skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fundamentally, there is no need for a lot of these ideas to be complicated. There is no reason we couldn't have home server/VPN software that was almost entirely plug-and-play for non-technical consumers, and which was still built on robust and well-understood technologies so the geeks could easily support it.

I believe the main reason we don't have that already is that the cloud computing PR machine stole the developer mindshare first. The kind of people who might have started companies to cater to the market I described above have instead started companies based on cloud technologies.

But there is no technical reason I shouldn't be able to run a simple installer on any home computer that sets up, say, a simple mail store and an IMAP server so all my devices can connect to it. There is no reason we couldn't have GUIs no more complicated than today's e-mail or calendar or IM software to configure fetching your mail or planning events and sharing invitations with friends/colleagues. There's no reason, aside from obnoxious DRM schemes perhaps, that we couldn't have a one-click-installed home media server that can act as a hub for your music/video/streaming pay-per-view/whatever content.

The technology to do all of these things is basically already there, it's just too often the case that it only runs on one OS, or requires messing around with a command line and text configuration files to set it up, or requires figuring out an absurd amount of technical details from 57,249 half-complete README files and three-year-old HOWTOs.

I'm actually a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't fought back against the on-line/cloud push, where it has been utterly destroyed by the likes of Google and shows no signs of resurrecting itself any time soon, with a comprehensive bring-your-own-cloud campaign that emphasized things like security, flexibility and reliability where the cloud hasn't exactly lived up to its own hype. They already had the required dominance on the desktop and in the business software market, and I can't help thinking that if they had tried to out-Blackberry a severely weakened RIM by offering a solid business product range instead of launching one underwhelming consumer phone after another, the mobile device market would look very different today. And once MS had the brand and credibility at business level, it would have the experience to attack consumer space from a position of strength, and the warchest needed to acquire a few key on-line/mobile players to help that move. But what do I know? I'm sure Windows 8 and the Surface (whatever that brand means this week) will be much more successful. ;-)
Pretty sure this constitutes fraud. Plus doubt the cheque processing is still carried out as described in the story- doubt any bank today would credit the customer account based on a bogus cheque that couldn't be validated. Surprised this was published in the ft as sounds like an urban myth.
He means it looks like a total rip-off of some fruit company
I'm guessing that it refers to the similarity to the iOS keyboard look and feel.
Best Buy founder offers to take company private at a premium
...not to mention the automatic typesetting of the handwritten diff. eq.
Fair enough. Though that's exactly what http://modernizr.com/ provides, no?

I realize nobody likes adding extra JS libraries, but if your only trying to access these properties from JS to begin with it doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Keto diets are faster than normal diets and prevent muscle distrophy. He's not following a keto diet.

Note that both keto diets and starvation mode diets cause cardiovascular stress (though for keto diets, this is only an issue if you have other risk conditions for cardiovascular disease, such as diabetes).
When are we going to have these same feelings towards open source licenses? Many people in this community have no problems using the current laws to enforce the GNU, which takes away just as many civil liberties.
Stripe is a great service, but I get the feeling their PR company or marketing department promotes extensively here (Makes sense since its the target audience).
Then perhaps piracy is an indicator that the pricing is considered too high, above the threshold at which a potential customer decides to either not buy it or pirate it.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.
Yahoo Sued Over Password Leak
Technology for sharing data does not care what data gets shared and has no way of doing so. Positing that nobody would shut down a service that is only used for legal sharing is therefore a fairly pointless exercise. Especially since definitions of legality vary so widely.
Ok.. cool argument.

Quick question: are you employed as a software developer? Can you give me a link to your product? I could use some free software.

--

Music is protected by copyright.. just like your software. So if you think musicians don't have a right to copyright, your software doesn't have a right to it either.
I think the touch input is simply much less practical for certain repetitive tasks than a mouse and keyboard, due to the ergonomics. For text editing, lifting your arms from the keyboard area of the screen, or from a Bluetooth keyboard, to scroll the page, select a tool, insert the cursor, select some content, etc. is much less efficient than reaching sideways for a mouse and scrolling its wheel or clicking its buttons, with only subtle movements needed to position the cursor while you rest your hand on the mouse. It is both tiring and tedious to perform certain tasks without a mouse, and until eyeball tracking is workable, you're still going to want a mouse and keyboard device accessible.
Why the narrow, legalistic view? If this band "MGMT" is a business, then they should compete in the marketplace, just like buggy whip manufacturers did in 1915, or radio tube manufacturers did in 1960, or ...

If technology renders something unnecessary, we should let the firms making the unnecessary product(s) disappear, rather than totally distorting markets, changing existing laws and reducing civil liberties to keep the markets-as-they-currently-exist around.

The only answer to that is to claim something more than "just a business" about making music or movies (or whatever "Intellectual Property" notion you want to push). At that point, you've departed from treating things legalistically. You have to start allowing for philosophical considerations.
> If a SNES game, for perfect emulation, requires higher than per-line synchronization, it was not properly written

I agree, and there were several such games released for the SNES. Would you rather those poorly written games never be playable under emulation? Because until now, they weren't playable. And now they are on moderate PC desktops. And personally, I don't think the extra emulator overhead will matter in 20 years when our cell phones have ten times the power needed for it.
How do you convince management to spend on fast computers?
I have friends who works on a billion dollar video game franchise (as in it's a popular game). They work with terabytes of assets and a large code base.

But, their CTO gets them relatively crappy computers. 4 cores, 8gig, 250gig HD (not SSD). He even wanted to get them 20inch monitors but was able to be convinced to get 24inch.

Every time they build minutes of productivity are lost to waiting. The longer they wait the more likely they are to get distracted browsing the internet.

Assume they get paid $120k a year (low). $120k a year is $1 a minute. Assume they'll use their machine during 1 project (~2years) That means from one POV for every $1k spent on a machine it only has to save 10 minutes a week or 2 minutes a day to save $1000.

How do you convince management to spend on machines?
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I hope you do quote me on that...I don't believe you can steal an idea or a design either. In fact, I don't believe that anything that is not both physical and finite can be assigned ownership.
This right here should should be the end of any bogus attempts to make an equivalence between Apple and Microsoft on one side and Google/Motorola, Samsung, HTC, etc. on the other.

Yes, both sides are buying up patents and suing each other, but one side is on offence and the other is on defence. There's no better illustration of that than Rockstar.

Tactically, making a separate Rockstar was a clever move. It evaded the licensing commitments made after the Nortel auction and opens up a new front that the Android world (except Sony) has to defend. But here's the thing... even if that is all Apple and Microsoft care about, it doesn't end there. Rockstar is a free-standing patent troll with a mandate to attack anything and everything but its creators.

Suppose someone wants to do something with Open WebOS. That would probably fall apart once Rockstar came calling. Suppose Jolla actually gets somewhere with Meego. They'd better not plan on entering the US market unless they have a plan for Rockstar. Carriers and ISPs probably need to think twice about buying telecom equipment from companies other than Ericsson. After all, it's unlikely that Huawei (#1 telecom equipment vendor in the world) and ZTE (#3 telecom equipment vendor) are in Rockstar's good books. And so on.

Creating the Rockstar patent troll is easily the worst move so far in the smartphone patent wars. The companies behind it no longer have any claim to being victims of anyone. They are unequivocally the aggressors and we should all treat them as such.
> Illegal and immoral are not the same thing.

Yes. Some of use have no choice but to pirate (why? Our credit cards are not good for international transactions.)

I buy multiple apps every week from Mac/iOS App Store, and would like to do so for other apps/books/... that are not available at Apple's stores, but I can't. So, I used demonoid and am now very sad that it's closed. Now I have to resort to googling 'warez [some app]' and spend hours trying to find a working link... :(
They make models of the software before writing any code, and a lot of the code can be generated from the models. There's a guarantee that if the model is correct so is the code. Or, you don't have to check that your hand-written C actually matches the system you were building.
Scientists were making web pages when you was in diapers, kid. I was there, working at Rockwell in '94.
Day 3 of Prolog
Wak, Tanam Sawit Kok Sampai Ke Bibir Sungai?
> Also, from desktop snapshot, in task manager it showed 4 CPUs, with 3 of them at almost 100%

The Ars Technica image guy made that screenshot. It wasn't from running my emulator, which is strictly single-core (for a whole host of reasons I won't get into.)

Your guess is as good as mine why he chose that screenshot, I didn't know about it until after the article was published.
Plenty of M&A lawyers bill $1000/hour. Hell, Big 4 accountants who handle M&A bill $1000/hour and get away with it.

You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.
> It takes all of 10 minutes to setup a site/tracker like Demonoid.

"10 minutes" to set up the site and half a decade of fostering, seeding trust and a community of people who laboriously upload and seed content, and then five years of fighting ISPs, world politics and DDoS attacks to stay running.
It might be trivial to charge, but storing credit card details and remaining PCI compliant is a nightmare for businesses, especially at scale. Trust me -- getting audited and fined because you're not PCI complaint is much more expensive than giving the burden to another company like Stripe. Plus, Stripe is great because they don't hold your customers' data hostage.
Plenty of people. Just to name a few in the tech field:

Hacker Newsletter

Javascript Weekly

HTML5 Weekly

Betalist

Startup Weekly
Except losing revenue, potential and real, is not a crime.
If 1% of your revenue is worth not spending a few hours to figure out BS PCI stuff I suggest you rethink your priorities or you're doing really low volume where 1% is like $5.
... wll eventually drive the price of music and movie down to $0.

Yes, yes, I went to college, I know how free-market capitalism works. In a competitive marketplace, the price of a good should end up at its marginal cost of production. Technology has changed this cost from $19.99 (or whatever) to some fraction of a cent.

Ordinarily, we applaud this sort of thing. Laptop computers cost $300, and have more computing capability than a multi-million dollar mainframe did 20 years ago.

A decent car runs about $12,000, and gets mileage and performance that would stun consumers in 1950.

Why must we as a society treat movies and music differently? To do so distorts markets, and takes away civil liberties.
I deposited a check at an ATM recently and it was rejected (by the ATM itself) because it was not endorsed. It wasn't and I seriously doubt this is anything more than a check for some ink on the back in the endorse-here area.

The ATM then tried to return the check to me, but there was some kind of paper feed error and I never saw it again.
This is how it goes... you call Chase Paymentech and sign an app and 24 hours later you have an account. WOW, tough!
If they hadn't kickstarted the process, how long would it have taken for the removal not to be premature? Often these things have to be done before their time in order for their time to come at all.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're making so if you could clarify that would be helpful, but if I assume that by "we should let the firms making the unnecessary product(s) disappear" you mean: record labels provide no value... then my response is as follows:

Record labels provide a lot of value, they provide the funding to produce albums, to go on tours, they provide the marketing experience and reach to take a band from small to big. Labels don't just take a chunk and provide no value, otherwise why would anyone sign? Labels provide a lot of value: value that (apparently) nobody on the internet understands.

Justin Bieber is a great example, he was a dumb kid on Youtube singing songs and had a small fanbase, he could have continued alone to make songs and maybe sell them on Bandcamp and maybe make a few thousand $, instead he chose to sign with a label and today is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. He is a global brand. Would Justin Bieber be worth $xxx,xxx,xxx today if he stuck it alone? Has any independent musician ever done that before? The value of labels is clear.

People don't need labels now to build a following, that much is true, but that doesn't mean labels should not expect the same protections that other business types get. If a label has a product they should have reasonable expectations of control over that product, this includes making it illegal to steal that product.
I currently use FastSpring to handle purchases of my software. What's the advantage to using Stripe instead of FastSpring?
The upper echelon of artists, such as Rihanna, is not where the losses would appear. This is a bit like looking at the CEO seats at Fortune 500 companies and declaring that the job market is as strong as ever because all those guys seem to be doing just fine.

Here's a great piece by David Lowery, of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame, on how the Internet is impacting the music business: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-...
>But what do we do when WE are the problem?

Find something outside yourself to focus on. Some quotes:

>The more I reflect on this question, the more convinced I am that man's fundamental purpose is to achieve; in other words, the striving toward goals is an end in itself.
... Viewed in that light, it would seem that striving itself - the constant working toward goals - is man's real purpose.

- - Robert J Ringer, How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization

>In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

- - fortune-cookie, no attribution

>The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

- - William Cowper

>To be of use in the world is the only way to be happy.

- - Hans Christian Anderson

>We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

- - Charles Kingsley

And Eliezer's post on how having "Something to Protect" gives meaning to life, http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/

Something to protect is the most significant from your comment's view, fear of risk to your "something" is the strongest driver around.
I was in a similar position with my ex -- although I think I used my start up as an escape putting more time into it than I would have otherwise. Then again, I could just have an addictive personality and it might not have made a blind bit of difference.

Either way, dwelling negatively on the past does not help as you cannot change it. I don't believe I would have come to the same conclusions if I had not experienced it first hand. Remember: work smarter, harder not longer!
How is that in any way related to this conversation?
I hope it will act as a gateway/threshold, now she can use her arms it might activate changes/growth in her upper body.
> MGMT comes to mind as a band who wanted to release their album (Congratulations) for free download but the studio or producer or whoever wouldn't let them.

That's because they sold "their" music.

The fact that you can't give away something after you sell it doesn't imply that you can't give something away that you still own.

> There's a lot of people that have their fingers in the pie.

Only if you sell them the pie.
They ripped off Apple's significantly contrasting, virtually elevated, rounded-corner button invention.</sarcasm>
> I don't even think there needs to be evidence to justify the point, because it's common sense

That's the problem. You're stuck thinking that a download == a lost sale, which is probably what supports the figures you gave. I'm pretty sure if I go download a thousand songs off of what.cd right now, I'm not draining a thousand dollars out of the music industry. In fact, I'm not draining a cent out of it.

A huge percentage of pirates not only had no intention on purchasing, but no money to purchase with. Not that they're necessarily entitled to the music, but the money you want to pretend is being lost just doesn't exist. What use is telling these people not to be so "selfish"? How is that a solution?

Piracy is a systemic problem due to copyright's flaws, not the other way around. You didn't provide a useful solution for any of this.

> No, downloading a song that is priced at $3,000,000 isn't worse than downloading a song priced at $1, but that doesn't make either of them right? I'm not sure I entirely understand the point you're trying to make here.

I was making the point that the author of some creative content should not be able to set all of the terms of their creation, including what they perceive as damages. (This is exactly what "fair use" is.)
New ATMs, that don't use envelopes, certainly scan the deposit.
Me too! When @supports was proposed I made sure to propose a JS API for the same functionality. David Baron liked the idea and it's now (mostly) in the spec: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-conditional/#window-api

Right after @supports landed I got a bug filed for supportsCSS() https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779917 and a few days later an initial patch landed. So I think we're all set here.

Also on browser support: Opera already has an implementation in progress of @supports; we haven't seen patches yet from WebKit but there is definitely interest.
Ask HN: N Startups to watch for?
I'm just curious which startup/products do you think we should have in our watch list? There are so many cool things built every day, and we don't know about all of them!

My tops picks are:

1. http://www.factual.com: I'm interested in data related products and found really fascinating how they are trying to make data more accessible for everyone.

2. http://ban.jo: More data here, even though I don't use very often the product, I found it useful when I want to explore what's going on in geek-related events :D.

3. https://www.authy.com: Did you remember that dropbox security thing last week? well this guys are here to try to solve that kind of issue making two-factor authentication a piece of cake.

So which are you tops picks of startups to watch for :D?

I'm not related to the products above just in case you wonder. But it is okay to mention your companies here too.

* Maybe a bit to the last one, I'm Colombian, they are Colombians, so I think is great to see this kind of products starting to take off here. I don't know the guys from authy though, but I hope they really make a big impact.
... so... you agree with me, that having to choose a single primary language doesn't work. The question was both worded quite explicitly to force you to choose a single language, and if you add up all of the percentages you can tell that the original form actually required only a single answer. My feedback was "people often don't have a single answer to this question", and after you spent multiple paragraphs attempting to claim I was wrong, when I asked you to actually tell me how you'd have answered the question, you came back with two answers. The question either needs to be reworded to allow for multiple answers or it needs to be reworded (in the way I attempted to provide an actual example of, putting in actual effort on my part to help future implementations of this survey) to help the person answering choose a single one.
Amazon Launches Textbook Rentals, 3P Sellers Dismayed
Except that the old version came with the old OS... also XQuartz installs itself as part of the system so that you don't run into issues using an older version of XQuartz when you upgrade your OS. I just re-ran GIMP, and it prompted me to go download X11. Downloaded, installed, and now everything works as expected.

I really don't see an issue with this. It is not like it is completely removed (XQuartz BTW is completely open source, so if Apple stopped developing it someone else could pick it up).

> Also, the installer didn't just not include X11, it actively removed the version he had installed. If the current install isn't compatible with Mountain Lion they could have popped up a message box or prompted him to upgrade the next time he ran an X app. There's no reason to delete things from his machine without telling him.

Instead it removed the software, and on first run it told him he would need to download XQuartz which is available freely ... The old software is not compatible, leaving it in place could have caused issues. I don't see why the solution Apple used is so wrong, they clearly did present a popup and didn't just let it fail without errors.
I've primarily switched to ebooks as the convenience is simply compelling enough for me that I'm willing to accept the downsides. The result? I read many more books than I used to.

That said, there are two major concerns I have with ebooks as they currently are sold:

1) Many ebook stores only sell you a license to read, not ownership of the book.

2) I credit my love of books to seeing my father regularly read from his personal library. When I read on my iPad, my kids can't tell if I'm reading a book, doing email, or goofing off.

My hope is that the ebook market eventually moves to either a proper ownership model or a subscription model. We've seen similar transformations in music and movies. The current Kindle store license is more akin to "leasing" the book anyway. If the prices reflected that, I believe there would be even larger uptake. If there is to be a serious competitor to Amazon, I expect they'll take such an approach.
37 million phones in Q1. $30/month for data. Seems like the billion dollars a month could help offset some of those expenses.
People with different workflows are stupid!