skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. Other providers host and maintain the security of as-high-profile "targets".

More importantly you have to question how much of the security problem Mitnick poses in this? If he is part of the cause I think AT&T & HostedHere probably are reasonable to want to get rid of him

(btw I suspect the 8 numeral password is a pin number: similar to the ones handed out by banks for online logins. Could still be his fault it is out in the wild though)
A service provider whose top priority was security could have taken another approach to KM... using him like the canary in a mine shaft, an indicator of problems with their security system (allowing all-numerals password would be just one example of such a problem that ought to be fixed).
Perhaps, although I don't think that to be the case here.

For me, the _why persona was a little beacon that radiated the message: "you can make cool stuff and have fun regardless of your circumstances". That's a nice contrast to the dreariness of so much of the IT world on the one hand and the (often justified, but still depressing) rants about the evils of the IT world on the other hand.
Talk to us, and we can work something out @olark :-)
Assuming this is a scratch of his identity (and not a hack) I have a grudging respect for it.

Not because he killed all his sites and code but because that's possibly the last we will ever hear! Too often do high profile programmers have a "hissy", delete stuff and then a few hours later make loud proclamations about why they left and who was being a dick for XYZ reasons (and how it is their fault)

Kudos for having the balls to just switch off I suppose.

(on the subject of it being a "dickish" move; it's not one I agree with or one I would take BUT I suppose it's possible he reasoned that copies of his code are around and anything seriously useful would be recoverable. The damage isn't too great. But the statement of removing it all is huge. That's it - no more contact ever).

With nothing to maintain or a way to be contacted he can just get away from everything that was bothering him (and it is clear stuff was bothering him). Assuming his actions are not more drastic (I cant believe NO ONE knows enough about him to contact him in some way) than this then perhaps in 6 months, a year he might return and carry on :)

To paraphrase a great film - lets at least end it with hope;

Hope guides me, that is what gets me through the day and the night. The hope that after you're gone from my sight, it will not be the last time that I look upon you.

Hopefully he'll be back.
That's true. Sometimes it is, though, part of the lifestyle.

Also, people have more problems with losses than looking for more profits; and, food is much more "visible" spending than, say, insurance.

I mean, every time I go to a grocery and spend few euros, I "feel" this money. Even if my food budget is still smaller than my health insurance, accountant, rent etc.
I'd like some feedback on this to :-), it was a pretty touch decision to move from hab.la to olark.
I find Kevin Mitnick going to the authorities for protection a little bit weird. If your claim to fame is that you are the 'worlds baddest hacker' you take the script kiddies as going with the territory. It's like Billy the Kid complaining about the wanna-be's that want to meet him at noon on main street.

"The move by AT&T came this week after Mitnick hired a lawyer to complain that his privacy was being invaded by people posting Mitnick's account information in public hacking forums"

You need a lawyer to complain these days ?

Most other 'celebrities' have these issues but being a high profile hacker makes you a great target.

The best defence against this is don't get caught hacking... that way your privacy stays yours.

What Mitnick should do is give tit for tat, expose the identities of his attackers. For such a hotshot security consultant (all digits?) that should be a piece of cake, really.

That said, AT&T has no business cutting him off, rather the opposite, they should secure their systems and use the publicity surrounding this to brand themselves as the provider that is good enough to secure even Kevin Mitnicks account.
The World’s Best Web Designers Are Unknown
thanks for reminding me of that :D read it years ago at school and you inspired me to dig a copy out.
PureMVC
I would like fellow hackers' views on this.
I would retitle this to "Goodbye _why" so people don't get confused and think this is John Resig's eulogy to whytheluckystiff.
One man's "snark" is another man's ignorance. Do you have a logical argument, or is snark all you got?
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USSR, China etc have very strong property rights, property was very strickly enforced.
Interesting article, but the lack of subtlety in some parts made me cringe, e.g: "wanta be partners?".
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"The 20th century"
Should a free RSS Cloud replace Twitter?
The Problem with Prototypes (in Perl5 subroutines)
Freedom of speech in Europe is essentially dead as long as in the countries with royal houses you can't insult the royals and you can't state any falsehoods wrt to whatever happened in worldwar II.

I'm all for documenting and educating, not for outlawing stupidity, no matter how long your toes.

I think I'd rather have USA style free speech laws than the make-believe ones that we have here. You can keep the guns though.
If we take the case of the robot surgeon, then the person/institution who made the decision to use the robot would presumably be responsible (e.g. in this case, the hospital). The 'obligatory supervision' in this case would mean running regular tests, getting it repaired, etc...

I think in most cases we can come up with someone who is responsible for the robot. The person who owns it will generally be the person responsible but there will be exceptions (e.g. if I borrow your robot, break the "don't attack people" software and then use it).

If, after doing all the maintenance, the robot surgeon still kills someone, then you would need to investigate. Did something go wrong with the robot? If so, is this a defect in design that the manufacturers should have thought of? If so, blame them. If not, well, no one is to blame (unless it happens with the next model... where they should have learned from the past). I suspect we'd also end up seeing recalls of robots when flaws are detected, as we do with cars occasionally.
See related HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770072
Reversible Computing (2006)
You gotta give the guy credit for writing 3 whole pages without saying a single, solitary, concrete fact about what exactly the company does. It's almost like a challenge where he's daring the reader to figure it out.
Jesus, what's the big deal? Just go and talk to them. Don't give away any sensitive information, of course, but you can learn as much, if not more, in an informal chat, as they can. People really shouldn't be so afraid of talking to competitors.

Competitors are just other entrepreneurs who are trying to solve the same problem as you. You should be on good terms, not paranoid.
Low Light Becomes a Highlight
I'm with him right the way except where he dis's CC-NC-SA. Surely if someone from the copyfarleft community works on the project then they too will be releasing it free and so how is the work not endogenic. CC-NC-SA simply puts up a wall, that PD does not, to prevent exploitation from outside the sharealike community (to coin a term).

I can see that without [intellectual] property if we wish to enjoy artistic works we must establish a way of paying artists; the question is will we do any better than copyright?

It is only really the long terms [monopoly periods] that stop copyright from performing its duty to aid movement of creative works into the public domain AND allow ample time for artists to gain reward from that work.

Oh yeah and viva la revolution comrades.
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Court reporters hold a very responsible position in the courtroom. They transcribe every word that is spoken in the courtroom during the trial and produce transcripts of the proceedings of the entire case. One needs to be properly trained to fulfill their responsibilities well. To be a court reporter you should have your CCR (Certified Court Reporter) certificate which requires many of the other introductory certifications to achieve the best earning potential. There are number of institutions that offer court reporting training courses. It is normally a three year course.
Come on, they've got nothing on perl.
Also interesting, posts faved by _why:

http://favstar.fm/users/_why/faved_by
The name of the bot is fatalzircd according to the guy and they didnt censor that so its not all lost. After googling that name I found several forums and easily found one with a source code download.
Exactly. That's why it's a horrific waste of time.

The folks that don't "win" can't keep working on it, either; they'd be competing with someone who won.

The only useful judge is the market. Any committee of humans is notoriously myopic and prejudiced.
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Toyota, Hybrid Innovator, Holds Back in Race to Go Electric
"There are tons of competitors, and one of the larger ones just sent me an email saying they'd like to talk and see if there is a way to work together. I think what that means is I'm stealing sales and ranked #1 for the keyword they probably want. A VC firm that invested heavily in them also called a few months back and wants to talk (I said no thanks)."

Paranoid much ?

Really if every approach is rebuffed like that how will you respond to the one that would have lead to either some great deal or an exit ?

The success of your business depends in a large degree on your communication skills, if you behave like a hermit towards the groups that are the most likely sources of 'big deals' then you have to really consider the value of what you've just lost. Especially if you describe yourself as the smallest fish in the pond. They're approaching you, that means you hold the cards, theirs are on the table. Go there and listen.

Nobody ever died communicating with a competitor or one of their VCs, if your main worry is some silly keyword ranking (as if that's the only way to build a business) then simply don't give away anything related to that.
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You think? I can't say I really engage with either community, but purely as an outsider, it appears that anybody who has written any software in Ruby and published it ends up with a minor cult of celebrity, with legions of worshippers being sycophantic.

OK, I could be overstating it a little, but I reckon there are people in the Ruby community who could tell me what DHH had for breakfast.

Perl seems to focus its love and attention on Larry Wall himself, for the most part.
But the tone of this entire thread is suggesting that somebody who wrote a bit of Ruby code is some sort of creative visionary! He may be a very talented programmer, but let's keep things in proportion. This idea that someone can be a big star in the Ruby world for doing not-very-much is a bit bizarre to me.

I'm reading this as a complete outsider, and trying to find the source of this level of adulation is difficult at best. I assume it's a community-centric thing, where someone outside of the community wouldn't "get it". It all just seems so bizarrely self-congratulatory.

And what do you mean "regardless of your circumstances"? What do we know about his circumstances that would convey that message?
Hi, thanks for the comments. For example take the book 54 by Wu Ming, released under a NC license, because it is NC this prevents both Random House and the local Anarchist bookshop from havin free terms, Copyfarleft allows the bookshop to have free terms, but not Random House. That way the bookshop could independenlt manufacture and sell copyfarleft material without any violation, but Random House would need to negotiate a licence with the authors, exactly as they did for 54.
Nope. Try removing your SIM card and making a call.
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Actually, what sane person reads the sentance "The ability to control productive assets at a distance, the ability to ‘own’ something being put to productive use by another person that makes possible the subjugation of individuals and communities" without seeing how well this applies to the USSR, China, etc. Property is still just as much property when it is owned by the State, the King or The Corporation. It is important to understand the distinction between property and possesion. Proudhon: "I prove that those who do not possess to-day are proprietors by the same title as those who do possess; but, instead of inferring therefrom that property should be shared by all, I demand, in the name of general security, its entire abolition."
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the researcher suggested a TOR audio conference

Audio over TOR? I thought it was too slow for that.
Oh no! Now how will I break my trainees' brains by having them unravel Camping?!
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As a basis of comparison:

For $40/mo, you can get a 1.7GB server from EC2 with one year commitment or $31/mo with a 3 year commitment.

With the Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso), you can get a 1GB server for $44/mo or a 2GB server for $88/mo.

Likewise, a 7.5GB EC2 instance is now $161/mo with one year commitment and $125/mo with 3 year commitment.

Rackspace charges $350/mo at their 8GB level.

15GB EC2 - $322/mo 1-year; $250/mo 3-year.
15.5GB Rackspace - $700/mo.

So, that's a substantial savings over the provider most like EC2 - bandwidth a la carte, SLA, hourly pricing - if you're able to commit.

The sad part of this is that it only applies to newly purchased EC2 reserved instances. If you bought a reserved instance yesterday, you're in at the old pricing. And that's kind of crappy of Amazon. That's my hesitance in locking in for a 3-year term. As technology progresses, you're locked in. Granted, the rates are wonderful, but it would be nice if Amazon promised that we wouldn't get passed by on changes like this.
Additionally, working (and therefore staying up) late can be out of your control. If you have a job where you have "fire drills" with some frequency then your sleep early/wake up early schedule is going to be hard to maintain. However, if you have a sleep late/wake up late schedule then a last minute fire drill might cut into dinner, social life, etc... but its less likely to cut into sleep.
Ask HN: Any room in the startup world for an ideas man?
Is there any place in the world of startups and online businesses for an ideas man? I don't just mean scribbles on napkins, I mean well thought out and researched plans for online services, bundled with charismatic presentations and an analysis of the current market.

I am currently working on the skills I need to bring these ideas to life, but being realistic it will probably be some time before I can attempt even the most simple of them, with or without a partner.

Sitting on my laptop are about 15 of these ideas (plans, whatever you would like to call them), each one is the product of a lot of work and the source of much pride. It would upset me to see even one of these ideas, independently thought of by someone else, come to life as a profitable business. I ask you guys, what should I do with them? Let people read them on some sort of website? Try to market them to someone with the skills and resources to bring them into the world?

Honestly, is there anything I can do with them?
If you're happy doing what you're doing, why do you care what anyone here thinks?
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The FAA (and common sense) treats an autopilot as just a fancy interface to the actual control surfaces of the aircraft, meaning the pilot-in-command is still responsible.

Even on autopilot, I'm supposed to be monitoring the systems, keeping track of where we are, where we're headed, the weather, etc. If my autopilot sends me towards a mountain, it's on me (practically and legally) to fix it.
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The perils of becoming a cloud software developer
Indeed. I also liked the link to the Audion story that was in one of the comments. That was quite a sobering read.
Why does this community have a minor obsession with sleep? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity.
are you being intentionally obtuse? problems that only come about it situations involving you being rich are "nice problems to have" that's the point of the colloquialism. get your knickers untwisted.
>Try to market them to someone with the skills and resources to bring them into the world?

It really isn't the idea, but the execution that's essential.

There have been lots of ideas, which i thought were stupid and too simple to be profitable at that time. But i've seen them grow really popular and profitable.

So i guess you should find someone to work with you on those ideas, and hope for the best. It may turn out that some those ideas become successful, but there's a higher chance that none of them do.

Discuss those ideas on HN, and i'm sure you'll get lots of useful feedback.
Ask HN: Copyright/IP Question
I've been asked this question by another person (so sorry if the details are a bit wrong) but have no real expertise there. Hopefully someone here can shed some light.

Hypothetically we have 2 companies competing in an indentical field: basically the 2 leading companies.

Now, the problem is company B has products matching company A in features and functionality. Company B waits for an A Product to launch then launches a competing product of this form (I think that is how it has been described to me).

How close does the product have to match (assuming no patent infringement, no code theft and no industrial espionage for the time being) before some sort of legal line is crossed?

Personally I am of the inclination that even if they directly reproduce a program identical in features there is not a lot comapny A can do? Or am I wrong?
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because a lot of programmers are the type who reject their natural sleep rhythm any time it becomes an inconvenience to getting work done. since this is fairly often (lots of articles have been written on why people doing creative work stay up late, won't rehash here) they wind up with chronic sleep problems when others demand that they conform to a schedule (read: the rest of the world).

my take: One of my MAIN goals for making a lot of money is to get to the point where I can just sleep whenever I feel like sleeping.
But many of those ideas are half baked :D it sounds like this guy has got some serious plans/ideas laid down.

That kind of stuff can go far in the right hands.

@OP: How protective are you over the ideas? Posting them to HN will probably find someone to build them. The risk being you might be bypassed in that process. Is there a way to give your knowledge / plan enough value that a would be "builder" wants to work with you?
Ask HN: Patents.  Disclosure.  Investors?
My startup has been approached by a management consultant who wants to take us through an angel funding round. (Hi consultant, if you're watching!)

In our meeting, he implored us to get patent protection ASAP, and to put all marketing, PR and sales plans on hold while we sort out patents.

We weren't planning on taking investment yet (if at all) - we've got a clear path to revenue, and our plan has always been to get the revenue up before we try to leverage.

Our product is virtually finished, and we were about to start sales and marketing literally this week. In fact, we'd already had an overseas distributor seek us out, who we've had to put on hold.

I'm having difficulty working out if we've been given good advice. Are patents THAT essential that we should put everything on hold until we've spent months of our runway with a patent attourney? Is limiting the scope of our patentability (by disclosure through our marketing) going to materially affect any valuation?
Meanwhile, WA's traffic has stabilized at pre-release levels:
http://alexa.com/siteinfo/wolframalpha.com

I think the best measure of disappointment for a web site is current traffic to release-day traffic ratio. It is huge for WalframAlpha.
The next stage in Troll evolution: from polluting other people's discussions to creating negative meme's.
Funny how the 3rd biggest mistake that kills startups is targeting a marginal niche (http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html). I know the key is whether its marginal or not. Still funny.
In my opinion, ideas bred in isolation usually need a lot more work, polishing up to actually bring them to fruition.

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
-Howard Aiken (i think!)
You're grossly over-simplifying this man's life. Personally, I'm not a part of the Ruby community, nor do I write any apprecible quantity of Ruby code. However, _why's ability to code, write, draw, and generally produce art greatly inspired me. I hope some effort goes toward collecting his works so that you too can be inspired.
I would deeply love to know the answer to that question. And why do I feel so angry about thing like that?
If a management consultant is approaching you he should work on no-cure-no-pay and non-exclusive basis.

If you do not take that approach he will hold you over a barrel, all he has to do is to get you to sign a contract that will allow him to either wait until somebody else approaches you and he can claim his fee based on exclusivity.

Otherwise he's just trying to get you to cough up.

His only renumeration should be a success fee paid from any investment he comes up with (and it should be a percentage with a capped $ amount).

This is a common tactic, trawl the web for promising new ventures with 'green' management, get them to agree to some contract and then sit back and do nothing. Or pass you some lame leads to prove that they're 'working hard'.

Management consultants on the prowl are the ambulance chasers of venture capital.

I'll bet you he can get you a nice deal on those patents as well (referral fee for him from the patent attorney that he's pushing).

These guys are mostly full of shit, talk to them, listen politely, learn as much as you can by pumping them, don't get pumped yourself, don't agree to anything and show them the door.
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Thats really my problem isn't it - I bring nothing to the table once someone has the plans. I'm a little protective, but I could cope with letting one or two go I suppose. I have only really shared them with non-tech people or my tech friends that are far too lazy or otherwise oriented to ever do anything with them.