skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did they prevent fraud with bearer bonds? (The wikipedia page is remarkably silent.) Since no records of ownership are kept, the only evidence of ownership is the bond itself. And given their value there is a large incentive to make fraudulent ones.
"It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends"

PG also has an age bias in that statement as it would practically be true only for a certain age group (young, in or recently out of college, without kids) anyway.

Someone who is, say, 33 years old, married with two kids and with friends who are in a similar situation (and assuming those friends even live in the same town at the time) would find it quite difficult to pull those people from their possibly established careers (say as an attorney, doctor, or rising manager) to leave on a "startup". Additionally not everybody has a large group of friends who share the same goals and interests. Obviously.
Show HN: iPhone and iPad responsive design tester
Cisco has the highest market share in wireless and it is Cisco's innovation in wireless that's keeping it ahead of Ruckus, Aruba and Motorola. Don't understand the conclusion that Cisco can't do "out of the box" R&D, at least in wireless.
Enterprise interest in Windows 8 half that for Windows 7 in '09
You sound like you're disagreeing with the OP, but the article explicitly calls out a $400K+ category of app development if you "do everything right". I think you're on the same page as the author here.
Some people become entrepreneurs because they want to make loads of money. Others do it for the freedom and lifestyle it affords them. It just depends on what your priorities are. Personally, I prefer setting my own hours over driving a BMW.
An Analysis on Twitter's Leaked Passwords
The other day, the note app got stuck for me when I touched an email address and tried to create a contact. I had to kill the app.
5-hour Energy CEO denies reports his drink linked to deaths
Any idea how 'simplified' it is? ie. Can they browse the internet? Could they run a python script?
Someone offered to buy an entire app from me, a paid iOS app that was making stable income and has a proven codebase. I quoted 80k (or was it 100k) and the enquirer was shocked, replying that he was assuming a 10k price tag. And he is a CTO of a startup.
Edited to clarify. The above example would be the enterprise version of his second tier, the $20k BMW
I definitely agree with you, I'd love to see more tech companies entering the NZ market. Sadly we are lagging behind other countries when it comes to technology.

One of my own goals is to help introduce a better environment for technology in NZ. Hopefully encouraging more people to start their own startup and base their operations in NZ ( I'm planning on basing my startup here in NZ ).
Not to mention that he's complaining about the boxed-in apps and the first apps available from the Windows Store. That's like complaining about the first-generation games on a console being boring. Which is absolutely retarded. First-generation games are always a disappoinment - then a year or two passes and holy shit so many cool games. So let's just see how things shape up now that Microsoft has laid the foundation and the devs start to experiment.
The Central Bankers Potemkin Village
The desktop view in Win8 is hands down better than Win7. Even if you never use the metro apps, I would recommend upgrading to Win8.
You can filter using keyboard shortcuts or the mouse, so I think that's fine, I just want an unfiltered view. There used to be universal search and now there isn't.
This has been festering for about six months now. It is supremely aggravating.
Loud typing is a symptom of the lack of private working space in the office. That means the company is too cheap to set up offices or good insulating cubicles for the developers.
I hardly think that this exploits hardened Linux systems since the JIT it exploits it is currently disabled by default. Maybe it should be titled "Attacking softened Linux systems...".
Ubuntu gains unofficial Netflix support, PPA coming soon
Care to explain how you'd run it differently if you were the director of technology? Ask for bigger budget and choose the companies you know instead of the ones the current director of tech knew?
Inflation since 1999 should easily tip you over the $1B mark :-)
Apart from being a little sarcastic I think I was generally respectful. I basically said that it was overkill to flame him so harshly when the only argument appears to be based with Suster's style. It's certainly fine to disagree with anyone, just why so harshly, and especially over such a minor point. Why not more respectfully?
> There is also one movie - whose name escapes me now - which entered the public domain and was then put back under copyright protection subsequently.

It looks like that got fixed:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/04/court-congress-ca...
Netflix arrives on Ubuntu - with a fix
The Bugatti Veyron SS costs approximately $2.7M. That's about the top of the price range for new-production road cars. Owning and operating a world-class race car costs more and tends to be budgeted as a lifecycle rather than a one-time purchase.

I'm sure someone else can come up with witty analogies for apps, but I think the model holds. Outsourcing the development of an app costs as much as a car, for some value of car. You get what you pay for, and the things that cost a lot at the high end aren't immediately obvious to people not in the business.
#muckedup Chat Tuesday: Robot Reporting
All this "discussion" and criticism of Microsoft and Windows is
90% conjecture or very personal (read biased) opinions.

These guys put 12 people in a room and recorded them interacting with Windows 8 machines, and noted the usability flaws encountered by the users. I don't know about you, but to me, that's as far from conjecture or personal opinion as you can get.

They were doing real usability testing with real people, not just spewing another uneducated opinion. And there's no particular anti-Microsoft agenda at work here either, if you look further on the site you'll find similar usability studies conducted on iPad apps with similar criticisms.
Forgive the density of this question, but.. what exactly can you do with this? There is very little info both on the app's page, as well as the author's webpage.

Can you, for instance, import os (or equivalent) and interact with the phone's file system? Does the standard lib work, or some percentage of it?

Does anyone have any detailed information?
Just wanted to thank all of your for your responses - this is very enlightening!

I can't listen to speech while doing something else (other than driving or sleeping) so that probably limits my opportunities time-wise.
I've heard that all you really need to know to understand copyright law is that Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain.
Particular likes...
That "one application" was software+hardware tasked with managing millions of hand-written paper forms. The electronic version of tax filing was far cheaper, and launched successfully.
Three weeks in: The lackluster launch of Windows 8
Wow! That's pretty epic - thanks for sharing. Given you are as close to a hardcore podcast listener as I currently know, how do you judge which tech podcasts to listen to?

I've found it hard work with the 1-2 hour long ones since the beginnings tend to drag and I can only give them five minutes before getting bored and turning off.
Don't mistake this article for a review of Windows 8. It's not supposed to be.

It's a usability study, nothing more.
Om Crippled His Site
Just agreeing with rogerbinns here - I think the fact that some of W8's new features and interaction models are not immediately obvious is probably the worst type of criticism. I consider it actually to be a confused sort of praise. Technology changes. New things become possible. Old UX models become outdated. Products are released which are different. People are confused, but then society adapts, and hey, it turns out that these new-fangled features make things a lot better.

Just because iOS is soothing and friendly and easy to use for the last generation not to be educated in problem-solving complex systems from their earliest walking moments[1] doesn't mean in any way shape or form that it is a superior interface. In fact in many ways iOS is very inefficient, and its popularity stifles real progress in computer interfaces. So we should be happy that a new interface model, that challenges people's expectations a little, is emerging.

[1] Videogames section in: http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/15...
Six Simple Steps Proven To Keep Your Windows 7 PC Safe From Hackers And Malware
I've had some other odd issues with Safari on my 3rd generation iPad:

- About every day (sometimes much more frequently) a tab will just die. You'll click a link or enter a url, and the indicator in the top left corner will start spinning, but nothing ever happens. The only way to fix it is to close the tab and open a new one.

- Less frequently - maybe every few weeks or less - large blocks of web pages will just not render, instead of text or graphics or whatever should be there, there are just giant square white chunks. The only way to fix this is completely reboot the iPad.

I've also had a number of weird problems with the iTunes app that have required finding a way to force the app to quit or reboot the device to fix.

I like my iPad, but Apple's stock apps have quite a bit of room for improvement.
One of the advantages of belonging to such a cosmopolitan city as London is that you really don't have to care about branding your events as "local" -- most European cities are a cheap flight away, you can easily meet many "big names" in whatever scene you belong to just because they'll often be in town, etc etc. The proof is the other comment saying there have, in fact, been many fairly large-scale Ruby confs in London already.

It's not a coincidence that a conference outside London would in fact require a "British" branding in order to attract recognition.

Note also how it was supposed to be a "British" conference as opposed to Scottish or English or North-West or whatever -- the organisers really did try to cast a very wide net.
Hm. Interesting. Might it be 'quiet!'?
> So anywho I love getting on my soapbox but it's insane how many huge companies benefit from these scams, and how simple it is for them to have deniability due to the ecosystem of using these small timers on the front end.

The same structure drives multi-level marketing, off-shoring/outsourcing manufacturing/recycling/garbage-hauling to sweatshops/polluters/mafia, and the junk mortgage bubble / global financial crisis.
Hi, my name is Abe, and I'm an engineer at Facebook working on the team that prevents these kinds of scams from spreading on the site. As you suspect, we actually do have a bunch of tools that detect attacks like this (and others), but they're not perfect, and you never really see when they work, only when they don't.

In cases like this, you're right that there are often obvious content patterns. However, enforcing on or detecting those doesn't really scale, as they're trivial for the attacker to change. Instead, we try to focus on aspects of an attack that are much more expensive for the attacker to change. One component of our systems that detect this does involve looking at metadata about URLs, and running it through some machine learned classifiers (you're correct that simply using bit.ly is insufficient to stop us).

Regardless, we've taken care of this particular instance of the attack and are always working to systematically improve our detection and mitigation systems. Let me know if you're interested in helping us out in this effort!
The core OS underneath the glitzy pixels is a fine OS. Really, more than fine -- it's a /great/ OS, fantastic at asynchronicity and driver support. It has warts, but on the whole it was well thought out. (I've been working with OSes for 30+ years, starting with TOPS-10 and Unix in the late 70s. I have a little pedigree here).

The stuff they put on top, not so much. I will probably wait years until I install anything past Win7, and if MS hasn't cleaned up its act for power users by then, the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux are the apps I use, and games.

(I do wish MS had some up with a better text shell. PowerShell doesn't cut it).

Steam on Linux may take care of the games part of my needs. The apps? Visual Studio is hard to beat, and there are some others that I can't live without that don't have competent Linux equivalents. Time may erode my dependency on these.

[I left MS about a month ago. It's interesting to experience the perspective shift]
Excellent explainer that i'll be passing along to aspiring founders in the future. Thank you.
Wow. 20 billion pounds expected with unclear outcome.

I have to wonder what the scope of such a project looks like to come within 2 orders of magnitude of that number.
Because they want people to be able to use both input methods simultaneously.
Teardown: iFixit Takes Apart Google's Nexus
We use all https and there is no notable problems in indexing or SEO that I can see. We get indexed quickly and show up well I search results.
It gives you an interactive python shell on your iOS device. You can't access the file system, because of the OS's sandboxing rules. The standard library does work modulo any sandbox rules. You can, for example, write scripts that use urllib to talk over a network and do some work.
Computer interfaces are going to become incredibly smart, fluid and responsive, and W8 is the first step in that direction.

That's not what I expected to listen from an iPad owner. Wasn't the iPad a huge step in that direction? From reviews, 'fluid and responsive' don't apply to W8 yet.

On OSX: the imported iOS features are out of sight, except for Mission Control, which didn't change that much. The default desktop has no clutter at all (menu-bars?). And since you asked, my mother (which was completely computer illiterate before) uses a MB without any trouble. It's naive to compare that to the radical changes that come with Windows 8, which even some long-time power users have difficulty adapting to.
If it works in Lynx, are you sure it's the website that's wrong?
Forrester finds mixed prospects for Windows 8 in the enterprise
Three pieces of career advice that changed my life (Jeff Weiner)
discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4802147
PG's post from a couple of months ago, titled "Startup = Growth", might be relevant: http://paulgraham.com/growth.html
They say they already have partnerships set up with brazilian carriers and are aiming for a launch in Q1 2013. If that goes well I assume it will be pretty easy to get companies on board around the world.
My wife is the same way: she works best in a coffee shop, with background noise. My hypothesis is that people who are able to multitask (ie. not me) need a certain level of stimulation to absorb the attention that would otherwise crystallize into distractions.

For me, when I'm able to concentrate, the background noise is irrelevant. I simply do not hear it.
I expect downvotes for this.

I upvoted, but I think this is an important point:

Mark Suster is a VC, and so his perspective will of course have to reinforce a view of the world that justifies the kind of entrepreneurship which requires large financing rounds -- unless he is a very honest individual who can accept that he does a job which is based on principles which he personally cannot endorse (I doubt this).

Conversely, you have a business that revolves around the idea that small(er) ideas can be scaled to large profits -- relative to lower expectations than VC financing, and relative to effort. What I mean is, from what I can tell: as a business, 30x500 forwards the idea that ~$0.5M/yr going into your own pocket for ~40 hrs/wk on a predictable basis is a preferable outcome to the proposition of applying a massive effort toward a very small chance for a single $10M-$100M+ payout.

This is a valid viewpoint as well, but it should be noted that you have an interest in forwarding this kind of a story as a valuable model of entrepreneurship.

I hope you understand that I'm not passing judgment on your model of entrepreneurship, i.e. I'm not saying you have a "little dipshit company." I don't have a preference to either.
Observation: nearly every single slide in that presentation that describes entrepreneurs exclusively features men in the (bad) clip art.

Just sayin': you can do better than that.
Google's augmented reality game Ingress released in closed beta
The "scammer" is making money off the submits and not the clicks.
> Eventually he told me he was going to leave because I was eating so rudely.

Does this happen in a jovial manner, or people really take serious offence to simple inconveniences?
Silence is golden.

Deal with that one.
There needs to be a clear distinction between pricing for an existing app vs pricing for building one from scratch. If the former this will be priced based on revenue, potential revenue and how much the owner wants to keep it. If building from scratch then the cost has to be based more towards developer/admin hours.

So given your app existed then potentially $10k could be a great price no matter how many hours you put into it if; you not particularly fussed about keeping it from an enjoyment sense, it makes sub $1000 per year in revenue and you don't see yourself creating significant future revenue from it.
Google Nexus 7 (32GB, Unlocked)
- No one pick a host based on a single microbenchmark, please. Game out what your app would need to achieve your target performance level with what each host offers. Amazon still might lose (sounds like that happened with TripAdvisor) but at least you've made your decision a sane way.

- For the best price, you'd want to use a reserved instance if this is a webserver, and perhaps a spot instance if it's a batch/HPC task. You'd want to use high-CPU instances if you really are all about quickly sorting 5M numbers. If your app is or might be come database-bound, DB perf's super key.

- I'd love to hear more broadly about the practical differences between the clouds--whether anyone seems to be better at managing noisy neighbors than the next guy, network and I/O performance, etc. One CPU-bound task can't really be the end of it.
It's not just a matter of convincing them what the market rate for software is. It's convincing them that it's worth that rate to them.

If I had a nickel for every time I was approached by someone with a spec that exceeded their purchasing authority (usually by an order of magnitude), I would be a very rich man. There are a lot of mondays out there where some manager says "We need an app, here's $10k signing authority, go figure it out" and what they do is e-mail 3 developers for quotes.

Each developer looks to the right, looks to the left, and sees competition, so there's social proof that there's money in the deal. Exactly one sales rep has a brain in his head, and uses the situation to score a meeting with an actual decisionmaker to talk about a totally different project that might be worth paying actual money for. Everybody else just expenses a few lunches and enjoys pretending that meetings are work.

But despite all the social proof, there's usually no real desire (within several multiples of required effort, anyway) to actually produce anything. It's just some lower manager read in a magazine article somewhere that they need an app, and they have the authority to use the corporate letterhead and book conference rooms, and nothing better to book meetings about.
Things aren't always like what they seem. Here's my perspective.

I use a ThinkPad that has a noisy keyboard. When I type on a Macbook Pro, my typing is silent. The noise in my case is because of keyboard design, not because of my typing force, I prefer the audible feedback. If I'm in a shared space where all I can hear is my typing, I try not to type.

I have slight breathing problems due to a small nasal passage. When I eat, I sometimes have to breathe through my mouth. I try not to, because eating with your mouth open is considered rude.
Fun! If you're interested in Linux kernel security, you should read the whole post, rather than jumping to conclusions about what it means right now.

SMEP is a processor feature that will disallow execution of instructions from pages marked as belonging to userland when the CPU is executing in CPL0 (kernel mode). SMEP makes life annoying for memory corruption exploit authors because it prevents them from using the userland memory they already control to hold shellcode.

BPF is part of the network monitoring code in the Linux (and BSD) kernel; it's what tcpdump expressions compile down to. BPF is a trivial two-register VM that implements matching on packet fields to select which packets will be shuttled (at great expense) into userland for pcap programs to look at. Modern Linux kernels have BPF implementations that compile down to native code.

JIT-spraying is a technique Dion Blazakis invented (and my friend Chris Rohlf, formerly on the Matasano team, spent several years working with). It notices that systems implementing JITs often give attackers control over executable code, even though the system is being careful not to allow data to be treated as instructions. JIT-spray attacks give a victim JIT code that when compiled will help abet an exploit; it's "sprayed" because the attacker does this repeatedly in order to fill the victim's memory with malicious code to make it easier to jump to during an exploit.

The coolest trick in this post is how they've accomplished the "spraying"; because there's a limit on open files and only one BPF filter can be attached to one, they need a way around resource limits. So they use explicit file descriptor passing, which is an obscure Unix feature that allows unrelated processes to send and receive open files over Unix domain sockets using sendmsg(2). By sending sockets with malicious BPF code attached, the technique forces the kernel to keep those BPF filters resident, while allowing the exploit code to close its own copy, freeing up space for a new socket.

The point of this post isn't "OMG Linux is doomed"; it's that it's difficult to blunt memory corruption attacks with simple countermeasures. 15 years ago, researchers thought they'd killed memory corruption code execution off for good with stack cookies; the years that followed have been a story of new countermeasures introduced, hailed as a single bullet, bypassed by clever attacks, and then fit into a patchwork of defenses that have made exploits progressively harder, but not close to impossible, to build.
Can you explain a bit more on why it is hard to deport people? The way I understood it the way illegal immigrants live in the country is because they either use fake SSNs or no SSNs, no paper trails of any kind. I would imagine that it would be very hard to live like that unless you are truly desperate.
Anybody else want to share their experience with Joyent versus EC2? I'm considering doing the switch as my EC2 bill is getting a little expensive.
100% agree. I learned so much off W3Schools. Yeah, it's sometimes inaccurate. But the information is a million times better than reading some WC3 specs or Mozilla's developer guides.

Often I see people link to MSDN or Mozilla's developer network when asked for how to learn web development, and all I think to myself as I see that is that if it were me, I would just quit. The content is explained in a way that's just not user friendly for someone who wants to learn for the first time.
That's a lot of bloat for a single-platform, first version app. A designer + developer duo can put a nice polished app out in a month or two, and could cost way under $100/hr. You certainly don't need a team of four + a PM. The process you're thinking of fits the "I want the best" price range (1 month testing?).