skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW, it's not just pg who has pursued one of those "sitcom" ideas that seem good (but really are not) before pivoting to make a different product that solves a real problem.

Before Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen built and tried to sell a hardware product (!) called the Traf-O-Data. The device processed raw data from roadway traffic counters and printed out human-readable reports for traffic engineers. Luckily for the two budding entrepreneurs, they were unable to close the first sale, leading them subsequently to pivot into making Basic interpreters for microcomputers.[1]

--

[1] http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=45
I agree, I think it's got to the point now that it's a choice between two visions rather than better and worse.

When I use Android it feels like it puts a lot of flexibility and choice in my hands, that I can probably do more with it that I can with iOS but that there's additional work involved in that, both in that customisation but also the small amount of additional drag that comes with the additional choices available.

When I use iOS it feels like there's more simplicity but if I don't like that simplicity then tough. Don't like the iPhone? Tough. Want better integration between apps and services? Tough.

Personally my position right now is that I want iOS (I have kids, a job, a house and a million other things that take time and I have no additional bandwidth to invest in getting something just so, even if there would be benefit in doing so).

Ten years ago that wouldn't have been the case and I'd have found Android a more compelling choice and would have revelled in the flexibility, the handset options and everything else.

But overall that choice seems good for all of us. Better two visions offering genuine options than two identakit versions of the same thing, or worse still one monopoly player and no choice.
FloCase: NFC Case for iPhone on Kickstarter by Flomio
there's also a van Slingerland Dev Set: (1) FloCase, (2) FloJacks, (20) Zapps and the SDK
LIMITED RELEASE: 88
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flomio/flojack-nfc-for-ipad-and-iphone/posts/351478
Amazon customer services have a great reputation. I've read many stories about them accepting returns and/or sending it again without questions.

If they decided that in the case of this customer things escalated beyond reasonable, they must have their motives.

In the end, both parties are satisfied: Amazon won't lose money sending to an address with a high damage rate, and the customer won't receive damaged merchandise, at least not from Amazon.
The US Government wants to read your email without a warrant
My first decent sized program is to parse a strange file format that contains multiple tables into a DOM-like representation, and then output that DOM to CSV.

What I have so far, is a SAX-like event-driven parser that works, and I have a CSV writer that works, and I have hooked them together, and that works. I managed to avoid using pointers for that chunk of code.

For the DOM building portion, I need to allocate table and row objects while I'm getting events, and since I don't know ahead of time how many of each I'm going to have, I more-or-less must have a pointer to "the current" table, and then when that table is complete or I run out of document I can add it to the document object. So the lifespans are not identical anymore: the builder is going to have to allocate tables as it builds and probably rows as well.

At the moment I'm using pointers, and I just make a new table or row when appropriate and then add it back to the container. But this is a little messy because the containers are, you know, vector<table> and vector<row> and they don't need to think in terms of pointers for that reason. So I wind up passing currentTable and currentRow to the add methods, which probably makes copies on the stack.

I am sure that somebody with more C++ experience would see the right way to do this. My experience is largely with conventional OO languages (i.e. memory managed) and functional programming languages. So I'm a little lost on how to structure this.
That would be two versions behind.
Everyone is talking about something different when they say "consulting."

I get the feeling some people are talking about freelance marketing with revenue-sharing, freelance development work, freelance sys admin work, and then business advice.
The qualifications you're making to the TSA's actions are a little bit generous aren't they? Given that a regular agent can't tell the difference between that cartoon contraption and an actual dangerous device, what's the point of having them in the first place? If all they can do is flag up anything that looks vaguely electronic and unusual, then they are completely useless.

Besides which, in this case they managed to determine that the watch didn't have any explosives attached, but they still arrested the guy anyway.
I guess that's why companies like Google, Facebook, Mozilla or Microsoft go to great lengths to publicize their disclosure platforms? This endless stream of avenues exist yet these companies feel the need to create their own? Right.

CERT-CC is the closest we have and that does little to ensure things are actually resolved nor does it afford any sort of protection to the reporter.

Care to link to one of these "many avenues" instead of just pointing me to Google?
> Intent is a critical factor. Like I said, the guy went too far. He didn't enter by mistake, though someone could have. He entered with the intent of making unauthorized copies of private data.

We're in agreement here. I think we're both making the same point. Intent is the key here.

The problem is that if you just consider servers, configurations, permissions, and other technical aspects ... intent doesn't enter the picture. That's the wrong way to think about this.
Theory: The US gutted its educational system some generations ago, and the results are now showing on a policy level.

As George Carlin once said: "When you have a selfish, ignorant public, you get selfish, ignorant leaders."
No, it wouldn't expose Google to that liability, because Google would have no intent to access information of any sort, let alone information that Google would have reason to believe it shouldn't have access to. The crimes charged here aren't strict-liability; the prosecution is required to prove intent.

Also: the authorization "built into" HTTP is used by a tiny minority of all web applications. Clearly, if you break into a retail brokerage and execute trades on behalf of other people, you're going to be liable, regardless of how that retail brokerage chooses to authenticate access to the site.

(I don't have a position about this particular case; I know virtually nothing about it).
It was used for lots of http://famous-website.com:long-token-nobody-will-ever-read@p... style attacks.

Microsoft's solution to the problem may not have been ideal, but at least that was the reasoning behind it.

Edit: And what do you see once you click post? Hacker news ironically proving Microsoft's point. It's a wonderful world we live in.
Mozilla Makes Prototype of Firefox OS Available
Have you tried LinkedIn? It should be your best friend.
If somebody has committed fraud, I think it's entirely reasonable to say so.

The responsibility is, of course, HP's. And they know that, which is why they took the writedown. But the blame for crime falls on the criminals.
> "The more concerning charge to online activists watching Weev’s case is based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which forbids “unauthorized access” to a computer."

There are HTTP codes to indicate lack of authorization. Presumably he didn't encounter those. How is this an argument?
I thought it's supposed to be of format like

'Ask HN: Review my startup CompanyName'

Anyways, I guess I got the timing wrong. Will post again.
Thanks for replying.
Vague rules from Visa and MasterCard will become vague laws on the books of the EU, and nothing will change.
Booting Up: Google Hires a Go-To Government Guy for Self-Driving Cars | Betabeat
I think this is incredibly important at most levels of the organization. Pushing for 100% capacity utilization (e.g. no downtime or slack) doesn't leave any room for garbage collection (and other optimizations) to occur in people's minds. Often the "Eureka" moment can't be found if you're exhausted after working full-tilt all day.

I also find that individual contributors, particularly in a software context, need more downtime than you think. Sure, you can solve just about any problem quickly if you rush, but you're introducing bugs (subtle or overt) that will have to be cleaned up later.

I'm not saying that programmers should sit in their office chair all day staring out the window, but some amount of it is a good thing.
The mine roller looked to be made of three parts: the black core (expensive); the plastic plates (very cheap); and the bamboo poles (cheap as shit).

Provided the weight came mostly from the core and the core never itself got blown up, I'd saw it can clear more than a couple of land mines for the money. Perhaps, a land mine per plastic plate, and if an NGO is paying for Afghani wages, you can roll that baby all day.

Bonus: it creates a relatively "safe" path in its footstep.
Touchscreen Guides Are Coming to 250 More Phone Booths Across NYC | Betabeat
I always assumed the stories about empty cities were like street interviews. Pick what fits the target narrative and toss the rest, even if the rest contradicts the narrative.
And it turns out he has yet to do that
A couple things:

1) "overrunning the planet with people, mass starvation and disease were to be rampant"

These were never consensus viewpoints. Anthropogenic climate change, in the low to mid single degrees Celsius, is.

2) There's a whole lot wrapped up in the word adjusting. If it's to mean anything more than "survive" (as a species--many individuals' lives would be cut short), it has to include an active component.

We "adapted" to the ozone hole. Yes, that involved new technologies and habits like better sunscreen and norms around using it. But it also involved people getting together and banning substances that contributed to the problem. That made individual-level adaption much less costly than it would have been otherwise.
You’re Not Paranoid, That Department Store Mannequin Really Is Watching You
Article author here:

Yes, you are absolutely right that this is a very valid metric to use when dealing with development. I'm not sure that it is not discussed, though. Usually people talks about "language productivity"

And yes, Python exceeds at that ;-)
I'm not exactly sure if I understood your comment.

But we know quite a lot about how the planet works and what our impact is. We don't know everything, but we know a lot more than nothing.

It's like sending a blind person over a busy road. If you do it when the pedestrian light is red, you might not know which car might hit her at what velocity, but you know that the outcome is quite likely much much worse than if you wait for the green light.
The easiest way to do it in my experience is to write your own simple forum software. This should only be a few hours work in a framework and will have the added bonus of being more specialised to your needs and probably simpler to use.

If it's a small forum you probably don't need any actual moderation features (stuff you do need you can do through a scaffolding interface).

Bots seem to be attracted to phpBBs like flies to shit so not being fingerprinted is a huge bonus.

Also helps to do weird stuff, like instead of having a <input type="submit" /> for a form submit use an IMG tag with an onclick that reads data from the form fields in the most roundabout way possible.

Also make the URL of each thread change when there is a post so it makes it harder for the bots to tell if their posts are working or not. Better yet don't display the results on the post on the site itself for 30 seconds or so but use JS to make them appear to the submitting user.

Some of those tricks can of course hurt usability and accessability though but I managed to reduce spam to 0 on one forum.
Stopping and questioning him about his watch was not batshit. Having him arrested was the actual batshit.

What's also batshit is the idea that people need to curtail their free speech in order not to piss off some ill-trained goons managing a contrived state of fear.
If TSA workers can't distinguish between things that are bombs and things that aren't bombs, then why do we have them and why are they arresting people? It's not like any of the bombs that people have smuggled on board planes in the last decade have matched the Hollywood stereotype, I'm not sure that screening for things that look like Hollywood bombs tends to make people safer.

Also, if they had simply gotten an expert or not let him board that would be understandable. But instead they arrested him.
Thanks for the voice of experience.

To rephrase the original concern differently, I think a big part of the problem is that 90% of the opinions these legislators hear are from people who's full-time job is to get in front of them, and those people are generally for sale.

Another thing, the senators and congressmen certainly say they want to do the right thing, and they probably even believe it, yet they'll often compromise between the right thing and the thing that keeps them in office.

Most of them spend more time dialing for dollars than they do reading legislation. Keep that in mind when you see them interact with lobbyists.
Twitter Suspends Beloved Account NYTOnIt After Trademark
I really like how the message they put on the end of the email about how they will stick around and answer any customer emails. I actually took up their offer and emailed them back to let them know I like the product but it wasn't solving enough of a pain point for me to upgrade it. They got back to me immediately and said they'd keep working hard to solve that pain point for me.

I'm actually considering doing something similar in my next email newsletter, cause that's awesome customer service.
Parents Are Completely Freaked About Advertisers Tracking Their Kids | Betabeat
Happy youngsters more likely to grow into wealthy adults, study finds
I don't think Gruber is correct on this one. The add minor items all the time without taking it down.
Hewlett-Packard Takes $8.8 Billion Charge, Says it Was Duped in Autonomy Deal
Recipes for startup failure
Maybe they're just efficient. Little work for max cost is more efficient than lots of work for max cost. (This is exactly what you said with busy and chasing the fractions of percentages)
Transient Cloud Sync Between Laptops(?)
Well, the proposal has been adopted as a report today. The Parliament has formally requested legislation to be drafted - it has gone beyond the proposal stage.

So this has entered the famous _wurstmaschine_ - the legislative sausage machine - where something will come out the other end.

Cheers,
Rick
> You need to define who you think the "big corporations that run america are"

The point is regulation is determined by the highest bidder. Does it matter who the highest bidder is? It doesn't change the fact that America is a whore.
Nokia HERE today with decent mapping on Apple devices
using this config now, liking it.
> No, it wouldn't expose Google to that liability

It wouldn't expose Google to that liability because Google is a large US corporation.

If it were a single greyhat individual with a history of unpopular speech, the argument would probably go something along the lines of "any reasonable person wouldn't spider the whole web, because they'd know they'd eventually get SOMETHING they're not authorized to access..."
What happened to the company?
how do I start a route?

This bugged me for a while until I realised that they don't do driving navigation. There's a purple button with an arrow (play button) when you're in walking mode that lets you start voice navigation. It's very disappointing.
I'm curious what department this guy was Dunphy guy was in the OIG office of -- OIG isn't an agency, it's a role within larger agencies (like the internal police for each department of government, the equivalent of internal affairs in a PD).

I have zero problems with firearms, but if the guy was breaking the law, using official status, etc. to help his friend, that I have a problem with, and I imagine any agency would as well.
The complaint cites "losses"

> To date, AT&T has spent approximately $73,000 in remedying the data breach. Those costs include, among other things, the cost of contacting all iPad 3G customers to inform them of the breach and AT&T's response to it.

BOO-#$%^ING-HOO.

As if AT&T shouldn't have had to lock down their user's info, and it's some kind of injustice to them that they have to do things the right way now. This perfectly highlights the fundamental disconnect between the corporations, the (their) legal system, and the Internet-connected world.
Uhm... now we just need some other plants that turn desert sand to fertile soil.
Writing a Brainfuck interpreter is a superb optimization exercise. Basic version is trivial to write, and in 2-3 iterations it's possible to get speed ups of 100x or more. If you haven't tried it, I would highly recommended it as a brain stretcher.

Then try and see if it's faster than this one - http://mazonka.com/brainf/bff4.c
Lazy Students Unite: MiniManuscript Wants To Be A Wikipedia For Manuscript
Haha. Here's another one I am skeptical about - BlinkX.

Edit: I just went to check their stock price - it's down 12%. Hmmm, I thought, has Autonomy cast a shadow on UK techs? Wait a minute - who's this grimmacing at me down the bottom?

http://markets.ft.com/research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=...

It's only Dr Mike Lynch, Non-Executive Director. Who'd have thunk it?
CFCs and consequent ozone depletion are, ironically, a negative forcing. One possible but likely stupid mitigation route would be to pump a lot of CFCs into the stratosphere and destroy our ozone layer.
Because APNs don't work that way. There's no "standard" way of doing that. It's not like over-the-air PRL updates on CDMA2K networks. On iPhone specifically, there's only one way of pushing APNs to the phone, and that is if the carrier has a carrier profile. If they wanted to have their own official, Apple-signed carrier profile on iOS, they'd have to play by Apple's rules, which presumably means becoming a contracted iPhone reseller.

Since Straight Talk rides the AT&T network and all of their SIM cards bear the AT&T IIN, there are some additional technical hurdles, some of which are discussed and fleshed out here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16266984#post16...

Ideally, APNs would just be another value that the SIM card could carry. But I guess since packetized data over GSM predates the SIM card standard, we're stuck with this need to program them directly into the phone.
"Some of those tricks can of course hurt usability and accessability though but I managed to reduce spam to 0 on one forum."

Did the number of non-spam posts also get to 0?

</snark> Sorry, had to.
> regardless of how that retail brokerage chooses to authenticate access

There was no other authentication system aside from HTTP in place in this case.

If that's the only one, and it's wide open, any reasonable person knows that the information there is public. That's how the web works. We're allowed to load URLs on planet Earth.
I'm in the same boat as you, but on a smaller scale. I'm based out of Charlotte. So there is "less potential." However, I don't understand the whole deal that recruiters try to recruit you for the town you're in.

What about candidates who are willing to relocate? What about overseas relocation? Not being married and liking travel that sounds like fun to me.
Fiber Optic Breakthrough to Improve Internet Security Cheaply
Greenhouse gases break record again, says top UN weather man
I'd definitely at least try it out. I don't have a lot of bones to pick with gmail but an awesome UI can often convert me.
The argument on the Forbes article is like something the character Sheldon would say on the "Big Bang Theory" sitcom. Ineffectual and pointless as far as convincing anybody.

I think the reality is that Rubio either doesn't believe his own words or simply doesn't care what the truth actually is in this matter. His words are just a position designed to appease to "the base" voters of the GOP.
> The first 32 bits form the minimum allocation size; you can't get assigned more addresses than this.

Well that's not true, if the below linked article is to be believed. The DoD has a /16, which is twice as big (bitwise, it's substantially larger in absolute terms) as the /32 the article says is 'the minimum allocation size'.

aforementioned article: http://gcn.com/articles/2007/02/03/dod-to-allocate-its-ipv6-...
If anyone else has this problem, check out http://www.unlockit.co.nz/ from your iPhone. It creates APN settings profiles which can be installed even if your carrier has disabled them.
NP :) Yep, we've actually had that _exact_ scenario (though I suppose it's not terribly surprising, but funny that you got it exactly correct). Dumb kid (over 21, but still a kid) from CT rented a Murcielago to show off, made it about 10 minutes and this happened:

http://imgur.com/fV4Ph

I recall someone did a similar AMA a few years ago, but indeed, maybe it's time for another one.
Gender and Technology: Imbalance, Not Bias
Show HN: Help me price my startup webapp
Thank you for taking some time to help me out!

http://projectionable.herokuapp.com

I just launched Projectionable at http://projectionable.herokuapp.com. My goal is to decrease the time it takes to get client approval for project estimates by making the estimates interactive for clients.

I haven't set up Stripe yet (I'm setting up an LLC then I'll be on my way), and I'm trying to iron out the pricing strategy by the time I have that set up.

Basically, I see three options:

1. Charge users to invite clients to a project. These are single transactions on a per project basis.

2. Offer monthly subscription plans that allow users to make project estimates and invite clients to approve of them. Here, I could create some activity quotas to offer several pricing tiers.

3. A combination of both options above, charging a premium for per-project transactions.

I absolutely appreciate any thoughts and sharing of analogous experiences! Thanks!
Of course :) Let me know when you're in NYC, Miami or LA...
Patriot Act infographic from ACLU
The other big acquisition in the enterprise search space around that time (Fast, bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion) had similar problems, kind of odd. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/03/did-the-enron-of-norway-pul...
On the flip side of the coin, I've seen Unix Admin positions that ask for C++ experience. A sys admin being able to develop? Come on..
We're announcing that we can't announce what we've found.

Seriously, though, I hope the results of whatever are confirmed. Not just for science but for justification for more funding to flow into space exploration.
If you could build a sufficiently cheap robot capable of navigating rough terrain would that do the trick?
>And areas too cold now will be able to grow food.

Sure, but to the transition will take money (effort) and time. And already food supply if a finely tuned system with not much margin for error.
http://www.unlockit.co.nz/unlockit/

The real assholes here are AT&T and Straight Talk btw.
Didn't Visa & Friends kill WikiLeaks donations two years ago? What good does it do for the EU to "scold" them now, two years later, after it turned out WikiLeaks was able to survive and keep operating without credit card companies?

Even if something comes of this, it would have been a helluva lot more useful to have happened in December 2010/early 2011. Doing something now might discourage this kind of behavior in the future, but it seems a lot more like calling the fire department after watching your neighbor's house burn to the ground.
Color Will Shut Down on December 31st