skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll accept anything, but I'll give more credence to some sources than others.

But this seems backward. If there is no evidence that Stuxnet was effective at significantly delaying Iranian production, then people should stop saying that there is. My willingness to accept evidence really shouldn't have anything to do with it.
Swiss whistleblower hands bank data to WikiLeaks
Well, I take it that /he's/ promising not to spam. The same that I can promise that no crimes will happen in my home- it's only as good as long as it's _my_ home, not someone else's, and I can reasonably manage things.

Even with a friendly-reading T&C he'd be free to break it any time, as would any future purchaser. I'm not a laywer but I'd believe T&Cs exist more to protect a site than its users, presenting the general terms and conditions the users can expect a site to be presented under, not a guarantee of of the same.
A closer look at expression closures
He's challenging the near-hagiographic conventional wisdom that Stuxnet's sophistication is a clear sign of its intelligence lab origins.

I thought this conventional wisdom was based on the success of stuxnet, once delivered, at having the desired effect on the centrifuge. The article appears to be based on techniques used in delivery of the payload, not the payload itself.
cassandra is just used for inbox search, and they stated recently that they were moving away from it.
There is one security difference. POST doesn't leave the data in the URL bar at the top of the browser. I sure would rather a site submit my credit card via POST than via GET.
Correct. I've clarified what I meant in a comment below. The dodging is more subtle than than the number of shareholders. The hype appears to be what did them in.
I usually answer this question with a redirect into what I'm currently really interested in. It leaves most people a little disoriented but the conversation flows on and I don't have to explain everything in detail.
From the author's text:
> My app has a sharing feature: if you like the app, you can email your friends about it.

Unless your software product has something similar (and is also priced low, and is also installed via something like an app store: and hence is one-click away), I don't think piracy will help you much. At least it does not to the s/w authors who claim a persistent 30-80% drop in sales the day the crack comes out.
Sorry Steve Jobs, Wallstreet hates uncertainty
And you keep them even after they fall from Twitter search or the user timeline right, so eventually you'll be able to find tweets that are otherwise unreachable right?
Firefox has crazy memory leaks.

Proof? This was the case with Firefox 2 but now it just seems like this is part of their reputation and is not necessarily grounded in fact.
How to Configure IPv6 On Your Home Network Using an AirPort or Time Capsule
Universal, Sony get a clue with "on air, on sale" policy
didn't hear back from you?
I'm a sophomore CS major in college now. I've had several interviews for summer internships with some big name companies (i.e Facebook, Amazon, etc.). Is there a large discrepancy in sophomore->junior interns compared to junior->senior interns? Thanks for the advice though!
Detailing the expected hardware changes for the iPad and iPhone
I've been working on a combinatoric approach with Fexl, "compiling" all the way down to my two turtles S and C, e.g.:

http://fexl.com/blog/9

I'm also relying on two higher-level combinators L and R to reduce the size of the combinatorial forms, e.g.:

http://fexl.com/blog/10

The bottom line is that the entire Fexl parser is defined in terms of the two primitive combinators S and C.
Getting From Zero to Rails on Ubuntu
You may be taking this to an extreme. Besides, bugs aren't so bad if you can fix them fast.
It would be better to add cursor:pointer; to a#mk2_gs selector.
The common thought experiment goes something along the lines of this:

Replace a single neuron in the brain with an artificial one. Every time you go out drinking you lose plenty more cells, so clearly "you" are still "you". Now do another, and another, and another. At no point do you "break the pattern", but eventually you're left with a completely virtualized mind. Copying the pattern and destroying the original generally counts as "breaking the pattern", which is what you are describing.

It's not really a new topic, but is still debated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
If I was a digital agency/consultancy, I'd snap this up. I think it would be fairly easy to fork and customize for big brands that want to do Facebook promotions, reviews, focus groups, etc.

"Tell us your 3 favorite items at Applebee's ..."

"Thanks for trying the new filet mignon chalupa at Taco Bell. Describe it in 3 words ... "

"What 3 things are most important when choosing your next car? ..."

(I'm sure someone more creative could do better, but you get the idea)
Parts of it have been closed for at least months - last time I went there wasn't much to see and the staff told us they were renovating.
Where are these reports? I haven't seen them in any of the more, ah, reputable media, but I may have missed them.
Need is infinite. All markets already exist and successful start ups just create products and services that capitalize on novel approaches to old problems. There are no blue oceans.
Aligning text with Tabular.vim
Maybe governments have easier ways, but it sure seems like a good idea to have an employee working for you at facebook.
I suppose it depends on the application. For signup spam, the expected return is definitely higher than the current cost. And unfortunately, it's also on a website's critical path, so making signing up more annoying is strongly against the best interests of a company.

In other words, it's a pretty hard problem.
Yeah, one of the things that I'm still trying to figure out is the exact amount of visual feedback that hovered elements should have... too much is gaudy, too little is not feedback-y enough. That button fell into the latter category, but I haven't had the time to rework it. Thanks for dropping me a note :)
@astrodust - Perhaps the @ sign? :-)

I actually just looked up hash tags on Wikipedia, and was surprised to see that the asterisk is starting to be used to give out "stars" and ratings to items:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)#Star_tags

So I guess so far, microblogging has appropriated at least four symbols: @, #, $ and *. That leaves: !, %, ^, &, and ().
The two product are not related. Every VC/Angel so far has asked about that topic. Thanks for reading the post!
I'm asking because it's unlikely http://presstv.ir is going host an article saying that Iran's ability to obtain a nuclear bomb has been delayed.

Mossad is saying that Iran doesn't possess the capability to build a nuclear bomb before 2015 and it says attacking Iran would be unwise [1]. Can you think of any reason why they would be saying this unless they believed it to be true?

[1. http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/01/07/132525.html]
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Well, here's why distributed is better than centralized:

You're working on something in SVN. You've made progress that you'd hate to lose, but it's not great yet. Which do you do?

1) Don't commit until it's great. This prevents bugs from hurting your colleagues, but puts you at risk of losing work or being unable to undo mistakes - in other words, it's just like not having version control.

2) Commit a lot. Opposite problem - your teammates get your bugs.

Distributed version control lets you have both benefits: commit locally as often as you want, and push it up when it's good.

(I think I stole this explanation from Joel Spolsky. Whoever said it, it was what made me realize I should learn a distributed VCS.)

P.S. If your answer to the dilemma above was "use a branch until you're ready," well, OK, but branching in SVN is painful and slow, requiring making a copy of every file in the repo.
Six swombat Headlines You Must Know.
Know Your RAM
Tagmask now supports RSS of your personal feeds
re #2: Just because someone has not yet published anything damaging does not mean they don't have damaging information that could be published at anytime. It is not unreasonable that parties at risk of being damaged could preemptive actions to discredit.
I keep all the tweets. So the answer is Yes, you'll be able to find tweets that twitter's search does not let you find.
Is it possible to show the landing page on a user's first visit, then have a minor popup for returning users? That would make the most sense to me.
Some people from here asked me about RSS on Tagmask so I decided submit the link to news.
Funny how this article has 33 main bullets points out of which 13 are or contain corrections.
5 Desk Exercises for Your Busy Office Life
Good ideas. Some brands and celebrities have a threewords.me with cool results, like Smashing Magazine: http://threewords.me/smashingmag

Also celebrities (thanks to @Mazy) like Young Money's Lil Twist - http://threewords.me/liltwist

I also did a test for using sentiment analysis as a monetization point, using the Amazon Kindle (question was, "What do you think of the Amazon Kindle?") which was displayed on top of the dashboard for all users, and it got something like 7,000 responses. The responses weren't amazing, but it is possible to improve them. There was zero targeting on whether or not the "sponsored listing" was displayed, whereas Smashing Mag's results are clean since the only people submitting words are people that know what Smashing Magazine is.
Ah, great point. I'll have to do that.
I got into tech via the security industry, so all my experience dates back to 10+ years ago when I left it. Since then I have only kept up with the more mainstream stories and the odd blog post.

I did make a sweeping generalization, and if it seems like I am holding a grudge it is probably because I am. I went through a lot of bad issues and arguments through the process of publishing articles, advisories, exploits etc. Enough to turn me (and many others) off for good.

I don't doubt that there are very good people out there in the netsec space, it just seems that every time a story floats up onto my radar it reminds me of the same issues we dealt with all that time ago (ie. pointless arguments, point-counter-point, one-upmanship, eliteness etc.). I recognized the template of that post pretty quickly, and it simply isn't constructive.

For all I know Nate could be awesome, but as somebody who only knows of him through the paragraphs I just read he fits the old stereotype that I am familiar with pretty well. But outside of the first line, the rest of what I wrote was more about that old template of how subjects, even as big and awesome as Stuxnet, are dealt with and written off by some in the sec industry.
SproutCore - Our journey with SC.GridView and insertionOrientation
An expertly constructed industrial sabotage malware might have taken more steps to obscure itself simply so that it could leave the same avenue of attack open to itself in the future, perhaps at a different target. That alone seems argue against this being the handiwork of the "best & brightest" in the US intelligence community.
I don't really see the mystery (unless you're suggesting that he never did win the tournament, which seems very unlikely). It'd be surprising if he did remember the exact strategy 30 years after the fact.

The Eurisko/Traveller story has never made sense to me psychologically though. People who are hardcore enough to enter a tournament for a very math-heavy game have probably already spent ages hacking the system, twisting it into an unrecognizable shape. It should have been very unlikely for these loopholes to have first been found by a program years later.
I'm asking because it's unlikely http://presstv.ir is going host an article saying that Iran's ability to obtain a nuclear bomb has been delayed.

True, but that doesn't mean we should accept every claim as true.

Can you think of any reason why they would be saying this unless they believed it to be true?

What? This doesn't tell us anything about the effectiveness of Stuxnet. Even if they did, intelligence services have a nasty habit of exaggerating their own effectiveness, so I'd find it more credible if that assessment came from another Israeli government organization or another nation's intelligence service altogether.
I got head hunted almost every day in 1999-2000. I said no to every single one. There was just this slimy vibe in the air and I knew I didn't want to be involved. I don't want to be involved this time around either.

So I've started my own company instead.
In addition to tzs' comment above, POST parameters do not get logged by the web server either (default Apache logging, etc), unless you're using a module like mod_security to log POST data.

Besides, don't use GET for non-idempotent requests (those which change state). That's just webapp development 101.

Edited for clarity.
Yes, it definitely isn't literal. I think it's more of a tongue and cheek post.
Xbox 360 jumps into lead in U.S. console software revenue in 2010
"I suspect his presence is vastly less important. The design team with Ives, operation team with Cook, etc. know what's making things work. He's been "absent" a lot in the last few years, yet it's been the strongest period for the company - clearly, something works when he's not at his desk."

Jobs recruits great people, and provides the right ingredients to enable them to work at their best. And he has his own very prescient ideas, as well.

When Jobs leaves, Apple will do fine... for a while. Then one of the people he recruited will leave, then another, and eventually Apple will revert to the mean, where it is no different from another company. Apple's products will become less special, and it's stock price will drop.

There is no reason whatsoever to make any other prediction. Jobs is at the heart of why Apple is what it is. He is unique. It's not a coincidence that the same person had the vision, smarts, and grit to be able to successfully found Apple, and also had what it took to bring it back from the dead after a succession of other CEO's failed.

Or, let's say... he may not be unique, but the odds that Apple will end up with a similar person at its center after Jobs leaves are low.

Again, it will do fine for a few years. But I wouldn't make a long-term bet on it after that.
I routinely leave my browser open for days on end and simply cycle through tabs, closing and opening new ones as needed, with usually ~10 open at a given time. I, too, noticed that firefox was eating up about half a gig of ram even when it wasn't doing anything, didn't have any youtube tabs open, etc. It got to the point where I would have to close firefox and restart after a day or two. Chrome fixed that. Now, I just use firefox with the modify headers extension to watch domain-specific video, and have no plans to go back.
The CEO is also the top salesman of the company. In many companies, the CEO doesn't actually run the company - he's the face of the company and goes out doing sales. That can be incredibly important.

I think there's little doubt that Jobs is the top salesman of Apple.
I'm genuinely curious why you suggest the growth curve on this is exponential at this point? I saw this thread on HN when he originally posted it, and while it wasn't something I would personally be interested in I imagined it might fit a certain demographic. The question for me was always the staying power with a quick hit site like this.

Now having seen a wider window of stats on the site from quantcast, all arrows are pointing down and to the right. I agree that he's smart to try to sell it, but only because the longer he holds onto it the less opportunity there will be to capitalize on the original spike.
Get laid as much as possible.
That's a nice-sounding narrative, but no assessment of Stuxnet indicates that it foreclosed on Iran's nuclear capability, and if it actually is an intelligence service attack on a foreign industrial process, the fact that it's been analyzed in the New York Times seems to suggest that it wasn't very competently done.

A big part of Nate's point in this article is that the virus and DRM communities have known for over a decade how to take programs like this and make them hard to analyze. Nate is pointing out that nothing like that seems to have been done here.

Note that Nate was a key contributor to the as-yet-unbroken† Blu-Ray BD+ DRM scheme, which he worked on in his last couple years at Paul Kocher's infamous Cryptography Research. Here he is going out of his way to cite well known, public sources for methods that would have allowed an intelligence agency to carry out this attack without broadcasting to the world "AIR GAP ALL YOUR NUCLEAR FACILITIES IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL LOSE YOUR CENTRIFUGES". He's not even suggesting that the authors needed to be world-class content protection experts; only that they would have benefited greatly from a book you can get off the shelf at Barnes and Noble.

The C.W. on Hacker News might be that it makes sense for Iran's enemies to brag about destroying centrifuges without a costly military intervention. But real intelligence services don't brag, if only because they'd like to be able to repeat the same trick against Myanmar or Belarus or Syria or whoever the next proliferation threat is.

† BD+ is interesting because it was designed to be broken easily and then renewed easily; there are numerous individual disk breaks, but so far as I know no break against the whole BD+ scheme that would enable a bypass of any studio update. BD+ may be the first such renewable content protection scheme ever deployed.
The point of this share was to show how Pageforest (my project) can be used to create a full web-app with very little code.

Pageforest is still a work in progress, but I'd love to get more feedback on it if you'd like to try building your own apps on the platform.
Does Title Length Matter?
BankSimple: The Buck Stops Here
Ask HN:Review My Startup Social Genie
An app that grants your wishes relying on your Social Network.<p>Any feedback would be appreciated.<p>http://apps.facebook.com/socialgenie/splash.aspx<p>Thanks
Some people also view the windows as an invitation to throw the stones in, claiming they are too fragile to be of any protection anyway.

Next time you buy a DRM-ed book from Amazon.com, or watch a film you can not make a copy of, you can contemplate that the protection there is much better than in some Mac app.

Would that make you happier as a user ?

The way to solve this problem is to spend more time on adding more features into the frequently released newer versions of software. Cracking all the same basic reg code would get boring for a few-dollar app.
Along these lines, where could I get a design critiqued so that I could avoid comments like this about my own site?
Is there an eclipse plugin for that? I want it!
I'm pumping up some prodigy and cracking some government databases later tonight it'll be perfect for that.
Link http://apps.facebook.com/socialgenie/splash.aspx
eg "Let's pickle!"?
That alone seems argue against this being the handiwork of the "best & brightest" in the US intelligence community.

Noob question: is it widely believed in the security community that the US intelligence community has lots of 'the best and the brightest' when it comes malware construction?

I only ask because I recall a bit of Jane Mayer's book that explained that post-9/11, the CIA didn't have any professional interrogators on staff because they weren't in the business of holding prisoners in custody to interrogate. Just curious if a similar phenomena might be at work.
Am I the only person who doesn't keep twitter open constantly?
BackType Analysis of the Tunisia Twitter Trend
more than a week, actually...
This doesn't add up. Russian scientists are extremely concerned about Iran's lax attitude towards nuclear safety issues (note plural). Against this backdrop we're supposed to be able to read tea leaves from a captured virus and determine the level of damage it did to a shoddily-operated highly-secret massively-complicated nuclear plant?
Sure, but the otherwise excellent OP isn't about that. It's about building higher level concepts out of the lambda calculus. Nothing to do with Turing machines.

Turing machines and lambda calculus are both foundational languages on top of which those higher level concepts can be constructed.

How to translate back and forth from Turing machine to lambda calculus is something I really want to understand actually. I've been meaning to sit down and figure it out but haven't done it yet.
I don't see how it could be interpreted in any other way. He referred to what is probably the most successful hack in history as 'embarrassing' without any real argument to back up his claim.

If Stuxnet fizzled out quickly, didn't work and exposed who was behind it, then I imagine it being an 'embarrassment' (in the way that the Dubai assassination could be referred to as an embarrassment). That situation could have called for a post outlining 'they did this part wrong, they could have tried this' (in the same way Schneier wrote about Dubai)

But the fact that Stuxnet was a blazing success, took years (unheard of) to be captured, months to be analyzed and totally broke new ground that everybody (lest the author of the post) didn't understand five months ago, nullifies all of the 20-20 hindsight theoretical feature improvement arguments made in the post.
As you said, Facebook has 500+M users, among those you'll find people annoyed by bugs and willing to: "to simply drop the service altogether and invest my time elsewhere."

But obviously those users are a tiny minority.

I challenge your conclusion that they should get their priority straight: if their goal is to keep growing at current rate as you seem to suggest, then they probably shouldn't change a damn thing, because they are darn good at it.
Zoombu (Seedcamp 08) acquired by SkyScanner
NSA is a hiring pipeline for software security. Some very, very talented exploit developers have come out of NSA.
For development/testing purpose, updated schema is enough; up-to-date data is not required.
Goldman is expert at following the letter of the law while violating the spirit of the law. They have enough expertise and talent at their disposal to know exactly where the line is and take advantage of it's placement.
Well, that's more than just a shell.
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Draft John Sculley?
Meh, decoding compiled C code is about just as easy for me. I wouldn't worry about it until it becomes a serious problem. The people who crack many apps in the scene are pretty decent at it and this will not slow them down.

Edit: Actually, they're not very good at it, but this still won't slow them down much.
That statement is extremely location-dependent.
Was Your Decision to Read This Conscious?
I understand the need for good typography and design and the importance of readability. I agree that they are important factors in web design.

But really? Unreadable? The typeface isn't THAT bad, nor is the website design THAT horrible.
When confronted with facts, you editorialize based on unsourced or anonymously sourced narrative journalism accounts in the mainstream press. Meanwhile, the points you make aren't even incompatible with his analysis.

Did you actually read the article, or are you too upset by the suggestion that Stuxnet was inexpertly constructed?
The challenge then is to write a script that automates the cracking.
Either I'm completely misunderstanding your grammar, or you don't understand what idempotent means... idempotent and state-changing are almost opposites.
The people making these predictions have great interest in making them false. It's quite possible the ETA keeps getting pushed back exactly because of things like Stuxnet.
It's a great concept. Question - why not just use CouchDB? We've been doing similar app platform stuff with it for years. Check out this wiki that is hosted directly out of CouchDB, with no other server side component: http://couchapp.org
It sounds like they've institutionalized the herding of cats as a project management system.