skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Growing up before I knew anything about computers I always asked my parents if I could play on the home PC, which really equated to MSPaint time.

Others might have started off with tinkering with BASIC and whatnot but I think I'm fortunate enough that it turned out to be my gateway drug into computers anyways.
Awesome blog topics all around you: Here's how to find them
Microsoft will "aggressively challenge" any government
Yes exactly - churn rates too high, free versions not converting to paid, et al. And for companies like KISSmetrics and Dropbox, those free customers come with an infrastructure cost that goes up fairly linearly with the number of customers you add. Tough going if you can't convert from free to paid. And then you add high monthly churn rates and, ugh, you're in a world of hurt.
AKA the Hacker News "talk shit about John Gruber" free-for-all thread. Have at it, though.
Hysterical is an amusing choice of words given your tone:

"grew on the backs of his maniacal defense...raw contempt for any...pandered to an audience that constantly needed to be reassured...is less hysterical about every random internet commentator..."

Gruber's greatest gift is his ability to inspire haters. I don't think he could be successful without being able to draw a screed like yours. Grist for the outside discussion that draws traffic.
I have no problem with attaching penalties, perhaps even criminal ones, to negligence on the part of people deploying apps, too. I don't see why it has to be one or the other.

Incidentally: I have literally no opinion about the Auernheimer case, so don't read anything into these comments.
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I know this is an old thread. But, situation has remained the same. Linus is an accomplished hacker, but this kind of language should be clearly unacceptable. Just because someone is accomplished and controls keys to the biggest open source project, does not mean people should discount such behavior calling it the necessary evil or even making excuses for it and justifying it. If we hear someone speak like that to another person, we surely will think that the person is terrible. Then why does Linus get away with it?
That link is pretty darn good, but don't forget the 97 year old guy is nearly blind.
Gross Exaggeration In Estimates Of Global Hacking Damages
I actually seek out domains like this; either because they're defensible, or because I'm insane. I'm not sure which yet.

I see this quite a bit. In fact, I strongly believe there are only two types of businesses that make competition improbable: A) those that pick normal problems, show up to the market early, and price to discourage competition, forever locked into low margins, and B) those that choose incomprehensibly hard problems and solve them better than anyone else.
That's what the term "railroaded" means in this context: that a person is not being subject to due process.
I'm a pretty good (acoustic) guitarist, and I swear it's because the guitar I began with probably should have been used as kindling. The action sucked, so I developed excellent finger strength. The poor tension made it really easy to choke a string, so I developed incredible accuracy. It was really "buzzy," so I learned complicated finger-style patterns just so it wouldn't sound so bad when I played.

The first time I got my hands on a real guitar, I sounded like Andres Segovia. :)

I won't say that I never tried to blame my tools after that, but I do often manage to remind myself that when things are going wrong it's probably not the fault of the knife, hammer, programming language . . .
The article does say they will ship to kickstarter supporters first.
First, you don't actually have the right to conduct security testing on third party servers. Nor should you. Real application security testing is disruptive, and in authorized tests, companies often take pains to ensure that testers aren't exposed to real user data.

Second, if you poke around to confirm the security or insecurity of an application, immediately report results to the target, and comply with requests for information, you may be civilly liable for damages (which it's unlikely anyone would pursue, given the PR implications) but are probably not violating the CFAA even as it's written today (that is: badly).
I'm unsure what your point is: I chose every word purposefully and with meaning, and I find it a bit odd if you think that's a "screed".

Daring Fireball has been one of the most negative, hateful, bitter (do those words offend you? Mightn't you italicize them for me, declaring them "ironic"?) sites on the net. It has absolutely taken a turn for the better over the past year, but Gruber's rise absolutely came because he essentially took up arms for all Apple Believers everywhere. I don't even think he particularly believed the things he wrote -- and I have a raw sense that he is a eminently likable person -- but he knew what drew the eyeballs and padded the subscribers, so for that the more power to him.

To your edit of your reply, regarding your purported endless amusement, I too am having a laugh at your continued, and rather futile, attempts to try to imbue emotions that don't actually exist into this conversation (two posts in a row, so you really are desperate for this approach to work). That's a boring BBS-era tactic that...well it just embarrasses us all. You have nothing to say to this but to attempt to laughably diminish the speaker so move along.
I was there in building 5. I played hockey with Scott and Steve (srk@sun.com, I was lm@sun.com, to this day the best email address I've ever had.) Guy Harris was there, he's why I went to Sun. He left to go to Auspex but since Auspex licensed Sun's source he kept coming back. John Pope and I worked late, Guy pounded on the door of building 5, we let him in so he could fix stuff. I still have memories of Guy going "shit, they haven't fixed this? Losers. Checkin." Guy committed changes to Suns code long after he was not employed by Sun.

Scooter used to come into our building around 7pm and tell us how we were going to rule the world. He got up on the conference table and he stood there and made us believe. How many CEO's are around at 7pm?

When that other guy was put in, some web guy, I was bummed. Scooter really loved Sun, he cared a lot.
The law is full of "reasonable person" tests like this.
12 Weirdest Laws in the United States
Zuckerberg’s dirty little secret: one master password accesses every account
I am. I'm bloody angry that consumers prioritize tiny/thin phones over a battery that lasts all day.

I hate how Google handles their bug reports.

I hate how low latency audio still isn't a priority on Android. I hate how the bluetooth stack was broken seemingly for no reason at all.

I hate that there's still no Bluetooth LE support. I hate how Google won't let the Commonwealth Bank of Australia implement a Google-wallet style application.

I hate how half the Android OEMs can't be arsed releasing proper sourcecode.

But I think the Nexus 4 is one of the best devices I own...
This is how I described it to someone else below, so I hope this helps:

This is a puzzle game in which you're able to slide objects (one penguin and a few ice blocks) around a 5x5 grid. The objects will slide off if they are not stopped by anything else, and the goal is to get the penguin to a waterhole in the center of the grid. It's difficult also because you get a limited number of moves on each level.
"Everyone will react differently to stepping out of their comfort zone"
> I'm unsure what your point is, besides to demonstrate that you know how to italicize words?

I was calling your word choice hysterical and showing my work.

> do those words offend you?

Not really, but I'm endlessly amused by your touchiness on this. Maybe the trick for Gruber is that's fun to poke the prickly.

> imbue emotions that don't actually exist into this conversation

> do those words offend you?
Gruber became insanely popular because he was credited by Steve Jobs in one of his emails. Before that, I had never heard of him.
Is more like if you wrote out your customers personal data in a book left nailed to a front door that opens onto a public street and then tried to criminalise anyone who looked at pages that weren't relevant to them.
As a former Yahoo, I can certainly think of a number of former colleagues whose function was unclear and possibly nonexistent but continued to be paid for years.
Breckenridge Lodging with the Perfect Location
Fancy drinking a website? Well this hack will do just that
That's cool, I hadn't made that connection before now!
If you can channel that frustration into entertainment and education, you, too, can sell outrageously lucrative feed sponsorships.
In an age of Photoshop and Illustrator this guy is drawing in an archaic painting program I used when I was in single digits and producing some awesome results.

I don't care whether or not you think MsPaint is lame, old or other debatable points about it, you can't argue this piece in particular 'Rambo' is awesome: http://hallasko.com/collections/prints/products/rambo

Being creative has nothing to do with what tools you use at the end of the day. People were creative long before the digital age and this guy has proven you don't need the latest, greatest or most expensive tools to produce a piece of art. Just an idea and any means to explore that idea is all you need.

This is nothing short of inspiring to me. Probably one of the most positive and inspiring things I've seen on HN in a long time.
When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Steve boasted that it is 5 years ahead of the competition. It wasn't hyperbole.

Ever since, the jailbreakers and Android tinkerers have provided a fertile testing ground for half baked ideas. Apple kept iterating, filling the gaps, and adopting the best things poorly done by the aforementioned to boot.

It is 2013 -- I can't even think of a good reason to jailbreak anymore. The low hanging fruit are gone and there's not much left to be OCD about. There's no room for this character, this stuff is now officially boring. It comes down to the old choice between running OS X or some Linux distro.
Gruber already does lament the shabby doesn't he? So what'd be the difference? In addition to calling out Google / Microsoft / Samsung, he also calls out Apple? Doesn't really seem like a big diff, except maybe for being slightly more objective.
The problem with the ESA’s ‘Essential Facts’ report on gender and games
If you are into audio stuff you can do what I did and learn Javascript within the context of building little sound generators and audio file sample trigger players. I now understand a good amount of DOM manipulation,CSS,semantic HTML and Javascript patterns as a result.
Sorry, just a minor nitpick. Should be "A NSFW Tumblr Search".
On the other hand, when AT&T leaves its doors and windows open 'in the web' they get a free pass from the general public because the technical aspect is lost on them.

If a bank used someone's first and last name as the 'access control' to their money, sure someone breaking in and stealing things is wrong, but should the bank be punished for negligence? Probably. When companies have security breaches 'on a computer' why is this different? Why the free pass? Why is the person that 'broke in,' or that that pointed out the flaw without breaking in the bad guy? Why aren't the companies themselves held to task for creating shoddy controls, and not following best practices when it comes to computer security?

A better example to demonstrate what's going on to the public would be to have a web form that says "Enter your SSN#" and a submit button. People understand that. Changing the terms in the URL bar is voodoo to many people, and this unfortunately leads to the belief that someone exercised nefarious skills to pull off an attack.
Again, how it's made forms the story around the piece. If you saw that painting in a jumble sale, with no story, it is irrelevant how it's made. But if you know it was painted with someone's feet, then that becomes part of your appreciation of it, and hence it can become more valuable to you.

I have a small framed bit of Chinese calligraphy ("Laugh") in my bedroom. It's nice in its own way, but nothing special. It was, however, given to me by my half-sister who I only got to know for a couple of years before she died from cancer. That bit of art has a particular story attached to it now, and that story makes it worth so much more to certain people (being 'me', basically) despite the art itself being mundane. The story associated with a piece has a value of its own, sometimes entirely orthogonal to the piece itself.
Twitter Rolls Out TV Ad Targeting to All National Advertisers
Because what it actually protects is rights, rights of the end user.

You of course know this, but you instead choose to endlessly harp on the meaning of the word 'freedom'.

Licencing your code under GPL grants the recipient of any binary in which your code is included a specific set of rights.

These rights include the right to the source code should the recipient want it.

This particular right makes GPL very interesting for many developers as they can release code, and then as recipients of modifications of that code, get access to those modifications in source code form and thus gain improvements to their original code.
The RPython toolchain has another mode of operation, which outputs higher-level class-based code rather than low-level C-style code. They use this for a CLR backend, but it would be interesting to try implementing a JavaScript backend at that level and compare it to the lowlevel+emscripten approach.

(This may have been tried in the past; in the post "10 years of PyPy" it's mentioned that there was once a JavaScript backend but it was removed because it was a horrible idea: http://morepypy.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/10-years-of-pypy.htm...)
I find your ideas fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

So please make one.
The rise of the personal franchise site in news
> So what'd be the difference?

I think the big difference would be hating everyone equally. Gruber laments the shabby with a song in his heart and a spring in his step because Steve Jobs was brilliant, Jony Ive satisfies and Stanley Kubrick was a master filmmaker.

This guy? "Fuck everyone, that's why." That's his schtick. So on the odd days when the sun comes out, you pay very close attention. The rest of the time, wry smiles.
I'm a very politically correct person myself, but sometimes I wish I could be encompass a little but of this attitude. The maintainer clearly did a bad job, and instead of admitting it he pointed the finger elsewhere. This reflects terribly on the project and if I was Linus I would be angry too for someone tarnishing the project.
Email this person: http://rckbt.me/contact/
.... actual premium services are usually under contract. Even when they're not they still want you to call into a real live human being to cancel because finding out about your concerns that lead you to cancel a $10,000+ contract is certainly worth the minor possibility that you'll be offended that cancellation is not a push button process.
Akamai: There Are Now 734M IP Addresses Worldwide
You are explicitly authorized by the specified policy that uses SSN to look up the data. If you aren't authorized, why is it sending you the data?

If you make no effort to authenticate requests, I find it very unreasonable to act like any requests are unauthorized.
Yeah, it is impossible to find it outside US.

btw, this book is about programming methodology (the way of thinking and structuring the code), not about Lisp, the same way HtDP or SICP is not about Scheme.
The slavery analogy is interesting because it's something that we all agree is unequivocally wrong. People sometimes can't wrap their heads around the GPL because not everyone agrees that e.g. not providing source code is unequivocally wrong, but that's the stance the GPL takes.

Imagine a world where slavery isn't prohibited by law, and that isn't going to change, but we still want to discourage it as much as possible. So someone comes up with the idea for a "license" to grant to current slaves: You can have your freedom, with the one restriction that you can't work with anyone who owns slaves unless they free them all and attach the same restriction. The idea being to create a large population of former slaves who have been freed with that condition, so that you create an economic environment in which owning slaves is discouraged, because anyone who continues to own slaves can no longer do business with an economically important population of former slaves.

Obviously you get the objection that you're restricting the freedom of the former slaves. The freed slaves would be individually better off if they could work with whoever they wanted, especially if there is a nontrivial population of slave owners who continue to refuse to accept that condition and might otherwise do business with them, but then you lose all the incentive for the existing slave owners to free their slaves which on the whole would result in a net reduction in freedom.
> They should have kept it at $600 and increased the total needed for the project.

I suspect the profit margin on the $600 price was too small, hence the small number offered.
Google News Showing Old Stories As New: A Google Bug Or Publisher Hack?
Spotify came up with a sneaky one.

I recently signed up and it only asked for some basic info. By default, of course, all email notifications are turned on. When you try to turn them off and save changes - it won't let you save because one "mandatory" field is incomplete [1].

So you're forced to add more info if you want to turn off email notifications.

It's not a big deal, but it falls in the same category. I like the company less now.

[1] http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4800/jfgt.png
Hey Dan,
Was always curious what you were doing there... Do you think there is a place in the market to launch another sparkbuy-esque site being that it doesn't seem like anyone has done anything "great" in that same space?

Feel free to respond to: chris@clientbiller.com
Apple Beats Wall Street’s Expectations
.99 for random access to all levels would be a no-brainer purchase. My other suggestion is to allow sub-optimal solutions, while letting the user know that they are sub-optimal. You could show the best solution so far, in blue if it's optimal.

If you're unaware of them, check out Lunar Lockout and/or Pete's Pike.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lunar+lockout
https://www.google.com/search?q=pete's+pike
Also appears here: http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val...
> Is This The Future of The Airline Website?

I hope not, especially for visually impaired users, tablet or mobile users, or just for general ease of use. It's way easier for me to type in a location's name or airport code than try to figure out where it is on the map.

Here's an example: let's say I'm flying from Seattle-Tacoma (SEA) to Boston's Logan Airport (BOS). On a normal travel site, I type in SEA<tab>BOS<return>. Boom, done.

In this design, I'd somehow or another choose my origin, and then try to figure out which of the many major airports in the Northeast I'm actually looking for. My sense of geography of that area is pretty bad, so it would likely take me a while to figure it out.

Or let's consider the reverse: flying to the Pacific-Northwest. If you're zoomed out far enough, you're going to have a very small amount of distance between Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. I guess you'll need to zoom in far enough to be able to visually differentiate them in order to drop the pin? OK, but why not just type in "Vancouver", "Seattle" or "Portland"?
I see you have an extensive background in construction project management. Why did you choose design? I bet your background could produce many opportunities as a project manager. Perhaps you should learn to apply your lessons from construction to software development. Then you can market yourself as an expert in project management, which could pay significantly more than designing.
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There isn't an Android John Gruber, and that's great news.

(Please don't take the rest of this too seriously)

This is the Windows and MacOS fight played all over in the product space. Apple is the Cathedral. They have one device, one OS, and say "take it or leave it. We will give you these features and this UI. If you don't like it, bugger off". Gruber reinforces that worldview. A lot of people have horrible experiences with Apple customer service, but their complaints get swept beneath the benevolent "We have gorgeous typography and know what's good for you" image.

Android, on the other hand, is the Bazaar. Rife with a bunch of cheaper devices, some of which are top-notch systems stamped with Google's seal of approval which can more or less match the iPhone, and others that are miserable tiny pieces of junk, but can somehow still run Android 1.3. You won't have anyone talking about them, but you will have people running them. They may be miserable running them, but the price point and the "good enough" quality keeps them going to Android.

There's two possible outcomes -- either Apple succeeds, and we all start using iApproved iDevices, or Android succeeds, in which case we will all be using vastly different devices, but running various versions of basically the same OS, which Google will have to add massive backward compatibility to.

Which do you want?

</pseudovisionaryrant>
I agree, but it's a sad omission. I really like Gruber, but I would love to see someone in a sort of "Android Advocate" role. From the article:

> There is no one on the Android side promoting these values and looking at the Android platform with an eye towards something besides simply parroting the feature set of the new HTC Milky Way Swipe Omega Machine IV Redux.

I find this sadly common. I would actually like to know more about Android, but most of the pieces I run across are generic "let's try out some hardware" stories. I see some good analysis when new version of Android come out; but most of the time it's the equivalent to reviews of the new Dell-model-of-the-Week.

Even if the "anti-Gruber" were to pick only one brand to discuss (Samsung being an obvious option due to market share), I would enjoy reading someone point out the hits and misses as they try to get the company to improve. Gruber is certainly known as an Apple fan, but he does criticize Apple when they miss the mark.