skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's face it: the technological literacy of the average user of smartphones/tablets/game consoles/etc. is such that being a script kiddie makes people think they're digital superheroes. DRM and DMCA are more likely to be mistaken for sporting goods manufacturers, record labels, or any number of things other than being known for what they are. The community that this is relevant to is still a minority - a shrinking one - but a minority nonetheless. And while it is a reason and logically minded community by nature, legal protection acts typically have an emotional component from those lobbying for their creation, because it has to do with their security. And income security lobbyists in particular tend to disregard anything but black numbers or red numbers until forced to do otherwise. Right or wrong, it seems the higher the income, the squeakier the wheel. I think it's a Ben Franklin quote: "If you forego freedom in favor of security, you will eventually lose both." If there's a solution down the road, I hope someone finds it before someone else takes it to heart that irrationality doesn't respond to rationality - but fear - and does something to hurt what chance there is at more digital freedom for the rest of us. I'd very much like to be and remain in control of what is or isn't allowed on my expensive and increasingly necessary technological equipment.
Can someone put those numbers in context? Are they large or small compared to what you'd expect/other elites?
And that's what I'd really love to see - EMP that detonates roadside bombs, rather than knocking out equipment. I understand that IEDs usually have some electronics, right?

It looks like there've been some efforts to develop these "The Air Force Research Laboratory developed an HPM system called MAXPOWER to detonate roadside bombs remotely, but it was the size of an articulated lorry — too unwieldy to be deployed in Afghanistan. The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, the defence department's bomb-fighting agency, declined to discuss the system, citing classification issues. But it did say that, as of 2011, it was not funding MAXPOWER.", but again, largely unsuccessful.

I imagine that it is too wasteful to EMP roadside bombs with explosive magnetic pulse sources. And non-explosive sources are too bulky...
And redundancy. Suppose you find qemu has a bug or constraint that's specific to you alone, and useless for your purposes. What do you do then? Write your own OR use an emulator that might not have that bug or constraint.
You will be surprised how many people don't know what they want until someone actually shows them.
right - got you.
I hope some more thought goes into the usability as well. I find the syntax for links confuses a lot of users for whom I have enabled mark down editing. Wiki style [[link text]] works great if you assume links have no space or maybe something similar. Similarly the syntax for images has also always bothered me.
It's possible not to use it. Maybe someday it will be like not having a phone, or email, but in my experience, it's still not like that.

Warning: According to Facebook you are not allowed to read this post, so beware.

WTF
Only the first 100 persons to line up get the premium music service coupons.
Understanding Tablet Use: A Multi-Method Exploration
This
paper describes a multi-method research effort that employed
written and video diaries, in-home interviews, and contextual inquiry observations to learn about tablet use across three
locations in the US.
I'm not familiar with the PS3's architecture, but it seems that any firmware update that includes new keys will... have to include the new keys. Since the update includes the new keys, and the old keys decrypt the update, the old keys can be used to obtain the new keys. Corrections welcome.
It isn't listed in the Sphinx doc http://sphinx.pocoo.org/rest.html#tables - and it points to rst doc only showing those two as well http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...

All my doc is in Sphinx so I play it safe, and all directives need to be supported in whatever version of docutils and rst2pdf are installed across the various developer machines. So for the moment I am stuck with ascii art.
The country whose army is most relied on advanced electronic system is most fragile to such weapons
J2objc - Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool from Google
The very first thing I though when reading this was one or all of these guys were former Google APMs.
It seems clear enough. Quote from the article:

What about tablets? No dice. The Librarian "found significant merit to the opposition’s concerns that this aspect of the proposed class was broad and ill-defined, as a wide range of devices might be considered 'tablets,' notwithstanding the significant distinctions among them in terms of the way they operate, their intended purposes, and the nature of the applications they can accommodate. For example, an e-book reading device might be considered a 'tablet,' as might a handheld video game device or a laptop computer."

Read this not as "smartphones yes but tablets no" but as "smartphones yes but kindle no".
For the first year or so I read about it, I though it was MnogoDB; as in, Mnogo Nukes. Woulda been a much better name.
I suppose you're right to a degree when it comes to supermarket doors and some car locks, the idea that things should be so connected is certainly already present, and there's no reason to expect it not to saturate wherever it can. But there would remain real value to the low tech approach for a number of reasons. Physical locks are less expensive than networked locks would be. Networked locks would be subject to the vulnerabilities that come with being connected to the internet and being run by software, whereas physical locks wouldn't. I think Bruce Schneier said 'complexity is the enemy of security' (if not I'm sure I'll be corrected) and the analog stupidity of physical locks is what makes them useful. Although granted, physical locks can be hacked too, and are, I'd submit that the networked variety would likely be no less vulnerable to physical attack, and still more vulnerable to attacks over the network (so, implicitly, less secure.)

A ubiquitous system for locks that somehow can identify you by proximity, can also be used to track your movements and whereabouts. Networked locks could be theoretically controlled from a remote location, leaving someone else to act as, essentially, the systems administrator for your physical access privileges. This is what they do in prisons. Applying the concept of separating someone from direct control over their physical access-space to a large scale, and it looks a bit ominous - at least if this assumes these network locks are also commonplace on cars, houses, hotel rooms, hospital rooms, etc. This is not even considering what happens when power goes out, or the network goes down. Physical locks still work without electrical power, and the tumblers only care about the piece of metal that's currently jammed into the slot and whether it moves the pins properly... principle of least privilege.

I can see this sort of thing becoming somewhat more commonplace but I also see its spread as self-limiting. E-books aren't going to replace physical books, the internet isn't going to replace television, which hasn't replaced radio, which hasn't replaced theatre. In each case, the newer version of the technology does provide their own advantages and enhancements of the medium but not to the degree that the older, less complex version no longer has relevance. The future is never going to be that evenly distributed, this I believe. In a hundred years, some people might be genetically engineered posthuman cyborgs linked to a quantum hivemind, but someone, somewhere, will be living in village of mud and stone. People will still use physical locks because there's no real reason for most people not to. They could theoretically still work in a hundred years. Software doesn't age nearly as well as a steel bar through a door jamb.
Universal Hash Function « Programming Praxis
> For that article, our sites were blocked in China. I'm curious whether NYT will get the block as well.

For those unaware, "our sites" means Bloomberg properties.
CSS Menu Maker: a library of CSS menus
I downloaded it today on W8 and it still did separate profiles. This is the release version from www.google.com/chrome.
I just completed one session, and I came across a bug.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/luLCk.png

This is with Chrome 22.0.1229.94 on OSX 10.7.5

Great site by the way, seems interesting.
The Missing Bit: Windows 8 Doesn’t Want Your App. Try Again Later
That site is broken on my android phone in chrome. Each time I scroll it moves back. WTF
What does this have to do with hackers? This has to do with laws, legislation, and authority.
Things I Learnt From Marking
Luck is like time travel.
Once you've done such an analysis, luck moves on to represent all those factors that you didn't take into account.
That's what the word means.
I thought about a tutorial or a step-by-step but EHCI controllers vary widely by platform, and going with the "least common denominator" means doing it for x86... I could never convince myself it was worth a blog post.

Maybe if the RPi becomes a favorite for OS development, I might do it. You could always poke around on http://osdev.org and see if you find some useful stuff there. :)
Formlabs raises almost 3 million with 6 hours left
lloyd, would it be to much to ask what you enterprise product is exactly? I'm thinking about one for quite some time now...
You have not yet attained the Zen of HN :(
Letterpress iOS Game Cheat
The founders don't appear to be devs, one guy is a product manager, another started his career as a tech manager. The other worked on "partnerships and marketing". Quoting crunchbase here.

If I were a formed stamped dev and now a Yahoo dev, I would quit Yahoo and form a startup. After all, Yahoo bought their work for lots of money.
What are the alternatives? Transferring from state-owned economy to privately owned one has to happen somehow. The experiment with straightforward privatisation, as done in Eastern European countries after 1989 was a disaster at least comparable to what's going on in China now.
This is simply untrue.

Microsoft's C++ compiler has always been wayyyyy behind in implementing C++11 features.
Funny, my first interpretation of his M:TG suggestion was that he enjoys playing and hopes others will also bring their cards to play with him.
> The primary reason is to provide for Chinese proper name marks

That's an improper use, you want {COMBINING LOW LINE} U+0332 for that.
While I think Samsung is a great stock and company, it's not like Apple is failing miserably. Shorting it here seems like a scary idea. They have 120 billion in the bank with a PE < 15. ex cash it's 10 or 11.
> And he did a horrible job of it. Horrible. But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown. Break that down for me.

Christ, you're being a dick. All John Gruber did to you was design a minimalist markup language and write a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept Perl script to implement it. Just use a better implementation and get on with your day.
Raspberry Pi synthesizer
Tom Preston-Werner (this page has been deleted)
they make roughly half their profit from iPhone. iPad I think may be around a quarter now.
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
As somebody whose enjoyed a keyless lock in a condo in Hawaii fairly recently I have few things to say.

* Keyless locks are great

* Depending on a phone is a very limiting requirement.

From my experience, it was a huge relief not to have to carry any valuables(such as a smartphone or keys) to the beach, because the door had a 4-digit-code lock device.
If i had to carry a phone around with me, i would rather carry a set of keys.

Furthermore, if youre planning to use it for AirBnB and youre expecting that your tenants will have cell service, youre excluding international travellers who have just arrived in your town and may not have cell coverage with their international phones.

What I would like is a code-based lock that would allow me to reset the code remotely, to add multiple levels of codes, time-limited codes, etc. I would pay lockitron prices for it.
I took Sebastian's AI class at Stanford and signed up for more classes at Coursera (NLP, image processing). However, I think both of them lacking in student engagement and need building up additional infrastructure to keep student motivated. Self-pace study or self study requires a lot of discipline and a little bit of push via game mechanics, daily emails etc. can go a long way.

I think their metrics should not be just based on total signup or total classes offered but how many students graduate with high level competency. It's the total graduates and their skillsets that have HR value at the end.
I don't like that subclassing generally doesn't work. You can subclass PFObject no problem, but you lose it when you are doing a lot of PFQuery'ing. PFUser would be a prime candidate for subclassing but that really doesn't work without a lot of shim'ing.

I don't like the lack of client side persistence. There is caching with PFQuery but it's caching the json response from the server. For example, let's say I have a message board with 1000 messages. If the user posts a message, I can't simply add the new post and have it cached, I would have to query and pull down all 1001 messages.

Now, I've written all the boilerplate around the parse SDK to do all of this, but it was kind of hacky. So now I'm ripping it all out and just using the REST API with my own custom digs. Much smoother. I'm slowly moving it over to it's own static lib at: https://github.com/jawngee/CloudObject

Don't get me wrong though, their SDK is definitely usable, but after a certain point it becomes a little cumbersome.
Some controller better than no controller.

I was allegedly a kernel engineer at one time but never go to do any kind of development work, so this sort of thing intrigues me greatly.

What hardware did you have?
Essentially ...

"I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure."

----------

I, for one, welcome the consequences of machine intelligence.
SDK Management for Your API with Github
Yes, and it's always sucked.

In the bad-old-days, of course, there was little choice but to use whatever (typically bad) commercial compiler one had available. So although these compilers generally sucked, that was just SNAFU.

But now things are different: GCC, and now Clang, provide high-quality and timely support for a wide variety of targets, and have set the bar much higher. The sucky commercial compilers of the past aren't really acceptable anymore.
Next Generation of API Service Provider: APIphany
If you have some potential buyers in mind, you need to pitch them like any other investor. So just send an email

Hi,

It was great meeting you that one time at <conference, coffee shop, online>. I was wondering if you had a few minutes to let me tell you more about XYZ startup. We've got some great things going on and I'd like to get your thoughts.

Thanks,

throwawaysale
You're missing the point, and you're missing it hard. Look at CSV. Do you want a repeat of that fiasco? That's a format with literally one feature, and yet in the wild it comes in so many varieties you must guess and configure with every CSV parser. We're in a unique situation here in that the progenitor of the format is alive and can appoint a successor to avoid that whole problem.

"But one of the goals of Markdown is to provided easy-to-use markup for text." This is in no way contradictory to the aim. The idea here is to standardize Markdown, not to replace it with XML.

"I think that people will get on board if it provides a clear advantage over Markdown as it exists as well as other markup formats." The clear advantage is that the parser won't have to guess what you meant and thus get it wrong. The clear advantage is that when you enter copy text from Github and paste it in a Reddit comment box it will come out looking the same. The clear advantage is that in ten years there is a flag for "Accept Standard Markdown only/Accept my weird extensions" to establish a baseline. The clear advantage is that your files won't have an expiration date. The clear advantage is that you won't spend months closing tickets and replying to emails entitled "Why is my formatting all fucked up?"

"Only geeks will complain about whether the successor of Markdown is deployed." Yes, and only geeks care about standards, because only geeks understand the immense difficulty that is supporting a family of mutually incompatible formats and protocols and therefore only geeks understand what standards actually do for them. Users may not care, but when shit breaks they have this unpleasant habit of blaming us and our work, and I find it frankly insane that any reasonable programmer could resist an effort to make their life and the lives of their comrades easier, practically for free.

"If enough people get behind this, it won't matter that Rockdown is a peer to Markdown." Have you ever worked with scientists? There is code in my codebase written in Fortran 77—and that code was written two years ago. Not everybody is interested in upgrading on your schedule. In fact, in many places, obeying the standard is the standard practice, and there is absolutely no interest in performing time-consuming comparisons to figure out independently what is technically superior to what or even what the options are. Standards are intrinsically valuable to these organizations, and you will inevitably find yourself tasked with dealing with them. You're essentially saying "Why declare a standard when we can just rely on word of mouth and let people figure it out?"

I hate to impugn a fellow HNer, but I really can't abide this sloppy, half-assed, incomplete thought. This initiative is obviously the right thing to do, or at least try to do. If you disagree, I curse and damn you to ten years of supporting incompatible highly-similar formats, after which I am certain you will see the utter pointlessness of it and the ease with which it can be averted and agree with me.
Using Ayn "Virtue of Selfishness" Rand to advertise your collaborative writing app is like using Donald Trump to advertise hair-care products.
I'm not sure I understand the pricing model. The front page has download links, but a purchase link exists at the top. Clicking it asks for some more information to get a free licence.

Any idea what's up?
Overall they have not broken Windows for PC users - that's OK. Nothing to see here.

The most interesting thing will be in cheap tablets area.
PG has a good quote, how ignorance can be useful when it keeps you from making other, bigger mistakes.[1] I think this is worth keeping in mind. Does ignoring luck [2] make you better off? Its not clear ignorance is the only strategy.

______________

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html; see also

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process
I assume he means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
Not least due to her dearth of writing ability.
reason for deletion?
Every collaborative story needs an amphetamine-driven cynic to cause a little bit of chaos.
Cool! @matpalm, please run your English extractor scripts on it! (http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/12/10/common_crawl_visible_text...)

'If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests, since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.'

This is annoying, that they're using the enterprise sales model for distribution. Just put it on S3.
Apparently Microsoft has bugs in their app store submission process.
That's what's known as a false choice. In practice, equipping police with tasers lowers the bar to using force (it's supposed to be non-lethal so there's not so much pressure against being trigger happy). Note that in for example the UK regular police don't even carry a gun, so there really doesn't have to be any choice between getting shot or tased.

By the same token I don't think the same situations will call for an EMP or a smart bomb. Setting off a bomb will get everyone's attention immediately, whereas this device would silently disable electronics and could even become standard operating procedure for things like SWAT teams.
I wasn't equating funding with success. I was saying that labeling the product and company a failure even though very smart people who do this for a living have recently put their money behind the company is a leap. If the company was failing, why would these investors put in their money?

I'm not "lauding", I stated that it appears like the move that both sides want to make. A small company gets to take the lead on mobile where they can potentially make a very big difference, much bigger than they could make with their existing company, and really a rare opportunity that not many people get. Mayer gets good talent that she trusts to help lead an important part of her organization. If it works out like they all plan, then it makes those Yahoo! shareholders who subsidized that acquihire very happy.
It says so right there on the page:

> 19:09, 25 October 2012 TexasAndroid (talk | contribs) deleted page Tom Preston-Werner (A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person) (TW))
It says right there: "A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person)".

A7 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#A7

I also do not have a Wikipedia article (despite a few peoples' random attempts to make one for me, and despite, to be entirely un-humble for a moment, having many more references about myself available online than mojombo) for what I will assume are similar reasons: if you are known in the greater world for only a single thing, even if you are known in smaller circles for a couple or a few things, Wikipedia prefers to have you merged into the article on that thing, rather than having a separate article for you.
While the natural response is to be disgusted by the corruption, there is also something else going on here. If startups are defined by growth, China is the land where tons companies are winning startups. For every 1992 dollar of income there are now 15 dollars to spread around.* An astonishing amount of wealth has been created in the last 20 years, and it has spilled on many people.

In the US, when tremendous amounts of value and wealth are created, it also lands in odd places. Think of the early Google chef, or the Facebook artist who are both extremely wealthy. They got the money because tons of value was created and it just landed on them because they were in the right place at the right time.

I am not really making a point other than saying that this is a story of corruption which is terrible, and a story of value creation.

* In the same period, the US has gone from $1 to $2 in real income per capita
This is a really good idea for Google in terms of shifting a multi-platform development effort into an Android focus versus an "iPhone, then clone with Android later" one.
Plus, Apple would never do something like this, so there is essentially no reversal if it catches on.
Wow, a big surprise that actors are employed in marketing material. Next thing you're going to tell me is that Justin Long and John Hodgman got paid for the Mac vs PC commercials or that the guys in the Samsung Galaxy ads weren't actually real people happening to stumble upon a crowd at an Apple store.

Unless by putting "paid" in scare quotes, you were implying something slightly less scrupulous...