skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had a similar experience. My work right now can be roughly described as engineering. However I've had a brief experience of trying to market myself as an artist/photographer about three years ago (I did photography as a hobby). People in the arts community are very picky when it comes to design. I had to learn nearly everything by myself. I found that as I was learning more about design, my outlook about art in general started to change, which in turn started to affect my photography (i.e. my content). Design is a very subtle thing. It is a mistake to think about design as "making things pretty." Design is communication. Everything you do reveals something about yourself. Design is about taking control of what the choices you make reveal about yourself.

A lot of engineers I know have the attitude (it's almost a cliche to say it) that "design is unnecessary; things don't have to be pretty." They say that because they have never experienced great design or have never had a chance to work with great designers. Great designers do not make things pretty; making things pretty for its own sake is frowned upon in the design community. This is not the 19th century when design amounted to putting in as much ornament as you could fit. The best 20th century design was closer to "information design" than to decoration.

Some of the greatest designers of the 20th century were also engineers and architects. Charles Eames was an expert in structural engineering and materials science, which gave him a distinctive edge (Charles and Ray introduced many new materials such as plywood, fiberglass into their furniture designs). Muller Brockmann (inventor of the "grid") was extremely precise (as well as concise) with his poster layouts -- as precise as any engineer is with the blueprints.

A related tendency some engineers have is that they dismiss the expertise of people who went to a design school or an art school. They assume (incorrectly) that whatever they themselves "like" will also be liked by other people. In this regard, I blame engineers more than I blame designers. Designers (at least all the good ones) understand that engineering is a complex domain and that they have to listen to the words of people who have studied it and/or are doing it professionally. Engineers, on the other hand, have this tendency to look down on art and design as "soft" subjects, to view them as unnecessary, and they tend to be dismissive of people who studied it. This attitude is self-defeating, however, since it only contributes to the proliferation of bad designs, which in turn gives the advantage to good designs because they start to be seen as "rare" and distinctive.
I use my personal domain with a mailserver running on a small fanless server (with full harddisk encryption) located in my basement. Software on the server is pretty much standard: Debian as distribution, Postfix for SMTP, Dovecot for IMAP, SpamAssassin as spam filter, Prosody for XMPP, Tarsnap for offsite backups, Mutt as MUA, Maildir Utils to search through my mails.

I had my mailbox "outsourced" to Google Apps for some years (using the same domain name), but while Gmail has really nice features, as someone working in the security area I feel somewhat uneasy about the huge centralization (everyone uses GMail nowadays). Why surrender your data to someone else when you have the capabilities to host your own server (Time and cost are not really reasons, as I also use the server for other tasks and need to operate it anyway)?
It's amazing that you can get their top-of-the-line processor for only $294. The best Pentium 4 cost $637 when it launched in June 2003, which is $757 in today's dollars. This means the best Intel processor money can buy is 2.5x cheaper today as compared with only 7.5 ago.
I'm not sure if that was hyperbole or not.

As I understand it, all that was required was for them to use the same random number /twice/. Let's say you're Sony and you sign a patch, release it, realise there is a minor fix, and release within 2hours... maybe in your rush you failed to regenerate the random seed?

Or, my initial thoughts, someone inside Sony did this maliciously?
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I used to run my own mailservers, but due to lack of time and the wonderfulness of Google Apps, and let google handle my email.

So I use my domain, but I use Google on the technical side.
If I were a spammer the first thing I'd do to my database is removing the "+something" part in each gmail address.
Google has 23,000 employees and ~$10B in yearly operating income. I'm pretty sure they could stay ahead of the bad guys if they wanted to.

EDIT: Additionally, it is hard to game pagerank rapidly because the rest of the web needs to link to your site. So, even if you switch your knock-off wikipedia site to a new domain, it would take weeks/months to rise through the rankings. I'm pretty sure it would only take a few employees (at most) to stay ahead of these huge spam sites.
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Not a good solution if you dislike stomping on your distro's package management.
GMail doesn't rely solely on algorithms, but also on learning from users' flagging of spam. The only problem is that sometimes it has false positives.

I would be happy if Google provided an "is spam" button that filtered the content only for me (i.e. without consequences to other users).
For the newsletter I run I see almost 10% of subscribers doing just that and another 6% using custom emails.
You bring up a good point, importance is a human attribution to information, and a lot of people are either stupid or self-important. Impartial judgement is important, but NPR's music segments demonstrate that trending topics are middling and not truly important.

If the curator is strictly online popularity, news sites invariably turn into people magazine. You need some high-and-mighty news nerd to determine what's truly important. Sure, the curator's occasionally wrong or late, but it's a lot better than pointless water-cooler talk.
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Congrats John! Thanks a lot for writing about your experience. It's good to see a hard-earned success.
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Also, gold is tax-disadvantaged.
Or add a period in the middle of your email, e.g. em.ail@gmail.com. I usually do that when signing up for accounts online, then have all mail coming to a tweaked address autosorted into a folder...
Don't Google engineers actually use Google? They shouldn't really need flags to become aware of this sort of thing.
It's a publicly traded company, but yes, "private" if you mean "not controlled by a government"
Hm well, I do use my distro's (ubuntu) default package manager if I'm not doing rails dev (sudo apt-get install ruby rake) but I need to easily switch between ruby versions and rails versions sometimes, so rvm makes my life easier. It lets me create "gemsets" -- it's not that I don't appreciate the package being in the repos or something :) Honestly I don't see the big deal. It's possible that a person might use the repo packages sometimes, and rvm other times. From a purely practical point of view, it seems okay.

Though, if I was able to do that with the distro's packages that'd be cool too.
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Just in case someone uses this as installation instructions, there's a (small but important) missing step. After installing via bash and before installing any rubies, add this to your shell's startup file:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

Then open a new shell and check the output of `type rvm | head -1`. It should return "rvm is a function".

Maybe more importantly, run `rvm notes` before installing any rubies. Many operating systems will need to install various development packages first. `rvm notes` will tell you what you are likely to need for your OS.

http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/
Thanks for the downvotes. What's wrong with my observation?
I've noticed that in the US, the term "liberal" carries a high level of baggage, and seems to elicit reactions from all sides. I suppose that this could be due to the influence of right-of-centre talk radio, where the term seems to be particularly demonized.

Here in Canada, "Liberal" is a major political party, as is "Conservative". With that said, we have several other parties in Parliament, as well.
That's why I was so glad when my college decided to "Go Google". Most college email systems setup for students that I've experienced are slow and awful...
Strangely enough, and with all the anti-google hype lately, this really makes me want to ditch google for web searches (Gmail is harder to leave...)
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well, yeah, that's how the algorithms work... by using a training dataset where a human actually says "is spam."

And as for the "is spam" button... a given email isn't automatically added to the spam training dataset the minute 1 guy hits the spam button. it goes automatically into YOUR spam folder but not automatically into the training dataset. That takes many "votes" from many users.
I never underestimate the value of repeating well-known errors as a learning experience. Sometimes, a useful way to sink a new concept in is to address the original problem by yourself in the wrong way, and later apply the right techniques that were developed in order to solve it better. Design patterns come to mind.
I concur. Spam is only a "solved" problem on services like Google Mail if you consider a high rate of false positive detections to be a solution. I suspect this is one reason that many of my friends now use Facebook as their default messaging system -- which is a pain for those of us who don't want to use Facebook, and even more so if we send our e-mails from a personal domain that tends to get arbitrarily flagged as junk by services like Google Mail and Hotmail the first time we write to each friend.
$1.50/user/year? That's what CPC was for my most recent Facebook ad campaign.
I also (same book lineup as you and 4 hour week, Godin stuff, those other bad books from Gladwell, yes all of them, I still like Black Swan) came to the conclusion those hype cycle blogosphere books are not for me and only distract.
Wow. Not a great article, but not a bad overview of the subject!
"Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield."

Sounds like a case of Innovator's Dilemma.
So far they don't, though--presumably because it's rare enough that they don't care.
I understand on the API issue, I've looked through that sort of thing too. The problem with that is if you invent any sort of beer site, you automagically have to try and compete with the big boys.

The usage problem I'm seeing is that if I search 'beer louisville ky', I get pubcrawler (which does put location first, but for argument is a horrible website) followed by all of my local pubs. If I were to search for 'hoptimus' which is a very likely query after visiting one of our local pubs, I get BA & RB followed by the pub's website. What use cases do you have that somebody would find your site useful over Google? Remember: these people have to be actively looking for pubs in the area already or they wouldn't have been interested in your page to begin with.

To me, you have many fronts of competition all better stocked with information here. You need more compelling reasons for use than just location information. One thought I've had (not to give away my own million dollar ideas) is crowd sourced beer stock information. Knowing where I can find that last bottle of Lucky Bastard would be pretty awesome. Not that I'd ever voluntarily fill in information to help other people find rare beers I want to buy on my next paycheck! ;)
From the article... I'm assuming you've understood all the issues that led to the successful intrusion in the first place before you even start this section. I don't want to overstate the case but if you haven't done that first then you really do need to. Sorry.

It would be better if you learned to read your logs on a regular basis, to know what the baseline activities and patterns for your servers look like, configured locally-appropriate log settings for your environment (and quite possibly with more detailed settings than the logging defaults), and to then look for oddities or patterns or connections or unusual events on a daily or weekly basis, or unusual logins, or whatever particular hole(s) the attackers have exercised.

Then you look for file system modifications or unexpected server activity patterns, etc. And match these against the log activity and firewall traffic.

Posting everything from your logs is going to drown folks in data. And may well end up exposing more about your security configuration than you had intended.

Follow what the article suggests here... What steps can you take to reduce the probability of an attack being successful?

Going backwards to where a server configuration might be defensible and debuggable and recoverable. Look to a move to certificate-based authentication (or passphrases and certificates) and away from traditional passwords, to VPNs rather than open protocols, to sftp and away from ftp, to locked-down web and service directories for services rather than writable directories, to various options with firewall blocks or zen-based or other blacklists combined with tools such as mod_security, to staying current on your software versions, to configuring defenses in depth against common attacks, and to getting your logs where you want it, and the one that tends to get lost...

You want... Good backups of your data.

And preferably with some of these backup copies entirely disconnected from the security domain of your server. Push-based copies or pull-based copies involving remote hosts, for instance.
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I understand the desire to stick with your distro's package management where you can (especially if you use Debian or a Debian-derived distro. APT rocks.)

However "stomping on your distro's package management" is not a fair description of what rvm does nor how it works. rvm is very well crafted to stay completely out of the way of a package manager like APT. If you use rvm normally, nothing is installed at the system level (e.g. /usr/local), much less into /usr/bin (or somewhere APT expects to manage). Everything is sandboxed in $HOME/.rvm/ nice and clean. You can remove it at simply as `rm -rf $HOME/.rvm` and a quick edit of your shell's start-up files. APT is in no way "stomped".
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The OP is referring to a well publicized controversy about the role of GS in the financial crisis and its influence over government decisions. Here's a good article summarizing common knowledge about GS: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american...
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Good explanations of privacy issue using Google for the neophyte. Thanks for this, I'll use this link when I tell someone about the online privacy stuff.
I think he's saying that the designer should've started off with understanding why the components of the modern bicycle exist in their current form, in order to more effectively find ways to truly improve them.
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I'm suggesting GS would buy FB stock even if FB was loosing billions every year and there was no hope for future profits. In the same way GS and company are spending who knows how much on political campaigns and lobbing.
I think it's some valid info here, and it's certainly worth being wary of the info Google collects, but I also sense a little bit of FUD here. The whole "...which can often uniquely identify you" makes me feel like this is playing on fear a little too much. It's not like that "big ebony booty" search is going to come up in a job interview any time soon guys.
Not in Japan, where my clients still insisted on them, on new sites, in 2010. And would then beg me to start it from a decently high number ..
I spent 2 days last week hunting a bizarre bug that turned out to be ultimately due to a type ambiguity in how JDBC maps Java types to Oracle types. Admittedly this is not a language issue (well, it is on a deeper level), but it's the same sort of problem.

I don't know how much time I've lost in Java to checking, catching, and debugging stupid RuntimeExceptions that would easily be fixed by having a good type system, or writing idiotic boilerplate design patterns that you simply would not have to write if you had a good type system (or were using Clojure).

No language in the world will save you from having to think about your program's desired behavior, but that doesn't mean we should make it hard on ourselves to even implement the behavior we think we want.
> I gave the book to Mary. => Mary has the book.

The poster says the above is exact inference. I beg to disagree. The inference is plausible but not exact. How do we know that Mary has not given the book to someone else, or even how do we know that Mary hasn't eaten the book for dinner? We humans know that books are not tasty, but how would a machine know that if we don't tell it?

Of course we need a plausibility model. My point is only that exact inferences are extremely rare, and that almost all inferences we make on daily basis are plausibility inferences based on an extremely comprehensive model of the world.
You know what? I'm one of those people that can probably say "who cares", but I think I'm going to try out DuckDuckGo over the upcoming week.
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ha, my Sager 8xxx was a great laptop and lasted quite a while. Would you like to buy it for parts? When it died I switched to a thinkpad t42 from 2004 that I bought for $100.
You appear to be confusing "Turing complete" and the "Turing test". These two concepts are only related by the man which proposed them. They are quite separate classes of concept.
Why not simply use https://encrypted.google.com with http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?
Agreed. Amazon reviews are also my first product research tool.
Screw simplicity.
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PhpMyAdmin is a really great tool.
It's also a really great tool with a history of exceptionally serious security issues.

If you run PhpMyAdmin on an Internet-accessible server please please please add some security above and beyond what the application provides.

1) Use web-server based IP-address based restrictions to allow/deny connections only from trusted hosts.

2) Please run it over HTTPS, as it passes mysql passwords around plaintext when you use cookie or www-auth authentication.

3) Use an additional .htaccess in front of PhpMyAdmin's basic www-auth.

4) Do not host it at /phpmyadmin in your docroot.

5) Maybe consider running it only on a virtualhost listening on a different port.
One more small note: this isn't some magic you need to learn, it spits it out when you install it.
That sounds an awful lot like yahoo and aol's homepage ad deals.
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As someone who grew up hyper conservative and has been becoming liberalized ever since - I can't help thinking this study is off. Did my brain structure really change, or was I a lib-brainer the whole time?
Fair enough and a good point. I hang out in #rvm on irc though, and a reasonable number of people manage not to read the notes the installer spits out (or the docs online, which are excellent). But it's a good point, nonetheless.
I switched definitely to duckduckgo one month ago and I'm happy about it. I find that for us, tech-oriented people, it provides very pertinent result pages, plus it is fast enough, and you can always !google or !wikipedia or else if not satisfied... Its recall is perhaps less than Google, but the smart handling of "spam" gives it a really nice precision. Never went on page 2!
Isn't your browser, computer info, ip address sent to every site you visit? Google isn't doing that, they're just adding the search terms you used to get there. This doesn't change any of the ad stuff at all, which would still all be true when searching from duckduckgo. It's very misleading.
Its more general wisdom from his eassys on his website. I find it timeless. I go back and read it every two or three years and enjoy it thoroughly.
You can also

rvm implode

or

rvm seppuku

and it'll remove itself. Which I always found to be particularly funny.
That's why I would be happy with a personal spam filter: training by users' votes can be gamed, and producing false positives can take legitimate websites out of business.

I see there are some browser plugins floating around: I'm not happy with those because I use multiple workstations, and because hacking around a product's deficiencies is not "voting with my wallet".
Hacker mentality is largely gaming systems, so Google should indeed change the rules.
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MongoHQ's got one very cool thing coming I saw mentioned in their support system - dedicated plans. That's a pretty significant plus if you really need to scale.
Yeah, there's a reason why RTFM became a saying...

I wasn't trying to criticize, I just wanted to point it out before someone said 'good luck figuring that one out.'
How would that solve the problems listed in the original link?