skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is all hilariously overblown and silly. And not about "feature identification algorithms". It's about one error on a map, which Apple probably has already fixed, and will soon if it has not yet.
What are you basing your assertion that most fortune 500 would be in the red on ? Corporate profit (post tax) are at a record high (e.g. http://elidourado.com/blog/the-short-run-is-short/).
There's already been a high profile failure to deliver, and it was a software project. Diaspora.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
Isn't it the case that kickstarter isn't necessarily a store? Many projects explicitly guarantee that you will receive a certain item, and some are even already manufacturing and selling the items but appear to just be using kickstarter because of its prominence and trendiness.

I'm sure kickstarter isn't liable even for the projects that explicitly promise delivery, so it's still not quite a store in those cases, but I assume that kickstarter doesn't prohibit projects from offering actual preorders.
something I noticed with some of the more "store-like" products (things that only use Kickstarter for money to mass produce and not development) is they have bulk options: $10 for 1, $100 for 15 "for retail distribution".

eg Scanbox: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-y...
People typically use variants of the same password across the web. It's a huge starting place for breaking into an email account.

Also, since it's vanilla http, you could sniff these passwords at a coffee shop's wifi all day and just wait for someone to log in to Pandora.
Thoughts? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3798597
If anyone is curious about what they raised, here's a graph I made:

http://canhekick.it/projects/446805249/vinted-bags-and-leath...

There's a competing site that has more information, but my graph is much nicer:

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/446805249/vinted-bags-and-l...
I would never sign an NDA with exception to acquisition talks or something important. Things like this, I'll pass.
Quite true, but I was thinking more of a founder role.
This is awesome. Check out how it's already turned up prior art for Microsoft's 'whack to silence a phone' patent application: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/109/microsoft-hav...
> reduce your taxes as low as possible

It's not something that's "encouraged" or "culturally ingrained." It's simply a matter of lowering your costs.
Can we actually prove fraud in any of these cases, though? I'm not saying it can't happen, or that it hasn't happened. But we should never attribute to malice what can be more readily attributed to stupidity. I'm more inclined to believe that a bunch of people got in over their heads than that a bunch of people intentionally scammed backers.

I may be wrong. But can someone point to some concrete examples? Fraud is a pretty heavy charge to level against Kickstarter projects, and it's also an indirect accusation that Kickstarter is a hotbed of such activity.
Get Your Client to See More Than Just Unicorns & Rainbows
First thing to be done is to reform the legal practice. Why is legal assistance so costly? Why can't it be done cheap. The legal mafia needs to be busted first.
That's because Walmart is not a marketplace like ebay. An app store is a marketplace with terms and conditions, any one that meets those terms should be allowed to list their app.
Smart move. AirBnB waited until scandal broke out and then tried to put out the fire. We were/are dangerously close to a major scandal happening on Kickstarter.
Python Valideer
Running the marathon is the easy part, it's the training that'll get you. The vast majority of runs when I'm training for a marathon are not tranquil, peaceful, or enjoyable. In fact, the runs that matter, the ones that make the difference between a PR and a disappointing race, are the ones that suck the most. Forcing yourself to run when you're tired, burned out, have other things you want to be doing, that is what it means to be a runner. I love to run, but it would still be a hell of a lot easier to go home tonight and veg out in the couch instead of getting out and putting rubber to pavement, and that's a temptation tat hasn't gone away, even after 10 years of running.

Perhaps the lesson isn't "Find what you love", but rather, "Decide what's worth loving and force yourself to grind your teeth and power through no matter what". Summoning the grit to power through and do what you love even when it sucks is what separates the marathoner from the runner that never steps up to the start line.
A new congressional investigation claims Microsoft has been able to avoid paying $6.5-billion in taxes since 2009 thanks to the complicated tax structure in the U.S.

The role of a CFO (and his office) is to do exactly what resulted above. Build a team of accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts that makes sure that the financial health of the company is strong. "Is this a tax credit we can take advantage of, do it." "Can we legally execute this transaction and conserve millions of dollars? do it."

If these items are legal based on federal law and pass Microsoft's board's scrutiny, then why is this even an issue?
"man's want for eternal significance - that desire to be known long after he is dead"

That's something I've never understood. What does it matter whether you're known after you're dead? You'd never know anyway since you're dead, and you couldn't derive any benefit from it since you're dead!
If you think iOS 6 maps are in any single way an improvement over Google Maps, or anything other than a power play in general, you're pretty damn likely to be making a worthless fanboy comment.
Liverpool vs Man Utd Live Stream Online 23/9/2012
Liverpool vs Man Utd Live Stream Online 23/9/2012
That's a start, but I still think that allowing hardware projects to offer arbitrary, open-ended numbers of end-product rewards is a mistake. Suddenly being expected to produce 100 times as many units as you planned is not, as people so often say "a good problem to have". It's just "a problem".

Yes, the general tendency is for marginal cost to decrease as production quantity increases, but that does not mean that it's a smooth curve. Instead, the line is jagged, littered with points where large investments need to be made. For an open-ended product, you get investors, hire extra people, buy equipment, etc. You'll end up taking a short-term loss that will be earned back in the long term. For a close-ended project like Kickstarter allows, you'll have the short-term loss, but no long-term profit.

And that's if you have experience and connections to pull off manufacturing and courting investors. If you're hawking a project on Kickstarter, it's pretty likely that you have neither.
And yet that shouldn't be a problem if the issue lies in the server's data.
I was hoping that link to lead to a product page for Lumia 920.
Fraud is too strong of a word. However, unrealistic renders are at least dishonest, and even if not maliciously so, the effects are much the same.
I didn't say they can't do it, they just don't like to.
Yes, however Muni's own signs at the stops often make inaccurate predictions. As an occasional Muni rider, I've often waited for a bus or a train only to find that it's not in service. There are also frequent "ghost buses", where the minutes count down to zero but no bus shows up.

In other words, although I'm certain the transit apps could stand to improve, I don't think even Muni has accurate data.
And then someone looks at your screen and takes your account.
This was becoming a real issue for Kickstarter. Many of the recent high profile 'projects' were companies (particularly game developers/publishers and consumer products manufacturers) effectively taking pre-orders through Kickstarter and using those funds to develop the product. As the channel through which the orders were placed (and the party that that receives the money and takes a cut), I think a good legal argument could be made that Kickstarter is a store, and thus would have to comply with the UCC and other laws (including the various Deceptive Trade Practices acts across the country) applying to retail.
I do biomechanical research and train baseball pitchers. I have a big blog post coming up about machine learning using PITCHf/x data to see if you can predict injuries with publicly available data from MLBAM (hint: future is promising!).

My company is Driveline Baseball / Driveline Biomechanics Research. We also develop wearable computing technology to capture kinematics of the movie arm (you know this as "pitching mechanics").

Check us out!

http://www.drivelinebaseball.com (Seattle, WA)
The ban on mutliple rewards is interesting. While there have been no tears shed over ~$1000 going to finance the Makey Makey project, there's a mildly awkward silence every time we try to figure out what we're going to do with 30 of them. It's also true that cannibalizing a old keyboard would have delivered the same functionality...

ఠ_ఠ
Can someone file a bug to rename the farm?
Simple, for every user that the hackers have, try their password for the associated email account, guaranteed they will gain access to many email accounts. Now they have access to their banking accounts.
Which would be a reasonable argument except that hashing passwords is effortless in terms of development.

The cost/benefit of implementing this functionality makes it a rule of thumb for front facing web pages.
> Can we actually prove fraud in any of these cases, though?

Is this the standard we want?

If you used an investment service which said "we require proof beyond all reasonable doubt of criminal endeavors before taking down [some UGC]," how much would you trust those investments? What if the standard for takedowns was a bit higher?
Do you like the new look of CodeProject?
This is blogspam.

Original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/sep/20/apple-...
drop of water placed on a vibrating surface vibrates. I really don't want to unsubscribe from HN!
Now we're applying the word 'skeuomorphic' back to real world objects? The sky is the limit for this new expression. Will it reach inception-esque levels?
Actually, it might be worse if he found things to do.
But the problems reported are all data problems, which presumably can be fixed in the cloud. No app update needed at all.
It will indeed; I just got that mail from ifttt today. So much for working around the problem.

New plan: post elsewhere (LinkedIn or Buffer) and have it pushed to Twitter, rather than the other way around.
The problem is that loopholes are largely monotonic.

Every loophole that exists was originally a political favor to some important constituency. There are always important constituencies seeking political favors, or embattled politicians or parties seeking new allies; so there will always be pressure to create new loopholes.

If a loophole's in danger of going away, its constituency will scream bloody murder. Republicans who vote to eliminate it will be painted as "raising taxes;" ever since Bush I promised not to raise taxes, raised taxes anyway, and then lost the White House, a lot of Republicans have been very afraid of this political attack. So there will always be pressure to avoid closing existing loopholes.

So loopholes are monotonic -- they can only increase over time.

The only way we could conceivably get out of this situation is if our tax code becomes so complex, everyone -- even the beneficiaries of the loopholes -- is angry and upset at the complexity and costs of paying, and decides to support throwing the whole thing out and starting fresh. This scenario probably requires a united government (same party controlling Presidency and both houses) which is willing to make the issue a priority. It's probably not going to happen in this year's election, unless a major event occurs between now and Election Day.
If you are a beginner, I wrote a post about how to start with Ruby / Rails as a beginner that you may find interesting:

http://www.railstutors.com/blog/the-best-way-to-learn-ruby-o...
Groupon Payments
Suggestion for anyone pissed off (at Twitter) by this: Check out https://rstat.us/ . It's a completely open microblogging platform, and at least for now, you can log in using your Twitter account (via OAuth) and cross-post all your Rstat.us updates to Twitter.

I've been meaning to try it for some time and this news compelled me to do it. Seems to work fine. You can follow me there if you like: https://rstat.us/users/graue (not really trying to promote myself though, my updates are pretty boring) Also, I have no relationship with the people who made this site, but they seem pretty passionate about open platforms.

I don't think IFTTT supports Rstat.us right now, but it would be great to see them add it.
>What's the bug that results from the "var i; for(i=0)" pattern? Someone refactors the "var i" away and you end up with a global var.

Wrong. JSLint will complain and then you'll fix it. That's why you use JSLint. It can find stupid things like this easily and accurately.
What do you mean? Google has never had control over the maps app on iOS. The previous app was also written by Apple, just using Google's Maps API.

For all we know, Google could have released their own maps app only to have it blocked by Apple for providing "duplicate functionality" since Apple bans developers from even revealing if their app has been rejected.
The OTA update was released before I purchased my phone. I don't exactly wait with bated breath for oh my god the newest and bestest. It is more than "just" a phone, but the marginal value of an upgrade has not, to date, been worth being an early adopter for any one phone.

"But I had to wait four days" is really just...really? And that gets you frothy?
Which is almost as bad. A service provider does not need to know your password, just a salted hash of it.
Why give your employees a puppy? That means they'll have to take care of it instead of working late.

https://www.joingrouper.com/jobs
Looks like the teardown is underway, so only a few pictures are posted. Would be fun to get a live feed of them hacking on it!
If I track down a quote from a famous US Justice from the early 1900's where he says every American is expected to try to lower their taxes, would that cause you to reconsider your view?
This is a prototype of my perpetual motion machine. The batteries will not be required in the production version.
People are used to big software budgets producing nothing.

It's an entirely different value proposition failure when they paid $100 expecting to receive a light bulb or gaming console only to end up empty-handed.
The "mentor" here is risking destroying himself and his business over this because Vinted has their own unique look and customers are generally not going to approve of his actions.
It's true that he worded it badly, but symmetrically encrypted passwords are no safer than plaintext in practical use.
People suggesting something unethical need be illegal are part of the issue. In the USA there is a tradition of aggressive play within the rules. If we want to bend the rules [1] a bit -- and make no mistake, that is kickstarter and crowd-sourcing -- there needs to be some ethical nous in place. Both by the companies and the supporters.

[1] The reason US required QUIbs and the SEC and the related regulatory structure (re: financial investment contracts) is precisely to create such bright line playing fields. But these lines are sufficiently complex to require a "price of admission".
I fail to see the tragedy, too. Every service should have an unique password. Also even if the password are hashed, if hackers get control of the web server, they could sniff the passwords when users log in.
function foo () {
x = 5; // totally fine
...
var x; // because we declare it here
}
Definitely. Thanks for the help :)
We're still going to get an orgy of he-said-she-said Techcrunch and TNW IFTTT posts over the next 12-36 hours, longer if Twitter actually comments on this.
It's not just OSM, Apple also gets data from TomTom (since June this year).
Cynically, I wonder if this policy change was not prompted by Kickstarter's own doubts about the lifx team being able to deliver. After all, this is the same team that couldn't meet demand for their custom cardboard box project.

I wonder if in the future there will be a requirement to limit the number of backers on every project. Logically there seems to be a point where additional money from backers over what was asked for leads to difficulty delivering at all.

For instance, say I could make 10 custom widgets a month at $100 a piece. I might decide to launch a Kickstarter project asking for $1200 to gauge if at least 10 other people are interested in my fancy innovative widget. What happens if I end up raising $12000? My target of 20% profit on each widget is no longer possible unless the backers are willing to wait up to 10 months for me to deliver. The only other option is to invest money into producing widgets in larger volume to meet this initial demand. That investment would only make sense if there were some reasonable expectation that demand would stay at the same level after the Kickstarter project ended.

So back to my original cynicism, maybe Kickstarter sees signs that some very good marketers are having enormous success with Kickstarter projects whilst being in completely over their heads...
Moving around intellectual property rather than than profits is very very old practice for tech companies. Why repatriate profits when you can use them for R&D spending outside the USA, where there may even also be an R&D tax credit!

Moving the intellectual property out of the USA, and then using that to make US sales from anther country is pretty ballsy though.
He wrote "Google’s maps are going to start degrading", not that their app would degrade. He seems to imply that with less iOS users, they'd get less corrections - which ignores the large userbase of Google Maps on other platforms (Android, web).
Ah thats a shame. Lego has always been pretty popular with girls though in my experience, though they tend to play houses with it rather than build vehicles. My girls love it, and so did my wife as a kid. Perhaps the genre specific lego sets have been pushing girls away from lego.
Looks like I skimmed too quickly then.
that's fair - Calc can do everything you need, so the objection is more clearly stated as it not being compatible with excel. You can't share files with excel users (like you can with Word and AbiWord or Writer).
Your suggestion that there be a "limit to the number of backers on a project" would have probably saved the elevation dock guys some grief. On the other hand, I want the Planetary Annihilation guys (Digital Product) to have HUGE oversubscription - we got funding for Metal Worlds, Water Worlds, Galactic War, and an Orchestra Score through extra funding!
The "expectation" is merely because that's what any rational, self-interested person would do. I can't see how it's logically possible to escape that.
May I ask why the awful 'ly' startup name?
To me the funniest thing is that they rely on the 'password' input type to obfuscate the password. If you change it to 'text' its just a plain text password sitting there. So... somebody thought, "well we're going to have the password here, better make this input 'password' so people can't just see it over your shoulder, it's private!"
Ricky Yean Of Crowdbooster On Bringing Value As A CEO And Customer Development
Here in Japan, I managed to spot a place with a Hangul (Korean) label! God knows how that happened...
I am curious about the senate committee choosing to single our Microsoft and HP in their attach, when there is ample evidence to suggest that so many other well known companies are engaging in similar practices. In 5 minutes, I came up with articles from major papers documenting 3 of the biggest companies in the US using similar practices...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strate...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-tax-...
I agree that they needed to do something. That something is totally not this. This feels like they want to do whatever is the least amount of work.

Kickstarter is supposed to be a service, for a share of the income they are supposed to facilitate the connection between creators and audience. Rubber stamping an increasingly bureaucratic set of rules is not the way to do this.

A better solution would have been to add the ability for prospective supporters to voice queries and concerns where they could be seen prominently on the page. Right now it seems the creators receive questions and pick the ones they want to answer and place an update answering the questions.

Even better would be to have Kickstarter assess the creators claims on their ability to deliver and assess queries raised by prospective supporters. That would be a real service offering real value, it would also cost real money. Right now Kickstarter's revenue comes from the fact that Kickstarter is popular. The thing that makes creators choose Kickstarter over another platform is almost entirely due to prominence. That cannot be sustained. Eventually it will have to rest on quality of service. The current set of changes do not increase the quality of service.
> why is this even an issue?

Because the Democrats want to press home the message that corporations and wealth are inherently evil in this election cycle, and the chairman of the committee quoted in the article is a Democrat, as the article mentions, twice.

An unfortunately large percentage of the US population apparently isn't capable of formulating the good and simple question in the last sentence of your post -- a large enough percentage that the story can attract enough eyeballs to justify its publication.
The class made total sense to me.

This is common stuff in enterprise software world.
Do most users actively know that the tiles in the iOS 5 Maps application are served by Google? The app itself is Apple top to bottom -- the display does say "Google" in the lower-left-hand corner -- but it would be interesting to know how users think of their iPhone maps application.
Football Outsiders abuses the use of statistics and engages in data snooping (the "study" on running backs comes to mind) to make their points. They're far, far behind organizations and people who have lent credence to sports analytics, like Baseball Prospectus, Tom Tango, Pete Palmer, Bill James, etc.
Apple posted 6 Maps developer jobs in the last 10 days (search maps)
This one did the opposite of what you guys do. http://gizmodo.com/5945103/this-instrument-translates-the-so...
Didn't realize the iPhone 4/4S did away with the simple screen replacement. I was really impressed with that when I broke my iPhone 3G display and came to replace it.

I was kind of thinking they'd sacrifice that with the new, even thinner iPhone 5, though. It's a pleasant surprise to see the screen assembly is effectively user-removable.

I just wish Apple supplied replacement screen assemblies. With the new integrated touch screen it's only going to become more difficult for third parties to manufacture passable replacement parts...