skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to enter and stay current with the security industry?
Hello all, I'm a Computer Science undergraduate and although I've had a general interest in computer security and exploits, I'm becoming more fascinated due to a security talk series in my department.

So, my question is where I can get "involved" and stay up to date with the industry? Are there forums that are common knowledge to security professionals? Listservs? Are there restricted forums to proven white hats? If I were to go it on my own, I guess I'd start with watching DEFCON and SchmooCon presentations and reading articles in Phrack -- just because that's what I know of.

I'd like to entertain my curiosity and see if this industry is where I'd like to spend my career. Any and all comments or suggestions are welcome! :)
I'm not trying to compare scientific communities.

Epidemiological studies are a completely different kind of science than physics, and both are a completely different kind of science than "scientific consensus"

If you understand the differences in the way the science is done, you understand why your analogy doesn't hold up. If you don't, it all just sounds kind of the same: creationism is the same as vaccine paranoia is the same as global warming "denialism"

Different sciences have different pieces that are put together different ways. This is due to the nature of the topic being studied. The problem with "softer" sciences is that, without falsifiability, you're always playing some Bayesian or statistical game. Things are true mostly because of other things. When you start piling up these statistical linkages into a CA model, or even without the model, you easily cross the threshold into creating totally useless correlations without even realizing it. This is a known fact in medicine, and medicine has thousands or millions of different subjects to test theories out on. We only have one earth. Some climate scientists and climate politicians feel as if they're exempt from these facts, but that's sadly not the case. That doesn't mean that those sciences are useless, just that different standards apply -- standards that don't hold up so well when presented as political movements.
What an attitude the author of this piece has. He keeps referring to "pseudo-science" and uses scare quotes all over.

Campbell's chooses "neuromarketing" over consumer feedback in rebranding its iconic soup cans.

Of course it does. It's trying to sell as many cans of soup as possible, not please a focus group. Implement what ultimately works, not just what customers request.

Of course, this smacks of the same pseudo-scientific marketing bullshit

Is this guy totally unaware that there is an art to persuasion (some of it grounded in results from scientific studies, though not all) and packaging? It's not like astrology. There are psychological tricks and shortcuts that are taken in most high end products and advertising to make them perform better.
At what point does it become ridiculous to move the data, which may be measured in TB or PB, when the algorithm itself would be measured in KB or MB?
Can't view the video on phone - can anyone summarize?
The Password Meter
FYI, it looks like the title was changed to [scribd] but the file is still a PDF.
I completely agree with davidedicillo.
Perhaps because it is the biggest? That is really the only explanation I can think of. Unless you wanted to show where the plankton feeders hunt to illustrate light penetration.
It'd be nice if a group like that could have a simple admission test. I'm not trying to exclude people that are actually interested, but something really simple just to keep out the whiners could be useful.
I don't think the author believes the world will end in 2012. It seemed like a tongue-in-cheek reference to all of the folks who believe in that particular numerology.
Rake and Ant Together: A Pick It n’ Stick It Approach
I like the concept of an algorithm 'supermarket' where you get all of these algos as part of one API with various objects/methods.

But the problem is one of specialization. Surely there are other APIs out there that specialize in particular aspects of what the supermarket is providing. For example, it this AAS business is providing distance algos as well as image algos, there must be Geo Businesses and Image Businesses that can provide higher quality given their specialization.
Empower the people with global democracy in the form of an open web-based voting system, show them what's possible and they may force laws to be enacted globally similar to the NI4D, become lawmakers, and end corruption. Many don't believe that the people are ready for that much responsibility, and it's better for them to be managed by the various elites, but the price for this will always be systemic injustice, economic subjugation, etc.
Drewforbes1980
I thought he/she was being pretty clear, actually. I understood his working definition to not be "all the bad things ..." but roughly "the philosophy espoused by the Communist Manifesto and by the governments of the USSR, Mao-era China, and Khmer-Rouge Cambodia".

What are the atrocities committed specifically in the name of capitalism? I'm genuinely curious which ones would add up to having the same impact as the ones committed in Stalinist Russia, Cambodia, and cultural-revolution China.
Hi Daniel, can you give us some examples of the sorts of DSLs you're playing with? The title ("Answering the arc challenge") led me to expect code snippets.
Every country with a declining birth rate and a promise to the older generation has massive unfunded liabilities. The United States, China, Japan, everyone is having to deal with the problem of "How do we pay for the elderly when we have so few children?"

I'm not saying I have an answer, but we need to address the real question previous generations never had to face before, which is how much burden do we want to put onto the younger generation to take care of the older one when there are so much fewer young people? At what point do you say "The cost to keep Grandma alive another 6 months costs too much."?
I once tried to build a web site with content tied to locations down to the smallest towns in all countries, and I found it hard to get everything right. So I think it would be interesting to have maps, all kinds of geographical information along with some related algorithms "for lease": e.g. find the nearest city to a given location, IP-to-location, address format for a given country for building proper entry forms, phone number formats, districts/county/states for a country, etc.

The database of localities and all associated information is not only huge, it's changing literally every day and thus should be constantly kept up to date. Definitely a good candidate for the hosted service scheme.
simple solution: just force MS to install Chrome Frame by default in IE. This may not increase awareness of other browsers, but it does make developers life easier.
New, from Google, Google Drone.

Now your maps can update in real time and terminate Terrorists with extreme prejudice.
Feed.Us can help prevent down time
I'm a skinny twig & my problem is that most of the clothes on the market from mainstream brands have waaaaay too big of a gut when cut reasonably in the arms, shoulders, and legs.
Yes. And it's supposed to help with smells, too. (As far as I know.)
Publishing has nothing to do with weather or not they are doing science. It has to do with the methodology they employ.
Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers

Didn't Jon Graham-Cummings just publish an article about having done just this, and finding an error in the data?

Of course, people like JGC couldn't do so before, because Jones and his colleagues kept the raw data secret.

Edit: here's JGC's posting about his article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/19/us/politics/11...

This side by side comparison says,

House version
Premiums for older people cannot be more than double
the premium for young adults.

Senate version
Premiums for older people cannot be more than three
times the premium for young adults.
Interesting article, but I find the author's use of statistics to be quite bizarre...

[quote]
Approximately 68% of URL shortening services were Stage 1 Compliant.

Approximately 56% of URL shortening services were exclusively Stage 2 Compliant.
[/quote]

It seems from his numbers that he just meant to not include the word "exclusively", even though it was italicized. Also, I'm not sure what prompted the venn diagram with three sections "A", "B", and "A and B". Most of the regions (such as "A"-and-"A and B"-not-"B") are empty, for good reason.
I worry that the challenge will eventually be dominated by over-specialized DSL's. Arc may have libraries that are particularly beneficial to accomplishing this challenge, but the functions and macros used to do so are not of a wholy different "language" from those used in everyday arc prgramming.
maybe, but I think there are forces involved besides the label which could alter the results. For instance, what if the weather is colder in Test Space 1 so soup sales increase not because of label, but because of desire for some warm soup. Maybe soup sales are down at test space 2 because that particular location had a super sale last week so a large portion of the local consumers are no longer in the soup market this week.
We were just looking at flup's code today and wished that its behavior with idle threads was a little better, that it wouldn't kill them off right away but wait a bit to see if more requests come in, like Apache can be configured to do. Maybe we'll send in a patch.
Okay, I agree for sure that the system is messed up. But my real question is, "Is the solution deleting software patents?"

Maybe the solution is holding software patents to the same rigors as mechanical patents. Why the distinction? That's what I don't understand. And still don't.

Why are they treated differently? By everyone. Even outside the courts.
Does this mean if you're a freelance programmer, you're at risk of running afoul of this law - as Joe Stack did - if you're trying to negotiate programming contracts directly with the client rather than through an agency?

My understanding is that you can protect yourself from this law by working through employment agencies as a W2 or Corp-Corp contractor?

Is that correct?

Is so, then perhaps the programmers I've met who said they were "independent consultants" were likely working through agencies since the risks of being truly independent are too high?
What are the results of Education vs. Income and Income vs. Happiness?
Strangest language feature
especially when it would only take a small amount of work for paypal to add twitter integration to initiate a payment via twitter instead of an email.

i just looked at their site and saw that their entire payment infrastructure is based on paypal anyway. i don't understand why anyone would fund a company like this that is so heavily reliant on other companies' technology.
If you click on the [scribd] part of the link, you get the scribd version. If you click on the other part of the title, you get the original pdf version. More info recently here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124940
Before I crippled it, my free game was getting downloaded between 50 and 120 times per day. Do you think I could get any kind of decent ad money on that? What ad network do you recommend?
I think we're talking past each other in that I'm focusing on the macro level of an entire system with N (where N is large) algorithms whereas you're focusing on the concept of an individual one.

My thesis is that even if I grant you a sane patent regime the macro level scales so fast and big that that changes the game and makes the concept impossible in practice.
(Amberjack) Javascript Site Tour Creator - Simple. Free. Open Source.
OK, so we are down to the crux of the issue. ;) The claim, then, is that the skeptics are not doing science. That is easily refutable, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_McIntyre and http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/12/13/centre-of-the-storm/print...

Thus, in contrast to evolution skeptics of the ID variety, climate skeptics give much more credence to the idea that the target of their skepticism is flawed at best, and doing bad science at worst.
> 1. When we talk about joint academic/industry projects we talk about numbers of dollars on the order of 1M and 10M not 10K and 100K.

Pikers. The project that I'm talking about has already spent over $500M out of a $5B budget. http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9780935

> Lots of conversation from various people along the lines of "we just hired some guys to get ready for FOA-xx"

Giggle. In other words, it's in the noise even for an anecdote.

We're spending around $800B so the overall effect better be massive or it's a waste.

> * Do you really think that the borrowed money wouldn't have created any jobs? * I have no idea what you are talking about.

The stimulous is being funded with a combination of borrowed money and printed money. The borrowed money came from somewhere. That somewhere is likely to have been producing jobs as well, jobs that won't happen because the money went into the stimulus. Unless the stimulus produces more jobs, it's a net loss.

> but at least in the power sector, even when credit was good and easy there wasn't this level of interest and job creation.

Which tells us that the jobs and interest are not driven by market value but by subsidy. In other words, you're being paid to do things that don't make economic sense.

That brings us back to weatherizing houses for $50k a piece. Yes, someone got a job, but do you really think that that's a reasonable way to spend money?

Or, are you arguing that "govt money" is special?

Surely you're not going to argue that money that goes into your pocket is special....
The solution then, it appears, would be to hold software patents to the same standard. Put the code in there. Patent the source code. Forget the legal stuff. If you use unpatented closed source patents, be clear about which product it is and which version you are using. Hold corporations responsible for using version control on their software and everything falls into place.

For loops are like gears.
While loops are like emptying water tanks.
Booleans are switches
Storage containers are variables.

All that stuff is represented in the source code. As a software engineer, my defense is my repository. I wrote all that code, look. I didn't take it from someone or copy someone's idea or try to infringe anything. I was trying to make the world better and people liked it so they bought it and I can feed my family. :)
So is this in the same category as Squid/Varnish/etc? What makes it stand out from the rest? I'd love to see/hear more about it, but the video, article and README aren't very verbose. I'm just too lazy to start reading the source for this, and would love a high level overview ;)
My favorite example of this is Katrina. It wasn't a hugely powerful storm like say Andrew (it was only a Category 3 at landfall), it just happened to hit at exactly the wrong spot. People have been talking about this happening since before I was born, so it shouldn't have been a huge shock when it finally did. Despite this, and despite the fact that we have had a string of mild hurricane seasons since then, Katrina is often pointed to as an example of the kind of worse-than-usual storms we can expect in the future.
Anyone know if any laws like this exist for Canada?
It's hard to tell if this validates the GPL. They were found guilty of DMCA violations for removing copyright and redistributing, but does that say anything about the validity of the license itself?
Kind of a sick joke asking people to type their passwords into a web-form for scoring.
Kind of hard to find information out there... The OP link and links off that page don't lead anywhere useful. Googled around and came up with this:

http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TS/Traffic+Server

Which also yields:

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/TrafficServerProposal

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/trafficserver.html

The Apache "champion" is Doug Cutting, of Hadoop fame, so it seems to have street cred.
http://www.maxmind.com/ is a pretty good IP-to-location database. They have a free coarsened version for download, too.
Share shopping using blippy
1. Originally, the biggest issue was "you can't patent math", i.e. where do you draw the line between discovering a rule of the universe vs. an "invention". Square roots are not an invention per se. A method for finding them...???

2. Scale: just how many are used in any one system makes "deleting software patents" a good and probably the best outcome. Especially since there was no lack of health in the software industry before they were allowed, and there's no evidence I'm aware of that they now help it and plenty that they don't.

It also seems to break down, mostly due to scale, when you insert patent trolls into the game. In the physical world there's a lot of cross licencing, where one patent, revealed to the world by the very act of patenting it, often results in an improvement, whereby the two companies cross license.

Let's take a step back: the idea of patents is that for their absolute monopoly of limited duration you reveal your secret sauce instead of keeping it indefinitely hidden behind trade secret law. I fail to see how the publication of software patents helps the field in this way. Even if they weren't obscurely written, there are again just too many of them (too many ideas).
Okay, consensus seems to be that I should drop it to $1.99 and see how that goes. So I did. fingers crossed.
consumers
A patent for a physical invention lays out, in its claims, precisely how an invention works. A lever-arm here, a catch there

Only if it was written by a really crappy lawyer! The company I work for spent months coming up with a design for a mechanism and ended up with something pretty suboptimal in order to avoid all the existing patent claims. A good patent attorney will state the claims as generally as possible. e.g., don't call out a "10-24 screw," instead call out a "fixed or removable fastener" or "a means of locating the rotating element" etc. You may be confused because many patents show drawings, but those drawings are only examples to illustrate the concept, not necessarily actual claims
Insurance companies care for profits and customers both now, as an example, through copays for prescription drugs. Drugs that tend to ensure the health of the patient are sometimes free and sometimes $40 or more for name brand drugs that do the equivalent of a $5 copay generic. The Insurance company takes a hit on the drugs with no copay, but they tend to reduce the lifetime cost of health for the insured by keeping them healthy.

Anti-inflammatories for example. Inflammation is bad stuff, so keeping it down keeps you healthy. You often need only a prescription to get free anti-inflammatories with certain health insurance plans.

Of course that tactic will also be quite strategic in a single payer system.

EDIT (from your linked article): In short, the AMA is endorsing a plan whose closest existing example is the most frequent denier of claims. How the public option exemplifies “delivering care to patients” is unclear.

Maybe more claims should be denied. Maybe insurance companies pay for things because the patient wants it and the doctors think it is unnecessary. Or perhaps medicare pays more overall even though it denies more claims. We don't know what the ulterior motive is, and the article implies there is one.
Thanks yannis, these are some great comments.

With regard to the social graph one, I've heard advice akin to this from several people: that the person is more important than the topic when it comes to advisors. When you look at the PhD as a license to carry out research, rather than a major work itself, this makes sense. But it is sure hard to force yourself to adopt that attitude when you're in the middle of it. From the student perspective, it is tempting to make the argument, "This professor doesn't fit my personality, but I really want to work on this particular topic."

Regarding scalability, what you say makes sense. Indeed, I am a bit jealous of people with a bio- prefix; they are in the same spot computer scientists were in a few decades ago.

As far as my personal background, I am a Computer Science guy with a background in the systems community (semantic web, databases, web architecture) who is interested in getting more into machine learning. I'd love any advice on where you think the exciting momentum is in that area.

EDIT: Re-worded for clarity.
duplicate:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136465
My problem with this is that in effect we are asking the young to pay for services that they will not ever see. There is a fundamental fairness problem here. It's also not as if governments (and many people who voted for them) never understood the demographics.

As for keeping Grandma alive, the closer we come to a government run system, the less you will be in control of what happens to your Grandma and instead subject to increasingly draconian policies of what is and isn't covered given that governments the world over are trying to do more with dwindling resources - something is going to give.
Roughly the same amount of people have died in India, from starvation, because of implementation of quite opposing ideas.
This blog post has some higher-level information about TS - http://ostatic.com/blog/guest-post-yahoos-cloud-team-open-so...
Subscription Model Likely for Apple iPad Access to Hulu
Popular research areas produce more false results
Young people are convinced they will live forever, until they reach 31.
That is a great story about Feynman, and thanks for the Hamming article link.
Where you gonna go?

I've lived in some other places, and let's put it this way... there's a reason why people want to move to the US.

There are all sorts of things wrong with the US, but it's as bad or worse in every other country, be it China, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Germany or any place or whatever that is.

Note, for instance, that all developed countries have universal health insurance, so you've got to go to China or Somalia or some hellhole like that to get away from 'socialized' medicine.
I couldn't agree more. Patents are a complete waste of time.

It is ridiculous to me that people can actually patent an idea, as if they are the only ones in the world who thought of it. (You're never the only one in the world who thought of your idea, even if you think you are.) A patent is not going to prevent someone else from executing the same idea in a better way. Meanwhile, all it does is slow down innovation and drain money and resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
Get a perfect name for your domain
I wonder how many more downloads Safari would get if titled "Apple Safari"
They used a sample size of 40 to determine the packaging for a multi-million (billion?) dollar company. Even if they used every possible technique to capture the "emotional attachment" to a label, it wouldn't be a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.

If you're going to go to the trouble to run the tests, at least use a large sample size. There is no way they could have gauged the entire soup buying population with just 40 people.

Like what was mentioned elsewhere in this thread: they would have been better off shipping 50 redesigns to various places and seen how they did in the marketplace.