skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is that supposed to make it OK?

If the man is actually guilty of a crime, convict him of that crime. If not, don't.

What you're saying is that we should convict innocent people of crimes they haven't committed because we don't like them. Do you not see the problem with that?
Reminds me Zelda and the puzzle blocks you need to move on the ice : )
This doesn't seem so much about profitability as cashflow.

Cash is, as they say, king.

You can be unprofitable for a long time if your cash position can bear it.

If your cash position is bad, then no amount of projected profits will save you.
I have to ask: what did they spend millions of dollar on in terms of Salesforce integration? The software is integrated with SFDC right out of the box (it is, as they say, a native SFDC app - whatever that means). It took us a total of 6 weeks to launch and about 1-2 weeks of work on the SFDC side.

Are you counting just their services, or other things?

Just my opinion, but if your company spent that much money on integrating Marketo with Salesforce, something is deeply, deeply wrong.
Samsung proprietary code violation
I'm not really sure what you could possibly expect after MS spent most of the natural lifetime of this industries senior developers' behaving badly.
Win8 still have it.
Many reasons, but one that I haven't seen mentioned is that it's a slippery slope.

Whatever we allow them to do to non-U.S. citizens can and will likely be turned against U.S. citizens. Their simple argument is that the terrorists walk among us, and are thus indistinguishable from American citizens. So, they must now cast a wider net that includes Americans.

We have already seen them use this rationale and, in fact, it is part of what got us here today.
I read this and I think - what would the creator of MS Paint think if he read this story. As a developer and a creator, if I would ever read a story like this, about a product that I had created, I would think my life to be complete. Stories like this inspire me to keep stretching the boundary of what is possible and to keep creating...
Speaking of cheap 2m/70cm HTs, I got into ham radio recently due to the Baofeng UV-5r being $32 on Amazon; got tech/general last week (KG7EPM). http://www.amazon.com/BaoFeng-UV-5R-136-174-400-480-Dual-Ban...
Yes, that is a gem. With liberty, I've submitted it hoping it will also be a conversation starter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094223

Reading one of the linked comments, it's even more interesting because the "Samsung proprietary code" looks clearly copied from the Linux kernel: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?82576-Samsung-Acci...

Sometimes I wonder if much of the corporate fear of open source is that it would slow development and restrict code reuse, since rather than just swiping the code and releasing the driver, once it's out in the open they'd also have to have endless discussion of what is and is not a derived work.
MetaFilter
So prosecute him for the shit that deserved prosecution and leave the CFAA out of it.
Interesting, I never knew this. I guess I just assumed that all the famous lisp hackers automatically were emacs users.
I'm not here to argue, other than intellectual arguments... You call my definition narrow. Not sure why. Can you describe what a GC does in a single sentence? I'm just going for a simple description. It also doesn't matter if you haven't seen this outside of Obj-C. I am almost lost at the point that is being made. ARC is in no way, at all, a garbage collection technology. @autoreleasepool is in no way a garbage collection concept. All it does is provide a scope for the compiler to inject a 'release' call on all the instances in the block that were sent the autorelease message in said block.

ARC is purely a compile time feature. And an awesome one at that. There is no ARC runtime process/thread. There is no ARC memory manager.

Anyway. Feel free to respond. I have said all I am going to.

On another note, is there any way to be informed/notified that someone responded to a post? Or do you have to keep coming back and checking? I feel that I drop out of conversations because I lose track.
Where in the Android world is the company that has been fun to watch, replete with a long underdog comeback from the brink of bankruptcy? You can't have engaged spectators without someone worth rooting for.
There's an app called Now that fits that kind of description. http://www.getnowapp.com/
The GPL 'freedom' is not that of freedom from licence conditions, it's about the freedom(s) given to the end user(s) through to these licence conditions.

Personally I've always thought that it would be better if they just used the term 'rights' which is what the GPL conditions actually grant the end user, I can't say I find the wording 'dishonest' though, just a poor choice.
Samsung passes Apple as most-profitable smartphone maker
I think there's a lack of a Gruber-esque figurehead in the Android community due to mainly to the general fragmentation of the Android system. When each carrier has their own flavor of Android and their own device lines, it's hard to get a single bearing on a sole "Android" device. With Apple, you have the iPhone and that's it. Android, you have hundreds and hundreds of varying devices.
For one, if you live with others, make sure they know that during the hours of 9-5 (or whatever your hours may be), you are actually working and cannot be disturbed.

My major struggle during my first full time work from home job was family would see I'd be home during the day, and ask me to run errands or do other personal matters during working hours. It was an uphill battle trying to explain to them that I, too, worked during the day - just not in a traditional office building.

Also, if you have the space, try to set up a dedicated "work" office, and them a "home" office in a separate room. Once your work day ends, you can leave your "work" office just as you would a traditional office. I've found this helps with keeping a regular schedule and not working 10+ hours a day. An alternative to having a separate office is utilizing a local coworking space.
Windows "Paintbrush" was the application that piqued my interest in computers back in 1991.
My artistic skills are definitely less than acceptable, and my inability to color within the lines in my grand-children's coloring books is proof.
But with "pbrush.exe" I was ushered into an entirely new realm where even I could draw a straight line, or perfect spheres and polygons.

However, none of my art work ever looked as awesome as that produced by Mr Lasko.
> We do what Andrew Auernheimer did.

You mean, exploit a weak access control scheme, fail to disclose the exploit properly, instead use it to download private data in bulk, make unwise brags to reporters about potentially misusing that data, and then be dicks to the judge?
Apple, aspiring to be exceptional, inspires exceptional zealotry. There is much to chew on for supporters of their products and platforms.

Android aspires to ubiquity – and achieves it. And so it is polluted by handset manufacturers with inept designers and short-sighted leadership. It is beautiful – sometimes. It is mediocre – most of the time. For everything one can celebrate in Android land, there is plenty more to lament.

Because of this, Android doesn't need a Gruber – it needs an anti-Gruber.

A churlish character who, rather than celebrating the excellent, laments the shabby. An irascible voice to scold the masses who value the wrong things. While Gruber is enamored of one party and frustrated by the rest, our Anti-Gruber must be frustrated by all. Annoyed by Apple's approach. Annoyed by the squandered opportunities of his own camp.

If you ever read the work of Ted Dziuba, that'll help you capture the sort of voice I'm imagining. "Jesus Christ Silicon Valley" is a bit over the top, but probably lives in a similar neighborhood:

http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com

This character must be pissed off for reasons, he must elucidate them consistently, and must be relentless in the coverage of his ire. Curmudgeonry is entertaining when it's purposeful – especially when it also serves to educate. Android enthusiasts would link to such blog – some because of its skewering of their preferred platform, others because of their agreement with the presented frustrations. Apple enthusiasts would link because sometimes it agreed with their worldview.

There's room for this character.
Oldest person in Britain dies at 115 years and 199 days
Mobile App Hackers Wanted
You like it or not, but the famous "Broken Windows" and bandwagon effects are in play.

Crime falling in some places just because being dumb looter or thief is less respectable than being "easy" credit consumption bunny. Why should you try to knock down a drunk for a smartphone, or press some fast-food stall for money while you can drive a cheap new Korean car "brought" without even first payment.

But in places like Russia even this doesn't work. These miserable rednecks will never learn (being uneducated and unemployed have no access to A-class credit) and because they are the wast majority, anyone who is trying to lead modern consumption lifestyle are regarded as a peacock or even gay.

And, of course, being a low-level criminal is inferior comparing to a "successful" corrupted official of any kind, driving $100k cars on the very same streets. It is very common in Russia to see people who live in a miserable soviet time panel housing blocks, but having a luxury car in a parking lot.

So, street crime falls with easy credit, but this is only temporarily. Any severe economic disturbance and you will have it all back on the streets.
If you think that's cool, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Check out Andrew Miller's PhD thesis: a compiler that can take the Agda description of any data structure and produce a cryptographically authenticated "Merkelized" version of it:

https://github.com/amiller/generic-ads

Here's an implementation of a red-black tree:

https://github.com/amiller/generic-ads/blob/master/RedBlack....
Having worked on a local events app in the past (which I ended up abandoning), I have a few thoughts. These aren't necessarily unsurmountable, but they were sticky points:

- Event database curation doesn't scale very well. If you want high quality and accurate content, you're either going to need to have people double-checking stuff or come up with some nice algorithms to pre-filter it.

- Event entry is a hassle. At the start, you're going to be entering a LOT of the content by hand. This is pretty normal across a lot of different types of product, but with event data, the data has a very definite shelf-life. As soon as the event is over, you've lost a piece of data and you're going to need to replace it with something else.

- Chicken & egg: when you haven't grown to be the place to search for events in a city, you're not going to have people entering events for the city (e.g. people who work at venues who want to advertise their events). There are so many different apps that advertise events for you, and putting events into all of them is going to pretty onerous.

- Facebook: for a venue, or a band, Facebook is a super easy captive audience. I follow venues I like on FB, and they advertise all of their coming events right there. That's your competition.

- Reasonably high cost to drive traffic. If I recall, we were paying somewhere around $0.25/user that came to our site. We got decent inbound traffic, but almost no sign-ups, and even fewer self-posted events.

- How do you monetize it? Your two big competitors are Facebook (free for posting events) and posters stapled to telephone poles (25¢/poster to print it).
It's there on Windows 7. Just select the Windows Start button, type in paint and hit return.
Josh Nimoy, because he uses emacs and got it into Tron http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178
I think that people who employ your kind of cowboy-film morality on suspension of rights for those they dislike to be complete scumbags.

I'd still want you to have a fair hearing if you ended up in the shit however, as I hold the quaint notion that the criminal justice system should at least attempt to be more than a popularity contest if it wants to retain any kind of legitimacy.
Mixamo Is Building A Platform For The Game Developers
Old fucking news.
There's a neat gif on the About page: http://halftone.co/projects/temperatures/about/
Actually if you push the reasoning in the article a bit it can make sense.

When they buy the company, they buy:

- the users and the revenue (which may be losing money for growth as explained)

- and also a product that should be easier/cheaper for them to sell to their existing customers. So they can have a very cheap batch of customers that grows their revenue a lot without increasing their upfront cost too much

-> it's like the up-sells/upgrade in the article: it's much cheaper to acquire but makes the same money

(
eg:

- you have 1M clients

- you lose money because it costs you 1.5R to acquire a customer and you're growing

- the company buys you with 10M clients, and it's only 0.1R for them to sell it to these clients because it's an up-sells/upgrade

-> they'll make money with your product even if you can't!
)
Here's a similar story, except this guy did it for 11 years.

http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1agon8...
The Harsh Reality of Indie Game Success
Forbidden Spheres at Los Alamos
Study: Cyberattacks Pile Up $300 Billion in Losses Each Year
Handling Rejection
Have a designated office space.

Ideally, you want to have a completely separate room for working in. I find that light and energetic colors inspire hard work and creativity. Put some art up on the walls, throw in a few complementary plants along the sides, and have great lighting.

If you do not have a separate room available, find a few coffee shops (or similar) that you can frequently rotate between. Also, open yourself up to people. They will come talk to you, and you should talk to them. You will make friends (and/or potential business partners/deals) that way. As a freelancer, this has been my best form of client searching.

Overall, try the different methods out and find what works for you. Remember to take breaks to go on short walks (or similar activities).
"so if I described it as a dashboard-of-patio11's-brain would it be so wrong?"

Frankly - yes, you would be wrong. Not that these companies won't face commoditization like the rest of software, but they aren't simply dashboards - they're tools for managing all aspects of online and offline marketing. That includes email, landing pages, on-site forms, reporting, Salesforce integration, notifications/alerts, lead scoring, et al. There is a lot going on.
Hunt for alien spacecraft begins, as scientist Geoff Marcy gets funding
There is no right or wrong, GPLv2 and GPLv3 are different licences.

In order to make it possible to use GPLv(n) code together with GPLv(x) code, developers often use the 'or later' clause when they licence under GPL.

However if they only want the code to be used under the conditions of GPLv(n) then they will omit that clause, as Linus Torvalds did with Linux for instance.

The example you portray has nothing to do specifically with GPL, it would be just as true in any other licence incompability scenario. And if the original authors don't want to change the licencing then that's their right, end of story really.

Again GPLv2 and GPLv3 are _separate_ licences, and incompatible with eachother _unless_ there is a clause which allows the code to be released under a later GPL version.
Squashing Software Patents
Echo JS, Ars Technica, .Net Magazine, and a slew of blogs.

And oh yeah, Twitter.
Having trouble getting past this part of her bio: "and counsel to anyone who employs Millennials." Really? Are they that bad? I've had nothing but good experiences and nothing, I repeast, nothing like any of the other supposed experiences the media seems to go on about. Seriously, they don't run up credit card debt like my parents or my friends do.
I think a better word would be "refuse", as it more accurately portrays the situation. It too is not perfect though, as your "refusal" can still be ignored.
This is a remarkably charitable take on the values that John Gruber stands for. A more cynical person would say that Gruber's fame grew on the backs of his maniacal defense of all things Apple(1), and his raw contempt for any who went against Apple in any way. That his draw was that he pandered to an audience that constantly needed to be reassured and reaffirmed, perhaps due to some sort of shell-shock from the days when Apple was an underdog or something.

This doesn't exist in the Android space because...well who wants to read that? A few authors do the growling anti-Apple/pro-Google spiel and see little uptake because that just isn't interesting. That John Gruber gained such an audience on the schtick that he engaged in remains a mystery, and is something you won't often see repeated.

It comes to me now that the one other industry where you see that is in sports writers. That John Gruber is the technology industry parallel to the guy writing about how the Red Sox are the absolute bestest and the players on all of the other teams are mugs and...

(1) I should mention that Gruber has reduced the bravado lately, and is less hysterical about every random internet commentator who happens to have a unkind word about Apple.
Who Honestly Wants Bill Gates To Come Back And Run Microsoft?
To try and define the term "daydream" as being equivalent to "make solid plans" so that you can equate daydreaming with criminal conspiracy is some of the most tortuous logic I have seen in a while. Have you ever thought of a job as a government press secretary? You'd fit right in.
Show HN: my friend made an adult blog search engine but was afraid to post it
> There is a Photoshop filter for it, I am pretty sure

In other words find a shortcut.

I would say when it comes to art, shortcuts are not the best approach.

Anyone could use that Photoshop filter, but it takes real skill to do it by hand.
Would think so, but IANAL and I'm not sure about the legality of it. Infringement occurs whenever you make, sell or use the invention without license. Distributing plans seems like it would contribute to infringement, so some enterprising lawyer could make a case for it. It's like linking to infringing copyrighted content.

I recall a story about a guy who blogged about coding up a shazaam clone and then receiving a C&D from the patent owner. It was never settled whether he had any grounds to do so, but sending C&Ds is cheap and mostly consequence-free.
Everyone- thanks for your advice. Definitely needed some outside perspective on this and you've been tremendous.
I genuinely want the emails they send me, even their most basic one-way emails provide me active value, and the relationship does transcend a more traditional marketing relationship, like the one I have with Amazon.

If you drag those messages from Promotions to Primary, Gmail will ask you if you want to do the same thing for all messages from that sender.
Maybe a description at least?
What I thought of was about the importance of process and the notion of a medium. Limitations are essential to creativity. That's why I think talking about "digital photography" as a medium is nonsense, and why I think instagram should be taken seriously.

I'm not sure how I think that relates to what programmers do.
"Companies in this space are also in an arms race where there are very finite amounts of scalable channels. (Scalable means, in this instance, any way they can convert money into customers in a predictable fashion.)"

Just wanted to say - a very smart comment - and something that most people and frankly even VCs don't seem to get: that what works at $5m in bookings won't likely scale to $25m in bookings. This is why you see so many companies moving up to selling to the "Enterprise" - the Adwords driven, low-touch sales approach may scale for a handful of companies who were early and in extremely horizontal business - but for most more niche SaaS offerings, the writing is on the wall - that approach will get you only so far.
There’s nothing like a tidy codebase
I don't like that I can't read all the words in your "built this myself website" to me usability trumps design and if I have to highlight it to read it you've already lost me.
you might try show:
Basic protocol:

1) Put signatures of your elements into a bloom filter, rather than the elements themselves.

2) Send the client the entire bloom filter.

3) Allow clients to request blind signatures for the elements they'd like to query locally.

So unfortunately, like most solutions in the "private information retrieval" domain, step one is "send the client your entire data set." They've explained that cryptographically secure bloom filters are superior to secure set intersection protocols (which are also largely unusable, although for different reasons) for cases where the data set is so large that the server would like to avail itself of the space savings that a bloom filter provides.

So at set sizes that large (say, 7 billion elements), step one is unfortunately to send the client a 700MB file. Not to mention that step zero was for the server to have calculated 7 billion digital signatures. It's otherwise a pretty neat idea, though.
The mother that drove her daughters' friend/rival to suicide via fake MySpace profiles should have known that what she was doing was wrong, but a conviction for her on the grounds that using a fake name violated MySpace's Terms of Service, and is therefore 'hacking' under the CFAA is just bad law. Making bad law to punish someone that was doing something 'bad' is a net-loss to society, not a net-win
From the blog post:

> I recently wrote about Apple’s overall philosophy and distilled it to, "Revolution, Great Products, Delight." Basically, they are one of the few corporations where money is second to the greater purpose of creating revolutionary products, that are exceptionally great, and which ultimately delight consumers.

From an e-mail "activist shareholder" David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital sent two months ago:

> In the end, the judge sided with us, and AAPL withdrew the proposal from consideration...AAPL announced that it will return $100 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015 and will evaluate returning additional capital annually. This vastly more shareholder-friendly capital allocation policy is a dramatic shift from where AAPL stood just a few months ago.
I _mostly_ agree with you.

How about _this_ analogy?

AT&T left a box of valuables in the middle of a lot they own, and weev walked by and grabbed them. Problem is, they weren't AT&T's valuables, they were mine and yours and 100,000 other peoples who'd entrusted AT&T with them.

Now who's "the bad guy"? Who's the more culpable "criminal"? WHo would we be holding to account if it were a bank who'd piled up the cash from 100,000 people's savings accounts into a building with all its doors and windows open?

Sure, what weev did was wrong. I don't think it was the _only_ wrong done here, or possibly even the "worst" wrong.
Do people wonder about why there is no General Motors John Gruber?

Apple has a lot of people who write about them because they check off all of the boxes in the type of person who would write about them. Just having a product (or an ecosystem in the case of Android) doesn't necessitate any of those things.

Apple is appealing to typography people, product design people, elitists and snobs, creative people, "creative" people, etc. A lot of those people are their customers.

They're also a single company, which serves to focus all of that ephemeral chatter into a more palatable narrative.

There are other companies who have a similar level of scuttlebutt about them, but all of the ones I can think of are video game companies (like Bungie, or id software), and it's certainly not to the same scope, even if it's of similar temperament.