skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great questions. Our basic stamps have dot patterns that are not obscured and are static on each stamp. They are precision milled out of the aluminum stamp body, and, thus, they are still VERY hard to spoof because the location of the observed dots needs to be precise down to the pixel resolution of the phone. You can't spoof them with you fingers. The nice thing about these stamps is that they are nothing more than a solid block of aluminum - no circuitry whatsoever. You can run them through a dishwasher or an autoclave - great for food service and medical applications.

We also have more secure "dynamic" stamps wherein the capacitive touch points are modulated in sequence amongst an array of potential contact points. These are still in the prototype stage, but we get a lot of requests for them, so may be looking to launch this new product line in the spring.

Finally, as for use cases - we can do many of the things people are currently trying to use NFC, QR Codes and/or GPS gating to authenticate. We already have apps that do retail loyalty, coupons, and micro-payments launched on the platform. We also have developers working on apps to authenticate EMRs (electronic medical records) and industrial systems maintenance. Finally, we won the TechCrunch DisruptSF Hackathon back in September by using the stamp as the authentication step for a webservice actuated door lock (article: http://snow.sh/ack)
The cost of the 3rd party payer system in healthcare
tel:01234567890

So, taking that as a UK phone number, what's the syntax to make it work from other countries? I'd guess tel:+441234567890, but is a plus sign allowed there?
This post is great advice if you want to work doing consulting for large companies run by MBAs/business people that view technology as "IT": a tool for solving business problems. I'd guess 90% of programmers earn their living this way, so I agree with it, to a first approximation.

What Patrick doesn't acknowledge is the huge role of culture/norms in business, and how these differ based on geographic region, and the backgrounds of the founders.

Revenue and profit attribution are human processes that involve a lot of bias. If a salesperson sells twice as much product, should he earn twice as much compensation? How does marketing's work on improving the company's positioning/messaging, engineering's product work, and/or the overall state of the economy factor into this calculation? Who really "created business value" here?

The other problem is bigness: as companies get bigger, it's way harder to measure whose contribution is helping the company succeed, whereas it's a lot more obvious when only a handful of people are involved.

I'm an engineer, but I work at a product company. If the product is better, it sells more, and we get compensated more, along with sales, marketing, and the whole team. People in Chicago (where I grew up) still bring this dumb 19th century management model to their companies, and it's exactly why (1) all the best innovators and engineers head to the west coat, and (2) why I personally got the hell out of there. I wanted to be a professional programmer, someone who made peoples' lives better by shipping a superior product, and get compensated accordingly, not some IT lackey selling some nebulous concept of 'business value' to some feet-on-the-desk small-business-owning ex-investment banker who wouldn't know the difference between Objective-C and HTML.
So movies are a pretty big business. Not as big as people usually think, compared to energy, food, defense. But pretty big. Culturally, people go to the movies as a form of escapism, because story-telling seems to be a deeply ingrained human need (I don't think there is a single culture we know about that doesn't tell stories). Some of these stories are quite inspirational: they inspire thought, debate, criticism, self-reflection, etc. And some of us, the ones that are inclined to, write reviews. I've written one or two myself. Occasionally conversations get started around movies with friends - arguments about the meaning of Being John Malkovich or why they only made one Highlander movie....

Listening to stories (or watching them, as the case may be) is a usually enjoyable experience - which is why we choose to listen and even pay for the opportunity to listen to a really good story from a really good storyteller. All of the "pain points" around this process have been thoroughly addressed: it's easy to discover movies, buy tickets, download to your computer, get reviews, write reviews. Even the watching experience itself has been improved with 3D (although this is open to debate) and better sound, even things like IMAX and more experimental experiences e.g. Star Tours at Disneyland. There are some places in the world where they even serve food and drink during the movie (or at least during an intermission).

The biggest pain people feel about movies is dealing with the proliferation of choice. It doesn't seem to me that there is an underserved market of people who would see more movies if only they knew about the good ones.

Imagine, if you will, your own personal Heaven. Presumably storytelling and movies are still happening. What is the heavenly, perfect movie-going experience? Does the movie take over your visual cortex? Are movies recommended by God - or indeed, created by Him to perfectly stimulate your mind in the way He knows you like? Does your reaction telepathically propagate to everyone else in Heaven? (Is telepathic propagation connectionless? I suppose that's another thread).
This is what I was afraid of. One tiny bug in one app is proof that Android still sucks.

I'm going to stop reading comments about Android by people that haven't used it recently.

After Jelly Bean, ICS and 4.2 saying that Android doesn't get the little details right is just laughable for me to hear, obviously they're embarrassed about this bug that affects like a microscopic number of people.
Stating something without justification is the BEST way to state it. Haha. It's "begging the question" in it's most convincing form.

At this rate, I'd rather just pay an "Innovation Tax" and be done with it.
Lotus: Farewell to a Once-Great Tech Brand
Thanks very much for the great answer. I didn't realize they redirected through an ad server, but that's exactly what the problem is. I'm not just using adblock and ghostly with cookies and javascript turned off, but I'm also using the ad-blocking hosts file.
Just a question - what is the advantage of putting this in a circle? Wouldn't these patterns exist just as well in a normal chart? The only difference is you don't see column 1 next to column 40 but that doesn't seem to have much impact.
4.2 has dozens of tiny UI/UX touches that Duarte added in that I've not found documented anywhere online.
My understanding of encryption is probably no more complete than yours, but any operation that can give me useful search results necessarily reveals a lot about the content. That's the point of search after all.
Tough.

Fact: I'm not going to write an app that you can use (perhaps for free) without getting a little something-something in return. Like knowing what features you use in it the most, for example.

It's called analytics.
The probability of a tragedy occurring is almost completely irrelevant to the common person (including my mother and wife). What does get people's attention is the shock factor when that one-in-10-million event occurs. Which helps explain the bewildering popularity of Nancy Grace...
"Our patent system is the envy of the world"

I'd really like to meet the people who sit around envying a patent system. I mean, seriously, how many people can there be that understand patent systems to the detail required to separate the US one out from other first-world nations (since this comment really is a jab at contemporary nations), who then sit around envying it?
They can't. Many of the core underlying bits are tied to the device drivers. [Insert mobile device drivers and ARM complains here.]
Re: your second paragraph, when you think about it, the FB mission of keeping you connected to your friends doesn't work because your distant friends remain distant and only closer friends show up in your feed. In my personal feed I keep seeing updates from the same 20 people over and over. I have no clue what the other 450 are up to unless I go to their pages.

If all I wanted from FB was a relationship with my closer friends, then Path is much nicer.

Our buddy Mark Cuban was at it again yesterday re: this. http://www.wired.com/business/2012/11/mark-cuban-facebook-ti...
In theory, yes, but if you have a profitable business with a 1% margin by definition it already has to be absolutely giant (e.g. Amazon) to be making money. And to reduce costs at this scale is harder than increasing sales.
Burnt down with stress and overworking, I was looking for ways to cut down on my busy schedule. For last 4 months, I have implemented the "No Calls" policy for all work-related conversations. I just stopped picking calls if it wasn't from my family or a few friends. First few days it was tough to keep myself away from the mobile as every ring on that cuboid would race up my heart with nervous tension. But it subsided eventually. I have to agree that it has made my quality of life better.
As scale increases, you invariably include populations that affect your per capita statistic. The EU as a whole has a 3.5 per 100k murder rate, for example; much higher than Germany or the UK alone.
Because it was published on November 2012?
I can't wait to get Firefox 21.

At last it will be able to drink beer too.
Nice list, thanks. I would add some more fundamental issues:

You may not do what you want with the software you bought (EULA terms, DRM protected by DMCA anti-circumvention clauses).

You may not freely share books, songs, software, etc. with your friends or people in need.

You may not freely engage in a creative process that builds on existing works, as all creative processes do (copyright, patents).

(These are paraphrases of the software freedoms defined by the GNU project: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)

Piracy is also not limited to information content:

You may not freely produce and distribute life-saving medicines to those in need (patents).
Honestly, to me, it looks fine. I was expecting something horrible and tacky when you mentioned clipart.

The last photo is recognizable from somewhere else (I don't remember where), but other than that, I see no issue. As long as it isn't the kind of Clipart you find in Office 2003, it doesn't look unprofessional at all.
I do. If there is any crime here (I don't think there is even one, FYI) it's AT&T not taking adequate measures to safeguard their customers' PII.

I don't think trafficking in any information should be a crime, though (unless it's the government - an asymmetry is necessary there), so I don't think a criminal trial is in any way justified.
I disagree. I said 'solutions like this', i.e. mine rollers as a single technique, were useless. I stand by that statement because the stats are quite clear on this as even in ideal conditions (which are seldom present) a roller can only be expected to detonate half the mines in an area. In fact in many areas rollers can't be used at all because of the terrain and vegetation, so demining teams use a combination of other techniques.

This concept is actually worse than useless because of the debris it scatters across a minefield and the false confidence it provides. While I applaud the designer's attempt to create something useful, his lack of domain knowledge has resulted in a design that doesn't solve the problem and may make things worse.

If I come across as bit hyperbolic, it's because I strongly believe that this is a horrible and underreported problem which demands both carefully-considered and effective solutions and acknowledgement of the people whose hard work and sacrifices have made so many places safe again.

It seems silly to laud an ineffective design while there are people out there every day clearing landmines with solutions that work.
If you're talking about the recent long gun registry, Canada has always had much stricter gun legislation than the U.S.

This website gives a walk through of the process required to legally obtain a gun in Canada:

http://www.howtogetagun.ca/

In 35 years of urban living in Canada, I've never seen a firearm that was not being carried by a law enforcement official. I do not know anyone who owns a fire arm.

This seems very different compared to some of the slogans I saw in the recent U.S. election where you could "vote and win a free gun". http://www.inquisitr.com/376318/vote-in-georgia-win-a-free-g...
Obviously it's a good idea for ANYONE to learn to code...but marketers should really make an effort. Even if they just pick up a little bit...enough to recognize what they're looking at...it can only help them.
Your warning has merit, but it's a little out-of-scope for the problem. I'm not talking about banning people from playing Halo, I'm banning them from just my server for medium durations like a day or a week. And chances are they're the only person connecting to my server from that ISP -- each of the ~30 people on the server probably has a different ISP.
It's the way the internet works. A few months back we were all chuckling over Apple maps screencaps. Google has to take their lumps on this -- it's a dumb bug and they should fix it. Frankly I didn't even know that app had a date picker and haven't used it ever. I'm far more upset over the fact that they replaced the bluetooth stack, frankly.
Yes, entrusting all your browsing data to Google in order to spite a non-profit sure makes sense to me!!!

...come on. What Firefox have implemented is an API. Facebook is not involved until you go to Facebook and give them permission to be involved. Quit being so hysterical and remember that Mozilla is a non-profit organisation and has your interests far more at heart than Google does.
I wonder (sincerely), do the posters who prefer email to a phone call really find other people's writing easy to understand? I love my own emails: they're great and unambiguous and filled with insightful nuance, but half the time I receive an email from someone else I can't figure out exactly what they want, so we have to reply back and forth to clarify things or just pick up the phone and talk.

And vice versa. They love their own emails too.
Super awesome,
Thoroughly covered post
Blast from the past, with some new stuff throw in too! I'm not usually a fan of these lists but this one has some good stuff. I was wondering why K10k wasn't there, but sadly it turns out it finally took its last breath a year ago (after years of inactivity): http://kottke.org/11/10/so-long-kaliber10000 They had one of the best tiling background collections of all.
How to Setup a New Mac for Ruby Development
Flint is Redefining the Mobile Payment Experience
The problem is that patent examiners are limited as to the sources they can consult for prior art. I don't know precisely what they are.
HP's CFO Tried To Stop The Company From Spending $11 Billion On Autonomy
Would you mind offering up a few of your favorites? I'm always looking for quiet places to eat in the city, particularly around the village.
Thanks again - feedback at this stage is golden!

1) This is useful feedback. If a client doesn't want to grant additional credits for social posts, we can certainly disable that feature. Unfortunately, most clients we have talked to see this as one of the main selling points. I agree - autopost spam on my news feeds sucks. This is one reason why our current MO is to have this be an opt-in feature after every stamp interaction.

3) Our HTML5/JS SDK will work on any phone running a webkit based browser. We're working on a code package for the new IE, though until we see more demand, it will be a relatively low priority. I'm not sure Blackberry is worth any expenditure of our resources right now, though if we had a developer who really wanted, we could probably make it happen.
That's really splitting hairs. The man said "innovation continues at an absolutely breakneck pace. In a system like ours in which innovation is happening faster than people can keep up, it cannot be said that the patent system is broken".

In other words, he says that innovation is occuring at a rapid rate, therefore the patent system isn't broken. Sure, that's not him arguing via correlation, but nonetheless that's a logical fallacy. And that's intellectually dishonest.
Interesting. Reminds me of Intercom (https://www.intercom.io/) who have had an activity stream on their user profiles for a long time.
This underlines what NRA folks have been saying: strict gun registration laws are tantamount to a ban, as your experience illustrates.
> The fact of the matter is that it's SCOTUS that sets the standards here, not the Constitution.

Well duh. Because the Constitution is inanimate, due to actually just being paper and ink. Meanwhile, SCOTUS consists of living people with free will and the ability to walk around.

However, nothing about these facts implies that what the Sovereign Council of Nine says is consistent with the ideals that led to the creation of said document.
I wonder about the deterring effect. How many attacks do not occur because security is there. It's hard to measure, with a high risk to reward factor.
There are a few github forks that have added a couple useful things. For my use case (converting case classes to/from JSON in scala 2.9.2) it works perfectly.

I've also written a Jackson plugin that knows how to marshal POSO classes - it's just an introspector that uses the scala convention instead of the JavaBeans convention. By and large it works well - perhaps I should put it up on github.
Yes, I believe everything you said is valid, it is a bad business decision, unless evidence to something else is found.

And in the end, it was not something that was done hidden from other people, if it was a bad decision they should have stood their ground.
Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy
How to get valuable feedback from customers who cancel your product or service
Thanks Andrew. Apart from everything, it's about time not money today. Clipart allowed us to get everything ready in no time. We could've spent some time on legal issues in case of using or ordering some 3rd party photos. Probably not much of it though but I believe the speed is worth it if you're in alpha.
That was the part I found particularly funny. As a New Zealander, I'm horrified by what the US Patent Office has done to the world of Software Engineering. This whole Imaginary Property push has had a chilling effect in IT and has erected huge barriers to entry into technical fields.

Far from being the envy of the world, the US Patent System is widely despised and ridiculed.
it's also deployable by untrained personnel cheaply - as a precursor to more rigorous/"professional" removal, why is it a Bad Thing?
I'm confused, why is this posted four years after it was written? Is it to say OP was proven correct or incorrect? I'm assuming incorrect given the great performance of index funds in the last three years, but it's hard to tell because the market remained in sell-off mode into 2009.

Anyway, I mostly disagree with OP. While I am not a firm believer in the efficient market hypothesis, I think it is very close. Index funds reflect the 'crowd-sourced' research from many very smart investors who have a lot on the line. I am 100% sure their combined research is more accurate than what I am willing to do in a few hours a month of my free time. Index funds are basically what give me the confidence I can safely invest my money into a large part of the American/World economy at a fair rate.
The stamps have a threaded bolt hole machined into them for this very purpose! We actually built a system very similar to what you describe (secure space access authentication) at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in SF back in September. Our project (amazingly) won the whole damn hackathon: http://snow.sh/ack
Just replace it with Smarch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RCs2RKiLlA
http://simpsonswiki.net/wiki/Smarch
"Smarch is the thirteenth month of the year, according to Springfield Elementary School calendars. It has 28 days."
Kleiner Perkins launches Design Fellows Program
Wow, a universal lock? Amazing!
Ask HN: Where do you store your media files?
I'm upgrading machines and doing some housecleaning. My code goes in Github, my files go into Dropbox... but how about my music/movies/pictures? I don't have a huge library; on the scale of 100-200gb. What is everyone's preferred storage method? I was just about to setup a NAS drive or time capsule but then started to consider whether I'm not just better off with just a bigger Dropbox account or Google Drive, etc. Do people find it worth it to store everything on a cloud server? Thanks!
Y-Not? - Adventures in Functional Programming (Part I)
tl;dr Work on what you think is cool.

Are you all applying for YCombinator? There's so much effusive praise for Paul. ;)

He mentions 3 basic factors: the founders want it, they can build it, and it goes un-noticed.

"Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way."

I agree with this premise, and he backs up the 1st point really well.

The 2nd point isn't really worth arguing. Ya, you've got to have product.

What was disconcerting to me was that he went after the pet websites. It made me laugh a bit.

As someone who used to work for Dogster.com and Catster.com which were both successful niche websites that were profitable and sold to "Say Media," I'd have to say no to this:

'The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." ...Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.'

Zero users is simply false. Dogster.com still has the kind of usage that isn't the home run Paul is looking for in his investments, but it is sustainable.

The 3rd point about not-noticing has two excpetions: Hegel and PayPal. Let's stick to the second. Elon Musk noticed it from the very start as a competitor running what was then also a payment system known as X.com. I think when he added his startup DNA into the mix, although it led to an employee revolt and his ouster, it made PayPal stronger. This is where Hegel comes in: the dialectic of history is a pattern that can be seen everywhere, even in startups, but that's another blog post.
Does Sony Pictures own your art portfolio?
Leahy scuttles his warrantless e-mail surveillance bill
Yes, that is interesting.
I changed something in my behavior about a year or so ago, I started answering every call. I put a phone number a huge one on my website and started answering and listening to my customers. It has been life changing, we know what our customers like, we know what they don't like. We're excited to hear and help them in realtime. Our customers love that we answer the phone. We also do email and live chat, but for many the phone is great. I used to suck at the phone and definitely I still have my moments. In general, I've learned how to end the bad calls quickly - or correctly in that a bad call can be your best call. When you can help a customer stay a customer, you can really do this best over the phone. I think generally, this author isn't into customers, but IMO if you're into software you have to be into customers - they are your life blood - love them :D
The request was to use native scroll bars, not to use non-native scroll bars that emulate Lion's defaults.