skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of that corner-cutting is being alleged here. Nobody but FTDI has been complaining about the counterfeits. This has every indication of being more like a big pharmaceutical company complaining about generic drugs. If these clones are actually deficient in some way, then they're a much bigger problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
I proposed that Trulia integrate Walkscore almost 7 years ago. Feels good to know someone did it, though I hope it stays open
I expect the reason Google is doing this is to be able to control the rate at which they allow people onto the infrastructure behind the new service. Going from internal testing to everyone on the Web using a service can be pretty rough.

[Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to Inbox or Gmail]
I found http://peerjs.com/ really, really helpful when attempting a webRTC project. Like most people, I found the spec to be a lot of gibberish and even the majority of examples are hard to follow. PeerJS 'just works'.
The gimmick is not in his motivation for learning. It's in how this is presented and contextualised.

For further comparison, Kevin Rudd's Chinese-language interview for Mandarin News Australia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bro4mkb_VKc) and then-Taipei-mayor Ma Ying-jeou's English-language interview for Council on Foreign Relations (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80GysZ3sldM#t=10m). Both Kevin Rudd and Ma Ying-jeou display fluency and mastery of foreign language.

Even Kevin Rudd has to engage in the same ritual formalities: the denial that his 普通話得實在是太好的. (馬英九 is never subject to this.)

Thankfully, Rudd's interview moves past this, and we never have to hear him answer 你喜歡什麼中國菜? or 在工作之外你會有什麼活動?
"For many San Franciscans who have been displaced or are on the verge of losing their homes, there's pain and a sense of powerlessness."

When I recently visited the Bay Area for the first time, I spoke with a worker who was helping with the catering of one of the events I attended. I sat with him while he was on break, and getting a bite to eat. When I asked him about himself, the conversation quickly arrived at this topic of gentrification. This sense of powerlessness is exactly how he felt, but there was also resentment toward new inhabitants making enough to afford the high cost of living.

Tech companies and workers are not the only (nor the main) cause of this issue, yet they're likely receiving a higher fraction of the blame. Whether this resentment is justified or not, it doesn't seem to be getting better with time. The cold but logical advice to "just move somewhere more affordable." isn't an acceptable solution to many of those who were or will be displaced.

I don't want to move to the Bay Area and exacerbate the problem, but there are clearly some great benefits of basing a startup there. So it's a difficult choice. Hopefully VR or another technology will make remote work a better solution than relocation in the future. Also, a better way to quickly and affordably retrain and enter a new profession must be made available to displaced workers so automation can replace low-wage service industry jobs faster.
CocoaPods Commiter Coins
Another update: Microsoft had already been made aware of the issue, and were investigating. I've lodged a formal compliment over the way their security team responded to my report (once I found them). Prompt, helpful, efficient and reassuring.
Something that jumped at me in the beginning, about the soup kitchen line:

Some carry iPods and smartphones, others come in suits.

Am I wrong to assume that somebody that can afford a smartphone and accompanying plans (which are not that cheap) and other gadgets like iPod, which probably means they own a computer and a broadband internet connection too - usually aren't so poor that they would literally starve without a soup kitchen?
It allows landlords a way to go out of business without selling the property they own.

It's often used to evict tenants who live in units that are regulated.

SF requires a compensation of $5,153 to $18,000 per tenant evicted.

NYC requires that tenants not be evicted unless they have violated provisions of their lease. If the landlord wants a tenant to move out, they can _buy_ the tenant out, at a price the tenant agrees to. If they want to stop being a landlord, they have to sell the building to someone who is willing to be a landlord. This effectively prevents tenants from being screwed with their pants down by their landlords.

Occasionally an asshole landlord will go through one of their buildings while the tenants are away and, say, rip up all the floors. As a nasty way to try and get their tenants to move out so they can renovate and flip the building.

But those guys typically end up in jail.

The reason it tends to work out fine in other places, is because other places are sane about allowing developers to build new units. SF ... not so much.
Why not use keys?
Sounds like a great startup idea: End the San Francisco construction ban. Make a lot of money.

Everyone always says to look for pain points when creating your startup, this is a great example. Maybe it's overlooked because it's not internet/software related ;)
What about browser plugins and mobile?
Not much is, anymore.
A great many music products (compressors, amplifiers) still contain vacuum tubes.

Simply including a "tube" is often feature enough to help sales.
This is not a Show HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Serious slow clap appreciation for the TC article and this comment. Thank you.
I wrote my first IF this year using http://textadventures.co.uk/ although after a while I had to download the desktop client to make things work.
I think you're right historically, and people built up patterns from what used to be the case.

On Google or Bing now though, such a search just returns the forecast directly, without requiring a clickthrough.

I'd be surprised if weather.com or even wunderground aren't the first casualties of the trend towards smarter search engines.
Sounds to me very much like the Active Inbox plugin, which I've been using for a couple of years and proselytize mercilessly. It's based on the GTD way of doing things.
I think they're providing this so they can make money off the information they get about users and what services they authenticate with.

It makes no sense to use SMS for a login. We know it's not secure and we know it's both slow and unreliable. As an alternative, 3rd parties can already use e-mail authentication for free. Any username/email could normally be linked in an account profile to a phone number to authenticate with, so numbers shouldn't be required for the login part. But if they use a phone number, those are globally unique and tied to a real person, and it works for people who don't have data plans.

So 3rd parties get a universal login that doesn't require a password or a data plan, they get to avoid captchas, and they get the expensive SMS transport for free. The trade-off is they hand over to Twitter who all their users are, and their users might have to wait a while to login as they try and re-try to re-send the auth token.

Hopefully they'll still support you logging in with an e-mail instead of a phone number, so you can have more than one identity for any of the services you use to auth this way (including Twitter itself).
If one is using "communism" as in actual Communist theory, then "government-assembly-directed-communism" doesn't make sense either -- that's, in that framework, socialism, communism is what you get after the state withers away.

If you are using "communism" in the usual sense anti-Communist speakers due -- referring to government structure typical of authoritarian regimes that have espouse Communism as an ideology -- then distinguishing "government-assembly-directed communism" vs. "communism" still doesn't make sense, as all such "communism" is, necessarily, directed by a government assembly.

So I don't think "legislative communism" makes much sense in any case.
The same amount of effort as when lobbying for something they actually want. As I said above. See eg twitter for tax breaks, or the $16m google spent lobbying the US alone in 2013 [1]. Or the ceo going to council meetings and being actively involved. Or any of a dozen things you could think of yourself that would demonstrate google actually investing some effort into housing. Or transport.

But no -- your links show they sent a letter. You even found a second article mentioning what appears to be the same letter from David Radcliffe. You've searched the local mountain view papers and there's three whole mentions of google "working" for more housing dating all the way back to 2008... but they sent a letter. (Note they couldn't even be bothered to send someone representing the company to show up to testify at the meeting regarding their letter.)

They're working overtime on this.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002200...
That sounds pretty much like what I said: card inflation keeps people buying new cards. I was being a little cynical, but if they cop to it, then great.

I don't see it as a 'natural progression'. Its lazy; you can think of new cards without obsoleting old ones, but it takes effort. I know; we've got an edition and 3 expansions so far (500 cards) and they took a lot of work.

As for being around; I see people come into our local card shop for tournaments, but nobody is 'playing Magic' any more. There has to be a gimmick, like a contest or draft tournament or some such. The kids in my Scout Troop were crazy about it 10 years ago; now its dropped off the radar. So maybe its still around, but its 30 year olds with money that keep it going.
This doesn't really make it not spam. After a while, I do have to wonder why quite a few of my emails aren't just items in an RSS feed.
I find it difficult to believe the number of people who claim to be "just making a joke" were honestly doing just that, and had no offensive motives.

Isn't that the classic response to offense? "I was just kidding!"

I'm guessing these folks were in CYA mode when they responded to these surveys. "Oh shit, Facebook is going to discipline me if I tell them I was being mean on purpose!"
10  Articles on Running a Two-Sided Marketplace
I've been running a marketplace startup for 3 years, and these are the best articles I've read on the subject. Hope this compilation helps you!
Are you kidding me? People who are serious about music swear by an all-analog mastering process with tube amps. The even harmonics make for a warmer sound than the harsh odd harmonics of transistors.
Are you going to Microwave the bird with that?
Very interesting. I've been reading all about it: http://www.recursion.jp/avrcdc/driver.html
A veritable treasure trove! Some really beautiful craftsmanship and perseverance.

Also on the site; Dial-a-threat: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/word/ Shannon's Ultimate Machine: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ultimate/
Having to write custom driver-level code to repair something falls pretty well inside the accepted usage of "bricked". It's only marginally easier than just hooking up a JTAG interface.
As a man who doesn't drink I can't help but feel the problem here isn't drinking with the opposite sex but drinking as part of a business relationship (outside the Christmas party).

I don't think I would be particularly comfortable at such a meeting; If I did drink I'd not enjoy the act and quickly become introverted (I have a low tolerance, I'm not used to it). If I didn't drink I would feel I'm not committing to the social aspect of the meeting.

What's wrong with a working lunch?
They change the PID to zero, which means Windows won't associate it with FTDI or any other driver. You have to jump through some manual hoops to undo it, which is something most people can't do. So for all intents and purposes it is bricked, a.k.a "locked out".
"Without the GNU Public License, every single business making software would have had to re-invent the wheel from scratch. Imagine if every TV maker and router maker had to re-create busybox. It would have been way worse without GNU."

I think that's overstating the case.

Without the open source movement, there would still be components available for sale that people could build on. For example, over in relational database land, we would still have Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server -- the big high-end offerings. What we wouldn't have are PostgreSQL and MySQL, the free low-end offerings. MS Access, or something like it, just might be your best bet if your needs were modest but your wallet was light.

It would be a world where the components you use to build your system cost real money, and of course there would be fewer options overall.
I think I get your point, but for what it's worth the sysvinit cryptroot/crypttab setup has worked seamlessly for servers for years. Basically if keyscript fails (smart card not available or challenge material not available or TPM won't unseal) it falls back to ask pass on a TTY with the hopes that you can type something in.

I also do appreciate the systemd features for mobile and desktop devices.

But the sysvinit mechanisms aren't rendered completely irrelevant by systemd; the sheer stupid dumb luck of the the thing is actually deterministic and repeatable in my experience. systemd migrations have exposed hidden dependencies I hadn't previously had to worry about between services, which is good in one way, but not necessarily good in other ways (transient intermittent failures which never occurred under sysv).

Yes, it's unfair to blame systemd for poorly defined services - I do like the concept systemd is offering in that respect. But if I have servers in the rack which have smart cards in them that I know are always attached except for very rare events where a sysadmin will be dealing with things, I don't think there's harm in a 4-line shell script failing maybe once or twice in a server's lifetime if it means not having to maintain bespoke C programs for years and years
Interestingly, in the video linked above, I think the Japanese panelist is one of the more natural speakers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5na5nHZsww#t=16m15s
VinylPlayer App
What an incredibly disingenuous reply. Chrome is truly this decade's IE, and watching Google try to play this kind of crap off would be disappointing if it wasn't so insulting.

"There's no intent to exclude Firefox", it just turns out you've done that for like 2 major product releases in a row along with a giant flashing button suggesting that the user downloads Chrome. I'm not stupid, you don't have to lie to my face.
The problem is that on Windows you still need .inf file with correct VID/PID (this is the case for eg. MCP2200). So for typical user there is not much of an difference between CDC and proprietary driver.
For new startups? A cult (of personality or of the religious persuasion)? A warparty? A pirate crew? All are good options.
What are the best collegiate startups?
Any startup who has a founder still at school (undergrad/grad)

I'd really appreciate it if you could list a few startups/founders. (The founders can be out of school now)
The only reason you get any harmonics is if you drive them to nonlinear distortion though.

If you have enough headroom, you can get near-zero transistor distortion and then apply your tube modelling digitally.

Audiophiles are often stuck in the 1970's with this stuff.
Most HN'ers seem to agree it is OK for FTDI to prevent their own drivers from working with the fakes, right? The fact that there are no OTHER drivers that are compatible (no matter what the pid is) with the fakes isn't their problem, is it?
> people living 10 years longer on average could have a pretty devastating effect on a lot of things.

Could you say a bit more about what problems you foresee? Are you talking about over-population, because I don't think we are at all close to that point. Other than medical costs and systems built around an expected retirement age I don't see any problems.
If steps 2-4 are optional, then you're fine. Step 1 is reasonable. Not great, but ok. If $70K would make a difference for you, such as allowing you to bring a product to market, then it's worth considering.

If all steps are required (can be forced by the incubator), then say no.

[source: I used to run an incubator that I believe provides value]
Your absolutely right. The last 14 years of iPhones, Google Search, Gmail, Maps, Facebook, Social Networking, the very site you are using right now... can all be summed up by "a bunch of twenty-something hipsters from California high-fiving each other."
But if I shoot myself while driving in nails with the butt of a handgun, no one would blame the gun manufacturer.
Cool laser based audio visualization I hacked together for my Halloween party
> These are people who may not intend to actually live in the Bay Area, yet they buy up homes without even seeing them.

A higher property tax with a "homestead exemption", i.e. for those who live in the property they own, would serve to counter-act absentee owners.

As you sort of allude to, the tax structure and Prop 13 incentive is to buy and hold, regardless of occupancy.
What is the purpose of this website?
I have the old Google Apps Free edition and I apparently can't use Inbox, so there you go.
Do you have anything cite for this claim? All the research I'm aware of strongly suggests (1) It's extremely hard for adults to learn new languages - usually requiring many more hours compared to kids learning second language (2) Brain circuitry to hear, distinguish and pronounce new sounds effectively gets shutdown in older age.
It's definitely not toy stuff... CircleCI's front-end uses ClojureScript, and they recently put the repo up on GitHub for all to see (https://github.com/circleci/frontend).
There is already an instant chat solution with both desktop and mobile clients: Skype. Whatsapp is useless to me, and, I suspect, most people in the US. Out of ~1200 contacts in my phone, 11 are currently registered with Whatsapp. I suspect a desktop client would be useful in Europe, India, etc. but be prepared to spend some real money on internationalization.
I'm actually far from a libertarian. I want strong government regulation in many areas (finance, food, healthcare, etc.), a broad social safety net (which would ideally include government healthcare for all), and I'm willing to raise taxes to achieve all of those.

But we do live in a capitalist society. So we have to, well, live with it. And part of living with it is recognizing that private entities that do work we would typically consider for the greater good of society have to compete against entities that exist for their own benefit. The reason that they don't pay the execs at the Red Cross more is that the rate of $600k is arrived at through a combination of what they have to pay to get a good executive, what they can pay, and the pay cut the execs are willing to take to work at a non-profit with high social value.

My argument is that the pay they've arrived at balances all of those things, and if we tried to cap it, we could harm the mission. Your argument is that the pay they've arrived at feels wrong, and we should ignore the dynamics of the labor market for execs.
I'm designing an Arduino-compatible board[1] that supposed to have an FTDI chip for ease of design. This whole thing makes me reconsider it, what would be the best way to replace it some other solution? Do I have any real option if I want to stay within the Open Parts Library[2]?

[1]: https://www.hwtrek.com/product_preview/VTZUZV9k
[2]: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Open_parts_library
> Also a bit scary as it makes some previously impractical weapons more so (like the MASER).

Well, Raytheon has a crowd-control microwave gun already, but that's only available to very big buyers.
Some smartphones are under $200 with pay as you go plans. Also, it's getting harder to get a feature phone now. People keep them for years, for what could be < $0.30/day. Also, if it lets you search for jobs, schedule interviews, etc, it can be essential for getting your next job/interview (ditto the suit).

People make judgement calls about what they need, and a smartphone is probably just as essential to someone seeking employment in the city as a working car is for someone looking for a job in the suburbs. Even if you need to take it to the soup kitchen.
I personally seriously don't get it. I mean, the article describes a guy who is out of job, fails to find a job anywhere around after multiple attempts, but it still adamant on remaining in a city where, for example, I - being fully employed and pretty handsomely paid professional - would not live because prices there are freaking insane. Why? I'm not even saying move to Arizona desert or something - but even moving to San Jose - which is not exactly the middle of nowhere either - would be cheaper. And moving further from the epicenter of crazy would make it even better. I mean, I get it if you have to commute to a job, or want to keep close to an active job market. But for that poor person, there's no job market to talk about in SF. Why he insisted on staying in SF and spending all his savings on his landlord, and after getting that wonderful deal and losing all his money - still wanting more of it? Please explain it to me, I can't understand it. I, personally, wouldn't want to live in SF, for a number of reasons, but I get it when some people do. There's a lot of nice things in the city (not like a short BART ride wouldn't get you there... but I digress) but if it just doesn't make sense for you to live there and you can't afford any of the nice things anyway and it brings you only suffering - why?
The Bravo Audio V2 has been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for a while now.
No problem. Thanks for the reply.
I have a lot of international friends.
Ask HN: Who's doing some c64 stuff?
I don't know why people keep saying that this is very impressive unless he was learning Chinese as he was also running Facebook. His tones and grammar still need a good amount of work. I feel like I am not getting the impact since I go to a university were 15% (very rough estimate) of the student body take four years of Chinese in about 2 years (all languages are compressed to 2 years at Princeton).

edit: After reading more comments, I understand that it is rare, but I can't say it is a much more significant achievement than if he learned another language such as German or Arabic.
Also, Seattle Metro has buildable land much closer than Livermore, Brentwood, and Morgan Hill.
"Illegal" is an extremely broad and imprecise way to describe a physical object.

Imagine I buy a car from a dealership, and without my knowledge the dealer has swapped out the original radio for a cheap counterfeit. I guess technically you could argue that makes the car "illegal" but it would be absurd to suggest that the manufacturer has the right to come to my house and slash my tires.

As I see it, it's not about whether "fake chip users" are obeying the laws; the burden should be on FTDI to justify its willful property damage.
This was a POW, in case that wasn't clear to anyone else
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. - Nelson Mandela
For those interested in why there was fighting in the Dardanelles, read Guns of August by Barbera Tuchman. It covers the timeline from Serajevo to The Marne.

http://www.audible.com/pd/History/The-Guns-of-August-Audiobo...
Curious what you think of this chart of home prices showing Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco moving almost in lock step: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BolI6BiIMAAgpWT.png

To me it seems like this seem would to imply statewide factors exert more influence than local ones (tech jobs, city zoning, etc).
Check out FTDI's Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/FTDIChip/status/524928658180304896

They're being somewhat evasive, but it's clear that this is intended as a deliberate anti-counterfeiting strategy.