skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This is one of the reasons why young people often make for particularly good founders. They don’t have a lot of other commitments."

Bleah. It's a balance of ability, interest, commitment, urgency and experience. Interest and commitment are not the same thing and neither is urgency. Experience does have value.

You limit yourself pretty badly if you follow this youth principle. Finding a twenty-something willing to bang his/her head for 80 hours a week is about the least useful thing a startup can do.
I'm sorry to sound pithy here, but it sounds like the lesson here isn't "be a solo founder", it's "build the right team."

Either way, this is an interesting perspective - thank you for sharing your experience!
Did you just call it a cost that farm work would become more efficient and need fewer man hours for the same productivity?
Exploiting network cameras like a hollywood hacker
Authorize at reservation...
Could the restaurants require an account to be created, limit the number of reservations one account can make, and check that people aren't multi-accounting from the same ip address?

The bots could get around this with proxies, but it would seem to be a pain to set up that many proxies.

Maybe there's a space in the market for someone to solve this problem for the restaurants.
Notification Center > Growl?
It's worth noting that 7% of the US population commits 53% of the murders. Can you guess which demographic group that is? I'll give you a hint, it's not descended from Europeans. So even if you eliminated all the crime committed by European-descended Americans, America would still have a higher crime rate than European countries.

Europeans who criticize America often imagine it to be a country of European colonists. That's increasingly not true. European multiculturalists also expect that a person's cultural background will have zero influence on them. That is also not true.
Don't forget "They might break the API without warning. Every two to three months. (Facebook)."

Your argument is exactly why I don't use Google AppEngine. I know there are open-source stacks now that you can use if you want to take your AppEngine code in-house, but trying to build up an AppEngine infrastructure at probably the worst possible time ("we're getting billed @ $10k/month, but only making $8k! getting more popular will cause us to lose more money! quick, switch to custom servers!") when you can build up a solid infrastructure using technology that you can replicate on any VPS or managed box or colocated hardware that you buy seems the easiest way to scale.
First, congrats on getting out there. I was not aware of something like this, and truthfully had never thought of it as an option. As a father of a 17month old, my wife and I have talked a little about a true camera (non-iphone) to take better pictures of our son. My first thought when looking at this website is that this is for a professional photographer to get gear from someone else, am I right? Or if I wanted to see how something like this works, is this a way we could test out a high-definition camera? If so, perhaps you want to experiment running ads directed at new parents to take professional pictures (to the extent I could do that with no training) without hiring a pro. Just a thought.
This cognitive dissonance exists in your head only.
That was my reaction too. You see exactly the same thing with concert tickets and scalpers. It's supply and demand problem that venues want to use rationing because it increases cachet, but abritrageurs have an incentive to step in and resell for the "market" price.

I wonder if we'll see more Ticketmaster-style countermeasures on reservation sites soon.

Or more restaurants varying their prices for high- and low-demand times like Alinea in Chicago (https://www.alinearestaurant.com/website/welcome/)
yeah given the banks track record in dragging their feet over phantom atm withdrawals thats going to work real well.

The banks will probably try to blame the victim to avoid paying out you must have shared/written down your banking password and/or start selling cyber insurance which will become the next PPI scam in a few years.
Charity for a Friend's Sick Newborn
If the people running this scheme are profiting from it, soon they'd start using stolen CCs.
I remember the original thread. I was very sceptical back then and am happy to see the project is alive. The website looks very good on first sight. However, my test search (Canon Body Paris), did not only have not hits, the page looked broken, as the place reserved for results was just empty.

- Just add a short apology "Sorry, we could not find what you looked for. But we have some awesome lenses in Paris, waiting for you to try them!" :)

- I clicked on your blog-link, and got this: "You attempted to reach blog.cameralends.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.herokuapp.com", with a big red exclamation mark.
Original source, from the previous discussion: https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant...

The siliconbeat.com article here just seems to be a reblog/summary.
It'd be trivial to change the payload to work with Linux.
Apple planning to restore most of the remaining developer services this week
Ask HN: Jailbreak Apple TV 3
Does anyone know if it's possible? I've looked around for a bit. The more famous sites like redmonpie says it's not out yet. A lot of smaller more shady sites says it's possible. So where do we stand? Possible or not?
You don't have to be sorry, I thought it was clear you weren't throwing anyone under the bus.

You're also quite the bigger person, I make it a rule not to respond to people who feel the need to use a clear insult like "moron" in addressing someone they don't know, especially here on HN. There was simply no need for that kind of disrespectful language
References do suck. All languages have ugly misfeatures, by nature. (Some language groupie collectives are in denial...)

But you get named parameters (and type checking of them!) for functions/methods through CPAN. And lots of other language extensions.

High flexibility in programming languages -- Perl isn't close to e.g. Lisp macros -- do have costs, of course. You need to use automatic tools, code reviews and coding standards. But you should do that anyway.

I really doubt the extra time/cognitive costs make for a noticeable extra burden, considering that you'll have to learn lots and lots of other stuff anyway.
References this past HN post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6108092
To be clear, this list is not all exploitable. It only shows php files that use both GET variables and the mysql_query function. Not all of these variable are being fed unescaped into a query, nor are they necessarily used in a query at all.
I'm sorry, but this line bugs me:

>Using OpenTable, Urbanspoon or SeatMe , diners could see available time slots and make a reservation online or from their smartphone without the hassle of calling the restaurant, and know that their table would be secure.

How is calling the restaurant a hassle? Especially when the solution is to use your phone to look the restaurant up online?

Maybe it's the cranky old man spirit in me, but I call restaurants every time -- I hadn't even heard of these sites. I didn't know that this was a need people felt needed fulfilling.
I think it's because only a limited number of people have the ability to do so. There are probably a number of other methods of "cheating" in similar situations that would also be viewed poorly for the same reason. A few examples off the top of my head: hiring a handicapped person to let you skip lines at Disney, hiring a homeless person to hold your spot in line, bribing an employee, having your assistant spend all morning mashing F5 while you go about your day, and certainly many others.

The ones I named would be seen by many people as unfair because they are options that are only available to people with a great deal of money. Other strategies (like calling in a favor) are only open to those with influence and special personal connections. In this case, we have a strategy that is only open to individuals with highly technical skills.

Note that I'm not saying it is unfair to use any of these strategies. I think reasonable people could disagree on many of them and they are sensitive to circumstances.

In some sense, though, this can be seen as a market distortion. For you or I, writing a bot to do this might be pretty simple. Since we don't have to "pay" very much for the reservations, we would be likely to over-consume them, that is, to make more reservations than we intend to keep. We might even double-book ourselves so we have options (e.g. this morning I felt like steak, now I feel like seafood).

This is obviously bad for the restaurants, but it is also bad for other customers who might have wanted the reservations more than we did, but were unable to build a bot to get them because, years and years ago, they chose to study things other than computer science.
> They weren't necessarily lying

They are misleading prosecutors: "In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept."
All the skeptics I know are huge proponents of science/evidence based medicine and are, for example, very anti-"Vaxxer" (or is it anti-"anit-Vaxxer"? Whatever, they hate Jenny McCarthy is what I'm getting at here...)

I think you mean conspiracy theorist circles. Very different sort of group, even when they attempt to mimic the language of skeptics.
If it works, then there'll be nothing on the other end but silence.
In my own experience, item #1 is by far the most critical of all reasons listed. It's big enough to have pages and more pages written solely about it.
I was the technical lead of an "educational platform" being developed and most of its products. As soon as two of the co-founders - out of 5 - found themselves jobs and other full time activities things started to go downhill very fast. One of the most annoying behaviors those then absent co-founders started to display was a sense of: "Why are you asking me that? Isn't this [feature/decision/scope] too obvious for you?". Hey, it's not a matter of being obvious or not; but still current or valid according to project's timeframe. I can't even elaborate on the amount of energy we lost.
I don't really understand what your actually criticizing here. Are you upset that you aren't making enough at your current position? Are you upset that a group that specifically focuses on conducting user experience research is selling their results for a price that you don't want to pay for it? Do you not feel as though their work is valid enough to justify charging for it, even though they've been an established group within the field of user experience for years?
Thanks. I scan a ton of documents with my Fujitsu scanner, so that's particularly relevant to me.
Trace, an action sports monitor
Show HN: Track customer happiness across all aspects of your business
This blog posts offers absolutely nothing new relative to what was in Diogo's original post [0] and accompanying previous discussion [1]. In fact it offers less since it doesn't include the original scripts Diogo used.

I (and I'm sure many others) would love it if there were some way for moderators to aggregate all upvotes for related articles that don't offer substantial new information or commentary on the original article instead.

It's pretty clear that a lot of journalists troll HN and related sites, find human interest stories that strike a nerve with the HN community, then write a blog post rehashing the same content without really adding anything new. It's a simple recipe for getting karma and page views that cheapens the experience here on HN. This type of journalistic pablum should not be rewarded with karma or attention.

[0] https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161
The Life of a Last Minute Restaurant Reservation
Thank you for this! I read the entire article waiting for "Ok, so why do bots book all these restaurants. Be nice if the author had pointed out the economics behind it.
I am vegan and have been for about a year and a half. Animal products are not necessary for a healthy diet. That goes for adults and infants.

http://www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter/20070523.html Crown Shakur did die because he parents didn't supply him with adequate nutrition, but there's no reason he couldn't have gotten what he needed on a vegan diet.

Plenty of children are raised on a 100% vegan diet and thrive just like children fed with animal products.
Why? Shouldn't be about punishment so harsh that it becomes an effective deterrant, and thus protection for society against future crimes?
I think I've stated my opinions on this matter very clearly. I also think its pretty clear we don't agree on these issues.

You have a solid grasp of what is technically being done, though I think you are less alarmed at what's already taken place than you should be given this.

The NSA is completely out of control and in a position to blackmail anyone, cut off and control the entire worlds communications and subvert anything they want.

The NSA and the USG are simply telling everyone that we should trust them to be the good guy, just because. While the government has already proven they will torture abuse and murder people with impunity.

These two things are incongruous - we can't have a political system that is proven to abuse and one that claims to be the moral good guy.

No matter how much we attempt to self-delude.
You can't restrict based on IP address since there are scenarios where a group of machines will present the same IP address. It's also very hard to verify with other methods. They would have to take an approach similar to hotels or car rentals. Even then I don't think the problem is easily solved because if the demand is so great for these restaurants and the supply limited, charging or authorizing a payment ahead of time might not be much of a deterrent if the profits to be made are higher.
Great point. For context, I add locations as people request them to post gear (seems silly to turn lenders away). But that means that places like Paris have -one- item (https://www.cameralends.com/items/24mm-3-8-elmar -- in this case, one that's harder to categorize in my system).

Point is well taken -- I'll add a note to work on the experience for non-SF visitors.
You claimed he misread the story. He did not. The government is using illegal evidence as probable cause and then lying and saying something else is probable cause. That is, the real probable cause, the thing that actually turned them on to these suspects, is made "not public". It doesn't get much more "responsive" than that.

Yes, I see that you claim to not support the program. It's hard to tell with how vigorously you are defending indefensible aspects of the program and seem to support parts of it on legalistic grounds when the issues at stake are legal AND moral. You continue to parse the posted article in an odd way that gives huge benefits of the doubt to the government when it would appear to deserve none.
What about all the vegetables you're exploiting?
I just clicked it. It doesn't do anyt

NO CARRIER
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Rootkit+PLO+Chemical+weapon+Disaster+me...

Do ya feel lucky? Do ya?
This would seem relatively simple to fix: post the reservations at random times, cache the result page in mem-cache based on ip for 15 minutes.

Yes some may be able to use a few extra ips, but to win they would need access to thousands of them, which is far more difficult.
Looks cool! Congrats and good luck.

One issue - site doesn't appear to be rendering properly on an iPad (using Chrome as browser):

http://imgur.com/m6TvEt7

I suggest eschewing the whole responsive thing when it comes to tablets -- just get the desktop version rendering on a tablet and it'll look great.

Keep it up and keep us posted.
Many people feel uncomfortable having to talk to strangers on the phone. Plus the hassle of having to repeatedly spell out the details of your reservation when the person at the other end is in a busy and noisy restaurant.
Because it would be nice to not have to constantly hop to and from services as they die from lack of resources?

Because it would be nice to not have to periodically have to re-learn everything as the app you're familiar with dies and you have to switch to an unfamiliar one?

Because good software is worth something?
Show HN: A Node.js wrapper for the DuckDuckGo API
Some additional points:

- Be careful with companies that don't sell the API or SDK as a product (Twitter, Google, Faceboook, etc.)

- Watch out for companies that don't like to publish roadmaps and makes APIs and SDKs deprecated or obsolete with little warning (Apple, and more recently Microsoft)
It's a hassle because for popular restaurants it can either be a wait to get a hold of the maitre'd, and it's likely there are no reservations available in your parameters.

Which means calling a restaurant, waiting on hold, asking for your reservation, possibly not getting it, in which case you get to repeat the same for another restaurant.

For online systems the perk isn't really about not talking to a human, it's the ability to see availability at a glance so you only have to "call" once.

For not-insanely-busy restaurants where I know a seat is almost certainly available, I prefer calling. After all, their number is probably already in my address book, and making a phone call is a hell of a lot easier than diving through multiple pages on a shitty mobile browser.
So if he didn't own an SEO company, would this post have been acceptable?

I think the point is that if he wasn't an SEO maximizer, it would be worded and/or titled differently, perhaps more outwardly usefully. In other words, why does the number of tips or the likelihood that the reader is aware of them matter in a headline? Linkbait, there is no other explanation.
16 cool things you may not have known your CSS could do
What's more concerning is the amount of people choosing not to use parameterized queries with mysqli: https://github.com/search?q=extension%3Aphp+mysqli_query+%24...
Sure, it has to be processed, but you get an order of magnitude more food per acre when you remove the cow step. I wouldn't have expected processing to be the vast majority of the cost.
Google Beef. Is that what he calls it? 0_o
Good idea. What about ads/sponsorships on photo related forums/groups?
When you call, someone at the restaurant looks up the info on opentable (or whatever system is used) then tells you the result of that search. It's quite convenient to look up this info online and even change make changes like reservation times.
Because there are plenty of times when that would break things. Consider:

$table_name = $_GET['from'];
if (!in_array($table_name, $VALID_TABLES)) {
die('Invalid table name');
}
$set_to = (int)$_GET['set_to'];
mysql_query("INSERT INTO $table_name (value) " .
"VALUES ($set_to);

Quoting/escaping the table name in this case would break the code. (Backticks will work, but that's another story.) The variable has already been sanitized immediately before, so there's no injection possibility.

The case with $set_to is still pretty bad form, but it has been sanitized above by casting to an int.

Not saying this is great code, just pointing out the fact that there's no possible way to do a mass-commit fix.
I couldn't disagree more with this. Having to involve two actual people, who have to drop whatever else they're doing and complete a trivial transaction, which can probably only be done during business hours, is a problem just begging for a technological solution.

Anyway, they're just entering your details into a system not unlike OpenTable. Why serialize this process into a conversation over a phone line?
I think this is a symptom of the way kids have been raised in the last twenty years or so.

"Don't talk to strangers" extrapolates to letting mom and dad answer the phone. Plus, in the era of dial-up, nobody could use the phone while you were going on Neopets.

A surprisingly large subset of my peers (think Google, Facebook interns) are afraid of calling up a restaurant -- they have no idea what the social norms for using a telephone are because they've never been taught.
My thought is that the justice system should exist to make the country a better place. If criminals can be rehabilitated, they should be. If they can't, why are we keeping them alive for 50 years in a cage, raping people?

Prison isn't the solution to every criminal problem, and harsh prisons just seem to produce more harden criminals. I wish we got over our squeamishness for non-prison punishments. For example, the "nanny cam" robber in NJ had twelve prior convictions, including one for a similar crime. You should watch the video, but I warn you it is graphic[1]. What does he add to society by staying alive?

Is he going to turn his life around at the age of 42 and suddenly become a good father, an influential artist, or a visionary scientist? Or hell, even a guy with a steady job that doesn't commit gratuitous acts of violence against his fellow citizens? I fear no matter how far we lower the bar, this man will not pass it.

Maybe I'm naive, but I reread "The Diamond Age" recently and I had a lot of respect for the brand of justice dispensed by Judge Fang. For example, Judge Fang would probably not order the death penalty on criminals like this[2] (again, graphic video) because they are young and probably much more malleable. But they need a punishment that is strongly focused on rehabilitation. In our justice system they will be sent to a prison that will only harden their criminal tendencies.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU0EJS3cJIc

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y70tZDW2AqY
Fukushima radioactive water leak an 'emergency'
Security issues with cloud startup ProfitBricks
You are ready to start a revolutionary war on account of the speculation that tor is being sabotaged by USG?
Very cool! For what it's worth, my frustration with borrowlenses/lensrentals isn't their pricing, which seems reasonable, but their lack of selection -- I'd love to rent out film cameras like an old Leica or a Mamiya medium format, and no-one seems interested in letting me do that. Maybe this site could? What's the reason you've limited it to Canon/Nikon digital so far? Seems like this could be a real differentiator to get your brand out there. (Oh, there are more options for searching than header buttons for posting. Weird.)

As for getting more traffic, have you tried going where the photographers are, places like dpreview/500px/I don't know where else?

If you wanted to put all of your energy into this, you might consider buying some camera gear to rent out to seed the site with renters. That's a large commitment, though.
Just require a credit card to be used for the reservation, limit the number of reservation each cc can make and require it to be used to pay for the dinner - you can still reserve the seat and enjoy the food, but the resale value of the ticket is nothing.
The restaurant might not be open. Or I might be at work. Or it could just be a busy night, and I want to see what's available without having to make multiple calls.

On top of that, I get a record of the transaction via email. If I call instead, I just have to take it on faith that the other person didn't mistype the reservation details or forget to hit "save".
Some possible hassles could be: waiting until the restaurant is open so someone answers the phone, being put on hold while they help another, going round and round with person on phone trying to find an open slot that works, making sure they heard your name, number in party, etc correctly.