skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No original content. Why not link to the original source? http://consortiumnews.com/2010/010510c.html

By the way: Bruce Schneier's whole frontpage is maybe 5% own writing.
Mac OS X native GUIs using Clozure Common Lisp [pdf]
> pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a
> short list of people whose comments he tends to
> find interesting ...

Really? I didn't know. Do you have a reference?

> It also might've been better handled by a short
> email to him.

To be honest, I never actually thought of that.
Oink.cd founder Alan Ellis cleared of fraud charges
There is no shortage of karma-free forums elsewhere full of flames and junk. The karma system is helpful in providing feedback to people with a lack of impulse control or respects for others. If you're repeatedly banned, you may want to examine how you communicate as doing so would probably increase your ability to affect change.
Apple has hired a banker from Goldman Sachs. Eyeing Acquisitions?
Scammers don't typically unfollow people who are following them, since it increases the likelihood of those people noticing and unfollowing back. They want you to stick around and learn how to get rock-hard abs in your sleep with a patch.

Twitter accounts are blocked from following too many people if they have a high follower-to-following ratio, so in order to have a large audience, you have to keep this ratio closer to 1.

An 'internet marketer' will follow many people in an automated fashion. Some will follow them back - either automatically, or because the scammer is convincingly faking a real person. The ones that don't follow them back are useless to the scammer. He therefore needs to unfollow them - so he can drop his following-to-followed ratio and begin the cycle again. SocialToo (and many other tools) help with this by automating the unfollowing part of the process.

Promoting scammy affiliate offers through Twitter only scales to an interesting point through automation, so if you break the automation, you break the process. That's what I assume Twitter is doing. The scammers will eventually replace API-based methods with screen-scraping bots, which is what they use for other social sites around the web.
I imagine most of the staff. Google makes sure all of their software works in most of the popular browsers.
What's the big deal with sending passwords in the clear? Your network security is not an application's problem. I understand the big concern with the Chinese firewall, but really, obfuscating credentials to non-essential services is just not the biggest problem with it.

If an attacker is already on your network, i.e. sniffing your traffic, you have far bigger issues than passwords in the clear. They don't need your password. They can already read the data just fine without logging in.

Everyone is screaming HTTPS, but to be honest, that does not make you any safer these days. Check out SSLStrip and null prefix attacks on SSL certificates. Now think about what would happen if the government did that. Now then, is SSL still a solution to this problem? No.
I see - though the main problem seems to be automated following, not unfollowing? Or Twitter should just find a better way to filter than follower-to-following ratio.
Common Practices To Increase Returning Visitors
It depends who their friends in high places are.
Does grooveshark pay royalties to companies other than EMI? From poking around their website, it looks as though a few college friends got together and decided to make a business out of blatantly ignoring music copyrights.

I'm sorry, I hate the RIAA as much as anybody else, but I have a tought time feeling bad for grooveshark.
Contacting site owners directly is another method of getting inbound links. This will have a lower chance of success in most cases but it is usually worth trying.

I hate those people. If I want to link to someone's site, I will. I'm not going to do it as some sort of trade to try to game Google, though. Linking to me might make me aware of you, but spamming me just makes the world a little bit worse. Ditto for shoving ads into my mailbox, affixing them to my bike or SEOing the heck out of mediocre content that most searchers don't want to see in the first page of results.
Great post full of references, and more importantly, brief explanations of why each ref is useful.
The botnet ecosystem
Well done, david927! insightful, amusing, witty, not about daily mundanities, less than 140 characters: would make a great tweet.
Agreed. Graph theory, set theory and statistics are all great tools for a web developers belt.
You have to think of the goals of the desired user versus somebody trying to game the system. Twitter apparently wants users to not just think about building follower count.

Why would a casual user ever want to unfollow somebody just because that person has stopped following? The only possible reason is to use that now vacant follow on somebody who's more likely to follow them back, which is the exact strategy of scammers taken to an extreme level.

Incidentally, if Twitter really didn't want people trying to game the system, they probably shouldn't have made the system so much like a game.
This has to be one of the best exchanges I have ever seen. I don't think I have laughed that hard in quite a long time.
Really crazy Cube Illusion (video)
I must be missing something here. Using e.g. Mercurial, I would start my refactoring and commit often. If a test fails at the end and I can't see why then just update to the version before the refactoring (assuming I hadn't ever ran tests in the mean time), run the test, if it passes update to the next revision and so on. I would expect this to take seconds or minutes to isolate. What kind of revisions system is he using that this even comes up?
For those looking for actual economic policy history and statistics, I suggest Barry Naughton's excellent "The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth" http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Economy-Transitions-Growth/dp/...

It's a textbook, but extremely readable and full of interesting history, as well as modern stats and tables.
Actually both. Some of the HR people were pretty irresponsive to emails. Also the interview was a joke- an 8th grader would have no problems answering the questions. I gave them this feedback so I hope they have improved since.
The vulnerability was in IE 6, 7, and 8.

"Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, and Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 on supported editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected."

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/979352.ms...
Why don't we teach project management to school kids?
Kodak sues Apple, RIM
There is a history at HN of people who encountered problems emailing PG and having the problem solved.
I was not arguing that programming is all there is to Computer Science (which is why I said I understood the point Dijkstra was making with his astronomy quote). However, I disagree with the notion that programming is "a very small subset" of Computer Science -- even though I think Dijkstra would probably agree with you on that. I think programming is a large subset of Computer Science. Yeah, there's a lot more to it than that, but in my book the practical side of things is more important than Dijkstra seemed to think it was.

He was obviously brilliant and very perceptive with regard to many things in the field. However I still think it is over the top that the guy didn't even own a computer.

There are many who would rather spend their careers just writing applications without ever analyzing the differences between two algorithms, much less ever studying or thinking about computation in general. Then there are those who would spend their careers strictly on theoretical endeavors, and do not wish to continue writing applications or software systems of significant value. It is my personal opinion that the best Computer Scientists are the ones that regularly do both.
Things I've overheard about my Linux laptop while on public transportation
Why I'm not a hacker.
The thing is: I submitted a bunch of interesting (to me) links this morning and this is the one to get front-page attention. I don't understand the difference. Indeed, this seemed to me to be the most superficial among them. But with my wife and I recently wondering how "like" entered our own speech patterns, it interested me.
Looking at this from a computer nerd perspective, China has been a successful NODEMOCRACY because they have been able to deliver on an increasing standard of living for its citizens. I suspect that a lot of Internet users in China are much more interested in their careers and lifestyle than "freedom." That said, if the Chinese government fails to deliver on an every increasing standard of living, then they have real problems.

A little off topic, but: here in the USA we spend about 1.5 trillion dollars a year on our military industrial complex (DoD, Home Land Security, foreign aid through the State Department, interest on loans to pay for all of this, etc., etc.) I am not the only one who wishes that more of these resources were directed at our own industrial and educational infrastructure.
I agree. It's very practical.
I guess we will be seing baiduu news, baiduu image search, bmail, bdrive sometime soon! :-)
Ask HN: Is Paul Graham a libertarian?
Some of his writing, like these has made me think so:
http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

But I've never seen him say it explicitly anywhere.

More generally, are many hackers libertarians (or advocates of free market approaches)? Are there any recommended groups in this vein around the silicon valley area (an otherwise, fairly liberal place)?
Google Groups does this now for all external links.
Right, even hough that’s a bit of a simplification.

It’s not necessarily “paying more”, looking at the clarified conditions as services (even though of course there’s overhead, and possibility of corruption, in the labeling and certification process).

Imaging some item, let’s say jeans. You can get just jeans from company A, with an unknown profit margin or middlemen, or you can get jeans from company B together with information and conditions on production.

If these conditions were a service you were charged explicitly for, of course the company B jeans would be more expensive than the ones from company A. That’s not necessarily the case, however, since there might be unknown expenses for the consumer involved with company A (like, say, higher profit margins).

Or, for that matter, the jeans from company A could be every bit as “fairly” produced, just you don’t know about it. Nothing says that the labeled (“B” in the example) ones would be more expensive, disregarding the labelling/certification overhead.
My bad. I assumed that a new submission would be, y'know... new.
Perhaps our collective sensibilities have evolved so much since 2001 so that this article is no longer novel.
What I wonder about is what do they mean by "stealth programming"? I can think of just programming with white text on a white background, but that wouldn't serve any security related purpose.

From reading that, it's clear that the shellcode was obfuscated ('encrypting' it three times, though, would be unnecessary), but that's just a good way to muddle things up. Although from reading that it's obvious that it was a sophisticated attack in this day and age of cybercriminals who go for the easiest target available, nothing mentioned there hasn't been possible for almost any buffer overflow attack. Code obfuscation has been used for years for copy protection and to prevent static reverse engineering in general, and although nonstandard in exploitation, by no means unheard of. In my opinion a more impressive exploit would be one which used all printable ascii (which also is possible).

On a side note, some of the terms used are either misused or just wrong: although the payload may have been obfuscated, 'encryption' at least to me implies separate key/decryption schemes, which don't really work well from a shellcode point of view. You'd be better off using a static 'encryption' scheme like ROT13, but that seems more like obfuscation in this day and age, particularly since the code to deobfuscate it would have to be built in.

TL;DR: I think they throw around 'encryption' in places where it doesn't make sense to use it because it makes it sound scary, and it doesn't seem like any of the techniques used were 'new' or somehow more sophisticated then what was previously possible.

For simple IDS evasion, at least, so that you aren't throwing up flags: it could've been done to make forensics much harder.
Visualizing hackers and what they need in a co-founder
They're denying it though, blaming it on IE only:

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/no_evidence_to_...
Songs in the key of life: What makes music emotional?
The stark modern minimalism of the language causes the meaning of code to float on the syntax like a feather on water.

I think Python is dandy. I will be starting a new project on it, actually. But "stark" and "modern" are relative. While there's a lot of very pretty Python that reads like pseudocode, there's also a bit of Python that goes down the same sinful path as C header files or Perl in the use of arcane symbols. There's no reason why things like meta-programming have to look like anything different from plain old programming.

That said, I think Python hits a very attractive middle ground. There is just enough syntax to fit the most basic cultural expectations of technical people as well as a large number of programmers. That, if you think about it, is a stunning achievement in human-interface design. (Read that straight-up!)

(And to be fair: Smalltalk - even more minimal, but ignores lots of important cultural expectations. Lisp - even more minimal and just about everything, no matter how meta, looks like normal Lisp. But on the downside, everything looks like normal Lisp.)
Why are embedded systems software developers getting a D- in C?
I wish they'd give us some idea of how they are testing beyond mentioning "customer workload"; maybe even release their own benchmark by simulating some typical customer workload. The dbench bashing seems out of place without some further explanation.
Wasn't Drucker the one who tried to avoid everyone multi-tasking ?

I personally prefer to focus on one thing at a time
Maybe it's your presumption of malice that's rubbing people the wrong way. Instead of immediately thinking that you are under attack, perhaps a presumption of malfunction would have shown higher regard for people's intentions.

(But then again, given that this is HN, maybe assuming their code isn't bug free is a worse insult? ;-)
Our very own fogus is one of the co-authors!

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fogus
"Users were required to make a donation to be able to invite friends to join the site."

I'm pretty sure this wasn't the case. Someone who is not me invited several people and didn't ever donate.

Glad to hear he's been cleared, though.
I thought it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938

...but it's not. Might've been somewhere else, or I might be mistaken.
I just submitted some feedback to the BBC saying this was false. I'm guessing many other people did as well. Hopefully it's not some sort of honeypot.
No, that thread states that he tinkers with "changes to the code that decides which votes count". I don't see why you would jump to the conclusion that it's intentional and not a bug when he's publicly said he's experimenting.
Blogpspam. Why not link to the original source instead? http://lists.openwall.net/linux-ext4/2010/01/04/8
Of course. They are a web company after all. Support for all browsers.
It's a good idea, but Chrome is very new code.
"At a time when the world thinks the communist model has been proved obsolete, China remains a communist country. In fact, under the current leader, Hu Jintao, human rights in China have recently suffered and are now in serious decline, according to Amnesty International-USA, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and others."

I take two related issues with this statement:

1) He says "in fact... human rights have recently suffered" as if it demonstrates that China remains a communist country. Certainly attempts at communist societies and human rights violations are correlated in recent history, but human rights violations are not evidence of communism.

2) China is not communist, it is Communist - that is, run by a political party which has the name Communist in it. People use the phrase "communist China" as slur. I believe this perpetuates the notion that China is actually communist among a non-trivial portion of the American population. It would be better to call attention to China's authoritarianism, which I think is what he's taking issue with.
That's the reference I found, and I found no others. Never mind, it was a nice thought while it lasted. 8-)
You're right that frequent commits greatly simplifies the particular problem of undetected errors in big refactorings. However, people being people, the sunk cost fallacy is still an issue in development.
I'm not really seeing the point of this article. I had already noticed that people are saying "like" a lot, and Hitchens doesn't do anything beyond making this observation. And he really can't do anything beyond that because he doesn't know anything about language, language change or syntax. (Although to be fair, these are not normally considered necessary qualifications for writing on this subject.)

Anyone who's actually interested in the grammar of "like" would be better off reading something by someone who knows what they are talking about. E.g. this: http://www.jstor.org/stable/454820
Here's Who Suffers For Sergey Brin's Stand On Principles
I can't comment on the collective voting pattern on HN, but my objection to Hitchens' piece is that he buries what might have been an interesting etymology of "like" under a mountain of prescriptive humbug.
This is a good list.

That said,

Why second edition intro to algs? Why not third? also, considering that intro to algs is one of the "Books Programmers Claim to Have Read" http://www.billthelizard.com/2008/12/books-programmers-dont-... , so those planning to read it, note that it is best learned in a classroom setting where you are forced to work through the problems.

Finally, interesting that he does amazon reference links to all these books, hopefully profit opportunities didn't taint the items on his list!
Dgraph - dependency graph lib for Clojure
With a threatening message engraved on it in an exotic, indecipherable alphabet?
Beautiful Desktop Calendar 2010, New Year Calendar 2010
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Cloud Computing Circa 1963
As I tried to point out (and obviously failed - you're not the first person to suggest this) the fact that others have in the past said that they have lost the right to vote, and the fact that PG says he tinkers with the question of whether specific votes count, make me believe it's not a bug or other unintended feature.

(ADDED IN EDIT: PG has said: "I'm experimenting with changes to the code that decides which votes count.")

And in some sense I'm content that for some reason and in some way my votes have been deemed irrelevant. I'd just like to know why. More than that, I spend time thinking before I vote. If my vote has no effect, I won't waste that time.
I know that it's been a full decade since the 90's, but you can't just pull out an old article and recycle it like that.

What next? The danger of hippies? The threat of rock'n'roll?
Apparently he carries codes to change the alliances of the storm troopers (in addition to the plans of the death star, I suppose), who in III turned on the Jedi.

This theme is/was meant to come in part VII-IX.

I read this on Slashdot.

At the end of VI the death star is destroyed, but whoever can take control of the storm troopers on the remaining imperial starships is a force to be reckoned with.
Interesting on the one hand, but is anybody seriously going to go through those books one by one now? Personally I have troubles going through just one book (Pattern Recognition by Bishop atm), and even that might be useless without practical application. I managed to eventually read through MacKay (enjoyable book and available as a free PDF, too) and feel I have already forgotten most of it again :-(

Another way might be to just get going, and pick up knowledge on the way?
Game-changing Nanodiamond Discovery for MRI
Did I just catch Techcrunch astroturfing?
FCC looks at ways to assert authority over Web access
Okay, so this topic comes up pretty frequently, so I'm going to go at it again. I, for one, completely support what pg is doing.

The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site.

I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site.

If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job.

Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't.

That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.
There's kind of an r/K selection thing going on, here. The people who do the least research per email have more time to send emails, so even if most link-requesters do their research, most link requests won't reflect that.
So in other words, I can launch an attack against any number of companies and organizations, and as long as I attack human rights activists accounts, everyone will blame the Chinese government?

What do you even call that kind of disinformation? False flag doesn't seem to cut it.
I love Wave, and still can't figure out what I should be doing with it.
Here's the better, less mainstream-media article from torrentfreak: http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks-fr...
No original content

Read the comments, please.
Someone pointed out the 3rd ed was out in the blog comments. I hadn't noticed, so thanks.

I agree that the CLR book is best learned by working through problems. For those that may not have retainend as much as they would have liked from classroom work, I think needing to use algorithms and programming them yourself also works very well. In that vein, CLR is also a great reference text.

I don't make any money from Amazon. Believe me, my friend, it is purely the other way around. ;-)