skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hans Reiser is above and beyond all a fucking psychopath. It is obvious to me that the cloning story is just a ploy for him to make some money. It seems ridiculous at first glance, but it has a chance of working.

You see Hans knows very well that he had a huge groups of fans and supporters and that those supporters were not very smart and supported him even after the evidence against him got more and more obvious and incontrovertible. I remember that even after he led the police to her body there were huge discussions on slashdot and some people were still talking about how he was still somehow unfairly treated by the justice system and Nina somehow brought this about on herself.

Psychopaths are very adept at using people, and I bet Hans just feels that there still are some people he can use out there. The problem is that after he showed her body to the police even his most ardent fans would have to admit that he killed her.

So he comes up with this story that he wants to clone her to give her the happy childhood that she missed. (Notice that he did not say that he wanted to give her her adulthood which she missed because he killed her).

Obviously a smart and practical person like him knows that this will not work. Even if cloning were possible, you would create a different person. It would be a different person with the same DNA but a different person nevertheless.

So yes, he is just a psychopath that wants to get another bunch of money from the fools that used to believe him.
I'm not all that familiar with the guy or the case, but the way it reads to me is that he's implicitly saying there's no way she would've ended up with someone like him if she'd had a good childhood. As Vonnegut would say, he is a broken thinking machine, so it's difficult to ascribe motivation to any of his actions, but I do get that sense.
I wonder what this kind of thing is called?

Bounty Hunter? Mercenary? Vigilante? Somehow, none of those labels really seem to fit quite right. Is this sort of thing something new?
Just how long do you think you can target someones eyes in a moving car? I am not saying a pilot or driver is not going to notice, but to cause actual harm would be really hard.
The admin backend should simply search any newly-installed theme or plugin file for hard-coded URLs, and then display them to the user prior to activation. And throw a huge red flag if it encounters any base64 obfuscation.
STEP 1:

Make every theme/plugin author create a private key to sign their releases. Their public key will be available on their profile page and via API. Wordpress will notify you if the public key for an author has changed or if a release signature doesn't match the public key.

Why is this not done?

(Also in other software that uses plugins and is updated easily over the internet.)
No, you misread me. I say "Some of these problems are inherent to PHP" but I'm pretty clear that the responsibility for WordPress rests with the team that creates WordPress, regardless of what language they chose. If they chose Python or Ruby or Java or ASP, they would still have the same responsibility. I linked to a conversation between Matt Mullenweg and Sam Ruby in which Mullenweg tries to blame certain flaws on PHP. I then quote Sam Ruby's reply, which I like a great deal:

"Yes, you can argue that they brought this upon themselves; but it is worth noting that at this point you are along for the ride. When I’m in similar circumstances, I tend to consider the karma implications of cursing the driver."

That puts the responsibility where it belongs.
What should Larry Page focus on now that he is CEO of Google?
Where is the signature grey shirt?
A theoretical paper which shows how under certain mathematical definitions the title statement is true. I was hoping for some real-world ideas of how to measure "diverse" and "problem solver" and/or experimental data to back it up.
Hooks? You mean method overriding.

Hook as a term is more used in a callback context.
The key here isn't a screening process for themes and plugins available through a WordPress website. The themes which have the back doors are typically pirated versions of paid-for themes which are never going to get into a WordPress app store. People are always going to pirate themes, people are always going to install themes from dodgy sources when they are free.
> I think of it in these terms: If you're implementing a key for a std::map, you have to implement operator<, which in turn implies that std::map is tree-based.

Not necessarily. For example a skip list can satisfy the same requirements but it is not a tree
numbers.map &:to_s could give different values in the same code—even though its argument doesn’t change

It's a family of functions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_family
How I almost killed Facebook
Terence McKenna's Last Trip
Well, I suppose I meant "real computers that support the feature of not having Adobe Flash installed", but PPC Linux is one I've used that comes to mind. I'm sure there are ARM-powered ones for which that's also true.
I don't know about Hans, but a 5 paragraph, 300 word rant about him and his "evil plot" in a HN post, seems a little kooky to me too.
Let's see:

1) Anything linked outside of the domain.
2) Anything not HTML/CSS/image/Wordpress tag/Javascript libraries
3) Anything encrypted.

Let me know if I missed anything.
If you think of what a company does to explore & exploit, you might characterize CEOs as being stronger in one or another.

I don't think you can say that Google under Schimdt has been weak in the explore department. Operating systems, web based office, video maps. BTW, I think every one of them can eventually be tied profitably to their core business.

Exploit, on the other hand, has been very effective but not really all that creative. If I was a google shareholder I would want to see them try to focus on the glue that ties these new services to their main business.

Google's customers are a massive asset. One that I think is hard for technical people to understand unless they spend some time working with them. Salt of the earth businesses. Electricians, cleaners, removalists, doctors, lawyers. These guys pay sums that would have been thought impossible to extract from small businesses. They pay, and they are hungry for more stock. Then, they have a massive ecosystem of consultants who can sell Google services to them and make them work for them.

All they have to do is find ways to grow the stock. That's why I think the Groupon interest is a step in the right direction. They don't need to go out and hussle to find businesses for it. They have them in bulk.
The URL seems weird at first, but Paul created mailinator, it's as permanent a URL to him as random-joes-domain.com is for Random Joe.

http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2008/03/writing-java-multithrea...
The computer vision aspects to the Kinect (and there are a lot, and very well done), were headed up by Andrew Blake at MS Research Cambridge, who's one of the foremost vision scientists in the world.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ablake/

Most recently they have built the machine learning technology inside the Xbox Kinect human motion tracking system.
In related news, ex-spy who runs his own private c.i.a. no longer has any business due to being featured in the NYT.
That's largely not going to make a difference. You can already mostly trust themes and plugins listed on the WordPress.org website. The themes with the bad code are the ones available elsewhere, and quite often are pirated versions of commercially available themes.
Eh, I would just limit the front process to coroutines accepting incoming connections and accepting complete responses from remote procedure calls and use neither threads nor polling. Launch a lot of worker processes to divide and conquer all the actual work, restart some on the other end of a TCP/IP connection if scaling is necessary. But that's my preference.
In one VC funded company I saw three CEO transitions: Founder CEO -> Outside CEO #1 -> Outside CEO #2.

The first transition, Founder CEO -> Outside CEO #1 was very smooth. The outside CEO has a three time CEO who had run both very small and very large companies. He had experience, passion, compassion and understood what it took to connect with people and customers. He could sell most anything.

The company took off under him. He was able to reign in finances and inspired people to work hard and get things done. We started to dominate our market and our tech was the best in the industry. In about 2.5 years we had near zero voluntary attrition and we built a great team.

Outside CEO #1 left for personal reasons and everyone thought Founder CEO might step up and become the CEO again. He didn't and we hired Outside CEO #2 instead (Full disclosure, I was involved in the process of hiring outside CEO #2. I preferred another candidate but didn't have senior voice in the matter).

Outside CEO #2 was a disaster. We had become accustomed to transparency at the highest level in the company and we got less and less until we got none from OCEO#2. He also hired people he knew for senior positions in the company without having those people interview for their positions (He actually had two people hired before he even started....he had two people displaced from their current roles for these two individuals). Those people started to hire people they knew without interview process and the cycle perpetuated.

Voluntary attrition of old/founding employees skyrocketed from 0% over 2.5 years to 60% in 10 months. Sales slowed, current customers were not happy with latest revisions of product and changes in customer engagements. We started to bleed money and needed to take a down round and then a D round of funding at a much lower evaluation. Our competitors started to fly by us as they started to do things we needed to do, knew we needed to do and had tried to do but were shot down for not being "strategic" by OCEO#2 and his new executive team.

18 months later the company is still in business but has lost all employees that were pre OCEO#2. Market has passed company by. Board is investigating what has happened and why attrition is so high but I fear it is too late (I say fear b/c I still have stock).

So many lessons learned from this experience. I feel I know so much more for having gone through this experience, both the highs and the lows. I feel for the Founding CEO, but he could take it back at any moment, and I hope he does. He will have a much harder time rebuilding the company, but he will also have lower expectations as OCEO#2 is such a disaster nearly anyone would be better.
You mean like the exploit scanner as linked to from the source article? Make that part of core WordPress and scan for other obfuscation techniques too and you're well on the way to improving things.
> Rails looks for files in specific locations to execute code, not arbitrary encoded strings.

The examples from this article are all essentially malicious third-party code. No language will save you from that.
This article reads like the back-story of a season of 24...

Owner of intelligence-agency-for-hire is "determined to remain a player." President/government has a different take on things and attempts to shut down the agency. Agency plants WMDs on American soil in order to distract country and guarantee relevance.

Wait. That was a season of 24.

Oh well. In actuality I'm surprised at myself for being surprised that such outfits exist.
It is fairly simple to check for obviously malicious JS or PHP code in a theme, but it's not so easy to find themes which are badly written and thus insecure. Can you always spot a XSS or SQL injection vulnerability?
Once again, consider where Iran is buying its networking equipment from. Aren't Western companies directly at fault?
Why does WordPress allow people to run untrusted code?

You write:

"If I were to run COBOL code from untrusted sources on my server you can forget about security."

That is why there should be a warning about untrusted code. Are you trying to let WordPress off the hook? Their attitude toward security has been horrible and they should be called out on it. I quote myself:

What can they do? They can automate the test that Siobhan Ambrose does in the above article linked to by this thread. At the very least, WordPress can search a theme for Base64, so that when you try to activate the theme, you get a warning:

"These templates contain Base64, which may be masking malicious code. Do you wish to proceed?"

It doesn't matter if WordPress is written in PHP or COBOL, the team developing the software should make some attempt to address its many security flaws.

Please consider the odd use of the word "disrespectful" in this paragraph:

"It seems fundamentally disrespectful to users who are simply caught in the crossfire of a political power move their neither know or care about. PHP core has never shown any particular regard for its biggest apps, as evidenced by the above bug and others, so I’m not sure why we should go out of our way to promote their upgrade. PHP 6 sounds much more compelling."

http://ma.tt/2007/07/on-php/#comment-422760

That is Matt Mullenweg. Please note that his statement can be turned on its head. I could write:

"It seems fundamentally disrespectful to users to create software for them that has lots of fun features but no security."
"Give her another chance at life"

The "her" you refer to no longer exists, and never will again (at least in this sector of the multiverse).

What he would be giving "another chance at life" to would be a wholly distinct organism that happens to share the same DNA.
5 Myths about starting a business
It's not pretty, but you can do it:

>>> sum([['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']], [])
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

This makes use of the optional start argument and list add operator. However, Python's docs suggest using itertools.chain instead:

http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#sum

>>> import itertools
>>> [l for l in itertools.chain(*[['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']])]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

(Of course you lose the benefit of a generator by using a list comprehension, but this is just an example.)
ITerm 2
I shiver when I think how many pieces of code are fetched over the internet on my machines.

If you are a motivated attacker you can compromise a plugin author's PC or server and silently push a backdoor to a whole lot of people.

Signed releases are commonplace. It would make sense to require them in most plugin systems, especially those with central plugin repositories and lots of users.
In Python, str is a class. And all classes act as function. If there is ever any doubt, you can tell like this:

>>> type(str)
<type 'type'>

You can tell that str is a class because it inherits from type type.
One more: http://www.rubular.com
GMail was definitely internally done (by Paul Buchheit). I'm pretty sure Wave as too.

But yes, maps/earth, docs, voice, etc. were acquisitions.
Bright Corporate Outlook Doesn’t Mean You Need a Bigger Budget
Isn't this primarily Google's fault? Their algorithms should be capable of weeding out the bad sites.
How do you know that Hans Reiser is a pyschopath?

Maybe it's just a ploy for him to make money, or maybe that's his way of remorse.
They look WAY better on W3C site. For some reason Smashing made a JPEG version of the original PNGs.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind HN that we don't use JPGs for this type of graphics. See: http://lbrandy.com/blog/2008/10/my-first-and-last-webcomic/ ;)
Show HN: GrooveBud - my weekend project
Word letters are processed simultaneously, not left-to-right
I've always been fond of Slashdot's X-Fry, X-Bender and X-Leela headers and their random quotes.
See the design FAQ here: http://docs.python.org/faq/design.html#why-is-join-a-string-...

Admittedly, the join syntax is somewhat counter-intuitive and arguably ugly, but it does the job without defining new built-in functions or adding extra syntax. If you really can't stand the syntax, you can always do this:

# old style way of joining strings
import string
string.join([1,2,3], ' ')

or:

str.join(' ', [1,2,3])

Of course method #1 requires importing an extra module (which can be a bit of a pain) and method #2 requires knowing more about python's implementation of str (as you argued about using str.capitalize), but they work. Generally though, the syntax isn't that bad, but you have alternatives if you want them.
That is why WordPress should save you from that. The WordPress team has had an awful attitude about security. They encourage a culture of free templates shared widely, without much regard for warning users of the dangers. Most users of WordPress are non-technical, the WordPress team knows this and shows no particular concern about it. WordPress needs to get serious about offering some security checks.
Ummm, this is NYTimes we are talking about. Probably in the top newspapers of the world by popularity. Not becoming mainstream would have been a greater feat of imagination. :)
What did Unit Tests ever do for us Anyway?
If he is really remorseful how about asking the public to donate to a fund that goes directly towards his children?
It's easy to identify with wrongly convicted people. It happens, and it's widely reported, but it's rare. Many people are so horrified by the thought of going to prison for something they didn't do that they forget how unusual it is.

Because he was a programmer, contributing to Linux, people on /. and elsewhere wanted him to not be guilty. They identified with him on some level. As the evidence started to mount against him, it made people look for crazy ways in which he could not be guilty.

I agree with you, he's a psychopath. This new story is just further confirmation that he's lost touch with reality. All you have to do is go back and read his postings to linux-kernel to realize he's also a huge dick.

Oh, and reiserfs sucks.
Reiser's lack of awareness of the feelings of others is extremely disturbing.

I hope somebody saves this article and mails it to the parole board.

W
T
F
Determine never to be idle. -- Thomas Jefferson
At one watt the safe exposure limit is 10micro-secs.
That's 0.000010s - I think I can hold it on a car for that long
Ovum may have been wrong on the IPhone but that doesn't mean that Android tablets would not outsell the IPad by 2015.

Indeed. This is nothing more than an ad hominem on Ovum. It does have some verifiable truth, but nothing that helps us judge how well Ovum can predict the future. N=1, and we aren't told how many other of Ovum's earlier predictions he checked. So, all we learn from it is that Ovum has not always made perfect predictions.
I think if he really wanted to try to hold onto and milk his supporters he would have never taken the police to the spot he buried his wife - instead clinging to the story he was an innocent man.

I think he's just f-n nuts (or possible brilliant and nuts).
It happens, and it's widely reported, but it's rare

Why should we assume that? Based on incentives, one would expect false convictions to be rather common: after all, when false convictions are discovered, there's no punishment meted out to the judge, jury, prosecutors, police and forensics experts that helped wrongly convict in the first place.
i've been trying to pull out a smarty pants comment relating this article to the robot on Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, without success, i feel saaad beer

edit:

the point was that having a few beers helps, with a good friend. sometimes it's a sign of exhaustion/burnout and a change of scenery really helps
That is exactly why WordPress needs to get serious about security. It's current attitude has been extremely slack. Their focus has been on releasing features that allow for a more pleasant user experience, rather than releasing features that enhance security. Above I compare the attitude of Microsoft to the attitude of Automattic. Justifiable criticism was aimed at Microsoft for promoting fun new user abilities, rather than security, in both DOS and Windows, for a long time. The same kind of criticism can be aimed at Automattic.

What can they do? At the very least, they can automate the test that Siobhan Ambrose does in the above article linked to by this thread.
> For your information: Appleseed, a 100% volunteer project, was started in 2004, while Diaspora was only kicked off around April 2010, so they’re certainly much further ahead of Diaspora in terms of development.

That does not follow.
"It always seems impossible until it's done"

and

"Luck is what you make it"
Great talk by Giles. Thanks!
A pyschopath don't feel remorse, therefore it doesn't matter what he ask the public to do.

Remorse is an internal state. It would be like telling children to apologize without the children actually feeling bad for their action.
Or, if you have a list that might be of mixed types that happen to have capitalize methods:

>>> import operator
>>> map(operator.methodcaller("capitalize"), your_list)
1. Web form by @dcurtis: http://snail.dustincurtis.com/

2. API by Postful: http://www.postful.com/

3. API by L-Mail: http://www.l-mail.com/
I have trouble watching them because they always make me feel like I'm wasting my life :-(
> Oh, and reiserfs sucks.

I was with you until here. T'so is quoted as writing that btrfs has a lot of the same design ideas of ReiserFS, and that he supports btrfs as the way forward (he particularly disliked Hans and Namesys, though): http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/1/217

Some distros moved to ReiserFS by default, too.

Somehow I've never found the time to properly try it out, but I never really got the impression from others that used it that it sucks. I might be wrong, though.
You write:

"Woah there, Captain 'Death to PHP'."

I can not imagine what would cause you to write this. I use PHP in almost all of my work. All of my major websites are written in PHP. However, I do try to take security seriously. The small regard that the WordPress team has shown for security is unacceptable.

To point out that the WordPress team had language options in no way implies that I disagree with the language they chose, it simply shows that their choice was a conscious choice over which they must take responsibility. I was responding to a comment that implied that the WordPress team had no power to make a choice other than what they made.

I am curious, too, that you would criticize what I wrote, yet you offer no criticism of "At the time LAMP was pretty much all there was." The sentence I was responding to was flatly, factually wrong.

You write:

"Absolutely none of those projects, even the ones written in Perl, were as easy to set up as WordPress was (and still is)."

That is one of the problems that arises naturally from the use of PHP - it is easy to set up. As such, you end up with a lot of non-technical people using it. And that is one of the biggest reasons why special attention should be paid to security -- the fact that WordPress is the kind of software that appeals to a crowd that is largely non-technical.
The case that human athletes have reached their limits
The use of statistics by an NBA head coach
Ironic quote: "And in 10 years will I be faced with the same dilemma again? Maybe, maybe I will." This turned out to be almost exactly right, as he rejoined Apple just 11 years later.
Had he not led the police to the body, he'd have gotten life without parole: he was convicted of a particularly heinous first degree murder. It is still unlikely that he'll ever be released. But after revealing the body, he has, as a formality, a chance at eventual release. I don't think the tea leaves you're reading really say anything about his mental state.
Now that you have someone interested in investing in you, you need to shop around.

Try to raise more money from multiple angel investors. It will only make him want you more, and it will strengthen your bargaining position.