skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The special feature of these "pseudo USSD" codes on Android is that you don't have to press the call button. Simply typing the digits is enough. Note I have no idea if this particular attack actually works.
Check Ins Are For Pussy Whipped Boyfriends, And For The Old Foursquare
There's a pattern you should be using here, instead:

"""

Something doesn't work right, so you add a call to fmt.Printf to help debug it.
Compile error: "Undefined: fmt."
You add an import "fmt" at the top.
It works, and you debug the problem.
Remove the now annoying log.
Compile error: "imported and not used: fmt."
Remove the "fmt" knowing full well you're just going to be adding it back again in a few minutes.

"""
This sort of thing is common from what I've seen. More traditional businesses (like phone companies) don't know how to "do a QR code" (as it were), so they pay a company to make them for them. Such companies are just selling a glorified URL shortener, but the other businesses don't know that.
"Gort, Klaatu barada nikto. Klaatu barada nikto."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto
Frictional Productivity
As a bearded Australian, I'm sure you will enjoy this song by The Beards.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmFnarFSj_U
Would be useful if it did a course grain geo-lookup on your IP to start it off in the right country.
I'm questioning my sanity.
Yes, I'm aware of that. But my philosophy is to always try to conserve keystrokes wherever possible. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and all that. :) For the same reason I prefer to use dict.items() over dict.iteritems() and range() over xrange() and so on.
"I truly enjoy the finer things in life."

The unindented javascript blob in the article is an example of the finest things of life then I guess?
It's getting some great reviews on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RIBC5ED8IUT4X

> Despite this book being an excellent take down of the pharmaceutical industry which everyone should read it completely fails as a flickbook. I'd expect a writer of Goldacre's calibre to be able to stick small pictures in the bottom right of the book's margin creating an animated effect of himself, astride a unicorn, vigorously stroking the horn until finally, a moment of satisfaction
Evolutia producatorului de anvelope Firestone
There's a growing Facebook community for Sydney startups @ sydneystartups.com - will checkout Reddit, cheers.
WolframTones: An Experiment in a New Kind of Music
Is that the case if the code is entered via a URL handler?

EDIT: Can anyone confirm this?
Does this trigger a confirmation dialog before typing the number? if not, installing another app that hooks up the dialer intent should work as a workaround.
"You are calling a 17 year old person a "child". This is wrong, and perfectly in keeping with the trend of failing to raise children into mature adults."

I see it slightly more cynically - in my opinion, either the 17 year old is "child" so is not held responsible and his parents are, or he is not a child and is held responsible. I don't accept the assumption that _nobody_ is responsible for a badly brought up child. The guy and his wife were put through something a lot closer to "terrorism" than anything many detainees at Guantanamo ever managed. If the kid had been Arabian, and hs parents had knowingly or unknowingly provided training and equipment that allowd the kid to do what he did - how differently do you suppose this story would have played out?
Isn't the issue that liberal arts educations have not changed in the past 40 years, but the cost has gone from $10K to $100-200K?. So, there is an order of magnituded cost and some minor Nx delta on the Return (~inflation).

English/logic/philosophy/history etc should be plumeting in cost. With the internet, the cost of books/articles should have gone to zero by now. Non-profit universities could force sharing of peer-reviewed work online for the priviledge of the peer review publication (for example).

A degree of this type is not worth more or less (especially as a social rank signifier) today than yesterday. And they are valuable. But they sure as hell cost way more than they should. Its time to question why they are priced as if they were luxury, brand name handbags. Rather than public goods being distributed by non-profit, tax exempt organizations.
Or you could take a picture of peoples name tags and it could just do OCR... surely?
What's New in Project Kotlin - Free Webinar
Being an Aussie, welcome mate! I'm surprised USA doesn't have a national broadband agenda...is there a reason for this?
I don't have a Galaxy S3 to test this, but my experience with the Galaxy S and Galaxy S2 is that for normal phone numbers, you need to specifically confirm that you want to dial the number. For the code to factory reset the phone, though, simply typing in the code is sufficient, you don't need to press dial. It might be the same here, so that only that specific USSD code can be triggered without a confirmation from the user.
Deliberate and targeted anti-semitism, stalking, death threats that moved offline from a 17 year old who says "thanks for giving me a break dude" and parents who don't want to go to the police themselves? All Leo wants to do is write about it.. I would've either prosecuted or put his name and photo (and all the threats and screenshots he sent) on my blog for 10 years.. that could've been the choice for the parents.
If the consumers, including the symbioses (nicest term I could think of for accessory companies) don't actually stand up to Apple and demand they conform to the standards the rest of the world do, then of course you have to expect that they'll do what they can to ensure the survival of their exclusive ecosystem that generates the money consumers are willing to spend.

Though for many of the accessory companies, this is great news for them. They get to resell you all the products you previously bought with nothing but a new docking connector.
"just do OCR"

It's the future, alright.
Find the ISP and ask for the user's information, either formally (with police assistance) or informally (pay someone for the info).
Looks like this thread may have been a source for the code initially [1]

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1687249
I linked to a Paul Graham essay where he [argues](http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html) succinctness is strongly correlated with reliability.

Agreed that simplicity is an underrated feature of programming languages (Rich Hickey had some very interesting things to say about this). That's kind of hinted at in my article with Yaron Minsky praising the consistency of OCaml performance, compared to the difficulty people have predicting Haskell performance.

And agreed that the most important aspect of a programming language is the quality of the culture built around it. I wonder, do the characteristics of the language determine the culture, or are they largely orthogonal?
Factory Data Reset of Samsung phones triggered from Internet browser
Using a frame, you can trigger the Factory Data Reset of a user's phone directly from the Internet browser. Indeed, the code is 27673855# and can be called using:

<frame src="tel:27673855%23" />

Source: https://twitter.com/pof/status/250540790491787264
what do you mean by there being no social contract?

When you break the law the state punishes you because you have broken 'social contract'.
Can anyone on HN confirm this exploit?
From that list they are particularly keen on declaring themselves "independent of government jurisdiction" when charged with motoring offences - I presume they had all of the required contracts in place to allow them to drive on the roads the rest of us paid for?
If this guy isn't Dutch, I'm the pope.

These are quite literally exactly the reasons why I'm emigrating.
Not just science, it would be good to see open-access across all fields.
Internet Giant Builds Web of Influence in Berlin
video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-0B04HPhs
It is beyond me why anyone would open with an example from the year 2000, the most artificial, inflated, unreal market in 3 generations. Salesmen were mere order-takers: They could spout whatever bullshit they fancied and still deliver increasing YOY sales.

Fluff meter is off-scale.
My cofounder and I knew we wanted to work together after attending a startup weekend and started Customer.io . During startup weekend we built a wifi / power outlet finding mobile web app.
But when you run out of disk space (as one of the posters wrote) it doesn't complain either. And running of of disk space happens.
I actually liked this blog post by Ferriss. I almsot didn't click on it because I don't like his schtick...but this was pretty decent.

Back when I worked in consulting for a successful, trendy dot-com era consulting company, they had a motto that we were all "working in marketing" and all of us, even the engineers, were always "selling". It was more philosophical attitude than anything, but made the engineers think a little bit when they were on site implementing tech.
It's fine.

The bedrock abstraction (usable languages etc) is higher than the hardware. The hardware we don't care about. It's disposable. In fact, you can drag pretty much anything you can do from the Pi onto another platform and carry on.

If the languages chosen were pretty tied to the hardware, then I'd worry i.e. if people were using it to learn ARM assembly or were developing early UNIX versions on PDP11s. But they're not.

It's suitable for education only because it's very cheap, it's functional and the bedrock abstraction is higher than the hardware.
Do we know for sure that security fixes won't be coming for iOS 5?
FTA: "A leaked document from the CleanIT project shows just how far internal discussions in that initiative have drifted away from its publicly stated aims".

They've largely overstepped their initial public aims, so judging CleanIT by their website is useless.
The part about the ARM core not being open source is a joke. Would it be better to teach children and students about esoteric open source architectures with no applications in the real world?

The real problem of the Pi, and not just as far as education use is concerned, is the crap Broadcom chip. After working with Broadcom, I would never-ever-ever consider them if there is an alternative. They strangle open source (which is shooting yourself in the foot, really, being that the community produces the best drivers out there), don't release documentation and won't even sell you the actual part unless you were buying millions.

The chip itself is outdated, bug ridden (Synopsys DWC USB, anyone? I'm making good money debugging the drivers of this DWC USB for my customers - one with a proprietary ASIC and one with an obscure Chinese craplet chip - so I know first hand how bad it can get, especially with the earlier versions) and has very lacking, if any, documentation available.

TI are the polar opposite of Broadcom in these regards: they nurture the open source community and encourage it to use their processors (Pandaboard ES contains a very high end OMAP4460, same processor as Galaxy Nexus and the weird sphere Nexus media thingy), providing near complete documentation and lots of technical knowledge.

The Pi design team essentially chose a bad foundation just to grab some headlines with their lowball pricing. Now people are slowly realizing how bad of a platform it really is.

A side effect of the Broadcom attitude is that even with a full manufacturing file for the Pi, no one can reproduce the design when the CPU can't be sourced. So much for openness.

I'm waiting for one of the mainstream manufacturers (TI, Freescale, Samsung to a lesser extent) to pick this up and sponsor a super low cost, basic board. The benefit to their commercial customers from the creation of a broad community and code base would be immediate and immense.
Worst Copyright Law in History?
Depends on the speed with which you can travel. During rush hour, even 1.5 miles is unbearable.
I wouldn't call a pseudo-feudal slave economy "successful".
I've also done a stint in big pharma, on the R&D side, running computational clusters for bio and chemistry modeling. The impression I got was that the majority of work was for improved science in order to create drugs that saves lives or improve it dramatically. The biggest money makers were things that deal with diabetes and heart disease, not things like antidepressants and ED. I think some focus was lost on the business/marketing side where opportunities were pushed and exploited in certain drug lines beyond what was reasonable. I get the impression that most of these issues were before 2006, it's actually not in the best interest of the pharmaceuticals to operate in this manner either if they want to remain in business. The regulators have also caught up. That said, it's easy to see the mistakes in retrospect, this has happened over the history of many drugs that have come and gone.
new panamanian copyright bill drafted

- no judicial due process

- fines of up to $100K

- fines go to gov't, nothing to copyright holder

- gov't staff can get bonuses from the fines, of up to 50% extra on top of their base salary
>All of the thumbs-up opinions I share, with the emphasis on that Go fills a niche that is otherwise a relative vacuum as-is.

D, Rust, modern C++, ...
Wow, I'm surprised to hear this- Fred Wilson had described them as one of the most successful companies in their portfolio [1].

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/indeed-a-hiring-powerhouse.h...
This is a sad state of tech "reporting" nowadays. One guy posts one thing on twitter, and this is at least the 4th or 5th "news" report about it, with nothing more to go on other than one tweet.

I don't doubt it can be done, and I don't doubt Petrich is capable of it, but nearly half a dozen news posts (each one getting more and more outrageous likely) from what's essentially barely a proof-of-concept level hack just makes my soul weep.

You must remember playing "telephone" as a kid. Look at what passes for tech news lately on subjects like this and just watch the reporting get more and more divergent every time one tech blog recycles another blog's half-news.

Rant done, sorry.
This was/is an infamous modem vulnerability:
http://www.securityspace.com/smysecure/catid.html?id=10020

It could force a modem to hangup and redial a number.
Education Nation: Rural Arkansas Town Rethinks High School
Yeas, there is a small "note" there.
But for me the problem is not that the author didn't know about 2GB data limit.

The problem is that Mongodb didn't complain when he was inserting data above the limit. A data store doesn't complain when it runs out of space? It should be mentioned as the biggest problem with 32bit version.
Stick around for another ~week or so (Oct 1) and you'll see the monthly Who's Hiring thread.
> just considering most/all bands are content and happy with Facebook and integration with the vast supply of Band Related apps...

I don't know whether to call this a gross generalization or plain wrong, but it's both.
Fixed. Switched example to Turkish and Iranian, as that is were most of your traffic came from this post. Just read an 800 page book on India, can't believe I made that mistake.
And it wasn't just chattel slavery. A whole lot of the non-chattel laboring class consisted of indentured workers and debt peons, as well.

But, as David Graeber put it, that's the point. The people who invented the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of self-ownership, or natural ownership of one's "liberty", mainly did so because they wanted to explain how one could trade away that very liberty for money.
It's important to note that Goldacre is writing from Britain, relying mostly on British examples. The regulatory system is somewhat different in the United States, so while some of his critique of new drug approvals generalizes to the whole world, the specifics of what countries are already doing to reduce the problems in regulation (which have been well known to many research-oriented physicians for years) vary from country to country.

As usual, I have to recommend here the edited group blog Science-Based Medicine,

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

which like any blog includes some daily articles that are duds, but which also features some of the best discussion in popular language by statistically astute medical researchers on what needs to be reformed in regulation of new drugs, and what is already working better than some possible alternative approaches. A recent post there, in this instance by a lawyer,

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/stem-cell-ther...

is a thoughtful discussion of some of the regulatory trade-offs.

AFTER EDIT: Two things to add here. The clinical trials registry

http://clinicaltrials.gov/

hosted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health is one response to some of these concerns that precedes the publication of Goldacre's new book (which I intend to read cover to cover). It has a lot of information about human patient clinical trials being conducted all over the world.

Reviewing another recent post to Science-Based Medicine,

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/news-flash-doc...

I see it mentions Goldacre's new book (favorably) and also analyzes a very recently published study about physician influence by drug companies. I have submitted that here to HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4569970

for thoughtful comments by all of you.
This was a troll that would make dial-up modems hang up back in the day. Sort of like convincing someone to do `sudo rm -rf /`.
A clearer video showing the lack of prompt: http://tweakers.net/video/6292/html-code-laat-galaxy-s-ii-re...
It would be a return to the Ancient Greek style of city-states which employ or enslave their surrounding rural population to feed the city-dwellers.
which quite likely mean the software sales agreement is accompanied by a professional services contract, too

I'm currently doing an enterprise SaaS startup, and we have a split-pricing model for that reason. The actual SaaS part has standardized pricing, which we don't change.

The professional services part is completely custom for each company. For the most part, we'll do whatever kind of arrangement is needed, from nearly no help at all, to white glove, onsite help, training, ongoing support, etc, with costs to match.

It's just part of life when you're selling to the enterprise, for all of the reasons the GP mentioned. The rewards are worth it though. :)
Apparently, this falls outside of tptacek's "jurisdiction". He's nowhere to be seen!

Luckily we've got Mr. Atropos taking care of things.
Search for available domains in your terminal using this node app
Riding? Yes.

Poor attempt at philosophy? No. This merely describes the daily situation here, and I find myself agreeing with most all of what he says. He is very well-spoken, and I believe it resonates with many people from the Netherlands.
Having burned up my share of electronics, this is probably the only part of the article I thought worthwhile. A little daughterboard with GPIO pin protection and buffering for 5V would be a great way to introduce students to real world interfacing.
Correct link: https://twitter.com/pof/status/250540790491787264
When every car on the road is electric, it will be feasible to have special "charging lanes" on the highways. In fact the whole road network could eventually be made to safely deliver charge to moving vehicles. Perhaps without the need to use the battery at all on these roads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistan...
But keep in mind; he doesn't seem to be a fan of property rights anyway, so he probably isn't sympathetic to a position of "defending your land".
That is the modem hangup string. You could send a icmp packet to a person containing just that and their modem would drop the connection. So it was common in IRC for people to ping a whole channel with that and have a bunch of people quit right after.
Conversation here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4569686
I just wanted to chime in and say that the space that MySpace once dominated is an entirely different one now.

MySpace is the underdog here. They will have a very hard time convincing people to join them.

I've used SoundCloud since 2008, when it was invite only and mainly known on obscure electronic music production forums. Sure, way back in the stone age musicians and producers used MySpace, but most of us were happy to get away from it as far as we could the moment an alternative appeared. SoundCloud is minimalist in nature. It focuses on the music. That's why it wins. MySpace started to look like GeoCities.

Nowadays MySpace is a wasteland, you have some big media content and thousands of dead accounts.

Arctic Monkeys were the poster child of a successful MySpace band and their last login was over a year ago.

And anyways, judging from the new look, the new MySpace still focuses on looks. Do we need another big content outlet? Shit, if you are into pop music you've probably already subscribed to VEVO's YouTube channel.

Virb tried to pull a MySpace and they failed.

Soundcloud + Bandcamp offer enough for most musicians. Add Facebook, YouTube and iTunes and most users will be happy too. Why would we need anything else?
Doctors aren’t all compliant pharma drones
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4568933
I think people don't understand how disruptive electric cars will be, when combined with autonomous cars.

When all you do is pull out your cellphone, select a route and a car picks you up in 5 minutes, takes you to your destination, and leaves... you don't worry about range and electricity and recharge.

You just use it, and the system can intelligently maintain battery levels and recharging across the fleet, ensuring efficiency.

Heck, such a system could provide gasoline or hybrid cars for trips that required them.
How central banks could cause the next financial crisis
Ask HN: What can i do to stop an identified spammer?
So i live in Albania where there are some companies that spam for money. Basically people are uneducated and pay these guys to send spam to albanian email addresses including mine.

One company is this : http://ederstudio.al/marketing/email/ (google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sq&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Federstudio.al%2Fmarketing%2Femail%2F&act=url)

He actually advertises on his site that the email will not hit he spam folder, security bullshit and other stuff. The customers can actually login on his control panel and send the mail themselves.

He sends the emails from <random_string>@emailcenter.al . One email that was sent to me: http://pastebin.com/fCzVPJZJ

The local police won't do anything. Contacting the guy directly won't help, he knows it's spam and gets payed.

I actually have spoken to this guy on the phone because a client of mine hosts his website there.

Any idea? Thanks
Capital gets cheaper, labour gets more expensive. This has been the general trend in education since the invention of the printing press.
That is why the Founding Fathers were opposed to the idea of a Bill of Rights. Because they knew people would come to believe their rights were granted by the document, instead of merely being non-exhaustively listed in it.
But if you think about it, doesn't this seem crazy? I mean, obviously I shouldn't kill people, but if I don't do the things the implicit contract expects me to, some crazy person will come up and put me in a cage.

For example, if I happen to grow a plant that will grow on its own without my help, and happen to store a lot of these plants for the winter, I could get locked up by someone for being a drug dealer.