skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're working on an alternative, but it's not quite ready for internet payments yet. http://www.thinklink.com
No, I understand what you are trying to say. But perhaps you don't understand what I am trying to say. I am saying that I was diagnosed in 2001 with "atypical cystic fibrosis" -- a degenerative "disease" where the typical course is that infection eats away the lungs until they eventually drop below some critical percentage (I think 50%) of normal functioning and the person gets listed for transplant (if they are lucky/haven't engaged in behaviors that disqualify them). I had a hole in my lung from repeated infections. This is something conventional medicine claims does not heal. You just live with it and watch the holes grow larger until they replace the organ. According to my most recent x-rays and how I feel (because the damn thing was quite painful), I no longer have a hole in my left lung. My fingernails are also much stronger and prettier than they have ever been. Fingertip health is strongly influenced by lung health and I always had extremely crappy fingernails. As I healed, my fingernails improved -- a strong indicator that my lungs are healthier than they have ever been in my life.
Every single thing you see is future trash
Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server:

$ git push master heroku

is a lot cheaper then:

Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI 1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do 1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh make sure to bring up another machine to act as a MySQL slave. You know how to do that right? And you're dumping your DB to disk and backing up to S3 regularly right. Just write a simple script/cron job to handle that. And when you setup your machines you made sure to setup 2 so that if one goes down, the other will still be around, and you setup a load balancer that will realize when one of those machines goes down right?

etc.... :)
Check out http://www.yourxiv.com
Higher education bubble poised to burst
how are we supposed to find the noobstories link normally?
Sort of true, but the problem is you want to be where your friends and family (and soccer team!) are.
Someone explained the appeal of Picasso's cubist faces in a similar way: it is a hack that triggers higher response from our face detectors than a normal face would.
CSP was published in 1978.
Although 4 is considered unlucky in Chinese, decimal numbers is represented in 4-number groups, instead of 60 thousand, we'd have 6 wan, 800 million would be 8 yi, etc
Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is what I learned from. I never learned Smalltalk, but I had programmed C beforehand. If memory serves, Cocoa Programming assumes no prior knowledge of C.
Wouldn't it be much easier to just restrict access to keyfiles and block anyone who fails more than 3 attempts?

Not sure why but the idea of port knocking always seems over complex for little benefit.
Hi,

this is a great idea. Please send more details at info@adwizzy.com. What is done already, how, and what does need still to be done.

Best Regards
Do you know how much Newton's work impacted Jefferson? It was almost as much as Bob Dylan's influence on Steve Jobs.
Siemens took over the BBC's R+D depts as part of the outsourcing deal which means they now run pretty much all the technical services.

BBC outsources to Siemens,

This includes handing over all it's unique skills

Siemens, then bills the BBC for stuff it already knew how to do.

Management demonstrates with many Powerpoints how this is saving everybody money.
Amazing how they can get away with pulling stunts like that. Why did they freeze your account in the first place?

BTW, I feel like this exact post has been posted before.

Edit: Yep, it has. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598227
Security by obscurity, thumbs down.

nmap -sV -p1-65000 ip
Hosted blogging platform
I'm wanting to start a personal blog to write about startup things and am considering a hosted solution for once. What are people using/recommending?
At the bottom of the page there is a "lists" link. noobstories is listed there.
Heroku is awesome for ruby development. If you're attempting node.js development, they do have a private beta (which I've tested), but is somewhat limited as I believe it uses an NGINX proxy so doing something like websockets with node.js (currently on Heroku) is not possible.

git push master heroku

is reason enough to give it a shot.

Joyent may be another option...
Use Heroku. The cost of acquiring or hiring the sysadmin knowledge is going to far exceed just using Heroku. This includes Heroku's main competitor, Engineyard.

EY has its upsides (and downsides), but definitely requires more sysadmin experience.
Than Hoare's CSP? Yeah. Than this proposal? Absolutely not. This presentation is from 2007 (and so is Go), Plan9 was released in 1992, Erlang dates back to 1986.
1 and 2 seem to me to be par for the course when setting up a server that you want to be secure... Only allow logins with keys, choose a high port that's not usually scanned, and only allow specific users to log in (law of least privileges).

Is 3 really that necessary? Are there often cases where an up-to-date ssh daemon gets cracked even though it is on a high port and allowing only public key logins of specified users with a small number of retries?
Actually, this works for a practical reason: scanning ports takes time and resources, and script kiddies are more likely to move on to the next target if they don't find a worthwhile target in the first few thousand ports. It won't help against a determined attacker, of course, but it does reduce the number of less-skilled attacks.
The protection thing runs both ways... You will usually lose chargebacks but you will win item not received/not as described disputes filed with Paypal every time. But if you're doing 30K a month why are you with PayPal??? Get a merchant account and you will pay much less for processing.
This brings back many happy memories of crawling through filthy ductwork in search of hidden spaces. I still have a box with rolls and rolls of B/W negatives that I shot in '83 to document some of the secret places at MIT. All I need is about 40 hours of free time and I'll scan them all...
Can someone give some insight on the last line?

That's it. Simple. Now you can launch the hello program by entering ./hello. Look at the binary size -- surprised?

Without being able to compile the executable myself, is the binary surprisingly large or small? A few months ago, someone posted this article:

http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/03/libc-free-world/

Which leads me to believe that the executable is surprisingly large given the content. Am I understanding that correctly?
It sounds to me like maybe you should go one further than just creating a superb academic RSS reader, and instead try to create an online community for academics -- a la reddit for PhDs.

Instead of simply indexing links to other sites, I think it would make sense to provide the necessary tools for academics to _easily_ host papers via this service. This way you wouldn't need to rely on typically paywalled online academic journals, and you wouldn't have to wait for papers to trickle down from Nature, etc.
Inploy, easier Rails deployment
Wow.

Have you kept track of environmental factors? Like your diet in that time frame as well as the air quality etc.? It would be just awesome to compile that and see the correlations with other people's datasets. Perhaps, that might lead to better strategies with dealing with atypical cystic fibrosis before we can actually find a way to replicate this 100% of time.

By the way, does the percentage of damage matter? How damaged were your lungs? Clearly, there has to be a threshold beyond which healing is nigh impossible, but has anyone ever tried to define it outside of ballparks?
I use Posterous.

I love it - it gives you enough features but also automates some of the mundane things. It allows custom templates, uploads, and just about anything you'd want for free.

For me, a blog is about the content more than anything. Different platforms don't matter to me as a reader or a person who tries to write stuff. That being said, Posterous is the easiest to work with at the moment. All I have to do is write - there is very little effort I need to put into managing it.

Some issues: If you don't like emailing posts, the WYSIWYG interface they provide isn't amazing (I like it, but it can feel slightly clunky at times). If you need widgets or a drag & drop interface for adding external content, you won't feel at home. These don't really affect me, but everyone's different.
Brute force

Do not under estimate the zerg. Although ssh servers on different ports are "harder" to find, they are still not invisible. Try changing your banner, using 'port knocking', TCIP fingerprint spoofing, and other obfuscation techniques. Nothing is 100%, but you can still have really secure boxes. Proper admins are your best line of defense.
A reset button on windows is sure to ease the pains of thousands of technical support staff out there. When malware strikes or the system simply isn’t working as expected, rather than painstakingly working through the registry looking to turn a one back to a zero, a press on the push reset button should do the trick.

Like System Restore? Notorious source of problems from viruses hiding within it, to it removing important files. Like Altiris SVS? With it's ease of accidentally uninstalling your documents along with an app if you misuse it? Like Windows XP System File Protection which isn't as helpful as you'd hope in the fight against malware? Like factory shipping systems with a boot option that restores the computer to factory shipping state - blank, no programs, no settings - always a fun support call to get.

A big red restore button is a hard feature to add and get right - and I don't want to deal with the aftermath of them adding it and getting it wrong.

Having a Win 8 os that starts up in say 15 seconds, 30 seconds or 45 seconds give-or-take will take the game.

Compared to the iPad's starting up in ~0 seconds, and Mac OS X's resuming in ~2 seconds, the game is already taken and Windows lost it. The best it can do is play catch-up - and a 30 second boot was doable on a Windows PC two years ago ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DWAmReoryI ).

A software license that roams wherever you go blurs the lines between a desktop and a laptop. A futuristic plan details users having system settings go wherever they go.

Futuristic plan? Windows has had roaming profiles for many years, and with Server 2008 and Windows 7 transparent VPN access that should be possible to setup with the server remotely right now. Assuming both systems have the game installed and the game supports saving part way through like that, and your internet connection is fast enough to download / sync your profile every time you login without annoying you.
The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You
I am totally in favor of Heroku. Like other folks have pointed out, it's far cheaper (at least at first) to scale up on Heroku than to hire an ops person. I think that outgrowing Heroku, or finding that your real costs would be lower by going elsewhere or buying hardware, is a good problem to have.

I would much rather spend my time building my product than dealing with all of the fiddly bits of managing web servers, databases, full text search setup, security, patching, etc.

If need arises, migrating off Heroku in the future shouldn't be too challenging.

Also, if you do choose to try out Heroku, pick up my iPhone/iPad app for managing your Heroku applications (http://dopplerapp.com). Good luck!
Working on a suicide hotline was educational for roughly the same reasons.
If I can get a textbook for free or sub-$10 with contextual ads on the side, I might be fine with seeing ads.
[Album] Blackmore’s Night – Autumn Sky (2010)
Ask HN: What does "the Cloud" mean to you?
I keep running up against different definitions of "the Cloud" and was wondering if there is a right answer or at least a general consensus on what exactly the term means. When I say that our startup, IActionable, is in "the Cloud" I'm referring to our use of Windows Azure, MS's cloud, and the distributed nature of our service, meaning that we can elastically scale within the resources of MS's cloud and boast some level of stability like a large company while only having to pay for the resources we use. Apps running within Azure, Amazon's cloud, Force.com, Google's App Engine, or Rackspace's cloud are "in the cloud" according to this definition.

I've noticed, however, that many people say they are in "the Cloud" where they define the cloud as a server on the internet. Their thinking goes that since they store all the information remotely and there is nothing on the client's computer, their client-server architecture makes them "in the cloud". By this definition every server on the internet is a cloud, and every web app is in some cloud or another.

So is it one or the other? Is there some other definition that I'm missing out on?
That isn't a horse...it is a magical unicorn!!!
Where do you get those shortened amazon links?
I've faced the same problem with info overload, even with the new astrophysics subfields introduced by arXiv. I am an active user of papers.app and have used Mendeley in the past; it helps with organizing but filtering is still a challenge.

I've thought about doing something like this for the arXiv, even something as simple as setting up a http://www.pligg.com/ may be a start; I'm planning to do at least that much for my own lab in the next few months.

I've already got two other startups of my own so I couldn't commit to a larger version of this side project at this point, but ping me if you want to chat about ideas and I could possibly point you to others with more bandwidth. I have experience in iPhone app development, web dev, and machine learning--and of course in startup founding and academia (I've worked in 7 labs doing research, now am a PhD student in astrophysics).
Exactly, childhood isn't about just studying hard, getting the best education in the fastest amount of time... its also about building a foundation of character skills to help you through life: making friends, building social skills, having crushes, playing in the sand and building castles, creating the ability to imagine things. That's what makes a fulfilling life, not solving theorems.

As a high level scientist myself, I know the tunnel vision you get when you're working on pointed world-class problems. And come on people.. this kid is "not" kidding about trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis. When I was 15 I wanted to build a time machine.

I should have played outside more too.
Computer skills or not, the pay is not appropriate for an engineering position if he's expecting any sort of experience or qualifications beyond the degree itself. I graduated from an engineering college, I've got several close friends who are engineers (electrical, mechanical, civil, chemical and geological), all of them started working fresh out of college at +$10k more than that.

Graduates are probably getting better offers from other employers and experienced workers are probably laughing at the job ads, or politely turning him down once salary was discussed but not telling him why.
For anyone who doubts the merits of obscurity for security:

http://danielmiessler.com/study/security_and_obscurity/

Hint: Why do we camouflage tanks?
I didn't track things on paper in the way you suggest. I have tried to share my best understanding of the process here: http://healthgazelle.com/ I would like to learn a programming language and write a game (simulation) to try to more effectively teach the process to others.

Of course the amount of damage matters. My 23 year old son has the same diagnosis I have but was never anywhere near as sick as I was. Where he is at provides clues to what may be possible for me. I don't know anyone else who was as sick as I was and came back the way I have, so I don't have answers to some of your questions.

My lungs were not deemed to be very damaged. I don't have a percentage. I have been working on this for more than 9 years, but I had to figure it out as I went. Presumably, if I can find the right means to share the mental model, it should take less time for others to heal. Of course, the best hope is to prevent damage in the first place, as was done for my son. It takes a lot of resources to come back, though far less than conventional medicine currently puts into this population with a result of basically dying slower. I think it is great that some folks get a second chance at life by getting new lungs. But I think it is horrifying and immoral that improving lung transplants is a much higher priority for the medical community than keeping these people well in the first place and keeping the lungs they were born with healthy and functional.
Cleveland Air Show 2010 Postponed
Wrong.

http://danielmiessler.com/study/security_and_obscurity/

Ask yourself why, if obscurity is worthless, does every military put camouflage on its tanks?
if you could convince labs themselves to pay for it, it'd be a money maker, although this may require more direct marketing at first. many academic institutions hold subscriptions/licenses in the $10k range.
There is a trade-off here. Weigh up the risks as you think is best and act accordingly, but try not to let the coolness/hacker factor of the solution affect your security decisions!

On one hand, it is clearly going to be harder for a random zombie machine to find your ssh on a non-standard port that requires knocking and a particular less usual username.

On the other hand, you're breaking from your distribution's standard installation. You increase the risk of breaking on a future upgrade. You could lock yourself out, perhaps, and there's a cost associated with this. In the worst case a distribution upgrade will fix a security hole and you'll be left with it (say for example because you modded the config file, dpkg queried it, you rushed through the prompts and it got left alone).

I accept my scenario is unlikely, but it is also unlikely that someone will crack your up-to-date machine using distribution standard ssh, a secure root password and public keys for day-to-day access.

It is far more likely that someone will access your secure machine from an insecure place with a keylogger running and get cracked that way.
Indeed. That's why I was asking for what reasons they chose PHP, i.e. what do they perceive it's merits to be.
Blog del Narco has disappeared
compare:
http://www.blogdelnarco.com/
with
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-IL-LIkvoN4J:www.blogdelnarco.com/+blog+del+narco&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
--this site had a lot of traffic and was covered on CNN and Slashdot (e.g. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F08%2F13%2F232249%2FNarco-Blogger-Beats-Mexico-Drug-War-News-Blackout%3Ffrom%3Drss&rct=j&q=site%3Aslashdot.org%20blogdelnarco&ei=AuGDTOW5FZS6sQO-8pz3Bw&usg=AFQjCNFRBpO0KyRgvy6vdKS1PNdxQuIaYw&cad=rja )
Any word on why it would disappear in such a manner?
Yes, it sounds like he wants Mendeley
Damn you, Poe!
Sad to see economic nonsense like "central banks have mitigated the effects of inflation" and "paper currency can fight the tough impact of deflation".

Deflation, actually, is good for the economy because it lowers the cost of expansion for businesses, and makes everyones savings have more purchasing power, making everyone wealthier.

Governments, however, like to spend without regard for responsibility, and so governments put out propaganda to try and scare us about "Deflation" as a threat so that people ignore the fact that most productivity and many technological advancements that we should be reaping the benefits of, are instead, "mitigated" by inflation.
I like Heroku, but if you want your own server (so you don't have to pay for outgoing email or cron jobs or DelayedJob), you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10 server super easily with Moonshine. I gave a talk about it at SD Ruby a while back.

http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby-depl...
BCC runs on a slice. A smaller client project runs on Heroku. I find Heroku requires less maintenance which is easy and more which is hard, like digging into Ruby gems to hack around why they are not working. By comparison, nginx configs and a thousand other things need to be done for VPSes, but the majority are straightforward or Googleable.

Strong recommendation for the DIyer: deprec will save you a week.
I've used Mendeley (and use papers.app when I'm on a mac) and it has helped me more with organizing papers than in filtering them. What you see as an academic in the morning is a 100 papers staring you in the face and you fall back on pattern recognition at points if you don't have more than a few minutes. Whose names and institutions do you recognize? Which titles seem most similar to your line of research? But you can miss a lot of interesting things and not view things tangentially related, but possibly useful as often. Journal clubs attempt to mediate this by having a group of people each pick an article and bring it to the table but crowdsourcing this and having cross lab "bringing to the table" would be very useful.
In most cases 0MQ will recover silently (and usefully) from common networking problems. When a peer crashes, for example, and then comes back, its partners don't see the problem. Messages get queued, and then delivered. This works for the main socket types and transports (but not PAIR and inproc:)

This lets us do things like start clients and THEN start a server... the clients automatically connect when the server comes along. The server can go away, be replaced by another on the same endpoint, and clients will gracefully and invisibly start talking to the new server.

In some cases this is precisely what we want, in other cases it's not. If we need to detect dead peers, we add heartbeating as a message flow on top of 0MQ. Most larger 0MQ applications currently do this. Eventually 0MQ sockets may offer heartbeating, it seems a natural evolution. ("Seems" but is not necessarily.)

Additionally there are some patterns (like synchronous request-reply) that simply don't handle network issues properly. If your service dies while processing a request, your client if it does a blocking read will hang forever. There are work-arounds such as using non-blocking reads.

It would be a mistake to try to solve all challenges at once in any project. 0MQ is taking it step by step, starting with the core questions of how to design massively-scalable patterns correctly. Just doing that is worth gold, as you can see from people actually using 0MQ, who consistently tell us, "this makes our life orders of magnitude easier, thank you".

And as we solve the core problems properly, we'll continue to address other aspects, either in 0MQ core or in layers on top of that, and this process will continue ad infinitum.
Everyone would benefit from an increased understanding of economics, namely so called "Austrian economics". They successfully explain the increase in bubbles in via monetary policy, and this explains why there are more bubbles even though markets are vastly more efficient now and information is much more widely distributed.

A good primer is "economics in one lesson" by henry hazlitt, which you can find online for free in various places.
Probably not a popular opinion, but I found BASIC a nice way to learn about programming when I was around 10. Especially line numbering and goto's seemed intuitive and although I wrote lots of spaghetti-code, I'm glad I learned using a model that somewhat resembled how machines actually execute code.
It would still have a good 8-16GB of flash onboard.