skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting situation. Given that "drivers" for USB serial ports are now boiler plate, why not just have some Chinese company buy the USB VID code from the USB Consortium and then agree that everyone will make chips that export that?
Careful, it sounds like you're proposing a pay to win model. Maybe that's good financially, but it ruins the game. If "boosters" (sounds like cheats) are allowed, somehow compensate in game. Maybe by offering pure matches, or by giving the boost to both players (kinda defeats the point).

OTOH, perhaps I'm a strange minority, and these annoying, unbalancing devices are loved by many.

I'd certainly pay for ad free, even a buck or so s month (Google Play has subscriptions).
No, I read it as that he donates for himself, but if someone needs blood, and he allows it, they take from his pool reducing what is available for himself.
Considering that a company like Vistaprint will do you 100 cards for $9 or so you might as well go down that route even if you wind up with a bunch of leftovers. It doesn't get much cheaper than that.
Touche.

Maybe Google Outbox will end up being amazing.
They are building a new e-mail system - yet still nothing one end-to-end encryption?

Oh sure, I know they want to build the End-to-End plugin for Gmail (the service they are trying to make obsolete), which they know only a few people will use. But this is an opportunity to start from scratch with end-to-end security by default.
In case anyone else is confused: DFP = Decimal Floating Point, i.e. native base 10 arithmetics on the FPU.

Googling "DFP instructions" led me to nothing but DoubleClick links.
Good luck! If I dont misunderstand you, the only thing that you will do is make sport...that doesn't look enough, but if work for you, nice.
If you're arguing that Blackberry and Jolla are major players, then Microsoft are killing it. Since the sales of Blackberry and Jolla are rounding errors, though, I'd say that they aren't a good benchmark.
Read pretty much anything by Alfie Kohn.

The book he's best known for is http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Reward...
Show HN: Meteor Based Multiplayer Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
they announced this a few years ago.

it'd just a PDF with the no-print flag set.

unfortunately it means registering a whole new file type for the promise of a lack of functionality combined with increasing all your document file sizes by appending a huge WWF advert to the end of everything.

really quite a stupid idea.
If anyone is curious what a real vs fake FTDI chip looks like under the hood (de-capped chip) this is a great analysis and some beautiful pictures.

http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supere...

Exerpt:

"What's the economic reason of making software fake of well-known chip instead of making new one under your own name? This way they don't need to buy USB VID, sign drivers in Microsoft, no expenses on advertisement. This fake chip will be used right away in numerous mass-manufactured products. New chip will require designing new products (or revisions) - so sales ramp up will happen only 2-3 years later. Die manufacturing cost is roughly the same for both dies (~10-15 cents)."
Thanks, I already noticed that from the visitors conversion from HN.
Actually, social and search traffic converts better, but maybe it's just more target audience.
Slow shift among vendors in static application security tools
This is a very nice extension, I've been thinking about building the same thing for years and never got around to it so well done, and thanks for doing a very good job of it!

I'm thinking about using it for getting feedback on web applications I'm developing, it looks like Point would be the perfect tool for the job.

My only worry is that I have absolutely no idea where or how my data is held. Does the information I add to Point become public?

Other question, how do I turn off Point for a given site/page? As nice a tool as it is, I don't want it on constantly (e.g. comment box, highlights etc.).

Sorry if I'm missing something, I couldn't find any information on your website.

edit: wording, additional question
Reminds me of James Harrison: http://gizmodo.com/how-one-mans-blood-donations-saved-over-t...
Google has almost 1 million miles on the road with its self-driving cars. I would be shocked if they don't add or improve their mapping data with each mile those vehicles travel.
Neue Comics – A beautiful way to see next week's comics
Hi all,

Thought I'd share our latest project. Feedback and suggestions welcome!
Hi everyone, I'm Eric, another one of the Database Labs founders.

We asked for and received written confirmation from Digital Ocean on this question. Currently, all of their newer hardware uses full Battery Back Up (BBU) and RAID on all SSD arrays. Data centers where you are guaranteed to be on a box with their newer hardware are: NYC3, LON1, and AMS3. These locations are supported in the Database Labs interface.

Digital Ocean's other data centers have a mix of hardware. All hardware at a minimum has dual redundant power supplies and hardware RAID with SSD drives, however, not all hardware has a BBU on the RAID card. While it is extremely unlikely that there will be a full power outage that overlaps with a write time on a database, it is possible. We recommend, if this is a concern for anyone, that deployments be restricted to NYC3, LON1, and AMS3.

We will be monitoring this issue with Digital Ocean, and will let everyone know as more of their centers are guaranteed to be SSD + RAID + BBU.

Thanks for the suggestion of documenting this on the web site, we will be adding some information about this in the near future.
Angel – Open Sensor for Health, Fitness, and Research
Aw give 'em some credit, they basically just got too popular and hit a rate limit. Nice indeed.
Making alterations to someone else's property without their consent for the express purpose of rendering it non-functional is commonly called vandalism.
I find this choice of name particularly egregious. It's not just the existence of current projects [1] and common use in technology prior [2], but the source.

Twitter, being Twitter could call this whatever they wanted.

"Yolk" or whatever would make just as many front pages.

I don't see how "Fabric" can do anything but serve someone inside Twitter who likes the name while being inconvenient / irrelevant to everyone else.

1: http://www.fabfile.org/

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_fabric
Show HN: (INDIA) the Tourist Map of Pen Drives on Flipkart.com
Microsoft should revoke the driver's signature via their next CRL update, so that it refuses to install (effectively making the drivers unsigned). It is acting maliciously and will break consumer's hardware, even hardware which doesn't contain any FTDI chips.

If FTDI have an issue with a company ripping off their IP then go sue that company. But what they're doing is catching consumers in the firing line, who will wind up with multiple dead USB devices. There's no reasonable way a consumer can know they are buying something with a fake chip and this could kill devices years old, which will be outside of warranty.

I am totally serious that Microsoft should step in. FTDI's driver is so defective that it is literally killing hardware, if they won't step in for this then what will they step in for?
Google Accounts Now Support Security Keys
Depends on how it was to evolve.

Parallel boot, sure. But you can always drop runit or openrc or something similar on top and get it already.

socket based service start, (hardware) event based, pass.

Frankly the core of sysv, the init binary, does very little. It sets up virtual terminals and fires up one or more processes (that it will keep an eye on and maybe restart).

The latter processe(s), most commonly a shell script of some kind, are what do the actual starting of "services" and managing of runlevels etc.

This is a very flexible system, as most of the logic involved is easy to get at. It is housed in interpreted scripts rather than compiled C code.

you can even run the scripts directly in a root shell if you have the need to do so (or perform the scripted commands manually).

Basically the scripts do little more than what someone would do manually if they were presented with a bare shell after kernel boot.
I appreciate this guide, so thank you, Gary.

My own special snowflake story: I am an experienced solo developer interested in getting up to speed with modern version control. I like that Git is popular and I prefer to learn well-supported tools. But every time I approach learning Git for my own needs, I get stymied and confused.

- I don't work in teams with other developers. I have no need to share code with anybody.

- I am not concerned about data loss, per se, because the systems I build include their own custom automated backup solutions.

- I don't develop in a VM on my local machine; I develop on a remote dev machine which is an exact system replica of the remote live machine (minus the software under development).

So what do I want from Git -- or something like it?

I want a good way to manage pushing features from dev to live with granular control. I may be working on 3 features plus a batch of bugfixes on the dev machine. When 1 feature and some of the bugfixes are ready to go I want to be able to push them live without pushing incomplete features live; and of course, I want this all to be as frictionless as possible because I don't want to waste time monkeying around with my dev tools when I should be working on dev itself.

Gary's guide doesn't completely get me here, but it is a nice, accessible start. So many Git resources I have read immediately launch into how Git works under the hood. Guess what? I don't care! Would you teach someone how to drive a car by first explaining how combustion engines work?

Maybe Git isn't the best tool for me after all, but with Gary's guide at least I know what commands to run without filling my head with an engineer's treatise of its internal engineering.
Offering stock instead of money for goods and services to your friends is risky. If the stock becomes worthless (which is very common for startups), your friends may not be your friends anymore. Of course, that doesn't mean much for an investment as small as a $100 drafting table, but losing your life savings is devastating.
2 year sublease – 8,893 sf
And Fabric.js!

http://fabricjs.com/
Please read my post carefully. Right now yes, SpaceX is more qualified. That was not the case in 2008 when CRS contract for SpaceX and Orbital was awarded, both SpaceX track record and success rate were far inferior.
Here is an emulator of Alto Smalltalk-72 by Dan Ingalls, the original implementor.

http://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html

It says that it is emulating the Nova instruction set -
the Alto hardware manual at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/... says that the standard microcode on the Alto emulated the Nova.
This reminds me of the Sony music CDs that came with a rootkit to prevent theft of their IP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

There were lawsuits and Sony ended up having to distribute a removal tool.
Thanks! Glad you're liking it :)

As far as data and privacy, every article you share, and the comments you make are private to you and only the people you mention in the 'point'. So there's no sense of a public feed or public commentary.

Edit: that 'popular' tab you see in the dropdown is a bit fictitious for now, so nothing that you point will ever show up in there.

2nd Edit: Once you've pointed an article/site and have the comment box up, you can strip /#show-last-point from the URL to clear. We'll be adding a better way to hide or delete this soon.
And here I am with a Windows Phone.
Or allow for replacement A to be mixed with existing system B, rather than have the whole edifice torn down and rebuilt.
You could sum up the post dot-com startup craze with "a bunch of twenty-something hipsters from California high-fiving each other". Nothing more than an unparalleled amount of resources thrown at solving first world problems that millenials have.
ah, my approach has been anything in my inbox that is unread is either requiring of action on it, or unread.
It amounts to an admission they are bricking clones on purpose.
How are your personal property rights being violated? If an ATI graphics card lied and claimed to be an nVidia card and the drivers cause it to overheat and catch fire, who is at fault? Should you be required to QA your drivers against counterfeit products?

Edit: nobody has shown that the driver is intentionally writing the ID to 0, the counterfeit chip isn't even close to the same circuitry and could be screwing up a legitimate instruction.
Rain in Exactly 12 Minutes: How weather apps became the ultimate reality show
I think in Progress' 4GL, you basically had 'the power' to use ()'s to hint at your preference. I dunno though, been a looooong time (1989) since I wrote any Progress 4GL code. Been mostly a MySQL/PostgreSQL user since then, although I confess to being more inclined to NoSQL these days .. :)
Autism gender ratio is 5:1, actually. Presumably (given current definitions) that includes Asperger's as well.
I'm still on side with Neil Gaiman here. I read some totally inane non-literature as a kid. Still do, on occasion. Now literature is a major component of my life.

Do I think Percy Jackson is crap? Yes. Would I a tell a 7 year old not to read it? No way.
How Apple Pay security controls may mitigate payment card breaches
You may want to look at Factorie (https://github.com/factorie/factorie), that has a decent POS tagger and it's not crippled by the license. It also has dependency parsing which works reasonably well.
Great ideas. How did you prototype/demo them?
Does anyone know of good FTDI alternatives? Are there any clone makers that are relatively legit (i.e. they put their actual brand name on the chip, they support drivers, etc)? At $4.50 a pop for bog-standard bit-banging in a day and age where you can get ARM M4 SoCs for $2.75 a pop (n=1 prices) I would think FTDI would have more above-the-table competition than they do.

Is the subterfuge required for illegitimate cloning really that much easier than getting a website, writing docs, and supporting drivers?!
I have two groups of emails: "professional" and "online" ones. I'll "inbox 0" my "professional" emails, archiving, deleting, and snoozing emails. For my "online" emails, I don't do any management, it's just a giant inbox of every email I've received.

The advantage I find to archiving messages is just a slight psychological boost. When the inbox is empty, I know I have nothing to do. If I have <20 emails (I always try to keep these inboxes under 20), I can see everything I have to do. As I work my way through the list, it's obvious visual feedback that I'm making progress. Just little things that I feel slightly improve my experience.

Although this only works because I have my other massive "online" inbox :D
Well, to be fair, Progress has had traction in India as an application environment for decades now, so it only makes sense that there be an iCloud'ification of their whole product line - all the cool kids are doing it..
How about a third way? If you want to go on making mistakes, do so over there, and only bring it back here when you can prove that it will not blow up in our faces.
Google’s New Inbox by Gmail Can’t Handle Its Inbox
I don't think you quite understand just how important the ideological battle over software creation was back in the 80s and how that shaped the world we have today. There was no open source or free software movement and everybody seemed perfectly willing to let the business guys handle those difficult questions.

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.

Even though most of the companies that use GNU software rarely contribute back, the world is infinitely better for having it, and it wouldn't have ever existed if it weren't for Stallman's prescience in creating a way for software to remain free legally. That way did not exist before Stallman invented it and would probably still not exist today if he hadn't done the monumental work of inventing and evangelizing it. All open source licenses owe their very existence to the GPL.

Without Stallman, the idea of free software would have likely taken another fifty years to coalesce, if not longer. I'm not overstating his contributions to the world, if anything I'm understating it.
it's not as simple as that, the whole stack is GPL, mainly due to Standford's usage of GPL for all of their NLP.

GPL is a killer for any project that's not a toy or for school.
screwing over innocent consumers who buy a device

The consumer isn't exactly innocent.

Hold on, hear me out.

It's similar to black market goods. A consumer wants the lowest possible price. It turns out the goods he bought are stolen property. He didn't know, but he is not waived of responsibility. If he was truly unwitting he will not be prosecuted, but the goods will still be repossessed, etc.

Basically, it is the consumer's drive for the lowest price that creates the market for these illicit goods, so they are not blameless. Additionally, illicit supply chains are hard to attack and often times the consumer "really should have known better", so one of the ways to attack that supply chain is by slapping the hand of the consumer who patronized it, whether or not they actually meant to buy stolen goods.

It's hard to deal with the "Well it was cheap and he was shady but I just didn't ask too many questions" purchases; responsibility is very diffuse, with everyone doing their best to avoid responsibility.
depends what the valuation is based on. If the company is generating revenue in theory and to some degree of tax lawfulness the strike price should be related to the actual ultimate market value

even if it's not and depending on the type of grant the strike price matters quite a bit for tax purposes to the grantee.
SimpleKeychain: Use TouchID and Accesibility Options with Your Keychain Entries
Thanks! I built it as a .js webapp, added to the iphone homescreen.
Check out the source-code in the browser dev-tools!
Twitter: Digits
FT232 isn't very stable to begin with. CP210x is a much better alternative from my experience with FT232, PL2303 and CP210x.
Can't wait. Whatsapp 2.0
Wrote a quick summary of key points in the talk - it really shows what the "top VCs" are looking for, go big or go home:
https://www.facebook.com/johan.aardal/posts/1015274252107585...
Didn't see your post when I was posting mine, but anyway -- CP210x.
It's quite possibly a violation of U.S. Code 1030(a)(5)(A), a federal felony:

(5) (A) [Whoever] knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;

Now "protected computer" and the [ab]use of the Interstate Commerce Clause mean that the device with the FTDI would likely need to be connected to a network for this to apply. Plus I think they still need to show $5,000+ in damage, but it wouldn't be hard to reach that if the driver wrecked a prototype and delayed a product.
No, that's not the case here. Fake FTDI chips are going to be used in absolutely everything, products from Alibaba to name brand professional stuff. It's pretty much guaranteed not everybody has complete control of their semiconductor supply chain, and even if they do there's an incentive for all companies to cut costs where they can. A consumer buying a product doesn't make an informed decision about the type of serial interface in their devices, much less whether it's genuine or not. There's an expectation that the product will work and that falls on the manufacturer, who might not even be responsible either.
Marissa Mayer's Boring Plans for Yahoo
Read state shouldn't be overloaded with "still to ToDo", otherwise you don't really know how many ToDo items you have vs those you haven't triaged yet.
But a stolen good is entirely different from a lookalike good.

These chips didn't fall off the back of a truck. They were in most cases legitimately manufactured and sold to an informal spec.
You should look up the word 'intent' in law.
Wow, a lot of bitcoins flying around the bay area right now... is that all from Coinbase?
Is this the case with specific facial features? Facial features that are considered attractive in various ways seem to remain relatively consistent between times and cultures.
And MySQL Fabric:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-utilities/1.4/en/fabric.html
Which prove what kind of value? Oh wait, I know. Cats pictures and yet another chat app. #Sigh
I really hope that all these overpriced startups which provide zero value and plans for "ads revenue" get what they deserve, and then we'll speak about "value" at all.
This is one of those games that I used to play in study hall with a pen and paper. I'm not sure it translates very well to a digital format.
Sigh. Even the headline is a spoiler.
As mentioned in the eevblog forum, Microchip make the MCP2200 which is about $2 in single quantities. Seems similar in features to FT232 chips and reasonable in price.

http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/Devices.aspx?product=MC...
best argument to use seamonkey I've ever seen.
Been using for a while. Much faster than copy/past/email and I share articles without worrying about clogging inbox's.

Can't wait for mobile!
This is a bad article. I gives very few rules, and even less resources to find out more.
Video: we're fixing email because people send too much of it

Blog Post: email inbox@google.com to try it.

..I got a good chuckle.
Education startup seeking professor testers
Education startup seeking professors and TAs to beta test some in-classroom software.

We're focused on drastically improving the lecture experience. We hope ot be able to make it trivial to capture and share a lecture. If you're at all interested, e-mail presentious@gmail.com

Thanks,
The Presentious Team
http://presentio.us/
Most of my non-face to face communication is email. But I'm old, and I have old friends. My phone is mostly for listening to voicemail and letting the NSA know where I am. [Hi guys.]

If I could just get my sixteen year old to email me instead of text, I'd be very happy.
Do you know if it supports non-standard baud rates on OS X> (Maybe Linux too?)

I use FTDI because I can easily run comm ports at 3 Mbit/s. OSX (and I think Linux too) does support comm ports at non common baud rates. I'm looking for a way to add decently quick USB comms to a device without writing my own drivers. FTDI seems like the only option. Using HID is limited to 64KB/s.
And I'm totally fine with that, even though that also creates a bad UX, especially for users who previously had a working thing, updated their driver / software, and now have a broken thing.

Really hope everyone starts dumping FTDI and they end up in a class-action lawsuit. USB <-> serial converters are a commodity these days, regardless of what these goons think. If they can't compete in a free market, they should find something else to do or go out of business.
Great purchase. I've done a fair amount of looking at stuff on Redfin and then typing the address into Walkscore for more info. Can't wait until it is integrated.