skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had my laptop stolen a few years ago. The police took the serial number and details, and added it to a list they circulated to second-hand/pawn shops; this is checked when big-ticket items are brought in. It was (apparently) also used for searching websites like Craigslist to look for distinguishing features in similar devices sold locally. Pretty cool overall.

So it works in this sense, and while I really like the idea you're talking about, I don't think it'll work for a few of reasons:

1. This is apparently already happening (albeit behind the scenes, and probably only in some areas)
2. It seems unlikely that the seller of a stolen device will be willing to allow you to check the serial number against a database.

OTOH if you do decide it's worth pursuing and you want some technical resource, hit me up :)
I hope you don't mind if I steal this text the next time I find myself in a similar internet situation.
Ask HN: Idea Sunday
First week of May edition.
Acun merak edilenleri anlattı
kimeralive.com offers private mail servers that are not accessible via non encrypted ports and require TLS :)
(disclaimer, I'm the CTO at Kimera)
The last 2 graphs look like they were drawn by someone who hates colour blind people.
Strange that this article was written in 2014, because Twitter already is a platform of the masses and it already is something which people use while watching TV. Seems like a prediction of the past to me. Using a hashtag isn't some amazingly complicated thing which only technical people know how to do.
I think there are two click mechanics going on -> visual and non visual. Depending on the level, not every click gives you visual feedback of the liquid decreasing, however, you get audio feedback for every click. Would be better if the clicks were always registered visually, though, and should be easy for the developer to implement.
I think it can work the other way round as well. No need to wait till your device gets stolen, log your details beforehand and in case you lose it just report it.

I understand that it becomes useful once we reach critical mass, but it has to start somewhere. We have to take charge and help each other and stop depending on authorities.
Was your laptop in Find My Mac?
Does the US want to get rid of its tourism? Because that's how it'll get rid of tourism.
Even though your statement is not necessarily true, I bought a Vaio T11 almost two years ago and I was able to upgrade the SSD (the laptop has the footprint of the 11" MacBook air) and I have a HDD (in addition to the SSD), that I can upgrade very easily, I also had a free SoDIMM slot and was able to double the ram from 4GB to 8GB. That's what I like about PCs. Here with the mac you only have one drive that you cannot change or upgrade and the ram is soldered.
>> "If we can tell ​a buyer​ somehow​ that the laptop he is about to buy is stolen, ​there is a high probability that he will not buy it."

I don't think this is true. People buying cheap laptops on the grey/black market care about 1 thing - price. Most know int he back of their minds there is something shady about the deal but it doesn't bother them enough to say no to a low price.
Matthew, thanks for your input. I definitely want to give it a try. Will shoot you a mail soon :)
I have the same problem here! I'm looking for a mentor as well. I think getting a mentor in the context of software development is n times harder than in others sector's I'm afraid. Best thing I can recommend you is to pair with people who are more experienced, and maybe in other projects. Maybe give http://agileventures.org/ | http://www.airpair.com/ | http://www.pairprogramwith.me/ a chance? hope it helps.
See my website that tracks price per TB of HDD and SSD:

http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
Unfortunately not! But I researched a lot after this incident and learned that most people who had 'Find My Mac' installed never found their device either. That's why I came up with this idea.
Simplest way to take card payments online?
I have been working on a few projects recently which are almost ready to start taking payments, but it seems that all payment gateways require a registered business for web payments - a lot of extra hassle/money/time. Are there any services which let you take card payments online as a sole trader or similar?
It's getting more and more common these days that whenever I talk to people about travel, the US is completely off their list. The TSA, NSA, NYPD, Bloods and Crips, the reasons go on.

It used to be that Disney Land was one of the reasons to go to America. More and more people I speak to who would have gone now say "meh" to the idea.
Whether something is in the back of your mind or in the front of your mind will affect one's decision-making. But I don't think that buyers will seek out this information as a rule.
The Valuation Trap
I agree that it's not easy to change people's mentality when they get a cheaper device. But if given a choice between a stolen laptop and a clean one, I'm sure many will opt for later. Also, I am not aiming for 100% success rate, even if we are able to help a few folks get their laptop back it will be our victory!
One could argue that jQuery, and other libraries shouldn't be included in the repository proper, instead it could be a submodule or included in a package manager manifest, such as bower.
The presence or absence of period is enough for Google Translate to create entirely different translations!

My link above doesn't have a period at the end. HackerNews cuts off the period from the end of the URL it seems.

So clicking on this link,

https://translate.google.com/#la/en/Duis%20gravida%20orci%20...

gives It's a child in a candy, but if you then manually add a period to the end of the sentence, you'll get, Designers in the film which, unlike in the United States.
Most police forces have some system like that, although it's primarily domestic. There are some cross-country collaboration going on though.

I used to work for a company that recycled used cell phones and as you might imagine, it's very tempting for crooks to try and float their stolen goods there. Because of this, all serial numbers (imei) were checked against a trans national registry (checkmend in the UK). But even though this is commonly known in the UK, and we even advertised it on site, then we would still regularly get stolen phones in.

I think the bigger problem is that most stolen goods are sold directly to the new "owners". In most cases they probably know (or at least suspect) that they are buying stolen goods. They just don't care. Unless you make it a risk for them to buy it (E.g. they knew the police would eventually trace the item and they would face charges of theft), it is not going to stop. People have shitty morals.
In many (most?) countries you can get a secondary passport that you can use with "unfriendly countries". You use that for one set of countries, and you use the primary one for USA and other countries that have poor relations with countries from the first set.
Famo.us took too long to develop and the window is now
closed shut, that is my prediction.

Famo.us is interesting and fun tech experiment, but it
will be the market development (lean) that decides, not
me. Famo.us are behind in the market and way slow
development velocity to pivot again.

I'm not going to make a prediction myself, since I have a dog in this fight, but you're just spreading FUD and Github can back me up on this. As of today, Sunday May, 4, 2014, GSAP JS libs [0] have 1265 stars and 226 forks, 1 open issue and 35 closed issues. The famous github repo [1], which has been publicly available for 3-4 weeks has 3229 stars, 404 forks, 38 open issues and 119 closed issues (main repo and submodules combined). That's hardly a textbook case of "window [of opportunity] is now closed shut". In fact, in light of this new evidence, you may want to re-evaluate if you are on the right side of the decision being made by the market. Being first doesn't matter. Google wasn't the first search engine, nor was Facebook the first social network. In fact the market is littered with the bodies of first movers.

And games won't be done in Famou.us either, it does not
work w/ models, or modelers, but a game engine like
http://typescript.away3d.com does.

FWIW, One of the main creators of [redacted quantity] top 40 highest grossing video games of all times is exploring famous for his next game.

Again, one of my questions still stands, have you even used famo.us? Yes or no?

Also, what do java swing apps have to do with famous and GSAP?

[0] https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS

[1] https://github.com/famous/famous
Attend Meetups and Conferences, meet people and share your thoughts with them. You can also join local groups. That's how you can pair up with people who are more experienced. You can even contribute to any open source project, learn from other collaborators and you will end up learning a lot.
I strongly disagree with the rationale for not supporting unsigned integer types by default. In fact, I think unsigned should be the default, and the advice on the Escher Technologies blog is harmful.

Other than that, Nimrod has been a pleasure to use. If you need a metaprogramming language to generate C, use Nimrod.
And some countries just stopped stamping passports, you'll just get a piece of paper you'll have to keep until you are leaving the country (Israel).
In case of cell phones, IMEI numbers are in place but there is nothing similar for laptops. That's why I came up with this.

And as I said earlier, I am not aiming for 100% success rate, even if we are able to help a few folks get their laptop back it will be our victory!
Thank you for these. I will definitely check them out.
I have down voted you by reflex because your message looks like spam (mail address, link etc ...).

You should read the comment part of the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), it will avoid you many down votes.
Good use of full disk encryption (or encryption of everything but the base bootable OS) and separation of systems (bitcoind on a separate server.) That's the way to do things! Good on them.
> You don't see Go jobs in the wild..

Do you fellas expect that to change over the next few years? I want to learn a new language, Go seems alluring, though I'd like to put myself on the right side of history.
Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is great for security
This is the first time I've heard of Nimrod and being an amateur C user these are the parts I don't like:

- No curly braces around anything.

- Whitespace seems to be important, just like python.

- Some nonsense about unsigned integers.

The best thing I saw was that it has C's explicit-size integers. The one thing I wish every C program would use rather than having configure guess which basic type it should use.
Another thing that interests me to solve this is via hardware. There are devices like Tile, Trackr available in the market but they are easily recognizable and thieves will detach them. Alternatives to that could be:

- A paper thin version of above mentioned devices that can be pasted on laptop OR
- Replacing a keyboard key with any of the above devices

The hardware will do two things: 1) It will tell the location of the device and 2) It will 'factory reset' the device so that the data doesn't fall into wrong hands.

What do you think?
Hacker News is horrible for archiving, though. The affordances work against a strong community memory, unless there's a secret 'best of' list I don't know about.
Actually we do design UI, every day. And there are plenty of ways to do this in a comfortable fashion without authorizing read access to the contents of every repository. You could for example, show a list of all repos and when you click to edit one for the first time ask for permissions once for that repository - hardly a UX nightmare?
every is the key word here.
Somewhat related, this puts me in mind of a project I helped with: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...
I had three concurrently valid passports at one time, partially because getting multiple entry visas sometimes requires having [a] passport couriered to the country in question and I didn't want to be unable to travel while my passport was in Abuja.

Using that to lie to consular authorities is really stupid though. I've travelled to Yemen and to other countries that are 'suspicious' and never had any problems, if I'd lied about it I would almost certainly have been picked up on it (come on, you don't think the US government has a database of people who've travelled to Yemen or Pakistan on most major airlines?) and would have had some very difficult questions to answer.
For what it's worth a gg-tends comparison between solr (the main ES competitor I know of) and ES itself.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=elasticsearch%2C%20so...

TLDR; they are roughly equal in popularity according to gg-tends, ES growing very fast.
Osxc – Simple configuration tool for OS X
Flask Web Development Book – 2014
That's correct. So, let's get further away from this cliff of not actually owning/controlling our property, not closer.

Edit: Down voting because you disagree? It's a problem that needs solving; I hope we can discuss it.
CubieTech Will Promote A80 High-performance Mini PC
Have you tried using it in production (for some value of "production")? I wrote a web API "Hello, world!" in Jester about half a year ago as a way to learn a little Nimrod and at first glance found it to be a nice web framework.

Looking at Nimrod's AST macros (which I haven't used) I imagine Julia as a closer competitor to it than Go. They both appear to come from a "programmable programming language" mindset, though Julia arguably more so because it's homoiconic.
Stamps on a passport is actually a pretty good example on what one would like to hide from the authorities even though he didn't do anything wrong. I say that as an answer to people like Eric Schmidt who say that if we have something to hide, we shouldn't have done it in the first place. Well, that would be true in a perfect world, but here we have a perfect example that it's not the case. So for this case, I would also advise having multiple passports.
In India, when you loose a phone, you buy a new one ... often a less costly one. No one ever even thinks of trying to find who stole the phone.
Looks really, really good. My Haskell app is just up to the point that search seems a logic next step and I will surely use ES and your lib for that.
You can go further and say that if the buyer knows it's stolen and asks for a lower price then suddenly stealing a laptop isn't worth it that much.
May the 4th Be With You: The Best Star Wars Games of All Time
I have lost or had a few things stolen. I'd rather would think of them as broken and let them go probably be more careful next time but without driving myself caremad. If your latop dropped in the water I bet you would be less disappointed than if someone nicked it. If you you can recover it, say for example laptop location showing to be located in a better area of town than it is worth locating and talking to the person, saying you would sumbit their identity to the police. Other than that it is better to let go of upset or it will ruin more of your life than the laptop is worth.

Database of stolen devices is a nice project and maybe can lead to recoverd things, particularly expensive ones, like my $5k camera. But in the end it will prolong grief people who lost their things to various situations. If you device is used for work it is best to insure it and back up regularly. Most pros that use their hardware for work insure their bits of stuff. However hardware is notoriously cheap nowadays even very good laptop costs around 2K, where I have spend 5k in year 2004 for similar setup relevant to the time I was buying it....
I think the project is not largely usable for now, I just want some feedback from HN to get it usable for everyone (and not just for me).
Functions have a sequence point that insists their arguments are evaluated before the function is called, but having both ThrowOnError objects constructed before calling any of the other functions would still satisfy that constraint.
I believe that kill switches. In my area at around year 2000, when 'dumbphones' were common but still rather pricey, theft or mugging of phones was a common crime. It dropped significantly overnight when IMEI blacklists were implemented and reported stolen phones wouldn't work on local networks. There were still some thefts of luxury phones, where it made sense to export them abroad, but it was a huge reduction.

Even if kill switches can be circumvented and phones can be sold for parts - it significantly reduces the incentive for someone to steal phones, as selling them is more effort and less money; such changes do affect behavior of criminals.
You can use the C wrappers in C++ code, of course, but it's often not very convenient. For example you normally have to call destructors of the objects created by the library with explicit calls to some C functions from the C wrappers API. By adding another layer of the C++ wrappers over the C wrappers you retain the ABI stability without the awkwardness of C style code in your C++ client code.
Irish websites offering jobs for programmers?
Guys, I've been using jobs.ie and irishjobs.ie but it seems that there are just a few offers for php developers which really seems to be weird.

Does anybody know some other websites worth checking out?
Bir haftada sevgili bulmanın yolları
IMHO I don't think the 'kill switch' agenda has that much to do with government access but more to do with increased sales of handsets.

Right now you can use various software to track down stolen devices, this leads to the owners to pursue the item and try to get back their property. While this method can be dangerous there 'could' be some type of support from law enforcement to help you acquire your stolen items. Instead they just "kill switch it" and now your item is useless to everyone, your only recourse now is to buy the item again.

This kill switch is really only good news for the companies that make these products.

One possible idea that might help is pooling fees similar to an insurance (lets say $20/item in advance or $50+ when stolen) and find private investigators that are willing to get it back for you. The PI will have the resources necessary to get the item back safely and you don't have to pay for a $400+ device.

What do you guys / gals think?
It pains me to say this, but when I was working with Oracle, its partitioning support was miles ahead of postgres (though not perfect by any stretch of the imagination).
- No curly braces around anything.

- Whitespace seems to be important, just like python.

That might be a 'bug' for you, but that's a feature for most. At least for Python, Yaml, Coffeescript, Jade, Stylus and Nimrod users :)
Fuck Work: Our Jobs Are Still Killing Us
Free hugs online
Show me a commercially viable, available, highly-sensitive touch screen (that responds to fingers) small enough to fit in your pocket (an environment with erroneous input) that is as responsive as the one of the first iPhone and that existed before the iPhone was revealed?

The only example, I've ever seen of a screen that could reliably do touch sliding with fingers (not just tapping or special stylus) is the Star7 demo device shown off by James Gosling in the 90s. That device was huge and never would fit in a pocket, and therefore had no issues with erroneous input when locked. A tap would have worked.

Apple literally invented the viable hardware tech that made sliding touch input a possibility, and for that they deserve a patent. There is some serious hardware innovation necessary to bring responsive capacitive to market. However, had such hardware been available at the time to all phone market participants, you would have seen more people arrive at the same obvious conclusion as slide to unlock. Apple only got the patent because they had a monopoly on the solution of the necessary hardware tech and kept it secret long enough to milk it for as many obvious interface/interaction patents as possible. No one else had even had a device like the iPhone to even encounter and try to solve the obvious problem of how to distinguish between erroneous input when the phone is in your pocket.

Please enlighten me on the distinction you're using for "mechanism" and "method".

It's very easy to claim hindsight bias, but you didn't even make an attempt to address any of my points explaining why this method is obvious across multitude of settings, including analogous ones that have yet to be invented, like my star trek door example. Maybe Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures has already filed a slide to unlock patent on those doors for whenever they are invented. Every lock in history is a state machine with position locked and unlocked. Almost everyone of those locks (because its preferred that locks generally are meant to stay locked and not accidentally unlocked) involve some method of moving from the state of locked to unlocked in a continuous motion, and almost all of them only respond to unlocking at the end of the range of that continuous motion. With that in mind, twisting/arcing and sliding are the obvious solutions to anyone with knowledge of locks, digital, physical or otherwise.
i think people are waiting on wayland to go public IMO.
A friend of mine said he would never visit Saudi Arabia because he could get jailed or killed for no reason or no fair trial. I told him thats my reason for not visiting USA, Bradley Manning among a list of many and Guantanamo.
I'm not referring to just private mail services, but rather if you can implore customer service to remotely administer you servers (even just rebooting) via email they should only act on crypto signed correspondence. Seems this would reduce the success of email social engineering as an attack vector. It might not make sense in all cases but if I am storing monetary value for others it would be a nice extra level to promote.
Show HN: My MVP Securegate – Reliable Two Factor Authentication via SMS
Wow, 8TB, that's a lot of girly pictures! For the same general use purposes, do SSDs put out significantly less heat versus HDDs and also burn less electricity, and enough so to, for example, help eliminate the need for fans?

For the typical consumer, not necessarily what to decide what to stuff into an HP 980, is it now clear that cost per byte is evening out and that soon the typical array of laptops in your local Best Buy including the cheaper of the lot will have SSDs?

Tl;dr, are hard drives being completely phased out faster and faster?
I really don't know why you are being down voted. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
Yeah, I know people who have "lost" their passport in between trips to Israel and to Arab countries. I guess it's worth the replacement fee to avoid potential problems.
meh, types give you enough documentation. once you play around with examples on README, reading type annotations (that are actually written manually as a form of documentation) of functions in https://github.com/bitemyapp/bloodhound/blob/master/Database... make sense.

examples could be moved over into modules.. but I much much prefer to have examples in one place that could be read like a gentle introduction and walkthrough of the library. Said that, additional module and function documentation could be useful, too. But not at all if the library maintainer just fills stuff in to generate fat haddock. Again, type annotation says much.

And, you're welcome to contribute documentation to the library.
Did you get your laptop back?
Already posted [0] and was killed [1].

I'd love to see this thread albeit less frequent (once or maybe twice in a month). Let people give crazy ideas, and let other be motivated to build maybe one of those. I found interesting and intellectually stimulating discussions happening around some of the ideas posted on these threads which IMO alighn with the core vision of HN.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693262

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693640
Earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693262

Last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601