skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations!

Now remember to do the laundry, get the groceries, and load the dishwasher. And get that stuff off the floor!

Joking aside, getting married, together with our recent baby is one of the best things I ever did.
What about Teco and DDT by Red Martian?

http://redmartian.com/napster/Red_Martian_-_Deny_Authority_2...

"You can hack anything that you want with just teco and ddt.."
"You make a better door than a window"

seriously, though: "on their own grounds / in context". But you're right, no pithy phrase comes to mind.

OT: I was looking for stuff like this:
"Linux: can't blend margaritas", which is kind of the idea.

and I found this fun Google query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22worst+*+in+*%22
No, but it's as good a description as any for neuronal interactions. The problem though is not with a finite set of connections, but rather the infinite number of possibilities.
One thing that I hate most is having to switch between interface methods and devices. If I can't do everything I need to do quickly, intuitively, and accurately with a touchscreen, then I don't want one. I don't want it for the 10% of the time that it might be useful if I still need a keyboard for the other 90% of the time.

That's not to say that I don't think that it COULD be useful at some point. If I had a computer that only had touchscreen and had excellent voice recognition capabilities, that would be a workable solution for the right application.
congrats paul!!!

who's the lucky girl?
This advice seems to be more true in academia than the startup world. I think Dyson was talking about academia, which is where he's spent his career.
That's really not true. I think you're conflating cryptography with security. In crypto, I suppose you could consider algorithms that increase attacker cost as "obstacles", though I think the word loses meaning when the "obstacle" involves summoning more CPU cores than there are atoms in the solar system.

In practical security, closing a buffer overflow, sanitizing inputs, and proving code paths are not "obstacles". There are a finite number of vulnerabilities in any piece of code.
Full disclosure: I'm a former eBay'er who spent 5 years at the company and had a good experience working there.

I don't agree that eBay is evil. It's just a big company behaving like all big companies eventually do. Still, I've given much thought to why no Western companies (Asia is a different issue) have been effective at competing with the company over the years.

I think there are three issues:

1) Trust and Safety is what eBay calls the never-ending cycle of identifying fraud, modeling it, and preventing it from happening in the future. It's a difficult, expensive, ever-evolving challenge that is far more complex than I realized before working at the company. Craigslist, which has recently seen a massive flood of spam on some of the more popular categories, is seeing how difficult it can be to keep a lid on this stuff. eBay is in a never-ending battle against criminals who are often very smart and highly motivated. New entrants in P2P payment systems have to deal with this problem to even get started. People think there is a lot of fraud on eBay, but they have no clue how much of it is killed before it sees the light of day. In many ways, eBay is like an immune system that can fight off infections it has seen before. It's the new stuff that gets through the system. Competitors won't have the benefit of eBay's decade-long immunity memory.

2) eBay spends millions on search marketing to maintain their position by keeping buyers coming to the site. eBay is, by most accounts, Google's largest ad buyer. It didn't used to be this way. There was a time when most users went directly to eBay.com to start their shopping, and that's still true of auction fanatics. But a large percentage of sales on eBay are now fixed price (or buy it now), and commodity shoppers increasingly start their shopping with a Google, Yahoo, or Live search. The cost of acquiring new fixed-price customers will be a major problem for anyone hoping to enter the general goods retail category.

3) It's still the best auction platform. The bottom line here is that no one has come up with anything fundamentally better than eBay's auctions. Personally, I think this is eBay's soft spot because the company is focused on fixed price goods and because they've owned this market for so long. The margin on auctions is very, very high, and someone could take them on. A better (more fun, cheaper) product would be a good place to start.

I agree with those who suggest that niche players will chip away at eBay's dominance, much like niche retailers at the mall chipped away at department stores over the years. If I was going to build an eBay competitor (and I'm not), I'd choose a single category of easily-shippable, high-resale-value items (e.g. SLR camera lenses or whatever) and create a better C2C trading system that kicks butt on that specific category.
What about security? Why should we as users trust a non-Gmail service with our Google Accounts username and password? We, as hackers, should not foster such bad security behaviours.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html
Pierre never patented the auction system. He didn't believe in them at the time.
That's not a monopoly, that's their business model. No one is required to use eBay. You need to to be more careful when using terms like monopoly and making charges of abuse.
I'd love to see the adoption of the ROWE (results oriented work environment) model on a large scale.
Fred Wilson: My Vision For Social Media
The Marketing of Mega-Burgers
some touch screens work somewhat like that already, such as the lenovo ones.
Livingston?
I'm really happy for Paul and Jessica, but I do find it a bit odd to have the event announced on Hacker News (and even then via Twitter; though not private, Alexis's tweet was probably not intended for general distribution). This is news about a particular (albeit prominent) hacker's private life, not 'hacker news' per se; it doesn't seem general enough to be posted here.
What is Teco and DDT?
I'd love to touch my screen! I'd also like my keyboard, mouse and monitors to be touch sensitive screens (same form factor but made with a 'screen' layered over them. So my mouse/keyboard can be completely customizable to the task at hand.

Now if they can get the screen surface to change texture AS WELL as the light that it emits it would be amazing. Rough and smooth surfaces for buttons etc.

Touch screens don't need to just be classic 'screens'.
You just need to respect copyright. So if they explicitly allow you to scrape the data, or if you're operating within the "Fair Use" doctrine, then you're fine.

(IANAL)
I found it interesting, too: I was just wondering if there was some relevance that I was missing.
Taleb saved it on his website, as a pdf, ads and all.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/wsj-patterson.pdf

For what it's worth, the same article has him still in as of October last year with a new fund called Universa, doing basically the same thing.
The Library in the New Age: Information Systems through History
This is probably the only comment I've read here that addresses the fact that the majority of people on the internet are not hackers.

Google is useful (through the same interface) to your grandma and a rocket scientist. THAT'S why it's so valuable and was able to go mainstream.

In order for Friendfeed to go mainstream, the services it's syndicating have to first. I don't think I've run into a single person in everyday life that knows what Twitter is.
SQL Server Programming Hacks
Anyone have a clue as to why (or, indeed, whether) Bayesian mathematics work any better than the more old-school neural network algorithms?
congratulations PG and Jessica! :)
for the first time, they could see a cunning mind at work on the other side.

I wonder if "hackers" actually think such things. The DirecTV network itself is, of course, a million times more magnificent and "cunning" than any of the pissy little exploits against it.
I think this is a very grey area. If it's on the internet it's scrapable. Does that mean you can use it? You really need a lawyer.

Take for example Amazon reviews. They are there to be scraped but some of them are not available via the web service API due to copyright restrictions. That's a clear sign to me that they don't wouldn't want this information scraped. I'm not sure how a judge would see it though.

Another example is is licensed material. Take TV listings. They are listed all over the place but they are still under copyright so you can't just scrape them and use them on your site.

IANAL but my basic rule is that I scrape if I think I am going to offer the scraped sight something in return (usually traffic). So if it's mutually beneficial I feel OK. That doesn't mean it's legal though :(
what makes it front-page hacker news?

It's something that many good hackers would find interesting. It gratifies intellectual curiosity. So by the News YC guidelines, it's an ideal submission (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

My favorite submissions here are the ones off the beaten track. I'm going to hear the latest news about, say, Google Android whether I want to or not. It's the stuff I wouldn't have run across otherwise that's really valuable. This post is a small, but good example of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_debugging_technique
Depends on what and how you intend to use the scraped data for. I'd recommend you also check the TOS of the site you intend to scrape. Many sites explicitly say how their data can be used and how you should scrape it. Some sites also ban IPs that are scraping them (they assume it's a DoS type of an attack.
If the websites you scrape don't want you to do so, they will update their robots.txt and ban you. If you don't respect that, they will ban your IP and/or take legal action.

So just try not to piss them off.
It doesn't seem like he's saying much more than any other market bear, of which there are many.
I think GAE tries to encourage people to write apps which don't need batch maintenance. Having been seriously burned by supporting other people's horrific batch jobs during fiscal year-end at a bank --- on the night after Thanksgiving, at around 3 in the morning --- I've always aimed to write code which does the right thing dynamically and without batch jobs.
6) Visiting http://news.ycombinator.com/
They absolutely did think those things. They even had a name for "the cunning mind": "Dave".

And, not to argue whether DirecTV is more magnificent than whatever, but the attacks on it were neither "pissy" nor "little". They were more advanced than most of what we see on general purpose architectures.
but if we take google for an example. they give the serached sites something in return, they make the easy to find. but how does the google spider know that it can index the site? it checks for robots.txt obv but does it check for Copyright?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Use
fair user seems to be only in the US, i potentially want to reahc the whole world even if the USA is a good place to start.
In practical security, closing a buffer overflow, sanitizing inputs, and proving code paths are not "obstacles".

I think you're being a bit picky over wording, an "obstacle" is just something which makes it harder for some to break your system, examples of which are closing buffer overflows and sanitizing inputs.

You could, possibly, use it as an argument against engineering, but I think you'd be wrong. The same as someone arguing "we're all going to die anyway so lets get it over with now" is wrong: it means that you have to make the most of what you do have.
The reasons why the neural network model failed and Bayesian inference is much more applicable are described very well by Jeff Hawkins in his book "On Intelligence" (http://onintelligence.com/). I highly recommend it, if just for the the questions and trains of thoughts it raises.
Your point about fraud may be one of those cases where the barrier to entry is different from how it appears on the outside. A better website or auction system may be beside the point, if it's not the really hard problem.

I don't think I'd have appreciated this before reading the Levchin interview in Founders At Work, which made it clear that Paypal's advantage was in staying a step ahead in fraud detection. They knew that any competitors who couldn't do that would be eaten alive (and were).
Explosion At ThePlanet Datacenter Drops 9,000 Servers, 7,500 Customers
I'd like to have a screen that gives an electric shock to anyone who gets their greasy, grubby fingers near it.
How to harvest solar power? Beam it down from space
Nautilus -  Short-term Memory Without Brain Structures
A touchscreen doesn't replace a mouse - as you've noted it's not precise enough. It can work with a UI that's designed for it specifically. But you give up a lot of screen real estate to make that work. (I've spent the last 3 years working on a touch-screen kiosk app...)

What's really interesting is the multitouch stuff, especially with very large displays. Once large, very high resolution displays become affordable, I think multitouch will take off in a big way.
It's often impossible to sell an asset forward, especially an illiquid one. Suppose you are a trading desk that makes markets in corporate bonds. If a client comes to you and wants to sell a given company's bonds, chances are that you will not be able to immediately find a buyer. You will probably be forced to hold on to the bonds for a bit. Now you're exposed to interest rate and credit risks. What do you do? You can hedge some of the interest rate risk by paying on interest rate swaps, and you can hedge some of the credit risk by buying protection in the credit default swap market. But without some kind of model, it's going to be impossible to determine how to use these tools to hedge your risks. Your only other options are to guess, or to do nothing. If you are a large player in the markets, this is extremely dangerous.

Certainly, it's foolish to assume that you are ever perfectly hedged. In this example, several things could go wrong: e.g. credit default swap traders could have a different view of a company's creditworthiness than corporate bond traders, forcing you to pay exorbitant prices for protection on the bonds. But this is a smaller risk than holding the bonds outright.

In short: models can be helpful in risk management, as long as you are aware of the residual risks you are exposed to. Just don't allow them to make you complacent or overconfident.
They were more advanced than most of...

Point missed. Were they more advanced than a global satellite network? There is simply comparison whatsoever. Exploiting a system is never as significant as creating a system.
Congratulations to you both!

Neat, I share my wedding anniversary (1 year today!) with pg.
The key phrase being "UI that's designed for it specifically".

Personally I think Apple did the right thing with the iPhone. I'm a lot more enthused about using the touchscreen on that vs. sticking to only the stylus on every single other mobile device with a touchscreen I have owned. I'd almost feel that a stylus would ruin the point of the iPhone, unless you needed precision accuracy, and it's been a year (just a bit short of that jailbroken) that I've had the iPhone and I still can't think of anything in particular that would need it.
... I presume.
What app/service are you using for email list management?
Looking for a hosted solution with a robust api so that we can keep certain fields in our main user database synced up with that of the remote email list management.
All four of the displays for the computers I use often have fingerprints all over them. Also I occasionally have a finger that feels sore from overestimating the distance from my lap with the keyboard to the display.

Stupid iPhone with its multitouch touchscreen display.
"Break In" At TechCrunch HQ Yesterday (entrepreneur breaks in and pitches his startup)
Nearly every social networking site and new web 2.0 site has this feature. Passwords are not stored. I rarely feel comfortable using these features because many sites try hard to trick you into inviting everyone in your address book(BluBet as a recent example). That's precisely why this widget would be useful--having a trusted company provide this functionality for many small sites would be preferable to trusting many small sites with these credentials.
Congrats! :-D
@almost: an article can be stupid or smart, I didn't put it as no.1 - users does. If you think that his question is stupid and article is stupid and everything including super bowl is stupid - that means you don't match... take it easy
The only usefulness of the salt is if somebody steals your database and uses a rainbow table to try to get the passwords. If you don't have salts for each users, then a pre-generated rainbow table for sha1 based on common passwords is going to be very efficient at getting the passwords for each account.
If you use salt however, you are protected from the use of pre-generated tables since the attacker has to brute force all the combinations for each user. If you use sha1 or md5 it's still not too secure since sha1 and md5 are fast to calculate and getting faster with this : http://nsa.unaligned.org/hw.php

Read http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tabl... from tptacek, it's very informative...

Of course, the big problem with the javascript way explained here is that you send sha2(nounce + sha2(password+salt))
This means, that anybody who get access to the database can send
sha2(nounce + hash_from_database)
So basically in this case using salt in the database prevent people from getting the password too easily (so it sorts protects the attacker from getting a password associated with an email address that he could try later on paypal), but it doesn't protect the account in any way...

And for those who think that it's unlikely for anybody to get access to the database, it happened to the reddit guys...
I like touching screens! It feels a lot more relaxed and natural to manipulate certain things by touch vs. using a keyboard or some other input device. It's almost like mouse gestures except so much better.

That's not to say the keyboard doesn't have its uses, and that it's my favorite input device in general though. Although I do love my logitech mx revolution mouse too...
Congratulations PG!
"Also, the GDB Boogie."

"Oh, yes. Two songs."

(Apologies to Flight of the Conchords...)
That isn't a claim, it's a simple observation that SimpleDB costs about ten times more than Google's datastore. You are absolutely right that SimpleDB is best used to return pointers to S3 data objects, and both the article and comments point out that actual costs depend on usage patterns. (Bandwidth costs will probably override database storage costs for many use cases.) Still, all the above doesn't change the fact that Google's distributed datastore is about a tenth the cost of Amazon's. You're just saying it doesn't matter in many usage scenarios.
That may well be true in DTV's case --- a point I acknowledged already --- but it's not true in security at large. Breaking an existing well-regarded block cipher, for instance, is far more significant than simply creating a new one.
Dev/Live Switch Bookmarklet
What we talk about when we talk about singularity
Should you fire the voice mail guy?
Honestly, I think it just comes down to simplicity. Bayesian algorithms tend to make fewer assumptions a priori. By contrast, look at something like backprop.
Thanks for downmodding me.
But it still holds. If he is the lead architect, it is his job to design the system that works! If it doesn't work, then it's his fault and not anyone elses.
Ethically, I see no problem is doing any scraping as long as you credit the source and obey the robot.txt file. I figure, they were the ones who made the information freely available on the web.

Legally, however, it's a whole different beast that I'm not qualified to talk about.
It's not 1997 anymore. People don't hijack TCP sessions. Have you ever done that before? It's incredibly noisy.

If you can observe insecure traffic, you can redirect it. The victim's traffic is never going to hit ycombinator.com.
That's a great news, congrats ;)
This isn't just pickiness. This is two totally conflicting mindsets about security. I'll be ungenerous and say that mine, which rejects the concept of obstacle courses, is the practitioner's mindset.

We don't let things ship when we know they have exploitable vulnerabilities. We recognize that there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and we try to mitigate the former. But the known knowns? Come on. Just turn SSL on. The Javascript rewriting hack is not hard.
Well, no, this is still misleading. One specific portion of the service costs 10x more, not the whole service. Furthermore, its the one part of the service that Amazon doesn't really expect you to use (hence the price).

As you said, storage is not likely to be the most expensive part of your database anyway, so claiming "Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB" is misleading at best.
So, copyright law doesn't care whether you scraped the data or acquired in some other way. That is, either you can use the information under copyright law, or you can't. If you can't use it, then getting it through some method other than scraping won't help you -- and if you can use it, then scraping won't change the legality.

So you need to make sure there isn't a copyright violation, which is going to depend on the specific information you're looking at.

There's still a potential problem, though, unrelated to copyright. After eBay v. Bidder's Edge, it can be trespass to chattels to scrape data in violation of a site's TOS. In the eBay case, the court held that it was in violation of trespass law because the eBay TOS prohibited robots... so it would have been fine if Bidder's Edge had taken the data manually.

Basically, you need to make sure the data isn't copyrighted, and you need to make sure that scraping the data isn't in violation of the site's TOS.
Well, I'm glad you added the quotes, because the title is pretty ridiculous without them (and really only slightly less so with them).
The problem is that most users are not programmers, are not at all interested in computer security... So, no maybe most people here would not use an important password for yc news... But the average user doesn't think about this and knowing this can you really say that it's there fault for not being educated on computer security?

Anyway, since you do the right thing: SSL + bcrypt, good but don't say it's the user problem if the system gets compromised...
Sure, it's not meant to be foolproof. I only wanted sometime to secure the login for the large number of sites taking passwords with plaintext. Right now it's completely a statistics game -- you can just stand outside someone's wireless network capturing packets. If it's insecure or WEP, you'll be able to recover the key, then grepping through with password=_ will eventually give you a password to use on their favorite sites.

I do think security is a matter of degree. And currently authentication is but a few removed from wide open.
Thats interesting, just yesterday I was reading into datacenters and how they are engineered. The fire prevention techniques are usually really advanced and that may be why none of the servers were damaged.
I agree. I think the whole idea is absolutely horrible. It'd be better to have webmail clients have a "Email my contact list to this address" functionality.
This is why app developers should be using SSL. I have no smart-assed responses to an HTTPS login screen. No ad hoc hashing schemes required.
Europe to Australia in 5 Hours (The LAPCAT A2 Jet) With Video