skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This makes me even more bullish on Xamarin/Mono. As Miguel de Icaza of Xamarin tweeted this morning after this was announced: "Wow @scottgu announces that Microsoft open sourced the Entity Framework, Mono's Achilles heel"

I believe if you are building mobile clients and need to target more than one platform you should do your UI with the native APIs on each platform, but should use something like Mono to achieve as much code-reuse as possible for the lower layers of your app.
This is stunt brilliant, but the truth of the matter is its not going to solve any problems. Don't get me wrong, I love that Shell oil is getting clowned, but other than possibly choosing a different brand of gas its not going to infect any meaningful human behavioral change.

As long as people live in a world where you have to turn on an engine to do ANYTHING - and participate in an economy that depends on and encourages over consumption, oil companies will continue to thrive. Humans will continue to burn shit to live the dream and humanity will carry on its march towards extinction.

Someone needs to find a way to convince people that using an automobile (or multiple automobiles) as a replacement for their legs is the real problem.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1820893788/katalyka/post...

I don't think anyone is sure if this was a scam, or if he or she is genuinely crazy. But, people funded a board game, and now the sun says no.
New Voice Recognition Platform Wants You Talking To Your Household Gadgets
End Users Still Don't Know How to Handle Personal Data
N-E-S-T-L-E-S,
Nestle has the very best
chocolate.

Back in their van.
With the windows blacked out.
Steve Ballmer is a used car salesman cast in the role of a CEO. These are the natural consequences.
I had a back injury that required surgery. Total cost: $150k.

My wife recently had a child. Minor complications ensued at delivery. Total cost: $40k.

My cost for insurance? $3,120 a year, plus about $400/year in copays. The gamble has worked out for me.
Judge to Apple : "Think Different!"
The more accurate way to phrase it is "it takes A class talent to hire A class talent." the implication being it is not a guaranteed thing. Bs and Cs are also capable of hiring As, but it is often random luck.
Is Entity used a lot? We looked at using it but it seemed to be inferior to NHibernate (don't remember details, think there was a problem with type error detection and other stuff).
Talking about not testing at all is both stupid and non-sensical, as there will always be some informal integration testing

Not doing any integration testing would translate to the developer making a change in the code and checking it into the VCS without running it. That does happen from time to time, but it's obviously a bad thing, right?

If you build and run a smoke-test before checking in, that's integration testing! So clearly everyone does at least a tiny amount of integration testing, and the question is how far do you take it, and how much effort do you put into automating it is a tradeoff. From experience, the more effort that is put into testing, the fewer bugs will be seen by customers, though you do run into diminishing returns.

Monitoring has the advantage of reporting just bugs that are seen by customers.

QA I think of more as having professionals that pretend to be customers, which, done right, can let you catch the bugs that are egregious enough to make you look had actual customers seen it.
Google Nexus 7 UK deliveries delayed
AOL Autos Partners W/ CarWoo (YC S09) To Let Users Negotiate W/ Dealerships
This is cool on a few levels, IMHO.

First, down with QR codes! – They go exactly the wrong way, making information only machine readable rather than making the machine process human readable information. IKEA gets this and they do it the right way here.

Second, I love the prototyping/concept communication done in this video. Using low-tech looking demos to portray a high-tech solution just works – it highlights the value of the concept, not the glitz of the technology or device. (Also, it really seems to fit with Ikea's brand image, but that's a different topic).
Hooking up Whoosh and SQLalchemy (sawhoosh)
How to fix America's parking lot blight
IANAL, but I believe that prior art can still kill a patent. The patented stuff is still supposed to be the inventor's original work. (The patent office may not be terribly diligent about searching for prior art, and establishing prior art can still be a massively expensive pain in the ass... but that's another rant.)

What first-to-file certainly did change is what happens when two claimants try to file a patent on something that wasn't prior art. It used to be that the patent office looked through the inventors' records to try to establish who was the first to invent the non-public technology; now, it's just the one who was first with the patent office paperwork.
Kickstarter (the company) does a decent job of filtering out obviously scammy projects. At this point I think a human being still looks at each and every project as just a sanity check (I know they also offer suggestions on how best to structure your project, etc.).

The much larger gray area has been in cases where it's: "Hey contribute $100 and get this awesome gadget in a month!" that have failed to deliver anything.

Most of those cases have at least seemed to be good intentioned failures where the project owners didn't anticipate just how difficult it is to manufacture and ship products or they were just wildly naive in their estimates, but again it is impossible to tell.

To date, these haven't seemed to have made an appreciable dent in the amount of crowd sourced funding happening.
The problem is that a lot of people spouting "free market" demagoguery don't practice your definition. Rather, it is indeed "anything and everything they can get away with".

There is also strong correlation with people intent on telling other people how to live their lives. (Even and all the more so when this ends up through revelations and evidence being a "do as I say, not as I do" type of message.)

One of my problems with so-called "free marketeers", is that so many of them are outright hypocrites.

Sigh. Trending too far towards the political, here on HN. But people, including many technical people, need to look at, analyze, and take apart free market arguments and statements, to see what parts are true and/or work and what parts don't.

I myself favor broadly but fairly strictly defining spaces and rules within which private enterprise can compete relatively freely. But, private enterprise does not become the final arbiter of same.

That's what studies I recall seem to have indicated. Regulation works well in broad strokes. It falls down in micro-management. But you paint those strokes strongly, and you don't let the competitors step an inch over that line without consequences. (Even if, sometimes, the consequences are a re-evaluation and adjustment of the regulation. Sometimes, the times really do change.)

If you let private enterprise loose entirely, you end up enabling the eventual establishment of quasi-states -- perhaps to eventually become de facto or real states. Autocratic states, by the nature of their structure.

I'm not sure we really want, or are willing to concede to the inevitability of, a Gibsonian near-future. Yet.

As for the regulation. It should all be open. With the world an ever shrinking place, private actions simply are no longer isolated. When company X pollutes watershed Y, it's no longer just a matter of their bottom line. Even in resulting settlements, court procedures, and arbitration, non-disclosure should not be a legal option for them. Shine the light of day on these bad actors. And shine it on government failures that enabled them.

A bit idealistic. But, IMO, better than "all hail free markets".

P.S. If you think markets are free, try following jobs across national boundaries. There is no worldwide "free market" in labor. (Something a bit less obvious to the highly skilled than to the rest of the world labor force.)
I'm not sure it lends itself to such contrived examples. A more useful comparison would be the use of backbone to build an entire web app (a small one). Backbone has a number of components and it's not exactly like you can have a three-line diff of the two to explicate the merits of one of the other.

I'd look here: http://addyosmani.github.com/todomvc/

Check out the Backbone one and the jQuery one. They should basically be the same idea, suited to each of the two frameworks.

Also, remember that Backbone and jQuery are not mutually exclusive (quite the contrary -- Backbone actually requires jQuery/Zepto). So you're sort of comparing Tangerines and Oranges.
In the article it's made very clear they entrapped multiple people by faking text messages, that didn't seem to be a problem.
If you want to make web games, make web games. That's fine. Just don't be deluded that this is "working in tech". It is not.
The problem Backbone.js solves is primarily that of structure and organization. It's not about replacing jQuery, its about how you organize that code and have a clearer separation of interface, data, and logic.
It's entirely possible the submission was originally made with a better headline, and then mod-edited to match the article.
It does seem like scamming $8k for a board game points more to "crazy". Though I guess if you were serious about this you could come up with an assembly line for plausible-sounding small ticket projects, invent personas for each, and come up with some just-interesting-enough sample content to get it funded. I still vote crazy.
The blog post seems link bait-y in that the 'lessons learned from a failure' really is an existing company, with capital I presume, raising 80% of the funds - not a failure. Certainly BlankLabel could ante up the remaining 18k. In terms of their goal to gauge demand, possibly timing was off, so if you consider they raised 80% for a women's work shirt during the heat waves of the summer of '12, they should consider this product line as having a reasonably high probability for a return on investment. The product line in question would be suitable for spring, summer through fall.
Switching from Android to iOS After 2 Years
There's a difference between being questioned and police just asking for help.

Being questioned = they are asking about what you did

Asking for help = they are asking about what someone else did

If you are being questioned, you can and should demand a lawyer even if you have nothing to hide because at this point you are already a person of interest in their investigation.

If they are merely asking for help...just don't be stupid answering their questions. The police aren't there for you.
Oil is more scarce and useful than money, it's hard to see what would make extraction unprofitable. A carbon tax would mostly disincentive wasteful consumers. I wonder if anything could prevent exploitation of shale gas with a really low EROEI.
It doesn't have anything to do with XSS or SQLI, quite right. But in his intro he dismisses two-factor auth as some sort of advanced security technique when in reality I think two-factor auth is a quite simple way to dramatically improve security.
For any new reverse engineers in Hacker Newsland, another win32 PE classic is Ero Carrera's diagram from 2005: https://www.openrce.org/reference_library/files/reference/PE...
This is absolutely moronic advice. You need insurance against situations that have no top end cost. Health care cost potential is near unlimited. As a result, other insurable events, like car accidents, are also potentially unlimited because you could be paying someone's hospital bills.

In this instance, people aren't brainwashed. Some people are just stupid...
Actually, and that is my point entirely, luck isn't the word. I have shitty genetics (I think on both sides, for the last 2-3 generations my family has been overweight/obese). Heck, during my wife's pregnancy there were complications, and due to stress + bad food + no exercise I ballooned up 9 kilos (20 pounds) in about 2.5 months. If I don't take care of myself, I gain weight quite easily.

And not to try to be the naysayer, but the effect of muscle on calories burned at rest has been quite the myth floating around. Check the references at the bottom of http://www.lanimuelrath.com/blog/calories-burned-by-muscle-v... and you will see that 10 pounds of extra muscle will burn at most 60-70 more calories than fat at rest.

Apart from that, I agree, do weight training 3-5 days a week. move around, eat healthy. That should be enough to at least get you to the normal weight range.
I am not a qualified (knowledgeable in relevant disciplines, formally tested, fairly competent) engineer. I can:

1. Defer to the majority opinion of qualified engineers, if one exists.

2. Hold no opinion whatsoever.

3. Become a qualified engineer.

I am currently doing (1) because I believe a majority opinion exists and that opinion is "airplanes hit the WTC on 9/11". If that is not true, then I would accept evidence to the contrary (high statistical confidence, random sample, repeated by multiple sources).

I could do (2), which would be perfectly legitimate, but I do not feel it is necessary (I am not aware of any dispute among even a sizable minority--I define sizable here to be at least a third who either disagree or are uncertain).

In order for me to do (3), I would need to take a few years off work and study engineering full time. Even then, I may not have what it takes to become a qualified engineer. Unless you are willing to pay for this option, you can't fault me for it. I am not pretending to be an engineer.

We live in a world of finite possibilities. I am no more demanding that you should understand advanced mathematics (what I know most about) than you should demand I understand civil engineering and materials science. I would expect you to accept a consensus of mathematicians on such matters, just as I've accepted (what I believe to be) the consensus of engineers.

That's what I like to call living in the realities of an imperfect world.
Their discussion of that attack, from the paper itself:

If the attacker is allowed multiple authentication
attempts — iterating the extraction and test phases,
alternating between the two — then the protocol may
become insecure. The reason is that during an
authentication attempt the attacker sees the three
sequences k0; k1; k2 and could memorize one of them (30
symbols). He would then train ofﬂine on that sequence so
that at the next authentication attempt he would have a
1/3 chance in succeeding. If the attacker could memorize
all three sequences (90 symbols), he could ofﬂine
subject a trained user to all three sequences and
reliably determine which is the correct one and then
train himself on that sequence. He is then guaranteed
success at the next authentication trial.

We note that this attack is non-trivial to pull off
since it can be difﬁcult for a human attacker to
memorize an entire sequence at the speed the game is
played.

. . . which isn't all that reassuring, given that if I were trying to break in using this technique, I wouldn't be memorizing, I'd be recording.

But it sounds like the system is designed to only give an attacker one trial (notionally opening a trap door under his feet if he fails even once), and it does seem much more secure in that context.
Apple forced by judge to run newspaper ads stating Samsung does not copy iPad
The $25,000 PDF at Amazon
Edit: Forgot to say, very same PDF is for free on IDC website http://www.idc.com/MarketScape/download/IDC_MarketScape_Virtual_Tape_Library.pdf
Whoever decided it would be a good idea to make a guy without any engineering or computer science education and just 2 years of experience working at a soap company before joining the company the CEO of Microsoft needs to be fired too.
Entrapment isn't a complicated concept. This isn't entrapment because the defendant wasn't coerced into committing a crime; he was willing to commit the crime anyway. It's not illegal for an officer to ask you to commit a crime, it's only illegal if they give you no choice but to commit that crime.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
demo: http://youtu.be/K5OKaK3Ay8U

13th Lab raises $700,000 to build its ‘UI for reality’
http://gigaom.com/europe/13th-lab-raises-700000-to-build-its...
Plus one for the least geeky application, and the most marketable I've seen so far in this post.
I am not surprised at the renewed calls for Ballmer's head but from a technical perspective he's executing well. Which is to say the company's net revenue against sales is right in line as is their operational expense. Where he is failing though is in the whole 'vision' thing.

That would suggest to me that he needs a better CTO. The closest thing they have is Craig Mundie (yeah I know, you probably never heard of him and that is a problem).

If you take Apple as the exemplar, Steve Jobs was huge on vision but he really sucked operationally, because of that Tim Cook was the 'go to' guy who ran day to day operations.

You need that blend in a company, good manager, good vision. They are rarely in the same person. Combine that with a 'star' issue (which is to say its better if they both don't want to be the person getting all the credit) and the 'trust' issue, which is to say they both understand and respect the others job and allow them the last word on decisions in their space.

When Microsoft had Bill Gates as the 'vision' guy and Ballmer as the 'execution' guy it worked well. Prior to Bill's leaving day to day operations it seemed like none of the other CTO candidates could (or perhaps would) do the job.

My claim is that kicking Ballmer out would pull the company off the tracks financially and that would be bad. But adding someone who had a clue vision/direction wise and could push that agenda through the company, that would help them get back on their feet.
>If you think this is stupid and ridiculous, what exactly are you doing to save the Internet?

I'm holding my rock. It keeps internet-killers away.
How To Keep Git From Committing Changes to Web.Config
Nope it was just me being an idiot :)
Journalists do not understand the law very well...

In this case, the police hit up a bunch of people they suspected of being the dealer's customers and asked them if they wanted to buy more drugs. The callees who were arrested agreed to buy more drugs without persuasion. That's not entrapment.

Left out of the article, because they were not relevant to the opinion, is those people the police texted who chose not to buy drugs from the dealer being impersonated.
" I was socializing" is one of the most common excuse people use when they procrastinate, be it socializing with family, friends or like-minded people. As Ray says:

>> WHY THE HELL AREN’T YOU BUILDING YOUR PRODUCT AND TALKING TO CUSTOMERS?

When you have a startup in it's initial phase, it's like a baby. It requires your sole undivided attention. I've seen way too many startups die because the founders spent more time trying to make their product popular rather than work on a good product first.

As a hacker, I completely understand what Ray means in pt #10. There are times when all I want is to code straight out, no distractions, no relaxation, heck, no contact with the outside world. It's just a hacker thing. :)

Work-Life balance is important, but sometimes(esp. when you are a core member of a startup team), my work is my life! :)

Well written Ray, and best of luck with Wigwamm! :)
Ha, I feel the same way about Dark Souls. Effing love that game, but it's almost too stressful to play.
Re the low profile: regularly paying a large media group for ad space in exchange for no bad publicity would make sense to these companies. Large groups buy unprofitable newspapers for similar reasons.
I don't like it, and we don't use it at Fog Creek, but, yes, it's VERY heavily used on piles of projects I know. It's not as efficient or flexible as NHibernate, but it's far easier and vastly better integrated into Visual Studio, making it a bit of a no-brainer for simple persistence needs.
Education is a competitive sport. You don't let Olympic sprinters waste time playing basketball, or they won't win any medals. If kids waste time learning about stuff that's not on the exam, they won't get the marks they deserve, and some other kid will get their place in university.
It's obvious Apple isn't the only offender, but they are a big and, lately, very active one.

I fault them for their actions because I think what they're doing negatively affects a large number of people. It being legal and them being able to make money because of what they're doing doesn't make it okay.

To be clear: I will say the same thing about any company using using frivolous patents to suppress competition. It is a flawed system, and the people in the best position to oppose the system are the people in charge of large tech companies. Apple is not doing the best thing possible within a flawed system, and they are not trying to change the state of affairs. They are using their patent portfolio aggressively to try to suppress competition, and I think that's a problem.
*"...he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner ... But after their arrival, Hinton's text messages on Lee's iPhone were no longer private"

I wonder if this argument still applies if you have a lock code on your phone. Yes, my phone may have been stolen or lost or left on a desk, but if no one can get into it then it's not public. Could an officer request you unlock your phone and then argue that the contents of your phone are not private?
Don't Let ATT Get Away With Bogus SMS Charges
Naw, I think they just have cheap humans going through it. No big algorithms there. :)
I find that in this case, conscious concentration can actually make performance of the password sequence more difficult for me.

Also, I get into a stateful kind of memory where if I have to produce a password I normally produce at home while I'm at work, I produce the wrong password.
And this is why movements fail, because everyone wants to add their own agenda.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that privacy is not a worthwhile concern, but this movement seems to be about protecting the Internet from government abuse, not about privacy practices of private companies. Sure, it could be about both, but that would dilute the message and create a handicap, especially if it means having to avoid some of the primary methods of communication online.
This is how smart criminals launder money?
I understand your question, and in many ways you're correct; that said, let's say you have stored XSS in some obscure parameter of your web application.

One way to exploit the Victim via XSS would be to convince them to browse to the compromised section of the site. Sometimes, that's as simple as getting them to click on a malformed URL -- basically, the same vector as getting them to click on your CSRF-ized link, anyway.

Many applications, however, don't have direct URLs to certain areas of the app. It could be hidden by Javascript/AJAX population, or written in a language/framework that doesn't support that kind of direct linking.

Therefore, if some kind of sensitive function is easily owned by CSRF (say, account.php?sendto=Eve), but the XSS is stored someplace obscure that might not be available via public URL (browse to Accounts -> Details -> My Bio, which populates dynamically), the higher threat severity would be the CSRF.

Sorry this turned kind of long, but I deal with a lot of webapp security issues on a day-to-day basis and feel relatively qualified to answer this one in some depth :)