al1x

There is no reason whatsoever to switch from Java. Ignore this noise.

Why not scrape Alexa's list of the top 500? -- http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/News As a side note, not to ruin your party or anything, but over the years a handful of HN users have made news aggregators as side projects and none of them have really gone anywhere. You might want to think about putting your effort into something else. Google News is a pretty sweet product.

I wouldn't waste a minute of time writing a business plan. If you want to throw together a 1-pager, or a quick "Business Plan" .ppt presentation, sure. Nothing beats product and traction. For the record, I've contacted thousands of VC's, spoken to hundreds, and closed none of them over the past 4 years. I have only once been asked for a business plan, and of the rest every one of them asked to see a demo.

I found all of the available JS engines in Selenium to be insufficient for my purposes. None of them handled a wide range of javascript well and would often fail to execute it. I switched to PhantomJS and couldn't be happier.

Does anyone want to summarize this novel?

TL;DR: Science is sometimes confusing. So is religion. Therefore religion is no less invalid than science.

What is this doing here, danso?

The source you really want to use for nutrition information is the USDA National Nutrient Database.

See http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6359?fg=&man=&lfacet=... and http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/1866

I'm more curious about how they plan on monetizing "annotating stuff".

But that operation had also involved surgery on the girl’s esophagus, which never healed properly. She underwent another operation a month ago to correct the problem and died from complications arising from the second operation, said Dr. Mark J. Holterman, a pediatric surgeon at the hospital.

“The trachea was never a problem,” Dr. Macchiarini said Sunday.

NES Game Genie Technical Notes - http://tuxnes.sourceforge.net/gamegenie.html

Isn't this what Dwolla's currently doing?

Atlantis is significant because it's the first market of its kind to support Litecoin, a lesser-known scrypt-based bitcoin alternative.

I'd suggest creating a few accounts on elance and odesk and under-bid on as many small projects as you can. I say create a few accounts there because contractors there are limited to the number of bids they can make (per month, I think). I say under-bid because you're up against a slew of Asian developers, who charge $500 for a month's work. But do it. You'll be making real money, building a real resume, and gaining a ton of experience. Once you get a few projects under your belt there it's easy to land gigs. Just make sure you deliver as promised and get rated well and after 6 months you could continue using those sites to source projects, at whatever rate you chose.

"One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is that on some level, you’re only as good as your pitch."

On some level that may be true. I think the primary level though is that you're only as good as your product. Smart pitches alone get you nowhere. If you don't have a solid, functional product (and one that meets a true market need) the pitch is irrelevant. Nobody buys ideas. Good products sell themselves.

The article really doesn't do a good job of answering why was it developed. Why do we need feathercoin? It's a litecoin fork. What improvements does it offer? "4x more coins"? Ok, but how does that add value? I'm all for innovation, but feathercoin doesn't seem to be doing it.

Or break down and invest in a VMWare license, and run everything (_everything_) in a virtual machine.

Not to mention by the time you burned it it would be well out of date (security patches). If you're going to go that route you'd be better off buying a USB stick with a write-lock (Kanguru sells some).

2013 Darwin Awards nominee?

There are too many open source alternatives for me to consider paying for something like this. Plus, API's are risky to integrate -- you'll never be able to guarantee the 100% uptime that you get from using a library. Libraries don't go down.

Tom Lane is a great guy. He saved my tail a few months back on the postgresql mailing list when I was up against a real head-scratcher of a bug. It turned out to be a simple misconfiguration on my part, but he patiently walked me through the debugging process, even parsing my ktrace dump to diagnose the issue. My respect and many thanks to this guy. Congratulations to him on the transition.

> The takeaway, happy or not, is that most companies see no disclosure as the only right disclosure and will punish you beyond reason if you're even connected to something that hurts them a little - even if they're the ones who caused themselves the hurt.

But we don't know this is true for Apple because Weev didn't try to responsibly/ethically disclose his findings. He boasted about it on IRC and then to a reporter.

So maybe Apple would have sued him if he tried to bring it to their attention. Still, he could have disclosed it to them anonymously.

> Because the fastest way to guarantee this stops sooner than later is leak every address publicly with information about every error AT&T made and let civil suits from pissed-off customers fry them.

I don't know whether you're a programmer or not, but one thing you learn very quickly when you are one is that programmers are humans and humans make mistakes. Bugs happen all the time, and no one wants to be on the receiving end of some kid who finds ones and takes rubbing it in your face as his divine mandate. Dumping all the info you pull from a hack is neither responsible nor ethical. Doing so dons you with the blackest of hats and destroys your reputation to all except like-minded sociopaths.

> No, then it'd still be broken and nobody would know.

If it's broken and nobody knows, is it still broken? I do understand where you're coming from though.

I think a more rational takeaway would be responsible disclosure. That or avoiding these situation entirely by not meddling where you're not supposed to.

Interesting statistics.

I can agree with you that maybe a restorative justice-based system would work better. It would be interesting to see how that worked in practice. I've always thought the prison system was too easy and that prisoners should be put to work in factories and farms. However, I don't feel like using weev as the poster-child for the restorative justice agenda.

Well I'm with you on the restorative justice philosophy.

I am a thief. I relentless pirate movies, television shows, and music. I do so because I know my chances of getting caught are next to zero.

I'm sure there are some who think that way and by the numbers hobs references it's probably a large number. Maybe a restorative justice based system could change this? Either way, I don't feel like using weev as the poster-child for the restorative justice agenda.

> Is it really worth the cost of imprisoning people for non-violent crimes?

Are you suggesting they should go unpunished?

> It doesn't appear to deter people from committing crimes.

The suggestion that the threat of imprisonment does not act as a deterrent to criminal activity is absurd.

> It certainly doesn't help criminals rehabilitate and become productive members of society.

Do you really not see "I'm here because I screwed up. I probably should try to not screw up in the future." going through the mind of prisoners as they sit in their cells?

He's not being treated inhumanely, he's being punished for repeatedly trying to skirt the system. You put people in jail who break the rules of society. You put people in isolation who break the rules of the prison system. He can "fight the system" all he wants but I don't see any reason to shed tears over it each time he gets caught and punished. He's an adult acting like a child getting punished like an adult.

Trolls getting trolled. Why is this not hilarious?

I run FreeBSD and Postgres on ZFS. It's been an entirely painless experience. No pitfalls to look out for from where I sit. Your use-case and results may differ.

Interesting news, especially given their consideration of adding bitcoin support. That would be huge for the BTC!

I think this story is upvote-worthy however the paywall keeps me from doing so.