skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really stood out when you said that you paid an statistician to analyze these games. I assume you did it to understand and try to replicate the successes of the top grossing games. What did you learn that was surprising? Did this level of analysis help you make better games?
He actually does have a point based on the text.

1030(a)(2)(C) Whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer; shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.

Under the statute, a "protected computer" generally means any computer connected to the internet.

Also, based on the legislative history, "obtains information" has been read to mean "merely observing" information.

The only issue is "without authorization." Based on its plain meaning, the law could mean that you need affirmative authorization to access any website.

Obviously, that's a real stretch, but there was a case decided by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals [1] that held a company liable for using a web scraper - where the court said the defendants exceeded authorized access based on the website's boilerplate copyright notice.

[1]http://openjurist.org/274/f3d/577/ef-cultural-travel-bv-v-ex...
Your missing the point of the analogy. The planes that should have been studied were the same planes that never RTB'ed so they could not be studied.
But there's a difference still. I think it'd be better to compare it with a guy who has only applied to a single university and got rejected. Not only has he lost a year, he's also lost his pride.

Next year, he needs to start all over again. It is at this point, where he sees his friends already start college and slowly feels excluded from the 'college social circle'. We, of course know it's all in the head. But does he?
I'm certainly not pushing for socialism or anything like it. I'm closer to libertarianism than anything. To me, the default answer for "should the government be involved in X?" is "no." To answer "yes," I want something pointing to either an "inalienable right", like "freedom from murder," or a clear public good, like "we all benefit if you aren't allowed to dump nuclear sludge in the storm drains."

Sounds like I'm in good company. That makes me happy.

I think the key thing we disagree on that I don't see copyright ownership as one of those inalienable rights, and you do. And I don't see indefinite copyright as a clear public good, either.

First, I think that people should be free to make a contract that states, "I will let you read this thing I've written, if you agree to certain conditions" (and those conditions could be anything - don't write fanfic, don't distribute, you have to do 50 pushups, whatever).

Then, copyright is just the government saying, "For the sake of convenience, here is the default contract. If you want something different, you can always explicitly opt out of this, and optionally specify something different."

I'm really interested to see if you buy this rationale for copyright.

Whose good is intended by said progress, if not society's as a whole?

I think the intention is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," which does benefit society, but indirectly. I think if the intention had been to promote the public good, they would have said "to promote the Good of the Public" :P

If you still think this is unclear, you're trying too hard (but let me know and I'll explain it differently.) Of course, you may disagree, but I want to make sure you understand what I'm saying.

As to whether it matters, it's the only existing legal rationale for copyright in the U.S.

True, I guess, but I'm not interested in how the current law can be interpreted ("legal rationale"); I'm interested in how things ought to be.
John McAfee certainly isn't a boring old man.

I don't know what to make of any of this. There is enough confusion and mis-information that it is totally impossible to know what the truth is any more but regardless of what the truth is I'm pretty sure that John McAfee isn't going to die in some old folks home to be visited on Sundays by his children that hope that granddad will kick the bucket soon so they can stop these visits.

At his age most folks are thinking about which brand rollator will bring the most value for their money. McAfee seems to be a star in his own totally weird movie with sex (illegal?), drugs (some of it definitely illegal) and banana republics thrown into the mix with abandon.

I'm happy I don't have to make the choice between the retirement home and John McAfee's, but I'm fairly sure that a large number of people in retirement homes would happily trade with him.

I'm not quite admiring him (definitely would not admire him if it turns out he killed that guy and taking advantage of all these young girls is definitely not ok) but I'm not saying he doesn't have his weird charm either. If he did it I hope he gets caught and sentenced appropriately, if he didn't I hope he manages to escape to safety somehow. The problem is that it is impossible to know what to believe, and a large factor in that is McAfee himself. He's been on the run in one form or another for years now so for him this is likely business as usual.
This is very good! I work for a payments service provider in India. And at our company, we have something similar but not so detailed as this. Ours is built on top of Pingdom - http://status.juspay.in/.

The bottomline here is that transparency is a virtue. And this is something that is all the more important for a company operating in the payments industry.
He's not a real "he", right? We're clear that we're talking about a fictitious startup, right?

I do not think less of actual startup founders who are unhappy when their companies fail. I just do not care for this particular fictitious character and would like to push back against the veneration of his fictitious feelings, which are (fictitiously) unreasonable.
I suspect it is because many people don't think the "crime" he committed either actually is a crime, or if it is that it should be a crime. Lots of gray area around this particular activity.
Despite the assertions of tptacek, there is no requirement for any fraud to occur for a crime to have occurred. This is a pretty important thing for computer people to understand, and it's really unfortunate that one knucklehead vehemently asserting false facts has ruined this whole thread.

I agree, you should stop embarrassing yourself. Multiple lawyers, including practitioners in this field, are discussing in depth why you are completely wrong. Fraud, it should be noted, is only one of the possible violations--there are others. But tptacek's point was that the intent to commit one of these violations is necessary (and that specific intent determines which charges apply. As you can clearly see from the statute, intent is an element for every one of these charges http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030.

You can shouldersurf someone's password, log in as them, type "ls", log out and never use that password again - you've violated that law. That's not fraud. That's accessing a protected system, which is a separate charge. It's a problem if you don't have permission, express or implicit, for that access.
Yes, every case has an activist judge -- according to the losing side in that case.
weev is a criminal. He spent many years making a living for himself by stealing from other people. He gets to re-write this past of his because most of his former crew are gone. weevs defenders are people who didn't know him when he was most active (2003-2009).

This particular case is also pretty clear-cut. If you were a whitehat, why would you retrieve so much data? Why would you give the data to someone who was not with that company?

Reserve your sympathy for hackers who get set up by their businesses partners, or people who aren't thieves and backstabbers. weev is just beginning to get what he has had coming to him for ten years...
There's a lot of value when a company tries to make it simple to understand, and more importantly to show what's capable and why it's good to do certain things. This is not only for my own understanding, but for when I pass the work off to someone else, I know they'll be able to learn quickly and communicate back well.
The 4 Secrets Behind Zynga’s Narcotically Addictive Games
Find small businesses in your local area that don't have websites and offer to build them one for $500 (or whatever number you think). You just need a few to make your money and it shouldn't take you long to build a simple site. Use wordpress and themes to make it really fast.

Restaurants are particularly good candidates.
Chances are, if they want to get someone like that, they are going to find a way. There probably isn't much need to specifically engineer a law to enable that sort of behaviour.
They're aiming for something different than the JVM, it seems. What exactly that entails isn't presently clear.
> In-app purchases work because they defer the visualization of the amount actually spent until the phone bill comes in.

But let's not gather the posse on all in-app purchases.

Non-game iOS apps with no consumable items can't help but go freemium in the absence of a time-trial mode (as in e.g. WP7), and Apple's discouragement of separate lite/pro versions.
Are you referring to the guy who was convicted for accessing his bank's site with lynx (or similar)? I remember a story like that but this [1] is basically all I turned up. I'm sure I read more than that originally. Do you know more about it?

[1] http://boingboing.net/2005/01/27/jailed-for-using-a-n.html
Your blog post is visible to the public internet. IANAL, but my first argument as the defendant would probably be to point out that that's implicit authorization to access, as is the act of accessing an implicit authorization for you to run Javascript. I could see an argument against the second w.r.t. the option to disable Javascript not being clear or well-known to most people.
Hmm yea that's a good point. I guess my thought was that founders are almost unilaterally interested in learning from successes over failures. For example, Startup School doesn't consist of a bunch of speakers who have only failed at starting startups because not many people would want to hear from Joe-Schmoe who failed. Maybe it has some who failed once or twice and then succeeded, but they still suffer from survivor bias.
This sounds to me like he's protecting his own income. The American patent system is the envy of the world. I Loled.
I've been down that road a number of times. And I've been lucky to find myself in situations that allowed me to pull through with out selling my stuff. If you're good at iOS and Android development, I may have some short terms (few days) projects.
I think I was the only one that read it as "Oracal Surprised by the President" (?!?!?!)
Whenever I'm down or sad, I look up to this video: http://youtu.be/H8ZuKF3dxCY and suddenly I feel better and blessed.
I spent lots of money on video games growing up.

The only difference I see between my spending on nintendo games and your son is that I used cash instead of an credit card attached to an itunes account.

The problem is that it is too easy to forget we are spending real money. Clicking YES on a popup is a lot easier than physically removing a 20 dollar bill from your wallet and handing it over. After a cash transaction, I reflect on my empty wallet. After a credit card purchase, I have to check my balance... if I even remember.

I dont blame the game companies for trying to make addicting games any more than I blame restaurants for asking if I want to try the specials or if I have room for dessert.

tl;dr, credit cards are dangerous. As they always have been.
I don't know how fictional this account is, or how realistic the story, nor would I defend the writing style, or hn-worthiness of the article, but the feelings associated with failure do ring true.
And guy-ropes.
The people paying for your WordPress plugins and themes are, generally speaking, people who don't have time to fuck around with piracy.

I've experienced this first hand. As a junior web developer at an advertising company, there were plenty of times when my grand schemes for how we could do something for free on WordPress were met with "no, just pay for it".
If it is still growing rapidly, it might be considered a startup.

http://paulgraham.com/growth.html
http://abr.business.gov.au will be good for determining the type of entity applying if you want to drop that question as well.

However, I assume most of the applications will be for a Company/Company+Trust. To get this data, if you do a company search via ASIC ($9 for the extended version), you can get this: https://connectonline.asic.gov.au/idc/groups/exportalcontent...

I am fairly certain nab will be doing a similar search so maybe you can work with them on that or have them reimburse you for Braintree performing the initial search.

Re. ABN/ACN there are certain (very rare) situations where the ABN and ACN differ apart from the additional 2 numbers at the start of the ABN.
Ask HN: What blogging service/software do you use?
I have been blogging on and off for the past 6 years or so. During this time I have used blogspot, wordpress.com (hosted) and recently hosted my own wordpress on a VPS.

Just last week my web site was down and I got an email from my VPS provider (a cheap $25/month service provide who shall not be named) telling me that I lost all my data. Yes, I am at fault for not taking back ups of my blog posts but between the code that I need to protect and my personal documents I have not treated my blog post content as top class material (lesson is learned).

At this point, I am in search of a new blogging solution that will let me post content easily, give me some sort of a backup, is not going to require updating the software every month. I am willing to go either the service or installed software route although my preference is a no hassle hosting.

Preferably this solution should cost me less than $20/month. What are your suggestions? What do you use?

Thanks in advance.
How is Kickstarter at fault? Is it really within their scope of responsibilities to conduct due diligence with regard to IP before allowing someone to fundraise?

I hope this does not "kickstart" a new trend of bullying crowdfunding sites.
You paid someone to tell you and XP is an exponential function of Level? Every game since D&D in 1974 (and probably earlier) has had that.

Heck, the human ear has an exponential relationship between air pressure and perceived loudness. As does the human eye for light and perceived brightness.
If you have a solid job, you should be able to get a line of credit with your bank. It's typically less than half interest of credit cards.

I was in much the same situation as the OP some time ago, when credit card companies wouldn't touch me because I was new to the country and had no credit rating. I called my bank and got a £1000 line of credit in 10 minutes, presumably on the back of them seeing a fairly substantial salary hit the account every month.
Do small-scale client work and ask for half up front. I've done this plenty of times succesfully.

I also paid my rent for several months while unemployed by offering to do work on my landlord's other properties. In fact, me and one of my other housemates were "employed" this way until we found more lucrative work.

Tutoring other people in web development has also paid my bills at times.
Just because everyone's already mentioned the easy (and probably best) answer of just selling stuff you don't need, let me add something a little different:

Enter programming competitions, app hackathons, that sort of thing. The kind that are typically one whole 24h day, or perhaps an entire weekend, and offer decent prizes to the top few teams.

Now, I'll grant you that this might not be suitable for a number of reasons. The main one being that you sound like you need this money ASAP and perhaps there simply aren't any good contests this weekend. However, they certainly meet your criteria for being earned "in a relatively short time frame" since you're not working more than a few days and potentially collecting a 4+ figure check. You also (obviously) need some solid chops, but you mentioned that you're "very competent" at web and mobile development, and those are the hottest areas so that's a good start.

Some random examples of contests and competitions that I've been involved with recently include Mozilla Ignite [1], The Great Canadian Appathon [2], and a bunch of other low-key contests with smaller payoffs, often aimed at students. I'm linking to the prize pages just to show you that it can be very lucrative :).

So get out there and give it a shot. At worst you make no money but meet a bunch of awesome people, and they usually present opportunities of their own.

[1] https://blog.mozillaignite.org/2012/09/ideation-winners/

[2] http://greatcanadianappathon.com/prizes.php
IANAl but putting up a website implies granting certain kinds of access. This is common knowledge and common practice. The foundation of Common Law (the basis of our legal system) is "what would a reasonable man do?"

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

You can't parse sentences out of context and apply programmer logic to them, that's not how laws work.
In Space, Flames Behave in Ways Nobody Thought Possible
Yes, you are right. There are many legit uses for in-app purchases. But this crack-cocaine in digital form isn't one of them.
One of my favorite business discussion program is The Bottom Line by BBC radio.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/bottomline
"Whoever... intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains... information from any protected computer. A protected computer is any computer which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication."

His blog seems to be used in foreign communication, it can be accessed from foreign countries. Does that make it a "protected computer"? I accessed his computer and received information. And I was never "authorized" to do so, except through the implied openness of the web, which the law doesn't seem to mention at all.
I'm guessing it's a delaying tactic to freeze the money, but I'm unsure of that since Amazon or whatever handles that part.

I also hope this means that the "technology" (i.e. hardware) category is still safe at Kickstarter.
I am a little naive as to American legal process, but does Kickstarter enjoy any safe harbor provisions as a fund raising website? They are not the ones producing the 3D printer technology in question, only facilitating its funding. If they are being sued for such service, wouldn't that also make Amazon Payments culpable?
You can always hate a patent system that can kill innovation like this does. How much technology have we lost due to these types of lawsuits?
Oh... I assumed you were using iOS because you replied to my comment about iOS 6.
It's my ignorance showing so be gentle. I'm not trolling. I don't read every link on the front page and what piques my interest may not be what piques yours. Having said that, I will read the article you linked to.
I know the Form team. Good people. I hope this works out in their favor in the end.
It just doesn't have that HTML5 feel.
> You wonder what the next article is, so you go to the URL and change it “articleId=31338” and hit return.

Does that constitute intent?
Is asking questions against the rules here?
"Work a day. Bill a day." will accomplish the goal with very little execution risk (pair it with "Borrow money from a bank." if you want a bit of an insurance policy). Better yet, work multiple days, then put away some of the income in an emergency fund, because usual hiccups do indeed happen when providing for a family.

There are more complicated answers, but they strike me as a perverse sort of poverty tourism. You have such astoundingly better options than poor people. Use them.
Depends on the definition of "quick" but sites like vWorker aren't bad if you're willing to work for less (assuming you haven't already built up a reputation) initially. On the one hand, it can sting to work for much less than your normal rate. If you're looking to pay the rent this way, you're going to need to take on a lot of small projects, and it's going to be a lot of work.

But on the other hand, it has some advantages, like potentially growing your client base and building a reputation so you can make more on those sites when you need to in the future. And sometimes time is all you have.

And it can make more economic sense than selling hardware, even if the hardware seems nonessential. Selling an oldish iPad now and buying a new one in six months is much more expensive than holding onto the old one for another year and a half. Hardware depreciates rapidly, so in theory, you could do well by selling an old iPad and then buying the same model used, later on if you need it. In practice, people usually don't do that.
Less software, more people.

Outline benefits not features, no one cares that you have slick-reports generation, they care about "Reports that will land you your next bonus". Same with the desktop thing, why should I care that people say the Desktop is dead. Instead say "Access your CRM while you're in the air for FREE" and then put an infographic together of how much the average business person will save in one year in wireless charges accessing Highrise from the plane.

Product looks completely sellable, marketing does not look like it will generate many sales.
What do you mean? It says he used an account slurper and stole people's personal information.

Should this not be a crime?
Before we checked luggage for bombs, bombers took down entire aircraft by checking in explosive laden bags. Before we checked passenger shoes, a bomber attempted to detonate theirs. If we relax our security, how do we ensure these things don't happen again?
When they originally made the change from 'fan' to 'like' in 2010 I thought it was enough of an issue to write something about it. It wasn't a very popular complaint at the time though.

http://shufferingandshnacking.com/?p=255
I'm honestly sort of confused why we care what he's doing at all. There are other accused murderers and other fugitives in the world. Why is McAfee a big deal outside the fact that there's a well-known company with his name on it?
Likewise - they're great dudes, and have made such a great product. Apparently 3DS is sweating a bit...
Exactly this. We'd expect for random abiotic organic chemistry to yield racemic mixtures of chiralities. Detection of one enantimer at higher levels than another typically calls for enzymes.
Style points if you bring a laptop and work on a project while waiting in line to sell your spot.
From the screenshots it looks promising. Even though $5 is a low bar of entry a trial version would be nice.
My apologies, your comment seemed more sarcastic to me when I first read it for some reason. In any case, I hope that was helpful.
Unsuccessful troll.
You could go donate plasma.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2195131_earn-month-donating-plasma.h...
The National WWII Museum implies that your WWII anecdote is the inverse of what actually happened. That is, that returning planes were shot in the fuselage, and a WWII statistician recognized survivorship bias in proposed reinforcement and concluded that the areas not hit on survivors should be reinforced.

See:
http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-se...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
By "hard," do you mean 80hrs a week for half-price?
It looks nice, but it also looks like Office 2003. Have you looked into matching the 2007/2012 UI?

Also, I think $5 is way too low. The people who need CRM would probably doubt the product's quality at such a low price point. Better to have 1 customer at $50 (or better yet $99 or more) than ten at $5.
Ah. Smart statistician. Thanks for that.
Fraud is deception for the purpose of financial or personal gain.

It's quite possible to violate 1030(a)(2) without any deception and without any financial or personal gain.