skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you really being outcompeted if the startup winds up going basically nowhere and you've put a year or two of huge time and opportunity costs into a failure? What if startups weren't worth it unless they were well-run enough to require very few hours over 40 from its employees?
yes, teaching exactly what has given. That's true, It's essential to know that your web hosting company is trusted and reputed otherwise problems and hurdles will be on your way of online business success.
Taskrabbit can be hit or miss. I signed up as a taskrabbit purely because I was curious about the interface they were using for bidding on and being assigned tasks. I completed two tasks in the span of three days.

The first was a pick up/drop off job that consisted of me picking up some rental items and dropping them off about 30 minutes outside Boston ($25). The second was ordering an iced latte at Starbucks and literally delivering it a block away ($14!). Both times the mobile app failed (iPhone 4S, iOS 6) in two different ways. For the first task it failed multiple times when I tried to mark the task as complete-not such a big deal since the task was done. The fail during the second task was critical-it would not let me login to view where the drop-off location was and the email confirmation confusingly showed the start and end location as the same address (Starbucks). I had to call the person who submitted the task to verify drop-off location and explain that the app had failed. They weren't irritated but I could see why me calling might be disruptive since they made this task to avoid leaving the building and walking a block.

Those sort of really simple (meaning ~2 steps) tasks seem to be few and far between. Many tasks such as, "Go shopping for me at IKEA," turn out to be much more involved when you read the details and find out the task includes assembling the furniture on-site.

For me it was more about trying out the interface on really basic tasks than making money but perhaps more complicated tasks would be something you'd be willing to do. Another important note is that the taskrabbit application is not too quick of a turnaround. I think it took nearly two weeks before I was approved.
This can actually be a little bit tricky in the US, since unsecured lines of credit are sort of a disappearing product at many banks. (They're strictly inferior to the bank as opposed to having you do a CC cash advance and their risk profile is off the charts because anybody whose need is "I can't get a credit card but..." when American banks hand them out like candy on Halloween is not generally a great credit risk.)

You can find them (particularly at credit unions) but they're not, to my understanding, as common in the US as in commonwealth countries.
It's hard to say without all the details. It's also the kind of thing that can be hard to gauge from outside the project. It could be new developers making rookie mistakes. It could be simple incompetence. Or it could be that what sounds simple to you on the surface balloons in complexity after being forced to fully engage with the problem and all its edge cases.

If it's closer to the second, it could signify more of a failure of process than a failure of engineering if engineers are being pushed to release quickly at the expense of planning, time for refactoring, qa, unit tests, etc. That "this should be easy, why's it taking so long??!" attitude can create a toxic environment if it's coming from people who don't understand the issues involved.
The "intent" is "intent to access a computer". It's not "intent to commit a crime".

If I am unconscious, and someone lifts my hand up and uses my fingers to type in a password, I didn't have intent to access a computer - I am not guilty of a crime. But if I intentionally struck keys on my keyboard, knowing that I was striking keys on my keyboard - that's intent. I do NOT have to know that it's a crime or intend to commit a crime.

Some crimes do have specific intent elements, where the person must be proved to have intended some specific result. This isn't one of them.
Write code that solves problems? Check.
Full-fledged programming language? Check.

I don't see how the fact that this code runs in a browser would somehow make front-end people "not developers".

Is coding up GUI's for native mobile or traditional desktop apps also "not development"?
Self-taught African Teen Wows MIT
First: What kind of working definition of "developer" are you using?

I'm inclined to say "yes". I am a front-end developer, working on everything from HTML/CSS + JS to the RoR app (controller & views, mostly. Rarely do I make changes to models, but I do poke in there to see how certain things are implemented, etc.)

Perhaps if you had asked "are front-end engineers really 'engineers'?", I would be inclined to answer "No".
Microsoft trots out Windows 8 mockups circa 2010, details the OS design process
I assumed this was another Anonymous "lol we took ur stuff" thing until I actually read the article... I don't know anything about the state of security in Magento, which apparently has issues, but I do know that I spent four truly miserable months working with it and quit a pretty good job after being put on another Magento project and given no alternative.

The only potential saving grace might have been that, had they not put some serious server power behind it, more than a dozen concurrent users would make the site unusable anyway. When a project advocates clustering as a primary method of scaling (this was an official recommendation that I can't find at the moment), something is clearly wrong.

[edit]
http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/performance-is-...

It's an old post, but considering the Zend-taken-to-extremes nature of the code base, I doubt the resource-intensive nature of the app has changed much.
[/edit]
I wonder if there's a better way to register one's complaint rather than merely opting out. (And I happen to agree with another poster who said that the 'enhanced pat down' can be more degrading than the scanner if you get someone who gets a little overzealous when they 'encounter resistance.')

What about a t-shirt, perhaps? Printed on the shirt would be a calm and clear explanation of the problems with the scanners/groping. Everyone standing in line around you would see it, the TSA officers would see it, and it could get some conversations started.
A whatchamawhoseit?
what led you to ask this question? why wouldn't they be?
Agreed. This question is ridiculous :/.
Tech Turkeys of 2012 (pictures)
If I had a penny for every security guy who thought a government was out to kill him, I'd be a rich man. Paranoid drives that industry. :) It's rare but threats happen given the data and relationships a security officer of a public firm will be exposed too.

More realistically, it sounds like John's eclectic lifestyle is rubbing people wrong like it did in the States. It doesn't take a genius to do a google search on your loud new immigrant and find a plethora of bad press, justice or injustice. In a developing country like Belize (which shares a border with Mexico), the corruption around you becomes very real when a community (or powers that be) start to feel your presence is threatening. And Americans REALLY don't go over smoothly when they think they are above the local law of the land. Travel security 101.

A former business partner sold his company to Symantec. We more recently built mobile security software and worked closely with local & federal govts in US, and UK House of Lords. I also worked in international finance, security of our Brazil and Mexico teams were something we thought about often.
>Also I've observed a lot of people who write the content first then fill out the top

I do that. Saves hassle of accidentally sending half finished emails.
CUBRID 8.4.3 with DB Sharding and API level Load Balancing is here
Who cares? Kill him; don't kill him.. just shut him up already.
That is an incredible beard, that must be where he draws his power from.
Investment boost for Aussie software minnow
> tptacek's point was that the intent to commit one of these violations is necessary

No, to be clear, tptacek is saying that fraud is necessary for any conviction under 1030(a). That's false. You're saying that intent to commit a crime is necessary for any conviction under 1030(a). That's false too.

It's you and tptacek vs. the DOJ's cybercrimes manual. Good luck!
Better late than never. 26/11 terrorist hanged.
I thunk one could start by arguing that the benefits of universal access to the sum total of human knowledge and creative expression to date, combined with the surge in derived/remixed/mashed-up works, would outweigh the short term reduction in new works while society figures out a new way to encourage creation.
You'd be surprised how far and deep the problem goes. I would also argue that it's not just limited to software patents in particular, but it's become common practice for many companies to create patents for anything they can imagine. This has resulted in a deluge of patents that have to be sorted out by the USPTO, and therefore a lot of bad, should-be-invalid patents get okayed.

Here's a perfect example of a bad patent screwing a company out of a product they've been making for years: http://luma-labs.com/blogs/news/4540122-an-open-letter-to-ou...

(Summary: Competitor gets an illegitimate patent approved, and now a company that has been "infringing" on that patent since before they applied to get it has to stop making their product. Why? Because litigation will likely put them out of business, even if they win.)

I'm not against the idea of patents, but the direction they've been going in recently, in fact the direction our entire economy has been going in recently, has been that of favoring those with the money to blow on hordes of lawyers capable of interpreting and navigating the legal minefield they themselves have lobbied to create.
A developer is anyone who can use the available tools to transform something into another tool to reach a goal. A developer may do these things individually or pay others. A developer doesn't need to have skills if the developer has the resources to obtain others with the needed skills. A developer might also work for other developers in developing these tools in exchange for money.

So, yes, I think anyone can be a developer. The bar for becoming a developer isn't much higher than being able to open a web browser and perhaps search Google. For example, if you want to create an e-commerce site then there are lots of hosted services which will set one up for little to no cost.

At the end of the day, you are either reaching your goals or you aren't. Compare an grandmother who can barely figure out the internet but makes a healthy income off selling items online (perhaps things she has made which and have gained a following) and a ninja engineer who has been mired in feature creep for three years and still isn't close to getting his start-up off the ground (and probably never will)
Code Smells in CSS
My read on it is he's saying that KDE 3.5 isn't great on older hardware either, so what's the point?
> products that work well

That's... debatable. The problem is that the Oracle portfolio is now so vast, after a decade of acquisitions targeted at "surrounding" SAP, that quality levels are very uneven across the board. Some products require constant attention from specialized personnel or they'll blow up in your face, the learning curve is always very steep, and some of them are just full of bugs. And I say that as one of those specialized folks.

Also, their licensing terms (and the salespeople who espouse and enforce them) are unabashedly, shamelessly greedy.
Stores Requiring ID, Tracking To Prevent Repeated Returns
What I would really love is for someone to provide both a date and time picker. For some reason everybody is concerned only about the date.
The hard part is pinning down the cause of a successful startup. Most people just point at highly visible things, and make a claim like "StartupX is successful because the founders worked extremely hard, the office culture was well-developed, and there were lots of team building activities." The problem is that this ignores the 5,000 other startups that did all those same things, but failed. Perhaps it turns out that StartupX really succeeded because they had a sales guy with lots of good connections, etc.
The question seems to actually mean "should back end developers consider front end developers equals."

This is a case of worrying too much about what an irrelevant class of people thinks. Are you good at what you do? Do your peers understand your skills? Do your clients or potential clients see the value in your ability? As a primarily back end developer, that's what I care about, and I think it's a good metric.

It's natural and not necessarily wrong to look for approval, but at the end of the day, you need to judge yourself on your own ability. Other people will judge you, whether you want them to or not, but if you take them seriously -- whether they like you or not -- you have put your self-image in the wrong hands, i.e. not yours.
Put a trial version and change the price to $95.

Also I would update the UI to look more modern. At worst take screenshots from a higher resolution screen so it doesn't look so cramped.

Good job launching something!
That's a two-way street. You could equally ask how much technology would be lost/delayed without the ability to get patent protection for it.
So are you taking the side of "people don't have two eyes"?
This Week in Startups
This Week in Venture Capital
Foundation
Mixergy

I can't vouch for every single podcast, I don't have that much time, but those don't disappoint. I love the A Smart Bear blog, so I assume the podcast is of good quality.
MMijsexfcr
The same reason Hans Reiser's court case kept popping up on and off. The fact that they're in the tech industry brings the odd sense of connection to them, for better or worse, that makes people be interested-- or, at least, makes media outlets think that people will be interested.

And yet this article is on the front page of Hacker News, so I guess the media's thoughts on the matter are justified :)
The problem with this post is that it isn't going to convince anyone that doesn't already agree with you. I swear to god that I am on your side. I'm a nerd. I'm pretty confident that what's being done to Weev is awful. You & I probably have mutual colleagues.

But this post made me less supportive of your cause not more.

You wont improve the standing of your argument in this manner. You'll only make regular people think you're crazy.
How your passwords are stored?
I don't know what the title was before, but this new title, while accurate to the article, is really confusing and I will say downright misleading if you aren't following this closely already... there were no iPads hacked, for example; this was an issue with AT&T's website, and probably would have worked against any targeted set of devices (where you could reasonably guess the ICCID; even if not, it is still entirely related to accessing servers).

(I saw this, semi-freaked as I'm constantly hacking iPads, and then read the article to find out the title sucked.)
The posting of corporate earnings is a rather poor example. The law doesn't require you to personally trade on inside information, as an attempt to manipulate trading by furthering actual or false inside information is sufficient. A reasonable person, which is what I presume the standard is, could expect trades to be conducted based off early release of corporate earnings. Therefore, this example isn't really applicable to the authors primary point.
I'm a proponent of simply calling them 'immediate functions'.
> the fact there's a well-known company with his name on it?

That's a good part of it, the guy has name recognition on par with most household cleaning products.

Then there is the little detail that he actually is - or was - half decent programmer and even in illegality he shows his entrepreneurial drive. It's the same kind of fascination that got the tech press running around Hans Reiser the way they did when Nina disappeared.

This is what drives tabloid sales, people love a good story and McAfee is giving them just that.

I'm not even sure if the facts of the matter will be a decision point from here on, the eyeballs industry probably hopes he will on the lam for a long time so they can milk this for what it is worth. The worst that could happen from their point of view is that he gets arrested or worse, that he really does get killed (they may try to go for the conspiracy angle if that happens to extend the time they can spin this).

It's a sad affair in many ways. McAfee used to be named right along Bill Gates at some point and now you're just as likely to find him associated with Hans Reiser (like in this comment for instance).
Freelancer.com acquires vWorker
> A well-known legal phrase is “ignorance of the law is no defense”. But that doesn’t really apply here. You know the law exists. You may have read it in detail. You may have even consulted your lawyer. It’s just that nobody can tell precisely whether this act as crossed the line between “authorized” and “unauthorized” access. We won’t know until if and when somebody tries to prosecute you.

This is a GOOD thing. The whole point is, there's no clear line between reasonable access and hacking. It's something which the courts have to figure out.

The Common Law is largely based on common sense, and precedent; and precedent is based on a previous judge's common sense. The three big rules for interpreting laws are the plain meaning rule (use the literal meaning), the "golden rule" (ignore the plain meaning rule if it's obviously stupid), and the mischief rule (figure out what mischief the lawmakers were trying to prevent).

A vaguely written law lets judges use their common sense. While I'm sure there'll be people who disagree with their interpretations, it's either that or black and white statues which simply won't work.
"It was over now. Two years of work and dreams replaced by a landing page."

Two years...that's it?

Developing tech products is an exercise in walking away. The vast majority of code written is a total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala no longer in regular use by anyone within a few years. It used to be said that most software projects were canceled due to overruns before completion.

"Even the t-shirts had been given away."

Serious question...what else was anyone going to do with them?

"8 IKEA desks = $1,200, 8 Aeron chairs (used) = $4,000"

I don't think I've ever written a line of code while sitting at a $150 desk in a $500 (used) chair.

"Nobody ever told him the hockey stick of user growth might look more like a baseball bat laying in an empty field."

B. S.

This piece is weird. I don't get it.
You seem to base your opinion of what is happening in Gaza on occasional random watching of biased TV news, which is not a good way to form an informed opinion. If facts are of any interest to you, here you go:

1. Strikes in Gaza are not removing figurehead, they strike known military commanders, whose direct involvement in the acts of terror and war is beyond any reasonable doubt. They also strike infrastructure used for such activities and for other purposes by military organisations. Of course, Israel army is not ideal and sometimes it is impossible to strike military targets without hurting civilians, and sometimes the intelligence is mistaken or the execution is flawed and civilians suffer. However representing it as "removing figureheads" and "killing people who aren't connected" only is to pervert the whole reality of what is happening.
2. As for further radicalizing - I'm not sure how you see further radicalizations of Hamas. Instead of destroying Israel and killing or expelling all Jews living there they'd want what? Instead of shooting rockets into the midst of Israeli cities and sending human bombs into the midst of Israel streets, restaurants malls they would do what? How you imaging further radicalized Hamas and Islamic Jihad that is worse than they are now?
3. The whole premise that people become terrorists because somebody hurt them is a red herring. Of course, some individual people do, but there are numerous example of terrorist organisations - both Islamic and non-Islamic - composed of people who were never hurt by anybody, they just decided that's the right thing to do. The facts show that stopping fighting terrorists does not make them disband for lack of recruits - this makes them bolder. Leaving Afghanistan to Taliban did not make Taliban unpopular. Leaving Gaza to Hamas did not make Hamas unpopular. Quite the contrary - they grew stronger and gathered more resources.
4. There is much difference with War on Drugs, and it can be easily seen. Terrorists are criminals that hurt people in order to advance their political agenda, and count on population being afraid and thus caving in to their demands. Drug users do not hurt anybody but themselves, have no demands from anybody and are pursued by the state for the only reason of spending their time and money in a fashion not approved by the state. If you leave drug users alone, nothing would happen. If you leave terrorists alone, you get 9/11. Notice the difference?
Looks cool.

Out of curiosity, did you ever consider building it as a web app or only plan a native windows app? Do you think there is an untapped market for native Windows apps? I guess people will be attracted to a one off payment for a desktop app versus a recurring subscription for a web app.

Btw, can multiple users share the same database or is it single user only?
Good old Lotus 1-2-3. Brings back memories and a few horror stories. I remember Word Star from that era too. And dBase. Those 3 apps were in every office in New York.
Of course - I suspect that most existing tech would exist, but some things (drug discovery) would need to be further subsidized. However, things like drug patents are arguably as apt to be funded as roads or a court system - public health mustn't be held hostage.
"Modern interface" - looks ancient to me.
At the startup I was at, we were unable to get a card even by putting up in cash the limit for which we were asking. In other words, even by securing $1,000 with the bank, we couldn't get a $1,000 limit card.
I was at the point Resistance or Enlightened.. Now I know how it was for Neo.
> I do not have a constitutionally protected right to eat a sandwich

Nor do you have a constitutionally protected right to air travel.
I think that this kind of behavior is against the law, but no fully sure on that.

3DS has been under anti-trust before and was forced to sell operations to Sony (?) I believe. They've sued (and won) against EOS (Germany maker of SLS equipment). They're known to be very litigious. I've actually been surprised this hasn't happened yet...
Terrorism is a tactic of murdering civilians in order to scare other civilians to behave like the terrorists want. Striking terrorists is nothing like that - nobody cares how they behave once they fulfill one simple condition - they don't murder anybody, don't blow up stuff and don't kidnap and behead people they consider infidels. If they stopped doing that, nobody would care what they do.

It's the same as saying putting a murderer into prison is the same as kidnapping an innocent child. Both limit freedom, but if you think for a minute, you'll find the difference. Try it.
Arbitrage on virtual goods from different countries/regions. Got lucky and got 15k in a week.