skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But it's a major speed bump for non-elite exploit developers. In particular for an organization with a big cyber-army of them. Not proficient with tools like disassemblers but proficient with basic techniques with source code.
First look: Android 2.3 Gingerbread tour in screenshots
Everything's open source, it's just written in assembly.
Bank That Froze Julian Assange's Bank Account Has Now Been Taken Down By Hackers
MasterCard will no longer process Wikileaks donations
I might say "control flow graphs" instead of "assembly". Not to be pedantic, but to dispel the notion that reversers are literally reading every opcode in the program.
I yield to no one in my respect for IP, and my karma would be higher if I didn't feel the need to pipe up so frequently on the "we should be able to steal music" topics. But I did not actually use Twilio's sample code for my product. It is sample code. Really. Go try running it, come back when you find that it doesn't even have enough for Rails to load.

I didn't even use that code as a base for mine. Again, it is sample code. Take a look at the user experience or error handling -- they're clearly inadequate for a real product, but suffice to give a competent Rails developer a taste of what API it takes to actually have Twilio make a phone ring. After you can make a phone ring (in one line -- and, again, one line I don't even use), you only need the other 3,500 lines of AR to actually make that phone call worthwhile for business purposes.
Tumblr Finally Starts Recovering After 24 Hours Of Downtime
Facebook: We're Not Kicking Wikileaks Off Our Site
This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always well captured in those quantitative data.

For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and local non monetary exchanges ? (you can sell cotton and have more money, while still having it harder to buy food). Do their subsistance depend more or less on external factors like speculation ? Are there less wars/civil wars ?
Microsoft Hits The Streets at Dreamforce
We've heard these claims ever since MS started releasing source to certain institutions/governments, and my reaction has always been the same: Reverse-engineering non-obfuscated code is absolutely trivial, and can be automated 99% of the way. If you can find vulnerabilities in source code, you can find vulnerabilities in a binary. For some reason, no one ever seems to understand this...
Vietnam Forex
it's all abour forex training
There was an oblique reference:

"But silicon minstrelsy doesn’t confer much respect: Until The Social Network, the computer business has been denied a mainstream biopic or a resonating social drama. (Even the titanic Gates-Jobs struggle for the soul of the PC, the Valley’s very own Cain and Abel tale, warranted nothing more than a TNT Original.)"
Android 2.3 Brings Games To The Forefront
I like this thought experiment. Let's try some speculative fiction to reflect the power dynamics a little better.

In my alternate universe, the Soviet Union won the cold war and the United States collapsed. The former USA splintered into several regional nations.

The European Union has been absorbed into the Soviet bloc, which now includes all of Western Europe and the Mediterranean.

The Eastern Seaboard of North America from Newfoundland to Florida joined the Soviet bloc and the leaders of these nations are loyal to the Kremlin.

The West Coast of North America from British Columbia through Baja California has deep military and economic integration with China, and is now subject to censorship and social controls dictated from Beijing.

Saskatchewan through Texas and Mexico is now a loose federation of independent nations that is not aligned with either of the two great powers, and is trying to be like Switzerland used to be -- they don't take sides, and they don't stir up trouble. They mind their own business and avoid international disputes.

A free citizen of Kansaslahoma finds a cache of documents showing that the Kremlin and Soviet oligarchs are using their military and financial might to lock up energy resources and systematically transfer wealth from nonaligned nations to the Soviet Union.

1. Giving the documents to the leaders of Kansaslahoma won't help, because they won't stir up disputes with a hyperpower.

2. Reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents by yourself isn't viable, and time is of the essence.

3. You can expose the docs for millions of people in nonaligned states to read and analyze. Maybe Moscow's data controls will be porous enough that some Soviet citizens will learn what their leaders are doing in their names.

Even if your actions don't precipitate a revolution by themselves, you know that you're imposing a lot of security overhead every time they try to communicate among themselves.

So the Soviet military-industrial-financial complex will become slower and less effective in their efforts at world domination.
Choose Your Own Adventure: If Groupon Were Acquired By …
Apache loses Java showdown vote to Oracle
Its almost as if you don't realize that Twilio makes money on service usage -- that you don't understand that they're probably thrilled to see their half-formed example code encourage someone to create a real business on top of their for-pay developer APIs.

(Assuming Patrick is even using Twilio and that the code is in any way relevant.)
The funny part of this is that a good chunk of the vanguard of vulnerability researchers aren't even bothering to piece through basic blocks anymore; they just capture a small library of inputs and throw bit-flipped variants of them at the target, like particles from a neutron gun, until something blows up.

Why bother with the source code when you can find vulnerabilities with dumb fuzzer farms?

(Hey, Cody, build one of those for us!)
Ha - I think that's already happening...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977647
PS. I just tried the programming challenge. But apparently the result I get for the third one (115) is wrong, and damned if I can figure out why.
> I agree that the system is structurally broken, perhaps beyond repair.

From what I've seen, you believe that the system is broken in such a way that sufficient voting can fix it. I disagree. Instead of attempting to persuade you otherwise (as it seems you're pretty attached to this viewpoint presently), I'll merely ask - what hypothetical developments and observations would it take to make you believe that your vote is futile?
By going to jail, this guy will likely get even more inbound links. It's extreme SEO.
I'm satisfied that we at least understand each other's points - it's gratifying to have an Internet discussion where the two parties aren't simply talking past each other.

I am not arguing that option 3 will magically solve everything - it's very possible it may do more harm than good. However, I'm also not convinced that it should be unequivocally condemned, and the truth MAY be that we simply don't know how it will change things. Like I said at the beginning, I'm somewhere in the gray. I rarely like absolutes.

There is one part of your argument that bothers me, though. On the one hand, you are fundamentally opposed to what WikiLeaks is doing because you feel they don't have a mandate for it, and a change in government policy should come from its own people, not be imposed from an external source (I could go on an obvious tangent here, but I'll stay on topic). On the other hand, you argue that WikiLeaks' actions will have a net negative effect because of heavy-handed government response, resulting in less openness and personal freedom.

For me, the second point severely undermines the first. If you strongly feel that government should and can be controlled by its own people (and not external sources), then the people should be able to prevent an inappropriate government response that is against their interests. If, on the other hand, getting hit on the head with a big stick is an inevitable outcome to a crisis, then maybe you have to leave the door open to the possibility that certain changes can only be forced from the outside. It almost makes something like WikiLeaks seem necessary.
I liked Foucault's Pendulum too, but didn't see it as anything more than an elaborate metaphor for kabbalism as intellectual cancer, although he was clearly having fun with the Holy Blood, Holy Grail stuff.

In contrast, Name of the Rose is brilliant on so many different levels, not the least being the way he pulls off the actual mystery. We can read it as a straight detective story, as a parable about faith versus reason, or on books-speaking-of-books (I remember him comparing the burning library to the burning bush as one point).

That said, have you read this essay of his on Casablanca? I've seen Passage to Marseille (the unofficial sequel to the film) and think this is one of the most fun things he has written. Not sure if it has been anthologized elsewhere:

http://andrewswebsite.net/books/eco_casablanca.html
Only because you can be sure of two things:

1) People who use guilt trips as a technique will always find new fodder with which to guilt trip you. They will never say "Oh, ok, that's been resolved so we're done now"

2) (Sadly,) There will always be a child starving somewhere
Any thought to integrate with Mechanical Turk? Some sites with lower visitor counts may not have the user base for this to work. I've written a Rails gem that makes Mechanical Turk integrations fairly trivial for Rails apps. (https://github.com/aantix/turkee) Hopefully this could help.
I am not able to find it; Google announced that they would have an exporter for the data that's presently locked-into Wave. Has there been any news about it?
Something similar: Transifex

http://www.transifex.net/

Built with Django.
Are they opening just the protocol software? Or also the UI?
Foul, foul, foul way to approach your own life and existence. Which isn't to say it doesn't work.

A "problem", you could say, with a lot of employed people is that they insist on seeing themselves as human beings rather than shallow, flat marketing entities. So they are not ready to believe that people are viewing them as two-dimensional plusses-and-minuses. They are wrong, of course, because we are lazy people who are much more comfortable dismissing people than we are accepting them. But I wish they weren't so wrong.

I know firsthand how easy it is to market yourself. Most people are awful at it, or unwilling to do it, or both. Treat life as a video game and high scores become easy to attain. Indeed, all of advertising is based on this system; we realized a century ago that if selling's the goal, you can sacrifice nearly everything else and make a killing.

The cost is merely your soul. It's giving up that view of yourself as an autonomous human being with unique hopes and dreams, wants and needs. It's deciding that you value a certain society-accepted sort of "success" more than you value yourself. And if you really don't believe in yourself, then you find that everything is easy. You can get a job if you're a branded huckster. You can get laid if you're a pick-up artist. Maybe it won't mean anything but you can have it anyway.

The real struggle, which this article doesn't mention, is this: What happens when you find the parts of yourself that you're unwilling to sell? When your own wants and needs contradict that optimal path? How do you manage the difficult dilemmas that come from your conscience?

It's a question I feel some here don't value much. But I think it's the important one. And it's the one that provokes the really genius ideas. Curiously, focusing too much on the optimal path denies you a lot of opportunities to be ugly and unbranded and staggeringly brilliant. The real difference between the good and the great is that greatness almost invariably requires a sacrifice.

As far as informing the uninformed goes, good article. The more self-aware people are, the harder this branding bullshit is to pull off. But I dislike that you present this without any warnings of the sacrifice you make when you start looking at yourself as a brand. I think it's irresponsible and potentially harmful.
What are his android apps? (I didn't notice them listed on his blog but I'm operating from a first generation iPhone so I do miss a lot. )
The difference is that Windows code is closed. Microsoft has given access to that code to allegedly hostile individuals, but not to friendly individuals.

Bad guys can reverse engineer and read code. Good guys can only reverse engineer.

With *nix it's a level playing field, because both sides can reverse engineer and read code, and contribute code.
TeslaTouch - tactile feedback from touchscreen surface
You are confusing results with process.

I am very dubious that the results will work out well, ie, I do not necessarily think voting will fix anything.

But the process of voting is another thing entirely. It holds society together. It gives us a sense of change. It is what allows me to live in a peaceful country. We might go another 200 years with the process of voting working well enough for civilization to prosper. And that's okay with me.

Now if you are asking me under what conditions I would choose option 3? It would have to involve my decision that my family was under imminent threat of harm, or that a majority of my fellow citizens would feel that enough people were under threat to warrant action. I would not take up such a cause simply because I felt strongly one way or another. Mainly because I might be wrong. I'm very good at being wrong, done it a lot. Wouldn't want to make an individual choice to make that mistake with other people's lives unless I absolutely had to, although as a collective decision my threshold is much lower.

This may sound awful, but really, I can't change the relationship from voting to the state. If I could, I would. I can observe that most folks who think they can are idiots and end up doing much more harm than good. They gin up a lot of outrage and passion and then it always ends up in violence and oppression, trading off one bunch of jerks for another. This is the clear pattern of history. I don't mean that personally, I have no idea what your opinion on the matter is.
Someone should make an ebooks site that uses Dropbox as a backend. Local file control is a really important part of keeping files secure in the cloud. Controled from a single company is really just control with a single point of failure.
Never say never with the right amount of indiscretion. It is probably only a matter of time before another Wikileaks outrage occurs and Facebook is drawn into it. They, again, will lose face in a way similar to the media storm about the privacy issues.
I don't know, it seems like the opposite effect is in place: "Just don't go overboard and you'll be OK. And don't brag about it to the times: apologize and say you're working to improve her experience, and you get even better coverage. But the odds are still that you won't get caught in the first place."
Yeah, well, the alphabet still starts with A, so ...
Shoutouts to projects making my own possible
Fair enough. Instead of my rebutting we'll just let it go for now.

Thank you very much for the great conversation! I lean on my HN friends to help me think through these things, and you guys have been awesome today. Hopefully our conversation has helped other folks sort through this issue also.
I agree with you, kermit_de_fro, but it could be better. If the intent is to show relative changes, then it should show percentages or have a hard baseline that indicates "zero change".

I don't think "the bottom of the Y-axis isn't zero" is a guaranteed bad graph, especially considering some of the horrendous graphs out there. These ones are not that bad.
Well, I think there is a built-in bias around issues like this. Because rationally, everyone realizes that some secrets are quite reasonable and do save lives, so the notion of leaking that information sounds quite wrong.

This is why I think the impact of the leaks was profound. Suddenly this abstract concept that so many of us had treated with reverence and respect turned out to have been severely misused.

I can personally state that I would never have dreamed that some of the things that were revealed would ever actually take place. Is it really possible that in 2010 the US Government can lie to its citizenry about such important things? Note that propaganda against US Citizens is forbidden by law, and the leaks revealed a massive propaganda campaign.

Only through leaks of this kind can the public accurately understand that there is a need to rein in the use of secrecy (and propaganda) by the government. When kept in the abstract, secrecy is a great tool of statecraft, warcraft, etc. So the only way we could be rational about this was to see firsthand just what is going on.

It's true there might have been a more delicate way to introduce the leaked information, but the biggest threat to Wikileaks' credibility is the notion that it selectively filters/omits information to serve its own political goals. With such a large leak, it becomes almost inevitable that a fledgling Wikileaks resort to leaking such large amounts b/c it currently lacks the credibility to do anything but.
How will you be licensing and pricing it once it reaches 1.0? Any plans for making it available under a free software license, dual or otherwise? I know quite a few people who'd be inclined to pay for and contribute to a solution of the kind you provide and Dropbox and Ubuntu One don't (very decentralized, secure, fast, works local-only) with the condition that it's free-as-in-freedom.
Tumblr now back online after being offline 24 hours
Also see:

http://jk-technology.com/ctips01.html#int_main

and

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/voidmain.960823.html
I'm a little confused by this; how do SQL databases not support more atomic operations that MongoDB, seeing as you have full control of the transactions themselves? Incrementing, adding to a list (generally done with inserting a row in another table), etc., are all standard operations.
The Name of the Rose is a remarkable book, so I'm with you there. But I smiled a little when I saw you mention Pynchon. Although I realise that appreciation of literature, like music, is a subjective thing, Pynchon could be the most overrated writer of the 20th century. Although it pains me to do so I can do no better than to quote Gore Vidal, someone certainly in a position to know: "Comparing Pynchon's prose with that of, say, Joyce, is like comparing a kindergartener with a graduate student."
Usually, important decisions in a company require a majority vote of the board of directors to approve them.

Control of the board is then defined as a majority voting ability for an individual or aligned group of individuals. For example, 2 founders with equal equity stake will usually have the same incentives. Therefore, a board that has 2 founders and 1 investor is "founder controlled".

Between being completely founder controlled and completely investor controlled, there is a "split board". That means equal number of founders to investors, and one mutually agreed upon independent party that could technically vote either way -- often times a person previously very successful in business with insight into the startup's market.

In practice, a split board usually means investor-controlled, for a couple reasons:
- The independent board member is usually suggested by the investor
- The independent board member usually has a stronger incentive to side with a powerful investor
It's built into the current web interface.

Click the box with three dots at the top right of a wave and then choose export.
It seems they are also open-sourcing a web client, maybe not exactly the same UI as the official client, but I can't see why they would go to the trouble of changing it. Kudos to them for calling it "Wave in a Box", J Tim would be pleased.

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
i did something like that http://www.adobocode.com/spread
To my knowledge there are no ad networks that exist for email newsletters. This in part because the inventory is difficult to standardize. You essentially have to hardcode images into the newsletter - you can't just "drop a line of code" like you can with a website.
...or I can find somewhere else to spend my time. :-)
"1. Giving the documents to the leaders of Kansaslahoma won't help, because they won't stir up disputes with a hyperpower."

It is my decision what nation to be a part of. If I am not happy with the nation I am in, my first obligation is to leave and find one that better suits me.

It is not my job to conduct foreign relations or participate in espionage, even against the mighty Soviet military industrial complex.

I thought I was pretty clear on that.
I'm pleased that Wave will be in such able hands. It really shows that Google does care about open source when they take this much trouble to follow through on their promises.
http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/06/innovationRiverOfNew...
File based encrypters might do your sensitive stuff fairly easy - there are a lot of options out there.

I understand the ease of system encryption, but then your files are still available to other apps/exploits or if the attacker roots the phone. For instance the iphone AES-256 is easy enough to jb and get at a full unencrypted fs even without knowing the PIN.
How built-in app feedback systems minimize negative App Store reviews
yes, selfpositioning can get some buzz among those who can hire you, but if a person achieve is finished on selfpositioning, and, in fact - can not work, or is able to work like everyone else, then the company still sucks and beyond, with these empty buzz, sic.
>>You cannot prove that every single one of the illegal users would have bought the software legally had they not found the key.

No, but you can prove that they used $x of your service and charge them for it. It's what they actually used not what they might have used had things been different.
I wasn't saying banks should use Dynamo, but that Dynamo-style consistency is appropriate for conducting e-commerce transactions, and originally that most scaled industries don't depend on ACID semantics in their core datastores.

Bank accounts are eventually consistent logs, which doesn't look like Dynamo, but also look nothing like an RDBMS table. It's well known and understood that almost all banking systems are based around mainframe-era batch-process systems that are eventually consistent in nature. It's awfully ironic that the "hello world" used to demonstrate transactions in the RDBMS world is a debit and credit of bank accounts, a situation that is vanishingly rare in the real world.

Also, please address my original rebuttal to your claim that Amazon uses an ACID database for their checkout process.
DNS is not "the internet".

If an ICANN-free system was setup, the "internet" still continues to operate exactly as expected, but the way of resolving addresses has changed.

This is one of the few articles where "internet" vs "DNS" actually does make a difference, but they got it wrong.

It matters here:
> If it works, a sort of "shadow internet" could form, one in which legal action against counterfeiters and copyright scofflaws would be nearly impossible.

Nope. You can still take action against IP addresses that don't have any DNS at all. What matters is who their provider is, not what domain name they use.