skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently Deloitte was supposed to do this, with KPMG as a safety net. It took a third (and also expensive) consulting firm (PwC) to notice issues.

I wonder if there will be any client fallout at either Deloitte or KPMG for this. Probably not...

Maybe HP is just trying to blame it on them? Who knows!
> It's as though he sees litigation and prosecution as beneficial to our economy

Well as a lawyer, litigation and prosecution are very beneficial to his local economy.
Airport Security Is Killing Us
cdw.com

If you just want some switches and don't need something really high-end (read Cisco/Juniper) then dell has some options and they are much cheaper than the brand name stuff.
So you'll turn it off.

Hundreds of millions of folk use their browser for social stuff. It's not an unreasonable use of developer time to make the web better for those people. (It probably springs from their work on FirefoxOS in any case.)

The small set of folk like you can just disable it. (Or, as is pointed out elsewhere, just never enable it in the first place!)
The platform support argument is not very persuasive here. The beauty of open source and the community is that when you combine a popular service with common platforms that are likely to be used, it is likely someone in the community will release the needed api. Why not provide some community support for the platforms, but allow the users to release an api where they know their needs better than you do?

On the other hand, the security argument is quite strong. Improperly implemented SSL handshaking, especially when dealing with payment transactions like they do, has the potential to be devastating. But this is where interacting with the community that is making the api's would be key. There's a lot of value to be had when company and community development work together. They could contribute the ssl code themselves to the open source client projects.
Wanted: absurdly wealthy individual(s) willing to purchase, and then ride around on, what is in essence a movie prop.

Not that this won't happen. I almost never say never.
Thats how you create a better world for everyone. I'm pretty sure this guy wants to create a better world for his corporate friends only.
Interpolating noise
9 or 10 words is about the average sentence that we receive, it is just a guideline so that users understand that we aren't going to handle multiple sentences or paragraphs.
It doesn't really say anything important (IMHO) because we may also have a hell of a lot to gain.

You can make an equally strong argument that not only will we not lose it, but we'll be far, far better off with major restrictions on what he's peddling.
"secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working despite a recent update

I believe secure login stopped working on several popular sites due to changes in those sites' webforms. A while ago I applied a patch mentioned in the addons.mozilla.org comments, and the extension worked again.

I've just checked out and diff'd the most recent v1 update. The only change is the addition of a pretty spammy looking URL that appears on first launch. No bugs were fixed. Sad.

The version I'm using (works in Firefox 17 for me) is:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/secure_login-0.9....
I suggest unzipping and doing a "diff -r" against the unzipped contents of the official version to check I'm not evil.
Sorry if I did not understand everything through, but I think I see the same options in iOS6. Still, i'm sorry if I'm wrong
Something like live mobile streaming? http://color.com/about :

At Color, we believe in the opportunity that the new mobile era presents and are excited about developing products that transform the way people share the stories of their lives.

We work collaboratively, iterate often, and enjoy problem solving. Color is a company of entrepreneurs and innovators, highly skilled in their respective specialties, constantly striving to learn and grow.

We’ve cultivated a very relaxed and informal culture and enjoy our extra curricular activities, which include but are not limited to: ping pong tournaments, ball pit acrobatics and impromptu poker nights.

I really have no idea
OpenOffice 20 - 25 MS Office as Freiburg votes to ditch open source suite
Which has the best resolution of all the Rover's tools? Obviously we didn't send a tunneling electron microscope to Mars, so what scale of objects can we detect? Bacteria-sized objects?
That picture doesn't do it justice, Chrome looks significantly better than Firefox.
It looks like they still haven't supported H.264, which is the main reason I'm still using Chrome and haven't switched back to Firefox.
We got his attention.

Now I'll write two letters per week.
More discussion about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808721
AT&T vs Verizon. The iPhone 5 / 4G Performance Shootout in San Francisco
Using that argument, a reasonable approach would simply be to make sure all steps for the worse are incremental, so nobody ever has a "turning point" they can point to.

Arguably this is already happening.

The turning point is often just the final straw, not "everything was 100% fine up until they started reading my email".
Legal Actions Every App Developer Should Take
With all of the legal events happening lately that can impact app developers, we wanted to summarize two major action items for anyone trying to launch new apps in 2013. Good luck!
As investors, isn't it part of their job to ensure the people they are giving boatloads of money to aren't grime?

I agree that the whole story of Color was a "shame", but the whole thing sounded like an overhyped pipedream to most onlookers to begin with, so when it turns out that's what it was I'm not going to cry a river for the investors.
It might become better too, though it's unlikely that a rapid change in the climate is usually something that the nature can adapt to very well, meaning decline or even collapse.

Let's give an analogy: if you push a button, you have a 50% chance of losing your house. Do you do it, since "just as well, nothing might happen"? 30%?

Often, stability has a lot of value by itself.
I wonder whether the problem of captcha farming could be mitigated using branded captchas (which obviously don't belong to a site they might be injected into) and checking referers, and also making them complicated enough that they're not worth whatever the typical per-captcha rate is. Something visual, like a puzzle captcha, instead of filling text out.

Then again, that captcha might end up being too complicated for regular users to be willing to fill out as well.
How many of you are allowed to drink beer at work?
I swear I used to see this as a "perk" that lots of tech companies offered. A few of my friends have worked jobs that have a kegerator in the break room.

Maybe I'm just living in a filter bubble, is this actually common at tech companies?
Right; the more important thing is that they all have a single intent.
Those who profit from patents will always support them.

The best way to undermine patentability is to publicly disclose the invention in advance, thereby creating prior art that no one can patent.

To me, the simplest solution would be "CantPatentThis.com" where you disclose your ideas/sketches. Think GitHub for ideas, not necessarily working code.

Thoughts?
Working around the brittle UI Virtualization in Windows 8
There could be a technical concern here, but practically speaking the BBC is so impartial it will happily half-destroy itself in the name of journalism.

Their own Director-General just had to resign after a grilling by BBC journalists on BBC programmes. If they'll do that to their own boss, some guy from Autonomy has 0 chance of special treatment.
The allegations seem to cover just about the same things Dennis Kozlowski is in prison for right now.
IMO the biggest benefit of REST vs RPC is reduced coupling between the client and the server. With RPC client needs to be explicitly aware of all methods and parameters that the server supports. With well designed REST interface this is not the case, you can have a generic client that does not need to be explicitly coded to support the specific service. REST interfaces are more difficult to design than RPC interfaces, but they are also more elegant and simpler. Roy Fielding (REST father) argues that elegant and simpler != easier.
The title should add "by itself" at the end, as they are still using REST - just adding client libraries.
Hello encryption, we've needed ye all along.
Without agreeing with him on this specific point, I do have to note that just because he sees the amount of litigation as a good thing does not mean he thinks that litigation itself is beneficial to the economy.

As a general rule, litigation is a sign of activity. The more economic activity you have, the more interactions and transactions you have, the more conflicts that arise, and the more litigation you have to resolve those conflicts. The litigation itself is of course overhead, but the fact that there are many conflicts can be a sign of an industry in which a lot of things are happening.
> the patent system isn't totally breaking innovation

This is like saying it wouldn't be so bad to be blind because blind people are able to live fulfilling and experience-rich lives. Yes, that is true, blind people do live rich and fulfilling lives, but this says nothing at all about the richness of the lives they could be living if they were not blind.

We have fewer than five large companies dominating the smart phone space. Let's ignore for a moment the fallacy that because smart phone innovation is occurring that therefore all innovation is a-okay. There are no small players in this space. This is like American car companies before Tesla and the other new electric companies got started. We know from experience that the domination of an industry by a few large players does not lead to innovation in the long term. It leads to tit-for-tat competition with little novel exploration of the space of possible products. These companies become conservative and self-concerned.

I think if you do any research into the current patent system, you will find it self-evident that the situation is untenable. Amazon holds a patent on "one-click ordering". They own a 20-year patent on the notion of only needing to click one button to make a purchase. Apple was just granted a patent on "searching across multiple databases simultaneously". The absurdity of the situation is apparent.

We are already in a period where large companies can use their patents to crush startups. It does not matter if the patent dispute is spurious and the startup clearly within their rights. Large companies with in-house legal staff can drown a startup by requiring them to fork out enormous quantities of money for legal representation in their self-defense. With a suite of patents, a company like Apple can bring suit after suit until finally the small company either loses one (these things are not decided by engineers or experts in patent law, they are decided by juries, a curse and a blessing), or runs out of money. This is analogous to the libel/slander situation in Britain, in which the cost of defending against a libel suite is enough to ruin a journalistic enterprise.

Read about what happened to Vlingo, as the situation I just described has already occurred: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-amo...
Yes it is, here in Crowd Interactive (www.crowdint.com) we drink beet at anytime, we have billiard table, xbox's, air hockey and bbq grill.
I have no knowledge of what BrainTree does, but if I'm picking a service with an API, I'm picking the one that is easiest to learn (preferably there is little that needs to be learned), I'm not picking one that requires me to switch languages -- or just as bad, locks me into one of a few languages I'm currently using.
Towards rejecting the entire autonomous bureaucracy he is but a small part of. However, given that most of the US is contentedly employed in service of the top-down government, agorism is the best bet.
My company actually uses this to determine which clients we work with. If the first email we get is a call request, then we politely decline to work with them.

In our experience, having a 'quick chat' rarely if ever leads to business. Most people know what they want already and don't need a call to confirm and/or waste each other's time.
Ah, so the windows are meant to be broken, else how will glassworkers remain employed?
Fast Debugging with Javascript Console Output
Not Home for the Holidays
> ... Depends on Hipsters

Hipsters? That word is still in use? The risk should be obvious -- the word has had so many different meanings over the years that it risks being rendered meaningless by overuse. In this context it appears to mean early technological adopters, but that's hardly consistent with its other meanings, including Luddite.
Definitely agree with you that the benevolent few who produce FOSS deserve admiration especially when wrestling with the esoteric aspects of POP, IMAP and SMTP.
It seems like someone with a modicum of jargon, zero ethics, and balls of brass would be able to suck a nearly unlimited amount of cash out of the herd mentality that rules VC. Perhaps there's a startup idea in there.
Because nothing says freedom like regulators from the OSHA and SEC warrantlessly reading your drunk messages.
I'm saying that they used to because when the iPhone was new it gave them incredible leverage. If AT&T hadn't agreed, they'd have taken it to Verizon, and still made tons of money.

They no longer get the same leverage that they had while offering an exclusivity agreement on the first iPhone. If Apple were to walk away from AT&T, both companies would lose a bunch of money. It's something of a "nuclear option," and Apple doesn't care enough about unlocked phones to waste their limited bargaining ability on it.
This comment just made my day, thank you.

Recently on a female subreddit, a woman wrote a huge rant about how if we want equality, we need to stop complaining about what we don't have. The idea being that complaining about it will just set us back further because people won't take us seriously. While I understand the sentiment, it backfires: awareness is the only way things are going to change. There are too many people that don't understand the day-to-day experiences of a[ny "minority"] to fully realize the extent of the differences in the ways we're treated both professionally and personally.

Even to say "no one cares about your gender here, we build things to prove ourselves" ignores that women are at a disadvantage in engineering to begin with. I'll cite again a local university professor that wrote adamantly that his natural expectations of the women in his courses were much lower and that he'd intentionally spend less time with them because they'd "likely drop out anyway". He stated that unless they came to him after class at some point, that he did not think they were serious about learning what he had to teach. Not only an ignorant way to view pupils, but an inappropriate way to approach education.
Agreed - although I don't think it will take nearly that long for wars over food and water. Thanks for your reading reco, I'll trade you 'Full Planet, Empty Plates' - http://www.amazon.com/Full-Planet-Empty-Plates-Geopolitics/d...

I don't have any doubt of humanity's survival as a species - even a total catastrophe, say a 75% reduction in food production, isn't going to wipe us out. The survival of our current civilization, on the other hand...
> it does still say something important: that the patent system isn't totally breaking innovation.

Rarely is it the case that anything is truly "total". And if the patent system is squashing 25% of innovation in the software industry, or even 10%, that is a big problem.

Also, it is possible to squash certain kinds of innovators - like startups without tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on patent litigation. While massive corporations can get nailed for a billion or two and hardly notice.

A patent-litigious environment is deadly for startups. And startups are crucial innovators.
I haven't done a painstaking trawl of the site, but I can't seem to find a corresponding red bike to race you're absurdly wealthy evil mate on...
How Spotify Stays Agile
We have beer in the fridge.
A limited palette is traditional, and pixel art is very traditionalist, as both an art form and a community of artists. That’s not to say there’s no innovation—plenty of—but it’s always with the same body of techniques: palette minimisation, antialiasing, dithering, hardware restrictions, and a large dose of colour theory.
The litigation itself is of course overhead, but the fact that there are many conflicts can be a sign of an industry in which a lot of things are happening.

As I'm sure you are aware, not everyone thrives in conflict. Some would much rather design a system to prevent it. I can't help but feel that this is similar to claiming that there must be a lot of fun happening on the school playground, because a lot of bullies are beating up the kids who just want to get along (and, occasionally, other bullies).
This might be a good time to point out that they could have built the same app for a tiny fraction of the amount spent. If they had done that, they'd still be moving down the road looking for traction.
Yeah, when HP said they were going to buy Autonomy, my first reaction was "Who?" And it's my job to stay up on this stuff...

Frankly, I expect this to cause huge problems for HP, possibly even sound a death knell. HP has been fucked for some time, but the real problem here is that they had no fucking clue what they were buying. I could have told them, if they'd asked, that there's no market for a Baysian search pack. I think anyone here could have said as much to them, but HP wasn't really paying attention to anything except the Autonomy people.

If I was an HP share holder, I would be on the phone to a lawyer right now, creating a class action suit.
Maybe Color is finally sick of playing jokes on the industry.
Initially, Color was for photo sharing around a place and time. For example, if you and I are using the Color app at the same party we would see each others photos even if we aren't "friends". It's a little abstract, but a very interesting take social sharing.
Just as a reference point, this brought to mind an old app (in the desktop sense) from 2001 - http://www.16color.com/

The site is still up, and they claim 40,000 movies were created between 1999 and 2004 (timeline from the DVD : http://www.amazon.com/Best-16-Color-DVD/dp/B000BD98AO/)

I don't think content volume is an issue if the right channel can be found, but you're right that the Instagram comparison is not the correct order of magnitude.

disclaimer: I have no relation to 16color, apart from enjoying it over a decade ago, and just discovered one of my animations was actually on their DVD.
I'm going to audibly (...well, visually...) emit a sigh and patiently explain, for what I'm hoping will be the final time, that the iPhone Configuration Utility cannot change the MMS APN, only the internet access APN.
If you want an honest assessment a company, business, or agency, don't ask the guy who stands to be fired if there's anything wrong.
Sounds awesome. Just yesterday I was trying to hack pipelining support into imaplib, ultimately for use with Tornado. I'd be very interested in your implementation.
Ah, Arthur Andersen. I had to refresh my memory by reading through its Wikipedia page. What a disaster.
I'm a Firefox user, not a Mac user.
random aside, I just discovered (I use firefox nightly now version 20) the about:preferences page.
I heard they use mechanical Turk for that
In my previous employment, alcohol was not allowed at work. In my current job, there is no rule like that but none of them offered beer at work anytime.
Except company B uses a single callback, returning an object that contains an error code when not successful. Company C uses a blocking library, and requires you to pass in your model object as a dictionary. See where I'm going with this?
Introducing Bocoup Screencasts - Bocoup
The about-face Silicon Valley has done on this issue in the last decade or two is pretty amusing. Back when Silicon Valley meant Microsoft making software and Sun making hardware, people ranted and tore their hair out over how lack of IP enforcement in developing countries was destroying innovation...
I would love to see this implemented. I started working on my finding farm project for many of the same reasons (it basically organizes content by topic so people can follow what they're interested in). Example:

http://www.findingfarm.com/?topic=startup-advice

I hate the scan - filter - repeat cycle. Even a good tagging system would make a huge difference. Hope it happens.
Even though the USPTO is responsible for both patents and trademarks, there is a big difference between the two. A food truck protecting its name would be obtaining a trademark, not a patent.
This improved my productivity by at least 2x. Highly recommended.
Didn't it used to listen through your microphone and match signatures of the sounds up with data from other people's phones to figure out if you were in the same room?
That kind of honesty my friend, will gain you enemies.

In other news I think it is missing features to be a commercial product; I don't know too much about iOS but if maybe you can convert it to emoticons that can be used in chat, or being a being able to customize size instead of the forced 16*16 would be nice, or a public gallery and being able to edit other people animations.
Ironically, the existing people/companies that are already there aside, Silicon Valley (and California in general) is a horrible place to found a tech startup. The cost of living is high and the taxes are high, with the former being an obstacle for bootstrapping a startup, and the latter being an obstacle when your company grows in size. The Democrats got a supermajority in the state House and Senate in the recent elections, so now they can unilaterally raise taxes, with the Republicans basically left powerless. No doubt many people will start to feel the squeeze in coming months as tax rates shoot up.

One of the big advantages of California is the year-round nice weather, but when you're sitting inside in front a computer, that doesn't really matter all that much. Moreover, a tech company, more so than many other types of businesses, can effectively work with people in remote locations.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that can't be solved easily over short time scales. The only hope is that people start realizing you can be "ramen profitable" a lot quicker if you choose to base your startup in, say, Kansas City (and there's always the nice added bonus of super-fast Google Fiber).
Awesome! Was afraid something bad happened.
Going through DHH's tweet history a couple of months ago when I was trying to get into a short CRM position, I'm not sure he's losing much on the CRM short. Based on the times that he was tweeting about taking or adding onto positions, my guess is that his cost basis for the short is somewhere in the $140-$155 range. That is assuming that he didn't short more when it dropped to around $100 (which involved a lot of tweets about how overvalued they were, but no indications that he was increasing his short position.) So he may be down 5-10%, but probably not losing his shirt.
Firefox Aurora 18 supports Retina now, and Firefox Beta 18 will support it when it's released later today or tomorrow.
This might also be a good time to reflect on the opportunity costs squandered by Color. Surely other companies did build the same app for a tiny fraction, who are either struggling or dead by now.