skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've probably heard the term "buffer overflow". A buffer overflow is one example of a memory corruption flaw. In virtually all modern memory corruption exploits, the goal of the attacker is to corrupt a victim program in such a way that they can upload their own code into the victim and run it.

For about 8 years (95-'03, the "summer of worms"), the bulk of all the work in stopping these attacks was directed at the broken code that allowed the vulnerabilities (for instance, the use of strcpy() and sprintf(), which are unbounded). The payoff for this work went asymptotic.

Starting in the late '90s and really picking up in the '00s, research instead went into hardening runtimes to break exploits. For instance, you can't simply overwrite the activation record for a function to change the return address, because there's a random cookie there. The stack and heap aren't executable, and the text segment isn't writeable. The whole runtime is randomized, so you can't predict addresses.

What papers like this (and, as Dave Aitel pointed out on Twitter, papers like John McDonalds from the 90s -- that guy is spooky) aim to show is that even if attackers can't literally upload x86 instructions into their targets, they can still take control of the process.

That's because even simple real-world programs are very complex at the runtime level, and linked to very complex libraries. The CPU can be coerced into executing any of the instructions in those libraries --- or, indeed, any sequence of bytes comprising any fragment of those instructions.

So, if you do some basic binary analysis on your target, you can craft a sequence of addresses in the target which, if executed in the right order, will have the same effect as any program you could write (it's "turing complete", but a more helpful way to think about it is that they're synthesizing a simple VM running out of fragments of code).

As far as we know, it is very hard to stop these kinds of attacks. An attacker that can write 1-4 bytes to an arbitrary (or even restricted) address in memory can trick the CPU into looking at attacker-controlled memory (say, the 1024 character login name they just gave you), and once the CPU is looking at that memory, it starts running sequences of its own code against itself.

This is systems programming, compiler theory, computer architecture, and computer security. If you're into serious practical CS, you're crazy if you don't consider security as a career. There are very few other jobs that will reliably expose you to so much CS (and even EE) at this level.
Seems like it might be hard to avoid the vista security warning problem, where alerts bother users and they just click through them.
If you are right about Apple then I retract my statement as it applies to Apple. However, this is not a legal requirement for companies who do business in the United States and it is not a standard practice. Even when it is standard for a company to do this it is done with a wink, so to speak. Companies and consumers in the United States (and Europe) are content to leave the issue of exploited labor out of the public debate. The general justification being that the companies don't actually hire the workers and so their hands are clean. It's convenient and immoral.

My overall point stands and it is sad that it has been down voted so much. It reflects poorly on the social awareness of the rich.
As many people pointed out after the Haiti earthquake, it's important to make sure your donations to any of these organizations go into the general fund, so they can be put to immediate use next time there is a disaster.

It's human nature to want to help victims of a specific disaster, but earmarking funds can make them unavailable for years, as agencies struggle to figure out how to spend them wisely. Meanwhile the money won't be available where it is most needed.

To help most effectively, pick one of the many agencies that does effective disaster relief worldwide, and make a generous unrestricted donation.
I don't care what you call it. Unless they have some sort of vision, they will continue to bleed good people and mind share until they are completely irrelevant. Cost cutting and efficiency gains are only going to get them so far. What will they be pursuing that will motivate their employees, allow them to hire talent excited about working there again, and cut the perception they are the next AOL? Sorry, but "providing content to people" is a little too amorphous for anyone to be too jazzed about.
2 questions: 1) what's Wagyu?, 2) what did you do to that poor cake.
> I've never been a Solaris fan (used it in school, and it's running one one of my old Ultra2s), but I really do love zfs

That's somewhat like my relationship with Debian and Ubuntu. I like the Gnome desktop and the rest of Linux, but what I definitively love is APT. I could move to a flavour of BSD or start using OpenSolaris as my netbook's OS, as long as it had APT.
Facebook Buzz
It's a commonly-received truth that children are not sufficiently developed to make potentially abusive deals. This is why we have laws against sex with children, why children cannot legally gamble or take out loans and why children have special labour laws. An adult is considered to be sufficiently mature to look after themselves, a child is not.

The employer is not the person who should provide food and shelter for kids - that's the parents' job. And 'some work' is often a euphemism for development-stunting, dangerous, exhausting labour which can harm the child for life.

Of course, one can argue that the child needs to work to survive, if its parents cannot support it. That's a separate issue. In this case the child needs a responsible adult to act in locus parentis, whether that is another adult or a state or charity. However, banning child labour is not an immoral choice and refusing to accept the products of it is not immoral either. I am surprised at your apparent astonishment that people are against the entire concept of child labour.

I suspect that your next argument in favour of the concept is that it would be immoral to take away the job of a child who relies upon that support. I'd argue that, in fact, the moral lapse lies with the parents and society that allows a vulnerable person to be put into that position without having had a chance to mature properly first.
If you are right about Apple then I retract my statement as it applies to Apple.

It says as much in the linked article.
I'm from the Canal Zone. I grew up there. I'm a former American colonist. The bulk of the workforce was Panamanian. Their wages were much lower than American wages. The justification by we Americans was that they were paid better by the Company than they would get in Panama. It's the standard imperial justification and it's wrong.

Panama has done quite well without America and their wages have improved. This isn't universally true but the justification that this is just something that every country must go through is wrong factually and morally. It is immoral for us to profit off of forced labor, unsafe working conditions, and child labor. That our country turns a blind eye is repugnant.
The same arguments were made when we decided that children shouldn't mine coal. The argument is wrong.
Is this a serious request? You want me to cite the basis for me stating that our society became better by outlawing the employment of children in factories and mines? This isn't obvious to you? I am grateful that people with your point of view didn't prevail when the United States confronted this issue.
I'm going to cut this line of questioning short so that you're not subjected to further downvote abuse from dumbasses.

It's really a shame we can't have a nice, intelligent conversation on HN without one side of the debate being demonized in the process.
I don't know why you are getting down voted. It's says much about society that you are. People on this site get outraged about App Store policies but not about child labor and Apple's ability to wash it's hands because the labor was contracted through a third party and they periodically do audits. God forbid Apple actually own the factory that makes their products and ensures that no children ever work there.
Also see: http://tombakersays.com/
Yeah, petty. Deleted.
It sounds like you're implying that lawyers do all this on their own initiative. In fact, they do these things because their client orders it done (with the exception of case law, of course, but why is making case law bad?). Blaming lawyers for these things is like blaming the messenger for the message.

Your description of what lawyers do is too one-sided. Lawyers not only send out nastygrams, but they help those who are the targets of nastygrams. Lawyers not only initiate lawsuits (because their clients want to sue), but also defend people from lawsuits.

Lawyers fight for the rights of the oppressed, the poor, and the unjustly accused and unjustly imprisoned. Of course, that's not all lawyers do, and not all lawyers do these things. But it's unfair not to mention the good that lawyers do, and pretend that all they do is reprehensible.
I'm more concerned about the potential problems related to food, water and air than I am about those related to petroleum, metals and minerals.

I agree that it's important to know "the true cost of things." It's the main point of the article and advice well taken. Much of the sand our present economy seems built upon is directly related to "not knowing the true cost of things" or at least "not being willing to accept the true cost of things."
"I hope, for his sake, that he hits some sort of bottom with all this….so good at getting good at stuff."

Tim Ferris got good at convincing you that he's good at everything because he makes a career out of finding things that appear incredibly difficult and doing them with ease. But if he started programming would he be teaching us all within a year? I don't think so.

This doesn't mean I think he's stupid because he must be super smart to come up with the stuff that he does and we can learn a lot from him. But keep in mind that he's basically a magician and, in order to this stuff, he's had to develop this special attitude of detachment from norms. And some of the norms he detached himself from were moral ones.
So you think that there should be no minimum age at all? Would you be comfortable having 6-year-olds working in a factory, even if it's just for 1 hour/day?

China sets an absolute minimum age of 16, and mandated special working conditions for workers between 16 and 18. This allows for a sort of "sliding scale" for that transition period between childhood and adulthood. And I think that saying, "we don't want any workers younger than X years old" is legitimate policy.

It's also a lot easier to enforce an absolute minimum age as opposed to special working conditions.
So far, the best market that I've come up with is that the influence and attention of intelligent and powerful people is a much scarcer resource than money. So if you develop games for influence rather than wealth, you can have higher ideals. Otherwise, you're stuck pandering to the lazy majority.
What happens if someone parks near my house, cracks my secured WiFi spot (easy with the right tools in the hands of a determined cracker), breaks the law, and drives off? Who's at fault here? I'm not offering a public service, and I am the internet subscriber receiving the nastygram.

Not good.
Ditto. Petty on my part as well.
Yahoo pipes Guide
You can't really do that either in Haskell. Well, in theory you can, but in practice nobody has yet written a way to autoparallelize Haskell that actually gets you reasonable speedups, because it requires predicting which parts are worth parallelizing.

Instead, the Haskell devs are mostly taking the same approach, of providing constructs for the programmer to explicitly write parallel code: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.6/html/libraries/base/Cont...
It's a commonly-received truth that children are not sufficiently developed to make potentially abusive deals. This is why we have laws against sex with children, why children cannot legally gamble or take out loans and why children have special labour laws. An adult is considered to be sufficiently mature to look after themselves, a child is not.

Children may be more likely than an adult to make a wrong decision. However, it still does not follow that consents law and labor laws actually solve the problem. Young adults still need to accumulate experience and knowledge about potentially abusive deals.

I suspect that your next argument in favour of the concept is that it would be immoral to take away the job of a child who relies upon that support. I'd argue that, in fact, the moral lapse lies with the parents and society that allows a vulnerable person to be put into that position without having had a chance to mature properly first.

That is to assume that society and parents have unlimited resources at their disposal. It may be the only moral option.

Banning child labor does not in actual meaning child labor will not occur. All that does is put child labor in the black market and from the prying eyes of upstanding members of society.
"One lesson of Plan 9 is that the right organizing metaphor is extremely powerful."

This sounds like a fundamental idea. Can anyone offer some more real life examples?
From http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-ne... (appeared several times at news.yc):

"Princeton’s 2009 graduating class found more jobs in financial services than in any other industry. According to Princeton’s career-services director, Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, campus visits and hiring by the big investment banks have been down, but that decline has been partly offset by an uptick in recruiting by hedge funds and boutique financial firms."
Such a shame the music and software industries are far too poor to afford to pay those bills.
Constitution for Governance of Open-Source Projects (v20100227)
If Facebook and Orkut were to merge the value would be...
e value of a network grows with n*log(n) instead of n^2 or 2^n
Roughly speaking, I agree with you.
Essentially, any entity that wants to "trade you money for nothing" has a parasitic aspect to it. It's not black-or-white.
I don't agree that exploiting firewall bugs justifies so much effort in keeping me from understanding what's running on my computer vs. just making it better.
Need I mention the real-world achievements of those (no, not me) who have attained the rank of Eagle Scout?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eagle_Scouts_%28Boy_Sco...
"It's a commonly-received truth that children are not sufficiently developed to make potentially abusive deals."

It was a commonly-received 'truth' that the earth was flat. But the fact is, everybody can be a victim of potentially abusive deals, not only children.

Child labor need not be abusive. And Another fact you are forgetting is that children are moral agents and so their choices are to be respected.
For the record, the United States interned first generation Japanese-Americans, Italian-Americans and German-Americans. They were still denied due process which is definitely unfortunate, but they weren't interned because of the color of their skin. I think that is what a lot of people hint at by always mentioning the Japanese internment, but not mentioning Italian or German.

The internment of these German-Americans almost certainly saved American lives by denying the German American Bund Party (Nazi Sympathizers) from being able to engage in espionage and sabotage.

Furthermore, I have a problem calling them internment camps considering how completely different they were from the kind of internment camps the Nazi's ran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American_internment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_internment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Relocation_Authority

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund
Ask HN: Python for commercial desktop software?
I've noticed that python is mostly used for open source or server-side commercial software, but rarely for desktop commercial software.

- Is this because of the ease of reverse-engineering of python bytecode?

- Any examples of commercial desktop software in python?

- What language should I write cross-platform desktop apps in?
Seems to me that it's against their best interest to limit the pool of of available business plans, which is what the $150 application fee does.

If I were an angel investor, I would ideally want to receive every business plan ever created in hopes that I at least have the option to invest in the next GOOG or APPL. Then it'd be up to me to quickly sort out the junky ones.
From a policy perspective, I think one justification for banning child labour is to encourage equal opportunities for children of poor vs. rich families.

Because of the diminishing marginal utility of money, children from affluent families will have no pressure to work, and can therefore focus on school for a better future.

Children from poorer families will have significant pressure to find a job, as any extra money coming into the family will offer a large difference in living conditions. Without minimum working age laws, most poor children will drop out of school and never realize their true long-term potential.

It also results in a less efficient economy, as the people recognized to have higher intellectual capacity, and placed in appropriate societal roles, will be a subset of the relatively affluent portion of society, and not necessarily the best-suited.
- edit : nevermind, found the answer in the 'pitfalls' doc : yes you can create picloud call from within picloud, but they of course go against your maximum count of parallel calls -

Hi

I have read (quickly) your webscraper example and i still have one question : Is it possible to launch piclouds jobs from within a picloud job ? i.e. from picloud download some list of url as csvs and then start webcrapers then have the original function return the results of these scrapers ?
Thanks for your answer.
This service is unavailable. I get it.
Thank you for providing the only sane voice in this thread.

Everyone who is from the first world country and who has never visited a third world country should stop talking about child labor. Now. Just stop it. It's very easy to bash child labor but do you know why the child labor exists in first place? Do you think parents of those child have any other alternatives? For their parents, it's a choice between living another day or dieing of hunger. For them, the so called 'abusive' work condition is the only option to survive.

To give a little personal perspective, let me tell you my story. I am from India. And when I was 10 years old (in 1990), my mom took up some side work to support us. She would do it 7 days a week and I would do it in evenings and full day on Sunday. We did it not for food but to make sure that me and my sisters could go to school and get the books we need. It was back breaking work but it was worth for me and my family. I was lucky enough that I worked so that I can go to school. Few of my other cousins were not that lucky. They had to work so that they can eat in evening. Because of my education, I have been successful and have been living in USA for last 5 years. Those poor cousins are now grown up and doing an average job but they are doing everything possible to send their kids to school. I am sure their next generation will be much much better off.

Before you decry child labor next time, ask yourself, what's the alternative for the child? Are you going to provide that alternative? If not, you are taking away the only viable choice from that child. Please don't do that.

For more thoughts, read this: http://cafehayek.com/2005/07/postrel_on_edmo.html
5 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142424

8 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138142
Will a very talented engineer rise to the top to become the CEO? Unlikely. He's likely stay an engineer, or, leave the company. Or will a very political, charming, shmoozer, sociopathic, do-whatever-it-takes, business-savvy, friends-in-high-places sort of person reach CEO? Much more likely. There's also randomness and "luck".
What? I didn't say that.

I said, I think a minimum age is a good solution, as long as there are ways for businesses to hire underage gifted children. This would prevent bullshit like "Even though you're an amazing programmer and we
want to hire you and this job could be the best thing to ever happen to you, we can't hire you because you're
fifteen, not sixteen. Also once you reach sixteen, this opportunity won't be here anymore."

I say all of this because I WAS in that position (I was 17) and I almost lost out on a very awesome graphics programming job in the game industry just because I couldn't legally sign an NDA. Thankfully it worked out, but it was a really unpleasant thing to see this awesome opportunity slipping away for reasons completely beyond my control. Don't you think that's a valid concern?

Also, it sounds like an awesome thing to offer a gifted six
year old a cool internship (one hour per day) at a factory with a safe working environment. This would give the six year old a sweet story to tell, and could easily net him a job later.
The "true cost of energy " from the coal example is perfect example of why tax incentives & subsidies hurt us. If it takes more energy to move coal out of a mine than it generates then the mine will go out of business, that is unless the coal is used as an economical store of energy -- i.e. we use fuel to power our cars instead of nuclear because fuel is easy to move etc.
I would guess one reason there is little Python desktop software is that the user interface components available to Python are not that great (unless you call-out to something like QT http://qt.nokia.com/products ). For a real horror-story (that happened to be in Python, but Python was not the biggest cause) do read "Dreaming in Code" http://www.dreamingincode.com/ . Plus there are the usual set of cynics who say there is no longer a need for desktop software (I strongly disagree with that).
Tell HN: What I like about HN
Whenever a link is submitted and makes it to the top page, there often is a "follow-up" within a few hours that tells the other side of the story.

For example:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol2/pjm2/ vs http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2010/01/actors-are-not-good-concurrency-model.html

There are many more examples, but I'm too lazy to retrace them :D Did anyone else notice the same pattern ?
...another retail store.
> You might have a point if people are enslaved into working.

Who's to say that the parents aren't forcing the child? The voluntary-vs-involuntary argument doesn't have to mean that the employer is forcing the child to work.

> Well, I don't know what you mean by that. The poor can choose to save what they earn too.

So you believe that the difference between a poor person and a 'rich' person is the ability to save money. So no rich person squanders money, and no poor person saves money?
The louder the noise the more they have to hide. Check out the beautiful Enron code of ethics: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/enron/enronethics1.html .
Scratching our own itch, then iterating: The Story of iPhone App
Wagyu is the breed of cattle commonly called Kobe Beef in the US. In proper usage, Kobe is a geographical designation like Champagne so "American Kobe" is a contradiction in terms. Hence, I prefer to call it Wagyu.
Remember, this is $150 doesn't actually give you the chance to pitch. No you pay $150 for the CHANCE to pitch.
Cool, it's in my calendar.
> Do you begrudge an employer who provide you food and shelter and a chance to live another day in exchange for some work?

By this argument, pimps are really philanthropists.
We'll see how I feel after this SF cooking extravaganza but it sounds cool. Send me an email as a reminder & I'll email you when I get back.