skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The metaphor doesn't really hold up; it's rather like you went to the administrative desk of AT&T 1000 times, asked the person behind the desk "Can I please have document 001?" and they simply handed it over without questions each of the 1000 times. That employee should have stopped handing over documents, but it didn't.

In my opinion the crime isn't in requesting or obtaining that information, it's in the way that he handled that information afterwards.

If he would have used it with the pure intention of showing that the system is insecure, he would have been right and nobody would have been able to blame him of improper conduct.

Instead he sold/handed over that information to Gawker, which is where he went wrong in my opinion, because he took another organisation's information and decided to put that information on the market against their will or consent.
Web users: We've got NO IDEA if we're stealing content or not
Just wanted to echo common sentiments that your blog post was a very well-written and yet personal treatise on how and why startups fail.

Another good pair of posts comes from Chad Etzel (previously Notifo):
http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/05/02/startups-are-hard.html

http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/09/08/fouling-out-moving-on.h...
In one or the other interview since this started, the interviewer asked him that very question and he responded rather incongruously that he loves Belize and has no intention of leaving. That was the moment I started to lean towards he's a little loopy.

There was also a rumor going around that he couldn't return to the US for tax reasons, which is plausible but I think unsubstantiated.
Browser Security Case Study: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
While I agree that "fake democracy" is a bit over the top, I also can't see how he "hacked into AT&T". There might be enough room to dicker over whether searching for a vulnerability equates to "hacking," but does anyone really believe Auernheimer did anything illegal by manually typing in an address?
Not yet...

HN is full of "hackers" who don't know the difference between incrementing a counter (to fetch URLs) and making up other peoples email addresses and checking if they are valid.

ajross sums it up nice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4813107

Meh
> ... that law enforcement and the legislative bodies will attempt to shut them down.

reminds me how heterogeneous the thing we call "western world" actually is.
The thought occurs, but lying to investors of a publicly traded company (ie. HP lying about accounting fraud) would in and of itself be massive fraud that would open HP and its officers and board to incredible penalties. I can't imagine how any scenario would make it worthwhile, especially if you consider the personal ramifications for the officers.
Make your friend guess where you shot your instagram pictures
I guess we are getting caught up in semantics here. A non-technical co-founder who has zero knowledge of even HTML / CSS but has hired a team (and has a technical co-founder) is obviously not a web developer by the job description they used to hire that team, but he is still developing that property (the domain name, which is part of the overall brand) to create value. I suppose you could also call this person a brand developer, business developer, product developer, etc.

So, this is a silly question. ;) Personally, if I'm making a profit (assuming that's my goal) then I could care less what you call me. I'm creating value where there was none before.
Information whether email is valid or not was made publicly available by AT&T. Shouldn't access to publicly available information be assumed to be authorized by the one who made the information public?

If you forget to wear your pants in public you are the one who is to be charged with indecent behavior not the people looking at you with intrusion on your privacy.
I never said crotch-grabbing was acceptable. I said that compared to being frisked by the police the TSA pat-downs I have experienced were unobtrusive. Given this, the outrage towards the TSA seems disproportionate, especially given that the TSA only affects people who fly whereas police tactics affect everyone in the country.

Is there a disparity or is it that Slashdot and HN post articles about TSA abuses but not non-technical police abuses? Most people don't even seem to think frisking is an abuse of power, (though it seems like you may disagree with that), so why the outrage at the TSA but not the police?
The lock metaphor does not work in this case

There was no lock, not even a sucky one, if you want to use a physical analogy then the one burpee posted above is good.
i don't think it's an option to be honest.
I can't tell if you are trolling or are actually asking me how to Google for more info on this guy's case?
Lotus was one of the most successful start-ups ever under the visionary Mitch Kapor. Lotus came from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor

Mitch started all the projects that kept the company afloat for 15 years. My favorites were:
Notes, Magellan, Agenda, and Improv and internally used Orion (search tool).

Jim Manzi the Mckinsey consultant who took over from him successful acquired and killed about 10 good companies (Approach, cc:Mail, Amipro).

Lotus Notes was a very good workflow development tool that forced to support email to sell more copies. Most large companies still don't have cultures that support open sharing of information and use email as the defacto workflow tool.

Check out http://www.lotusmuseum.com/
Tumblr quote that.
A free and open web depends on Google
Speaking of English. It has been noted that VirtualBox icon for «Clone» is a sheep. Russian translation that uses «Копировать»/«Copy» instead of «Clone», making the sheep icon absolutely idiotic (the translators resorted to «Copy» because metaphors like «Clone» are discouraged in serious Russian texts, and VirtualBox obviously uses «Clone» in the metaphorical sense).

So it seems icons have to be internationalised too.
That's pretty good advice, but I'd hold off on spending it on legal affairs until you really need to. $5000 gets you a long way when it is spent on hosting and bandwidth, it's a drop in the bucket when you are spending it on legal advice and incorporation fees.

Use your $5,000 to leverage it to get you another $10,000 or $20,000 in sales, then start thinking about another round and spending money on legal advice and other niceties.
This is very good advice. It's surprising how many people are adverse to short term loans in otherwise financially stable situations.

Many people fall into the two extremes: they either borrow too much, or they are so afraid of debt that they never borrow at all. People on HN are a bit more paranoid and tend to be the latter.
Looking through the email threads I found this: Kay Sievers more or less broke udev for a substantial amount of users by prohibiting kernel modules to load firmware in user-space. Sievers, Hartman, et al consider this reasonable as the drivers, which do this, should be fixed. Torvalds, Cox, et al consider this no good reason to break things. So at least Alan Cox seems to support the forking:

> Just fix udev, and if you can't fix it someone please just fork the last working one.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.video-input-infr...
Is cargo cult the correct term? I have never seen it used to mean "doing things a certain way because they have always been done that way."
Well, he addresses this in the article: "Even if we'll probably be found innocent, why take the risk? Better to keep quiet." That has a chilling effect, suppressing free speech and is generally harmful to society.

In addition, there's a whole grey area which he highlights and you disregard just by trusting the courts, which doesn't prevent you from getting arrested and sued with all the financial and mental stress those things entail.
Nice a desktop application.

Congratulations on that.

Regarding customization, what business really want in a CRM system is the ability to add/remove modules (extra functionality), and scripting abilities to drive campaigns.
Compare to how much people would put into the 'new machine' at the arcade during their first day or two of playing it.

Admittedly, I thought they were wasting money at the time, but they didn't seem particularly upset about it either.
Syntax Highlighting with MarsEdit on WordPress
That sounds like bullshit. Posting link to Hacker News is not exactly how one protects access to his private information. Obviously, whatever is written on that page, the real intent of the author was to publicize the article, and his words in the blog that he is denying access is a lie.

Also, this is placed on a well known public blog, also submitted to search engines and other public catalogues, means that nobody in his sane mind would consider this a private place not intended for public visitors.

It is also a common practice, accepted by vast majority of users, that sites run Javascript in user's browser, and that some data - such as cookies, display resolution, etc. - is available to these scripts. If the site took some liberties outside of accepted practices common for Internet browsing - such as using a hole in the browser to read documents on my hard disk that I did not specifically upload to the site - then yes, the site author would be liable. But to scare me into believing what author intends me to believe, he better would find any court insane enough to interpret it this way.
So, once again, it turns out that REST reduces to RPC plus some advisable practices as soon as you point out how the original REST schema is woefully impractical.

Not-REST: You can algorithmically generate requests for the information you want based on documentation.

REST: You can algorithmically generate requests for the information you want based on documentation that's provided in the session. (Oh, and forget all that crap we said about URIs having to be presented to the API consumer as part of session's hyperlink navigation.)

So, now I can turn RPC into REST just by slapping a link to the documentation on every response (and maybe moving verbs to the appropriate HTTP request type, even though that has nothing to do with CRUD[1])? Gee, why didn't you say so?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4811969
There is a right answer. As some other commenters are saying, there is an objective right and wrong. If someone trusts and commits to you as fully as they do when they marry you (or common law marry by prolonged cohabitation), there is absolutely no excuse to damage that trust and that love for a selfish satisfaction of running a successful startup.

When you enter that type of relationship with someone, you commit, at the very least implicitly, to make your SO the primary priority in your life. If you want to run a startup, you have to work it around your relationship and not vice-versa. The amount of pain that's inflicted on many different people when a relationship that has all the trappings of permanence, lacking only the discipline of the participants to enforce that permanence, is extreme, and far worse and farther reaching than having a company fail or losing a bunch of investor money.

I understand that over the last several decades, individual "fulfillment" (aka undisciplined selfishness) has become the primary attainment for people, regardless of any social structure or moral definition. Marriage has been nullified and diminished to the point where most youth don't even see a point in it anymore. People have been taught, essentially, to worship themselves -- to put temporary individual interests above permanent social cohesion and the good of the whole, and really, the long-term interests of the individual as well. But that doesn't make this correct, and it definitely doesn't make a valid excuse to betray the trust of those closest to you -- triple especially if children are involved. True familial love is worth more than all the money in the world could purchase, including the money your startup may or may not generate, and this is an objective reality.
Believe it or not, I don't disagree with you. The majority of states in the US are not what you would think of as "developed" by any objective measure-- be it crime, poverty, health, education, or equality. That is why I included states like Louisiana with murder rates comparable to some African nations.

But you cannot deny that some regions of the US are developed, are great places to live, and are comparable in terms of geographic area, population, and economic output with the European countries mentioned in this thread. Basically, to anyone who has spent time here, Louisiana is as different from Oregon as Lithuania is from Denmark. To lump all the states together and draw meaning from the statistical average is to fundamentally misunderstand what America is: a coalition of independent states, with different agendas and demographics.
Do you blog on your iPad?
Ask HN: Why is it so expensive to accept payment via SMS in North America?
I'm currently a junior developer and will share the lessons of my experience 6 months in:

- Making mistakes will kill you, when you sit at home working on your personal projects and a bug slips through, it's not so bad, you can fix them and the client (or yourself) is normally pretty cool with it. On the other hand, when it's someone elses fault, E.G. yourself, your boss will come down hard on you. That's his project, his clients and his shame, if you make mistakes in a commercial environment, it costs someone money - get in to the habit of being your own quality assurance.

- Your wage is shitty. Well, mine is, anyway. You have to learn to deal with this, I could go in to detail about finding housing and the lack of respect you face when you need housing benefits, etc, or can't eat for a few days, but there's no need. Get used to having no money and always put as much as you can aside for that rainy day you think you are immortal from at the moment.

- Get used to being the go to guy for all the boring work, no one wants to sit there and refactor spaghetti code or build yet another custom joomla module when they have some cool CSS3 design or some technical challenge of epic proportions to work on.

- Give your boss respect, he may be friendly but he isn't one of your friends, you can joke with him but at the end of the day don't forget that this (wo)man pays your wages and evaluates your work, if you're making a lot of jokes but you have a week where your work goes wrong, the evaluation will be that you're the class clown.

- Slow down at the start, when everyone goes in to a new job, we work our asses off trying to impress then slow down once we settle in, even more so for a junior in their first role, we want to prove we belong in the industry. The kicker is that this pace is difficult to maintain and once you slow down your boss will notice your apparent lack of progress.

- Always be early, never be late. Your boss doesn't notice the fact that you come in early every day (by 15 minutes), what he does notice is the one day you're ten minutes late and unfortunately the hours aren't interchangeable. If you make a habit of being late, you are going to get fired, this isn't college where you could turn up to a lesson 15 minutes late and get a giggle from your peers for being that guy, this is the real world, where lateness isn't tolerated for very long.

- Arrogance is bad. You aren't arrogant, but you have an opinion and you come across as it, starting sentences with "actually, I think" or "No, that's wrong..." will land you in the shit, especially in front of a client. Your boss wants to appear to be an all singing, all dancing super coder and until you have a few more years under your belt, your opinion is largely invalid. However, if something is seriously wrong, drop your boss an email or a skype or a campfire (That's a thing, right?) and explain why in the least condescending way possible, if you do this tactically and only at the right times it will look very good on you.

If anyone is about to jump in to their first job as a junior or needs any advice, feel free to email me, I normally check it every couple of hours.
Would be interesting to see the EU import/export relative to EU GDP as a whole and not split up on member states.

A large part of EU member states' export is export to other EU member states, just like these figures ignore the US interstate commerce.
When I joined the startup scene 3 years ago, I mostly saw success stories. Now that I've been through my own failed startup, I see many failure stories.

I believe that two things have changed:

1. The field is maturing, so more people are talking about failures, the downsides of entrepreneurship, etc.

2. I'm growing as a business person, so I'm reading a larger variety of things, not just stories that reinforce my beliefs.

So it's possible that, like me, you're so focused on reading positive startup-reinforcing articles, that you're missing out on some of the articles which focus more on the failures and things to avoid.

Oh, and definitely read pg's articles - they have a lot of truth in them, compiled from one smart person who's seen many startups both fail and succeed, and who is specifically looking for the reasons and patterns behind it all.
The Real Definition Of Skeuomorphism
Agreed - I struggle to find any area of engineering that would decrease in output in the long term from the striking of patent from our laws.
For people looking for a project, Mozilla has a lot of documentation and tools to help first-time contributors. "Contributing to the Mozilla Codebase" [1] documents how to get the code and build your own Firefox. "Bugs Ahoy" [2] is a Bugzilla search engine that filters "good first bugs" based on programming language and interests.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction

[2] http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/
> What a terrible reason to fork.

Sure, but as qznc's comment makes clear there's quite a few things udev have done that together count as sufficient reason for the eudev authors.

> This feature is useless.

Running out of space on /usr tends to be significantly less obnoxious than running out of space on /. So it's not entirely useless; whether it's worth the additional complexity is a separate matter that I don't have a considered opinion on.
nice. i will give it a shot later.
1K is credit card money. Get one.
What Louisiana Schoolchildren Learn About Evolution
I don't ask you how to Google. I ask you to substantiate your claims that the article is biased and the truth is different from what is described there. If you are convinced this is the case, it must be easy for you to provide some evidence. Of course, you may consider this trolling and refuse to continue the discussion. The readers would then left to judge if your bare unsubstantiated claims are proof enough. I was assuming you wrote that comment in order to try to convince the readers in the truth of your claims. However maybe I was wrong.
Nope this is not what happened.
Play team made the decision months before to start moving to Scala when experimenting the play-scala module of Play1.

This is a technical decision to build a web framework to the JVM. And even if the core is written in Scala, it doesn't mean you can't use it in Java. Give a try!
For me, he hits the nail on the head in the scond footnote:

"This, naturally, raises the question as to whether HP might be sandbagging its goodwill writedown to make future results look better. I have no special insight here, other than to note such an occurrence has happened many times before."
> Pardon me if I'm missing something here, but doesn't the post exactly say that that has what weev has been charged for?

weev's actions are a gray area. I don't think that convicting him under the CFAA is absurd. It might be unreasonable or unconstitutional, but there's a valid security issue at stake. To liken weev's actions to viewing a deliberately published-for-public-consumption blog post is a false equivalence: and precisely what makes the piece alarmist.
There's already a mechanism to push out every piece of content that you create to your fans: it's called email. (Also, RSS feeds on your website, blogs, etc.)

I'm 24. I don't communicate by email with anyone in my age group or, indeed, anyone under 30, unless it's to pass around attachments (and that's rarer these days with Dropbox). I know of one person my age or younger who actually maintains an RSS reader; I tried, but I couldn't really be bothered. I know no non-technical people in that age bracket who make a point of regularly reading blogs (but many who read one or two posts that reach them through--you guessed it--Facebook).

Facebook is rapidly leaving convenience territory, and that's what makes a lot of their recent behavior concerning.
Terminator 2 Effects explained
Bingo. I think it was a dick move to go running to Gawker with it, rather than practicing responsible disclosure. But even then, I'm having a hard time with the idea of criminal charges for that; he didn't steal this data, AT&T happily handed it to him. He basically ran around saying "Haha, what a moron the guy at the administrative desk is, I just kept asking him for files and he just kept on handing them to me". And while that's distasteful, is it criminal?

Honestly, to me, it feels like he's being run down because someone got embarrassed, and he's being railroaded with archaic laws that can be applied in vague and nebulous ways to make just about anyone a criminal if it's useful.
This is beautiful, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way when it comes to the markup.

Once we used HTML TABLEs to express everything, and accessibility was destroyed by the many nested tables used to define layout.

But now we use DIV and UL to express tabular data, and accessibility is destroyed by the many nested divs and lists that define a table.

Would love to have seen a status page with highly accessible HTML still look as beautiful as this one does.
No. He's saying that the court would not use 18 USC 1030(a) to charge someone of a crime when they did something completely normal and innocuous but which was technically against the language in 18 USC 1030(a) because it was poorly drafted.

He's saying that the courts can make distinctions between what Congress intended (to make it illegal to bypass computer security systems without permission), and what the law might technically forbid but what is completely normal and innocuous to do (like browsing someone's website without their explicit permission).
Emerging Trends In Real Estate
The real estate sector follows a common direction or pattern. Such even patterns or changes in the normal trend of pattern are called as Real Estate trends. There may be changes in the same over the course of time which may be due to economical condition changes, changes in mortgage rates, speculative consumers, etc.
Rent a home to airbnb? AirBnB pays you fixed rent to rent your home from you and then rents it out to guests?
I used Notes and Domino in 97-98 and quite liked it. We used it to develop in-house workflow and documenting tools and at the time it was really quite slick. Doing web interfaces to the tools was amazingly quick (relative to most other things at the time) and generating custom spreadsheet reports was quite quick and easy assuming you where also using Lotus 1-2-3.

Never really used the email functions though.
Can you please explain how "GET /iccid/12345" is hacking? I must be missing something here, could you elaborate a bit?
Kickstarter should be able to reach a pretty large market for a boycott.
The entire point of the courts is to address grey areas. Legislation will never be perfect, and will never be able to account for things on a case-by-case basis, and will never be able to keep up with change.

If you want better legislation, then you need to make sure the people writing it are well-educated in the areas you care about. This is the original purpose of lobbying.
Just a note, but I believe the article is intended as commentary on this case specifically:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507661/jail-looms-for-m...