skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Edit: this is unrelated to botmasters trapping researchers, and is more of detecting botnets. My bad.]

This has been going on since the late 80s to early 90s; at that time, viruses scanned the disks for signs of "abnormality". For example, a sophisticated virus would check to see how many directories where in the disk, how many of them were non-system, it checked timestamps to see if everything was pristine. If it found files containing number constants, it checked to see if $number-- and $number++ existed. And as soon as it was confident the system was a research box and not a user box, the virus would exhibit extremely benign behavior, or do without stealthiness and go full on violent, trying to destroy hardware equipment (i.e. spinning floppy at max speed. Asserting and holding controller lines for expensive hard-disks.)

This probing behavior is not the default, but it's triggered if the virus had some slight suspicion about the machine (checking performance, too fast or too slow?, checking to see if a debugger was resident, scanning the heap for anti-virus tool signatures, see if a few interrupts were hooked, etc.)

IIRC, I read about this first in one of the Phalcon/Skism philes, though it could have been NuKe.

The heuristics sound complex, specially when you think about it as a HLL programmer working in a protected environment. But they were very straightforward in DOS, where one had direct access to system data structures, and entire structure-traversal strategies could be as simple as bit manipulation.

/me just got the sudden urge to find that article. brb ..

P.S. And this really bugs me: why do black-hats consistently out-class "normal" programmers when it comes to systems programming? Pound for pound, the average underground "file" has more information density, sometimes an order of magnitude (bear with me here) than the normal "app dev" articles you see elsewhere. If I am hacking on a new platform the first thing I do is get the official manuals and specs, then I look for its underground text files.
It would be nice to get other ideas about alternatives to HN.
This sounds like some good advice to help prevent ideas from being taken:

"We get that question a lot. It was kind of concern. So what we usually do in our first bid, in our first description we’re kind of vague. We say, ‘We’re looking for a developer for a simple photography app.’ And from all those people we’ll choose three to five that look kind of trustworthy, seem like they could do the job and then we’ll give them the wireframe bid. So we start off really vague so not everybody sees it. We’ll pick three to five people, we’ll give them the full details and then they’ll give us a more detailed proposal."
Is it me or does it sound like they are just winging the whole business? Andrew had to pretty much coach on what to do, and what to answer.

That said, they still get A+ in my books for just doing it. That's the biggest differentiator between people who find success and people who don't. Kudos.
One more reason I use imap to access the various gmail accounts I have.
Pretty R syntax highlighter
It may be harsh, but here's some honest feedback: I don't see the value of WikiTorrents. (That probably doesn't mean anything, as I wouldn't have considered Twitter to be a huge winner either, but it is a data point for you nonetheless.) The name is non-intuitive, as it doesn't have much to do with torrents - or wikis in the traditional sense. Manually compiled/user-submitted lists of videos seems to be easily duplicable, meaning there is little competitive advantage.
Wait, what?

They do $80k in monthly revenue yet "one of the founders still works a full time job"

That makes no sense...
wish you were my college advisor...
Ditto. My family does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (see http://blog.seliger.com if you're curious), and the only file type we can safely exchange with clients is .doc. It's also one of two file types funders build their systems around. As a consequence, I'm running Office for OS X and always have; my experience with the latest has, so far, been mostly positive, with a few niggling details: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/31/thoughts-on-the-new-version-o... .

If I could, I'd probably use iWork or Mellel or something similar full-time, but Metcalfe's law is too strong in what I do for me to resist effectively.
Okay, not half. But cutting down on bandwidth is their own self proclaimed reason for failing so hard at validation.
UK copyright laws to be reviewed
Processing all your pseudo-private information takes a lot of cycles. Multiply by millions of users at peak times. Lots of private information, lots of sluggishness.
Google Instant: Just Plain Useful or Am I Just Plain Lazy?
Ask HN: I enjoyed living in the Bay Area. How does Boston compare?
I'm from Canada. I am considering moving to Boston, or specifically Cambridge, for work. I was temporarily in the Bay Area and I really enjoyed it there. How does Boston compare?

Obviously, the weather in the Bay Area was amazing, but I can't expect anything like that in Boston. I also liked the culture in the Bay Area. I felt that I was surrounded by a lot of smart, driven people. I feel like Stanford had something to do with that, but I could be wrong. Perhaps with Harvard and MIT in the area, I would find the culture to be similar?

I would also be interested in how Boston would compare to the Bay Area for families and raising kids and such, if anyone has thoughts on that.

Thank you.
Bloglines is coming back
Removing the post doesn't hide it. Anyone with showdead turned on in their account will see it.
Commodity prices spike post Fed
I think many of you are missing the forest for the trees. If the idea were profitable, I wouldn't be looking for seed money. If the implementation of my idea were very refined, then it would be a mature product and not a working prototype.

The idea now is a working prototype of a site where users can create lists of videos. That's all the idea is supposed to be. Right now, it's very rough around the edges with lots of usability issues. That's why I need seed money to work on it and make it user-friendly, add features, move features, etc.

If I may paraphrase Paul Graham, implement an idea that the founder himself needs. In my case, it's lists of videos I can find all over the Internet. To quote Paul Graham again, release early, release often, and surprise your users by constantly listening to them and revising the product.
That particular belief was actually one of the most counter-productive ones I have come across. Not only will you never get a meeting with a business angel unless you actually reach out to anyone. If your own view of your business potential is that pitching it to someone would pretty much amount to harassing that person, then maybe your idea needs a little more work.

Bottom line is that neither job offers or angel financing will come to you as a result of you indicating that you need it in a comment on a web page. You need to talk to actual people (yes, to their faces) and tell them what's in it for them. It's not about them helping you, it's you offering them something valuable.

By the way, if your site has nothing to do with torrents, maybe the word torrent shouldn't be in the name? To not confuse people.
I concur it has been weirdly slow for a few weeks now.
my adblock still works great on javascript ads!
I hope that you don't sacrifice the simplicity here. Instead of actual fields or clickable options for setting tags and due dates, let me type them in and then display them as needed.

something like:
look into alternatives for GTD due 12/1/2010 [work, gtd]
Motivational Blogs. What Are Your Favorites?
When you need a bit of a pick me up, some inspiration to get you fired up and motivated, what blogs do you read?
You must work for an investment bank
Daring Fireball: Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It
this time I think we need to do erlang stories for a week.
Exactly. The DC folks got caught because they used the same vehicle and stayed in the same area. Al Qaeda surely has the resources to avoid that one.

Add in some random rural targets and the entire country comes to a standstill. That this hasn't happened yet indicates to me either that Al Qaeda is far more neutered than we generally think, or they utterly lack any amount of imagination.

It's rather terrifying how close our society is to total panic and shutdown.
what are some of you apps
Great comment.

I just wanted to bring up a point about free-app/knock-off vs. paid quality app.

I would draw a parallel with the fashion industry. Louis Vuitton, for example, will never go out of business because of Chinese knock-offs. Why? because the person who buys the knock off/cheaper product is not their target customer.

Same I think is true with iPhone/iPad apps. Those users who only search for free apps and put up with disruptive ads (let alone click on those ads) are not the target audience of a premium application maker.

Where the cheaper app maker has to churn out dozens of products to make decent revenue, a single app maker who focuses on quality and sustainable business model can really build a meaningful business in the App Store.
It's not as if they've had a massive influx of new users, though. It happened suddenly a few weeks ago to me.
who gets the money? =P Why wouldn't I just put that list of videos on my own blog to generate revenue?

I think my point is that it's not enough to just make something that's already been done (a website of a list of stuff...). Your solution needs to solve someone's problem... say if you had some algorithm that could generate these interesting lists of videos w/o user intervention, or some automation to aggregate videos of similar content.
Two notes I did not see below:

* For a site that launched a few days after FireSheep was announced, and that wants me to put in (somewhat) private data, I think that at least having an SSL option is necessary.

* Re: demo page: Is it really that hard to save it tied to a temporary cookie, and copy all the data on the backend to a permanent account if a user signs up? I would not even call that a "demo page": just have the editor widget be right there on the front page, letting the user play with it (keeping the video to the side).

I understand the value of launching quickly, but adding a Gmail auth/Facebook connect option, adding an SSL option and adding better "try-before-I-have-to-give-you-my-email-address" are all things I would consider a must.

[Edit: fixed formatting.]
I've been thinking about how to work myself up to a hard on before going through as a form of reverse molestation.
I can have one non-ad flash object on a webpage and it immediately makes my fans spin like mad. What makes Flash be such a beast is not the advertisements with full motion video or moving dynamic multimedia, it's just that Flash completely and utterly sucks on a Mac.

On the other point, any website that lets advertisers take over their content or more space than it should because there are no boundaries (as opposed to Flash) is a website I won't visit anymore, and I suspect a great amount of people think the same.

We have great advertisement providers as Fusion and Google are which are non intrusive. If you wish to add banners and the such you as a content provider should very well be on top of your ad space and avoid shady advertisement companies.
Yahoo just released a paper explaining what S4 is, the rationale for it's development, and provides detailed comparison with Hadoop (and map/reduce frameworks in general).

http://labs.yahoo.com/node/476
It's only a scam if you fail. Hell, most people give up even when the blueprint is right in front of them.

It's time to stop making excuses and realize that there is so much money to be made on this here internets that the best idea is to TRY HARDER.

caveat: Yes, this may be a bit slutty. But I don't know if you noticed this Halloween - slutty is in.
Google Books’ Robo-Block
It's very tao...
Some people look at the empty bowl and say "this bowl is empty and therefore worthless."

Other people look at the bowl and say "this bowl is empty. How useful to have an empty bowl that I can fill."

I'm a member of the second group. The site has little to do with wikis and/or torrents. The value of wikitorrents.org is the lists of videos, not the simplicity of the site. One good list of videos, regardless of the topic, can generate an exponential amount of traffic that find that particular list useful. If you had seen the traffic from just that one specific list of ycombinator applicant videos, you would understand the potential.
Taking syntax like that is definitely cool. I was thinking though of just being able to hover a node and get teensy widgets
I keep seeing this come up. I don't think Gmail has ever been noticeably "slow" for me. Which leaves me wondering, what do people mean when they say "Gmail is slow"? Searches take a long time? Delays in sending/receiving mail? Unresponsive UI? Would appreciate some clarification from someone who has this issue.
A twist and a finance application. I bet some designer or brand guy just got the shivers at the mention of this and the connotations it suggests.
Silicon Valley, in East London?
Or I could use any one of a dozen other languages that are more convenient to use, already available on my system, already works with S4, and with a syntax that doesn't make me want to cry :P
Fair enough - although I still think that your articles belong here. Look at the home page now and tell me it couldn't use some more article with practical advice for people currently running startups.
How about "Just type in anything you want"
Something like

karma per vote = #comments / #votes

Okay, actually that sounds reasonable.
Umzugsfirma
maybe but IMHO makes very little sense to provide puzzles not requiring programming skills. If you want to filter, filter for smartness and not for determination on solving a non cool puzzle.
Its awkward, but it means "everything after this rule is !important." So you are parsing it correctly, its just a weird context.

But now that you've mentioned it, @important would be a lot more intuitive.
On some occasions, seemingly at random from the end user perspective, either logging in, loading a message, or sending a message can take upwards of 30 seconds. Searches are usually fine for me. Loading emails on my phone using IMAP also takes forever.
Well, looks like he's well on his way to a resolution. After Gabriel Weinberg wrote a popular blog post[1] about how slow his Gmail had become, it was fixed[2]. Now if only there was a way to fix these things without complaining about it to thousands of people...

[1] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-become...
[2] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-is-fast...
For me, it manifests as clicking a label and seeing the "loading" element appear at the top for 5-8 seconds before the contents of my <ahem> folder appear. It's never been a problem for me before this September, but now it's pretty consistent during business hours.
Also see JS/UIX:

http://www.masswerk.at/jsuix/
I'm experiencing what techcrunch describes.

Opening email and opening the rich text interface when composing are the two places I see it most. Sometimes the operation won't complete at all, claiming there is a connectivity issue. Other times it will complete, but will frequently take 30+ seconds.
As far as I know, nothing. But since I no longer work for Google, I would need to set up a dremel-like system (which would minimally include needing to inject logs, etc., into an new or existing hosted system), which increases the barrier to entry until I have the time to do so.
I know a couple of startups that have specifically chosen http://www.postgresql.org/ because of oracles acquisition of MySql. I wouldn't be surprised if this trend continues.
Searches flat out don't work for me. It sits there loading and loading. And then it changes to say "Still loading…", but it never shows results. This also causes problems with labels; I can't filter email, at all.

As an example of how slow Gmail is at times: I've started a search for something before going out to lunch for an hour. When I came back, it hadn't found any results yet. As far as I could tell, it didn't time out. This was sometime in July and it hasn't gotten any better.

There's also the problem where mail from my college's mail server shows up anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 days after it is sent out by someone. Needless to say, this causes problems when talking to professors, unless I use the email account provided my my college.
Twitter diplomacy: Who Follows Whom Among World Leaders
But what is it actually straight forward about? All that can be gleaned from this particular graph is that there are a lot of noise complaints at night, a lot of streetlight complaints around noon, and that there's a larger variety of complaints during the day. The rest is just pretty visual noise. Consider the humps and valleys that occur when following the sections for "consumer complaints"... The rising and falling of that line means absolutely nothing, yet it obscures the line's own thickening and thinning to the point where it's pretty useless.

A simple line chart (while not as pretty) would be even easier to read and much more useful. You'd still see the major trends you see in this chart, but the rest of the information would be useful instead of just noise.
New forms of an old art: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/12/the_history...
Having smart people in groups doesn’t necessarily make groups smart
Supposedly, they've got real advertisers, and people have been calling them all day. Some have cancelled their ad buys.
I agree that seeking "face time" with particular people is useful and necessary. But the initial comment sounded like I should stalk people, corner them, and in general be a jerk. I refuse to do that.

I also agree that the idea "needs a little work", probably more than a little. That's what seed money is intended to address: keeping a roof over my head while I work on the idea.

To paraphrase Paul Graham, for the third time in this thread, the final product tends to look very little like the initial idea.

Yes, I agree the site probably needs a name change. The very initial idea in this case was user-created lists of bittorrent files, "Wikipedia meets BitTorrent", if you will. I've modified the idea to include links to videos that are not bittorrent files, including youtube, vimeo, posterous, and justin.tv. So yeah, the site probably needs a name change, which I've considered for awhile.
A road map to the end of AIDS?
This is incorrect. You can use XtraBackup for this which is an open source alternative to innodb hot backup. Alternately you can quickly lock tables and take a filesystem snapshot or even run mysqldump with --single-transaction all which will let you get a consistent dump of a set of InnoDB tables.
I grew up in Boston, went to school in the Bay Area, and about three years ago moved back to Boston.

Real Estate. Both are pretty similar, way expensive (waits for someone from NYC to comment). Boston is actually a bit more expensive than the bay. If you are willing to commute 45 minutes into the city the prices do drop quite a bit, but who wants to do that.

Diversity. Bay area is much more diverse than Boston. Being a white kid from the suburbs I had never had thai food nor known someone from vietnam before moving the Bay. Boston is a really young city, tons of colleges, so you do have a good mix of cultures in those crowds.

Smart People. Boston is full of them, but really so is every other city. There are a lot of schools here, so there are plenty of smart people. You will have no problem finding smart people in Boston/Cambridge. All of my friends are driven, but I do not think thats because of the city, its mainly because of who I choose to hang out with.

Family. I'd probably want to move out to the burbs for that. Cambridge can be a bit of a young crowd, crowded, etc.

Feel free to ask any questions.
Yes, runs faster, but while hogging more of the machine.
I've loaded Canvas experiments and don't get the same chugging.
This is why the world needs LCTHW =)
Knowing some of the content obviously makes it easier: I'm currently in a 4th year CSC networking class (helped with A and C) and it took me 10 minutes. I made a trivial error on B, which added a couple minutes!
probably the most hilarious comment i have ever read
LOL! we used indian virtual assistants in costume for the interview =)
I see you are referring to this comment thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850917. To be honest, you didn't make very good comments there and argued mostly emotionally without actually explaining your point clearly at all.

Plus, I'm afraid, it is a bit premature to question the direction HN is headed in after using it only for 6 months.

As others have said, the noise may have increased around here, but the signal is still very strong. The best people who make HN a great forum are still actively contributing, having intelligent conversations, building great stuff and helping people. Ask yourself, do you not get good value just reading stuff here? Don't judge it solely based on how your comments are received. And if that really matters most to you, consider taking a break for a while.
I don't disagree. I think that people generally pay to have a problem solved for them.
What if you compiled all of this scraped data and made microsites for each category? I think your idea is interesting but so far the implementation is off-putting. You could do all sorts of organic SEO tweaks and then put some ads on the pages for a revenue stream.

Don't give up, but also don't expect people to throw money at you for making something. If that were true, everyone on HN would be millionaires.
What I'd really like to see is tips to make a webpage look "professional". I suspect you can take a great looking website, screw the colors up, mess around with the fonts, and even not design with a grid, and it will still look "professional". Am I not right about this?
It Begins: US Military’s Cyberwar Command Is Fully Operational
Yeah I hope so too, in fact I often find myself thinking something is true and hoping I'm wrong. But as a betting man, when it comes to the intersection of government and enterprise you have to give me pretty good odds for me to wager on the side of the consumer.

The good news is, in 5-10 years wireless internet will bring to ISPs the sort of competition that satellite TV has brought to cable I think.
i think it has more to do with having possible search terms as your app title
Canvas experiments are not written by the kind of programmer who usually works for an ad agency.
Webit is starting to provide rendering and animation that is more native and more efficient.

Simple fact is, Flash is not as good as we need it to be.
Started looking at AppEngine last week for some projects. The day I wanted to look at getting started info and documentation it was down for a couple hours. A few days later I go to sign up and that process is throwing an error for an hour. Is that unusual? Didn't exactly make me feel confident in relying on them.
That's roughly what I'm thinking as well..
Their last one was somewhat more relevant.
Are the tests you've seen usually done on a Mac?
When a nation's A leader unfollows nation B's leader I expect that they'll summon nation A's ambassador to explain their actions.
Isn't there a pass through mode?
Mac Pro?
Good luck guys! I liked the idea of HireHive, but it seems like execution might have been difficult. Good luck!