skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He mentions that re-writing a script from memory produces a better script. I discovered the very same thing in high school. The best essays I turned out where the ones were we had to write a rough draft at home, and type up a final draft due the next day, and I forgot the rough draft in my locker[1]. I always attributed that to the fact that the first draft is an act of discovery, and inevitably carries cruft from wandering paths and dead ends. Starting anew is much better at removing the cruft than editing the original.

Then I became a mathematician in college. In the maths, it's pretty well accepted that every problem and every proof, except for the most trivial, will take at least two drafts. One for discovery that is exploratory and meandering, and one that drives from the hypothesis to the conclusion like an arrow from Athena's bow. Published proofs are never in raw form, even a single page can hide a year (or several lifetimes) of refinements and incremental improvements on partial results.

Don't be too afraid to scrap your current work and start over, no matter what you're doing. The second round is much faster, and much cleaner. Such an undertaking shouldn't be done lightly, but it's often not as onerous as most people assume it will be.

[1] Yes, this happened several times. Don't mess with a winning formula.
The attack/code he showed cannot, but what you can do it write different iframes. Here is an example:

a+'.'+b+'.'+c+'.'+d

where a=192 b=168 c=0-255 b=0-255

Of course this could be any private network address range[1]. Next you would use document.write or .innertext to make these iframes. Personally I wouldn't stop at the first one. I would log all the frames that loaded into an array and from there test them further. I would also get the users IP address and tack on :80, :8080, :21, ect and see what I am presented with- web torrent frontends, ftp servers, ect.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
Solid Resource, Thank you.
This is about where things are heading, not where they stand right now.
>What Google is doing should be illegal.

What?
Máy chủ | Chỗ đặt máy chủ |
There are more than a few of us who don't consider a machine suitable for real work unless it ships with a derivative of the bourne shell and makes it easy to run the same software we use on our servers.

My process to get up and running on a new machine is to change the keyboard layout to dvorak and run `wget -qO - bit.ly/newbox | sh`. On Windows I have to do everything in a Linux VM anyway, because I hate messing around with cygwin, coLinux, etc.

I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but to me a Windows box is a glorified Xbox with a web browser. Sure people work with them but unless you're using VS I don't really see the point of using Windows for development.

edit: I know I'm not representative of the larger population but I think there are more people switching away from Windows than to it these days.
Not everyone acts according to their best interests. That doesn't mean game theory is wrong.
Ask HN: All startup websites look the same
All recent startup websites look the same to me. I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly, but the main style is:

A whole lot of white, plus one dominant color (usually blue, green or dark grey) used for footer/header.

Layout uses light-grey-to-white gradients to make gentle borders between columns and even tabs.

Borders that don't use gradients are always 1px grey.

Large rectangular rounded buttons in dominant color (or green, orange) with white lettering.

Sans serif font everywhere.

Bunch of links that don't fit anywhere are moved to lower footer in small font.

Approximately 940px wide fixed main layout.

http://www.loopt.com/

https://indinero.com/

http://www.nozbe.com/

http://www.peerindex.net/

Does anyone know how/why this came about?
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No, because evented code (usually) is scheduled cooperatively; (most) conflicts are precluded.

This goes out the window when you start forking processes and using shared memory, but at least then you're default-private instead of default-shared.
How's that better? That's like changing the port SSH listens on to 2222 even though root's password is "root".
What's a paw?
I like the idea of having less stuff in general, I think there was a pg essay on it a while back.

Temporarily moved back to my Dads place recently so I had to cut back down to only really having a room for my stuff, was a great opportunity to clear out a lot of stuff that I wasn't really using.
Google caving on net neutrality (the joint policy with Verizon).
Shoe hurled at J&K CM Omar Abdullah
This piece of information should be forwarded to Carol Roth of the "Screw Your Brilliant Business Idea" thread fame. She has some horrible floating blot that pimps some free report. On a mobile browser these things make me bail immediately.

If we are lucky, mobile may spell the end of popups because they render the reading experience useless. I'm looking at you, Mashable.
>"deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband"

Regardless, this sentence is entirely false.
I was into Robocode for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocode
The 3d is wrong... he's ruining it for people who will think they are seeing 3d by crossing their eyes. The 3d he shows is parallel view.

Someone trying to see what he shows will be disenchanted with the 3d experience. They will think they can't see 3d. I wish I could go into the internet and punch this guy. I love 3d things and this guy ruins them.
Obligatory: http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/482577430/introducing-aristo-...
1. http://www.pandora.com
2. Create a station for "Paul Oakenfold"
3. Hit Play
4. Code like a beast
Some things are cooler / more fun than others. Like, wearing a watch or using a real compass.

I have a notebook in which I write directions to a place before going there for the first time. Lame, I know... but every time I have a get a copilot, they end up looking through the book. I doubt they would have done the same if the directions were stored in a smartphone.

Cash is still king.
May be helpful when evaluating cloud providers
A Racist Experience
A Racist Experience
Can Canonical count users without uniquely identifying them?
Because of house edge, coming out ahead in the long run is difficult if not functionally impossible for most people. Card counting in blackjack will give the player a small edge if done at the correct games. I believe at one time there were internet casinos which offered blackjack games which gave the player a small house edge with optimal play, but those games are likely no long available.

I would say that discipline and controlling your emotions is more important than being any sort of a genius. No strategy will hand you a win if you fall apart when you're losing.

I don't want to say that nobody has ever figured out how to beat the casino fairly over the long run. I'm sure there are a small number of professional gamblers who have figured out various strategies for coming out ahead, even though the idea of overcoming the house edge (if there is one) goes against logic. If there are people out there like that, I can assure you that they wouldn't be posting their strategies unless they were totally finished with gambling, and even then they probably wouldn't post their knowledge.

If you would like to try to "game gambling" then my first suggestion would be online poker. Essentially the players, set the "pot odds" for you. I would guess that most players don't even know what "pot odds" means (look it up if you don't.) That means a lot of poker players are playing blind. As long as these uninformed players are creating opportunities (inefficiencies in play) for better players, then this is the best place to make money in gambling.

Other than poker and counting cards in blackjack, I'm not sure there are any other opportunities for playing with the edge in the players favor. Betvoyager is an online casino which offers many casino games with zero house edge. Betfair does the same, though Betfair is much more restrictive with betting limits and other things. That's still not a player edge, but it's the lowest you will likely find. So if you would like to test out strategies, then Betvoyager with their zero edge games is a good place to check out.
Forgot Windows 7 password - what should you do to log on your computer?
I'm also curious as to how he's managing to call to the router via javascript. Anyone have more details on the hack?

edit: Here's more info...

http://samy.pl/mapxss/

The hack relies on a specific XSS vulnerability in the Verizon FiOS router. It requires that you're already logged into your router or that you're using default username/password.
Don't forget that 2010 is the year of the Linux desktop!
This probably will win some sort of award for 'most apt domain name'.
Apparently Flip Flops are in great demand for Haiti assistance. Raise money to get them donated?

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-07-18/news/os-lk-ha...
"... I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that once Facebook had about 5-10 universities they were unstoppable. Once you have 5-10 universities, you're going to get all the rest. ..."

It wasn't that easy according to "The Facebook Effect" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect... Competitors existed but Facebook had 2 things going for them that the others did not - a) A fast school addition tool allowing Facebook to quickly add new universities & b) A strategic thinking founder who realised if you added universities around existing sites (friends, associates of the target university) you could pull in enough of the users of their competitors sites to render them ineffective. Such is the power of the "social graph" and relentless determination.
Italian recluse Pordenone Montanari, aged 73, hailed as a genius of art
>Google is nothing but a series of infringements snowballed together.

From the tone of the article, it seems that no one is able to build anything without infringing on someone elses patents.
This sounds like a great idea:

Make a site that allows people to order a pair of flip flops, and simultaneously donate a pair (like Tom's Shoes). Give them some kind of social badge they can use on facebook etc., when they make the donation/purchase so they can spread the word.
Although I'm pro-legalization/pro-decriminalization I don't think it's a good idea for Mexico.

"Instead, they're referred to a panel comprised of a drug-treatment specialist, a lawyer and a civil servant, who usually recommend treatment -- and pay for it, too." is something that won't happen here. And I think that's a fundamental part for legalization to work.
which do you generally prefer?
Ambitious but perhaps slightly naive?

If Oracle have decided that they want to build the best Solaris engineering team then it's only a matter of time before they actually do.

The best engineers gravitate towards the hardest problems, the biggest paycheques and other brilliant hackers. Oracle easily provides the first and will quickly provide the last two.

In fact, it won't surprise me to see people who've recently left going back to Oracle within a year or two. Either that, or people better than they are will fill the empty slots.

Worse still, anyone working on OpenSolaris is simply doing R&D for Oracle.
The telecoms own Congress because most ordinary citizens never call or e-mail their reps and make their voices heard. A politician's goal is votes; they'll listen to telecom lobbyists because that gets them money which they can use to buy votes. But that's an indirect, inefficient process: they'd much rather have some idea of what it'd take to get your vote directly.

When the bailout was up for a vote, there was a massive letter-writing campaign, and it was defeated. The first time. Then we got distracted, it came up for a vote again, and it passed. Imagine what we could accomplish if all of the American populace was able to divert as much attention to influencing Washington as a professional lobbyist is. In other words, what if we all wrote our senators all day long instead of playing Farmville all day long?

Come to think of it, that might be an interesting hack. "Congressville". Instead of managing a virtual farm, you manage a virtual legislature by planting, growing and harvesting legislature. And you "play" with real letters to your real representatives.
Although I agree it was an interesting read and I do like this language feature, I think generators should be used with caution since they might detract from the code's readability (especially generator expressions). Some async libraries like dieselweb just use them too much for my taste.
Sounds like fun! A little out of the way for that early on a Sunday for me (with MUNI and my bike my only means of transport). I've set an alarm, we'll see if I make it there to spectate ;)
WordPress templates.
That's the whole trouble about software patents, isn't it?
Permutations or combinations? For instance, does it count as a separate instance if the lettuce is above or below the patty?
I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly

Actually that was a pretty clear explanation from where I'm sitting.

And yeah, I've noticed that too, but I have to say it is serving to modify my aesthetic expectations - now I get jarred by websites that don't look like that. Hazard of spending too much time on HN I guess....

(Although I have been a fan of rectangular rounded buttons with white lettering since olwm, so at least I can claim I am consistent)
As blogger Matthew Yglesias is fond of pointing out, one of the most insane things about minimum parking requirements is that bars have them.
wonderful article, thanks for sharing!
I doubt he'd have settled down so quickly with another coder who worked in his company.

Gates founded Micro-Soft in 1976. He married Melinda French in 1994, 18 years later. She was a manager, not a technical lead, and she was primarily working on "information products" like Encarta, not software products.

However, I agree that it's unlikely that getting a date was his motive.
This sounds terrible, but when industries really boom (in the US at least), it's largely because I-bankers have figured out how to chop up and sell unprofitable businesses to people at home watching CNBC.

See, for instance, internet entrepreneurship, 1997-2001, construction, 2005-2008.

That being said, I say Green/Energy.
I thought "Oh, so it's like Twitter."
I always thought it was people borrowing from 37signals. I don't really have a problem with it, looks good enough and if the product works who cares.
You need to watch the video again. Starting at 1:20 he mentions logging in using the default admin credentials.

He's using an XSS vulnerability in the router admin interface to execute JavaScript on the router's pages, so he can use JavaScript to do pretty much anything the user can do.

But even without an XSS exploit you can make cross-domain POSTs using forms, and GETs using IMG or SCRIPT tags. You just can't get the response, so it's not suitable for this attack where you need to get the MAC address out.

The "Drive-by Pharming" mentioned in the link I posted used the latter technique, because all it needs to do is POST some form that tells the router to update the DNS settings, it doesn't need the response.

He actually mentioned that technique in the video, but sort of glossed over it (right before "now, this isn't necessary in our geolocation XXXSS attack")
a policy proposal, mind you, and it's certainly not evil
Don't know the exact origin (37signals?), but they all probably descend from a common ancestor - which was probably very successful, hence the copying.

Analogy would be how many big box stores (eg. Home Depot) routinely build next to Wal-Mart, because of course Wal-Mart, Inc. spends millions on and has "location, location, location" down to a science.
I always preferred 'nothing endures but change', though it's admittedly longer.
Samy is smart. Been friends with him for about 15 years. One of the smartest hackers I know. Built most of Fonality's backend, too. Also won "Caesars Challenge" in Vegas when he was like 14 years old.
These examples all look pretty different to me
Yeah agreed. Smooth replacement of content is great, but I think you could easily build seam carving into this. The hard part is doing the person-detection in the first place.
No, presumably he means we get out ideas from within, not without.
I think he used laptops as metaphor for web (social networks, blogs, etc). There are so many ideas but none of them is yours. The more your mind is surrounded with other people ideas, the harder it is to come up with something original and fresh.
This whole article is absolutely bizarre, from the title onward.

A few of my favorites:

"Oracle might kill Google's Android"

"the tech-liberal... are being deluded into thinking that Google is the open side of this new conflict, and that Oracle is the big, old and closed company"

"Oracle likes Linux so much that it funds Btrfs, a GPL licensed, futuristic and advanced new file system that supports pooling, snapshots, checksums, and other features that sound a lot like Sun’s ZFS, which Oracle now also owns. The difference is that Oracle didn’t mire Btrfs in legal quandary the way Sun did with ZFS before Oracle bought them.

That fact not only highlights that Oracle is just as “open source friendly” as Google, but that it’s also more responsible in developing open source software in such a way that it doesn’t recklessly expose itself to being sued the way Sun did, or the way Google did."

"Google doesn’t even have any experience in creating software platforms"
The Libre Web Application Stack (A Code Story)
Totally agree. Correlation does not imply causation.
Who remembers the Intel processor ID debacle of ~10 years ago?

http://www.schneier.com/essay-187.html

There were similar privacy concerns when it was found that Microsoft were able to generate unique identifying fingerprints of PC's, which they used for license tracking.

This just proves that the debate then was moot since MAC addresses would become universal unique identifiers. Now everything from phones, routers, computers and laptops all have unique IDs.

To make the situation worse and unlike the Intel debate, the growth of WiFi means that these unique ID's are actually being broadcast for anybody to pick up and read.

RFID will only make this situation worse. There was so much of a fuss about the Intel ID's back in 99 that I can only think that people care less about their privacy today.
how would you state it in this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_%28programming_language%29

I presume it would be an awesome painting/shirt ;p
Spam and viruses.

Two days ago I awoke to find my status had been changed to "penis" overnight. I have no idea how this happened, since I don't share my account details with anyone or use it on a shared computer. It had an interesting effect on my friends, to say the least. Had it been changed to something worse, an attack like this could easily have led to damage to my social network of friends, which would definitely be grounds for me quitting Facebook.
I pretty much just install emacs and I'm ready to go on any unix box(Until I get to emacs I can use Vi, useful for things like Arch linux)
HerWay.com: Dating where only women are allowed to message/search
Thanks for the clarifications. I'm now turning off my router's web interface ;p ssh is all that's needed anyway.
Safe Search With New Google Encrypted Search Engine
That seems pretty similar to the language this proposal uses:

A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband Internet access service from--

(1) sending and receiving lawful content of their choice;

(2) running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and

(3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or
service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service
I once started to learn core wars (a few years back) then this happened

http://www.koth.org/irc-logs/2008-06-25.txt

(Look from 11:06 to 15:42)
I actually find it quite disturbing. When your conscious mind has been very focused on something the whole day it will naturally keep the momentum. That in turn makes it difficult to fall asleep and when you do the sleep is often quite thin. What I figured is that if you find a way to turn your mind off either with meditation or some distraction (for example movie or book), the sleep is much better and the next morning is usually much more productive and often the mind comes up with some suprising new ideas.
... And there was never a better time to create.
~940px is close to the safest assumption you can make of the minimum horizontal resolution for an average user.
Building the Lego Universe Online
There are two problems with charging people to park: one is enforcement, which isn't free, and the other is that customers strongly prefer to shop where free parking is available. Even if prices are lower at the shop that charges for parking, people will prefer the shop with free parking. If you restrict parking availability in an area, you'd have to be prepared for customers to go elsewhere unless there are no other options.
Considering Oracle just killed OpenSolaris this week, it is very difficult to view Oracle as "open source friendly"
Scrollbar takes only about 20 pixels, if we are taking about minimum height of 1024px, that means you can go up to 990px, 960px or so.
Don't know if it's true, but there's a cute urban legend about the location thing.

Apparently, McDonald's franchise location strategy always used to be to analyze all kinds of variables to find the most cost-effective location in a given area. Burger King's strategy was always to build right next to McDonald's.

Of course, for various game-theoretic reasons, the optimal location for competing businesses is usually right next to each other.
The curse of HP
We're not that bad: http://www.drawntoscalehq.com
I suspect you want a couple dozen horizontal pixels for what designers call "negative space".
It reminds me of a quote by Chris Rock few years back: “You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon.' Need I say more?”
Medicrit – Medicare – Viagra history
What you're describing is good design and UX.

White space is a fundamental of good design.

Light gradients and thin grey lines provide subtle distinctions between content areas without overpowering the content.

A strong, obvious 'Call to Action' button in a vibrant colour encourages click through action.

Sans serif fonts work better than serifs in websites because of the inherent limitations with rendering fine details using pixels (they often also communicate 'modern').

Moving secondary links to the footer is simply good UX. They're available but out of the way.

940px (I'd say 970 actually) is the current sweet spot if you want to target the majority of people's screen resolution to provide a good experience.

(I agree with HNer... the examples you provide all look very different, but are just fairly well designed)
just a formula which has evolved and seems to work. hence more and more people are using it. now it's at the point where people have a preconceived idea as to what a tech startup website should look like... perception is reality... so unless a company has a groundbreaking new website design, it makes sense for them to conform to peoples' expectations. so yeah, wordpress blog with a particular style of template.
These sorts of articles are transparently engineered propaganda.

Someone sat around "How can we increase taxes and wealth for ourselves?" "What about a parking tax! $1 each time you park anywhere nationwide, that would be billions each year!" "No one would accept that." "Oh yes they will, I know a guy at the NYT we have worked with before. I will have him write an article. He can spin anything into gold." "Do it."