skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really needed. In New York, there is a problem of punk kids snatching iPhones and running. It is hard for the police to do anything about it, and these kids are fencing the phones for about $150, and they are likely shipped to out of the country where carrier blocks don't work.

For whatever reason, I have heard of a bunch of people that get their iPhones snatched, but never android phones.

The market for bad ESN phones is way too strong. A simple ebay search shows that bad a ESN iPhone 5 still fetches $250. Apple needs to drive down the value of bad ESN phones to near zero for the safety of their own customers.
Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into
everything. Trusted to run it all.

They say it got smart... A new order of intelligence.
Then it saw ALL people as a threat, not just the ones on
the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond:

Extermination.

There was a nuclear war... A few years from now... All
this... this whole place... everything... it's gone...

Just gone.

There were survivors... Here... there... Nobody even knew
who started it.

It was The Machines, Sarah.
Sure, that's entirely valid. However, would you be making the same point if the numbers were different? Fox News would be having a field day.

What about this jackass Armstrong's reasoning, in light of the current numbers? How about Papa John?
How can California do this? Interstate commerce clause and all that.
Impressive display of persistence, stringing together those vulnerabilities. I also see your English has gotten noticeably better :) Keep up the good work!
The measure of good HR should be a successful company.
No, but, they track acceptance % by drivers so a driver that is screening locations like that will put themselves at risk of being kicked off Uber. The expectation is that the acceptance % is very high and that once a fare is accepted it is 100% carried out. Also when they display a potential fare to a driver they only show an estimate of how far away it is in minutes and a very zoomed in map of the location so it is hard to even know where you are going to be headed exactly before you accept.
Bitcoin is not a stock, they are not comparable; stocks don't have the same growth curve as new technologies. Great opportunities are around all the time, but new technologies like Bitcoin are not.
But "reputation economy" means someone gets to be the guinea pig.
I've talked to a backend developer at Coinbase, he said their codebase is a mess and that he wouldn't hold any.

This, and a few other things I've witnessed firsthand makes me wonder if Y-Combinator doesn't need better technical intelligence or some form of auditing. It could be done in a non-intrusive spirit of openness. Basically position it as a "show and tell" focused on technical process. Just have companies show what they're proud of, and if they so choose, show what they're ashamed of/what extent of technical debt they're in.
Govind Tiwari
We can do that in the US too. I don't believe there is coöperation between international carriers, though.
Have you used the Tesla music system before? I use Slacker extensively in the car, and it's entirely skinned to match the car interface. I have no commercials or ads in my streams and the only branding is a small logo in the corner of the music display (which I don't have to have on screen to use). It's not an "app" in the typical sense, just a service that powers the music player.

I would expect it to operate much the same way with Rdio. You'd buy the ad-free plan ($9.99/mo vs $3.99/mo for Slacker) and get the same experience.
Electric Cars Will Help to Kill the Planet
https://stephenrees.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/electric-cars-w...

I am very in consent with the outrage that William Rees dares to disseminate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugv0OY6LyuE#t=450
They do make Windows Laptops. All you have to do is provide a copy of Windows.

That being said, few people would buy an Apple phone without getting the iOS.

Samsung has pretty much captured the market for Android phones for people who admire iPhone hardware, so Woz isn't completely misguided.

I just don't see the upside for Apple. Does he think Apple can gobble up the Android market with well-made, high-quality Android handsets? It's not worth using your resources to manufacture lower-margin equipment when it could be used to make/sell higher-margin equipment.
Not necessarily. NYC introduced medallions because a glut of taxis we're clogging vital infrastructure and nobody could make a profit, thus safety and maintenance were compromised. Capitalism does not produce the optimal outcome for consumers when externalities are not part of the equation.
I know it is not appropriate on HN but I can't resist: AUEHAUEHUAHEUAHEUHEUAHEUAHUEHAUEHUAHEUH WOW Apple! Such Apple... Many Apples...
You're probably right - I think that's more valuable to coordinate rather than a mandatory kill switch.
>On Friday, State Senator Mark Leno of California, a Democrat, is expected to introduce legislation requiring all smartphones and tablets sold in the state to include this kind of feature.

This should be a required option, even if it's opt out. The consumer should be able to turn off this kind of remote authorisation over their device, even if it reduces the "herd immunity".

Killing core functionality goes a step beyond IMEI blacklisting, which can be circumvented by selling the phone outside the blacklisted jurisdictions. An IMEI-blacklisted phone is a phone with a reduced market. An effectively "killed" phone is worth its recycling rebate.
> Maybe they're perfectly sociable but prefer to spend their free time with people of more diverse backgrounds and interests than other developers.

Specially when you have a good amount of subculture involving "star" in the name ..... Nothing against those ones, but the amount of time a reference is totally lost on me is staggering.
I'm with you on insurance and licensing, but "certified GPS billing" seems backward. Imagine the app is open source and people are not complaining about suspicious behaviour or billing patterns in the reputation ranking system -- why would this be necessary?
What is worse about performance reviews is the categories tend to change from year to year. Sometimes if not always the first time an employee is made aware of a category is when the review forms land on their desk. Its even worse for self review companies. Then you have those which declare all that "below expectations" ratings is the new normal as no one doesn't have an area they cannot improve.

All in all, what a great way to demoralize your people and what a rotten tool to give to groups of managers to take out their pettiness against those they dislike. Hint, groups are meaner that single reviews.
Introducing some consumer protection measures back into the Uber model may make sense, depending on how it is done. Writing into the law that the only way to ever provide any taxi service ever is exactly and only the exact way it is done today, by what today is de facto a cartel, does not make sense. Since this law is doing a bit of both, it's hard to give a snap summary of goodness or badness, but on the whole, I'd rather do nothing and wait a bit more for real problems to arise before I write into the legal code the impossibility of ever again innovating in the field of taxi-like transportation. (Especially with driverless cars metaphorically just around the corner. Whatever regulation may be desirable there, nobody's currently in a position to write it.)

It is not clear to me that Uber is a huge problem for anybody but an industry being disrupted yet, and that is not only not a crime, it's a feature of the system. (Feel free to correct me in replies, if you like; this is not a permanent state of mind. It really is not clear to me right now that Uber is a significant danger to anyone but existing taxi companies. I've heard a couple of anecdotes, but so far the taxi industry is well able to keep up with "anecdotes" of how they do bad things too, so calling it a "wash" would probably be doing the current incumbents a pretty big favor....)
This is a great idea if the user has, or can take, sole control over that switch.

If my phone must enable me to kill it remotely, neato. If anyone else will be able to kill it while I have it, that's terrible.
Why we built VelocityPage
All of the companies you listed already have licensing requirements.
I think the author's point is more along the lines of "don't offer ideas veiled as advice" and that advice is rooted in experience.
Allwinner shows off 8-core A80 SoC for the mid-range
Well yeah it takes a little longer because drivers aren't going to hang out in that neighborhood. You do eventually get picked up though. My experience in Baltimore with taxis is that no amount of calling will get them to come to a part of town they don't like. Nothing is going to change the fact that it is a crappy part of town but the difference between no pick-up ever and pick-up with a small glitch is huge for a lot of people living around those areas.
Ah right I hadn't seen this. From this line

"A nanoscopic progress bar. Featuring realistic trickle animations to convince your users that something is happening!"

You could do the same with progre(c)ss. And do it purely with CSS. Essentially that is what I am doing with the proge(c)ss bars on the page, I am using a keyframe animation and just setting different times on it.

Something like

@keyframes progress {
0% {width: 0%;}
100% {width: 100%;}
}

Then simply assign the animation to the :after element of a current progre(c)ss and there you have it without needing js.

Thanks for the heads up on nprogess, hadn't seen it before.
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About – Donald E. Knuth
> Thanks to @milesgrimshaw who inspired this reminder not to believe everything you read, even if there's seemingly cohoret data to support the argument.

I was reading the article thinking what crap this is, then came to the end. Well done.
CA can require that every phone sold in their state must have it. Since it's easier not to have multiple models, until another state makes it illegal to have it, the models sold in other state will have it by default.
I also wanted to say that I have worked with two Rails applications in that timeframe (2 weeks). One app being Rails 4 and the other Rails 3.

I delivered more than one feature, not sure how many, maybe 3 or 4 features, without knowing the codebase at all, and the applications were government related applications, so they were large applications.

I never worked with government applications before and that domain is new to me, I think I have a decent understanding of how Rails works so I'm not sure what the problem really was.

They blamed me for asking questions, I did a bit of pairing with some members of their team.

In the end, I was fired, and the excuse was that I wasn't productive, but how I'm going to be productive in a very short timeframe without them letting me learn about their application first?

It's tough.
1. I would still have to scroll down the (web) page and flip the (bubblin) pages. In any case, if I'm on a tablet, I would rather scroll through the book with my finger (like a web page) instead of flipping between pages.

2. Awesome. Search is one of the top reasons I prefer reading ebooks.

3. I was getting text cut off from the bottom of the page at larger text sizes. Firefox 26 on Ubuntu 13.10
A phone "killed" via service termination could just be given a different SIM.
Show HN: App for nonprofits, feedback appreciated
Wow, really clever stuff! Also of note is the $4,000 reward he received from GitHub's bounty program — their largest to date, according to the email.
I whole-heartedly agree.
I think that YC embraces technical debt. Exponential market growth means you can hire developers to re-write the problems in a couple years.
How about you argue the issue at hand on its own merits instead of introducing red herrings? Taxis aren't like nail care. In many cities, particularly Atlanta, they serve as an important extension of the public transportation network, and are core to tourism and commerce. Heck, taxis are the reason why bars in the city, most of which are accessible only by car, can even pretend that they don't cater mostly to people who drink then drive.

Taxi services aren't regulated for the sake of limiting competition. They are given a monopoly in return for agreeing to be regulated as quasi-extensions of cities' transportation infrastructures.
Choose OpenBSD for your Unix needs. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. The world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.

Also, http://puma.io/.
Certainty about what?
That was my first thought as well. The potential for abuse seems to be pretty high
Let's say your friend calls you and asks you how to generate a secure password. You say to your friend, "just slide your finger down the keyboard to get a bunch of letters. then capitalize 1 or 2 of them."

This is how it looks if I do this:

qasWdfghjzUkilo

Those 15 characters look pretty random.

Yet, if you KNEW a thousand people were following those instructions, then you could build a model of the actual entropy that goes into the password:
1) Where did they start and stop sliding their keyboard
2) What is their keyboard layout
3) Which is the FIRST letter they chose to capitalize?
4) Did they choose to capitalize a second letter, and if so which one?

The above is very low entropy. If a thousand people are following your instructions, you can guess one in WAY less time than brute-forcing 15 random letters.

The issue is that although the result LOOKS random, very low entropy is entering it - you can repeat the steps, if you know the algorithm.

Likewise, pseudorandom number generators take SPECIFIC steps (algorithmically.) If you know the "seed", such as the time-stamp, that they're initiated with, you can simply repeat the steps.

This is a huge vulnerability if the result is supposed to contain a high degree of entropy.

I've simplified a bit, of course. Good pseudorandom algorithms have very good, equal-looking distributions.

But make no mistake: at their heart they're just steps that anyone can follow along with, if they know the entropy entering the algorithm they can come up with the same result.
Oops, mistype. I realized that just didn't type it right. Thanks.
This is exactly why regulations exist. MtGox should need to register as a Money Service Business (MSB) in the US and as a Money Transmitter in each state that they support. That needs to happen even if they're not a US company. The same applies to the EU, Australia, Canada, and many other countries that have regulations around this kind of activity.

The purpose of the regulations are to protect consumers for companies that are either malicious or incompetent.

The problem is that the licensing process is expensive, painful, and long. There should be better ways. Nonetheless, there's a reason why the exist.
Here's how you target Mark Zuckerberg using the Facebook ad platform.
No, we have every right to decide for ourselves and our children here :)

(also, no phobia, but given your language, well -- disgust you back, to say so)
My protest at MtGox Offices – 5 to 7th February 2014, Tokyo, Japan.
> Someday large segments of the population are going to
> gladly submit some control of their mind to 3rd parties
> who know which programs and products are good for you, and
> which you are unauthorized to use.

This is already in place and has nothing to do with technology. Just observe carefully all the stuff people get offended about, or call racist, or call sexist—usually there is little to no thinking involved, just conditioned response, sometimes reaching absurdity (like insisting that black person from UK should be called african-american).
My impression is that in these cases people don't really have moral compass or deep understanding why something is right and something is wrong—this all was "outsourced" somewhere and all left are just learned reponses to stimuli, with extremely crude pattern recognition.
And yes, to some degree this applies to those inceasingly speaking about walled-gardens.
SEEKING FREELANCER - NYC/NJ/Remote - Free Music Archive freemusicarchive.org

WE ARE:

The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal MP3 downloads directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. We're one of the largest repositories of Creative Commons music on the web, and our curated approach means it's not just free music, it's good music. We're based out of WFMU's magic factory in Jersey City, NJ.

YOU ARE:

A skilled backend engineer, with solid background in modern languages and techniques. We're looking ideally some overlap with our stack which happens to be PHP/SQL, and for someone who doesn't mind working with legacy code. You'll have the chance to make valued, long-term strategic contributions to the project.

For more info, send a note to andrea -at- freemusicarchive.org
Consumer level 3D printing fits the description. The type of plastic fused deposition modeling machines (Makerbot, etc) that are common now all largely hail back to 2-3 open source designs, which they then tweaked and improved on. Hobbyists are still pushing a lot of the game forward with better software and interfaces, as well as ideas for improvements like heated build beds, etc. Knowledge is often shared on web forums and blogs.
> $4000 reward is OK.

$4000 !? Wow, I'd love to be able to make $4000 on the side just doing what I love.

> Interestingly, it would be even cheaper for them to buy like 4-5 hours of my consulting services at $400/hr = $1600.

This sounds like a pretty clever strategy for marketing yourself as an effective security consultant.

EDIT: $4000!? wow. so money. such big.
My Ideal Presentation Prep Process
How quickly do these 'punk kids' sell the phones on, though? And could a system to trigger the killswitch be responsive enough to trigger it before the phone's been sold? And if it were, could it ever hope to be sure of the facts in time to catch bad requests?
So I think the most up-voted response does a great job of explaining the "why it matters" part of the question, but he never really touched on the "whats the difference"... IE the fact the pseudo-random basically means generating statistically random data, using a deterministic process.
Please tell me where you work, so I can make sure to never work there.

One of the best ways for-profit, high-tech companies maintain profitability is to ensure that they have happy workers.

This is dumb, all-around: it doesn't save much cost, and it creates animosity.
Inside view on how Lego survided when 6 months from bankruptcy
The thing to remember about performance reviews (especially for technical people who's responsibilities don't change that much) is that your first one takes forever to write, but then you can copy-paste from year-to-year.
Also, the main point of this is just to make a super simple CSS implementation that requires little JS to work.

Because on the js side you are still having to call a start function and a done function and whatever else you need which is the same as being able to do this with just CSS and then just doing a one liner in js that sets the attribute or adds a class.

Also with progre(c)ss you are only needing one file and people can quite easily change the attribute without having to load in a js file.
Would you buy gas at a pump that was not certified? Do you check to see if your pump was certified when you get gas? Would the rank and file consumer verify the routing measurements of an app or even know how or have the tools to accurately do so?
Wow, I am shocked.
I just tried OsmAnd again when visiting FOSDEM and trying to save on my roaming plan, but Google Maps on Android was so much superior for me.

It's hard to search for a street.
It's harder to search for a Hotel
The overlays (maybe I could tweak them) showed me useless things and not even the central station.

I really tried to like it, but so far... not gonna happen.
Just to be clear, Doge tipping is mostly not happening on the blockchain. These transactions are only transacting on the chain when people cash in or out of a tipbot.
So Apple has the best HR?
According to his website, the minimum time you can buy services for is 8 hours so I'm not sure what he means here.
Ask HN: How would you make this 37Signals animation?
From what I understand, the mechanisms for this law are already in place and aren't much of a problem; any Apple customer already has this with the "Activation Lock" feature, and any carrier can already deny service based on a blacklisted ESN. The proposed law, at least in spirit, would require carriers and phone makers to honor your request to make your device unusable when you report it as stolen. It isn't so much that the government is going to be making technology and forcing everyone else to use it -- it'll let the private tech industry do whatever it needs to do to comply with the proposed "please brick my stolen phone" law.

I can understand how handset vendors other than Apple would have a problem with this. For example, where is the "activation lock" setting stored and who controls it? The handset vendor (Samsung, LG, etc)? Google (since it's an Android phone)? The carrier? Who deals with the customer when the device is stolen? That level of coordination would be a mess to deal with if you don't already control most of the stack and user experience like Apple does.

As a side note, Apple already does this with Mac hardware too: https://discussions.apple.com/message/19010713 .
The Computer as a Communication Device [1968]
Really drunk guy vs a wall
Feynman discusses this problem in his "Theory of Computation" book. If I remember correctly, its actually part of a joke he plays on the reader too. In one of the earlier chapters he brings up the problem and then assigns it to the reader as homework they should complete before moving on. I spent maybe a week or two on that problem, discussed it with coworkers... and we came up with nothing.

So I gave up and continued reading. Then somewhere in the 4th or 5th Chapter he says something like: Oh I hope you had fun with the Firing Squad Problem, I still work on it from time to time and hope to come up with a solution myself one day.

Facepalm.

Edit: Here is a link to the book, its enjoyable for experts and laymen alike.
http://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-On-Computation-Richar...
Not suggesting anything, but "your" might be the key here :-)
I'd like to do something like this for a future project and wanted to know a best place to start from.
8 hours at 400$/hour will still only be 3200$ and he can presumably spend the remaining 4-3 hours doing more security analysis with less overhead, so it might still be cheaper to hire him as a consultant.
How The Guardian Uses "Attention Analytics" To Track Rising Stories
Why Programming is Difficult
There's not much going on here. Look on meetup.com for a few things that might interest you.
Hey @oftenwrong we're head over heels to get search in place. Just finished setting up Thinking_Sphinx moments ago!

> Text-cut off from the bottom.

Have noted the issue. We will get it right on Ubuntu as well.
I'm pretty sure Egor's first language isn't English, so OK might mean 'meh it's alright' through to 'hey this is great'. I know a few non-native speakers who do similar things.
> Two weeks is still far, far too soon to be making any kind of decision like this.

Not in modern times, and apparently not for this employer. As I said, the OP is probably better off without this experience.