skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cyber security experts say they have identified the world's first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target...

Allegedly an explosion of a Soviet gas pipeline was caused by a bug intentionally inserted into control software stolen from the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage

Not a cyber weapon, but close enough in spirit, I think.
Better yet "That happened to me this one time..."

empathy > sympathy
Ask HN: Build Site vs Use Magento for eCommerce site?
Hey there - I'm building a really simple eCommerce site. I'm a good coder but don't want to do work for work's sake. For those of you who have worked with Magento, would you recommend using it vs. building your own Ruhy or PHP site? Have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
monocles and eyepatches? Sign me up!
You should absolutely let it be known who this company is. If you're uncomfortable do it anonymously. Rescinding an offer after a candidate has quit an existing job is shameful and anyone doing it should be outed for all potential candidates to know of.

Don't be embarrassed about asking for your old job back.

And ask the 50 person company to reimburse you - they should pay you for the trouble they've caused. If they're not complete idiots they should agree to at least a month's worth of salary, possibly more. Have them do it as a consulting fee if they're not comfortable phrasing it as damages for their rescinded offer.
Reminds me of the famous Steve Jobs quote, "People Don't Read Anymore."
Dave McClure should've hosted his website on angelfire.com
The entire selling point for this site is that they sell DRM free games.

Since the games are DRM free, you never have to worry about the publisher, or anyone else, pulling servers offline and making the games unplayable.

GOG can go out of business the day after you purchase and you still have the games you already bought and downloaded.

They're not a game backup service. They're a game store. Once you've bought and downloaded your games, you can make your own backups; you don't rely on them to keep anything available forever.
I'm not an expert on Stuxnet (or really malware at all) but this whole thing seems extremely overblown.

Is it interesting that there's a piece of malware out there that targets industrial controllers? Absolutely it is. It's probably not just some bored college kid.

Is it a "cyber missile" aimed at the heart of Iran's nuclear weapons program? Probably not. Among other things, the IP ranges it's "targeting" aren't specific to Iran. Also, there's no evidence connecting it to Iran.

Whenever you see a better-than-average piece of offensive computing technology, your first thought should be "extortion", and your second (distant second) thought should be "competitive subterfuge". Extortion happens all the time, and you rarely read about it, because the targets don't want to talk about it. And, while there's never been a corroborated story about an actual cross-state offensive strike using IT technology, there have in fact been cases where industry leaders have whacked on each other using security flaws.

The reporting on Stuxnet seems too captive to tidy and palatable narratives for me to take seriously. It doesn't help that these stories are sourced mostly to SCADA security experts. There are some great people working on SCADA problems, but that field takes everything annoying about computer security PR and amplifies it.
I believe that non-profits on the whole are more likely to work to directly "do good" than for-profits.
Whilst it might mean I end up "supporting" a cause that I personally would not subscribe to, as a broad definition it seems suitable to distinguish pricing policies based on this if I want, on the whole, to support organisations that "do good".
I suspect that you might not be very familiar with Tom. Stay tuned and you will find there is much to learn.
I also have a similar technique. When I'm 70 or whatever, how would my biography look like?

Hopefully something like...'At 18 he moved out of the house, at 25 he started on a new startup, etc.' I want it to be full of events, doesn't matter if they were failures or successes, what matters that they're experiences and experiments.

Hopefully it won't be something like 'He joined company A at 22, and worked there till 65, and then retired.'
A social web is one thing, but a social everything is even scarier. Imagine the impact of privacy leaks if Facebook had their tendrils spread to every gadget you used.
I do not believe any of these unintended consequences are unintended, they were intended but never spoken out. Authoritarian traitors of human kind are very patient about reaching their goals, no matter where they come from, we are sitting on a major entitlement problem that will have a extremely violent outcome of which I hope will not happen during my time on this planet. But shit will really hit the fan if current development stays it's course.
You don't see that as a complement?
Potatoes give about 6 million food calories per acre. (Wheat and most other plants yield less.) Assuming 8,000 calories per day, the family would need at least 1/2 an acre to survive. An Olympic-sized pool is 0.3 acres, so it's a bit beyond the edge of possible. I doubt their pool was that large, and since most other vegetables, to say nothing of fish and chickens, are less efficient food sources, I suspect they get a good fraction of their calories from elsewhere.

To check myself, this seems like a good thread: http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=... . The strongest advocates for intensive and efficient agriculture say "less than half an acre (~ 0.2 hectares) can support a family of four" and "a vegan diet can meet calorie and protein needs from just 300 square metres using mainly potatoes. A more varied diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, grains and legumes would take about 700 square metres." Say it's 2500 square meters for a family of 4 = 0.6 acres.

So, no, I don't think they get most of their food from the area of their backyard pool.
Found pg's original comment via searchyc.com - it used to be 100 days; that may have changed though : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048468
And relaunching with BG1 + TOTSC for $10 -- Sold. I always meant to play Sword Coast -- and have no idea where my BG1 CD's have gone..
Recent Lawsuits Challenge Use of Flash Cookies to Track Online Behavior
Can we retire the phrase 'rock star engineer/developer/progammer/whatever' ... please?
a very helpful tool to experiment with CSS on the fly.

My version of HN:
http://cl.ly/69649580c36f1baa9d9a

The code for it:
http://pastebin.com/WZmdaBPs
Twitterplaces - Munich is on fire for the Oktoberfes
How about turning the light on?
How Constraints Drive Creativity
We're hiring, email us: jobs@mixpanel.com
Just a guess: competing directly with the iPad may be too hard to even try. Apple has a quality product _and_ may have the economies of scale to be price competitive, even with their margins (pricing of the Dell Streak may be evidence of this) "Fits in your pocket" is an aspect on which the iPad can easily be beaten.
Well, technically speaking, 0 correlation isn't an insult. It just means HN karma says nothing about your hacking ability.

If, OTOH, he said Corr(HackerNewsKarma, HackingAbility) = -1.0...
I'm sure it's true that Bezos at 80 wouldn't end up looking back and cursing himself for failure at starting a company. But it's a little naive to overlook that a lot of people would. Decent careers aren't exactly growing on trees.
Cool, yeah I definitely think you should delay the need to sign up. Combining #2 & #4, you'll likely want to fold the state to state logic into the questionnaire.

Best of luck.
Might not have the taste any longer to join another startup, but Justin.tv is hiring engineers and if you want to continue on to move to the Bay Area you should check us out. /shameless plug

In any case remember tomorrow is another day and surely things will work out.
Thanks! I just did a little searching on searchyc.com and can't find anything which contradicts that or indicates it has changed.

I have Swiss cheese for brains these days... :-/
it was on the homepage from day 1. i recently removed it. i thought that it would be a good social proof counter and all my friend enjoyed keeping track of how it was growing. the site started out as a fun thing that happened to be profitable. i had no idea that it would grow like it did.

i want to continue sharing information among the community, but it's pretty weird that those guys straight up jacked my style without even emailing me. i honestly don't know how i'm going to proceed.
IBM and SUN had tons of competing products. They compete in: OS's - Solaris vs AIX; Hardware - Sun's Low end x86 vs systemX, SPARC vs Power, Disk Storage, Tape Storage; And probably a bunch more I can't think of.

Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.
The existentialist's solution: throw all the cards in the trash and make two piles of zero.
In any one on one, there is a 1:1 ratio of managers to managees.
Thank you!
There's so much moping and sadness in the world! Lighten up and laugh people!
The key here is damages. ie. what have you lost. If you ask for your old job back and they don't offer it then you're in a stronger position to show damages. If they do offer it - well then you're in better shape then you are now.

Just another point in the "suck it up and ask for your old job back" camp.
I know two programmers that have pilot's licenses, but I don't know any pilots that have programmer's licenses. ;)
"Method Entrepreneurship" - The Method Acting of startups.
What are some vulnerability & Exploit publishing sites that I MUST know?
Hello,
What are some vulnerability & Exploit publishing sites that every security engineer MUST know?
Zuckerberg to Donate $100 Million to Newark Schools
Yes, you do. Helmets can be replaced, heads not so much: http://yfrog.com/0shelmetij
I was a self-taught programmer (with a little parental help) long before I took a programming course in school; I started when I was about 9 years old.

I breezed through the college freshman-level programming courses (and pretty much all of the later CS courses too) because I already knew most of what was being taught. My friends (most of whom had minimal previous programming experience) were much worse off; I don't think I would have done even as well as they did if I were starting from scratch as I entered college. I had a 9-year head start on them, although I learned at my own pace and on a self-directed, meandering path without any structured classes or tutorials.

Most of those friends graduated with a CS degree while still not fully grasping concepts like how malloc() works (this particular example comes from one of my friends who invariably showed up at my door looking for debugging help near the deadline of every C project, complaining that malloc was breaking his program). I feel like I probably missed out on some useful tidbits because I mostly tuned out the CS classes, since I felt like I "knew it all" already (obviously not true, but close enough that I could do well on the finals), but I am certain I knew more about practical programming than most of my friends who studiously applied themselves in those same CS courses.

If I hadn't had previous experience programming, I doubt I could have become an effective programmer in just four years of academic instruction (I certainly didn't fare so well in my non-CS courses in which I had no previous experience). Observing my friends, I could tell they were having a rough time with the way programming was taught, but I don't know whether that is a solvable problem within the time constraints.

I doubt my approach to learning programming was the most effective possible, but I think it's worked reasonably well. I learned to program because it was fun, not because I wanted to make anything useful, and I enrolled in CS because it looked like a way to continue that fun. In the end, I was disappointed by the (lack of) depth in the CS courses I took and the amount they rehashed things I already knew, but I suppose it's not feasible to tailor undergraduate courses to people who are already programmers. Perhaps with the growing accessibility and popularity of programming, there is a place for "CS for programmers" that would skip the introductory content and get into the real meat earlier than the third or fourth year. Certainly the courses I took met neither the needs of myself (too basic) nor my non-programmer friends (too advanced too quickly).
Yes, charges now in dispute with VISA.

What really chafes my ass isn't necessarily the unauthorized billing, it's the attitude of oDesk.

I can say, I have had bad customer service in the past, but this ranks as one of the worst.

The guy i was dealing with was arrogant, argumentative, and quite full of himself. Qualities that no customer support person should portray.

It turns out I'm also not the only person to have such disputes with oDesk. There is a litany of complaints ranging from billing issues to delivery failures. Many of those very complaints are posted here on this system.

There are many alternatives to oDesk and I would welcome feedback by anyone who uses a competing service.
$250,000-a-day Minecraft strikes indie game gold
Israel has been pretty public about its desire to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

This kind of plausibly deniable attack sounds just like what Israel has been wanting. And they have the talent to get the job done.

So why not? A nation state sabotaging an enemy's nuclear weapons without it being traced back to them. That's a pretty nice thing to have.

While what you're talking about is of course the most common scenario, it seems like a no-brainer to me that the NSA/DOD/IDF would spend money on preparing to make these kinds of attacks even if they rarely or never implement them. I don't see why the author's theory is implausible.
im trying too lol
Wow, I talked to a recruiter for startups and we're in the process of something similar. I too am risking my status in the states by switching.

So...anyone need a Django + front-end dev on a project basis?
"Memory stick"? Is this a ram stick or a flash drive?
Ya it's a pretty dick move, especially given your immigration situation. I'd out em... politely.
yeah .. unless you specify a :visited attribute, it treats all anchor links as the same for styling purposes
New website features maxims and insights from successful entrepreneurs
I think it comes down to rationalizations: I know that I can rationalize doing something new and different. I can convince myself that a failed venture taught me something, whereas I have no way of telling myself that I shouldn't regret a missed opportunity.

It's much more common to be stuck wondering "what if" as opposed to "what if I hadn't".
I read this and thought what a waste of electricity. Putting all those processors to work on folding proteins would have brought about so much more social good.
A bit more discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1699405
After talking to a lawyer, burn the company. Post here and on a blog and email TC. Assholes should be called out, and fucking with someone's life like this is indefensible, doubly so when he or she has visa requirements. Remember in the US, truth is a defense to libel. And you're doing this not for yourself, but for karma, helping all the future employees this company will screw over.

Finally, if you want an sf area rails job, contact scribd -- I literally can't imagine them treating an employee this way. And some of the other big rails shops too; I can't give you an exhaustive list, but maybe start with hashrocket (this isn't a rec, I just know the name), pivotal (in the bay area, have a cool product we use at work), etc.

gl
There is no evidence to suggest that Israel has anything to do with this. None. But here we are, speculating on whether Israel is targeting Iran with "cyber attacks". This is my problem with any story that suggests any country is using security flaws as a weapon.

As a professional matter, nothing in any of the reporting or analysis of Stuxnet suggests to me that this would have cost more than low-six figures to build cold (meaning, what it would cost to have a contractor familiar with malware and runtime security but not familiar with the particular software targeted here). It'd be significantly cheaper if you had devs with industrial controller backgrounds assisted by an exploit-dev contractor.

So, yes, Israel could have been behind this attack. And the NSA could have been behind the Twitter XSS worm. It could be Putin ordering all those DDoS extortion attempts on gambling websites. But I doubt it; it's probably just someone's scheme to make money. Talk to banking security people sometime; crazy stuff is happening every day.
You may want to describe what "really simple eCommerce site" really means. Is it going to grow in the near future perhaps? The simplest conceivable eCommerce site in my mind is some cart component and single form checkout process that just compiles an order and sends the owner/clerk in an email.
> send http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:yR0N5a0R8puacM:http://www.... to the company who retracted the offer.

That would be extremely unwise. If there is one take home lesson from all of this, it is that you NEVER burn your bridges, no matter what.

It's a small world, and you just might have to rely on that person you gave the finger last week tomorrow.

Spectacularly bad advice this.
I see it differently, personally my allegiance lies with other developers, it is why I was respected even when I was in executive management. Personally, I would feel that it is my responsibility to not let this happen to other developers. Further it is not his responsibility to hid the actions of the wrong. They where in the wrong not him, he should not have to protect their reputation for fear of reprisal by some future employer. I would hire him if he named the name of the company because it is not his duty to protect and cover up their actions.

This is certainly a different case than airing a companies dirty laundry and creating a whinny bitch fest just because you are unhappy with a company for log hours, mismanagement or something similar. In this case a company showed a clear disregard for their actions.

Further outing the company would make this post real in my mind. Color me skeptical, but we all know that there is a lot of back room crap that goes on with getting low wage immigrants in to fill positions. They go to great lengths to do so. It would not at all surprise me if they are AstroTurf'ing boards to scare existing visa holders into "staying put" (HN would be a good place with our visa holder community). I would not put it past them and this is just the kind of post that would do so. So with some real facts the story becomes more credible until then I will remain at least partially skeptical.
I'm confused. What is the method of delivery for this program? I sure hope no one is hooking up nuclear power plants to the tubes in such a way that it's even possible for the computers that control the reaction are able to make talkies to anything. That just sounds like a really bad idea. And the plot for a really bad Hollywood action flick.
Especially if it means being kicked out of the country. Being jobless is only a part of the problem here.
what was the isbn?
The only true failure is inaction.

Plunging toward something terrifying lets you know that you're making progress, pushing your limits, forcing growth. The best, most enjoyable points in my life have been preceded by fear (leaving home for college, starting really tough roles, dropping a safe job so I could get into the software business, moving across country).

Conversely, the points of the most significant stagnation have been entirely devoid of fear. If I'm not scared, clearly things are too safe, too mild, too absent of challenge.

I measure how well I'm using my days by recency of fear. I know if I'm getting too comfortable, things are getting slack and it's time to start evaluating what new risks and challenges could lead to interesting rewards.

Have I screwed up? Sure. Plenty of gambles didn't pan out, but each and every one of them taught me a lot. Most also gave me a great pivot to work with, leading to new opportunities I never would have found.

It's a more proactive regret minimization framework, but I like it. Most importantly, it got me to the Bay Area, the best place I've ever lived.
SMAQ stack for big data
No, sorry he should not do that. His situation is precarious enough as it is, he should play his cards very carefully and not do anything rash or out of revenge.
Ugh. A thirty minute status meeting every week? I'd be updating my resume.
Mark Zuckerberg: If I knew who leaked it to you, I would’ve fired them already.

[... snip ]

Michael Arrington: You said Erick’s working on something else, what’s that?

Mark Zuckerberg: Um, oh he’s working on a bunch of stuff.

Michael Arrington: What’s the top secret mobile thing he’s working on though?

Mark Zuckerberg: I actually think that what he’s working on, is like I don’t think that any of the stuff is that top secret.

Michael Arrington: So there’s a theory in talking to my sources that there are…

Mark Zuckerberg: That there are levels of top secretness [laughs]? I mean, we have a pretty open culture.

Eh?
Decide what you want to program before finding a mentor, even though some mentors might help you find a language to specialize in rather than just teaching you a small part of what they know and how they think.

If you want to be more involved in web side of things and getting dynamic website stuff (forms, etc. etc.) done quickly, go the PhP or Ruby on Rails route.

If you want to have a job almost anywhere, do Java. With Java you could be doing anything from server-side, embedded code in chips, to Android apps, to web applications (dynamic websites).

If you want to have a job with almost as good of a chance as knowing Java, learn C#/.Net. You can cover the Microsoft side of the virtual world.

If you like utility, crazy looking slashes and text manipulation, learn Perl.

Want to write software that runs a lot of the faster stuff, operating systems, things that allow Java, Ruby, C#, Perl, etc. to run, software that runs devices, etc., learn C and C++.

There are many more options as well. Try to choose something that fits where you want to be, not just something easy.

I agree with those who say you should find a programming job that showcases your pilot's knowledge. That will provide you with the greatest chance of success. Find out the type of programming that Boeing, etc. need, and do that. Odds are, it is C/C++ or Java. Or check out Flight sim companies. These two might be interesting: http://www.prepar3d.com/ or http://www.cascadegamefoundry.com/
I'm having a hard time imagining what a 'rock start engineer' is, and he was trying to find a better gig which is what got him in to all this.

Starting your own company is usually not an option when you're an immigrant on an employers visa (did you read the post?).
Not for the ornithopter itself, I just there'd be technical discussions of airflow over a moving wing or minimum change in the angle of attack required to generate a certain amount of lift...seems like the sort of thing that might be useful to helicopter rotor designers or so.
A few extra data points about using subdomains vs different domain for static content (assuming that you serve your site exclusively off www.domain.com)...

OK: Google Analytics - You can use the function "_setDomainName('www.domain.com')" on your GA tracker to restrict the cookie domain to only the www.

NOT OK: Quantcast - The Quantcast tracking code explicitly forces the cookie domain to be ".domain.com", and the only way around it would be to alter their javascript and host it from your own server, which they do not allow (though I am not sure what the recourse would be). I emailed support about it, and they said they had no plans to let you specify a different cookie domain.