skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blackberry buys Viigo
Anybody see the logic in this? As far as I could tell, Viigo wasn't much more than an rss reader for the blackberry, and I can't imagine that is the killer app Blackberry needed.

Or did they just pick-up the people super cheap?

http://bulletins.viigo.com/2010/03/26/breaking-news-viigo-joins-rim/
Waiting to fix bugs until they become an issue is smart, if a bit ruthless.

Waiting to fix security flaws until they become public is negligent.

From firsthand experience with at least one of the companies implicated in the recent stories: they aren't sitting on things. What Charlie Miller is finding is news to them.
Didn't he?

"Has anyone ran benchmarks with MySQL or PostgreSQL in an environment that sees 35,000 requests a second? IO contention becomes a huge issue when your stack needs to serve that many requests simultaneously."

my answer to this point is that IO contention can be vastly reduced in MySQL (and probably even better handled in Postgres, I bet) with some tweaking of settings and lots of memory. Memory is pretty cheap these days, so stuffing a server full of RAM is really not a bad option.
I'd really like to see a set of use cases for each type of system too. I recently compared NoSQL systems in terms of the CAP theorem and the underlying data model (discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190772). I haven't seen enough of these systems in production, but it would be great to see examples of each combination of CA, AP, or CP systems with relational, key-value, column-oriented, document-oriented, and graph (not featured in my post) data models.
It depends on the vendor. There are vendors for which the "announce and hold back" strategy will probably work: they're the ones who market based on security. It is a Big Deal if someone has an IIS remote, or a reliable Flash, or Apache/WebSphere.

We'll see how big a deal it is for Google and Apple. Marketing based on security means more than just talking about security on your web page. It means making a business out of people who buy based on product security. I like my Mac, and I like Apple, but I have no illusions about the resilience of OS X.
Can you spot the partisan blogger?

Seriously, the guy links to newsbusters. Really the only thing his graphics show is just how good the Republican party has gotten at forcing their members to toe the party line.
Music engages your creative hemisphere, thus hampering your creative thinking capabilities.

For me this wasn't a problem when configuring routers, but I found that if I listened to music, I could spend an hour programming a solution to a problem that could have been sidestepped entirely.

I read some articles about that, but don't have a reference handy. In any case, once I noticed the effects it has on me, I am being extra careful.
A better way of saying this is: “I worked a lot on X” is less interesting/impressive than “A bunch of adults acted on something I did.”

To be honest though, this article’s premise (I should figure out how to efficiently get into college) seems pretty stupid. It’s just as stupid as college counselor’s premise, and really basically the same.

Instead of “drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule and put your attention toward becoming an insider”, how about trying to learn as much as you can from your classes (emphasis: learning not some irrelevant number), build cool stuff, and try to make it have a real-world impact because they are intrinsically valuable things to do?
I've never read anything by Joe Stump before but I just bookmarked this article so I can peruse more of his stuff later.

I liked the way he personalized his argument to his own deployment situation rather than making generalizations. I also liked to hear about his experience with Cassandra (5 minutes to clone a hot node and have it balanced and in production).
You would be surprised. A lot of these guys write the most horrific code you will ever see.
Before somebody says it:

The minimum Federal sentence for murder appears to be ~20 years (the sentencing range is ~20-25 years, for second degree murder, for someone with no criminal history). The minimum Federal sentence for first degree murder is life.

Yes, you can rape someone and spend less than 20 years in prison. Personally, the problem I see there is with the rape sentence, not with the sentence for selling 100 million people's credit cards to the Russian Mafia.
10 years from now when I'll look back at this, I don't want to remember Steve and Schmith "sitting in a tree" ... all I want are the facts ... what company released what, with what impact and what was the retaliation from the other competitor.

I understand that News are either about things you can use right now or about things that keep you entertained.

But boy, the preferences of people for entertainment is getting really weird lately. Too bad geeks aren't into clothes fashion, otherwise we'd be talking about Steve's shoes right now ... oh wait :)
Luis Villa on Patents (H.264, Theora and MPEG-LA)
ErrantX put it best. In general, their mission of exposing any leaked document can actually decrease freedom rather than increasing it.

Examples:

1) If they ever leaked witness protection documents - the witnesses are now less free (more at risk).

2) Their actual leaking of the membership of the British National Party. You and I might disagree strongly with their platform, but, leaking that membership does harm discourse coming from a minority group (admittedly, an extreme one).
At one company I worked for, we introduced a fuzzer into the testing of one of our products. Due to a longer than normal release cycle, we were able to collect data on bugs customers found vs bugs the fuzzer found.

A lot of bugs the fuzzer found were not found by customers, but a lot of the bugs found by the customers were found by the fuzzer. Furthermore the bugs encountered by the fuzzer identified modules that tended to be buggy and allowed even more bugs to be found by inspection in them.

I guess it comes down to how much you value you place on fixing bugs before customers run into them. I certainly feel like in the case of security issues, the value is very high, especially since this is a class of bugs that attackers will specifically search for!
Explain the problem to someone that doesn't know anything about it.

Usually that 'clicks' at some point and I realize what I'd been missing all along. The less the person knows about computers/programming (my usual subject matter) the better it seems to work.
Say this paragraph out loud:

I don't use Gambit, I use Skeem. Yes, I know Gambit is Scheme. Skeem is also Scheme, just a different Scheme.
"I feel like if my IQ was in the genius instead of just very bright range or if I graduated from MIT instead of a Tech school, I could someday..."

Stop that. Right now. Many of the great people you look up to aren't smarter than you, many of them didn't go to the right college. They just worked hard, and worked smart, for long enough. What you're doing here is identifying an external excuse to psychologically allow yourself to fail. I apologise if this seems harsh, but it's true.

It also comes across as really, really whiny.

The only option you've got is just to get on with it. Stop worrying about being a master, or being great - just concentrate on being better than you were yesterday. The rest will sort itself out.
Has anyone used Amazon payments on a site? Would you consider it a viable alternative to paypal now or in the future for donations, subscriptions, ebooks, etc. ?
Reality is not so clear cut. There is a huge span of information which is useful to potential enemies without directly being a risk to people's lives.

For instance, in the Army counterintelligence report that Wikileaks recently published one of the classified items (much of the content of the report was actually unclassified information) lists certain countries that were believed to have the capacity to hack Wikileaks. Now, if you were (say) North Korea, then your presence or absence on that list tells you something about what the US knew about your cyberwarfare capabilities. If you were the US, leaking this information undermines your desire to not reveal all you know, and might even reveal something about your own intelligence capability.

I've intentionally chosen a fairly benign example because my point is not that this information is so valuable, but that classification of information does not simply break down into "nukes" and "embarrassing".
So open source devs should offer premium support and paid options for better features...I think thats called running a business, right?
This "rubber duck" strategy is great for debugging too.

One person plays the rubber duck and sits there and says (at most) "uhuh, uhuh" while the programmer with the bug explains the problem. Nine times out of 10, the bugged programmer will do a facepalm and fix the bug immediately while explaining the problem.

You actually don't need a person at all for this, or a rubber duck... just the willingness to explain your bug aloud to yourself when you have one.
That's a really funny name for it. I don't think I'll alert my favorite 'victims' to it though, it might backfire :)
http://counterpunch.org/roberts03242010.html
Could you put some lower bound on what you consider 'complex' ?

It seems a bit of an outlandish claim to make without a reference point, what's complex to you may be simple to others and vice versa. So a bit of extra data as to the kind of complex systems and problems you visualize would help.
I thought Steve was impressive because he was uncommon. By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; you're likely to see hundreds of Davids in a given college admissions department. It's much less likely that you'll encounter someone who worked with an NGO or the UN--even if Steve's abilities or perserverance weren't exceptional.

Still, I think there's something to the model. It is difficult to envision how one might become an advisor to a UN NGO! That was definitely a factor in my evaluation.
Dali didn't do that to get "the best nap ever." He did this to sleep just enough to get some hypnagogic images to use in his art. He never claimed it improved the quality of the nap itself. And why would it?
Agreed. "Ur" could be removed completely and the title would still remain readable.
I can't say he didn't deserve the sentence, but the name "Gonzalez" had no bearing on the sentence given? No siree bob..

Max Ray Vision, the "carders market" guy, got 13 years recently, and that was the longest hacking related jailtime sentence ever given till now. Other big cases didn't yield significant jailtime: 5 years for Mitnick on a second offence. 8 months for "MafiaBoy". David L. Smith (Melissa virus) 20 months. Sven Jaschan, 3 years probation. Kim "Kimble" Schmitz, 2 years for Internet credit card fraud.
Navy World War II Plane Found Near Oregon Coast
Prosecutors acknowledged that Gonzalez did not obtain any of card numbers in the case or receive any proceeds from the thefts.

I understand the need to provide some kind of deterrent but sheesh.. you could get drunk, take your car out on the road and kill somebody and not get that much jail time.
I dislike it when business agreements are changed unilaterally. (Think of Darth Vader speaking with Lando Calrissian.) Terms of service at a web site with authenticated login is a business agreement. A bit off topic but the only thing I like about FB is that it looks like an interesting application platform for 3rd party developers.
20 years in prison for most crimes short of murder seems ridiculous to me. It is only relatively recently in human history that long prison terms as punishment have become normal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement
I don't know the stories on most of these cases, but I know the Mitnick case wasn't anything nearly as bad as the TJX case. Mitnick didn't set up a business selling the results of his exploits to organized crime.

When you exploit security flaws to help the mafia, or, worse, profit from helping the mafia, you become part of the mafia. A tip for people considering a life of crime: don't become part of the mafia.
That's an interesting article about a movement that appears to conflate everything that is wrong about criminal justice, and everything that is reasonable about criminal justice into a single issue.

10 years for aggravated rape? Aggravated rape: throw away the keys.
Murdoch's online newspapers to start charging this June
What a boring title. Go and read this amazing article, people.

In short - "How to invent things (even when you cannot)".
^^^ This! I was involved on writing an invoicing system that ended up failing. The real intent of management was to try to bring more control to pricing using the project. Management was unable to negotiate this new process, so it ended up being an overpriced spreadsheet and was replaced a few months later when the company switched to Salesforce.
Apple Leaks Approved iPad Apps
Interesting - yes. Informative - yes. "Genius" though?
The scary thing ... a robber can get from a house something like $100.000 (and that's on a good day). A good cracker can get tens of millions in a week.

I think he should've gotten the full 25 years.
But the software company should've also been fined, depending on the stupidity of the bug that allowed for an SQL injection.
Five (+ 1) Things I Hate About Python (and then five more)
Iceland or any other country is not under US jurisdiction!

The article claims that US State Department was investigating a leak from the US embassy in Iceland. If the government of Iceland (an ally and NATO member) is cooperating with such an investigation, that is unsurprising.

Wikileaks is a medium for whistleblowers, not a "spy agency"!

Regardless of how you describe it, Wikileaks is of interest to people whose job is counterintelligence (i.e. secret-keeping). Suppose you have information you want to keep secret. I prevent you from keeping that information secret. How shall you regard me?
Chrome 5 for Mac Adds Translation, Other Updates
Twisted 10.0.0 is out
So and how long did the companies get that stored "130 million credit cards" in systems vulnerable to SQL injection attacks?
Bootup Labs' Summify renames and launches beta
Well, that's not entirely true. If you're running your own data source through EC2, you can make sure it's in the same availability zone (datacenter), which makes latency very small indeed.
They fixed it, which is good as it was pointed out to them.
Ask HN: opening a company in US (for non US citizen)
Hi. I am porting one of my products to US market. If possible and no too expensive I will open a company in US for it. I am not from US and I am from a country where flying to US is quite an expense so I would have to think trice about it, if that would be the requirement. Can I ask the following:

- Can a non US citizen open a company in US without physically going there (I heard you have to go to sign for a bank account)

- Are services like this a legit and smart way to open a company in this case, if not what can you recommend http://www.myuscompany.com/

- By reading about this I now understand LLC or C corp is a form of company most appropriate for startups?

- Any other thoughts on this subject?

thanks, I love Hacker News community, Janko
I can see that Apple relies on Google services, but what does Apple provide which Google relies on?
This is because you can't always trust management to report things properly. My girlfriend works at a liquor store (small business, <50 employees) and they use a biometrics scanner for their clock in/clock out. It is very efficient and prevents the problems I stated. If sizable groups of your organization are cheating the system and your organization is large enough, it's going to be difficult to figure this out.
That was my first thought too, seems like the simpler solution and the way I've built multi-site apps in the past.

It sounds like they are still using a different database per site, as opposed to one database and scoping data by an account_id. I wonder what the performance gain is over the complexity it adds.

I remember this is the same way that FogBugz was setup too and they ran into issue when they had so many small databases instead of one large one.
That type of strategy consulting is completely different from IT consulting. You don't "ascend" from doing IT work at Accenture or IBM into doing management consulting at MBB.
yeah, take a name like 'Clojure" that sounds like Clozure, the company that maintains OpenMCL, now Clozure Common Lisp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ivy_(Los_Angeles)
Solid SEO 101 presos from Tribune Co. SEO guru
The best part is that the RNPs are designed to create EFFECIENCY in spending by creating a competitive bidding process.
The product I am talking about is Signiant:http://www.signiant.com/.
It's a file based workflow application that basically that is written in Perl in the same sense that emacs is written in emacs lisp. The idea is for people to write workflows in the embedded Perl environment which is the same across of the machines on which Signiant is installed. I could use another interpretor, but that would require extra work and I wouldn't be able to use a lot of the Signiant specific code.
"if you have a legit business reason for it then you can claim the cost of your rent as a business expense"

I'd be a little careful about this. The advice I received was that the Revenue clamp down on things like this pretty hard. I used to push a proportion of my rent through my company books (I was working from a home office almost 100% of the time) but after seeking the advice of a specialised tax accountant I promptly stopped.

I'd recommend speaking to some good tax accountants before making any decisions like this and to discuss some strategies for maximising your take home. Drop me a mail if you would like me to put you in touch with the company I work with (I've been with them for the past 4 years) - they specialise in advice and services to small firms and contractors particularly those who work in IT.
Ah yes, Ryanair, beloved by economists and libertarians all around for charging for every damn service and for seriously contemplating charging its clients for in-flight bathroom use.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/4861505/Ryanair...
Costs $15 a month for the VOIP service.
At least it's only general information...

... by which they mean everything until you explicitly say not to share something.
The almost-magical "content aware fill" plugin from a few days ago...on gimp.
Online Marketing Tips for your Mom-Targeted EBooks
Now that you have several eBooks put together that you want to sell, how do you get the right people interested? To gain a foothold in the mom market, your marketing needs to be on point with them. Here are a few tips for marketing your eBooks online to moms.
There's a popular fallacy --- at least, I think it's a fallacy? --- that involves people being shocked at the consequences of doing stupid things with computers. Sometimes it's outrage at the fact that the perpetrator was just joking, or was just exploring. Other times it's outage at the fact that the "victim" was so vulnerable or took so few precautions.

The reality is that none of this matters. If you crash a system that would not have crashed on its own by running something called an "attack" on it, and that costs the victim tens of millions of dollars, guess what? You just did tens of millions of dollars in damages.

There is some BS involved in assessing damages, where cost of investigation and cleanup gets inflated, just like your landlords inflate cleanup costs to get your whole security deposit. But the fact that you used a computer to casually attack someone who was not adequately protected doesn't insulate you from the consequences of your actions. Be more careful. Computers amplify bad consequences as well as good ones.
I'm not that familiar with Digg (it's the same as Reddit though, right?), but two major things occur to me:

1) I'm much less likely to vote a answer/question up/down on SO than I am at Reddit. On SO, if I'm not asking or answering, I'm rarely causing any writes to the data store. On Reddit, I vote on most of what I look at. I could see this having a huge impact.

2) Obviously Reddit can do some caching, but I think SO can cache much larger pieces of data. As far as I know, everyone who goes to the main page of SO sees the exact same list of questions. On Reddit, each subreddit's top items can be cached, but they are mixed differently for each user.
I use PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout. PayPal and Amazon are almost interchangeable.

Google Checkout, on the other hand, is relatively weak (doesn't support bank accounts, is slower, more false positives, weaker API, etc.).
> An argument is an argument is an argument. If it holds water, let it carry the water.

The thing is, until now, most of the arguments I trusted most about China were anecdotal. Not because I distrust numbers, but because numbers about China are so untrustworthy. If someone reputable in a forum like this one plausibly presents themselves as an old China hand and explains conclusions they’ve come to from a wide range of experience there — about what average citizens think of the web censorship, etc. — I’ve tended to assume that it’s as close to the truth as I’m likely to get.

So sure, this only taints anecdotal evidence about China. But for a country where nearly all non-anecdotal evidence about important things is already tainted by the government, that’s a big blow.

(Some acquaintances have traveled in China and explained things about life there that really raised my opinion. Now I’m a little scared to bring them up — despite being generally pretty darn wary of the Chinese government — for fear of looking like an astroturfer.)
Isn't the whole point that they are equivalent? Both can calculate anything that can be calculated (in finite space, since both are limited by the finite length of the tape / size of RAM).
Accenture, one of the primary beneficiaries of this $722m, operates offshore.

They're now in Ireland after having been in Bermuda for the sole purpose of avoiding paying the US governtment taxes on their international business.

So in reality our tax dollars are going to fund a multi-national conglomerate that's making the spread between the $100/hr consultants and the $400/hr billings.

I can't wait to see the tricks these companies come up with to service the $100,000,000,000 a year that we just dumped in the pork barrel for health care.
At Molex, we've been pitched recently by Invention Machine to adopt their SAAS service "Goldfire". They claim that Goldfire makes it easier for companies to incorporate TRIZ principles in their new product development processes. So far, most of my colleagues who've heard the pitch are quite skeptical. This article covered most of their objections: it's a gimmick, it hasn't been objectively proven to yield innovative ideas, we don't need expensive software to use these techniques, etc.
Haml for nodejs
A faster and more compliant JavaScript Haml implementation for nodejs
Eddie, a programmer's editor for MacOSX and Gnome Linux
I also choose David over Steve. Maybe it's because I have a disdain for politics.

The ability to cause havocs in UN meetings would more impressed me. Competing with the United States Post Office and then crushing them is also an incredibly impressive to me.

What I would search for, as a college admission office is people who is likely to defy authorities and be massively right. If I can get that guy into college, then that's the greatest achievement I could hope for, because this guy will have massive positive impact in this world.

I don't need Obamas people, but I would like more Talebs people in my school.