skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just trying to help people that might spend an hour looking for a simple kind of solution to this, when the answer is really quite complicated and the math involved in the linked solutions are way beyond the understanding of most non-mathematicians.
Any requests?
Friday is part of the weekend for Palestinian children too.

Another problem with this system is that it only works for people who can read and understand English.
Akamai needs to wake up and realize that their technology hasn't been a big differentiator for a few years now and change their pricing to reflect that.
Before I read up on how Alien works, I have to guess: it uses dlsym() (or the Windows equivalent) to find a function by name, and has a number of prototypical function pointer types which it uses to call the symbol returned by dlsym(), based on the number and types of parameters passed in Lua. When calling C++ it could even check the parameter types, provided they know how name mangling works for whatever platform the run on.

Now to see how close I was...
Apple Adopts A Subway Station
Glibc change exposing bugs (or how memcpy can bite you back)
No. I will say that the solution is more notable than of the guesses thus far, with the possible exception of "yesterday's news"
He realized that there were a set number of patterns. Once he figured that out it was easy to hit the button when the next square was going to be the one he wanted.
wow, what an awesome read. I referenced the TJX hacks in a ton of customer presentations to sell Cisco's security suite, but never knew what happened behind the scenes. On one hand, he caused $400M in damages to his direct victims, but made a fortune for IT software/security companies by instilling FUD in enterprises across the globe.
Im quite impressed. I never thought it would actually make it. Congrats guys!

I thought it would be just another side hack and be left to nothing, but surprisingly, it worked.

Now all you need is to hit Barnes and Noble Magazine Shelfs to hit it big. haha
you can probe USB commands, but that takes a lot of time. much faster to connect a usb analyzer and then 'replay' to see what commands do what.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/09/kinect-hacking-video... (demo of analyzer)

http://github.com/adafruit/Kinect (USB log dump)
I loved this book as a kid: http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets-Engineering-Eldad-Ei...

It's probably a bit out of date now, but my dog-eared copy is still a good read. Ah, nostalgia. There once were days when I dreamed that a CS degree would make me as a god; the silly thoughts of a child. Now I know that it is a _PhD_ which makes gods of men.
Just because the explanations you've found use mathematical terminology, that doesn't mean you need a degree in math to understand the solution if it's explained properly.
You use a USB sniffer to observe traffic between the host and the device and make guesses about how to interpret the data.
Samsung Galaxy Tab Review: A Pocketable Train Wreck
Guessing the interface is like shooting in the dark. More likely is someone had access to a USB snooper like the USB Beagle - http://www.totalphase.com/products/beagle_usb480/
I've been getting this from hacker news links all day, what's the deal?

Error establishing a database connection

I'm dealing with a client right now that's completely ignored their deadline, I'm not really sure what I can do.

What are your strategies to prevent client procrastination?
Gonzalez doesn't seem exceptionally competent.

Depends what you're talking about. He's described in the article by his peers as "barely [able to] write simple code", but the US attorney who prosecuted described him as the type who knows how to manage talent around him (which seems obvious given how he leveraged friendships to accomplish some very high-level stuff.
I've explained it to many non-mathematicians, and they certainly seemed to have understood.
Someone please write a web design book like this
I believe the box will only have Hulu Plus - not full Hulu. I'm not sure if they're still kind of back dooring Hulu in. But Hulu's corporate masters are generally trying to only allow Hulu plus on the big screen.
depressingly quick. Where was the suspense?
Oh man. Ordering one ASAP. So much cool stuff could be done with this. Going to try to create a gestures thing so I can browse my email from bed.
Speak to Search - HTML 5 speech attribute (speech recognition)
I think the internet is getting people to the point they expect it to be hacked a month before the product is actually released ;)
Get Your Loaned Item Back with These Simple Tracking Systems
Why Data Portability Would Kill Facebook
This is completely irrelevant to the discussion, but your account is exactly 1337 days old today.

Happy leet day to you :)
Wow that blog post is really inspiring. I just posted it - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891756
As others have pointed out, in this case he probably used a hardware USB sniffer (though he apparently doesn't own an XBox, so who knows). If your device has existing drivers that will run on an OS in a VM, you can use USB passthrough (most virtualisers including VirtualBox) to run it on top of Linux, which comes with a USB logging module called "usbmon" (http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/usb/usbmon.txt).

There are also software loggers for Windows such as "Snoopy Pro" but last time I tried that it dropped certain types of packets. No such issues with usbmon.
Picture Me In Computing
Ask HN: Please review publiclog.com (It's like the "Public Log" for your life)
HN Friends,

I created a new web site, http://publiclog.com.

I call it "a social application for logging everything that happens".

My definition of 'logging' is that it has a start date and end date.

I use Facebook and Twitter to comment on my "present" activity, but I couldn't find a good site where I could comment on my "past" activity. Or on my "future" activity. Or the date range of my "present" activity. So I created the site!

There's a lot more features I can add too (mobile, better UIX, edit log, follow user, better feedback threads, better tagging, alerts and notifications).

I also added auto categorization of the posts, which doesn't always work, but is fun :)

The site influences are twitter.com, facebook.com, foodspotting.com, dailybooth.com and hotpotato.com.

I guess I'm the kind of person that likes to document everything!

I also like to read what other people are doing in their life, so I can learn from them.

If you have time, please logon, give it a try, and let me know what you think.

I appreciate it!

Best Always,
Mike
I strongly advise against trying to learn physics from this book. Trust me, while the idea looks magnificent in theory, it's a horrible book to try and learn from for someone who doesn't have the mathematical and physical background. It just isn't possible, and yes, even if you're very, very smart and talented. Despite the fact that theoretically it's self-contained, you really need an equivalent of a PhD in math or mathematical physics to approach this book; but if you do have that background, there are better specialized textbooks.

The whole thing is basically a massive exercise in vanity. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually were the most unread book published recently, in relative terms (that is, the most percent of people who bought it didn't end up reading any substantial part of it).
125 million iOS devices morph into credit card terminals
Jacking the point-of-sale terminals was inspired - very elegant problem solving.
Your local print shop might not be printing their own business cards. My dad owned a print shop and he has been outsourcing the printing of business cards for over 10 years. He makes a little profit on outsourced cards (@$5 per thousand) and no profit on in-house printed cards. The only cards he prints in-house are car dealerships that have mass bulk with only the salesman contact information changing.
Now, he can help you pick the stock, ink and other options and will make sure the order/product is correct before you pay him, so there is some benefit to local.
was going to go with moo but wanted the more traditional business card size. just went to h&h imaging at 16th/alabama, really great service, options, price. http://www.yelp.com/biz/h-and-h-imaging-san-francisco
I've reverse engineered some protocols -- haven't done a USB one yet, but I'm sure the principals are similar. Grab some data, look at it (usually with a good hex editor -- last time I used ghex2), look for patterns. Usually there's some sort of packet structure, or maybe some data that looks like something in ascii -- ghex2 shows you what every 2 bytes or 4 bytes are if they were signed/unsigned ints, floats etc. Usually something will jump out at you.

It's a fun game usually.
Edward Tufte selling his rare book collection at auction
>You can't have more than a few talking at once or it becomes very unwieldy. Is that what makes it hard? Having to multiplex 40 input channels together? Would it be easier if most of the lines were muted? Because that is a workable compromise.

Oh. Yeah, I'm not sure that's even considered conferencing in the telco world. No mixing involved if that's the case, just transmitting multiple streams.

The hard part is mixing that many people without having background noise, etc. make everything inaudible.

>As for SIP support, it potentially opens up twilio service to some neat applications were one end of the phone connection could be hosting in a web app via flash/silverlight.

Ah, I see.
Nice design. I'd suggest showing what the deals are without having to sign up. Maybe you do this and I just missed it?

If I see a site that says "We have really cool deals for you, just sign up and we'll show you," I'm closing that window.
Thanks for your gracious and speedy adjustment. I realize my note may have come across with a bit more venom than required under the circumstances; I'll blame the stupefying "Cooks Source" incident for that. ;)
Just tried it. Very slow. Very hot. Seems like there's still no GPU support and very little power management.
A Roman and an Arab meet.

The Arab: Look how easy this is: 1234 + 4321 = 5555.

The Roman: I don't understand that. It's probably a trick, it only seems quick. How could anyone ever understand that? Look, this is understandable even though it is a little more characters: MCCXXXIV + MMMMCCCXXI = MMMMMDLV.

In what way am I being intellectually dishonest? That you (along with the 6 people that upvoted you) don't understand the Arc code doesn't mean that I don't. If anyone is being intellectually dishonest it's you. You are dismissing a piece of code that you don't even understand, and do not even try to understand. Then when somebody comes along and says that he finds the 4 line piece of code easier to read than your 40+ line piece of code, you claim he's lying.

FWIW, I have written a (toy) continuations based web framework in Ruby (the same technique Arc is based on). So when you still don't believe that I understand the Arc code and find it more readable, what can I say?

Open your mind and try to understand how continuation based web programming works. It's not that hard. Then you'll understand real reasons why it doesn't work well in practice and you'll be able to write some honest criticism of it (and as a bonus you'll understand why news.yc sometimes gives you "request timed out" errors). Heck, I'd claim it doesn't work at all in practice in it's current rendition for the vast majority of sites. Would you still call me a fanboi?

And you didn't answer my questions.
I'm going to post my current thinking on this, in the hopes that maybe someone can give me a hint without revealing the whole solution:

It seems to me that the best that the prisoners can do is 1/2^50 (and the worst they can do is 0). For instance, if the prisoners decided that everyone would just open boxes 1-50, then they would have zero chance of finding all 100 names (since 50 of the boxes would never even be opened). It seems like the best they can do to maximize their chances is to make sure that each box is tried exactly 50 times. One way to do that is to divide the prisoners into two groups of 50, then assign the first group to boxes 1-50 and the second group to boxes 51-100. Then the chances that the first group all find their names is 1/2^50 (not 100% sure about this number, but it seems reasonable) - and if the first group all find their names, then the second group will too (since if all 50 in the first group were found in boxes 1-50, then all 50 in the second group must be in boxes 51-100). So the total probability of success is 1/2^50.

What's wrong with this?
Ask HN: Review my Pivot - Peer Coaching web app for entrepreneurs
Link: http://beta.coachfire.com

I am currently working on a tool to help entrepreneurs form small groups online to bounce ideas off and get feedback on what they are doing.

(This is a pivot from the original version that was focusing on professional coaches.)

Please check it out and provide some honest feedback about the tool itself:

- Would you use it?

- What do you like?

- What do you dislike?

- Any obvious feature missing?

Thanks everyone!
Windows Phone 7 already doomed? Don't let early sales fool you
I really like the martial arts saying he uses:

"When you are not practicing, someone else is. When you meet him, he will win".

I remember years ago when I was on the swim team I had missed two practices. My coach said I had missed 4 practices, and I tried to correct him but he said, "You missed 2 practices, but your competition did not. So now you are 4 practices behind your competition."

I always remembered that.
Followed the embedded YouTube video and was rather disgusted by the comments on it. Almost all suggested she cheated, and half suggested it in an incredibly disgusting/demeaning/sexist way. Is this what the broader culture assumes when a woman pulls off something clever?
Even the first solution linked to doesn't explain it. It only declares the result that the probabilities work out in a particular way.

The second link contains the math, and no way would a non-mathematician have been able to come up with that math.
The response of the developer (Andreas Schwab) is one of the most unprofessional I've seen in a very long time, but then I have a particular loathing for bugs that manifest as subtle runtime peculiarities. Technically he's correct in that it's not a bug if you were to follow the letter of the (API) law but to break existing functionality at such a fundamental layer and then say "hey, not my problem!" blows me away.

I'm not quite sure how I would handle it in a project as large as glibc but if this was my project I'd probably provide a fast_nonoverlapping_memcpy that did all the neat platform specific tricks for speed in addition to the stupid simple naive memcpy and then let the developer select which one he wanted to use. That or add a trick to memcpy that checks to see if they do overlap and delegate to memmove if they do.
>Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts.

Now that is condescending.

>They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either.

Suppose you'd never met Rain-Man and saw him pull off one of his counting "stunts". Wouldn't your null hypothesis be that it was a trick? Now you meet someone else, Derren Brown say, doing the same trick do you assume he does it the same way or is it really a trick. Next you try with a buddy - first time he gets it right, WTH? Savant, conjurer or lucky?

Once at school I got a run of about 8 dates fired at me (I can't remember the context it might have been birth dates) and told people the day of the week correctly for that date. They wondered how I did it, and as I'm good at maths, figured it was some mental ability. As it happened I just guessed.
For 4 weeks in, that is pretty good Python code. Keep up the good work!
It continues to amaze me how much is packed into the Go language. It's not perfect, but the language specification is something that you can easily read in one go; something that is impossible for languages like C++. This results in more intuitive behaviour and, in my limited experience, fewer bugs.

I hope other language designers take note of Go and put more emphasis on simplicity in the future.

I would also be very interested to know which companies are using Go, and for what.
Dedication is A Pre-requisite, Not a Panacea
Agence France-Presse: "All Your Twitpics Are Belong to Us"
Facebook is lying
Just the facts, ma'am.

Unless the gig was very short (and so can be safely omitted), there's no reason to be coy about simply listing, in objective terms, where you worked and what you did. If you like, you can simply go into more detail (lines / bullet points) about the positive experiences, and less detail about the negative ones.

Also, you can safely "couch" negative experiences (like being fired for no particular reason, or effectively forced to quit by some domineering jerk) in various ways, like for example when it comes to listing references -- because it kind of looks bad not to have at least one reference for recent gigs, at least -- to simply not give the phone number of the obtuse junior manager which was the main reason you quit anyway, but listing instead a compatriot developer, perhaps still bound to his desks with golden handcuffs, but who knew the deal about what was going on in that sorry place, and won't be shy about putting a positive spin on your time there.

Basic idea being is that if you must convey negative (or simply lackluster) information about a former employer, it's vastly better to let someone else do it for you.

Or if you must deal the poop yourself, at least try to soft-pedal it so that the basic truth gets across (while still not sounding like you're nursing a grudge): so instead of saying "OMG they were so clueless", true though this may be, you can say things like "well they weren't really interested in trying new ways of doing things, so ultimately I felt my talents were underutilized."
Good for you, it always warms my heart to see someone taking these first steps. Try to notice your own reactions, its good to be reminded of when you yourself were a novice.
This is really great. I love the concept and simplicity.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Use the Amazon API to autosuggest book titles and author names.

2. Normalize the lists. That is, count up which books are recommended the most and use those statistics to recommend books.

3. List similar lists on each list :) Lists that list the same books might be related. If they list two or more of the same books, they're probably related.

But even if you don't change a thing, it's still a great little project!
Don't make the mistake of reading YouTube comments and making any sort of broad judgments from them. It's pretty widely agreed that YouTube comments are one of the strangest phenomenon online.
It’s a wonderful idea. But won’t this be sending most money to those who least need it — e.g. lots to the big projects, and none to the little guys who spend days to months a year, but no more, on small, lesser-used but valuable open-source projects? I would like to see those little guys get a bigger chunk.
How much did that domain name cost?

These are similar, they may help inspire you for features:
http://www.goodreads.com/
http://www.shelfari.com/

Keep it up!
git <TAB>

completes subcommands

ls <TAB>

with the alias shows files from the root /

GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (Linux)
I'm in their WebsiteSpark program, through StartupToDo.com

The service is great, they're really trying to build a sense of community, and obviously, you're getting the whole suite of development tools.

However! I've been concurrently (okay, mostly) developing the project I'd intended with it in Rails instead.

That said, it's still a great deal for a small developer who wants a little more power than the free editions.
I'd suggest that the author browse some of the old Buffett letters, you can get some good tips on how to communicate complicated topics to ordinary people:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html
I'd be very interested if you could explain it properly without using math, natural logarithms and Euler's constant as the linked solution does.
Could this all have been genius marketing by Microsoft?
5 Top Trends in Web Design
Web design is a constantly evolving animal, and it should remain so. But every now and then we sit back and take notice of design techniques that show up more and more often in that evolution, and learn from their strengths and weaknesses.
Ask YC: Review Our Start-up Innoblue: [pre] YC for Penn State
Like SSE Labs at Stanford, some Penn State Students have come together to start an accelerator style program to spearhead innovation and entrepreneurship at Penn State.

Feedback on our messaging would be helpful.

Thanks.
identical assembly. No C++ compiler that I'm aware of does that.

e.g., std::vector<Foo * > and std::vector<Bar * > generate identical code for whatever you do, as they both only deal with the pointer, never dereference it in any way. Also, in code like

template <class T> T get(T x[], int i) { return x[i]; }

on a 32 bit platform, get<int>() and get<char* > generate the same machine code, whereas on a 64 bit platform, get<long>() and get<void * >() generate the same machine code.

No C++ compiler that I'm aware of folds these cases into one; The C# generics do (not sure about non-generic code with identical final machine code). I would be surprised if idiomatic C++ code could be shortened by more than 50% by a compiler that did. However, if you write your code for column-major access, the binary can go down 90% if the compiler did that.

edit:formatting
Off the Rails: GOP Misreading Ayn Rand in Blocking Railroads
Consumer debt won't return anytime soon
The (attempted) use of indenting and whitespace as a form of expressiveness is so passé. As demonstrated by the transcendent rise of Python. It's the wave of the future. Get used to it, man.
LeisureLink raises $9M to do for hotels what Captain Kirk did for flights
Charitable Giving Fell 35% in 2009 Among Affluent
Would you mind linking to a job listing?
Mike Chambers: Apple only recently provided APIs necessary for hw acceleration
Didn't Einstein say: "If you can't explain it easily, you don't know it good enough."?
Founders: Are You Leaning Far Enough?
This is a misleading title. The Kinect sensor has been hacked, but Kinect proper is a combination of hardware and software. Arguably the more interesting aspects of Kinect are in the software.

That being said, this is still pretty cool, it'll be interesting to see what people come up with using this technology.
Seems like you are still just two practices behind them. Maybe in your coach's original example there was a limited amount of pool time available and your absences added 2 practices worth of pool time to the aggregate excluding you.
how much does the world pay people to play video games?

Actually if you're good enough, plenty of money. It's not a matter of how many people do it, it's a matter of how much better you are than the many people that do it are. Amateur programmers shouldn't be making software for Bank of America, the same way an amateur musician shouldn't be playing for Dream Theater. The interesting thing is that one generally doesn't notice when you cross the line that makes you a professional, which is generally delimited by profitability.

If you can make money with your abilities it's because there are a bunch of people that can't, but never make the mistake of thinking that because a lot of people do something it means you can't make money off it. Oh and of course, the person with such abilities that doesn't take advantage of them to make money doesn't deserve them (with the exception of the multitalented who leverages a 'better' skill or the person leveraging those skills in a risk filled endeavor for larger profits).
Hosting company Midphase holds user data hostage
I'm imagining a sweaty Ballmer holding an impromptu press conference tomorrow announcing a Kinect SDK screaming Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!