skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many NES games have had their password systems cracked:

Mega Man 3: http://www.mmhp.net/Passwords/MM3/

Metroid: http://www.gdward.plus.com/site/flash/metroid/

Kid Icarus: http://www.geocities.ws/passgens/pages/Kid_Icarus.htm

Castlevania III: http://castlevaniadungeon.net/forums/index.php?topic=4659.0

Google for pretty much any popular NES game + "password generator" and you'll find something.
This point isn't moot at all. One of the first things Amazon tells Kindle Fire developers to do when setting up their development environment is download the Android SDK:

https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/fire/setup.html

To me, the real issue I have with the SDK anti-fragmentation clause is that I have no idea what it means.

Does it mean you can't develop for the Kindle Fire, Nook, Nabi et al using it? Or is it OK if your apps still work on Google devices as well? Does that mean Amazon can't use the SDK when working on the Kindle Fire OS? Or is that fine too as long as the OS passes the associated compatibility tests (and, reportedly, Amazon has been very good with compatibility to date)? And so on.

And whatever the bizarre restrictions are how in the world is Google even dreaming of enforcing them? Or are they just planning to complete with Microsoft and Oracle for the "most pirated development tools ever" prize?
By that logic, why bother paying for a shiny domain name? Why not just post the IP address on HackerNews and have people go to it directly?

The value that Diaspora would have is in getting people to use it, not in the actual software; and that includes people who aren't necessarily tech-savvy. If your browser throws out a giant red page talking about an untrusted page, how many of those people do you really think you're going to get?
How an environmental activist came to love GMOs
Innovation is doing fine. All these whiny bloggers and investors simply can't see the forest for the trees. The reason there are so many trivial startups is because the web is now a mature market and the barriers to entry have fallen to the point that anybody can jump in. Time will show that most of these ideas are worthless and not very many people are getting rich off fart apps, but for now it's a gold rush plain and simple.

Fundamental innovation in tech is in hardware and software standards, neither of these things is suffering. The evolution of web standards is moving faster than it ever has. Hardware is making steady progress. Cloud computing is making big strides. Things are moving just as fast as ever, it's just obscured by the mass market noise that is obscuring the big picture.

Now obviously a lot of this stuff is incremental, but guess what: computers and networks aren't new anymore. The level of innovation from 1980-2000 was special because it introduced the power of general computing to the majority of the population. It's not a matter of simply working on harder problems to replicate that. It's one of a few evolutionary sea changes like mass production/automation, railroads, wired communications, or space flight. Nothing short of the singularity is going to appear that amazing, especially with the compounding effect of nostalgia.
I wonder if it'll be an honest account of Jobs' life or just the popular bits. There is a big difference between the man and the legend.
Have to say, the symbol for spinner icon is poor choice. It doesn't look good when animated like that; typically the individual dots grow/shrink sequentially (impossible to implement in CSS as long as the icon is a single element).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway
The Slow Data Movement
The only "bullshit" I can see here is your comment[0].

Of all possible crows I would expect the Hacker News one to be the more rational about this; but no; many here are pretending this is somehow OK; lets be very clear, for many sites this for all practical reasons the same as hiding the pay button in any SaaS or PasS start-up.

The tracking done by many ads could be stopped by deleting cookie-headers and using a proxy to serve the ads to hide the real IP from advertisers; but no; they decided that removing the ads completely was a perfectly good idea.

Google should stop allowing all users from that ISP to use _any_ Google service at all (Including Google search and Gmail) with a little message saying that "Your internet provider is actively hurting our business model by using default ad-blocking in all their routers including yours. If you like to keep enjoying our services please contact them and ask them to stop using such aggressive tactics. Thank you."

The only reason we the people with ad-blockers as browser extensions are not actually harmful is because (believe or not) we are a minority.

[0]Yes, calling "bullshit" the title someone decided was appropriate for this article is just as offensive as calling your comment the same way.
While MM2's password system seems pretty straightforward, I've always been fascinated with how other games managed to track state with a 10-24 letter password. Metroid, for example...IIRC, didn't the game also keep track of your current health, besides the progress you made in the game? I guess that state could be encapsulated in just a few of those letters. And the state of progress would be pretty easy to do (A = Kraid beaten, B = Ridley beaten, and so forth) as each individual "scene" resetted its state as soon as you left it.
Exactly, I think you're 100% right.

The real "war" is a price one. If Intel are willing to cannibalise their own per-CPU margins, they'll sell bucket loads of mobile chips.

If they're not, then they won't - it's not much harder than that to understand. I can see why they wouldn't be willing, once you get a relatively high performance Atom chip then the use case for a highly profitable Xeon chip becomes much narrower.
The innovation in the past 5 years in tech dwarfs the past. Monsterix has a great list of the innovations that have been developed recently and complaining about the lack of innovation is sloth - a lack of willingness to get out and speak with the companies that are building non-linear tech.
As a customer, I don't really care about extraordinary support. I care that when and if I have an issue, you do your best in trying to resolve the issue. What I absolutely hate is being forwarded from one guy/dept to another without a real resolution. Yes some problems are user errors, some could be hard to solve right away but for me, extraordinary support would mean that you took time to understand my specific case and are working diligently towards a resolution. Rest is all fluff.
What if the phone falls on its face instead of its back?

A case that provides enough of a rim so that the impact doesn't hit the glass front directly is useful.
Actually, now that you mention it, I pretty much wear the same-looking clothes all year long. I have one brand and a favorite cut for each of my garments and I stick to it. I even have 20 pairs of identical black socks for easy selection in the morning.

I like how iOS and OS X force us into one particular set of minimalistic UI. I despise skeuomorphism and I'm eager to see it go away on iOS. But I realize others may want to customize their OS, and for that they have to be grateful to have alternatives, namely Windows/Unix and Android/WP.
A Techmeme For Tracking Iconic People In Technology?
Well, it's both.
Lego axle sorter
See previous comment, I was under the impression that the phone turned off when you looked away, rather than stayed on if you were looking at it.

Blame poor marketing.
The Typeface-A-Day Calendar Teaches You 365 New Fonts
Except, the bandwidth has already been paid for, at least twice.

Once by the consumer by way of a monthly internet bill and once by the content provider(website) in the way of their hosting/bandwidth costs.

It is not clear by the ISP's name(Free) whether or how much they are charging for internet access. negrit seems to suggest that this ISP has a fairly aggressive pricing model.

However, if the cost of people actually using their internet access, especially just to browse websites, is too much for Free, they should look to their pricing model or consider upgrading their networks, as opposed to trying to extort(or at least block) advertisers.

As you mention, this ends up being a much bigger issue in regards to net neutrality. For now, it is just youtube that is using 'too much' bandwidth, but blocking that will only mean other sites will take its place as bandwidth hogs.

Hopefully this will result in discussions to finding a fairer solution, but I believe that should involve upgrading infrastructure and providing better service, rather than blocking sites like youtube or netflix.
I'm sure that's a good thing for the Android ecosystem. I'm not against that on priciple (that is to say, I'm not an open-source zealot). I'm just saying that a having single entity with the sole right to change the API is essentially the definition of a closed system.
"where each client expects "

The lone developer should ensure that client expectations are correctly set. Honestly, it is their responsibility and not the customers. Customers always want everything unde the sun. How you handle their expectations is the key.
Fred Wilson on privacy as a feature
Darpa Spectrum Challenge
When I got a Super Famicom from Super Potato in Akihabara, I got a copy of Rockman 7 (known as Mega Man 7 in the English localization) too, and that was my first time playing a game that old. It was so weird seeing the password system, rather than saving in-game. They used a 4x4 (or 5x5?) grid of faces of characters from the game. I wonder why they didn't just use a text password - perhaps because it removed the need for localization.

Another game I got, The Legend of Zelda: The Triforce of the Gods (known as A Link to the Past in the West), had a great in-game save system. It seems like there should have been enough storage for that with Rockman 7 too.

Edit: my bad, 7, not X7.
"There are real skills - mainly people skills,"

This. If only more companies understood that.
Down-vote Pandodaily? That's surprising.
Actually, to my mind there's a good case for sites like Youtube to ask for money from the ISPs.

The ISPs users want connection to the Internet because they want great content (cat videos on youtube and the like). If Google blocked free.fr users from accessing Youtube, it's likely that many free.fr customers would go elsewhere, to another ISP that can provide them with the cat videos they crave. And Google need to pay for all the bandwidth these users eat up repeatedly watching cat videos somehow.
But see, you have analyzed that you desperately needed some kind of birthday widget and that iOS didn't suit your particular needs. You switched over or went directly to Android. That's fine, you have an alternative and you seem happy with it.

However, I despise such things. I've analyzed that I wouldn't stand using Android for those reasons, and that I'm better off with iOS.

I go with Apple's motto: "there's an app for that".
Cloud Costs Cheat Sheet and Comparison
It's mostly Google adsense and Youtube ads. People say it's because of peering issues between Free and Youtube. It's surprising considering that Free is the one french ISP that had always had his shit together, I guess the discussion is becoming heated.
The Note 2 is a tablet that also happens to make calls. Compare it to the iPad Mini. The Nexus 4's battery is not removable.
Archos Turns Any HDTV into Android-Powered Smart TV
>1. People afraid of being tracked down and prosecuted because someone used
their exit node for criminal behavior

Again, Flash Proxy is not an exit node, it's a bridge. It merely helps people
to access the Tor network, and does not relay traffic back out (which, as far
as I know, is not even technically possible). There's zero risks involved.
Also, why are you not running at least a relay, anyways?

>2. People concerned about limiting criminal behavior

Limiting criminal behavior is fine, but never at the cost of essential
liberties and rights. This is inarguable. People rallying against Tor for
"criminal behavior" are the very same people we need Tor to protect ourselves
against.

>3. People who want to stop free speech

I you[1] are such a person, I hate you and you more than deserve to have your
browser turned into a powerful weapon of the very thing you want to stop.

[1] This is the general you, I'm not talking to the parent poster specifically.
Questions you should ask at the interview
I was actually using submissions as a poor man’s substitute for HN search :)

I found the tutorial ( http://felix-lang.org/web/tutorial.fdoc ) to be a bit info sparse when I had no clue what I was looking at. Once I’d poked a round a bit it was much better, and started answering questions I was having - mainly how FFI is handled: http://felix-lang.org/web/nutut/intro/intro_01.fdoc

A very cool project.
Bootstrap should include vector icons by default. In the era of HiDPI displays, bitmap icons look just plain ugly (unless served in double resolution). Nobody should use them. (Not to mention save of bandwith!)
Depends on the lighting; can be anywhere between instant and 2s. Trade-off is the camera's useless in the dark, takes maybe 1s for the phone to realize this (or there's an override button) and falls back to pattern/PIN.
Just for the record , the owner of FreeBOX (ISP)(Xavier Niel) doesn't appear to be blocking ads on websites that he owns.(Monde.fr) Can't wait for that filter list to be public.
The only three true interview questions
Launching other apps can be done by any app right now, but the app package needs some info saying the app is able to handle a certain data type or open a certain URL protocol.

I am an Objective-C developer and I love the SDKs on the iPhone, but I am just so tired of Apple's bullshit regarding using our devices the way we want to. I'm tired of waiting for them to enable basic features like phone number black/whitelists.

My next device will be a Nexus. Then I can run apps in the background other than music, share data between apps, sideload apps from third parties, run a mobile terminal, run mobile scripting languages, and basically be free to use my hardware as I'd like.
Yes, in any normal commercial venture, those are the normal procedures for commercializing something, which are the investment. Re-reading back to the top of this thread, I see this spun out specifically from a one-liner about research by professors at public universities. The funding sources for professors at public universities is varied (depends on what funding they have managed to gather and what strings were attached, and what they were intended for), and the degree that the results of their research is clinically applicable also varies. A researcher may discover that a certain receptor on a cell's surface responds to a specific molecular structure, but this is far from being a treatment. Depending on who funded a particular research study, the results may be pre-assigned to a private entity, or may become public information. It all depends on how the research was commissioned. In any case, university researchers don't usually create new drugs, they discover relationships; they just don't typically have that mandate (as far as I am aware, which admittedly isn't that much).

Incidentally, patents are not to cover "invention" costs, they are so that inventors can get the rewards of invention while at the same time exposing their invention, rewards and costs are not the same thing. For drugs, public exposure is a necessity of the way we require FDA approval; since without such regulation, drug related litigation would ultimately end up in open court anyway to prove liability or negligence, it has been deemed a public good to do this public exposure prior to market introduction, and require a degree of pre-approval (that we assign directly to a government agency).

In the US of A, the FDA grants neither a monopoly, nor a patent. The FDA's purpose in new drug development is the declaratory judgment regarding the safety or applicability of a drug. It is perfectly possible to get a patent, but fail FDA approval. It is also possible that the process to produce a drug at scale is itself a novel application or invention and itself patentable (though that may also need FDA approval separately from the drug treatment).
I don't agree that email is heavy at all. I see nothing here that couldn't be accomplished with email and/or a wiki. Sharing links over irc makes little sense, links belong on a wiki so they can be searched for and edited etc etc.
The fact that we have way more tools is great, but I've found that it can lead to a paradox of choice for those that are just getting started.

Do I start with vanilla JS? jQuery? Backbone? Spine? Angular? Knockout? Ember? I need to make my site responsive - how do I write that from scratch? How can I test in all browsers? Should I use Bootstrap? Foundation? Skeleton? What's a CSS compiler and which should I use? LESS? Sass? Scss? Stylus? Plain CSS? Should I still use PHP? Or is Node the new thing? My friend said something about Ruby on Rails. What the hell is a grunt? What's an asset pipeline? How do I gzip/minify/concatenate/compress/compile files? On and on...

When I got into web development ~12 years ago, I don't remember having to make many choices besides HTML and CSS. After that, it was a gradual learning process as web technologies developed. It seems that beginners today have a lot more tools at their disposal, but they also have a much broader set of technologies and practices to navigate.
Off top of head, hope it helps.

Accounts - https://www.dailycred.com/
Docs - http://saaspose.com/
Billing - http://www.stripe.com/
I'm sure there are justifications for this clause, but that doesn't change the fact that you can no longer fork the code, and that API changes are under the control of a single entity.

This is almost the textbook definition of closed software.
I think it would be better if people stopped perpetuating the likely myth that emotions are similar to a hot gas that can be reduced in pressure by venting.

- http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-...

- [PDF] http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf

*I'm not arguing against the video game link, just the suggested mechanism
One of the problematic sections others in this thread have mentioned dates back to at least April 2009:

"3.3 Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not load any part of the SDK onto a mobile handset or any other hardware device except a personal computer, combine any part of the SDK with other software, or distribute any software or device incorporating a part of the SDK."

Here are some more rights you were giving up back then:

"4.3 You agree that if you use the SDK to develop applications for general public users, you will protect the privacy and legal rights of those users. If the users provide you with user names, passwords, or other login information or personal information, your must make the users aware that the information will be available to your application, and you must provide legally adequate privacy notice and protection for those users. If your application stores personal or sensitive information provided by users, it must do so securely. If the user provides your application with Google Account information, your application may only use that information to access the user's Google Account when, and for the limited purposes for which, the user has given you permission to do so.

4.4 You agree that you will not engage in any activity with the SDK, including the development or distribution of an application, that interferes with, disrupts, damages, or accesses in an unauthorized manner the servers, networks, or other properties or services of any third party including, but not limited to, Google or any mobile communications carrier."

At first glance, I don't think 4.3 or 4.4 is unreasonable (3.3 is more complicated), but those terms are clearly non-free. Free means free to use for any purpose (including trying to invade people's privacy or taking down cell networks) because different people will reasonably disagree about what purposes are and aren't legitimate.
Fast Fingers; The Top 5 Alternative Keyboards for Android Smartphones
I'm of the opinion that the behavior of code shouldn't be changing depending on what tool you pass it through. If down the road your homebrew concatenation script gets replaced by, say, a minification tool that does concats, but no ASI defensive code, then your code might break.

Besides, you don't necessarily want all files to be automatedly wrapped in a function. jQuery for example would break.
On the scale of innovation, it's important to note that a computer program will never be a flying car, or antigravity, or a cure for cancer. It won't be anything physical, by definition. For the most part the total output of any application can be specified as a sequence of pixel bitmaps, and the utility of that sequence is subjectively measured by the person interacting with it. Applications can't do any more than acquire data and generate bitmaps. I only say this to emphasize that it's important to set your expectations before getting "disappointed" in the state of software innovation.

The other thing about innovation in software is the need to distinguish between application development as distinct from computer science. Writing an application is very different from writing an algorithm! Much of the "boring innovation" happening right now is about application development, not computer science. Once we accept this we can start making clearer calls about what kind of innovation we think is stagnating.
It's a bit of a stretch to call Kottke.org "blogspam". Jason has been a consistent source of interesting content for years. He deserves credit for the service he provides: finding and sharing interesting content.
How to Securely Share Files Between Linux Systems
You can also just save and then send the link.
What do you think "known, unresolved issue for almost two years now" means?
Sure, there are definitely benefits to tracking, and if TV advertisers could do it I'm sure they would. I just wanted to address the contention that DNT implied that ads would be blocked. And I wonder how much benefit tracking cookies really have - even without them you can target based on a site's rough demographics, just not on a particular user's. Personally I find it creepy when ads follow me around after searching for a product, for instance.
Having written an IRC client and several bots, I actually like the simplicity of the protocol.
Sounds like Galt's speech in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
Dublin, Ireland: Temple Bar TradFest 2013
Catch a re-run of Y2K in 2038
It seems a fair argument until you notice that oil is subsidized too though the relationship of these subsidies and how they compete with eachother is complicated and not worth debating.
It's also a logical fallacy to argue against "people" instead of bryanfryer, who said nothing of the sort.
This comment would have a lot more force with specifics that show how Anand/Intel's numbers are wrong or misleading.
I have been using Free for years, and now that I moved across the pond, I can safely say that Free is at least on par with Verizon for Youtube, probably better. And if we simply ignore the Youtube issue, Verizon is years behind Free, there is simply no comparison between the two. I get ~6/7Mbps here with Verizon, and I simply cannot watch a 720p video on Youtube. No problem with Vimeo, Twitch, Netflix etc.
I agree, flat design is in vogue (and is done badly most of the time). Where were all these designers with their beloved flat designs before Windows Phone came out? Rhetorical question, I know exactly where they were: designing and blogging about faux 3D iPhone-inspired UIs.
My LG Optimus V running Android 2.1 has bouncy scrolling in the browser but not in most standard apps.