skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article states

"Weev and a fellow hacker who originally uncovered AT&T’s mistake and collected the e-mails didn’t ask the company for permission to access the Web addresses that shared iPad users’ private information"

I really don't see how this argument holds up.

From a technical point of view the very nature of HTTP includes asking for permission.
You send a request "Please can I see the information at this URL"
If the organisation running the server does not give that permission, it should not serve the data.

These charges seem pretty odd to me, hopefully it gets resolved in a sensible manner.
You don't have to be in the loan business to make money on the float, you just need to invest it. Say you have $100M of revenue per month and are paying out all $100M of it in 60 days. You can very safely keep the float in an interest-bearing account earning, say 3%, giving you $500k/mo. Because your revenue stream is constant, so is your investment. In practice you would also need to buy some insurance (FDIC won't cover you and surely there are some regulations here), but that's the idea.
It's not really a sweeping call. I'm not criticizing AH's picks, just their outrageous valuations. Anecdotally, I've heard they've outbid others by multiples in some cases. When you pump too much money into a growing business, Fab, or a largely built out one, Github, you create unrealistic goals for further growth. Managers at these shops no longer go after high ROI projects, but instead feel pressured to hit the home runs that can justify their valuations. At more reasonable valuations, these companies leaders would be better decision makers and thus increase the probability of long term success for their respective businesses.

Make no mistake about it, I believe AH and the unrealistic valuations they have imposed upon the sector is bad for tech in the medium and long term.

As far as their high early returns go, one could argue any growing fund (be it VC, PE, or HF) has high early returns. It's called survivorship bias.

As for the Skype exit, these sales may become much more difficult with the impending tax reform. Companies will be under a lot of pressure to pay out big dividends in 2012, rather than risk higher taxes in 2013. Reducing the tech sectors internal cash hoards could put a lid of exit prices paid by GOOG,MSFT,AMZN,AAPL,CSCO (and other giants).

The flip side of less cash in corporate coffers means more cash in investor hands that could be put to work in the IPO market. Now if we can only IPO solid companies at reasonable valuations, there is some long term hope to avoid boom/bust.
Some banks offer interest on their draft accounts (usually called "checking" accounts) but not many

Not debating the rest of your post, but in lots of European countries you will find the exact opposite. That is, almost noone provides zero-interest accounts. Because those who didn't give interests, even on checking-accounts, quickly found themselves losing most of their customers. Basically markets and competition in action as they should work.

So don't be too eager to extrapolate the (reasonably backwards, technologically under-developed and un-modern) US banking industry to a global de-facto statement. It usually doesn't hold ;)

I mean... You guys still use cheques. What's up with that?
Session State is a bug
I hope I'm not being overly pedantic, but:

>If you think of the internet as just a series of pipes; then it’s what you push down those pipes that matters.

That should be a comma, not a semicolon. Semicolons are used for separating related independent clauses.

I know it doesn't really matter, but when it's the first sentence it really stands out.
Mike Lynch (ex-Autonomy CEO) is speaking today at a start-up conference in London. Who wants to bet he won't be taking questions?

What the HP press release doesn't mention, but what the BBC and others are reporting[2] is that HP are both planning to refer it to the SEC/SFO and take civil action against "various parties". It's not a huge leap of faith to suggest Mike Lynch is probably one of the parties involved.

[1]: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/25/mike-lynch
[2]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20412186
Place to crash for British startup founders during YC Interviews
We're coming to YC Interviews from the UK very soon! Interview is on the 29th. Does anyone have a spare sitting room/lounge/floor for us to crash on for a day or two around the interview? We're happy to pay rent, would just prefer to meet some dev/startup-like people as an added bonus around the interview. Let us know if you have any thoughts. Tom and Prash from growthintel.com
Almost 30,000 Georgia Nationwide Insurance Customers Hacked
I once had some programming languages listed on my resume that I didn't substantiate there. The actual meaning of that was "this resume will overflow one or two pages if I list everything I ever did to know every language I know."

Now I have LinkedIn for that.
Recently I've been playing with Stripe to put a payment form (url) into a QR code. So the cashier prints the receipt, the user scans the QR code and pays using the form on her iPhone/Android.

But why would merchants or users prefer this solution? why not just use the credit card? Perhaps these kinds of ideas are what pg calls made-up startup ideas.
This. To me this was a raising brow thing when I read the article. Either is this ingnorance of the current rules, or was a publicity stunt.

I know the rules, I follow them, thus never had any issues in airports. But there is a golden rule: if you feel like you are probably going to break a rule ( by carring somethin g strange, for example), do the first step. Always. And it works. Heck, I moved a a few bottles of finest lager from Munich to NY, I went to AA representative and after explained she agreed with me taking them.
Always Remember That You Will Die
Is it bothering anyone else that the picture talking about paying Apple 6-8 bucks for Android has a Windows phone by HTC? Did they not notice the obvious windows logo on the bottom of it? Really no one had a picture of an iPhone next to an HTC Android phone?
Yeah, they are paying Microsoft for a Windows 8 phone license which then goes unused so they don't get sued.

Like to use rounded edges? Want to use open source? Too bad.

http://betanews.com/2011/09/28/microsoft-extracts-android-ta...
How to avoid horrible nested for loops?
I wrote some Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox. They are pretty basic and a bit buggy, but work well enough:

https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHalfLife

https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHighlightUser
It's good, but I dislike the way that it's presented. If you want something that's presented a little better, you may want to try: http://www.musictheory.net/lessons
"If you’ve had five jobs in the last five years, why should the recruiter think this time will be different?"

Maybe because who is hiring is supposed to be better than the others? There are far too many terrible companies, especially the big ones, and honestly I would never stay in a company just for the sake of it.

If recruiters think that this is a problem, it means that who is hiring is not confident enough or worse, the company IS really terrible like the others.

IMHO, nobody leaves a company if he feels good, stimulated and paid enough.
I think this is lovely. From first-hand experience, I know how often something as trivial yet important as "updating that horrible Joomla website to the latest bug-fixed version" gets low on a company's priority list. It's really just a reason to host your site in a SaaS CMS instead of uploading a bunch of PHP files yourself, but in case it's too late for that, having the hosting provider take care of this is lovely.

That said, I think the article is an odd mixture of business-speak and nerd-speak. As a coder, I'd like to know whether it fixes my handwritten SQL injection vulnerabilities too (probably not). My boss, however, probably will need a simpler version to get the point.
We've updated our site to better accommodate you and the world. This means the browser you're currently using is no longer supported

Web developers, please do not do this. I have no power over what browser is installed so this only ensures that I won't read your content. Give me a warning and display it anyway. My browser is one version behind the current version.
$750k raise for YieldKit, a German Affiliate Link Company
Be aware of the anti-pattern section of TFA though. The impression of job hopping really does "damage your chances" as the author put it. I hope its not too rude to talk about my own case.

I lost a job in 2008 over the financial crisis (LIFO employee retention policy), had 2 short contracts (which really shouldn't count as job hopping!) a research position where I suffered a burnout and now recruiters don't answer my calls and I have to jump on any opportunity that comes around. I'm looking for both accounting and software development roles (obviously slightly different CV for accounting roles - in fact I generally tweak it for each application).

My (dev) CV is at (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8PrUXneejNRdThYRWFHZUk5aHM/...) and I welcome and solicit any feedback to relfect on. Its hard to wrap a cohesive career trajectory around it when its really just me taking the best of the opportunities that I find.

I admit my github is embarrassingly bad, and I've been focusing more on my Coursera courses at the moment. I've had 1 interview in 2 months of looking for entry level/junior positions.

/rant
Why “Disruptive” Corporate Divisions Don’t Work: A Parable
Porn companies adopt facial-recognition technology, encourage Instagram photos
bravo, nicely written !

one would think that great coders grow on trees or something, heh?
What does 'goes to hell' mean here, specifically?

I regularly remote into a 2012 machine here, and for my uses it works just as with every other machine.

Maybe I'm always ctrl+alt+break'ing into full-screen and you don't, so that my accelerators/shortcuts/whatever are working as expected? Can you provide more details about the pain points you experienced? We're thinking about a bigger 2012 deployment as well and maybe I'm missing flaws that are just outside of what I expect/usually do.

Please share?
The post is funny, but is there really that much agitation in the PHP community to rewrite tech stacks in PHP? I'm genuinely curious about why someone would think that's a good idea - is it just NIH run amok?
Last ever typewriter for the UK ships...direct to a museum
The problem with this law from the beginning was:

1) It assumes companies like Google/Facebook have full control of users' data. This is untrue: anything you post on Facebook is already out of Facebook (or it amounts to that: there is no control over what your 'friends' will do with it).

2) It is paternalistic: look, we the lawmakers (who are NOT the people of Europe but a bunch of guys and gals in an Ivory Tower) know that you the people are unable to restrain yourselves and will make things public of which you will later repent, so we want to grant you this power to 'erase' all of your data.

I know it is way more complicated than that but it boils down to those two ideas (dealing with specific data such as forms or automatically collected data -as phone calls, location via triangulation etc.- is quite different: these are data the Companies are not allowed to share in the first place).

As a Spaniard I am quite fed up with paternalism from Brussels.
The sound of a rocket being fired from Gaza City at Jerusalem
The writing style was rather annoying and detracted from the overall message.
This is why we can't have nice things.

Not only talking about his subpar game (he didn't even know he could check windows), he introduced more players into the secret society of sit-down artists.

Pathetic.
I thought Bocconi had a good reputation?
Also, the original reference is "series of tubes" if that's the illusion they're trying to make.
Supposedly it wasn't ready.

The Apple / Google maps deal had a year or so still to run so apparently Google were taken by surprise that Apple pulled the existing app when they did.
They would go away from Europe to Bermuda (Google there?) or elsewhere, that would be much cheaper. Engineers would be happy to emigrate.

Which, come to think of it, may be even good for the European users of those services.
Simulated Brain Ramps Up To Include 100 Trillion Synapses
>For instance, Mechem's sniffer dogs have displayed a 90% success rate on target filters, so statistically having three dogs per team perform cross-checking paths on the field should produce the 99.6% confidence level for the type of mines the dogs can detect.

I know nothing at all about this area, but presumably this only works if the 10% failure rate is random rather than based on some quality of the undetected mines?
Doesn't look like they are using vectors and there is no inertia when zooming. Perhaps features they are saving for the Nokia phones...
Nice work. Play 2 needs a LOT of work to get back to the simplicity and elegance of Play 1. This sort of effort really helps that.
I gave up taking the article seriously after I read the statement about WebObjects. The first release of WebObjects was in 1995. It's gone through some radical changes since it was first introduced. The biggest of them was the conversion of the framework from Objective C-based to Java. Just because a framework is old, it doesn't mean that it's bad. ﻿
Ask HN: What would happen if HN was split into "sub-reddits".
I see two types of articles on HN: Really tech-stuff (MongoDB, NoSQL, scaling x language, etc) and the other types (Pg's essays, opinion articles on apple, microsoft product releases, etc.). I'm sure there are a few more categories that I'm missing as well, but for the sake of this discussion let's assume there are only two.

I would love to be able to filter by the two since I'm really interested in the latter type of articles. Do you think HN is at a point where we need something like this?
It means that vast numbers of people around the world will have unsupervised access to it and if you wait a few weeks someone will post it all to Wikileaks.
I knew it the day these speculations began. I believe Apple could be paying HTC more than what HTC is paying apple themselves, only because the number of patents don't matter, but the quality of the patents do matter.

Even a judge once said[1] that Apple will have a hard time convincing everyone that Apple doesn't infringe on two of HTC's patents, which is why I believe this settlement occurred in the first place.

If you've used a HTC Android phone before, you'll realize they make some of the market's amazing high-quality android phones. Unfortunately, their financials aren't that great for some reason though.

[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-06/htc-patents-challen...
I once asked this when I started at the hedge fund I currently work at.

The answer I got was that for a large company, hiding things on the balance sheet is like getting a home inspection and finding out later that the house has some big problems with it. The point being is that inspections find somethings but can never find all issues.

What they meant was that if you dig deep enough you can always find out the problems, but when your going through the aquisition, you often don't have the proper access to the records you want, or the time to do the entire audit.

HP has owned autonomy for over a year and just found out this quarter. There is no way they would have had such access to autonomy's books during the due diligence phase nor is there anyway that autonomy would have let them take over a year to do their due diligence
Judging by the video, growing anything on that land would be near impossible - it may be that this is often an issue?
Sounds like quite a different set of tactics from to the cross-country theatre of war.

There is a whole other type of player on the x-country trains: the seat-reserver. These people allocate themselves an assigned seat number for their journey when they buy their tickets. This is a completely free-of-charge option available to all users of the UK rail network, but only a select few are ruthless enough to go through with it and wield those little cards against their fellow man.

Some of the saddest, most unnecessary arguments I've ever witnessed on public transport involved seat-reservers. On one journey, my girlfriend was sat next to a stranger, and with me having failed to find a seat I was stood nearby. A seat-reserver showed up and demanded the seat of the woman next to my girlfriend. This woman was somewhat old and did not want to give up her seat. An argument broke out (a polite British white middle-class argument, mind you), and my girlfriend decided that she would give up her seat before shit started getting real.

In the meantime, the conductor had been summoned. By the time he arrived, these two women who had just been arguing were now sitting uncomfortably close to one another and attempting to mend the fence. Things had begun to calm back down, but the ensuing discussion with the conductor stirred everything right back up. It transpired that the seat-reserver's ticket had entitled her to my girlfriend's seat all along, and the older lady next to her needn't have worried. The two people made an awkward show of offering to swap seats with each other and declining.

The stakes on the cross-country battlefield are high. Fuck it up, and you're jammed against the toilet doors nose-to-nose with three strangers for the next several hours. It's no wonder some people feel tempted to reserve seats, but I've always felt quite strongly that able-bodied people asking other able-bodied people to move based on the authority of a small piece of card is a bit pathetic. Don't reserve yourself a seat unless you have a legitimate need to sit down.
If the second sentence is true, then he can't answer questions.

Rock and a hard place for Mike Lynch.
>> required visiting an AT&T web address with a particular – and easy to guess – code tagged onto the end.

How is this different than a password?
Sheep like to eat stuff like grass, which does not appear to be plentiful in the areas in question. You could feed hay, but then the sheep will congregate around the area where you dump the hay instead of wandering around getting blown up. Not to mention that hay (as well as fencing, and possibly water in some of those areas) would be expensive.
Are they profitable yet? I'm still not entirely convinced Twitter isn't just one big bubble.
In fact, HP should start suing the one that had the brilliant idea of acquiring Autonomy: Leo Apotheker
Only old people use checks, or when you need to send money through the mail (which is almost never). It can be handy to be able to give someone an amount of money that isn't limited by the amount of cash you have on hand, and without requiring them to have anything more complicated than a bank account to receive the money (and even that is optional if you use a check cashing service).

Which is not to say that the US banking industry isn't backwards and bizarre.
> You guys still use cheques.

Only old women do that. Usually while in front of you when attempting to pay the cashier.
First randomised controlled trial to show spinal cord regeneration in dogs
Allusion.
Oh come on. "Instagram for pixel art"? When will the baity associations end.

The description on the app store sums it up perfectly - "Draw! is a pixel art editor. Draw 16 x 16 animated pictures and share them with your friends."
That's the third Series A of a HackFwd-accellerated company in recent months, following FantasyShopper and Delta Strike (now known as Starforce Delta).

HackFwd is definitely setting its position as a top European accellerator fund. Great to be part of it!
> From a technical point of view the very nature of HTTP includes asking for permission.

A web server isn't an agent of the company and has no capacity to grant or deny permission.

Think of it as a security system you install in your home. Now, if the security system is malfunctioning and you notice that it is malfunctioning ... do you call up the owner and let them know or do you go inside and look through their stuff? If you go inside and look through their stuff, it's trespassing.

Obviously the two scenarios aren't the same, but I'd imagine that's the logic used in the argument.
Thank you for your interest. The service focuses on fixing vulnerabilities in commonly used and popular software solutions such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. So, currently, we do not fix handwritten SQL injection vulnerabilities.

On a technical level it differs primarily on that it's not an external service that can only start responding after the website has been hacked; they treat the damage caused by a successful hack instead of preventing the hack in the first place. Because we can scan the code itself, we can actually patch vulnerabilities before they are being exploited. The beauty is in that we do not do "normal" updates but just patch the vulnerabilities in a non-obtrusive way, this prevents the website to fail because of incompatibilities.
No android app at launch is dumb. You're losing half your potential audience.... and honestly, that's the half that's more likely to use alternative payment schemes. Even Paypal is too new for a lot of my iPhone wielding aunts and uncles.
Simplicity in Software Architecture is Underrated
Yes, the 403 status code exists for a reason!
HP writes down Autonomy purchase and accuses management of misrepresentation.
The fact that Nintendo profits from games actually goes along with the great grandparent's point though. IIRC a large part of the death of Sega was a "sell consoles cheap, subsidising them with the profits we make on games" model.
Many businesses doing annual volumes of sales in the millions don't understand what a RESTful API is. For example, me. I have a small manufacturing business and I enjoy reading hacker news but I could not program anything with and API today because I can't code.

So do I concentrate on new product development (welded steel items that we sell) or customer development (some of our customers spend in the hundred of thousands per year on our product) or do I hire someone who can program so that I don't have to learn it? Time I spend learning a RESTful API is time I don't spend making the new widget that will buy my wife a new vehicle. Time I spend learning to code is time I can't spend converting our customer who spends a million a year with my competition and only a 100K with us.

Patio11 email is really about time. How to use your skills to help out companies that have a shortage of time. If we had all the time in the world we could all learn programming. But I don't have any where near enough time to do the things I want to do. I have four kids and all the time sucks that go along with that (school, soccer, art class, etc) and a couple of businesses and a dozen employees. I have to travel for work 8 weeks a year, plus manage a dozen employees and two dozen machines, an outside salesforce and over a 1000 resellers. I have hired computer consultants with underwhelming results several times in the past. I have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on crappy results.

What Patio11 is selling is his competency. He has proof from previously satisfied customers. He clearly can provide leadership on a project and deliver results. He doesn't sell what he can't do, and has said multiple times that he doesn't take on projects that he can't deliver on (thus protecting his reputation). Leadership is way undervalued on projects. It is the result that matters not the price.
This thing is awesome!
I understand that due diligence is hard and there's always going to be things which get missed... but I have trouble understanding how it's possible to miss 8.8 billion dollars.