skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would I commit a felony if I'd enter the mall the next day anyway? Would wearing a fake mustache to avoid security change anything?

How many years in prison would I get for it?
Tupsu: The Furry Little Monster Just Wants to Play
State of online music (nice report, like Mailchimp's)
The safe bet would be some atmospheric event that concentrated existing pollution. Any new pollution generation event would be expected to have more impact on the baseline, right?
This would work well with the images from that bad movie 13 Ghosts (2001 version). The movie wasn't that good, but the depictions of the ghosts which were only viewable with special glasses, was very well done.
Not only that, but I'm not feeling the long scrolling thing. It was relatively unique and cute the first few times I've seen it, but I really would like to see the conversion data for sites that choose to place the sign-up and information 3 virtual miles below the fold.
Just as a heads up, I cannot scroll to the bottom of your page.
I keep bouncing as I hit the bottom and end up with 'Start using Squash' being cut in half. Screen res: 2560x1440
As others have mentioned, Sudoku is a rather crowded market.

Still, your take on it looked interesting so I clicked over to the Play store intending to install it. I then saw that your app wants the "phone status and identity" privilege, which is an automatic no-go for me. Perhaps your potential customers do not want you to know what their phone number is, or the phone numbers of the people they're calling?
I'm very curious to know if they'll open up the API to third parties. Might be some interesting applications of this technology for virtual assistants a la Siri.
No, I'm saying that the whole premise of this being somehow a unique Apple phenomenon is clearly wrong. I've seen tons of negative press for at least Google, Microsoft, Nokia and RIM.

Further, I'm speculating that the reason the author thinks this is an Apple phenomenon is because his put his head inside the Apple echo chamber. Which is fine, people can get their news from any source they want. It's just that complaining about it makes little sense.
The point of the prosecutor's fallacy isn't that you should ignore evidence, it's that you must include all the evidence in calculations of probability. Swartz' suicide is inductive evidence for the hypothesis "Steve Heymann caused Jonathan James' suicide", you can't just ignore it.
Launch: dropify – Make Files Social on Facebook
WordPress Source Control: Commit Messages - Tom McFarlin
Does this mean it's a direct partnership with Gmail? If so that's pretty awesome. Or is it a plugin?
Very true. While you may know about strings, integers, floats, and arrays, it's always good to read about them in the context of a new language you're learning. The Well Grounded Rubyist is riddled with useful tidbits. The predecessor to that book was Ruby for Rails (also by David Black). Each time I read the book, I picked up new information, even the third time around.

When we learn, we learn by applying new material to what we already know. Hence foundations and context. When you read, especially something like a book on programming, you're not going to absorb it all. Also, programming books shouldn't be treated as one and done reading. Each time you read, I guarantee something will pop out based on previously acquired knowledge.
> It's not illegal to change your mac address or wear a ski mask. It can be illegal to do both of these things while committing other crimes.

Honest question: why is that? Why is it not enough to charge someone for the actual crime they committed? Why does someone need to be charged for committing it a specific way?
> The law of property isn't directly applicable to computer networks, but is a source of guiding principles and analogy. If you're on an open network and the administrator bans your MAC address, I think a normal person would conclude that the message that you are no longer welcome has been reasonably conveyed.

Let's say Aaron's laptop gets its MAC address banned for doing whatever it is he did initially. Aaron then walks over to one of the available library computers and looks up directions to the train station. In your opinion, has he just committed a federal crime?
Ask HN: New start-up domain names for sale
Hey HN community,

I have a couple of domains that I'm planning to dispose off soon, because I don't intend to use them any more. Originally I bought them because I was going to work on those ideas, but now since I am already working on an idea (which I've decided to work on full-time forever) I feel these domains are just going to become a burden on my already bootstrapping startup.

This is not a typical domain sale listing, because I will not just sell you the domain, but also personally even advise you about -

1) The idea and the revenue model

2) The marketing plan

3) The technology stack

4) Some free UX/UI design consultation

5) The Feature list you should eventually add in the next one year

Here are the domain listings:

1) slickpanel.com (.com, .net available)

Could use for a dashboard for something (be creative!)

2) dealsbuff.com (.com, .net available)

Idea - dailydeals, but done right

3) gesturemode (.com, .net available)

Idea - Gesture controlled media (like https://leapmotion.com/)

4) platformetrics.com (.com, .net available)

Idea: An analytics service (not a Google analytics competitor) (will tell you in depth if you are interested) for premium publishers (like Mashable, Techcrunch, etc.)

5) Offersworth.com (.com, .net available)

Again, could use it for a top-notch deals (or coupons) done-right start-up

6) lifespac.es

An extremely attractive name. Could use for a real-estate related industry - like finding houses or office spaces or something like even airbnb

If you are interested, please feel free to shoot out an email, along with your offer to westwind.innovations@gmail.com

Thanks!
Clearly I'm not the target market because I moved off the site so fast that I didn't even see what it was. My attention was on my computer's volume button and the back arrow on my browser.
Cool project management and comprehension tool for the web
They should promote this guy and have him replicate the process across the entire organization.

Cutting up your job into tasks and instructing others to do it is actually quite difficult. If this guy got away with it for so long, it probably means he is an excellent manager.
Folding@Home seems to do alright. As does Bitcoin.
I don't like the bouncer analogy. The network people surely know that the MAC filter is ineffective and no bouncer would be fooled by a fake mustache.

I agree that it is clear enough that Aaron Swartz was intentionally circumventing their attempts to keep him off the network. Where I have trouble is that any notional security mechanism is apparently enough to make the circumvention a serious crime.

I suppose where I am going is that severe penalties should be for circumventing security features, and easily altered implementation details of network hardware should not qualify as security features.
Really cool. But why do I get an email to "verify my email address" when you use Gmail's authentication APIs to link to my Gmail account in the first place?
"Petitions do work. What a lobbyist does is petition the government. They're just professional at it, and why we presume that a developer or a plumber or a chicken farmer should be as good of a lobbyist as a professional lobbyist is, is beyond me."

As much as I think lobbying is a great harm to the system, I can't help but wonder. Would it be effective if there were some sort of "Kickstarter" for lobbying that would allow the mass public participate in a particular lobbying effort with their own $.

Think "We the people" but backed by people who wish to affect change in a particular way with a small "donation". The difference would be that each project would need to be curated by a professional lobbyist to ensure that the details are correct. There could be a threshold set and a particular lobbying effort would only move forward if the threshold is met... Etc, etc, just like Kickstarter. I can't help but think that I'm being too simplistic and overly optimistic. Is there any particular reason this wouldn't work?
Couldn't agree more with the sentiment here. It always blows my mind when I come across what appears to be a terribly designed (and outdated) squeeze page that still goes gangbusters on conversions and avg rev per sale
I always wonder at these sort of tinfoil hat articles. It seems to me that someone who has the skills and access to the internet but does not leave much of a trace is a huge red flag for what ever the tinfoil hatter fears. A better strategy would be to boot in to your original MAC address then have a covert switch that randomizes it for doing things out of the ordinary, then returns it to normal once they are done. If you fear you are being tracked, it would be better to leave a completely normal, boring footprint that is easy to find. Normal boring Facebook page, tweets, etc. All the way down to a cache of vanilla porn on your hard drive with just a hint of kink for that ah ha moment. Then anything that goes beyond what you want that footprint to look like then moves to randomized MAC addresses, TOR networks and all the other tricks…
Lynda.com Raises $103M in First Ever Financing
Yes. Numbered approach, which I like because I can pack data in. So for instance: dbserver_01_n01. Which is the first node of the first db server. I have servers that are mostly used in read only and others which are write only. But their roles switch. We do all of the writing (not users), so it makes sense to split the namespacing this way.
How California’s Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It
> So you really think that Comcast doesn't want you on their network with a router spoofing a laptop MAC today?

Their captive portal demands that I install client side software. If they didn't want me to do this, there are definitely better ways of letting me know about this than a captive portal. Why would they captive portal someone they intend to let use their service?

What concerns me here is the degree to which I seemingly have to guess at Comcast's motives.

> It's not just "I did $5,000 worth of business."

So on one hand we are violating the terms of service for a connection we paid for... and on the other hand we are violating a terms of service for a connection we paid for.

How is a layman, who is apparently responsible for evaluating the legality of his own actions, supposed to make a distinction?
That's something that would need to be decided in court. You don't get to declare someone else's property to be worthless when you are taking it.
> Not everyone is from the US, y'know.

Incredibly valid point. The angry rant above was hastily written (typos and all) in response to a thread about a change to US public policy. That's my excuse as to why I got it wrong, not an attempt to say that I actually got it right.

> The abolition of slavery took a civil war

The actual passage of the amendment took an act of democracy, however, that still had to overcome mountains of entrenched interests even with the South temporarily out of the picture.

> and the vote for women and civil rights took massive public protests, illegal acts and (in the case of the suffragettes in the UK) hunger strikes.

All of which worked to change public opinion, and pass those bills through the democratic process.

My angry rant was probably less towards your statement than similar ones that I've heard too many times. So I apologize for directing it all at you.

I do strictly disagree that if petitions worked, they'd be banned, however. Petitions are nothing new; the only thing about Obama's site is the ease with which they can be made and the promise of a response. And petitions have worked in the past to effect change either directly, by making those in power aware of people's strongly held petitions, or indirectly, by helping to raise awareness and eventually changing policy by swaying opinion. They do work, if they have enough support.

I know you weren't explicitly making this argument, but many were complaining about how terrible it was that 25,000 signature petitions weren't effecting real change. The US is a nation of over 314,000,000 people. It would be madness if any 25,000 member subset of them could meaningfully coerce the government to action. I'm happy that the bar is being raised to 100,000. I kind of hope it gets raised to something higher. Once you start being able to describe the number in terms of millions it starts carrying real weight. And if people know that that's what they have to shoot for, they'll be more likely to achieve to it.
Cool, so what do you have by now? You're a marketer and you co-founder a developer?!
Are you venturing outside of the realm of C/Java descendants?

The nature of how those languages model execution, their basic paradigms, data structures and design patterns all fall within a fairly narrow scope. Stepping outside those trappings lets you see them with a bit more clarity because you're forced to stretch your brain to accommodate something altogether new and get fresh perspective on the problems the languages are solving and how they solve them.

You won't necessarily gain any perspective if you're writing the same exact kind of code in languages X and Y, and you can gain perspective by writing an entirely different kind of code in a language you're used to. It just tends to follow that when you learn a new language, you'll learn to do things in the style of that language.
A Multi-Tool Mashup for Accelerating HTML5 Development
> And if you were a thief, you would have much more use out of them as a straight excel spreadsheet which you could cross-reference with other property records...or at least just do quick name searches across a large Excel file.

Are they using this to steal the guns or avoid the houses with guns? Owning a dog is probably the single best way to dissuade break-ins if you are that concerned.
I have 3 sudoku apps on my phone; I can tell you what you are missing: scratch marks. At higher difficulties, it is absolutely necessary to be able to note eliminations or possibilities within a square. Without that, the best you can hope for is casual sudoku player, but soduku is by nature not a game for casual players.
The "witch" comment reminded me of the shift in the term "hacker" to refer to criminal behavior. A lot of people distrust cleverness. I've always suspected that if another term was adopted for positive hacking, such as "tinkerer", it too would be shifted to have a negative or criminal connotation.

It was frustrating that in high school, whenever any computer shenanigans went down, I would always be the one who was automatically called to the principal's office. And some of those times, I wasn't even the one responsible. ;)
This looks really cool.

A small respectful note: As a consumer, if I didn't know about Paul's financial connection to HelloSign, I'd have liked to seen it disclosed in connection with his prominent endorsement.

I hope this comment isn't taken as an attack on HelloSign or Paul; Paul is known as particularly ethical (thanks in part to his suggesting Google's motto), and I'm sure he really believes what he says in the quote, and this does indeed look nifty. All the more reason to have a little footnote somewhere: So no one can blow this up by claiming anything is being hidden.
Go buy an ad in the Newspaper right under the Sudoku puzzle.

So many freemium models invest hundreds of man hours into development then expect to pay $0 for advertising. It doesn't work like that. If you invested 100's of hours into dev, then get ready to spend 1000's of hours marketing, or alternatively buy your way into the market which is expensive.

Good luck!
Just want to point out that the back button doesn't work on your site. This is intensely annoying :).

Edit: By which I mean: clicking your link, then clicking the back button just takes me back to your page again.
Transition in our industry...and for me
I remembered I read somewhere in a blog post in HN, that one of the most important things is have friends, and friends that can lift you instead of bring you down.

I have some friends, but usually I am the leading one in everything, it is a lonely and tiring position, where I don't have people to aspire to be like them, or to admire, or to ask advice, people come to me to ask advice and learn, but I have noone to do that, people come to me wanting to do what I do, but I have noone to do what they do... It is kinda bad.

For a long time I ignored this, until I had for some short time a girlfriend that was way above me in social class, it was a totally different world, and it was the time that I mostly advanced in several areas, even talking with only her (I never met anyone she knew), I had to raise the bar in many areas, learn a lot, behave better, learn better, and so on, it is when I noticed that I had a loooong way to go, and when I am at the top, there are no perspective to know what way I should go, thus I need to be friends with other people, people that make me be on the bottom again, so I can follow them until I am equal to them.

I think this much explains my motivations right now...
Let's say I normally let people cut through my lawn to get to the road behind it. But you come on my lawn and start yelling at my house. So I tell you to leave. Are you still welcome to cut through my lawn to get to the road?
How Pandora Could Become Profitable
As an answer to the actual title of the article, yes, it is hard. It can't be any other way.

The answer to the question here: there could be many reasons for this. The one that stands out is the fact that the market is very crowded and thus, to get traction in the early days, you need a lot of marketing. The method you have adopted (blogs, forums, videos, etc.) sound like a good start.

To make money — and since the app is free, I presume you are looking at ads — you will need traffic. That traffic isn't going to come in a month; it may not come at all. It seems you've had high expectations and are disappointed at not meeting them. So, yes, here are some of the things you did or are doing wrong:

* the market and the offer (as a combination, not separate) — A crowded market and a me-too offering. There has to be something distinct, something that makes you stand out in a market as crowded as this.

* the marketing itself — You need to be a lot more aggressive in marketing, get your app out on a lot more places. Even if a few blogs aren't publishing as quick as you'd like — and there's a reason for that — be persistent. With this kind of an app, it will be difficult. But not impossible. Get traffic in as many ways as you can.

In some ways, as far as the traffic is concerned, you are also limiting yourself. Why advertise on just game related forums? You can go anywhere you think there is a good percentage of Android users and post. Build some reputation and you will drive some traffic. Again, the key is to be persistent. You may not meet your expectations but the traffic will go up.

Great job on getting something out there! You have made some mistakes, and set some really high expectations, but you have something that you can learn from, if nothing else.
We needed something like this years ago when I was at Charles Schwab, we had like 3 different engineering groups that all wanted to use their own stack. At the time we were stuck having to all integrate with ONE of the groups SOAP API's, a message queue like this could have helped by providing a common protocol for all of us to pass our messages around.
Nice catch. That's a bit of overkill. We'll remove that.
Price: Free

Platform: Android
You're going after the wrong target market. Sudoku apps are for middle aged women (Yes, I generalize, but it's pretty much the only game my mother plays on her Android phone).

Stop targeting your ads at Android related users (Android forums, games review sites). Go find a place where the people who will actually play your game hang out and then advertise there. Mothers group forums, parenting forums, business traveler hangouts, school teachers - whatever.
The converse fallacy would be that "anything X that is easy for me to do is therefore an effective form of activism."
Note, that doesn't mean I think you should get 30 years in prison for simply walking across my lawn.

Agreed, which is one reason it is important in this conversation to separate false identity from trespassing.

The relevance of the security measure is that it serves to prove that the trespasser knew he wasn't allowed on the property.

Ah! Exactly! Which is why this conversation is important. The OP has said that he effectively always says no when asked if he is "Insert Name". My example is also poor, because asking someone if they are Bob Dylan also informs them that Bob Dylan is restricted from entry, which means something to the law.

A better example would be a security system based on something fleeting and baseless, like your favorite color. You might have always liked the same color, or you might change favorite colors every year, or you might just tell people a different color because no one really knows what your favorite color is but you anyway. If the security call box asked you what your favorite color was, you told them something random, and they let you in, is that illegal? The security guard never said that people whose favorite color is X are not allowed, he just asked what your favorite color was, and then he let you in.
http://dropify.com
Coincidentally, if you're considering trying something new, I really recommend KDE. I've found it to be a very well-thought-out system that's both easy to use and easy to customize. The defaults are good, so there is no real need to customize, but if there's something you don't like chances are you can change it fairly easily.

I also really like certain KDE applications, especially Amarok (the music player). Okular is also pretty good--at the very least, I like it more than Evince.

I've been using KDE on Fedora for a while now, and I've been entirely happy with it. I'm switching over to a much more minimal XMonad setup now, but that's a different story and a much larger shift.
Seriously, you are equating job loss as a harsh consequence when she threatens 35 years of jail time to people?
Two is not a sample size. The sample size here is the number of defendants prosecuted.

Two events can be very significant if the prior probability of the event is very low.
I hate websites that play sound without my permission.

That site look exactly like those paper flyers you get in your home mailbox. Maybe their target market is stay at home moms. Thus the look and feel, and the auto play sound.
Hackerdojo is a great place to hang out and work which is relatively close.
Not by design, what browser are you in? thx for checking it out.
The only option that the author doesn't explore, is the possibility that the WSJ author may be correct in saying that the more robust Android ecosystem is gobbling up market share.
1.

I don't understand about the captive portal. Do you really think they don't want you on their network with a router?

The fact that their motives are unclear would be a good argument in your favor in case you were in court. Note that there wasn't any doubts about MIT's motives. Aaron isn't an idiot and he knew they were trying to keep him off the network.

2.

So on one hand we are violating the terms of service for a connection we paid for... and on the other hand we are violating a terms of service for a connection we paid for.

I don't understand how this is a reply.

If I use fraud to buy something you would sell for $8000 for $6000 instead, that's only $2000 worth of damages.
They don't have to be unique. MIT/JSTOR wouldn't have really cared about accidentally blocking people unfortunate enough to share Aaron's MAC address. And, the MAC address would have been perfectly reliable had Aaron not spoofed it.

With enough resources it's practically impossible to provide reliably unforgeable credentials without strong crypto, and strong crypto goes against the whole point of MIT's open network.