skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part is how business is done when you have a patent system in place.

It's hard to innovate when you're an investor, so those who do manage to sell in a certain market tend to milk their users instead of trying to get more customers. They don't really understand very well why people use IT products, so they tend to take no risks and lock in.

This could be solved like this:

* Be a company who doesn't lose lawsuits to patent trolls. I don't really know the details of that. I don't know how the justice system technically manage those things.

* Fix the patent system to have an healthier innovation landmark.

* Have a business model where companies who do innovate refuse to be bought, and only agree to do partnerships with other companies so to avoid the lock-in between giants. If you get bought by google or microsoft, it will indeed change how your product will end up being used or not. This solution is naive.
ArsTechnica has an interesting article [1] on efforts to recreate the F1 using intact engines and the original design documentation. Reading it, I was surprised how difficult this proved to be in practice, given the extensive information available.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-...
I expect Mark Karpeles to upvote this
> I worked at Apple, in that department

Please have the bridge delivered to my home between noon and six.

(Though, really, I should just accept this absurd statement, since it amounts to you admitting your own incompetence.)

> Stop trying to acquire internet points by being a jerk.

This from the guy who decided his scintillating contribution to the thread would be redundantly accusing people of "apologism" and "incompetence". You do understand the people who actually do work at Apple are human beings, and that you are flinging insults at them, right?
It's decryption of encrypted contents with a key that you're not meant to have access to, and with measures to try to prevent you from accessing the decoded video and audio on its way to the screen/speakers, despite the fact that the key is on your system and it's being played back via hardware that's physically under your control. It's a bit like trying to stop a sieve from leaking with your fingers.

The only way of making it sort-of, maybe achieve anything in software is through obscuring the key and decrypted data sufficiently to make it more effort than it is worth.

This means the DRM implementations are all closed source, and Linux ports are pretty much bottom of the priority list of any of the companies providing DRM solutions, not least because it gets massively harder to lock down access to the data on a system where tons of people know how to rebuild the kernel and modify drivers and otherwise try to intercept it.
Risky. MAC address tracking is definitely a legal 'grey area' at the moment. I can imagine mining/fingerprinting in this way could easily become illegal in the not-to-distant future.

In the UK, City of London already banned the wifi-enabled bins that were tracking MAC addresses.

It would be really easy to tie a name to MAC address (from point of purchase with a credit card), then see exactly where that person went via the 'sharing' of data with other retailers. This is certainly something you would expect to need 'opt in' to.
DRM is handing a ciphertext, a decryptor, and keys over to someone else and asking them to use it only in the way that you want them to use it. (It's not signed because nobody cares whether the information is authentic or not.)

Once you have bought into the rigmarole that this can somehow be effective, you have to test and support various platforms. Doing that for Windows is cost-effective, doing it for MacOS is less so, and doing it for anything smaller is not a money-making proposition.

Of course, if you could add 2 + 2 to get 4 in the first place, you would use an open standard and be able to sell your media to everyone.
Right, it's all based on this lack of configuration, and could be avoided by users. It's alternately amusing, annoying and irksome to me that the researchers propose to fix the situation with a "product that could be installed in wi-fi access points to prevent this kind of hijacking - without requiring the user to take responsibility".

That is the wrong approach. User education is hard, and lacks incentives for the gear makers, but adding new layers (maybe proprietary, maybe with vulnerabilities of their own) is the wrong approach. The autoconfiguration features on some routers are an example.

Equally bad is the "dumbing down" imperative that in recent years has made interfaces more opaque, restrictive and stupid. "Click this big, colorful icon and we'll do it all for you, so you don't have to think!" -- and then interface makers try to cope with users being more ignorant than ever -- failing to perceive the cause and effect relationship.

The right approach is giving controls for all the functionality, status displays to show what is happening, explaining in plain terms what each control is for, giving step by step instructions for the essentials, and making the default configuration safe. (In the case of a router, this would mean no WAN connection until you configure the device.)
Yep, special cases.

My comment about mounting network drives as local is that all of a sudden, a file move takes a non-trivial amount of time, and may even timeout. Opening a "Windows Explorer" type view and generating thumbnails becomes super expensive.

Naive software, in personal experience, doesn't even work well with modern multi-core, multi-cache CPUs. Even when it's multithreaded, if it wasn't designed with all this in mind, you're better off running multiple processes on a single machine, treating each core (or sometimes pair) as as separate computer.
Philosophy behind Undefined Behavior
They didn't really "ban" anything. They just instructed the company that was hosting them to stop doing so, in the face of a media shitstorm. And since that company was also a licensee of the City, they saw it fit to do as told. A shop owner in the City can still do as they like.

[source: I was doing other work for the bin company (renew) and saw the whole car crash from the inside]
Uber kept new drivers off the road to encourage surge pricing and increase fares
Your argument loses a lot of weight when you consider that since we're talking about stuff on the Internet, most of the examples in OP could just, y'know, link to it. But that wouldn't let them get ad revenue for someone else's work.
I disagree entirely!

Otherwise sheltered teens likely have at least enough family resources and support that a couple hours of supervised contact isn't going to turn them into rampaging criminals, and dealing with people who aren't on a track straight into college and then into elite employment will make them more grounded.
Not many, but in 360,000,000 there are probably a few.
The whole point is the customers in your store have nothing on there phones. Their device simply sucking down the MAC that is broadcast. They are going to get the unprotected MAC.
The reality would be that if people knew of the extreme threat to life which existed, they would look to leaders such as the President and NASA to show they valued that life.

While in a military command and control situation it 'makes sense' to say these people are already lost, we just abandon them and move on, that would not be acceptable to the general public as that's not how things are perceived.

Indeed, it would almost certainly destroy the ability of NASA to continue if they were seen to be so impotent and incapable of doing anything when things go wrong.

A dramatic, high risk rescue attempt would possibly be the only option, even if that itself ended in disaster and death of all involved (a real risk according to the theoretical plan).

I think the public would have been more at ease knowing that a real rescue attempt was made and that genuine heroes had made the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to save their colleages. People are all mushy and emotional like that.

Would it have made sense in terms of risk assessment, as a direct risk-reward evaluation ? Clearly not. But it's not always about that.

Besides, this is an alternative time-line scenario which never was. Those always have the benefit of working just like in feel-good Hollywood movies.
The last few routers I've used have an option for remote management, but that option is disabled by default, as it should be.
Good advice, but seems like a long way around saying "do everything in small, fast iterations, including research"...
You shouldn't be using OpenSSL unless you are an expert in crypto and software development. It's not easy to use and it shouldn't be.

I can't say those difficulties he had in using the library were put there on purpose to keep people like him out, but it seems to be a good effect here.
I've been into computers since I was 9 years old as well, and I was interested in anything electrical before that. My point is that most here (on HN at least) have started out early, running around bragging about is just silly in my opinion. It also is a bit discouraging for people who have not started out yet. I remember thinking I had to give programming up since I did not know that awesome language X at age Y. When I learnt some high-level concept people said learn C, when I learnt some low-level concept people said learn Haskell. Later in life I understood that I had actually achieved to learn many advanced concepts, which will be useful for my entire life. It just was disturbing to me personally (and I think many others) who had very low confidence back then.
Found a few more.
https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/69169/1625945/b216d7b8-56d...
https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/69169/1625938/a859fa70-56d...
https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241254/23bc3d0c-9c...
Teaching Teachers to Code in Just One Day
That article is 2.5 years old; Mono has gotten significantly better since Xamarin spun off from Novell, and much progress has been made in the last 18 months or so. It would be interesting to re-run those benchmarks with the latest version of Mono though.
White House Weighs Options for Revamping NSA Surveillance
The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought For $19 Billion
Announced here: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2014/02/mentoring-orga...

Direct Link: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/list/public/google/gs...
There is a quick back of the envelope calculation that we can do to understand this better.

The force due to drag on an object is described by the following equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation):

F = (1/2)p(v^2)(C_d)A

where p is the density of the fluid the object is moving in, v is the velocity of the object relative
to the fluid, C_d is the coefficient of drag and A the cross-sectional area. C_d is around 1 for most geometries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient).

In the CAID report, the dimensions of the foam is estimated to be 19x11.5x11.5 inches, which is roughly 0.5x0.3x0.15 meters. Assuming the foam fell with the smallest surface pointing down (a bad assumption), we can estimate A to be 0.045 m^2.

According to Wolfram Alpha, the density of air at 20km, the altitude at which the foam broke off, is 0.089 kg/m^3. The initial velocity of the foam was about 1568 mph which is around 700 m/s.

Plugging all of this in to the above equation gives:

F ~= 981 kg*m/s^2

The mass of the foam was estimated at 1.6 lbs, or around 0.7 kg, and using F=ma we can calculate the acceleration to be about 1400 m/s^2. The foam traveled for 0.16 seconds before striking the shuttle, and assuming that the above force was constant during that time (thus overestimating the change in velocity), that would result in a delta_v for the foam of 224 m/s, which is about 500 mph.

This is all assuming of course I didn't make some trivial mistake with the math, which I probably did.

It would be great if someone with more knowledge than me could chime in about drag near the speed of sound (or multiples of the speed of sound).
Dart Lang 1.2 Released
Well that is the capability of security cameras, loyalty cards, credit cards, scanning ID to get booze and a million other identification means. Unless you go to Starbucks wearing a ski-mask, a Faraday cage, and paying with cash you are possibly being tracked for marketing data. As much as I have an natural dislike against rampant corporate abuse, I am hard pressed to find a reason a privately owned merchant couldn't put one of these in their store. When I go to a hockey game I get my ticket checked, my ID checked, I have to empty my pockets, possibly even my bag, and I have to get scanned by a metal detector. But that is something I consent to so that I may go about enjoying the game. I feel as though eventually these types of Mac address scanners, loyalty cards, credit card tracking, and things of the like will just be terms that the stores set that we just sacrifice to be able to shop there. As for me I would just rather turn off my wifi and buy as much as I can off online stores.
As someone who collaborates with people in different time zones, I think it would be nice to have a physical version of this that could hang on the office wall.
"If you do not want this information reported, disable this package from the Metrics section of the Settings view"

https://github.com/atom/metrics
Nancy is indeed an excellent framework, I use it for practically every web project at my day job these days.
Not knowing what Watsi was, this is ridiculous. Finding out they're an organization that gets donations for medical treatments, being threatened by an insurance company? Beyond ridiculous.
At Bolt (https://bolt.co) we use Twilio for this, and I'm pretty sure WhatsApp does too along with other providers. With Twilio we also fall back to delivering access tokens with a phone call when the SMS fails.

(Full disclosure: I am a former Twilio employee.)
This is one of the points where British English and American English diverge. Candy in the US is the generic word with the identical meaning as what in the UK is just called "sweets". Same thing as trousers / pants, although not quite as amusing.
> Lets you create Groups. This sounds simple but imagine wanting to talk to your core family members in 1 text ? Whatsapp lets you do that with no pain.

That is the #1 feature for my family. I'm in the US, my sister is in India, and our parents travel all over the world. Nearly every day, we post something to our group chat. Be it photos, personal news updates, or questions to one another, we actively use it almost daily. I have an iPhone and I think they have Androids.
I'll bet this new empirical scientific result will make psychiatrists and psychologists abandon talk therapy and their questionable anti-depression drugs, right away, in the public interest. Let's all hold our breath for that outcome.

http://www.planet-science.com/media/24009/holding%20breath_9...
Sorry, I'm normally not one of those people who correct others on spelling/grammar, but this is a pet peeve of mine: it's "voila" (french), not "wala".
Counting elements with dictionary
We do store the email addresses an account sends so that we can show you a dashboard of the signups on your site. It's also on our roadmap to add a hashed endpoint.
I blame gremlins. I just squished a few of those myself. Great job on the site.
You went off on a pedantic tangent: from the perspective of anyone interested in using a payment system, the network they care about is the network of people who they can exchange things with. What you're talking about is like arguing that people use US currency because of the special paper used to print dollars – it's an important implementation detail but not something a normal user thinks much about.

Whether it's something like Bitcoin's distributed ledger, trusted third parties or a central record keeping system just isn't a detail the average user cares about as long as they can buy a cup of coffee when they want to. If something shiny comes along, the only questions will be “how much will it cost?” and “who accepts it?”

This brings up two areas where Bitcoin's system is a threat to its growth: the huge blockchain increasingly stymies mobile or poorly connected participants and the requirement that miners acknowledge transactions adds latency to the transaction time which will be a challenge for speed-oriented businesses.
Roslyn and the MS/Xamarin partnership suggest Mono will be benefiting in some big ways in the coming year.
The Microsoft deal closes, and the unwanted parts, especially Nokia X, are spun out as quickly as possible.
Nokia X is shut down immediately after the deal closes, the rest of the cleanup takes longer.
Satya Nadella is so put off by Nokia X he either pays the penalties to back out, or finds a way to claim Nokia has spoiled the deal and it cannot close as-is.
It's so awesome to see FreeBSD as the OS. Hard to learn in my opinion but worth it since it's so reliable.
Hey Sujan,

Thanks a lot for your feedback, and sorry for the crashes.

The UI bug will be fixed in the next update.

XTouch patent-pending Technology has been implemented and fully tested on the iOS platform.
The Deal on Being a Micro VC, with Jeff Clavier
It's only a matter of time. If BitCoin makes the legal transition from commodity to currency then FDIC regulations will apply.
I've talked to someone who runs an exit node. They not only have avoided hassle, but they run it via Amazon, which is supposedly against ToS. No issues so far.

Also, if people would like to help Tor but are afraid of running an exit node, Noisebridge (a hackerspace) runs a fucking giant exit node. Donating time or money to them would help.
> I work with folks who worked with Jobs and he was a major, active, creative contributor.

He contributed style and color choices to the designs of others. To quote you, "You're way, way oversimplifying things in an intellectually dishonest way."

> His role wasn't, as you say, to be handed products defined and designed by other people and figure out how to sell them.

No, he decided what color and shape the final product would have. But he could not create the technology, he could only change its external appearance.

> But I don't see why people work backwards from that and say he was only a brilliant marketer.

That's easy to answer -- name the product that Jobs designed, that someone else packaged for him.

Don't take my word for this -- read the Jobs biography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)), which ultimately agrees with my view, describes Jobs as a clinical narcissist, perpetually insecure about what he didn't know, and always on the creative sidelines trying to exaggerate his role in the final product.
http://nshipster.com/method-swizzling/
Phone signaling is also just making calls point to point. Very simple. Well except that making it not crash, making it scale, handling corner cases, legacy devices, regulatory stuff.

One can sort of take a high level look at a large class of system and just say "it sends messages from one part to another". A financial transaction sends one message from one account to another one. A lot of sites and businesses are "just" get data from database send to web page, then send updates back to the database. Pretty simple.

The devil is in the details and in the proof of work. If it is simple, ok, do it. Not being facetious, you might actually succeed. Just try it. Erlang is a good choice for it, start with that.
Was addressing the use of categories to override not method swizzling per se.

Oh, I read your link. So you add more behavior to it, not override it completely.
Big difference between a one-time invite cost and the cost of continually texting/messaging someone.
The Great TechCrunch Flappy Bird Hunt
compile roslyn to js. Don't really need server here do you?
An actually accurate Flappy Bird clone
There's a nice chart in the PDF that was leaked, which was later confirmed by him on IRC. It had BTC/fiat currency assets vs. holdings vs. debts, etc.:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...
Honestly, ActiveX/JApplet comparison seems pretty fair to me. I know you said Java, but still.
Bluetooth uses MAC addresses as well FYI.
Apple’s security vulnerability and Level’s first response
> First, flask was designed with a purpose. The creator makes it very clear "The “micro” in microframework means Flask aims to keep the core simple but extensible. Flask won’t make many decisions for you".

Yeah, well, it turns out that a lot of Flask users aren't looking for a "microframework" at all. They want something pluggable where they can build their own "full stack" out of different parts. Why else is there a huge ecosystem of Flask extensions for everything but the kitchen sink?
Plus the Japanese diet tastes better than a fish oil gel cap ... speaking of which, does this mean that the incidence of depression in Japan is low?
The whole world will learn to program--great! But the
cost to live in America just rises, and programmer/coder
wages will dwindle? It really bothers me when companies
that can afford to hire American programmers still go
overseas. I keep a mental list, and yes--I don't use
anything from MS unless it's free--and it better have a
low learning curve. So a big FY to the cheap outsoursers.
I agree, irregardless of the big picture, that is always sad on an individual level.

BTW I think the way to at least partially combat outsourcing in rich countries is through agreeing to work for lower wages (which would still be higher than national average, I'm not advocating becoming working poor). Arguably, that's what's already happening, and that's one of the reasons why programmers don't earn nearly as much as some of the other professionals.
Technology almost caught up with CSI.
> It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service.

I think this is the main problem with the space shuttle. They look good in a museum. They look good in a postcard. They have a mix of cutting edge, unproven, easy to break technology. They are a dead trap and explode in 1/50 launches.

According to Wikipedia the Soyuz have 4 dead astronauts, in 1700 launches. (No deads since 1971, and they change the model, so the new model perhaps is safer or perhaps they are lucky.) But they are "cheating", because most of the missions are unmanned. When they explode, usually nobody dies. The death rate is also approximately 1/50, But they only put humans when it's necessary.
> B) not respond at all, depending on how good the rest of your pitch was.

Why are you doing anything but this, in any situation? Delete/mark as spam, move on.
I believe that the reason they switched away from Erlang, though, was that nearly nobody in the company (besides the team that made the prototype) knew the language. In other words, they switched away because they had trouble integrating Erlang into their processes, and instead chose to rewrite it using tools everyone else was more familiar with.

This, then, is basically recreating the same problem they had before, just with 40 or so more engineers who are on the "Erlang" side of the vote.