skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People are not dying because Wikileaks releases stuff. People are dying because other people are shooting them or blowing them up. Responsibility for an action rests with those who carry out that action.

So essentially, you believe that if I were to compromise a covert operative who is then killed, I have done nothing wrong? What the heck did we convict Aldrich Ames for?
Someone has already made it available as a PDF.

blog post:
http://irr.posterous.com/netflixs-transition-to-high-availab...

direct download link:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.posterous.com/irr/1OaUyyUq9eF2...
That's a weird way to put it. OS X is certified Unix (capital U).
I work in the same office as the makers of MongoDB, and they're an open source startup. I have no idea whether or how much money they're making.
What would be the value of this article?
You are who you are. Some are innate qualities and some are simply the cards that you have been dealt with.
You have to become what you want to be with what you got and then some one will write an article some day mentioning you as a reference and the qualities you have as the key to being a founder :)
I agree it's a technology and HN story, but as you can see the conversation is much more loaded around the emotional content of the leaks than the technology involved. (Or the implication of such technology on modern society, which I find interesting)

Without getting into too much naval-gazing, when I visit a topic with highly emotional posts, I always try to turn the subject around. See how it plays when it's a cause I fiercely support, people were hurt, and secrets were kept. Ask if my opinion would be different based on how I personally feel about the underlying politics, or if I am acting as part of a general rule that makes sense and can be applied to the world at large.

Tough conversations to have. I doubt we're going to have them here, and I doubt wikileaks has done anything at all to help us.

I await the day a startup can take topical news stories and help people understand where they agree on issues, how to develop and apply general principles by taking people with vastly different worldviews and finding consensus. I think this technology is possible. But I also feel like it's going to be a long wait. Too much notoriety and publicity to be had fanning the emotional flames.

This is a historic moment, no doubt. But it is not one I find any joy in, only deep sadness for all those involved.
It's not anything new. The whole point of copyright (and other intellectual property law) is to artificial limit unlimited goods. Copying has become cheaper with the digital age, but copying's been cheaper than buying monopoly copies for a long time. Why do you think libraries impose limits on how much you can photocopy out of a single book ?
pg isn't saying that your team is flawed - he's talking in general, and in a statistical sense. People who start out as friends before are more likely to succeed - that doesn't imply anything bad about your specific group. I think at the level where you're "interviewing" thousands of teams, looking for patterns starts to mean a lot.
I like the way the title is always in a nice readable contrast and the info box down the botom always matches the selected colour - lots of fun.
Ooh. Get one of them over here to post! But good suggestion on a company to look into.
Ask HN: Why not PHP?
Forgive me for the naive question, but: why is PHP considered so inferior to Ruby/Python?

And, as a beginner, do you recommend going with PHP to start with, or straight into Ruby/Python?
Google Toughens Privacy Controls
UGG Bailey Button Bomber
WordPress Founder on the Key to Open Source Success
I interpreted Qz's comment as "this professor is deserving of the allocated credit." As a recent CMU CS grad (and student of Professor Miller) I would agree and say that this is also generally the case.
I write free software for a living, because the result of my programming services are GPL licensed.
Also, don't bother researching illnesses for yourself on the web. A medical professional will have every motivation to pay attention to every little symptom you tell about.

The first iteration of a startup will almost always be wrong and you'll have to throw most of it away. So it doesn't matter so much whether its the best code in the world or not. The important thing is that you learn from your first iteration. If you don't have a tech background and hand off the first implementation to a superstar, it's very possible that you won't learn anything. If you do it yourself, you will learn a lot one way or another.

Also, it helps in many ways to be able to demonstrate that you are not an idiot.
Don't you mean shabda@agiliq.com ?

Why would you put my email address in a spam-harvestable form on your website (http://www.hackernewsjobs.com/apply/contractor-at-metaoptimi...) if you won't do the same with your email address?
No, but I'm willing ask they put in that amount of work to subsidize college students...

So they are permitted to say no?

... based on the probability that they'll later make a net contribution to society, including the laborers - if that probability is high enough.

Try to pay attention. I was responding to a comment by elbenshira questioning whether it was a waste even if the education goes unused. I was asserting that it was a waste in that case.
I think 'manage' is not quite the right word. I am sure there are plenty of people out there who could be happier while spending less- the ones who are spending in search of happiness.
Great post. I just forwarded it to the 1,000 people on the co-founders meetup mailing list (http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/)! It explains very clearly the value a business person can bring, and debunks the idea that busines people are worthless. Thanks.
Star, Not So Bright
Also, where did "Equity Available: YES" come from?

And, seriously: NO. You you may NOT interpose a form for applying to Matasano jobs in front of potential applicants.

Not cool.
$799 HP Slate aimed squarely at businesses
[Album] Taylor Swift - Speak Now (Deluxe Edition) (2CD) (2010)
Storing lots of files
I am looking for ideas on storing millions of small files. I want to build out a system, for uploading images. I am planning on resizing the images and storing thumbnails as well as the original image.

Originally I was planning to store the images on a shared file system, where the webserver and app servers could access the images. I was planning on creating a dir structure based on the user id uploading the image and breaking the long into /xxx/yyy/zzz/image.png. Then storing the photo info into the db.

The problem with the file system approach, is that I can see moving this file system with millions of files can be unwieldy.

Then I started to think about storing them in a database either mysql or mongodb. Using a Master slave setup where the writes are stored to the master as blobs and then then read by an app to serve out the image. I was thinking of using caching in front of the db, either a memcache setup for the thumbnails or creating a cache by writing to the local disk for serving up the image.

I am soliciting any other ideas on how to best handle this situation, Any ideas. Thanks
With the price fixing the only competition in town is priced at free. Therefore the market should bear somewhere between $10 and free. But not $10. Its still a ripoff no matter what way you shake it. Competitively, paying to download something is purely for the convenience of not having to hunt down a free copy. So I'm paying not for the music, but the ease of downloading it instantly. And thats not worth $10 to me.

(Ok, so the music you buy doesn't have DRM, that is true. But its still worth absolutely nothing after you download it...)
I was leaning towards that positive interpretation, given CMU's positive reputation.

But given the thread root, and not knowing any more about Qz -- indeed being unable to trivially associate that handle with a real name/project via the profile page -- a cynical comment from a disgruntled grad couldn't be ruled out.
Python may be the best language to learn if you've never done any coding before. Clean syntax, straight to the point, etc.

However, I'd say Ruby fills the RAD a bit better than Python, and Python is is not a language that scales, so aside from little scripts it's not exactly a language that's conquered a niche.

Go with Ruby or Java if you plan on making something useful right away.
Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system
He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.
"Responsibility for an action rests with those who carry out that action."

And with those who directly influence and, in this case, potentially enable those who carry out the action. Using your logic you can justify a lot of things that are illegal in this world, since you yourself are not directly responsible. You don't have to literally pull the trigger to kill someone. (accomplices go to jail too)
You're talking to the guy who invented EC2. I think he knows what's hard.

http://blog.layer8.net/ec2_origins.html
This article talks about two different things. First, it talks about how much money one would need to live comfortably in different parts of the country. Second, it talks about retirement.

I have a question about the latter. Does anyone else notice that the retirement articles are always written by the same old school business journalists, in this case CNN Money?

I think this article illustrates a major difference between our generation (I'm 24) and previous generations. The retirement conversation always revolves around living off of a nest egg investment that will hopefully be enough to survive on later in life.

Let's change the discussion to be about earning income regardless of employment status. Anyone banking (no pun intended) on a 401k to sustain himself in 40+ years is nuts imo.
Pause the video once it starts playing so it can load the video and then when it loads to where you want to start watching, scrub the player to that spot and hit play. Tada!
Yep, makes perfect sense, thank you. I've disabled keepalive and increased my mancrush on varnish.
Did the guy own any of these three stocks and others???
One can only hope that the next generation will find a way to blow whistles into cell phones to get free calls.
Coding Horror: The Keyboard Cult
I didn't know that, I thought everything ran on beam. I guess the point is the canonical Ruby implementation is really slow when it doesn't need to be. It's not like it's a hard problem, or even that it hasn't already been solved (look at GemStone's Maglev: http://ruby.gemstone.com/)
LA is a very big place, so there is a big variance between the coast (e.g. Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey, South Bay) and the inland or valley areas. Usually the weather reports are almost like clockwork in an X/X+10/X+20 pattern: 70's at the beaches, 80's inland, 90's in the valleys.

If you want to stay cool and not too dry, it's not too expensive to live in the southern areas or even Long Beach.
I know quite a few people in the special forces on the ground all over the middle east and you'd surprised how many adamently believe that if Americans did indeed know "the truth", we would already be at war with half of the middle east and possibly Russia.

I think assuming that the American public has an aversion to war is a dangerous one. Remember that full transparency is a double edged sword. One the one hand people learn about the innocent loss of life, on the other, people may learn just how dangerous and determined the forces against "us" are. That could very well result in a cause to action.

We invaded two nations that presumably had nothing to do with 9/11 over 9/11. Take a moment to think about the potential ramifications of a population that is fully aware of the extent powerful movements within Iran, China, Russia, Vemezuela, Pakistan and a host of other countries go to undermine our national security and economic stability. In case you didnt know, the US is already fighting covert wars on all of those fronts (you can google around for articles on this stuff, they come out all the time)
FWIW, i returned my Kindle last week. Reason I bought was to carry mostly techincal publications to read on my trip to Africa. Somehow Kindle a bad daytime read but in the night????? Cant be used in the dark, no way to tweak contrast to suit darkness. I find it rather over-hyped and think Amazon needs to do something about it. I found a similar review on an Australian site as well as Amazon's website. I reckon most people have returned the device for this reason too. So as even as lending might be an appealing move, the device has a lil more mileage to go. IMHO tho
Google India Music
Actually, he's wrong on that point. there is a way to force quit an app without saving its state.

Press and hold the sleep/wake button for several seconds, until the Slide to Power Off control appears. Release the sleep/wake button and hold down the Home button for another 7-10 seconds.

The app will quit and return the user to the Home Screen.
You will receive as many different answers to this question as there are people. Focus on patterns of software development, techniques, and less on the specific language. It will get you further.
Agreed, but is it now possible get established relatively easier by simply writing a better book than the other guy? I mean the ease of distribution brings the harm of piracy but aren't there also some gains?

As examples, I'd offer both Why's poignant guide to Ruby and 2 pretty good books I've recently checked out, Learn Python the Hard Way & A Byte of Python.
It's not a side project, it's a business project.

The so-called hackernewsjobs website is built on the JobBoardsHQ platform. The email address shabda@agiliq.com reveals that the poster works at Agiliq, which develops JobBoardsHQ (as a business, not a side project).
The rocket burn to get you up that high isn't something you get in a plane.
The vast majority of books from academic presses are basically written for free. Even books that sell fairly well from relatively well-known presses like MIT Press make their authors very little money. They do it because publishing your book through MIT Press is a great way to get your ideas out there (and get paid indirectly in academic cred / CV lines). True to some extent with other nonfiction publishers too, e.g. I believe HN user lsc gets "paid" for his Xen book primarily in publicity driving sales to his VPS business, not because the royalties are something to live on.
Google spends more lobbying Congress
I was an overnight security guard for 3 years at a Christian college. Honestly, it was the easiest job I've ever had because there was never any crime, the students were serious about school and very studious, and it was a dry campus. It was easy for me to get overtime, which made the pay tolerable.

The first thing I did was make a reading list. I re-read most of the Western Canon and a lot of other non-fiction books I wanted to read. The school also had a computer lab with Macs and even a few Linux boxen, and during the winter when I was snowed in I spent many nights learning PHP, Python, and MySQL. It ended up being one of the most productive learning periods of my life.
This should go in your next hiring post. "Who we're looking for: Somebody with the chops to dig into code that has passed professional inspection and do horrible, horrible things to it. Someone who can find a stack overflow in document.write. Someone like you, because if you can program we will teach you these and other dark arts. The last stack overflow in Firefox was found by a 12 year old. Are you going to let yourself lose to a 12 year old?"

Sidenote: I think I have a guess based on a prior conversation, but for the edification of HNers: $3,000 is how many orders of magnitude below the market worth of that vulnerability?
I think I might have misread what you've said - Are you saying Ruby somehow scales better than Python?
It's a particular way to scroll a page, how creative can it be?
Do you really have to turn on the screen just to see if there's anything new?

Yes, but I don't think the turning on the screen is the big problem. If I'm wondering if I have messages, updates, etc., turning on the screen is a very minor hassle (I'm already taking it out of my pocket or picking it up).

That being said, the notifications are one of the two major shortcomings (albeit very major) of iOS relative to the base Android install and other mobile OSes -- the notification system and the built in turn-by-turn directions.

There are other issues, but those are the two really big ones that don't involve the network it runs on (at least in the US).
Right, but a country can get well-educated citizens in high-school, and spend promoting lecture and arts. This last benefits all society, not just students and professors.
>US liberated Iraq from a bloody dictator

That the US installed, in a war justified by lies, or are we still looking for the weapons of mass destruction that could be used in 45mins?
People always bring up Jobs and Woz in these discussions. IRS a useful example, but not as an example of fate or extraordinary luck. It's a great example of one of the most common, reliable ways to find a technical cofounder. Jobs immersed himsel in his local tech scene, where he met Woz and started working on stuff with him. Rather than mythologized or fetishizes the pairing, is it so strange to think Jobs might have checked everyone out, ascertained that Woz was the best guy there, and then chose him as his guy? Sure they became friends and all, but I think it's important to realize Jobs made a deliberate choice when he started hanging out with Woz. He wasn't groaning about not being able to find a dev, he went and met them all, spotted the best guy, and started a company with him.

Jobs chose Woz. If you can't find good people and get them on board with your plan, no web app or meetup will save you. Go out. Meet people. Choose the best guy whose company you enjoy and make friends.
That's not applicable here. This definition of intent refers to the criminals intent, not the victims. I was talking about the data owners intent to broadcast, not Googles intent to collect.
I forget - can we still read bedtime stories to children or is that an un-authorised use?
why is PHP considered so inferior to Ruby/Python?

When I studied English in college, I discovered that the English language is a very poor choice for writing poetry because it is a very rhyme-poor language. For that, look to French or Italian. English is such a mess of a language, with irregular forms and inconsistent pronunciation. But if you're not writing poetry, English is your best bet, because more people speak it than any other language. You're going to find more books written in English and people who read them, and more people who speak your language.

PHP is the English of the programming world. Python and Ruby have cleaner syntax and consistent programming conventions, but more people speak PHP. There are lots of resources for PHP and lots more developers who know PHP.

If you find yourself in a remote fishing village in China, you're more likely to find one person there who speaks English and knows PHP than one who speaks Italian and knows Ruby.
Assuming it is reliably exploitable and packaged with the exploit, $3,000 is substantially less than what that vulnerability is worth. As with everything, it depends on how aggressively you sell it, and whether you believe in an immortal soul.

I can't tell you exactly how much though because I'm busy tracking down his email address so we can be his 8th grade internship.
Thanks. Emailing you now.
If an author can't afford to put all their time towards writing a book though, because they no longer make any significant amount of money out them, wouldn't it be a net loss for society.

I agree that creativity isn't bound, but it will certainly happen less when a person who is exceptional doesn't have the opportunity to full devote themselves to their craft.
As a math major that makes me worry a little bit.

How tiny is the fraction?
Supporting Shen: an appeal
Good for him! If he keeps this up, he's going to be an awesome programmer.
I've been keeping millions of files in single directories on XFS without problems. The big upside is that you won't need to learn any funky/new management tools.
Don't think the number of clever kids changed much over the year. It's just much harder to spot them, because everyone and their dog is "doing computers" now.
This is very interesting, and maybe goes against normal reasoning. I've heard the general idea is not to become business partners with friends, but the opposite seems to be true with startups.

In the two startups I've been involved in previously, I hung in there because I didn't want to let the other person down. One ended up dissolving, but we remain on good terms. The other is ongoing, where I freelance, but give it my all because I don't want to let the other person down.

The third is new, and I just was approached by an old friend who wants to get involved. I thought about it for a second, then realized he's the kind of person I don't want to let down and I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual.
Bomb Shelter Inspection Day
That was written by a kid sitting in jail for computer crimes. NOT the same as Hacker News.
That or he'll ruin the whole Internet and then do a dissertation on stochastic congestion control.
I was kind of expecting this to link to a blank page. I was pleasantly surprised to find a very logical and coherent article.
I'd go with the db + filesystem approach. It's listed here under "best of both worlds": http://www.hashmysql.org/index.php?title=Storing_files_in_th...
Automattic (http://automattic.com) The company behind Wordpress software and http://wordpressfoundation.org is a good example.

Canonical Ltd with Ubuntu is another one.

The business model for open source business solutions is to give away the software and build a service business around it as the domain expert. A company like Engineyard makes money by selling services around Rails which is open source. Some of the key Rails/Ruby contributors work at Engineyard.
I'm sorry, but I can't help but see this and think of all the kids around this age who are prevented from earning money by child labor laws, and the idea that this kid is a "Slave" because he's "too young to make decisions for himself. It may sound like this is a ridiculous thing to say, but just yesterday someone was making this claim in another forum.

I was busy writing a game at that age with the intent to sell it. Unfortunately, at that time there were no good distribution methods for independant games.

But I think the desire of some people who are well meaning but narrow in their worldview to "protect" children really prevents a lot of children from achieving as much as they would like, and are capable of.

When I finally was allowed to work, I remember several years where I had to work part time, even during the summers, because of these laws. One of my first jobs was a programming job, and I learned a whole lot from a senior programmer. I was 14 or 15, he was mid 20s. I wonder how much more I would have learned if I hadn't been prevented from working as much as I wanted because of state mandated limits on the number of hours. I can recall many times when he was explaining something to me, and it was getting really good, but I had to leave.
When App Engine Went Wrong
Then it might be better to buy him a sports car than to fund Alice's education.
If you're looking for a good read, I enjoyed Jeremy Campbell's "Grammatical Man" quite a bit, it ties together information theory and linguistics. Obviously not the most in-depth book on either topic, but fascinating nonetheless.

http://www.amazon.com/Grammatical-Man-Information-Entropy-La...
Here's the advisory, with link to the bug (require login to see bug).

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2010/mfsa2010-65.ht...