skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, indeed - I tend to agree with you. I think people are over dramatizing this sale probably because they were tied emotionally. This is a good thing actually, it means that there is still a huge opportunity for email clients and people are more likely to switch if a good client emerge. (I know I would).

I also think that this sale is not a bad thing necessarly. It won't stop us from spending more money on software, on the contrary. I think that if there are more exits available for indie developers, more developers might opt to go the indie route in the future knowing they might have a chance at getting acquired and thus having more developers launching great software.

Again, I don't think the Sparrow team made a mistake and I applaud them for selling their company and joining a 'corporate', if that is what they wanted to do - good for them. I'll surely buy more software from them in the future.

(I'll probably get downvoted to the ground like my other comments on that thread for having somewhat different views from the mob).
And they are doing it elegantly. I don't even remember how I turned on the real identity feature. It was that seamless.
We've switched our DNS provider and we're waiting for it to propagate. Check http://fogcreekstatus.typepad.com/ for updates.
Tri-band WiFi chips for 7Gbps speed coming from Marvell, Wilocity
Erm.. ok? If you don't mind me asking, why would I want to look at that? I can't really tell what it can do for me other than "make zsh more awesome". How? How does it make it more awesome?
Storage Goes Scaled Out, Solid State, And Cloud-Enabled
#Giveaway: 5 Unlimited Web Hosting Accounts from Zyma
The site's down.  Quick, Tell the customers
There is a ton of documentation and example applications on Apple's developer website. Most major parts of the API have example applications.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/navigation/

If you already know how to program then this is a pretty great resource.

There are also some introductory articles to help you get started. For example: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Gener...
I have no objection to the website operator wanting to cater only to people who want serious relationships, but calling flings and hook-ups "smut", with the implication that people who engage in such activities are "smut-makers", is extremely unprofessional and disrespectful, to say the least of it.

In addition, there are many people who are open-minded about casual sex but want serious relationships, perhaps with someone who shares their values on sexuality, but these people will have been turned away (as well as their not-so-open-minded friends who think the operator has no right to be a jerk toward their friends), thus reducing the usefulness of the website altogether, not only for those who have such values, but for anyone who might have otherwise found a good match with them or their friends.

In general, promoting your business as inclusive and caring while tarnishing the reputation of your previous employers and insulting other people have done no wrong to you is more than a little hypocritical.
Hacker News DEF CON Meetup #1 (Las Vegas)
AFAIK all of the major ISPs in the U.S. do this.
I strongly disagree. I currently live in Iran, and sometimes (just for fun, I guess - see here for an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3575029), they disallow all encrypted connections (to/from outside the country) and every single website/service that uses SSL and is located outside of the country stops working. If HN login were HTTPS-only, I couldn't login at those times.

Sure, now they can easily sniff my HN password (which I don't use anywhere else) and could abuse it, but I don't give the slightest damn about it. I'd create a new account (though it's not ideal as I'd lose my karma and can't downvote objectionable/trollish comments). My HN profile is probably the least valuable online account I have; I don't care if it gets removed or hacked. It's more annoying for me if I couldn't login at all.

Of course, your use case most certainly differs from mine; which is why I think it's a good idea to show HTTPS login form by default. But please always allow a less-secure but probably more reliable option for logging in when you're creating a login form for non-commercial sites like HN.
My real name is INSANELY googleable (as in, from what I can tell, a google of my first and last name acts like a "primary key" to my entire internet presence)... so I fucking hate these efforts. I hated it when Blizzard pushed it, I'll tolerate it on Google+ but frankly, I NEED a place where I can speak anonymously and freely.
New In iOS 6: App Store Doesn’t Require A Password To Download Free Apps
Rogers and Bell in Canada both give you their own pages when you type a URL that doesn't exist.
Timing attacks like you mention here are trivially easy to prevent.

Step 1: Determine how long a query for a not found user may take... Let's say 1-2 seconds since there may be many rows to deal with.

Step 2: Multiply the value in step 1 by two or at least add a comfortable margin, perhaps 5 seconds total.

Step 3: On the start of the request performing the look up spawn a separate timing thread.

Step 4: At the end of the request join the timing thread.

This will tie the processing time of the request to the uniform time out value instead of your database processing delay.
* We don't cap traffic at the moment but we do work with our customers when the traffic is significant, offering suggestions on how to improve DNS caching. If we ever do need to cap we'll make sure to give plenty of notice to any customer that would be affected.

* We don't have a timeline, but we have been working on it. We'd like to roll out support for secondary NOTIFY and AXFR, but perhaps we can find a short term solution without that.
Amazon's the villain, not Apple, e-book sellers say
This is the most dangerous kind of fuzzy thinking. The twentieth century is littered with counterexamples.

See http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2012/07/it-isnt-easy-to-und...
This is a real shame. The comedy that is YouTube comments will be greatly diminished.
We've switched our DNS provider and we're waiting for the change to propagate. http://fogcreekstatus.typepad.com/2012/07/index.html has all the details.
Actually this has already been discussed here[1], sorry.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4277485
There most definitely is still a market for people making desktop applications. Take Sparrow (http://sparrowmailapp.com/) for example. They seemed to be doing well for a desktop application - so well they got acquired by Google. An number of other applications I have purchased on my Mac are done by small teams: Alfred, 1Password, TextExpander, Things, Coda, Tweetbot. As other comments have mentioned, it may be easier on the Mac due to a perceived higher quality & richer client base. Independent games are also doing very well. Look at games like Braid & Limbo (true these also were XBLA titles). Games are still desktop applications after all.

So yes, I'd say there most definitely is a market for desktop apps & I wouldn't be surprised if the market was the strongest it had been for a while with the rise of the Mac App Store.
Ask HN: How to get my Kickstarter in front of the right people?
I tried posting this earlier, and something went awry; the majority of the post didn't go through. Here it is in its entirety.

I recently launched a Kickstarter project: ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1402474606/the-ilex-edc-pen-and-capacitive-touch-stylus ) and have found that it is much more difficult to get people to the Kickstarter page than I had anticipated. The project is a combination pen (either fountain pen or ball point) and capacitave stylus, with a focus on quality and elegant design. The project came about in response to my frustration with the stylus market when I bought my iPad. None of the styluses I could find felt like high quality writing instruments.

There has been some recent discussion on HN about Kickstarter projects, and problems with them (particularly that some proposers have pretty unrealistic ideas about what it takes to get a product to market). I've tried to avoid falling into this trap by involving my brother, who designs and develops products for a living (he's a mechanical engineer working in the knife industry). Based on his experience, we have a pretty good idea of what it is going to take to get this into people's hands in quantity, and our pricing structure reflects that. It's somewhat higher than other pen or stylus projects on Kickstarter, but not out of line with the high-quality writing instrument market as a whole.

Response to the project from people who have seen it has been pretty positive, and conversion rates have been okay, so I don't think there are too many problems with the product itself or with the pricing. The main problem seems to be publicity. There are a host of manly-gear-related sites (uncrate, gear patrol, and the like) which would seem to be the obvious venues for this sort of thing, but they haven't responded to our emails. Does anyone have any suggestions?
A good example of a developer in a specific, unfashionable, but successful niche is Progressive Solutions [1].

Their target market is far from glamorous, but it's a very successful business (they've actually just been acquired last month).

1 http://www.progressive-solutions.co.uk/products.php
This might help: http://route53d.googlecode.com/svn-history/r2/trunk/README

Looks like they are close to getting NOTIFY and IXFR (incremental AXFR) working. It's an interesting approach none-the-less.
Not quite, and I'm not confused.

Both have sandboxes (ActiveX since Windows 6.0, IE7), both have restricted APIs, both run native code.

PNaCl is equivalent of silverlight which is cut down CLR.

More performance - I doubt it. CLR+JVM is pretty much up there. The moment you add any virtualization, trap code or translation layer to native code via NaCl which you will require for security, there is going to be overhead which will knock it inline with a VM architecture. Startup time might be less - that is it.

Better security - that's a lie. Virtualization on any layer never gave anyone better security. It's throwing stones in glass houses. The only hard security boundary is at the MMU/page table. As NaCl grows, you will see it break.

No-one getting sued? I'm sure the EU will have something to say when no other vendor implements it and Google uses it to leverage market share, much like Microsoft did in the late 90's and early 00's.
If you can't see the hypocrisy of the media then please ignore my post and move on. Is it a bigger crime to kill civilians or to kill soldiers? Is James the dozen-civilian-killer a terrorist or not? Media calls him a "suspect", why was the Fort Hood shooter not called a suspect while he was being investigated? Can't you see the pattern that if the murderers is a European / white American he is a "suspect" and if it's a brown American (like the Fort Hood killer) he is a "terrorist". Did you see the sympathetic posts about the person who went on a killing spree in Afghanistan? The poor guy had issues so we wanna consider that rather than call him a terrorist, how about the brown guys killing civilians, maybe they had issues? Maybe they had trauma from their folks being murdered or tortured? I am not justifying any crimes, I am only highlight how the media is justifying some crimes and calling other perpetrators terrorist from the get go.

>Obama trying to kill a terrorist and then accidentally killing civilians is not terrorism.

>It all comes down to intent, no?

Oh yeah, when we bomb wedding parties out intent is good, when they killed civilians their intent was bad, that was simple, now I get it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=afghanistan+wedding+bombed

Clinton knowingly bombed Sudan pharmaceuticals factory (I have posted the link somewhere on this page) and killed half million infants by sanctions alone (1996 UN estimate of the period 1991-1996), Bush knowingly went to Iraq when there was no link to any attack on US, Obama went into Libya for no good reason (oil contracts), Obama has killed hundreds of civilians in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drone attacks and his latest piece of art is to label all adult males present in the site where he wanted to bomb as "militants".

That's neat of Pres Obombya, Americans own the whole world; the Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Pakistanis just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so they are all terrorists. Let's kill them and call them militants unless proven otherwise (just imagine Osama using the same logic, oh there were bad guys in those buildings, the intent was to kill only those who were bombing Iraq).

http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/how-obama-changed-definition...
But it’s the only place in the world where most rich people don’t really flaunt it.

Also: If someone isn't flaunting their wealth, they're by definition blending in. How the hell is Arrington supposed to find the non-flaunters in the world to figure out where they are and aren't? He can't, he can only know about the ones in the industry he intensely follows (and I'd argue he isn't actually doing that either).

Oh Mike, your feel-good sweet-nothings are as hollow as ever.
I don't think you want to be living a life where you have to issue ultimatums to get what you need. The world is a bigger place. Find better work and go and do it. You can remind them of the things you've been unhappy about by leaving. If everyone did that (instead of sticking in dead-end jobs) it would be much harder to create crappy jobs.
Darwin's Law for the modern age ... don't write the comment if you can't take the credit ;)
There is a (2005) missing in the title.
These are some things that also bothered me when switching to a Mac. Then I learnt the Mac tricks for dealing with them, which are as natural as the Windows ones... once you learn them. The fact that Enter gets into a folder is just because it has always been like this in Windows and (most) Linux file browsers. I love that I can rename without looking where is F2. I could give solutions (or more precisely, point in the correct direction) for all other points, but, what for? You stated you didn't want to know the solutions, and looks like you have not even looked for them. So stick with Windows.
This is more like a branch than a fork.
Microgrid Keeps the Power Local, Cheap, and Reliable
Note: this is a story from 2005.

He was found guilty not because he used a non-standard browser, but because after he donated the money, he ran some pretty trivial "security tests" on the site, like attempting to access /../../..

http://www.zdnet.com/tsunami-appeal-site-hacker-found-guilty...

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/008118.html
Use a realistic fake name?
Batelle's “universe in a shoebox” via software
OT, but something I've been wondering for a while:

Why, WHY is it called "The GIMP"? I mean, I understand the acronym. I understand that nerds in general (such as myself) are the kind of folks who look past names and appearances and judge just about everything on its content.

But whenever I attempt even explain the benefit of linux to a layperson, inevitably the user's need to "run apps like Photoshop" will come up. And inevitably, I'll tell them that there's a similar program that's entirely free, which they become excited about. Then I tell them the name and they immediately make quite a number of assumptions.

The name sounds amateurish and unstable. It sounds like some Windows freeware that installs a toolbar or two, not a powerful image editor or a real alternative to something called Photoshop.

And don't get me wrong, I think the software itself is great and I use it constantly! But for software, just like any product, image and impression are quite important.
I'm not sure exactly how you're counting, but I think the original breaks down to:

* 3 lines of "data"
* 8 lines of boilerplate
* 5 lines of logic

That's less logic to understand, less data to understand, and much less boilerplate to mentally filter out (which does require effort even you're familiar with it.)

A more complex example would probably involve more form controls being submitted to the service and more elements being updated in the response. Neither of these are likely to change the data or boilerplate line count of the original example, and they don't necessarily have to change the logic much either:

data: $('#new-status').serialize() suffices to gather all of the form data in one statement no matter how many controls there are (in a real app your service will probably need most/all of them for validation/context, and a more specific selector can be used to just gather some elements).

When I want to update the display based on my service response, I typically return new markup as one element of my json response. So, my success method is something like $("#status").html(data.markup), once I check data.status to make sure I had a successful response rather than an error. This can be extended to multiple elements by returning a list of id/markup pairs, or going all the way to a jsonp response. Now, this does mean that I'm doing my templating on the server instead of in the browser, but I happen to prefer that because it makes it easier for me to support non-javascript browsers and different templates for different devices. (I try to auto-detect, but also allow the user to override and choose which view they want.)
Do you have any data on how well non-App store applications are doing? Specifically I am looking at the power-user/developer market.
Will An LCD Wall Help Remote Working?
Could I integrate DNSimple with DNSMadeEasy via NOTIFY/IXFR/AXFR?
Omnibus response to the omnibus response: Certainly a determined attacker can find the timing difference in under a week over the internet. However, now he needs a week of preparation and leaves a trace I can at least attempt to detect. Or I can insert a random microsecond delay, throwing his measurements off. He could then make more measurements to factor out my random delay. Security is a layer cake game. You penetrate my first layer, I add another one until either you or I get bored. Point is: not leaving an obvious indicator in place is the first layer. It defeats anyone not willing to rent a rackspace server or spending a week at figuring out how my app works an behaves in which case. That's probably good enough for most cases.

(btw: 30x longer is not of interest for timing attacks. If it's 1ns vs 30ns then it's still 30 times longer but doesn't buy the attacker anything when he can only measure ms precision)
At least we know that nothing will make Youtube comments worse than they are right now.
Z80 Labs - a new Buffalo (NY) startup incubator's website goes live
Somehow, I think there's more to this story. I know that I sometimes play with a site's URL parameters, especially if I'm going to be giving them my credit card information and it looks like they're doing something non-standard or risky.

Of course, even with that caveat, criminalizing this sort of 'hacking' (or even calling it such) is absolutely absurd.
What's up dock? Apple to shrink connector for iPhone 5
This brings up an interesting point about the cost-benefit of some simple security practices.

If pg spent 2 hours downloading the libraries for and hooking into the API of, say, bcrypt or pbkdf2, that on top of the rest of his authentication code would result in a benefit once the password database has been stolen. There is a man-in-the-middle possibility because HTTP is still a valid login method, though you could argue he can spend less time securing his code against a database breach.

If pg spent 1 hour making SSL the only option for logins, the resulting benefit is that all communication of the password is secure, though you could argue he now has to spend much more time securing his code against a database breach.

Of course, if he spent 3 hours doing both, everything is more secure. But we don't always have time to spend.
The main reason I use an alternative DNS is because my ISP's DNS service goes down constantly.
This is quite old news from 2005.

The man in question donated to the tsunami fund, didn't see a confirmation page, and fearing a phising scam, ran a couple of security tests against the site. Total fine: 400 GBP plus 600 GBP costs:

http://www.zdnet.com/tsunami-appeal-site-hacker-found-guilty...

I haven't been able to found any details about what "security tests" were run against the site, but the UK's computer misuse act appears to be quite clear about it: if you're not authorised to access something, you've broken the law.
The Power Strip That Lets You Snoop On An Entire Network
> now I regret linking my gmail+youtube accounts

Not like you had much of a choice. "Youtube accounts" have been dead for a few years now, you can't log into a pure youtube account you're required to convert it or link it to a google account. In fact, youtube doesn't even have its own login page anymore, it's accounts.google.com or bust.
Great article. Another suggestion if you don't mind... the floating Steven Kovar block makes it difficult to zoom in and read in a mobile browser, as it floats on top of the text.
I cannot count the number of reviews of Android products by Apple oriented writers that have singled out the head phone jack on the bottom as a flaw. Now what will they say?
Meet the new drugs, same as the old drugs?
Trello.com is unreachable because of DNS. Accessible by IP, though.
That's false for well designed signup forms. Signup forms should never leak "email/username does not exist" but only "this combination of email/username and password is unknown". This prevents the trivial attack. Timing attacks might still be possible, but then at least you're on the same level for both attack vectors.
I'm betting they don't have that on file and very few people at the company know those details.
Make the Moon Landing a National Holiday - Lets do this
A Startup Advisory Board Dream Team is Priceless
In Aug 2011, Google banned quite a bit of Google+ accounts for using fake names and nicknames. Does Google still do this?
> I find it very frustrating that Google thinks that forcing people to reveal their identities is a "good" thing.

Remember: Google's business is advertising, and you can sell far better/more expensive ads to "real identities". As far as business goes, real identities are most definitely a good thing. For google, that is.
Apparently, if an identical radio-Earth existed somewhere, current SETI hardware could detect it at about 1000 ly distance.

What's the rationalization for this? Is our radio footprint really so powerful as to not be drowned out by 1000 ly worth of background radiation?
That for loop looks pretty neat, however I don't tend to write loops that often on the command line so it doesn't really benefit me that much.
Yet companies act in exactly that way towards their employees. Late too many times? Ultimatum is issued where you get fired if it happens again. Too many sick days? Same result. Underperforming? Yup, you guessed it. Your employers are not your friends - do what you have to to make your life easier. IMO, ofcourse.
I started off with it being just me - part time. Then full-time me and a salesperson. And year by year we've grown - a lot (we don't release numbers).

We did this a sale at a time. No venture funding and not really even any self-funding. Just keeping it profitable and growing from those profits.

So yes, it can be done (my company is http://www.windward.net). The trick is to create something of value. And then to focus on what you need to do next to grow the company.
I used jsfiddle in the past only because I knew its name. jsbin is a lot less clunky. I'm sure I'll use it a lot more.