skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this article is actually indicative of how our electronic security is being managed, the United States is in serious trouble.

"It was supposed to be a war fighter unit, not a geek unit," said task force veteran Jason Healey, who had served as an Air Force signals intelligence officer.

A fighter would understand, for instance, if an enemy had penetrated the networks and changed coordinates or target times, said Dusty Rhoads, a retired Air Force colonel and former F-117 pilot who recruited the original task force members. "A techie wouldn't have a clue," he said.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the warrior would either know how to defend the network, or that it was penetrated at all. The skills necessary for electronic security are so far removed from physical security that the implication that someone that had been involved with physical security would somehow have a better understanding is ludicrous on its face.
I agree. Alternately, one could make a Darwinian analogy. The market should accommodate as many strategies as possible(biodiversity) to ensure its stability. The market has changed to incorporate new, high-tech strategies, but this is actually a good thing as it can increase diversity - so long as no one strategy is dominant.

An ideal market would snap to an exact valuation of companies and commodities, and adjust instantly with each passing second; but our markets are not sufficiently informed on the fundamentals to do such a thing. Hence we'll always have some trading action take place around the true price, in which speculators attempt to beat the market psychology. What we're doing is accelerating the speculation, shortening the timeframes for everything; this doesn't just increase liquidity, but also increases the average spread of prices over a given time period. This could be seen as a better reflection of market uncertainty over true price.
You should just become a journalist: your writing is readible, sincere, succinct and honest.
Another of the Best 16 Apple Mac Wallpapers (High Quality).
There is absolutely no comparison between Nokia and Myspace. Nokia is coming out with new things like S^3 and running app contests to encourage development. Myspace failed because they did nothing when an unquestionably superior product came out.
AAope?
I would disagree. There's a point where code terseness and abstractionlessness come at the cost of code readability, and these competitions cause you to go way beyond this point. There's no sense in practicing how to write confusing code that is very short, other than the problem-solving aspect of it.

I think code golf is just another form of a puzzle. So, whatever benefit you get from solving a puzzle, or mind bender, or whatever, you'll get from code golf. Hopefully you'll have the sense not to golf production code.
Why I'm Long On Startups
How Memory Foam Mattress Can Benefit You
Who said Twitter DOESN'T keep a record of your tweets? What's been said is that Twitter doesn't let users access any archive of your tweets they may well have, and that they may well continue to mine. Your point makes me want to revisit the standard terms under which users license their original tweets to Twitter.
Why Atom was created
Most "technology" that we speak of these days is created by kids who are smart but who were brainwashed by left wing profs and left wing public school instructors. They are good programmers but have no idea what "conservatism" even is (and that's because they have never been exposed to any accurate information about it) otherwise most would embrace it.
For one, the interface is a web site that isn't well-adapted to a mobile screen, so getting to the store is cumbersome in itself.

Secondly, downloading an app after buying it is very slow and frustrating. It involves adding a special APT repository with a unique key, and APT on the device is unusably slow.

Third, actually publishing on the store is, as far as I can tell, practically impossible unless you have a company and the name of that company is Rovio.

Third, they have no decent categories, no search functionality worth mentioning, very little information about each app... the list goes on.

As a final nail in the coffin, the prices are much higher than in the Android or iOS stores.

This is all from when I tried the store, needless to say I haven't felt any desire to relive the experience again so things may have changed. I really doubt they've fixed it though.

I don't know if you've used the store on a symbian device, the experience may be better there, but my experience was indeed terrible on the N900.

I really don't see Nokia turning around and putting out a fantastic mobile OS with a well-integrated experience that grabs customers, just like I have a hard time seeing Microsoft managing it. Although, Microsoft do have Xbox Live they could leverage.
Startup Weekend Vancouver is the same weekend and I'm going. You should combine. Hootsuite is sponsoring a big dinner. And the Startup Weekend network is pretty sweet... access to a group that runs startup events across the world. It's a pretty cool grassroots event. You can go to Startup Weekend for around $50 total (Startup Digest discount) which includes food + everything. Just curious, why did you plan an event the same time as they did--just to save $50 so you can buy your own food? Why not work together?
I don't know - they probably do, god knows it allows me to make something that doesn't look like a series of cat turds, but formulaic designs don't last long term. You need something which really differentiates you from the pack.
I think part of the issue is the conflation of capitalism and conservatism. Many conservatives pay lip service to capitalism with free-market rhetoric, but both their actions and many of their values are in direct conflict with it. Capitalism is fundamentally a dynamic system -- people start companies to change the world, not conserve the status quo.

I agree that capitalism has taken a beating in much of the country (though in my experience it's still alive and well in the valley).
There's absolutely nothing stopping the big institutional players setting up a private secondary exchange between themselves which doesn't allow short-term traders (even using something like a dark pool if they want to keep sizes quiet). The reason they don't is because exchanges that have short-term traders have more liquidity and better prices.
Yet another service providing hosted memcached instances for Linode customers
So I didn't really expect my service to be "yet another," but ritonlajoie seems to have beaten me to the punch by a little bit (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1727045). If anyone was interested in ritonlajoie's service, but has a 'node in Newark rather than Dallas, feel free to check out my service.
Happens to everybody. Take a timeout. In the 12 years of my career, I have taken a total of 3 years off - and I am certain that in the 9 remaining years I achieved more and better things than what I would have had I worked the 12 years straight through.

It is like when you have been staring at a computer screen for long hours at a stretch trying to solve a problem. You stand up and move away from your desk and within a few moments all the answers and solutions storm through.

Your career and personal life are no different. Perhaps you are trying to hard to find the answers - so stand up and walk away for a little while.
Cheap Android phones are already here:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/03/huawei-ideos-hands-on/

"this thing is going to be launching for somewhere between $100 and $200 unsubsidized in Europe, Asia, and both North and Latin America. It's got 3G, WiFi, mobile hotspot capability for up to eight devices, and was apparently developed in direct partnership with Google, a sign that Mountain View is serious about taking Android 2.2 across the entire price spectrum."
I tried DDG for a week as my search engine. The search result quality was definitely on par with Google, the two biggest factors for switching back :

1) Google's "Did you mean?" appears to be a bit smarter and corrected more of my obscure searches than DDG. Wish I had recorded a couple of concrete examples to pass on, but they escape me at the moment.

2) Speed. Google returns results faster (at least on the days I was using DDG). Apparently my brain is use to sub-second search results because anything longer than that can feel like an eternity.
Appyzilla: The New iTunes 10.0.1: Tries To Push Ping
Manufacturing flic.kr style photo URLs
That blog post should've been summarized with one sentence.
"dont trust twilio because they turned off intl sms without warning"
Uhm... You get great pilots to fly planes and great hackers to defend / attack networks. Having a pilot pick programmers is as stupid as having the MBA choose them.
Just a heads-up: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/F/07/GLB_SMPHN0710.gif

Now, they've actually started to put up competitive phones in the mid-high-end of market, and top high-end coming in spring, so I'm not sure Nokia's going to fall that much.
The system right now significantly favours whoever can invest >$50000/month in infrastructure (regardless of trading volume).

For example, in the recent flash-crashes (e.g. 6-may), anyone using the "standard" feed had a lag of several minutes on price data, whereas anyone using the newer interfaces (at $10K "pay-to-play" minimum) got up-to-date prices. While this was extreme, it did happen 4 times in the last 6 months; And it happens every single day to a lesser degree.

Also, "flash orders" which got everyone raging last year are still permitted. Their only purpose is to let the faster players profit at the expense of the slower players. The regulation here is broken.

Markets change; that does not mean the market today is operating properly. If anything was game, you wouldn't need the SEC or the huge amount of laws and regulations to make it work.

Insider-trading laws were needed because some people were able to take advantage of others. The details have changed, but still -- a lot of what is not illegal today should be.
Wow that is very impressive, here's a link to the Epic Citadel demo for anyone else interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymlCWbxTgds
Here's the link in iTunes as well: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic-citadel/id388888815?mt=8

Also Project Sword looks incredible, coming this holiday season they said: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImdjgUip0Nc

Also, that Rage demo by John Carmack was amazing also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeXe_G0xmY0
The Case Against College Athletic Recruiting
Hmm,

Do you think they could finish porting Qt to Android and move their whole environment that way?
Kaspersky: Stuxnet Worm Has Nation-State Support
Ask HN: Which websites actually have a useful search that Google can't beat?
Everybody uses Google, Bing, DDG, or some other search engine. But are the search giants as ubiquitous as they seem? I think there's a great value to individual sites' search features, mainly because they go beyond the grasp of GoogleBot.

There was a post recently about Google's main competition being Bing. I think that's entirely untrue. I think their main competition is the long-tail of search that they simply don't have the dataset to compete against.

Here are sites that I can recall using the search feature, and it actually being useful:

- Wikipedia (half the time I use Google, though)
- SearchYC
- Urban Dictionary
- BTJunkie
- StackOverflow
- Delicious
- Twitter
- YouTube
- eBay

What sites do you find have a useful search feature?
Yes, the hardware isn't very old at three years, but one year without security patches is a pretty long time, considering that most people rely on their router for DNS-caching and such.
Zed Shaw's response was more helpful than yours.

He provided recommendations to fix the mistakes instead of just dissing the whole thing. If you want people to write better code, share what you know.

Makes me wish Zed had a "Learn C the Hard Way" to complement what he's doing with Python.
The World's Smallest & Fastest JavaScript Library
Why do you think flash orders are not practiced anymore? The SEC hasn't banned them, and AFAIK some brokers still flash their clients orders before executing them.

> but even if you're order is flashed it will only match if the price is improved.

I don't think you understand how flash orders work -- flash orders tell some 3rd party what YOU will be doing in the next second, enough time for that 3rd party to snatch all offers at that price, raising the price for you. Of course if you had a limit order it wouldn't match; but now, if you still want to buy those shares (which most flashed clients do, for whatever reasons), you have to pay a higher price. Incidentally, it's almost always that 3rd party which offers those shares to you -- guaranteeing their profit.
A good test of journalism is how it reads when you are an expert in the the topic. It usually comes off sounding a little awkward. If there are no outrageous mistakes, then count it as a good article. After all, it is written by people who need to have expertise a mile wide and an inch deep.
if you turn on Lady Gaga too you'll get the full effect
I think the name is the only thing that is wrong with DDG.

Another thing, I personally don't feel quite right about using a search engine that relies quite heavily on other search engines to give results. From what I understand DDG is not a search engine in the same sense Google or Bing is a search engine (pls correct me if I am wrong).
There is really no mystery about UI. Yes, it requires skill and a deep knowledge of how humans process information, and even a touch of design genius.

But the real problem is that most shops can't measure usability in a fine-grained way. And yet everyone does have some idea that it's really important. Consequently they are bamboozled by anyone who purports to have such expertise.

For the most part, so-called usability experts are really just graphic design snobs. They have a certain aesthetic they like, which is arguably "cleaner" and has more white space. So the page might be better organized but that's nowhere near what true usability is.

Real usability work is about trying to understand how the user is thinking. What their mental model is. What their goals are. In what context they are trying to achieve a task. Not just how their eye is scanning for information.

Anyway my point is, when it comes to real usability work, programmers are just as (un)qualified as graphic designers, marketers, or any other kind of "product" person. Arguably the designer is supposed to have a larger toolbox when it comes to possible graphic treatments, but the programmer also has a toolbox of quantitative methods, experimentation, and a deep understanding of how the system could work.
I avoid the net on 4/1. It's like every site is taken over by the "Looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays" lady.
Are you sure all of these makes the CLR more interesting? One can argue some of it just makes it more complicated. Real generics, I agree about, but structs and unboxed data? I am not sure that implementing these instead of investing time in making the compiler & runtime smarter is the thing to do.
Hmm,

I love Qt and I'd love to develop for Symbian.

I'm working on a Qt desktop app that might be a good candidate for a mobile port.

>>>I can't even find a Symbian phone in the US to develop on.<<<

I can't see any way to begin mobile development from the US at all - except order a Symbian phone from overseas or something. If you can't start work, it doesn't matter how easy things are.

(and yes, any Symbian folks who want to help me are welcome to come up with solutions)
Haha, yes, I did a pretty bad job of 'hiding' it. But however you end up getting to startup school, I hope you'll apply.
Just out of curiosity how many people are invited to attend Startup School vs. the number of applications you receive?
That's a good definition.

If you compare market mechanics in any US exchange to e.g. Eurex, you see that in almost every place they are different, there's a player in the US that uses that difference to generate essentially risk-free profit. I'm sure there are similar problems in Eurex -- only much, much fewer, and less visibly exploited.

US markets are totally broken.
Do you agree with these best practises for managing EC2?
I wish I could upvote this article twenty times. The references to evolution are telling and echo the sentiment of open source projects. This article may have convinced me to start a local programming group.
Adjacent possibilities...I'll be stewing on that for a long while.
What's the point of that? I'd get better performance from a disk cache, rather than connecting to some distant server with crazy latency.
Just scan it looking for the first in a run of alnum characters, build a table of nodes, and then scan the perimeter of each node looking for a character that starts an edge (`'|- etc). Then write a little state machine for following each edge, and build an adjacency list.

I really ought to use this thing for C class.
Wow, only a 4 hour difference in two people launching nearly the same thing. Pretty neat.
Are you sure that you understand this ahead of the rest of the market? How do you know this positive outlook isn't already built into the price?

If expectations are high, any trip-up by NVDA or its current partners could send it tumbling.

My point is that it's not enough to know a company is doing well. To make money off the stock, you need to know it _before everyone else does_.
I hate queries
Yes. Queries to me is a "annoying" requirement of software/product/website development. What is strange to me is that we are living in 2010 and yet here we are writing queries for a backend layer that should simply be a lot more easy and fast to do. Imagine for websites, you have to create a database with tables and fields and so on, then you have to write extra code in some perhaps to you foreign language where you select what data you wish to present based on some parameter.

Why oh god why!? I don't want to write queries, and it's not because I think it's hard or anything like that, the reason is more about time and funfactor. Writing queries to me is the most boring part of any project and often a very time consuming process, imagine spending this time designing or improving your app in other ways. So what could we have instead?

Well imagine a perfect world where all you would have todo is create some table/fields or documents depending if it's a relational or no sql db. Then you would simply through some amazingly easy and efficient interface select what data you want to present and it would automagically generate whatever code/query or a process that is necessary, then you would just invoke that process to obtain that data.

Nooo no no I am NOT talking about query builders, those are horrible! They take even longer time to work with than just writing plain simple query code, I am talking about a revolution in the way we deal with this layer - "queries" I call it a "layer" because to me it's like a layer of a development process that is necessary but should not be as time consuming or boring as it currently is. Sorry to all you query writing lovers out there!

There should be some tool or way to generate a function/stored procedure/x that outputs your data as arrays/objects/json/xml/whatever based on some simple dragging or dropping or marking that you would do with a super neat efficient interface. The tool would then do all the work for you, and whatever query/procedure/function that it generates would already be amazingly optimized, now you would just invoke it and bam there is your result set ready in some array or object for you to use as you want. Que rico, verdad?

Maybe I am living in the 90s still, maybe this already exists, and I have been living under a rock, perhaps I am asking for too much, who knows I am just letting the world know and I am sure there is a lot of people that can agree with me. Especially people more oriented at design or frontend stuff...

Gaah the frustration,
Please don't hate, ps english is not my mother tongue so forgive me if you can't understand it ;-)
To put it bluntly: this slide deck is a recipe for being an investor's bitch.
...And that's why I ran away to HN and MeFi.
I work in computer repair for a university, and we see students coming in all the time with liquid spills.

We usually:

1) Disassemble the computer (ifixit.com is your friend here)
2) Clean the board with a non-conductive cleaner such as Electro Klene (http://www.criticalcleaning.com/CCContact.htm)
3) Dry it off using compressed air and then let it air dry for a bit
4) Reassemble and cross fingers.

We find this works about 1/2 the time.
You can get a cupcake cnc (old makerbot) for half price while their supplies still last.
> Gender gaps are nothing new, but they are problematic for colleges because they can be taken to suggest women are seeking higher education, while men are not. They can also cause awkward social environments on campuses and, if they get wide enough, may discourage men from applying.

Advertising the gap is probably a great way to increase the number of male applicants.
Having both been to and missed Startup Schools in the past, the recorded talks capture 99% of the experience. Granted, it doesn't offer the same opportunities for collaboration & discussion with your fellow startup geeks, but I know I feel a lot less guilty listening to a StartupSchool talk while doing other tasks in the privacy of my own home (as opposed to while he/she is actually speaking).
yes, that was the point.

people who shouldn't be entrepreneurs get way too excited for the wrong reasons. a reality check is likely very useful for many folks to re-consider the probabilities involved.

folks who decide they still want to choose the entrepeneurial path are then at least forewarned, if not forearmed.
I'd choose a tech stock with less than $1b in market capital and little analyst coverage. Anything larger will have been picked apart by the professionals doing this for a living. It'd probably take a few hours of poring through SEC filings and studying the relevant technology to figure out whether it's viable. It probably wouldn't be a name that's mentioned on HN or Slashdot.
I'm not a conservative, and I'm not taking anything personally here, but seriously...what the hell are you talking about?

>capitalism is a type of liberalism

Come now, sneaky word games don't add clarity. Capitalism might be part of classical liberalism, but that's not what people mean when they identify as "liberal" today.

>conservatism leads to anti-capitalism

Huh? How?

>If you're really looking for new conservative ideas, take a look at DRM...paypal data mining, and most of "web 2.0".

How are these political?

>national firewalls

The only two countries I can think of with national firewalls are both communist.
It interferes with "traditional" "notions" of physical property.
Some kind of pink, sugary, sticky kind.
I think you'll definitely like James Burke's old BBC series "Connections", available on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeWeb
I was about to say the same thing. Most young men are interested in sex, and a 2:1 gender ratio is likely to mean that unless they're deformed or have zero social skills, they'll get plenty.
Two years ago was far too late. As I said, perhaps if they had started this initiative earlier then who knows? We've had nearly 4 years of the iPhone now, and nearly 3 years of Android, so this was a slow move and a late one.

I applaud the idea behind the Symbian Foundation, but it was too late to tackle Apple and Google.
Why you should keep your goals to yourself.