skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to throw my personal favorites into the ring: decompilation and deobfuscation.

In either case, after a certain amount of analysis you'll end up with a set of nodes (typically basic blocks) which connect to each other, but they'll be what I call 'immature' nodes. You know they connect, but they all effectively end with gotos. To make any sense of them, you have to make them into mature nodes: if, if-else, while, do-while, for, etc. Via graph reduction this is possible.

For instance, a few years back I was reverse-engineering Apple's Fairplay DRM and ran into an odd obfuscation scheme. There were dozens of functions which had the same structure: a switch inside a while statement; a state machine. After some hand-analysis, I figured out that at the end of each state, it'd set the state variable to either a constant value (a jump) or one of two conditional values (a conditional branch). At this point, it became clear that they were simply taking basic blocks and turning them into a big obfuscated state machine.

To make this into something worthwhile, I wrote a script that would go through the function and 'execute' it, to determine the state connections automatically. Then from there, I wired them up into a big graph, with two types of nodes: Fallthrough (no conditional) and Branch (conditional). Now, that helps a lot in terms of showing you what's happening, but not nearly as much so as control flow structures do, so the battle was only half over.

Now, if you look at common control flow structures from a graph perspective, they all look pretty straightforward (using something like dot graph notation):

A; if(X) {B} else {C} D becomes A -> B, A -> C, B -> D, C -> D.
A; if(X) {B} C becomes A -> B, A -> C, B -> C
A; while(X) {B} C becomes A -> B, A -> C, B -> C

So if you walk over the graph looking for these patterns (only looking at single nodes, mind you), replacing them with their mature equivalents, and recursively do that until you don't change anything, you can end up with a fully deobfuscated, cleanly readable result.
Let's take as a benchmark intentional homicide rates:
North America 6.5, West Europe 1.5.
Also, more murders per capita in US than Armenia or India.
There is cheaper hosting here: http://www.kimsufi.com/ks/

49€/month for a Q6600 quad-core.

and 99€ for a octo-core and 12gigs of ram.

I'm using their quad core at the moment for 6 months and nothing bad happened. Didn't try their tech support, though.
PS: Please, no cliche like "learn whatever you are passionate about" - I've heard it all before. What I'm looking for right now is to step out of my comfort zone (SE).

Sorry, but that's about the only responsible answer to a question this broad. It's a bit like asking "What book should I read?"

If you can narrow the question down a bit, you'll get a much more appropriate answer.

Gaining "domain knowledge" is key. However, the range of possible domains is next to infinite.

Your success is not going to be dependent upon the quality of the domain, but on the quality of your ability to learn the domain.

So, pick a subject that you are able to learn. Is there some domain where you have a natural advantage of some kind?
Well, I'll have a go at getting some myself :-) I've written a small for-fun app, which is selling at $1.99, once I've had a week worth of sales, I'll double the price and see how that affects sales. Then if it looks good, double again the next week!
yeah you suck pg.
Father of a 2 year old here. It is really about still-face. Daughter won't allow me to change her nappy still-faced (notice this often when I have something else on my mind and try to do a quick nappy change expressionless). I have to acknowledge her and talk to her otherwise she'll cry.
For about the same monthly cost, Amazon has a dual-core machine with >3x the memory, 7.5 vs 2GB.
What's a good curriculum / reading list for learning graph theory? What kind of things do you need to understand before you can check it off the "things to learn more about" list?
As someone a few days away from having his first child, this is pretty stunning. I don't want to say it's unsurprising, because it makes total logical sense. However, the speed at which the baby went from being in a happy mood to trying to get her mother's attention again was the most interesting point.

It must've been difficult for the mother to not respond, and I can't imagine the parent who doesn't love their child like that. It just makes child abuse that much worse knowing how much children need attention like that.
Surveying. I get to do a lot of travelling. I am still in the very early stages/training though. But I am looking forward to everything.
Then it's not a single character variable name anymore
Jenni Kayne Elegant Shoes
The corporate-speak inserted one month later by "Nicole from Rent-A-Coder" is comically misguided.
Complementary. Complimentary is something else altogether.
If you're looking for a "stable" buyer and you aren't located in western part of the world i might be your man
get in touch
paolo-at-paolomaffei-dot-it
i really enjoyed that the news item linked to the robots.txt file :) it's nerdy, it's short, it's clear and concise, all in one :)
Slaughter House Rules - Passing the health-care bill
I thought the figure would be much higher, around 80-90%.

Maybe that's why nobody is reading them anymore?

Is the economist really the last bastion of interesting informative information or is it just me?
Expertise that's in demand now wont necessarily be as hot by the time your learn their ins and outs.

Just a hunch: enterprise software design. Someone has got to navigate all those XML specs.

Also, it's always a good idea to learn whatever programmers hate.
How did you come to that conclusion? From what I'm seeing, the large instance is $0.34/hour, or $244/month. It looks like for a bit less ($199), one can get a 2x quad-core xeon with 6 gigs memory with the other deal.
But then you lose a lot of options for exercise. Walking and running are definitely out.
Thank you and that makes total sense. Point and case?:

I googled an executive of a company that was looking to do business with me. I came across some google groups discussions that he was part of from a couple years ago... and let's just say the material would be a dream for someone with a vendetta against the person.

Thanks for the perspective!
When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well.

Spin is your source biting back, and some of the sources are getting quite good at it. The response is to bite harder. Writing process-stories about how this or that was "spinned" is just whining.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this applies to them.
> I love it that you say you eschew the experts, then go on to cite a parenting book.

I knew someone would say that :)
Hold on to your Kids is not a parenting book though. It is a book about parenthood. It is not a book about what to do with your kids (when they misbehave or otherwise), but about who to be for your kids.
The search results page retrieves some content from s3.amazonaws.com. The http referer in those requests contains the search term. Thus, even though duckduckgo.com doesn't know you performed a search, amazonaws.com knows your IP address, what you searched for, and when you searched for it. They probably have a log of all that information too.
Quick note: On the last page there is a typo:

If you do not complete the first page of the survey survey...
Yes, self posts are perfectly fine, as long as you don't overspam.
This book is on-line, free, and the few bits I dipped into are sufficiently accurate.

http://www.ecp6.jussieu.fr/pageperso/bondy/books/gtwa/gtwa.h...

Not sure what it would be like to learn from - certainly you would have to "Read Like Math" and not "Read Like Prose". You would be strongly advised to do the exercises properly and not just skim.
spam?
I live in Asunción and the Internet connectivity sucks in general :(
This is a link to an ADSL ISP http://www.click.com.py/planes.php if you want to see prices
Precalculus, at least in US high schools, means something like “trigonomety and limits, plus applications”. “Calculus I” means single variable calculus, though the Spivak book they list is much more rigorous than a typical first-year calculus course. “Calculus II/III” in this case means vector calculus, which is enough of its own material to get at least its own semester course. I don’t think I’d quite put Spivak’s Calculus on Manifolds in the same category – maybe more like basic differential geometry/differential topology – but hey, this isn’t my list.
Would love to hear some analysis of this by people who actually know a thing or two about economics. Is it more of the usual baloney?
Most of these examples are either naturally graphs already, or on the contrary, can be presented as graphs through ingenious reductions (e.g. coloring as an approach to register optimization). So transforming the domain problem to a graph theory problem is either trivial or hard.

I found that a huge benefit of knowing some graph theory lies in being able to approach problems where this transformation is easy - neither trivial nor hard, but easy once you have some experience and intuition working with graphs. Every time you have a bunch of entities, and you can kinda think of their interdependencies as a binary relationship of some sort, there's a warning bulb going off in your brain - "is this a graph problem?". And if it is, then very possibly you immediately get lots of insight into your problem, basically for free.

This occurred to me a few weeks ago as I was thinking about this puzzle: design a circuit that inverts three inputs, but uses only two NOT gates (plus arbitrary amount of ORs and ANDs). It's an interesting puzzle to solve manually, but I also wanted to quickly write a program to find the solution. Circuits are trivially graphs, but there're too many of them (an infinity) to iterate over. Once you see the problem as a reachability problem in a certain fixed graph, however (easy, but not trivial), the code writes itself. Someone with no exposure to graph theory might easily just balk at this easy problem, not knowing how to proceed.
I keep hearing people to build a niche skill. I'm a Python/Django/AppEngine developer - is this "niche" enough?? :)
>Not really. He made broad, sweeping and unreasonable assertions, incorrect assumptions and no one has any real reason to believe anything written up there.

I shouldn't have to convince you to be respected. I have other things to do with my life than gather together a compendium of research on porn. The truth is out there for all to see. You can find it yourself if you want to. The thing is not malicious, it's just an alternative opinion. I don't stand in your way, you are free to live your life as you like. If I condemn a thing you want to think is good, you don't need to take personal offense, just politely disagree and let's all be on our ways.

EDIT: I'm truly curious to see this one get downvotes. Do you guys really want people to call you out on every opposing opinion and make you run to and fro gathering a corpus of data, anecdotes, and other evidence to support every claim you make? I just don't have the time for it, and I don't have the interest because I know that I won't be changing any minds here, it'll just get written off with, "Well that psychologist/victim/whatever is a religionist so obviously he's backward", etc. Be sensible here, please.
this sort of thing is usually tolerated on HN... offers for things that HN readers are generally interested in.
At some point they get mixed up and interdependent. Go read until you run into some concept that gets you stuck, and then switch topics and work through until you understand it. Unless you’re taking university classes, no one cares what order you follow.
Not meant to be, I just thought this was an unusually low price and was considering biting. I posted it partly to share with everyone else here running an internet business, partly to get a potential reality check from the comments, and to see if anyone had disparaging things to say about ServerBeach.
http://venturehacks.com, read it from the start
No RAID, and I am guessing, no ECC RAM.
There's been many discussions on the purpose of downvotes and the consensus seems to be that it's inappropriate to downvote something far below zero when it isn't malicious or spammy because it decreases the possibility that less popular ideas will be seen and discussed.
Dell sues five LCD makers for alleged price-fixing
His argumentation misses an important variable: The programmers time involved. Fix this, and fix the machine, and programming languages do have speed.

And certainly, the statement 'This problem solution in language X developed in Time T running on machine M is faster than the problem solution developed in language Y developed in time T, running on machine M' (often condensed into 'X is faster than Y' is certainly possible and valid, given that the programmers developing the program are about even in skill. (I don't want to assume the same programmer here. Language benchmarks have been shot because someone wrote a good C-Program and a horrible Python program and complained how slow the python program is).
I'm mostly interested in engineering/science. That's pretty much as narrow as I can get. The point of asking a broad question was to get answers I wouldn't spontaneously come up with. I'm looking for diversity and originality.
I guess that depends on who's populating the dinner party. Usually the subject of pornography wouldn't come up at all, so it wouldn't be a concern.
"you ignored us, but the FTC said we were right, nah nah nah"

That how I read their open letter. And my interpretation of "you should have worked with us" is as "you should have hired us as consultants"
That's precisely why I'm looking to learn something not related to software development.
True on both counts, though they offer RAID for a fee (40-100/mo for controller, then drives). Instead I'm planning on going SSD for 60/mo more + aggressive backups (bad idea?)

I'm planning on using this for things where performance matters a lot more than 100% data integrity.
What's wrong with a variable annuity? Just curious b/c I don't know anything about annuities but they sound good for the future.
This technique worked well for us too. Four kids all sleeping 12 hours/night within the first few months (can't remember how many, but 2-5 sounds about right)

Also worth noting: all kids are different and develop different skills at different ages. The variance on the age at which kids learn things like talking, walking, toilet training etc is huge, years sometimes. If your kids early at something, doesn't mean they're smart, and if they're later developing doesn't mean they're dumb.
Assuming you have no car and are stuck wherever you go, why not just move to the South Bay, e.g. Mountain View.

It meets all your requirements, plus there's no scenery to stare at to even get the slightest bit distracted. AND, there's entrepreneurial activity going on 24/7 to keep you motivated.

As a side note, I had a couple friends go to Thailand with exactly this in mind, and honestly they didn't come back with much. Beaches can be distracting...
Nice, it looks like I can get 2x1TB drives (gotta have my software raid) and 8GiB ram for around $250/month with that code. nice. (I mean, it's still cheaper to own, and obviously, I'm equipped to deal with my own hardware, but that's a relatively reasonable price as far as renting hardware goes.)
IBM Test-and-Dev Cloud to Exit Beta
It has been driving innovation in the early days of the web but it is not true anymore. Disclosure: I've been freelancing for several adult companies and personally know some business owners that are in this industry.
SSD is not raid. get a second drive; you should be able to setup software raid without their help, and for a mirror, there shouldn't be much performance difference between software and hardware raid.

ECC ram is a larger problem, at least in my mind. having wrong data without knowing it is about the worst thing possible. ECC at least has the courtesy to crash my box when it gets an error it can't correct.
The basic outcome of that article is that any country is bankrupt on paper if you apply the right criteria and filter them through some historical information super-imposed onto what may or may not be happening now.

The fact they picked China gives it a high propaganda rating in my eyes.
Hey smakz, I'd be interested in getting in touch with you (see email in profile). I might have some things you'd be interested in.
Well, a subscriber can't easily figure out which articles are fully free or mostly behind the paywall.

And it's easy to get the full test by doing a Google search on "unique fragement" site:wsj.com and then clicking on the result. But submitters ought to include a link to such a search in a comment.

E.g. for this article: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22great+reshuffling+of+U.S.+...
Yeah I second that it might well be someone who wants to prove himself, or a geek with poor social skills who want to befriend you by commenting on your work.

It is pretty rude to just ask outright of anyone to rewrite their code, a writing such a request as a suggestion or opening to discussion is much friendlier. It would not be rude if there's a critical problem, but just a small performance increase is way out of line.

The correct way to deal with this is of course to add the script tags at the bottom of the page ;) (apart from your coworker not noticing - it's better for performance as (most?) browsers completely stop doing anything but loading javascript when they encounter a javascript tag).
moreover, you should expect to pay more for a physical server. It's more expensive to run a physical server than a slice of a virtual (at least until the physical servers start getting bigger than 32 or 64GiB)

Physical servers provide more value to the user, too; if you split a disk to 8 VMs, in times of contention, each vm gets significantly less than 1/8th of the disk's maximum performance. See, sharing the disk means that during times of contention, what would otherwise be sequential access become random access, and disk, especially cheap sata disk, is not any good at random access.

I wrote a bit about it here http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2010/03/forward-looking... when I was trying to track down a problem that pinboard was complaining about. (turns out the problem was actually a debian xen bug and not actually the problem I was describing. But what I say above is still true; virtualization is not any good at all for disk I/O)
You'll need to be more specific. They have really nice ones Levallois, Neuilly, Versailles. And not so nice ones: St. Denis, aubervillier. If you take the train from CDG to Paris than you only see the bad. The train from Orly to Paris has lots of nice areas. Anything by La Defense and Versailles has as sizable expat population, ie. $£€, so they are well off.

Just like New York's South Bronx doesn't surround the city. The bad suburbs don't surround Paris.
This wasn't an article, just a straightforward question posted on a forum I frequent.

It damages families in a lot of ways. Porn users are almost universally addicts; you might say you're not, but if you're a regular consumer, try to go without it and see how long you last. I challenge all naysayers to do that. A few can do so without much effort, but the vast majority can't. This reality is opposite of the lie that most will claim.

There are accounts all over of addiction to porn and the feelings that it causes. Companions feel inadequate compared to the airbrushed, artificial bodies their companions lust after. Porn users perceive the subjects of their pornography in an abnormally sexualized light and it diminishes their emotional and intellectual sensitivity.

Pornography steals time, productivity, and money from its users; it is not a wholesome, upbuilding recreational activity as some here say, it is not comparable to video games. It is degrading to its subjects and its users.

Pornography, like drugs, is a mechanism to enrich a few for the moral entrapment of its many users. Porn users become addicted and can't stop using it. They go back for more and more. They desire harder and harder material. They seek to mimic what they see in their preferred pornographic material. How is any of this desirable?

Pornography has a large negative effect on its users. That's absolutely true and no amount of studies, hopes, oblations, snarky comments, or any other thing can change that.
It's About New Behaviors: A Proposed Playbook for Massachusetts Tech Companies
Original post from the Skype blog:
http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2010/03/advances_in_audio.ht...
Link to SILK on Skype Dev Zone: https://developer.skype.com/silk
My rationale is that random small block read/write perf of a single SSD is greater than that of RAID 0 of traditional disks, so I was going to go that route. If I notice that there's still an IO bottleneck, I'll consider adding another.
Ditching them would probably identify as "the guy without browser identification strings".
I can't see it on the app store, maybe it was removed. The price on the google cache of the itunes preview was $399.99

The game was released around 1 year ago. There is a page in the forums: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=7404
Oh, if performance is the problem, sure, a SSD is great. I was thinking of the redundant part of RAID.
The craftsmanship really is superior at Tiffany's though, and they also have a lot of 'not-found-elsewhere' items because of their uniqueness.

I view Tiffany akin to the way I view art, which is to say yes, if you melted it down, it would lose significant value, but you weren't buying it for the raw materials were you?
That merely requires a different pattern of investment. There is a ton of easy money in porn. One wouldn't have to have a big exit i.e. acquistion or IPO to make a lot of cash as an investor in such a business, just a pattern where you collect a certain percentage of the revenue stream for x years.
Thought it was some virtualization but wasn't sure how it differentiated from VirtualBox for example. Jackass.
YMMV - for me Objective-C is the most pleasant OO language I've ever tried. Speedy and powerful.
highlight-parentheses minor mode hack which is found here

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2413047/can-emacs-color-d...

seems to me like the best solution so far. It only applies "rainbow parens" to the parentheses and parents parentheses of the s-expressions at the cursor.
Agree. I'm German living nearby and it always amazes me what Frankfurt is doing in these rankings.
Statistics For Programmers IV: Ordinary Least Squares
London-based start-up allows anyone to print their own newspaper.
We're not an amenity: How an entrepreneur grew his deluxe fountain sales
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129357
bst were the first time i went "holy crap. i love complex problem solving"
http://www.google.com/search?q=project+903

The youtube link in the above search shows the thing "in flight."
How TOMS Shoes Founder Got Started in a Start Up.
"The Rocket Project" commercial for SONY in USA by 180 Los Angeles
Is John Lewis the best company in Britain to work for? | Business | The Guardian
It's worth noting in relation to the HTML5/Theora/VP8/H.264 shenanigans that Skype currently use VP7 as their video codec.

I like this summary of why royalty free audio codecs makes business sense for them:

"1. Technological progress saturates.

2. Patents expire.

Therefore, the performance advantage of royalty-bearing standards diminishes with time, and high-quality, royalty-free standards are unavoidable. I'm convinced that today we have reached this point of commoditization for audio and speech coding technology."

from http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/codec/current/msg00897....