skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what he's saying, but a legal defense based on the response to an HTTP GET constituting de facto permission to access whatever that URL addresses is going to be disappointed. I'm not saying the defendant here is guilty; I'm just saying, he's not not guilty simply by reason of HTTP.

As a matter of law, the onus is not on the operators of web applications to ensure that their defenses are effective. If you do something stupid in your web app, but it remains clear to me that I'm not meant to access whatever your stupid app failed to prevent me from accessing, I can still be charged with a felony for doing it.

Now, if whatever it was that you tried and failed to protect wasn't obviously protected, so that I can argue in court that a reasonable person would have believed they did have permission to interact with it, I'll probably win in court. The prosecution will no doubt collect all my emails and any other piece of evidence it can find to build a case that I knew I wasn't supposed to hit your site that way. If you were especially dumb, and built an application that not only exposed sensitive information, but did so in a way that any normal person would just have assumed that sensitive information was theirs for the taking, the prosecution will have a hard time making their case.
I'd like to have a credible source, or I'd be prone to believe he just made it up.
> To be fair the study [1], while tongue-in-cheek

The article has this flavor (oh, God, no pun intended) but I think the originating author may be serious.
That's not how democracy works. When people don't like what's going on, they work until they change it. What they won't do is "give it a rest".
Yes, that's what I meant. Implement web crypto and allow the user to use his own encryption key. So nobody but you and the recipient can access it (unless they can crack it, of course).
Also I'm pretty certain that it's a mixture of bots and humans by now. I'm using random questions currently and whenever I change them the amount of registered bots goes down for 1-2 days. Then it slowly comes up again over the week until I think up new questions.

So I guess there's probably someone going over unknown questions regularly and adding new answers.
The Man Who Invented Scrobbling and Changed the World
Thanks, that's what we love to hear!
Point of information: did weev or anyone at Goatse Security report the hole to AT&T, or did they just send the information to the media? None of the reporting I read at the time said that they reported to AT&T, but I could easily have missed something.
> He noted that during a time of growing litigation in the smartphone industry, "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," he said.

I don't think anyone has been arguing that innovation is no longer happening, but rather that the mess of software patents is making it increasingly difficult for newcomers to enter the industry.

I also like how he completely dodged the question of whether software patents should be allowed at all, from a philosophical perspective..
> i sort of like anecdotes of actual Nobel Prize laureates.

Yes, me too, especially the scientist who expressed a rationale for dark chocolate, then hastily retracted the viewpoint after realizing he might be taken seriously.
Q&A with Chris Dixon on Joining Andreessen Horowitz
True, but true everywhere. There is simply no bottom for quality of higher education, or just education.
At the same time, it's worth noting that running curl in a loop is slightly less difficult than factoring RSA keys. So if someone "hacks" you via an unauthenticated public web service, the courts should take that as less of a computer crime on the attacker's part and more of negligence on your part. But on the other hand, if someone breaks into your well-engineered system through some nearly-impossible attack, then you should not be liable.
None of which is either scolding nor regulation.
I'm helping running this hackathon that is live right now: hackerrank.com/thanksgiving, show off your skills and get noticed. It ends today @ midnight PST and the winner gets a meeting with a YC Partner and Thanksgiving meal delivered to their door.
The biggest frustration I have with gmail is multiple account management. This chrome plugin isn't perfect, but works really well.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/checker-plus-for-g...
You're right, it sounds great--but it's darned hard for the average singer to nail it. In any case, I'd still consider your example to be an exception to the general rule, while the augmented second is used so often that I have to believe the author meant something other than what he actually said. (To be excruciatingly precise thought, augmented seconds are not used nearly as often as minor thirds, which are sonically identical, even though they're musicographically different.)
Star Citizen's $6.3 million haul breaks gaming crowdfunding record
I still haven't seen anything from Rick (and I've asked him directly on Twitter before) about how privacy and freedom equate with software piracy, if at all.

If they don't, then perhaps "the Pirate Party' is a bad name?

I support the government not reading my email, I support people being able to donate money to whistleblowing organizations, but I don't support nicking a free copy of someone's app.

Rick if you answered here that would be awesome.
Regrettably the only "safe" place is the location where any mine actually exploded, couple of feet away, not so much.

The haphazard nature of the exploration is the big issue and using this would most likely give people a false sense of security. This is an interesting piece of lo-tech design created with the very best of intentions, but it is essentially useless and may even be harmful.
In light of this compelling argument, I have changed my stance on software patents. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Kappos!
That screenshot looks less like "Firefox displays horribly with retina scaling" and more like "everything other than Safari displays horribly with retina scaling."

Which Apple may consider a feature rather than a bug :-D
As far as I know, following responsible disclosure practices does not waive any legal liability. It may make you look professional, but if someone who is friends with the FBI wants to fuck you, they can still fuck you.
Somewhere in a patent-free parallel universe humans are flying around in cars.
While all under the umbrella of "intellectual property," trademark, copyright, trade dress, and the various forms of patents all cover different things.

I think many people doing business in China are more concerned about trade dress (fooling people into thinking that their item is the "legitimate" thing).

Edit: rather than patents. I also think copyright and trademark are big concerns. I don't think patents are.
Just goes to show how disconnected from reality our politicians really are. How come its always the least innovative people who try to protect innovation?
Very cool, but I find it strange that all of the example phrases on the demo page are much longer than recommended by the API docs (<10 words). Why is this?
Get the official Apple iPhone Configuration utility off of the Mac App Store. It is for enterprise customers to config their iPhone fleet but I use it to set my APN settings for AT&T prepaid which doesn't officially support iPhone.
The search for quiet and some peace, maybe that is why I like to go hiking in remote places during colder weather. Yes there is still sound, but for some reason I find the sound of water or a light wind far more peaceful than the sound of people and the machines and gadgets they bring along.
Crowd Interactive Tech Blog: Creating and using modules in Rails
Pick an unsearchable name for your product, then don't make a product. I think it was performance art.
Lenen in vertrouwen doe je bij Credivite - Je Geldzaken | Je Geldzaken
How long ago was this, and what iPhone model and iOS version were you using? The instructions they give are exactly the ones that I need to be able to execute on my "unlocked" phone, but the menu they reference is being suppressed by AT&T's carrier profile. I don't see how it is possible that these instructions could work for anybody that was using Red Pocket on an iPhone that wasn't jailbroken and that didn't have a tweak installed that reveals that Cellular/Mobile Data Network settings menu.
Hello to you from the other side of the ocean! How's the weather at where you've left from? I have to admit, it is somewhat disturbing to meet you in the middle of the Atlantic, rowing just as enthusiastically as we do, just in the opposite direction.

>You no longer have the basic rule of law.

In many EU countries (my own included) people would start either crying bitterly or laughing hysterically have you told this to anybody older than 12. Loosing control over your mail shouldn't be the turning point in making a decision whether to emigrate or not.
In practice, you're unlikely to be charged for good-faith testing of someone else's system without their permission, especially if you're not an idiot and you don't ransom off your findings to the company. Also, many sites explicitly offer permission to security researchers to test their sites.

However, I believe it remains black-letter illegal to "test" websites for security flaws in such a way where you actually exploit flaws and gain access to internals or sensitive data.

Either way, don't do it. If you don't have permission (Google, for instance, gives blanket permission for testing), don't fuck with other people's web apps. It's very difficult to ensure that any kind of security testing, outside of really basic stuff like CSRF, won't disrupt the site; even silly XSS vectors can get cached in backends and replayed to other customers. You're unlikely to pick up a felony charge for doing this, but you can be sued.
Congratulations, you just invented JSON-RPC (http://www.jsonrpc.org/).
AngularStrap: Bootstrap directives for AngularJS
What is it like to get funded by Y Combinator?
Oh very cool! Thank you for pointing that out.
No problem! I hope you can figure it out. I've had many ideas for GPS-based games but as an avid gamer I couldn't help see all the ways I could cheat my own system.

Somewhat related... I'm not sure if you checked out my HN profile but I actually founded a gamification platform company called http://IActionable.com a few years ago. We started it before the word 'gamification' even existed got to watch in horror as people turned it into a cheap gimmick instead of properly implementing it. We actually don't like the term 'gamification' and the baggage that comes with it. Dealing with cheating was a high priority on our list when we initially targeted social applications but we eventually found the enterprise market to be the best fit for our technology. Basically, we were able to avoid the cheating problem because we made the 'game' involve people you really knew which naturally discouraged cheating.
This guy is the head of the Patent and Trademark Office? I think we can now see where part of the problem resides. "Envy of the world." He's either lying or blind.
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/11/pitch-perfect-2012-dvdrip...

http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/11/pitch-perfect-2012-dvdrip...

http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/11/pitch-perfect-2012-dvdrip...

http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/11/pitch-perfect-2012-dvdrip...

http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/11/pitch-perfect-2012-dvdrip...
In the year 2012 when you have a 3D view for DOM, you still can't reorder nodes or edit the inner html in the markup panel.

What the hell are those crap on the developer menu anyway? Oh right they are there because you still can't do live editing in meaningful ways in the inspect bar. See point above.

Font rendering is still terrible by default for Asian fonts BTW. Argh. I'm going back to Safari.
I'm French, now living/workin in the US and I'm not too sure I agree with you. Did you know that even small businesses when they register at "Chambre du commerce" they usually protect their IP/Name through INPI. That's like the first thing they do even if it's a food truck. So for me IP protection is very present in our culture. Same for the companies I worked for we usually submit patent to USPTO before EPO.
>Metric X is high, therefore disputed policy Y is boosting metric X.

I would say that it is even worse than that, because the metric itself is disputed.

If the police were to start a policy of giving out free GPS handguns to anyone, they might justify it by saying that they have caught more murderers since the policy began. The metric itself is flawed, as it assumes that catching a murderer it good in and of itself, and is in fact better than preventing a murder in the first place.

Here, he is arguing that lawsuits are good in and of themselves, without looking into whether those lawsuits have a positive or negative effect. He merely states without justification that the lawsuits have the effect of ``protecting innovation.''
#1 is the model I have, and I wouldn't call it "fully" unlocked with this limitation in place.
I don't think things are looking so ugly everywhere else, no.. At least not in Brazil.
The Future of 3-D Printing Depends on Hipsters
Given that he was nominated to the post by the Obama administration and confirmed by the Senate, where should a grassroots movement to get him shucked out of office be directed?
Moving social stuff into the browser should actually help make it more open. If a page/framework uses this Social API instead of hardcoding against a few popular networks, it opens the door for you to choose how the integration works.
I totally disagree with this philosophy. I do not want my software to be a living-breathing entity. My browser even less so. Security issues aside, I do not want to ever update until a new feature is released that compels me to upgrade. God knows how many times I've upgraded a perfectly good piece of software just to be greeted with unwanted bloat or regressions in features. I hate this trend towards removing the meaning of version numbers. Don't get me wrong, I understand the massive boon to security that this model will bring. But there's no reason why software can't auto-update just security releases.
Full "bombshell email" text after Swiss bank UBS incurred losses of £1.4bn
How do you know?

Besides, it's capital, not capitalists, that is amoral. Some capitalists may not participate in certain ways the same way a religion might have dietary restrictions or taboos, but capital itself doesn't care.
I can see this having the Apple fan-boys frothing at the mouth.
Economist Proposes a $30 Billion Megafund for New Cancer Drugs
Whatever it is I hope it's significant enough to initiate a human mission to Mars
By "extreme" I mean that paleo insists not only that certain foods will affect our bodies in certain ways, but that some foods are "natural" and some are "unnatural" using pretty iffy logic. It ultimately translates to "fewer carbs and less gluten" and that can be effective for some people, though I can process gluten problem-free and I find the occasional carb coma vastly enjoyable/not super detrimental to my long-term health. The pseudo-dogma that revolves around the diet is unnecessary.

> If you harvest seeds of wheat which we cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable", which is the more extreme diet?

Is that more extreme than relying on specific animal species to eat and process foodstuffs we wouldn't find "palatable" on our own, then letting biological process transform that into material which we're capable of harvesting off their bones, cooking using an artificial heating process, and then putting into our bodies?

I'm not saying that raising animals to kill them is particularly "extreme", I'm saying that if you want to, you can make any food process sound like it's much more "unnatural" than it is. I wouldn't eat chicken feed, but I'll sure as heck eat the eggs that chickens poop out. Or the things we squeeze out of a cow's udder – who saw udders and thought that was a normal thing to do?
Your sarcasm is noted. :) I will switch if Apple does not address this. The phone DID used to work, and I WAS happy with it. In the world of software, things apparently CAN change AFTER you have bought the product and already lived with it for a while.
Fantastic Infographs
Will try it out right now, useful for full screen terminal sessions !
Aurasma is some kind of an augmented reality browser / platform by Autonomy.
> Metric X is high, therefore disputed policy Y is boosting metric X.

Although the reasoning doesn't exactly follow, it does still say something important: that the patent system isn't totally breaking innovation. In other words, he's saying that we have something to lose, and he's right.

You can make a strong argument that we won't lose it, and I'd agree with you. But it's not exactly proven. Actually, I don't think it's a simple win or lose situation, I think that patents (or the lack thereof) change the nature of things invented, and it's hard to quantify whether it's better or worse.
This title is feels like a product of the previous article "how to pick your titles using AdWords" it is just missing "1 cheap trick that an Afghan child came up with that makes demining companies furious"
Does it matter? This is HTC vs Apple, not Android vs iOS. That is an HTC phone, and an Apple phone. Not at all bothering.
We at OpenDNS have believed BlinkX to have something less than above board going on based on some VERY UNUSUAL traffic patterns that we started to notice a couple years ago related to ad clicks. Ad clicks that we couldn't explain in any legitimate way.

We never dived too deep, and never pursued, so no evidence to present, just a theory we had internally.
It's an example of evolution:

Phase 1: consumers receive goods packaged in shipping containers.

Phase 2: consumers become goods packaged in shipping containers.
Except that when it comes time to evaluate which way to vote with your wallet, the "whatever reason" does matter. And since Straight Talk isn't the entity here that is enforcing this restriction, I am much less likely to give them the boot, and much more likely to give Apple the boot.
Being physically able to do something isn't the same as actually being able to do it. Mental/emotional contexts can make it very hard/stressful to change your eating habits, and often the stress isn't worth the end result.

This suggests a way to make changing habits more convenient, and the response of some people here is to sneer at the people who need such convenience. Which is somewhat typical, but still unfortunate.
Show HN: InstaPDF
Every time a new Firefox ships, I start thinking about Firefox 99.
No, patents and copyrights and other things too. One major Chinese telecom company used to copy the equipment of one major US telecom company down to the English silk screening on the circuit boards. Who wants to do all the expensive design work for a Chinese company who is then just going to undercut you with lower prices through cheap labor?
In the article, his responses suggest that he views patents as the first step toward litigation - that suing or being sued is an intended, by design outcome of patents existing.

It's as though he sees litigation and prosecution as beneficial to our economy, instead of seeing the ways in which it blocks innovation and free market actions.
One could argue that we don't live in a true democracy. What we live in right now is much closer to fascism. I'd even go as far as to say that the concept of lobbying is a fascist idea.

This guy has huge ties to IBM, I'd have a very hard time believing he has the public's best interests in mind. He's more likely to pass laws which would help his rich friends instead.

Note that I'm not a strong believer of government to begin with. My rationale is that if society is anything like software development, management should be seen as counter-productive.
The 100% electric TRON motorcycle - $55K
I don't care about how open it is, my browser is for browsing. If I wanted a social browser I'd use AOL.
I found the translation between native code and a REST API to be what I'd call boilerplate. You need to build a URL, build the request (usually converting some model object into JSON), make the request in a non-blocking fashion, receive and parse the response into either a successful response, probably converting JSON back into a model object, or a failed response, which needs to be mapped to some native representation and passed back into the business logic.

Contrast that with a client library which can do all of that for you, for example: taking a native model object and calling one of two callback functions provided, letting you concentrate on the business logic of your app.

I'm not arguing that a client library is the right way to go, but I certainly understand where the grandparent is coming from RE: boilerplate code. Also, this is going to be heavily influenced by the language and libraries you're using.
A collection of useful Ruby/Rails gems
Software Startups: How not to price your software
Can you respond directly to some of the points raised in the article? For example, ensuring SSL certs are validated?
I think this is a great idea - making people aware of this assault on rights is the best possible course of action, at this point
I have a hard time grasping this. If the books are in order, I wouldn't expect to later find significant fraud affecting the books. For example, if the books show $x in orders pending, I'd sample the orders to verify within some confidence level that the lot is worth $x.
> "Our patent system is the envy of the world,"

I thought it was worlds lawyers wet dream and laughing stock of everybody else.

I can't remember one mention of US patent that was not grotesquely funny. I heard nothing of sorts about patents of any other country. The only thing I heard about those is that they are hard to get, expensive and short lasting.
I was going to write the same thing: it's really really difficult to get clients when your pitch is "I can increase your revenues" because the average client wonders if you can deliver on your promises. But when you talk about saving money they are all ears.

When I was 12 a friend of my dad's was complaining about problems managing his warehouses and I offered to write him a program that would solve his problems and save him money.

That's how I got my first job, writing some code for $70 an hour, not bad at all.

Right now I'm working on a project that has a long list of clients (clients, not users) signed up and hasn't even launched.

Our catch? we are not only better than the competition, we're up to 40% less expensive.
It is absolutely true. If the OS itself is not corrupted, you can erase your data and restore YOUR DATA from backup, but that doesn't include the OS itself. If you do a "full restore" of the OS (and this isn't the first time I've observed the confusion caused by Apple's overloading of the term "restore"...in this context, "restore" basically means "complete reformat and OS reinstall"), you WILL be forcefully upgraded to the newest iOS.
I do everything that I can to avoid phone calls. As a developer, the interruption to flow is the biggest deal for me.
"This just in -- exciting news about the Mars Rover -- more at 11"
From the article, I read it's Leahy's:

"CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week."
Be "The Wolf".

http://youtu.be/ANPsHKpti48
Fuck this guy and fuck patents.

That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,
we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours;
and this we should do freely and generously.

- Benjamin Franklin

Bless Benjamin Franklin.
That's an interesting avenue I had not thought of; thanks.