skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue with their claim, I believe, is that the software isn't really circumventing any protections in place. It is simply using the existing publicly facing API. If the software made clear attempts to prevent this API from detecting or locking it out, then that would be an absolute violation, but I don't believe pulling crypto keys and reimplementing the API after REing it is necessarily a DMCA violation. Certainly it violates some other things, considering it is difficult to prove a clean-room situation when it was all done by one person. Seriously though, Snapchat should be focusing on hardening their API rather than trying to shut down imposter APIs.
Fair point Jess.
Yup. And it's quite difficult to figure out how to efficiently sell that much bread (or hotdogs, or shaobing). But once you do, you're in business.

You miss the key part of the equation though. More people want to make video games than want to sell street food...
There is only one problem with this: it is Canada, not the US.

Why would I want to do a start-up in Canada, rather than say the UK or Germany or Chile?
For the same reason Microsoft made the Surface and Google has the Nexus devices. "This is how it's done" sets a very strong precedence for OEMs to follow. Canonical can set the bar high right off the bat to avoid being like the first few years of Android phones.
Timeline for citizenship is 5-6 years: 3 years of residency, after which you can apply for citizenship, which currently takes additional 2-3 years to get.

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/information/times/canada/cit-pr...
I would have backed based on this theory if it was a Kickstarter project. Kickstarter uses Amazon and doesn't charge until the end of the drive. Indiegogo uses Paypal, and charges immediately, giving a refund if the drive fails. While both of these differences aren't quite showstoppers, they're enough that I didn't pull the trigger on something that seems highly unlikely to succeed. I wouldn't mind paying $600 for this thing if it actually happened, but I would mind having $600 sitting around in my rarely used paypal account.
I'm not an economist but I do wonder if the reasons some of those places have higher mobility is because the previous generation in those areas have relatively low income jobs (i.e. mostly agriculture) and many of the current generation have a "gotta get out of here" mentality leading them to better paying opportunities elsewhere. I know I felt that way living in the mid-west in early high school.

I'd like to see a map of how many of these income reporters moved away from their locales and to where and also what professions they picked up.
This is possible, i do exactly this with a multi-site WordPress install.

The plugin i use for that is: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-piwik/

Maybe you can get an idea how to do it with your codebase from that...
Another sign that Android is not about Google anymore but more about Galaxy line and Samsung.
Imagine being a scientist, and your models show a billion people could die soon.

How would you take it if people told you: "You're such an alarmist. Shut up, and keep working on your models"

And if scientists shouldn't speak up, who is left in public discourse?
You know what has a lot less information than the blog entry? All the comments about how little information it has.

Well... and this post, now.

I always come to the comments to throw a little balance or extrapolation into my reading, and its disappointing to find people mostly just complaining.

Got a few interesting nuggets, though. So not all bad.
Are you sure the decline of the Middle East was a result of the Silk Road fading in importance? A better argument is that it was the other way around.
Yes it's CAD, as all figures on .gc.ca websites are.
Canonical crowdfunds "Edge" Ubuntu phone
Awesome Linux-Smartphones
You can replace "In America" with "In Any Country."
As someone born in the bottom fifth who worked up into the top fifth, a big part of it is actively escaping childhood culture and that culture's expectations. When I grew up, I didn't know anyone wealthy or successful - I met them when I was an adult. Good role models are critical for kids' sense of scope and possibility.

Then again, as a political liberal, I tend to say an un-liberal thing when talking about income distribution... income isn't distributed evenly, but neither is talent. Mediocre people don't advance society. They tend to stay where they started (which explains a lot of management mediocrity - some are born into positions of privilege, but lack the talent to do anything with it but maintain the status quo). The way to maximize success for society as a whole is to maximize the opportunity of its most talented members, by eliminating cultural and social barriers to success.
Piwik is great until you get a decent amount of traffic, I had it on a client site as an experiment. at 100k page views per hour Piwik nuked the server :(
I deleted a previous comment because I didn't accurately convey my thoughts, but I'm hoping this is more accurate.

My hometown is one of the cheapest, yet most uneducated and violent cities in all of California. There was a huge class divide amongst my peers, none of whom were rich; Some could afford to move elsewhere, and others couldn't. Of those that couldn't, I would say approximately 20-30% are in prison, and the rest are stuck in <$10/hr jobs probably for the rest of their lives.

Of those who could move elsewhere (not rich, mind you, just well-to-do enough to move to a different city in CA, like say Sacramento or San Bernadino), most have decent middle class blue collar jobs (~$40k). About 10% of the group that was better off ended up going to college, and I would count myself amongst maybe 5 people (out of a class of ~400) that have truly jumped class barriers.

When you can only afford to live in one place, you are limited by the options of that one place. Even tiny increments in income/wealth open up exponentially greater opportunities, for the sole reason that they allow you to move elsewhere. For this reason, I concur 100% with Yglesias' theory: Housing regulation and laws, which have a disproportionate effect on housing affordability, are a huge impediment to class mobility.

Seattle, I hope you shape up before you turn into San Francisco. Thankfully, I can afford to live here, but my presence in Seattle is crowding out people that are exactly like me from 2-3 years ago. Accommodate them and build new housing, or you will cause their demise.
There was someone who was (is?) running a spreadsheet in which they attempted to "drink it all" - that is, try every possible drink in the microkitchens. Then they rated them.

I'd say "guess the gender", but given the company, you probably already know the answer.
This is what happens when our field is overrun with MBA's and other scum.
The US has argued that they have jurisdiction over any cyber crime which affects a US company or institution, regardless of where the person was - e.g. Gary McKinnon [1] was indicted by a grand jury in Virginia for hacks on computers owned by NASA and the Pentagon despite never having visited the US.

What really matters in cases like these is whether the country in question will arrest and extradite the individual to the US - this is far less clear cut - see the Snowden case for an example of someone attempting to evade US extradition law.

Some countries (notably China) have been fairly opaque from a US judicial perspective - see hacks on Google, the New York Times blamed on the Chinese - which have ended up with no visible action.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
Is New York the Next Hardware Epicenter?
Dan Loeb - Mission Accomplished, 1B + now
Perhaps observing this phenomenon should lead him to consider that there might be some substance to these critiques, and not just dismiss them all out of hand as some sort of "derangement".
Agreed. They should definitely lock it down for their internal use (and eventually provide a public API). I would imagine that in a young company that is moving fast, there is a high potential to overreact or to appear to because of canned responses.
I've ordered one too, because I really like the sound of a Phone OS based on Ubuntu, not controlled by the likes of Google and Apple, and with a UI based on HTML. The proposed UI and demo apps look nice, I like the idea of losing the chrome as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO7QbCqFY7Y

It's going up quite fast, from 167k to 198k as I finish writing this, but I'm not sure if they'll make their target, just because the phone and OS are such an unknown quantity. I hope they will - and if Pebble can raise $10 Million, then they do have a chance, even if it is a slim one.
It's mostly a family thing. Neither me nor my wife are originally from here, we moved up for a gig that I don't have any more. If we hadn't bought a house at the top of the bubble we'd probably have split already. That said, I really love our house and where we live (Stillwater), it just feels kinda lonely on the family front now that we have our own kids.
Well, if you don't define what "if you know what you're doing" means, it could be anything from "running Chrome" to "using curl on an OpenBSD box and parsing the source manually." But I was referring to that and the general sentiment that "AV is shit and you can just uninstall it."

Literally anything could be possible "if you know what you're doing" if you leave it that ambiguous.
I didn't follow Mozilla closely on this, but I'm not sure if they design their own hardware. As far as I know they are using existing one from partners (correct me if I'm wrong). I.e. they took a few shortcuts to make things easier for them.
>> [..] but I think you're being sexist.

Things have really been getting out of hand here, lately it seems almost anything that even has the faintest trace of 'usually being associated with female gender' is interpreted as being sexist. Some people have been taking the good Samaritan attitude a little too far I think, are we supposed to restrict everything we say to gender-neutral language or what?
Actually, I would disagree with you, based on (1) my personal work and (2) discussions with a variety of other people as I thump the "not all programming needs to be imperative languages" drum.

First, working in a single language allows you to accumulate what, for lack of a better word, I call "IP". Components/libraries/frameworks; a body of work. Having a single language gives you the leverage of previously written code solving prior problems in a debugged fashion.

Second, having a single language allows easier social operation; people can review each others work, a common body of knowledge can form around the language under common use which is difficult to maintain for multiple languages simultaneously.

Third, having a language which is a bit of a melting pot allows idioms to be used in which people are comfortable with their specific idiom - OO/FP, etc.
The issue is, what else is on that machine?

When you allow public connections to a service running on a machine, security for that entire machine now largely depends on that service. Are you 100% sure that your copy of Apache or Nginx is patched up to date? That the web app you just coded up won't allow arbitrary command execution? That the OS has no local privilege escalation vulnerabilities?

If you are using a web host or VPS, the risk is limited to the code you're testing. You could lose the whole machine and it's no big deal.

But if you've exposed your personal machine--with all your documents, files, settings, etc.--then you've got a lot more to lose if a bad guy gets in. Worst case is a rootkit install that collects all your passwords and sends them out.
Back in 2000? Good tools like Make where built in the 70s that's utilized by Autotools and other great build systems to bridge the gap between different platforms, so that you don't have to distribute as the author of the article we're discussing, a whole runtime with all dependencies.
> That violent struggle is a stereotype of rape that hides non-consensual sex as a form of rape is irrelevant to the main point: this law destroys our ability to educate and our freedom of expression.

I totally agree with your point. However, promoting stereotypes about rape does diminish our ability to educate about the facts and experiences of survivors and makes it so that causes of and solutions to rape as a form of institutional violence become obscured.
Then it also makes no sense to not comply with the request. "It was just a weekend project" is not a legal defense.
In Boston, definitely walk around Harvard Square and Harvard's campus. It's a bit touristy but is really cool. MIT is a bit boring though, to be honest. Also check out the Back Bay area.
is facebook.com about people or simulating people?
You can start a company with a US business partner on an H1B if you're a minority owner.
I setup a Pagodabox app to launch a new self hosted Piwik instance a few back: https://pagodabox.com/cafe/noinput/piwik

Hope some find it helpful for a quick way to test out and run it for free to see if they like it (I do).
Oil fracking.
Haha, that's brilliant :-)
"Although our core business is software for PCs and the cloud, we know the phone industry pretty well too."

"We’ve scoured the research labs of the biggest companies and most exciting startups for the latest and greatest mobile technologies to specify the first-generation Edge."

Do the people involved actually have hardware experience? That's not clear to me, and the second passage gives the impression of treating a phone as a collection of parts.

32 mil is a pretty risky first project…
> I am under the impression that reverse engineering is still protected under fair use doctrines. Is this the case?

Not insofar as the reverse engineering is used to produce an anti-circumvention device under the DMCA (that is, the reverse engineering itself is still just as protected as it used to be, but that protection does not extend to making the anti-circumvention device available.)

Note that there is still the issue of whether what you've actually is an anti-circumvention device.

> How should I respond, if at all?

If the project is worth the cost of consulting a lawyer, you very likely should do that so you understand better what your exposure here is and can make a more informed decision than you would be able to make based on lay advice you might get from HN. If its not, you should probably take it down.
What are the practical drawbacks of using libhybris? Have there been some benchmarks done yet?
> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt.

I'm kind of surprised this isn't happening already.
U.S. military jettisons bombs near Australia's Great Barrier Reef
> “Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that’s closest and scale that.”

This is basically mip-mapping, and was described in a 1983 paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126.
If that were the case for me then anything I would write would get upvoted in bulk, but that's just not been the case. I wrote it because I thought it might be useful to some people and presumably it has been for those who've upvoted it. On the other hand, those who have found it worthless have expressed so very strongly in this comment thread. So it goes.
This isn't really a problem because Harvard and MIT allow students to cross-register (for up to half of your credits, the same as if you transferred from another school, although I'm not sure if the rules have changed in recent years).
eh, spelling and grammar, oops, too late to edit. sigh
I suggest the following:

Combinatorics [1]. I took it in college and was really interested and the professor made us program in Mathematica as well.

Probability and Statistics

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics
The Angel's and VC's need to be "designated." So simply starting a firm in Canada may not grant the firm access to this program.
Looking through the very short list of "designated" VC's it is quite obvious (from a Canadian's point of view) that these are all very well established Canadian companies.
Oil/Gas jobs?
Totally. You can tell that just from walking around. We were out there over the 4th weekend and I could definitely see raising the family there. My tech network is pretty much non-existent out there though (for now).
Just off the top of my head:

Boolean Logic

Automata + Computability

Statistics

Relational Algebra
My first job out of college was writing Super Nintendo games in Vancouver. My starting salary was $28.5K/year in 1994. Had I have been working 40 hour work weeks, this would have been a reasonable salary, but for 80 hours a week (which is closer to what I was working), it was less than McDonalds paid at the time.

The difference is upwards mobility. It's hard moving up the corporate ladder while flipping burgers. It was not so hard to turn the game programming job into a lucrative career in software development.
Another aspect is that some opensource licensing schemes may require you to link dynamically. The LGPL, for example, requires you to do this unless you release the rest of your source code.
I guess Jolla engineers would know the most, since they are primarily developing it:

* http://mer-project.blogspot.se/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-and...

* http://mer-project.blogspot.se/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-and...

But I didn't see any comparative benchmarks published so far. Translation cost might be not critical (i.e. tolerable), but it's still a cost and native approach should be always better.
The mobility those regions demonstrate is better than average for all income classes, and those income classes are defined nationally, not locally.

Of course, that "gotta get out of here" feeling isn't limited to lower income kids, so it could be a factor. Certainly it's typically good for your earnings if you're willing to move where you can make more money. But then why isn't upstate New York dark blue? (Sorry, upstate New York!)
I think it means they'll do Cyanogenmod style distribution instead of partnering with a handset maker/carrier.
Wow, thanks for that link!

The author's explanation was incredibly clear and I feel like I got a handle on it!

Just 'lift' the relevant game state and pass mutatations along in a simular way to how you might pass exceptions along with a promise based system... Then it eventually feeds to a makeSounds() or an updateAnimations() or whatever! That way the code can keep all related functionality in one place, instead of spreading sound or animation related methods all over the code base encapsulated in each object with its own logic! Brilliant!
That will make it harder yeah. I share my last name with a danish director and a female norwegian actor.

The actor has been in a few movies with a guy I share my first name with so they tend to pop up into the results for my name whenever they do another movie.
I strongly agree with ScottWhigham in this matter. If anything, I have a problem with the fact that every word im the English Language gets assigned to multiple IT products, movies, books etc. which inevitably leads to confusion.
The outcry! The injustice! Sigh
How To Build A Robotic Arm That Tracks Your Hand Movements
Reselling someone else's developer phone from last year isn't exactly the marketing message we're going for. Edge is meant to be a premium product, not just another "me too".

Unrelated: if you simply want to test drive Ubuntu for Phones, it's already been ported to 40+ platforms.
I believe it's the oil industry.
I really think they're overestimating who they perceive their target audience to be. 830USD is more than an unlocked iPhone 5...
So, a H1B holder working for an employer can start a company if they hold a small equity?
I never quite understood these obvious benefits. Could someone list them to me?
Missed opportunity?

I actually don't think it's that bad, though...
Dissecting a WordPress Brute Force Attack
I imagine they'll contract out the manufacture - they'll be collaborating with a manufacturer who makes phones presumably - they say the manufacturer is in Taiwan, but don't specify who.

The features they list are pretty standard on a high-end smartphone for next year, though perhaps not usually seen together.
He's probably running the developer beta...

And yeah, it's stable. I've been running it since it came out without any issues.
This is true. I do have that option.

But I very rarely trust the author. Most of the time I've never heard of the author. This is a good thing, and exactly why Github has been so successful. By nature, if there's something obscure that I need doing, and I find some software or software module that lets me do it, then chances are I won't know the author.

This means that downloading and running the binary is suddenly a very obscure use case. It should be for you, too.
We had Spanish in elementary school in St. Louis, but (in my school anyway) it was more of an occasional special topic bonus class rather than a semester/year long study.
Are you referring to the recent disclosure, or just in general how they do it?
In Chrome I had to click the first button 3 times before anything happened. I was beginning to think the same thing.
> Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents.

What's stopping anyone from crowd sourcing a database of prior art for existing patents that would invalidate them if it came to it?

A valid defense against patent infringement is to show that the patent shouldn't have been issued in the first place, right? So a database of Ready Made Legal Defense sounds good.

Am I missing something?
At this point, I would just remove it. Since this is on the front page of HN, there's no way Snapchat can make the code disappear anyway.

If you need legal advice, I recommend seeing if SFLC (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/) will help you. In the past, I worked on a free software project where we willfully ignored a cease and desist notice and got sued by a large multinational corporation, and they were awesome.
In a prior job, I did a decent amount of Python distributions. I had it simple: 1-2 python libraries plugging into a single app which was distributed on a .deb server. Even that was not particularly fun. I can definitely understand the appeal of a build n run system.

As a user, I find rubygem based installs rather horrific (same for pypi & cpan).

n.b.: I'm sure there are tools out there that will appropriately massage your app and put together a app.zip package for you. But IME those sorts of tools are a lot of work to get going.
How Indian software engineers help US companies
Adapting to a new country is going to be hard no matter what country you go to.
Canada is very well known for successfully mixing immigrants from many different cultural backgrounds into Canadian culture, there are many free programs in place, as well as many support groups. Canada's extremely diverse.
Reminds me of the story behind zerocater
Ubuntu Edge is orthogonal to existing commercial discussions with OEMs and operators.

It's a premier, demonstration platform, not a mass market device.
Yes. And how does that seem to be working out?
It's been tried.

Many times.
I had a bad attitude dealing with patents in my last job, refusing to take part on the basis that I hadn't come up with anything novel. I noticed a member of staff with views on patents in line with mine taking a more active role. He took part in the patent meetings, but instead of merely offering nothing up, took active part in finding prior art, thus preventing time wasting patents going to the office. He took special pleasure in finding prior art by current employees at the same company, preferably in the same arm.

I am impressed by Spolsky's positive attitude to do something about the problem, I bid ask patents continued good fortune!