skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming language of aunt's calculator: turned a calculator (boring) into something you can program (cool!). Editing was tedious, so it made me figure it out on paper first (good thing!).

ZX Spectrum Basic - at your fingertips mere fractions of a second after powerup. Can your Eclipse do that?

Z80 assembly language - so fast and so powerful. Magic knowledge for gaining infinite lives in games.

Pascal - structured programming and type safety for the win.

C - nothing in your way, the only limit is yourself ;)

C++ - it has classes!

OCaml - the pinnacle of type safety without typing the types (excuse the pun). And its fast.

Smalltalk - all you need to know about the object-oriented paradigm is there.

Java - Has libraries for everything.

Delphi - I think it's still the fastest way for putting together a decent looking windows GUI app.

Python - I couldn't put it better than: http://xkcd.com/353/

Clojure - its constructs for concurrent programming are life changing. And it's a Lisp. With extra readability for the parentheses-challenged. With a very well thought out standard lib.
This is pretty exciting. Great news!

I would love to use this for a number of things I'm involved with, but I am surprised by the package that is offered.

I'm not saying that what they offer (1 year of 350 GB for $800) is not worth the price, but I am disappointed that there isn't a smaller package.

My needs for this kind of thing are more like 10-20GB. The team features are very attractive, but there's no way I am going to sign up for a package that large.

I'm sure Dropbox has put a lot of thought into the decision though. I'm very curious about where they are going with this and if they will ever offer a smaller team account.

Personally I'd love to see a team account somewhere around $10 a month for 10 GB and 5 users. Basically same price as their Pro 50 individual account, but with 5 users and 1/5th of the capacity.
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Don't leave us hanging, what was the funny Dropbox joke?
If they hadn't disabled Wikileaks accounts there would have just been another topic just as controversial that would have gotten a bug up hacker's asses. This isn't a story about Wikileaks. Wikileaks is just the handy example. This is a story about how small numbers of people can have a temper tantrum and produce a global impact.

You can't reason backwards and say "well if they just hadn't done X everything would be fine" The parent's point is if they start reasoning like that, they'll just toss out anybody vaguely smelling suspicious (which I also think is the logical result, along with increased black lists of IP addresses)
doesn't diminish this particular feature

Well, this particular feature is a bandaid for an underlying misfeature (manual schema management).

Proposing this as good practice is somewhat akin to proposing "If you design a new operating system then make sure the installation of virus scanners is as easy as on Microsoft Windows".

You may call it a strawman, I'd call it "putting something into perspective".

Besides, the schema-migration has very little to do with the ORM, except for the fact that they both interact with a database.

That's a nice theory but in practice most rails users do use the builtin migration mechanism, for the lack of a better alternative (at least to my knowledge, feel free to correct me).

Consequently I don't think it's unfair to compare that mechanism to the equivalent in similar frameworks - and in that comparison rails loses, big time.
War is a political problem too, doesn't mean you shouldn't have an army ready.
I will bet anyone that 20 years from now we will see that China's "greedy" investment in Africa has done more good than all the decades and $billions of "selfless" western aid, both public and private.

And I also will bet that privatized school systems will perform better than public school bureaucracies that receive hundred million dollar gifts.

The invisible hand is puckish like that.
Site Map :
Using multiple processes in Python (rather than multiple threads) avoids many of the limitations of the GIL, and the new concurrent package (according to the PEP) can use the processing module or the threading module.

Processes in Python does have a different set of limitations in it's own right, but for most applications they aren't too disastrous.
OTOH, you can't let dictators use their own population as hostages, when they buy weapons instead of feeding the populations (Saddam, which you mentioned, had lots of money from smuggling).

Also, is it better to let those populations suffer in "jail" for generations? (If I was Eastern European, I'd be pretty pissed to have been left to rot until 1989.)

If nothing else, the dictators spread their problems (support of terrorists, atom weapon programs etc).

Look at WW II for what will happen when democracies are pressed. At the start of the war, British military argued against bombing private property (German factories). Compare that to a few years later.

(I guess the place where this is closest to happen next, is Israel and the humongous Hezbollah (/Hamas?) arsenals of rockets optimized for attacks against civilians.)

Point is, those juntas are arguably a blight on humanity that needs to be solved, the longer it takes the worse it might be.

Ah well, this is both after the discussion and irrelevant to Wikileaks.

Edit: Made a bit clearer.
On my machine:

Chromium 10.0.604.0 (without Crankshaft): http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

Firefox/4.0b8pre from 20101208: http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

Overall, Firefox is 2.08x faster.

Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64, on a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz

Comparing these with your results, it sounds like the JS performance war just got interesting again.
One of the calls I saw for the current round of DDoS attacks listed Amazon as one of the targets. It seems to be having no effect. Can I infer from this that Amazon knows how to handle DDoS attacks?

If so, would one reasonable answer to the question then be "host with Amazon" and let them deal with it for you? Or at least have a backup ready at Amazon to switch to? (With the recent announcement that Amazon's hosting is now PCI level 1 compliant, hosting at Amazon becomes possible for many for whom it was not an option).
The customer ars was referring to was Wikileaks and potential future customers who engage in non-mainstream political/commercial action. The resulting backlash from the Wikileaks affair will encourage the decision makers at Amazon or Paypal to avoid doing business with non-mainstream customers in the future if there is an even insignificant chance that in the future some non-mainstream customer will offend those in power.
Don't you mean "Great Ormond Street children's hospitals" ? You gave money to them but don't even remember their name properly?
> All nodes receive all torrents?

Each node has a subset of all torrents. You flood searches as well. There is also a second overlay on top of the first which groups peers by their similarity in taste, with the aim of reducing the number of hops necessary to find what you're looking for. The taste similarity is also used to actively propagate recommendations so that stuff you're interested in is more likely to move towards your immediate vicinity.

I would recommend scanning through the paper to get a more accurate idea of how it works. My knowledge of Tribler is pretty out of date.
Yeah, I'm not too serious about HN being involved. I just always think it's funny when there's a story on a popular website about some website being over capacity because everyone starts visiting and checking if it's up yet.
300,000 Android phones activated each day.
Nah, no way. PayPal wouldn't go down from a few 10k additional hits. PayPal is huge, and needs 100% uptime, and in addition to that has undoubtedly prepared for a major DDOS attack.

They have unlimited resources, they have expertise, and they've seen it coming. If Anonymous can take PayPal down, then they can take anyone down.
You almost identified the problem correctly.

Internet is already distributed. The attacks against Visa and MC are also distributed. But Visa and MC are not. They are single points of trust for our financial transactions.

A more distributed system, where a web of trust and transaction system exists, could be used. But such a thing hasn't been invented yet.

I thought about it some last year, but such a system is hard to design. I did design several prototypes, but they had lots of problems. It also involved changing the structures of presumed governmental financial structures ("central" bank for example, is also a single point of trust).

So I think, the rephrasing of the problem should be: We do need to think about how our financial systems can be reorganized to be 100% distributed systems to prevent future abuses by anyone, including governments.
From the other thread:

The core principle is similar. DC has centralized hubs which handle searches and upload files directly to users. Tribler has a distributed search engine which runs on every peer and uses bittorrent to share files. Effectively every single Tribler node behaves like a DC hub. As a result it is much harder to take down.
Intel Girds For Netbook and Tablet Wars
Battery life in smartphones is rather marginal today. With light to moderate use it's still necessary to charge smartphones every day and there's no guarantee that your battery won't run out. Changing that equation such that average battery life is on the scale of weeks instead of a day or hours is quite significant, enabling people to use smartphones in new ways they would not have before.

But yes, electric vehicles are definitely the most in need of higher energy density batteries.
You reminded of a sort-of related quote: When an expert says something is possible, they're almost certainly right and when an expert says something is impossible, they're almost certainly wrong.
The traditional GIL implementation caused a multi-threaded program to run slower on a multi-core processor than on a single-core processor, so if Python's new GIL can make multi-core processors more competitive with single-core processors, I'd say that's a win for parallelism.

(note: this post may be excessively cynical)
Probably because "rich" and "innovators" isn't really the same thing, and there was even less overlap in the past.
Twitter Explains Why #WikiLeaks Isn’t Trending
Is this because they blocked the funds of Julian Assange? Probably a hacker group teaching a lesson or two here
make an exception for Assange because he's in the news?

because Swiss banks are so rigorous about closing the accounts of third-world tinpot dictators?
I won't hold my breath, though; this could all end in tears, with a mess of ill-informed and poorly-implemented measures that cause all kinds of additional dangers to innocent people without actually fixing the real problem.

If I were a betting man, I'd say we'll see many years of ill-informed and badly implemented draconian policy. I'd go further to say that it won't improve significantly until at least a couple more generations have walked the halls of power and true digital natives finally cast their votes in parliament.
After 18 hours, still no example designs.
It's a quote from Arrested Development. You should check it out if you haven't seen it, it's on netflix and hulu.
Wired.com Nav menu turns into ad, back into menu
This is brilliant. How did they do this? HTML5 + JS?
The real issue is when you have feature branches and merge them in to master/trunk - so it's not a single file conflicting, but maybe a week or more's worth of work from both developers.

As you say, it would rely on notifications that there was the possibility of clashes, but unless you monitor every other developer's local feature branch, you would only know when the branches are merged into master.
Live from LeWeb'10 (the #1 European Internet event)
There's a table listing the migrations that have already been run on the database. The list of migrations in source control are compared against the list in the database, the outstanding ones sorted into timestamp order and then run.

So if the two branches are separate there should be no issue - all my changes get run in order, irrespective of what the other developers have been doing.
Anybody who can remain moderate in the current climate basically isn't worth having on your side anyway.
"copy"ing an immutable string just retains it, so there's little benefit to using a retain property for NSString properties, or for properties of the other NSMutableCopying type families. As a best practice you should always use copy properties for them.
0) Be prepared

Be proactive. Plan for the solutions below in advance, not when traffic is hitting your servers and SSH along with everything else is unresponsive.

1) Availability for investigation

Renice sshd to make sure you can get to your servers when they are hit with CPU usage due to the DDOS. Reserve some connections for the root user on your SQL server (Postgresql already defaults to 3 for this) so you can still connect, investigate and analyse what's happening.

2) Pattern matching

Every solution against DDOS can be described more or less as "pattern matching". There are two steps involved:

-> identify a pattern associated with DDOS requests.

-> match them as early as possible (iptables, upstream provider, hardware firewall) and reject them.

Easiest is to match offending IPs, those that make repeated queries (i.e. once every second). Set the threshold in the right spot - too high and you'll ban valid users, to low and you fail to ban enough in order to restore service availability.

Other things to watch for are at the connection level: either SYN flood behaviour ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_flood , deploy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_cookies ) or KeepAlive connections that keep httpd busy (always reserve in httpd.conf for example a number of connections that aren't KeepAlive enabled).

Identify pages on your website that are slow to load or generate large, time-consuming SQL-queries. Those are the main target during DDOS attacks; pattern-match their URLs and disable them during attacks if they're not critical for your website, or have a fall-back for them.

Check for errors in the attackers' requests: either they have the same weird-looking user-string, or lack the referrer, or something else that you might be able to find. Pattern-match and reject based on that.

Pattern-match clients that keep requesting the .html without loading the corresponding .css or images -- most probably they are attackers calling the GET API (corresponding to wget-ing the HTML) but don't parse and download the corresponding images on the page. Sure, you'll ban text-browser users but that's a small price to pay in order to restore your website.

Have a low-resource version of the website where you can turn off the requests for CSS, images and so on and just serve plain functional HTML. Pattern-match, if any, those IPs that keep requesting CSS and images previously associated with non-cache-able HTML pages.

And lastly... be proactive, be prepared, have a plan.
It was over a period of four or five months, ending about six months ago.

I think it was the shape of my eyes at fault - i would have a fortnightly scan, they would remould the lenses (which was done at some central factory, not by my doctor) and they still wouldn't sit correctly.
Most clients participating in DDoS attacks are plain dumb.

They will continually perform a GET request on a single page and not parse the response. This means they wont respond to javascript, images, cookies or redirects correctly.

You can devise a test that identifies attacking clients and then blacklist the IP addresses for a while.

While I'm sure this strategy isn't perfect, it has been sufficient for the two attacks I have been subjected to.

Edit: vladd's reply articulates this idea better than I was able to :)
ahem

My Nokia regularly goes a week without a charge with light usage.

(I've heard tell the power management in the Symbian kernel far outstrips the competitors, which probably explains it.)
True, but to compare them assumes that Apple's rate hasn't risen in the meantime, which is unlikely given that this is the holiday quarter.
The OCaml compiler is a work of art. Reading it fills me with awe.
Ditto. I'd pay about $20-30 a month, depending on the value offered, for 20GB/10 users, and surcharges for overage.

As is this is of no use to me. There is no free trial so I can't see if it works (for me) first. No way I'm springing $800 up front without seeing the merchandise. This is a shame because Dropbox is a great service, and I don't pay for a personal account (don't need more than 2GB), but could totally see myself paying for a work account.

If Dropbox could be configured as a backing store for a NAS (eg QNAP) it would take over the world.
Amazon is too big to be taken down. It will require much more infrastructure than paypal.com
The shared-nothing approach (for example, implemented by using processes instead of threads) is also more scalable.

After all, if you design your parallelism architecture to not rely on a shared memory space, you can later parallelize over multple machines as well as cores.

The only thing I wonder about is that processes might be more heavy-weight than threads with respect to memory usage. Then again, if you only create a fixed amount of processes, equal to the number of cores, as you should for "perfect" parallelism, the overhead is pretty much zero.
For me "if you malloc, then you must free" is much harder, because you have to know whether ownership was passed to you, who else might be using object when you free it, etc.

In Objective-C there's no owner, everyone borrows objects. You increase retain count (if you want to hold object for longer than lifetime of a function), and you decrease retain count when done.

And there are few methods to increase (retain, init, copy, new, property assignent) and few to decrease count (release, autorelease, nil property assignment).

To me it's that simple.
This is awesome. I couldn't find any info on how locking would work though - Word's temporary files that it uses to detect simultaneous opened filed aren't sync'ed to Dropbox (for good reason). Anyone any idea how this works?
What IRC channel are you talking about?
It appears to have never went down. The script kiddies targeted paypal.com, which is different from www.paypal.com.
Gumstix + portable brainwave monitor
I'm working on a device that makes use of dong, a few servos, a gumstix COM, and a portable brainwave monitor. For now I'm calling it "m4strb8.ly", though if anyone has any suggestions I'm trying to think of more "kid friendly" names (along the lines of "the jackrabbit", or at least something less conspicuous than "m4strb8.ly"). Essentially it's the female version of the fleshlight but it features a brainwave monitor to maximize stimulation and draw out the optimal personal experience. I'm having trouble with the portable brainwave monitoring device and the processing limitations of the gumstix com.. can anyone recommend any good (super-efficient) open source libraries I could use to train for optimal stimulation?
Efficient Paging with WebGrid Web Helper using ASP.NET MVC
Fowler himself was impressed by Rails implementation of ActiveRecord, and that was long before Arel (google for 2006 railsconf keynote by M. Fowler).
I wonder, what are all others which are better according to you…
There are always a few vulnerable points. Even Amazon can go down if you chose the right point of attack as the past has shown.

http://mashable.com/2009/12/24/ddos-attack-amazon/
Whilst I am into the idea of the Chrome Web Store, at the moment it seems to just be the "Chrome Web Directory", Yahoo tried that and look where it got them...

I am more interested to see if sites can really make any money from the store, I guess we need to see Chrome OS get some traction first.
"Well, this particular feature is a bandaid for an underlying misfeature (manual schema management)."

Could you expand on that? Maybe I'm missing something here.
The main difference is that you can update the document variables without fragmenting the index. In Lucene you need to reindex the document (i.e. delete it and write a new one). If you update your relevance variables an average of 10 times per document it can get really fragmented with Lucene.
Removing, more likely. Everything in GMT.
A competitor can attack you to take your service down.
Although the website mentions that "files are encrypted to military-grade standards" that doesn't help if secure client-side encryption is missing.

The best encryption doesn't help (me as a user) if I'm not the one in control of it. And even if I would fully trust Dropbox this does not help, as Dropbox must still surrender the data if, e.g., requested by law enforcement (which would not be an issue if the data were encrypted on the client, so that the user is the only one able to decrypt it).

Using software like encfs inside a Dropbox container does not help either. Once I start hacking around on such solutions it's easier to just use a service with client-side encryption. So if anyone from Dropbox is reading this: Consider this as a "feature request". I absolutely love the way how Dropbox works, but right now I don't really use it due to this security issue.
This works great until a Senator pressures Amazon to drop your site.
I'm French too, and I think it's a shame so few of our fellow countrymen know about MBTI types. It really helped me understand my personnality.
Security is hard.
Security on a large scale system is is very hard. Securing a legacy system is extremely hard.
Securing a large legacy system is near impossible.

Yes the government wants to cover its ass first and foremost.

But that doesn't mean they don't take IT seriously, they just don't understand it to the point they cannot select people to work with that understand it correctly.

disclaimer: I've designed COMSEC systems
I'm pretty sure you'd still want a local backup if you're going to use this for business data.
> If someone were to write such an article about C, then it would have just one line: if you malloc, then you must free.

That implies you cannot return malloc'ed memory to a caller in C. I doubt many people are willing to live under that restriction.
On the news here in .nl this morning there was an item on a police search that was carried out at a hosting provider that hosted a web page calling for the DDoS on MasterCard and hosted software (LOIC, presumably).

So yes, it's already happening, and in the coming years the internet is bound to change profoundly.

On a meta level, and for improving my own communication skills, I'm a bit surprised that you are being upvoted while I got downvoted yesterday in the MasterCard thread for saying essentially the same. Anyone who answered me yesterday and disagreed with me care to tell me why? Did I not make my point clearly enough, or was it the form of the message?

Edit: link to previous post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983858
I learnt Forth as a kid. (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008967 plus Acorn Forth)

What blew my mind was that - apart from a tiny kernel - Forth was written in Forth. It bootstrapped itself from basic principles. It's kind of the Principia Mathematica of programming languages...
Prevent double clicks on ajax links (rails.js)
Encouraging to hear these words from our former PM.
An amazing resource. Brilliant... Stanford lead the world in open education (MIT are great too)
So you'd be willing to pay at most $3 per month and employee for a productivity tool? You're not running a real company, are you?
The British entrepreneur and investor Peter Jones also worried about that problem and decided to double any money his children earned for themselves.
If you could only learn three programming languages, which would you choose?
But it sounds, phonetically, like 'wanker'.