skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension?
Ask HN: Any possibility of making a pay-to-use firefox extension?

I'm developing an app on the firefox platform. I would like to know if there's anyway to make a pay-to-use extension (license key to activate thru net?). Pay-and-download would result in piracy.

Has anybody done this? How would you go about it?
When I was researching server space 2.5 years ago price wasn't an object (ahh, remember those days?).

Anyway, I've never had any reason to complain about Rackspace service. Now, I'm not saying the service is a good value (you definitely pay a premium), but it's been solid for me.
THREE WEEKS TO NIGHTMARE METAL FEST II : All Access Magazine Blog
Same! (mt) kept setup their containers to restart if they ran close to their memory limit! We moved to slicehost and haven't looked back.
Reminds me of the current Louis CK meme floating about. System 7 is running on your phone. While it in itself right now isn't the most amazing thing, the series of events leading up to it is.
I work in higher ed and I can tell you that schools are doing pretty much anything they can to stop the bleeding. Some are lowering tuition, others are freezing and the majority are raising it in small amounts.

But given there's no where else to hide and the lenders love giving away the student loans, I think you're going to see kids going someplace. The community colleges might seem even more swelling, but...I don't think tons of kids are going to fall from the school rolls, as much as kids whose parents make too much for them to qualify for aid, will be less able to go to their first choice school where mommy and daddy have to foot the bill.
You're missing the key feature: DRM. The studios won't sign off unless they trust the DRM.
Check out Rise of Nations (gaming circa 2003): it took the Age of Empires style to its logical conclusion by crossing it with Civilization, and it includes lots and lots of features to minimize micromanagement. Things like idle workers automatically finding a nearby resource node to work.
My understanding is that is was the only viable DRM solution that was cross-platform.

Apple won't license FairPlay and Flash-based DRM ain't quite there yet.
The whole point is that its got baked in DRM.

Anyway, what's the point? Everything's already on bittorrent, and everything on streaming is also available on easily rippable DVD.
I don't think it would be all that useful for scrabble. For that you would have to be able to input random letters and get words out.
I didn't, however, have any difficulty figuring out what the site was for (the name and the icon made it fairly clear I thought). The "crossword puzzle" metaphor could have been incorporated a bit more in the design, maybe.
Howdy, thanks for posting this.

It would be awesome to visualize wikipedia edits overtime. I don't really care about what the text says, just how blocks of it change over time. I am after the ascetics present in the ever flowing change of data. I think your script might be a good starting point. Think of the videos of a flowers growing, that compress months into a few seconds. Do something similar with wikipedia edits.
A Big Tax Bill for the Investor Class
It's subjective, I suppose. I haven't done any rigorous testing, but the Silverlight player running through Firefox on my MacBook Pro seems lower quality than Firefox running the old player through a Win XP VMWare instance.
Classic Mac OS has been 'ported' (that is to say, emulated) on many, many platforms. It can still play many impressive games and the original hardware wasn't terribly beefy, so it's a great candidate for emulation on weaker devices. That's not to say the iPhone is weak (it isn't), just that this has been done more impressively elsewhere.

For example, there's MinivMacDS: http://lazyone.drunkencoders.com/wordpress/?p=41

There was MinivMac for iPhone before:
http://namedfork.net/iphone/minivmac/screenshots.html

Basilisk II for PSP:
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=3741

It also helps that a lot of the emulation materials are legally free. Apple gives out the disk images for System 6 and 7 on their website, for example.
Money is the expected utilons of human existence. If society doesn't give something money, it doesn't care. If you don't give it money, you don't care either.
Why hasn't that business model worked with any other form of communication? Lack of verifiability and the fact that anyone someone would pay money to talk to probably has better things to do than getting paid $3 / hour reading tweets.
I wonder what the variance on those numbers is. It can be important. For example, the average salary of the 1984 class anthropology* majors from UNC: Chapel Hill is several million. This is because Michael Jordan was in that class.

* not sure if this is the correct major
or the correct number. It is much larger than you would expect
Widevine (http://www.widevine.com/cypher.html) offers a flash based DRM that many of the studios like, but it's shockingly expensive.
Fred Wilson on The Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Letter
In honor of Theodor Geisel's birthday: Dr. Seuss on parser monads
I've been using the Silverlight version on Boxee for a few months and I have had few issues. I do think an opt-in opt-out program would have been a better move.
Copyright Holders Challenge Sites that Scrape Content
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Two beautiful palindromes my father and his friend invented in a wonderful Berkely summer.

Sic transit gloria mundis:

Rey, ¡ay!, era rey, ayer.

Eco:

Ella, ¿ves, Eneas? es Eco, ve y oye voces, esa, en ese valle.
One way Fred is like Warren is that they both invest in things they understand. I always liked that Fred took the time to test and use any company that he was thinking of investing in.
Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow
That's pretty damn incredible. They're taking a risk, but at the same time their home page is fascinating now.
Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering
What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09
What about "teach by example"?
"Google is abusing its monopoly position by overcharging corporations for access to consumers."

Aren't google adwords basically bought at auction? I don't see how you could accuse google of overcharging.
The Internet now has three phases: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Skittles.
To defend Rand a little - I do like her quite a lot - Francisco's idea is that by doing so he's eliminating the "looters" from society. It's entirely fantasy, but it's very fun fantasy.
Thanks for that.

According to Alexa, Yahoo gets a little less than twice Facebook's traffic. Yahoo's revenue for 2008 was $7.22B. So yeah, $1B+ for Facebook from conventional ads is probably reasonable.
Firefox.. is not a platform.
A billion Twitters?
I don't know how citation works in these cases, but I think you should get credit for bringing this story to everybody's attention on IRC before it got submitted.
I thought it was hacked, but this is legit.
Okay, real answer. First of all, you'll never be able to avoid piracy. Nature of the medium.

Second, the best way would be to embed individual user credentials into the extension. As in, they signup and pay or whatever, and you generate a unique extension that contains their authentication information, which they then install.

What is this for?
HIV's mutation rate occurs after entry. This is due to the fact that HIV seems utterly incapable of fighting the human body without making itself weak in the process. HIV beats the human immune system by changing itself quicker than the human body can adapt.

It's like one day you're fighting the Nazi's, the next day its the USSR, then it's Mussolini's Italy, then it's Saddam and then some Aztec warriors with machine guns. Each day you're expecting to wake up and see more Nazi's, you're not expecting the Iraqi army. Each of these armies is on the retreat, it's just that they win by attrition because every mutation they have they get to swarm your immune system.

It is true that the virus can spread during this time, it's just far less likely. The drug they're proposing is that they make the HIV virus switch its uniform (surface markers in the biological sense) faster, say every 6 hours. Well the problem with this is that you're potentially going to kill the cells through ware, or you're going to end up with an Aztec-Nazi-Russian (or a HIV virus with multiple surface markers) so you then know to attack all of them.

You're somewhat right, with this kind of drug it's likely only going to benefit us that we're cautious to make sure it doesn't create a new virus. Hopefully the virus will cause the HIV to present multiple surface markers and by this help the body target the virus more efficiently.
IPhone’s Misplaced Decline Button?
Um doesn't tsv = csv with separator=tab?
HN user Mazy actually pinged me about it first and based on the Twitter search results it seems quite a few figured it out a couple minutes prior. Overall, awesome news is awesome news.
Their technicians once left 2 active network interfaces down for 45 minutes on one of our servers when upgrading something and didn't fix it until we called them.

They're just overworked like most NOC guys.
The power here seems to be the district judge who was willing to actually do their job.

When just the reporter tried after the judge had retired reporter was ignored like everyone else.
From the source:

"You can write the word Twitter 20 times in an actual Twitter post, but you can only write Skittles 17 1/2 times. We don't want to call it a conspiracy, but..."
Agreed, there's like two stages to the virus. The first infects you (and almost everyone you have unprotected sex with) and only presents flu-like symptoms, then months or years later you'll prevent full blown HIV symptoms and this is when the virus is fighting you and mutating like crazy.
> We need somewhat higher resolution, color, and a nice interface for flitting around from place to place.

Laptop works fine for this. A reader is for reading linearly.
http://www.modernista.com/ (an ad agency) has been doing something similar for a while. Seems a bit copycat.
Its a developer tool so the target audience are developers.
and apparently racists love skittles
Pretty disgusting spam popping up there (along with the rest of the stuff - pretty awesome).
This is a cool thing that's been suggested in Sci-Fi for the longest time. However, I notice one flaw:

> "More compelling, however, is Laura’s ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments."

This is not necessarily the best judgment of a persons importance. I've met and seen a lot of very rich people who ware clothes you certainly wouldn't expect; two brothers own a series of coffee shops and I've seen both in jeans and t-shirts, another is a guy supposedly worth over $50 mil and he wears the same ripped and faded shirt virtually every day.

My point is, there's a lot of people who've got extremely rich not by wearing a fancy suit and tie, but because they never wasted a single penny and brought that mentality into their job. If you start stalling people because they wear crappy clothes then you're going to start getting problems.
Indian industry badly hit by economic slowdown
Motives are irrelevant. The only important question is whether outcomes are socially beneficial. I assume we evolved to look at motives because they're a good predictor, but today's society is somewhat more complex than the african savannah.
Ask HN: Do web startups hire CS majors?
Right now im a 1st year student at Cal Poly Pomona as a computer science major. I have been interested in building web applications, however, there are no CS classes at my school that teaches web development. I know i can learn it on my own (i know html, basic SEO, CSS, some php). I was wondering if startups hire CS majors or should i switch to CIS, which has a few web classes related to the internet, but CIS is mostly buisness related from what i know about it. If startups do hire CS majors, what do they do?
But since he won't a competitor could make that killing.
On the other other hand, perhaps at lower levels forcing students to read for information might have positive side-effects. Ctrl-Fing and quick search functions do make the Internet a different experience from the textbook, after all.
If there were ever a book written entitled "How To Spend Money While Not Selling Candy", chapter one would probably be "Turn your website into the brief object of fascination of people using another service, who have the collective attention span of an ADHD squirrel hopped up on crystal meth".

P.S. Did anyone even notice they linked their product pages to Wikipedia? I'm thinking that sounded very hip and progressive at the planning meeting.
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We are working on database export, it's on the roadmap:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html

-- @mdrcode / App Engine PM
Just finished interviewing 5 programmers, all of them CS undergrads or grads, for my startup. (This might be a bit biased because CS majors were the ONLY ones we interviewed so far.) Two things occurred to me during the interview process: 1) CS majors have some formalized training in designing software, and 2) the most important part of their resumes was the experience/internships/projects section. Nothing can replace the work that is done outside of the classroom. Classes can't expect 40 hours/week of coding but real jobs can. So, initiate projects yourself or find internships that will actually utilize and grow your skills.

I am a sophomore in college, so take my advice for what it is. But, I wouldn't think I'm too far off from reality. Good luck
I think that we have made massive strides in the last ten years. First of all, consumer hardware is obviously much, much more powerful (certainly powerful enough to render everything shown in the video, although perhaps not shaped as elegantly). The Web and the cell networks have provided a lot of this interconnectivity. Wi-Fi has emerged as well; with laptops and cellphones, many of these things can be approximated already. It's just a matter of taking the extra step to make them available and easy for the average person.
You are simply conflating CS with programming, which is very commonplace.

Programming is the craft/art skill of manipulating digital code and data. Within programming you can learn about specific domains - for web apps that would mean databases, networking, a host of standard formats and protocols, and user interfaces. Many commercial programmers go their entire career focused only within one or two domains.

Computer science is the academic study of computation. As the rigorous curricula of today would have it, it is a more mathy endeavor than programming by itself. In particular there is a focus on provability and formality that doesn't come up in commercial programming.

Basically, stuff you learn in CS won't help you ship the ideal mix of features, stability, and time cost for (insert app here). What it will tell you is about a variety of methods with which you may approach the underlying computation problems and direct your own original research efforts.
It seemed a little rambly and stream-of-consciousness, but when he talks he's like that. His written stuff is a little more disciplined.

Bruce Sterling has been one of my favorite authors since I found him, I have always felt that his stories represented a true attempt to describe the future according to his best guesses, rather than make some political or philosophical point and have everyone turn into beings of pure energy or whatever other people consider science fiction.
Indeed, we're working on adding support for a new runtime language. It's on the roadmap, along with lots of other coming improvements:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html

-- @mdrcode / App Engine PM
Does the license even permit this? I'm not going to do the legwork for you, but I'd examine this very carefully with the help of a lawyer who has worked on these sorts of issues before. This may mirror the driver issue in the linux kernel -- even plugins may be contaminated by open source licenses. (Contaminated used in the nicest way possible; I'm a big fan of OS licensing and software.)
Resimli Program Anlatımı » XP’yi Orjinal Yapma
I've seen this mentioned too. It seems they do concentrate on just shipping stuff.

"Here's this phone we made.."
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Furthermore, a formal understanding of computation will give you a good intuition of what things are "good" or "bad" techniques (algorithmically), what kinds of things are computable/not, etc.

This can be advantageous (you know things like DP and more formalized algorithms) but most of it is far above what you will ever need to do (probably. Certain areas use more high-level things)
Win 50,000 Highly Targeted Ad Impressions  For Your Start-up's  Marketing
They linked everything to outside sites. That's the point.

Why would this be a waste of money? as marketing campaigns go, this doesn't look expensive.
Sterling says: "Sun were the guys who built JavaScript, if you recall."

I don't recall that. Wasn't javascript made by Brendan Eich at Netscape?
This is a process story co-opted by our Madison Avenue overlords.

Oh, how I hate process stories.
I think its possible, I would pay for firebug now that I've used it so there is a market.
Just an FYI: Agency.com is the team behind this: http://www.clickz.com/3632968

This is a powerful idea in that they've directly inserted themselves into the online conversation. That Twitter search stream aside, the rest of the content they have are pretty much regulated and closed despite being owned by a third party. YouTube has moderator tools, Flickr has moderator tools, Facebook fan pages have moderator tools. And Wikipedia is pretty darn hard to fuck with.

So, really, the only thing they don't have a direct control of is that Twitter search stream. However, Twitter is spending a lot of time right now deleting Skittles spam--I know this from personal experience!--and non-relevant tweets. I'm sure for Ev and team, Skittles is yet another big deal and they wouldn't want to fuck it up.

All in all, I really think this is genius and they're quite safe at protecting their brand's value.
No, this is definitely selling candy. People are talking about Skittles. That sells candy. Also, I'm betting that this was very, very cheap relative to other means of marketing.

I can only think of one other use for a website of a brand of food items: informing the visitor of other products under the same brand or made by the same company that the visitor might not know about. This design does a poor job of doing that, but I think a web site can be a trendy topic of discussion as well as informative if it's done the right way.
CERT Advisory VU#435052: An Architectural Flaw Involving Transparent Proxies
Actually, yes. Nixon was a son-of-a-bitch, but that doesn't mean B & W didn't violate the public trust. For several months in the 1970's, a virtually unknown spook paralyzed the government of the most powerful nation on earth. And Woodward & Bernstein covered it up.

Refusing to name sources is about two things: actually protecting people in danger, and protecting your rep as a journalist. Felt's safety was never an issue. This is a man capable of bringing down the president, right? He was sitting on 50 years of dirty secrets collected by JE Hoover. No one dared touch him.

So B, W, and their editor kept quiet for purely selfish reasons. Then they willingly let themselves and their paper be used to settle a personal score against Nixon. They provided Felt with cover to make his leaks more effective. All the while they painted it as a home run for integrity and democracy, when in fact it was a political feud.

How is all of that not that a violation of the public trust, ie, corruption?
It is hip and progressive: they're sacrificing an opportunity to present their products in the best light possible, and are instead trusting the general public to describe them. To me that's a huge display of confidence in their product.†

You say Skittles is wasting money and misdirecting effort, but it seems opposite. How much does this gimmick actually cost? All the content is hosted and delivered (and in some cases created) by other people. Skittles' site wasn't popular before and the next couple days will get a lot of hip people thinking about Skittles, so it's seems like a great move.

† It's also not that big a deal since it's, you know, candy, which usually puts people in a good mood. I doubt most makers of consumer electronics would display unfiltered commentary from their customers.
How to Share without Spilling the Beans
In particular there is a focus on provability and formality that doesn't come up in commercial programming.

I'd call tarsnap commercial, but it has involved proofs and formality. Right now I'm writing a paper which proves some properties about the efficient computability of functions -- because showing that these functions cannot be efficiently computed makes it possible to rely on them for security purposes.

Sure, tarsnap is unusual in the amount of cryptographic research behind it, but most interesting applications do something new at least.
Presenting Clojure with a Gitorial
Would it help if Skittles offered watermelon flavor?

Edit: OK, so I'm going to explain the humor and the criticism here, since I'm being voted down and I actually wanted to get a point across with this comment. thomasswift's comment of "and apparently racists love skittles" rubbed me the wrong way, in that it seems to implicate Skittles in the racism by association (or even just accepts the premise that by allowing people to say anything about Skittles on their home page they were tacitly endorsing everything people say about Skittles). I thought my comment was over the top enough to be obvious. But, I'm pretty sure every satirical comment I've made in the past couple of months here has been voted down. Hackers love satire. I dunno who you humorless ninnies are, but you aint who I wanna hang out with. I'm guessing you're new around here.
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>We've de-emphasized the history part though have kept it in the product

I would default it to off, otherwise, pretty evil.
> Look at their default rate on the mortgages they wrote compared to the rest of the industry.

Huh? Neither Fannie Mae nor Freddie Mac wrote ANY mortgages. They bought mortgages that others wrote, which is a very different thing.
They 2.0'd their site:

Home/Chatter: Twitter, Friends: Facebook, Videos: Youtube, Pics: Flickr, Products: Wikipedia

The only normal (traditional) thing about their site is the contact page. If they really wanted to go all out they would have only used myspace messages for contacting them.