of a home automation type product, but that's about it.
> Ok, I'll put you in the category of people that swore for years that Motorola's bootloader protection would be hacked. That was... 3 years now since they introduced that and nary a vulnerability found?

Yes. The trajectory on companies getting secure bootloaders right points in a clear direction: they're on their way to getting it right!

This makes me unhappy, but unfortunately, it's taking longer and longer to jailbreak devices, with the exception of Apple devices. (Unfortunately, this seems to indicate a need to brush up on security on their part.)
I believe this is known as "the ChromeOS solution".
Here's the web cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hawaii....
I'd love to apply for the O-1, but I'm not sure I'm ready yet.

No other visas are suitable.
Their burgers are (deliberately, carefully engineered to be) hyperpalatable. There are plenty of hyperpalatable foods that also happen to be gross.
Blither (blither.com)
6.) Throw money at the problem. Examples: Google+, Bing.

5,4,3,2,1 all offer good advice.

6 could (will?) be a bottomless pit
> For the most part it's a company whose core business model is "leverage unfathomably vast marketing resources to coerce large numbers of people into making the least healthful dietary choice available to them at any given moment".

They don't coerce anyone to eat their food. What a ridiculous hyperbole.
> Finally, it was worth mentioning in that without such a warning about strong political leanings, one may not be inclined to be on the lookout for the above mentioned types of issue conflation. A warning about this is fair, whether you agree or disagree with the conclusion, it doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention for it and understand implicit biases in a piece.

Shorter sophacles "I try to appear objective so don't notice that I'm applying a double standard". Namely, he'll make up stuff about Koch and their ilk but folks he agrees with get a pass. And he expects to be praised for this.

> A part I noted in the article that is subtly trying to conflate two things, is that privacy guards are injected as a first amendment violation, in an article over the absurdity of computers being an independent actor in free speech.

That part was so important that it didn't rate a mention until he got called on the Koch fallacy.

That might have been an interesting discussion, but he was more interested in poisoning the well.
I cannot stand their new aesthetic.

I saw a demo of Metro on a tablet at the Microsoft store a few weeks back and was really, really turned off. Why are the app squares of variable sizes? The guy accessed a settings menu out of nowhere. I was so confused I had to ask him to show me how he did it. There were no indications, cues, hints, etc, that would've led me to believe the menu was there. This isn't only limited to the settings menu.

I don't want to turn this into an iPod/iPad vs. WP8/Surface debate, but the first thing that popped into my head after I walked out of the store was "Jesus, my mom would have a hell of a time learning how to use that." She's a pro with her iPad, and it'd take her a very long time to reach that same level of savviness with a tablet running Metro.

Metro isn't designed for the average person. There's nothing that directs you, there are no consistent UI elements that carry on throughout the design. Every app the guy opened was designed differently. With iOS, I at least have the top (and often bottom) nav bar to guide me. I, a guy who's been playing with computers for years, was utterly confused and put off from Metro.

I think they've got a long way to go if they plan on seeing the same adoption of their WP8 phone that the iPhone has seen. I'm not sure if that's what they want, but I assume they do.
Not Mechanical Turk, specifically, but I've used other forum posting services in the past, and the quality was quite low. If your site is targeted at anyone but the most general audiences, I doubt it would be very useful.

For example, I think Reddit could have benefitted somewhat initially from random, paid people posting content, but I doubt a site like HN could.
Awesome. How many YC companies are there now with web apps? How many of their admin consoles do I get to get because technology allows it? I bet a bunch of them would be happy to buy access back from me once I take it from them.
I disagree. A PM is an excellent communicator between engineers and the rest of the organization. It's not a matter of dysfunction, but a way of filtering what is important and what isn't.

I've been in both situations where a) I am in direct contact with the rest of the organization and b) where an intermediary is. I prefer B and that is what a PM is for.

Some large organizations may be able to eliminate the middle man, but I wager they've dug a ditch so deep they can't tell the difference.
The guy he bought it from, who was once homeless and destitute: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Murdock#section_1
I thought facebook seeded by selling itself as a service to be the directory++ for colleges et al, for a long time you needed a .edu email to sign up, and many colleges just signed people up as part of enrollment. Only later did they change to everyone, all the time (ca 2007 iirc).
> So there is plenty of precedent ..

No, for software, there isn't.
You took it literally when i said "go home". Fine I will refine it for you. Go home as in go build the next product.
I'll read and respond to that comment, but I'd like to reiterate that the comment you made immediately above the one I'm responding to is nonresponsive. The analogy I've provided, of pirating and reselling books from the library, is in fact perfectly analogous to the issue we're discussing.
How Long Can You Go Without Hiring Your First Employee? | 21times
Apple fined $2m over misleading iPad 4G claim in Australia
You know what else provides less than perfect coverage? Pin-tumbler locks. Should we stop prosecuting breaking and entering?
Speaking of #5:

A few days ago imgur announced they now have a host of extra (proper) "social" features, comments and the like. It made me realise that #5 is exactly what imgur has done, started out as a simple hosting service fuelled by the rising success of reddit and now they're branching out into their own community and removing the reliance on reddit one bit at a time. This definitely seems like the best approach.
This is so astonishingly detached from reality that I don't know where to begin.
Why the hell is it even for sale?
action.io - awesome product !!
He's a 3D game engine programmer (the tech cofounder at High Impact Games, an offshoot of Insomnia games - he worked on Ratchet and Clank). He's probably not too bad at 3D programming.

He's not claiming anything big. Just that it works as well as conventional filters (and he might just mean "works well enough").
Voting with your feet, Condorcet edition
Historically, secession from the union is frowned upon. See: the bloodiest war in US history. On the other hand, my former employer Dean Kamen did jokingly found his own country on North Dumpling Island and signed a non-aggression pact. He seceded when he was denied a permit to build a wind turbine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dumpling_Island