skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why bother paying at all? This is basically the same as just walking straight out the store with your goods. A guard won't accept a receipt that says your flat screen tv only cost 49p.
Tesco frequently has attendants monitoring the self service checkouts; if someone sees that your items are going through for £0.01 (the prices are displayed on the monitoring screen that the attendant can see) you're probably going to have a bad time (banned from the store at the very least).

Not worth it...
Next Generation Web Framework
> pledged to do everything to ensure the country's core values were not undermined.

Is this not a little dangerous surely if we take this over to USA where gun ownership is part of their core values?
I didn't flag it, but I remember reading about it some time ago. Probably here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4005239
Sendy - Send Newsletters via Amazon SES
Show HN: Compose Together - Real Time Jam Sessions
Because they have to. The rest of you have been busy voting the government more and more power which means google has to lobby to keep their competitors from using that power to kill them. The only way to reduce the power of lobbyists is to reduce the power of the government. I feel like I'm the only one who sees that truth.
Halfway through the two-year program, Mayer herself would lead the group on a summer trip to visit international Google outposts. (I accompanied the trip in 2007; we went to Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, and Tel Aviv. This year, one of the cities included Jakarta.) It would be a bonding experience for each year’s group of APMs — bonding with each other and to Mayer.

Why do I get the feeling that the author is referring to newly hatched Velociraptors rather than human beings?

It's not like this "bonding" will mean they recognise Mayer as their den mother for life or something.
If you have 0.5MB data to send right now, you could queue it all in your application layer, then you could still decide to cancel it or schedule your sends based on your own priorities.

I agree that applications that care about this don't use TCP, but one of the primary reasons for this is exactly this problem: that you don't get to send at the edge of the TCP window. There are other reasons, of course, each of which is fixable (and should be fixed!)
Every time I've seen a good exec move from a company, over the next 6 months you see people follow them. Every. Single. Time.

To say that it is ridiculous for this to happen to Marissa is in my books the same as saying that she is not a good executive. People will follow her. The only question is who, and what their impact will be.
Hacker convention brings out top NSA spy
Would love to hear other folks opinions/examples of Poka Yoke in Software.
While it's cool to reverse engineer stuff like this and talk about the vulnerability, the final part of the blog post indicates that the person intends to 'test it'. This is just a 'modern' equivalent of the old scam of removing price labels (remember those) from cheap items and sticking them on expensive ones. That was commonplace enough that the labels themselves were made in multiple parts so that removing them was messy.

'Testing it' is a bad idea on two fronts: (a) it's fraud and (b) he's actually gone and told everyone he's going to do it.

If the supermarkets were losing a lot of money on this then I'd imagine they'd move to a more secure barcoding scheme.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the 'red' number was related to the weight of the item as this would be needed for the self-checkout tills.
In response to a Swedish economist noting that there was no poverty in Scandinavia, Milton Friedman once said that in America there was no poverty among Scandinavians either.

Probably apocryphal, but it does draw attention to the role that cultural differences play in what sort of rules you can implement in organizing a society.
I wrote this 4 months ago, but feel as strong as ever about ThoughtWorks, its culture and its people. I would highly recommend you consider ThoughtWorks, if you finally want to feel good about going to "work".
> It doesn't seem like you are trying to discuss this in good faith. Read my post again, I was pretty clear that privacy matters in some cases, but that I do not think it is the common case.

I am actually trying to discuss in good faith, but you're last sentence in your post is:

> "You get zero emails about leaking it."

That's what I dispute. If information would have leaked on that project I'd have had a very angry email from my customer in the inbox. Probably rather a written letter in the letterbox ;)

I guess basically we're both in agreement. If you go back an re-read my statements, I do agree with you that double opt in is

a) not the golden end of it all and the one-size-fits-all approach won't work
b) and legally not required in some cases (though we differ on how many cases there are)

However, I argue that im my experience most projects will end up with double opt in because

a) they're legally required
b) or they might be legally required to do so in the future (like when they plan to send advertisement emails)
c) they have risk-averse stakeholders that want every anchor they can have in a (potential, probably imaginary) lawsuit that some bone-headed user might trigger.

In any case you're kinda missing my original point: The starting point of the discussion was not that you're required to have a privacy protecting signup scheme. My only point is that it's possible to have one. If you don't need one, that's fine with me.
This way when you scan the item, it will be identified as the product you are purchasing. Supermarkets frequently discount items by an extra order of magnitude by accident and if you were caught doing it this way they may not immediately think you're scamming them.
tldr: Marissa Mayer is strongly connected to lots of extremely smart people. Wired needs clicks, so they call this a "Secret Weapon." Hardly.
Good call. I would say that in public perception, since there is an international jihad underway (again, narratively speaking) it is easy to label the tubes bombings as non-domestic. If there was the perception of a global right-wing/fascist war on western society underway then perhaps the Norwegian massacre would have been seen differently.

Any Brit here caring to comment on British public perception of the tubes bombing? Would you say it's considered domestic terrorism in Britain? Please chime in.

EDIT: in any case, while this IS an interesting discussion (about the tubes), British reaction to terrorism does not reflect on the original comparison and points, so far anyway. Just want to mark different discussions and tangents as different.
> "A lot of them already hijack port 80 and inject random junk in there..."

That's a pretty bold claim. Other than free wifi at hotels, I've never seen an ISP use transparent proxying to intercept pages and serve ads.

Do you have any examples?
You are definitely right, and while we've thought through several threat models blackhat marketers are endlessly creative. Might make for a good blog post depending on what we learn
Onebip Releases Single-Click Purchasing Feature
That's a completly bogus excuse. The question wasn't why you're releasing it publicly, but why you haven't made any attempt to contact the company beforehand, which you seem to have had a year to do.

Edit: The only reasons I can think of are laziness or just plain not giving a shit about responsible disclosure.
> You can't seriously argue that the consequences of creating+controlling a software patent (while advocating against software patents) are always net negative

I actually don't argue against "all software patents." Truly novel work should be patented. But Software patents should be explicitly enumerated, their definition of "obviousness" refined for the field, and their duration shorted substantially (5 years?).

For example, the software and hardware that went into FingerWork's TouchStream keyboards (which Apple bought, btw) was excellent, novel work. They advanced the state of the art as they produced a product, and they deserved to be rewarded for that risk and innovation.

The problem is not the existence of patents. The problem is the lack of a clear definition for software patents and the abuse this void is suffering.

And I was specifically arguing against the idea that Bill Gates is an existence proof for abusing society for personal gain being justified by potential future good. Not only is that outcome rare, but Bill Gates has been demonized far more than his personal actions deserve.
If people accept it without complaining, it works exactly as intended.

Let's not assume the people implementing these measures are complete morons. There's power to be gained and money to be made from a submissive, unquestioning people.
System and method for preventing unauthorized access to electronic data
Don't discount it to £0.01, that is just stupid. The obvious scam here is to take high value items and mark them down dramatically. For example, marking a £200 phone down to £20.

Not that I approve of this...
We need a Zed-P-M!
>Plus it helps get rid of the "internet fuckwads"

Hahaha. No.

Take a single look at Facebook, and you'll be proven wrong. The amount of
utter retardation people post under their real names is both astonishing and
depressing.

I've seen the reaction of another community where the "overlords" had the
brilliant idea to force real names for exactly this reason. It was, by at
least two orders of magnitude, the biggest shitstorm in the history of World
of Warcraft, and that's saying something.

(In all fairness, Blizzard realized what a gigantically fucking stupid idea
that was and retracted the announcement pretty quickly.)

I hope that this will deal a decisive blow to Youtube as a platform. The
monopoly it enjoys in its segment is unhealthy and needs to go away.
The article mentions Onity - what about other companies?
I don't understand what the difference is between Referly and linkshare.com, which already has thousands of premium affiliates and a solid api. Could someone enlighten me?
So they can save those $100,000 per year after 100 years. Good luck with that.
Do you think all the locks are going to be fixed by Monday?
Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games
Yeah, I thought I had seen it. I reposted it as more of an intellectual exercise. Note that I do not have my tinfoil hat on, the whole thing is pretty meta.
More intro to K&R's ANSI C
Patent US6857067 is the "'067" patent that EA, Notch and a whole lot of other people are being sued over.

See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276691

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/minecraft-developer-su...
Queens Has No Intention of Being Left Out of Tech Boom
There are various reasons why no one has chosen to implement that standard. My personal discomfort is that it basically punts on the security portion and leaves most of the scary stuff entirely at the discretion of the implementor. For that reason alone I personally think the spec is a non-starter.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the 'red' number was related to the weight of the item as this would be needed for the self-checkout tills.

The original barcode (which is still present as part of the discounted code) should allow the tills to look up the weight.
'Testing it' is a bad idea on two fronts: (a) it's fraud and (b) he's actually gone and told everyone he's going to do it.

I was just going to chime in a with a similar comment.

I'd love to know if a friendly Tesco store manager would get in trouble for helping to run an experiment with this though. If head office got wind - or were informed by the manager - I'd presume they'd either go mad and threaten/fire the manage in question, or congratulate them. I couldn't predict it either way.
This is great stuff!!! It truly is an exciting time to be working in news/media.

It is absolutely the case that mixing, mashing, hacking and building are a means-of-expression as vital to news/media as words and images.

A key ingredient in our sauce over here at Vox Media (SB Nation, The Verge and soon Polygon) is a break with the old pattern where technology and development teams are considered (at the organization and conceptual level) to be utilities or tool providers for editorial and business initiatives.

Rather, we embrace what internet native reporting and story telling require: an organization and mindset where editorial, business initiatives and technology are intertwined together like some kind of triple helix.

This sounds like business speak but what it really is a tough challenge - one that is very exciting and one that is creating some pretty great opportunities for creative people and builders.

The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews initiative looks like a great a way to get involved and I very much look forward to the ideas and things this fellowship program produces.

Cheers!
Hacker News Podcast is back
Am I crazy or is software engineer not listed? I guess using that at all goes against your "standard"? Hmm.
Nice work! Thanks for releasing it!

Direct link to samples:

http://gojs.net/latest/samples/index.html
Well, there's Pixel32, which has been in development for... years! (http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/)

As for proprietary Linux software, I'm a delighted user of SoftMaker Office, Corel WordPerfect, NoteCase Pro, Realsoft 3D... All superb software; and why shouldn't the authors be recompensed for their efforts? (OK, excluding WordPerfect ;-)

Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean unfriendly...
>That's what I dispute.

Because you are taking it out of the context of the implicit "for a typical web app" that had already been established in the previous post.

>I do agree with you that double opt in is

You are still arguing a false dichotomy of "double opt in" vs "not double opt in". Double opt is entirely irrelevant. The only time I mentioned it was pointing out that it is not in any way a legal requirement.

>My only point is that it's possible to have one

Nobody said it wasn't possible. People said it is a huge usability flaw.
If you really want to test it, surely raising the price by 1p is the best way? That way, you get an answer and you aren't stealing anything.
Related to this: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/youtube-commenters/
s/stuff/staff/ of course :)
Most people (maybe 85% or more that I've met) don't understand the basis of the social contract. You are given two choices, you vote for one, and that's the extent of your control over your situation.
Everything I'm releasing is specific to Onity. I can't speak to the security of any of the others, as I haven't looked at them yet, but I'm planning on doing so in the near future. Next up is most likely Ving, though Timelox is a really clever system, so that could be fun.
Comcast has disabled all DNS hijacking, and has since they implemented their DNSSEC validating servers.
He could pay a pound extra to see if his algorithm is correct...
I'm sure they'll update http://hacknjill.com/ for the next one in January. I had an amazing time there building Flare!
I completely agree with your point, also made in the article: It would be not be surprising if some of these baccalaureate APMs wind up at Yahoo.

As the article pointed out, however, It’s not surprising that a high percentage of APMs go elsewhere. APMs are chosen for their ambition and independence. Those traits are often at odds with working at a big company

A successful executive at any organization could be expected to bring along X number of of loyal reports if they move laterally. It seems likely though that the especially ambitious and independent individuals discussed would be less likely to do so.
This could be compounded by the reported personal difficulty some individuals had while working with her (Douglas Edwards' book http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-Employee/...).

In all, the headline sensationalized the situation: she developed an employee incubator program at Google and some of the graduates will probably end up at Yahoo.

Edit:spacing
In California, where most fuel-efficient/electric cars are sold, gas ranges between $3.50-$4.00/gallon (or above $4.00 during periods of "high demand"). Gas in the areas targeted by Tesla (i.e., Beverly Hills) starts at $4.25 and goes up from there.

Also, very few cars on the road anywhere in the U.S. get close to 30mpg, excepting hybrids and 2012 or 2011 versions of some (but not all, or even most) smaller sedans. The most popular models of the most popular sedans of the last decade, i.e., the Camry, Accord, and Civic, do not get 30mpg--they tend average around 22-25mpg in real-world conditions. MPG is even worse among the luxury cars that compete with Tesla.

Consequently, the gas cost savings experienced by Tesla owners would be significantly greater than $1,000/year.
The mention of an iPhone suggests a more elaborate version of the old "sticker" scam.

With a suitable smartphone app you could dynamically generate the appropriate barcode on screen, with a set discount (say, 50%). Then just hold your phone over the actual barcode as you scan each item.

This should be relatively hard to spot for any cashier watching, and the weights and stock etc. would all match up.

Of course the CCTV cameras are likely to see you and they're likely to spot what's going on soon enough to cross reference before the footage is wiped.
Your note is not a waste of time at all, but a concise summary of why materialist determinism (really, 17th century physics wannabes) needs challenging.

As someone wise once said, If free will is an illusion, to whom is it so?
I wonder how Googlers who weren't selected as APMs feel about having to compete with these pre-designated golden boy and -girl elites?

I also wonder whether many APMs display any sense of clubby entitlement? Probably not many of them do, but in any group like that there are usually a few here and there.
What percentage does Referly take per payout?
Why should they?

HTML5 apps were Steves original vision. Add to homescreen exist because that was supposed to be the way to deliver new apps to users on smart phones.

Why should Apple destroy that? To protect their 30% cut from a store that doesn't bring in a profit? For heavens sake why?

Apple makes money when you buy an Apple product. They want to make it so that you want to buy more Apple products, not fewer. If removing the capability to add HTML5 apps to the home screen causes a loss of just one Apple product sale, it is not going to happen.
In order so that they could do ... what, exactly? It doesn't sound like there's any mitigation that they could perform. At the very least, the guts of every lock has to be replaced. Given that, the rational, profit-maximizing thing for them to do is to stonewall, misdirect, bring out the lawyers, shoot the messenger, and generally continue to sell as many flawed locks as possible. We've all seen vendors do that in the past when faced with intractable, deep-seated defects in a product, so it wouldn't be unexpected or unreasonable to assume.

All the notification would be is a courtesy, allowing them time to start designing and marketing a new product, instead of having the market get handed to their competitors when hotels suddenly have to start replacing their locks with less-flawed ones. And I'm not sure a company that produced a flawed products deserves that.
Free Online Word Processor [WordPad Online]
> I've had friends consider me crazy for complaining - way after the time, I hasten to add - that I'd had a small deodorant can taken off me in airport security, which I'd then had to purchase in the duty free shop.

No one believes your deodorant would take down a plane. It's just that no one wants to pay to back that belief up.
If someone can afford an electric car, especially a Tesla, they will probably just fly first-class to their destination, where they will undoubtedly have a second electric car waiting for them.

So my estimate would be about 1-2 hours.
A Tesco store manager has a lot of responsibility and is likely a well-paid, long-running member of staff. If they investigated something like this then I'd be surprised if head office looked upon it negatively.
Yes. Now find every place that can be slow in some cases and do the same thing.

Note: just doing this in your app isn't enough, because you run in a framework and on a virtual server, and things like memory usage affect the speed of these components.
A VP at SAP was accused of swapping barcodes on lego sets recently and charged with 4 counts of felony burglary [1]

[1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/VP-of-Palo-Altos-SAP-Ar...
Just as a note, the vast majority of schools in the US still don't have metal detectors despite incidents like Columbine. Talk about that sort of security theater, and imposing the costs on the businesses as the government wouldn't pay for it themselves, seems overblown to me. All that would happen is that the targets would shift to other, less protected, sites: malls, shops, restaurants. It would be a neverending security escalation, and an enormous financial drain directly on the businesses (not on the fed or the states) that they would likely lobby, effectively, against.
Is the obvious fix to make the programming port available only from the inside of the room? That's where the screws for physical bolt locks go.

And you can still have a DC power port on the outside in case of a powered-down door, just no programming access.

Why have they not done it that way???
Standard bodies exist to standardlize already existing technologies so others can implement them.

And btw did you miss the experiment part of all the non-standard APIs? About the only thing that wasn't was the manifest (which is JSON) and the icons.
So, he's swapping real bar codes with fake bar codes? I would not recommend publicly disclosing that you'll be defrauding a store. It's a lot more common than you'd think and there was even a Silicon Valley exec who recently got caught doing this: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/incredibly-wealt...
Amazon career choice program
Yes. Now if you have a problem and the email isn't sent, you have still told the user it has been.

Also, you have to fix this problem every place else that you touch the user database, such as your signup process. There are normally many places you would be affected by the user database, because often the service you provide is slightly different for each user.
Not cool, dude. Not cool at all. The company might be lazy and ignorant, but it doesn't mean they won't move when faced with a lingering public disclosure. You must give them a chance. What you are planning to do is egoistic, it serves your own interests, and it does that at the expense of people staying in the hotels. How is this even remotely ethical?
Was it necessary to wear a t-shirt that reads "It's fun to use learning for evil!" in the photo shoot for a Forbes spread? This doesn't help the negative perception of the word "hacker". :-/

All due respect to the work you're doing – I'm a former member of the security industry myself (worked on the IPS engine at TippingPoint).
I agree that it's probably futile, but the white-hat thing to do is give them notice. If they say they will not fix it, or ignore you, then you release the info.

If they say they're working on it, you give them a reasonable timeframe for that, and then release it.

That way, you've done everything 'properly', and nobody can say otherwise. With the path you're on, everyone is going to blame you instead of them, even though they're at fault.

Please consider doing this the proper way, even though we both know it's most likely futile.
Check out all the awesome stuff that got built here: https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/hackn-jill/hacks
I don't find Benjamin's posts as user-blaming, per se, but I definitely don't feel he adds anything to the conversation besides "I got to try an app before you and here's how it doesn't fit my iPad-only blogger lifestyle and therefore won't fit into yours. Have I namedropped one of my friends yet?" That he feels his blog is Daring Fireball subscription-worthy put me (and how he updated his layout to look very similar to Gruber's), a previously everyday reader, off to reading it even in its free form.