skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correct me if I am wrong but dont they mean a computer science nerd rather than a geek? I mean geek is someone eccentric with a single minded approach to anything from comics to radios. But a nerd is a obsessive personality with a single minded approach towards his field.
The Men Who Live Forever
I can't speak for those countries, but in Sweden where I am there is a lot of competition. I live in Stockholm and I can choose between one cable company (up to 100MBps for ~$50/month), DSL from the three major phone companies (~20MBps for ~$40/month), DSL from a bunch of smaller virtual providers, and if I manage to convince my housing coop to install fiber, there's a bunch of providers that can deliver 100MBps for ~$30/month.

If I was living in a small-town, I would probably be able to choose between a cable company, some DSL providers, and possibly a local municipal network.

If I was living far out in the country-side, there would maybe be DSL, but definitely mobile broadband.

So wherever you are, there is competition, even though it's of course fiercer the larger the city is. I don't know if the broadband market is fully saturated yet, it's probably pretty close to it.
I live in Japan's answer to central Kansas. I could pick up the phone and call one of, hmm, four ISPs for fiberoptic service. That is only the tip of the iceberg -- there are also (at least) three Wifi providers in town, etc etc.
"The servers used in both attacks employ the HomeLinux DynamicDNS provider, and both are currently pointing to IP addresses owned by Linode, a US-based company that offers Virtual Private Server hosting. The IP addresses in question are within the same subnet, and they are six IP addresses apart from each other,"

Quote attributed to VeriSign's iDefense security lab in http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/01/researchers-ide...
There is no author, only a text.

If Jon Stewart acts like a media critic and promotes integrity in journalism, his motivation is an implementation detail.

Asking if it is all just an act is an easy way not to meet the argument. This is why the "real" media call him a comedian or entertainer. His criticism is not crucial to them, it's all peripheral issues.

If on the other hand the goal is to put him on a pedestal or judge him, his mental states might be relevant.
I modified the program so that the main function looks like:

say = NULL;
say("OH NOES");

When compiled with all warnings on, there are none. When run, it immediately segfaults. (The same would happen with any assignment from void*, like 'say = malloc(42)'. Nice.)

Edit: I knew this would get downmodded :) Why does any post implying that type safety is good get downmodded?
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns
I actually agree with the law, I'm making a statement about cause and effect, and inherent vs. instrumental values. The law that requires CEOs to increase shareholder value is valuable because it leads companies to satisfy customer desires in the most efficient way possible. If it didn't lead companies to satisfy customer desires efficiently, it should be eliminated.

The problematic part is when you get that causation mixed up and argue that because CEOs are required by law to increase shareholder value, the government should help them, eg. by protecting them from competition. Because customers are best served by robust competition between businesses. Shareholder-value laws, antitrust laws, and intellectual property laws are all tools for this purpose. Just because CEOs should maximize shareholder value doesn't mean that government should pass laws that make it easier for them to maximize shareholder value, particularly if those laws are at the expense of consumers.

(And I realize that points have sorta become twisted around, such that it now seems like I'm arguing against myself up-thread. It's complicated. Basically, government should enforce level playing fields - it should make sure that products compete on their own merits, and not on the basis of their success in other fields. Cross-subsidization, like what Google does on a massive scale, is a tricky area. It's wrong if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then jack up prices. But it's fine if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then keep prices low.)
Interesting though, how you can think of the most unlikely things and a google search will turn up several examples.

This is probably closely related to how difficult it is to find some original niche to exploit. If you can think of it, so can others.
I suspect it began as the later, and the former crept in while they weren't paying attention. If you look at the early shows they didn't give anywhere near the time to current events and politics as recent ones do.
Also a very accomplished JS programmer. He wrote the Code Mirror Editor.

http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/
Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.
I don't know if these are exactly what you are looking for but try the following:

-A Touch of Greatness
-The Class
-The War on Kids
-Declining by Degrees: Higher Ed At Risk

I'm incredibly passionate about this topic so will be interested to see if any one else adds anything here.
A common use of function pointers is in a dispatch table. For example, in a text editor, every ASCII character value, including control-characters and printable characters, is used as an index into an array of function pointers, each one of whom represents a function. For example the ^N character retrieves a function pointer for the moveToNextLine() function. The printable characters all are insertSelf() function.

Use of typedefs make the code more readable.

Instead of: int (* var_pointer_to_function)(int)

one must first do: typedef int (* funcptr)(int)

which is initially equally messy, but then allows one to declare function pointer variables in a simple succinct manner: funcptr foo
Ask HN: Kindle v/s ipod touch
For someone who likes to read books from Gutenberg the free books site and one who spends 24 hrs a week in a train journey (long distance) which one is preferable to buy?

Touch is good option given that I can occasionally play games and watch a movie on the go.
Code Used in Google Attack Now Public
Thx for feedback. I might wait til a few more chapters are in and a little copyediting happens, but I'm very looking forward to finished product.

Discount/promo code; you can go to Manning.com, in upper left there's a "Email newsletter" link, they send out codes a few times a month.
Whats the point of writing jokes when news organizations and politicians does it for?

I suspect the editors of the Daily Show has a pretty easy job. It shouldn't be that hard to find materials with the amount of farce available from news organizations and so called journalists.

TV news is a joke with partisan hacks caring more about supporting their team (left or right) as opposed to reporting the news.

Thankfully, I disconnected my cable about 1 year ago (right after the election).

Times are better spent reading books, if I care about any interesting TV shows I can watch it on hulu. Its amazing how muh free time you have when you don't have cable anymore.
Programming with proportional fonts is great
Thanks for the links - I had not seen these before.
You mention DSL from major phone companies and virtual providers. Do all of those major phone companies run their own copper/fiber or use the same infrastructure?

100 MB/s would be nice. I'm paying about $50/month for 5Mb/s DSL in the US.
If reading is what you want do the most of, I'd go with the Kindle because its display is going to be much easier on your eyes because of the e-ink and size.
Xobni takes over Twitter's old offices
Pretty good article actually. Nothing terribly surprising, but it's interesting to get some perspective on the early days of Valve and Half Life.
Not enough women are arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks
This winter break, I built a python-powered robot telescope.
Data extraction|web data mining
ScrappingExpert is an Ahmedabad-India based provider of powerful web data extraction,website data extraction, screen Scrapping,web crawling and data mining solutions.
Lest I repeat myself from last month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=990301

Oh, and the number is now ~19,438.
MiFi fun.
http://www.evilpacket.net/2010/jan/14/mifi-geopwn/
I too am very passionate about the subject. The suggestions are great but they are more highschool oriented. We want something which has college culture in it. You know how they bore us in class while we could learn much more outside building things.
Indignation is precisely how NOT to engage China. The political culture is very different from the US. Leaders want face and respect above all - there are no Jon Stewart type shows poking fun at any political bosses. You want China to change - it is, at its fastest pace in its long history. You want China to improve its human rights record - it is, just not as fast as you'd like. The right course of action - FOR CHINA - is through incentives that make the leadership look good.

Another way to put it is, everyone learns differently. You don't publicly scold a sensitive child and think that is going to be effective. China is that sensitive child (at least relative to the in-your-face ways of US politics).
About Integer Overflows
Logo Design Services Can Change the Fortune
Have you ever thought about first impression? Obviously you did because most of the people do. Not only the people but also any products or companies need a good first impression.
In TFA, Brian Williams mentions Stewart's takedown of Cramer in an interview in which 'the odds were stacked against Jim Cramer'.

This brought to mind a brilliant attack on the now defunct political show "Crossfire", in which Liberals battled Conservatives. In a nutshell, Stewart was brought on as a guest after attacking Crossfire on The Daily Show. Although Stewart is the guest on the show, he takes the offensive and puts the Crossfire hosts at an instant disadvantage. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE
There's only one copper infrastructure which is owned by Telia, the previously state-owned phone monopoly. If you want more copper lines to your home, you have to get it through them. However, the phone and DSL provider market is deregulated such that Telia has to allow other companies to install DSL equipment in the phone stations as well as use the copper cables.

Fiber networks I know almost nothing about. I know there are several country-wide fiber networks, all the phone companies of course have their own infrastructure there, but there are a few more companies renting out access.

I think you can become a DSL provider without actually owning any equipment, just renting access at the appropriate places, but then you are of course dependant on the actual infrastructure owners, and you will probably not be able to deliver the cheapest service, but have to compete on something else.
The odds were stacked against the hosts. Cause you know, they are dumb and partisan hacks pretending to be fair under the disguise of a talk show. One of those idiots, Tucker Carlson, never bounced back and lost his job.
Flash 10, mostly. Sometimes Neko.
In my experience, working as a pair produces bug-free code at least twice as fast as working singly.

The person not typing spots bugs a lot better than the person at the keyboard, and having someone to bounce designs off of means you don't head down the wrong path with them.
2-4GB? wth are you doing?

I remember a post on here saying how hackernews was running on a new 8GB server or something. There's no reason it couldn't run on a 200MB server easily.

(Related: Is HN really sluggish for everyone else as well? Like 3-4 seconds per page load)
Excellent infographic about App Store metrics
'Tis an unweeded garden,
That Grows to seed;
Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
I think "both sides" are having difficulty make things work here. I work at Generic Japanese Megacorp, which could easily be Generic American Megacorp except with rather less white people. My day job expects me to have a 4 year degree in a rigorous field of study, be expert at our problem domains, be proficient to expert in a list of technologies which I quite literally cannot fit on a single page in 8 pt font, and have unlimited tolerance for overtime. In return, I'm paid about what an English teacher makes. Why can't my employer find more geeks like me? Hmm, that's a tough one.

Then there's the other side of the fence: some of my friends use Ubuntu on their laptops, are really good with the Internet, and can quote every episode of the Simpsons ever. Quite a few are stuck in jobs like software testing. Why can't they find jobs paying $80,000 which require none of the commercial skills they have assiduously avoided learning? Hmm, tough one.
This is related to "there are no women in open-source".
Yahoo knew of cyber attacks before Google
There are no straight men in fashion. News at 11.

This constant analysis of how Women are different than Men, whilst refusing to accept that they actually are different for reasons beyond anyones control, is just getting boring IMHO.
What was wrong with the original title? A woman wouldn't have changed it ;)
What more and more people have been discovering in the modern age of openness and availability is that much of what we once thought of as serious institutions (televised and written news, for example) are far more style than substance.

The Daily Show's critiques of modern journalism are so devastating because, despite being a fly by night fake news organization with comedy as their main goal, somehow they manage to put on a news show that is nearly as substantive as the competition, merely by accident. And that's due to the fact that in news these days there really isn't much there there. Once you boil away all the high-gloss production values and the special access and the fame and the reputation you find out that at its core there is very little legitimate, original reporting work being done in the mainstream media. Which is understandable, because the big media companies learned long ago that hard journalism is difficult business, costly, and sometimes hard to sell to the viewing public. But the rate of return on glossy production values, infotainment, and pseudogravitas is through the roof.

But these tricks are approaching the limit of their shelf life. The big TV and print news organizations aren't attracting new, young viewers, their viewership has been getting old, and dwindling. They are rapidly approaching becoming inconsequential and that has as much to do with folks like Jon Stewart pulling up the stakes of their circus tent as it does with technology passing them by.
I'm not sure if it's widely true, but my provider (Shaw in Vancouver) does a sneaky thing where they burst me to 25Mb/s downstream for the first few meg of a download, and then put it back to normal (~8Mb/s).

It is useful for some real-life cases, but it also makes speedtest.net tests very mis-representative.

I think the downstream is quite acceptable for what I pay. The upstream is ass though (0.5Mb/s).
I can't speak for the Kindle, but I've been doing okay reading on the Touch with Goodreader.

I might try an ereader soon, but the pocket-portability of the touch has been nice.
Guide to testable code
> To be honest I cant see the point of this; it's barely productive or conducive to addressing the issues.

Firmly disagree - I love this. The biggest problem with government agencies are that you can't put them out of business by refusing to patronize them, so you have to whip the public into a frenzy and get politicians' attention. This should help with that.

As for TSA: I'm an American, I travel a lot, and I think TSA is absolutely a mess and a joke and a disgrace. I don't support how I get treated and how visitors to our country get treated. If we can get enough pressure to shut down TSA or reform it, who knows, maybe we can move on to other scummy branches from there. It's a longshot, but it's really our only hope at this point from the giant bureaucracy snowball that's rolling down the hill really fast gaining speed.
The other side of the coin:

"I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer."

http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html
I don't understand those complaints

If you recruit most of your customers from a population which steals most of their software, then aggressively socialize them to think the software which isn't convenient to steal yet is fairly priced at $1 and expensive at $3, and then ask their opinions about your business model, what were you expecting their opinions to sound like?
SharePoint 2010 - Solution Deployment using PowerShell
Official post from Russia re their Oracle/Sun anti-monopoly investigation
You can be self-promoting without being a jerk. The problem is it's hard to finesse that, and it's a lot more acceptable for men to cross the line than for women to do it.

I think it's mostly because we have this pernicious idea that manhood is somehow related to dominating others.
Google vs. Apple
Pharmaceutical Packaging
"A rant about women" is just linkbait. The modified title is much more descriptive.
Which actually isn't true. The KDE project is the only large project I've been up close and personal with, which had a small number of female developers relative to the whole, but at one point virtually every other sub-project was headed up by women, including: KDE e.V. (financial, legal), documentation, usability, artwork and translation.
Those are good questions. I defer to some theories aired on the MarginalRevolution blog -- none definitive, some quite arguable, but most plausible enough to consider:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01...

And an essay on the topic also relayed via that blog:

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/leftover/wh...
i generally agree that submissions should use the same title as the original article. but in this case, that title isn't very good. "A Rant About Women" could be almost anything, and the implications it carries would prejudice me against it.
The Tarahumara of Mexico have been getting a lot of play recently specifically because of a book called Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall (http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...).

The Tarahumara people have been known in the elite runner/super athlete circles for a few decades yet but it seems that since the book came out everyone has been searching for their own experience with them. They are also somewhat responsible for the recent barefoot running phenomenon.
"There are no straight men in fashion. News at 11. This constant analysis of how Women are different than Men, whilst refusing to accept that they actually are different for reasons beyond anyones control, is just getting boring IMHO."

What makes you so sure that the reason that straight men avoid fashion is innate to their sex?

Women and men might be differently situated in our society for reasons beyond anyone's control, but there certainly seem to be some reasons that are manufactured. The real question is, why does your opinion on the matter get to be the definitive one?
Ok, you're right, the new title is probably better although it's also spicier.
This attack sounds more complicated then your typical metasploit attack
http://www.metasploit.com/
Ah you're right, it's in Fowler and in fact, in the earlier (first edition 1906) The King's English. Fittingly, for something that evolved into a classic, it touches on almost all the points discussed in this thread, in one paragraph and a footnote:

http://www.bartleby.com/116/101.html#5
Small by Choice, Whether Clients Like It or Not
I wonder how much of this has to do with women being biologically wired to avoid risk or anything that threatens survival of the race while men are biologically wired to be as aggressive as possible and take as many risks as possible to show they (and their genes) are even fit to survive?
You mean like it basically says right in the beginning of the post? ;)

"Earlier today this entry from yesterday at Wepawet (an online analysis engine for malware) was pointed out to H.D. Moore, and within hours Metasploit has an exploit of the vulnerability integrated. McAfee has confirmed that the exploit is out and the same one they saw during the investigation"
Source: http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/01/the-aurora-ie-...

On your second item, here's what McAfee has stated:

"Computer code that exploits the yet-to-be-patched Internet Explorer vulnerability used in Operation Aurora to attack Google and others in December has now been published on the Internet."
Source: http://siblog.mcafee.com/cto/%E2%80%9Caurora%E2%80%9D-exploi...
That is incredible. My weekend is now officially over.
It seems to me that the word "sophisticated" is being misused here. Rather, I would say "knowledgeable."

If you, even within your general field (say mathematics), talk to an expert, he will easily give you arguments that will seem sophisticated to you, and simple to him. He's spent more time learning, getting familiar with, and thinking about those arguments, and that's the simple reason.

Here, the Chinese government is through a nationalistic sentiment endorsing hacking and education about the same. It is a large country, and many of the people conducting the attacks were not amateurs, using already established techniques. They were professionals, I wager, learning, getting familiar with, and thinking about how to attain their hacking-goals.

An educated person, in any subject, will seem infinitely more sophisticated than a non-educated one. And I argue that China, more than anybody else, invests into young men doing just that.
Review of Let over Lambda by Doug Hoyte
This book for some reason was ignored from the discussion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052858) yesterday about the Lisp fingerprint reader. I think more people should read it.
Russia Now Stands Between Oracle and Sun (via abcphp.com)
Men's thong as comfortable underwear
Men’s thong is underwear that provides a comfort fit for the person wearing it. There are many types of male thongs to suit different tastes and needs.
Reflecting on our "SourceSafe Must Die" Campaign
The torrents themselves are not copyright. They contain no copyrighted data. He didn't actually share the copyrighted data, just provided a facility for others to share the torrents.
Epidermis 0.5 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
The question is, are there no women because they have problems getting into it because of male domination or are they in general just not interested?
I was wondering what started this particular health fad.

Given that there's some legitimate cultural anecdote and biological history behind it, maybe it'll actually work.
In Mountain View (in the Heart of Silicon Valley) we were able to rent a townhouse for roughly $500 a month. (with 5 people)

If you want to reduce your expenses, get a room-mate. (Then it will be $400 a month)
Except to pay for one of these, you still pay via credit card, paypal, etc. that links to real identifiable info. I was wondering why, if one of the attackers instances were discovered by google, they didn't just hand it over to the authorities and have them get a subpoena for the account info? or maybe they did
Deploying Sinatra On Ubuntu: In Which I Employ A Secretary
More Reports Confirming Eminent Windows 7 SP1 Release
If you can stage an attack like this, you can steal credit card numbers or phish your way to a Paypal account
Youtube: Aurora Vulnerability Exploit (Attack on Google/Adobe)