skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "teenagers have written tfiles that are markedly more sophisticated than this virus" justifies the title, but this is a difference of opinion and a classic example of an unproductive HN argument. If you think his title sucks, fine.
Change Wikileaks to 4Chan.
Any thoughts on possible monetization strategies/revenue model?
Sadfully, he passed May 3, 2009.

Here was HN's article and responses: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600523
Rails does all of this stuff 100% correct. It basically gives you a Level 2[1] REST interface by default.

The people most likely screwing this up are the PHP-without-a-framework people.

1: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...
You don't need to extract the whole lot.

"Thousands of random users' data has been downloaded from Facebook and published on Wikileaks" would be enough for a good media scare story.
this is definitely one of the best introductions to RegEx that I've seen b/c it is explained in layman's terms with very understandable examples of how to implement, test and experiment within google analytics.
Not sure why this comment was originally downvoted because its very good advice.

Your domain is your brand.

Your brand is whatever you make it into.

Who would have thought that "Apple" would be synonymous with high-end laptop designs and innovative products?

Would "eBay" be your first thought when looking for an online auction?

Is "craigslist" the word that conjures up hookers and apartments (or now, just apartments).

And so on.
While it's better than the web UI, it suffers from the "mp3 player" problem of trying to make up its own widget library and UI style, and actually is kind of lame in a lot of ways (there is no top-level "new tweet" button, which is kind of a feature of all the mobile clients, and it's definitely a pain to use for DM conversations. It pops up weird non-standard shaped windows all over. I'd consider it a respectable indy effort, but pretty disappointing for Twitter, Inc.
You'd be surprised how many internal projects are going on inside apple at once. THe difference might be that Google is more public abbot many of their projects (Labs). Also most Projects inside apple get killed or morph.
At the very least, to make a Mossad claim plausible, you'd need to have:

(1) a statement by Mossad issued before Stuxnet was released forecasting that Iran would have a weapon by time T_0

(2) a statement by Mossad issued after Stuxnet was released forecasting that Iran would have a weapon by time T_1

(3) T_1 larger than T_0 by at least a year

(4) a statement by Mossad claiming that there were no significant impediments to progress besides Stuxnet

Again, this all assumes that Mossad is not lying. These are the requirements just as a matter of logic. If you don't have all these elements, you can't claim that Mossad's statements prove that Stuxnet was effective at significantly delaying Iran. At best, you have (2), but without (1), (3), and (4), that proves nothing.
I made that connection when I first read it too. But HUGE differentiating factor: Facebook's employees are also their customers. Enron? not so much.

This goes back to the well-known advice of "make a product you want to use"
I can't help thinking that the tacked-on whine about this is why people want iPads and not PCs would make more sense if this post were not about a web-app that would probably slow down any tablet it was accessed on.
Tampering the source code is an interesting idea. I think it cannot be the PHP code because that's peer-reviewed by 1000+ employees daily.

It would have to be code rarely seen by others, e.g. Apache's mod_rewrite.
Even with Octave-forge?
Pageforest is a pretty thin wrapper on top of a AppEngine's BigTable implementation. It does have to add things like a user accounts, user permissions, and caching layer.

The client library (JavaScript) is also design to make it very easy to write "single-page" web apps. You basically just need to write a setDoc() and getDoc() function to persist your document as a JSON blob in storage.
Browsing through that list now...
I'm not sure but I think someone from my uni did GSoC last year, I'll try finding out about that first. Thanks anyway!
Show HN: My first Android app
> "Regulators can't regulate assault away."

I have no beef with enforcing laws to prevent a priori harmful actions. By this I mean: actions in which we don't need to wait 10 years to decide who the victim is.

A more apt analogy would be the War On Drugs. Good luck attempting to regulate the demand away, when you have mutually agreeable transactions in which both sides believe they are benefiting.
How do you like it now? Better? (aside from the broken images for the RSS logo)
You have posted about this several times over the past few days. I know you're excited about it and probably work on it a lot, but if you're going to be making "review my startup" threads every day, then it may just be better to make your own blog about the progress of your application. Broadcast new updates to your blog using Twitter or Facebook. It's probably not a coincidence that you're not getting much feedback here - people have already seen your older posts. If I recall, you even deleted the first one, which had some good advice in it, I think.
Loved your app. I've created something similar to myself only, not a webapp, a desktop one. Congratulations!

Oh and on your madebyloren.com website, did you intentionally left the title untitled or was that some lapse?

Cheers & thanks for the notes
andre
Thanks for reading! I'll keep the posts coming.
Yeah, It will go up and this situation shows why Tim Cook is so vital to Apple's future.
No kidding. I like coding with a hoodie over my head, literally. Never thought about why, but now I know.
Hi Dan,

you address a very good question that I didn't consider: Why did I start? I didn't write it down, it wasn't conscious. First, I wanted to learn to tune my brain. From high activity to zero: I already knew how to put it at half-speed, and had my part of occasional high-speed modes (where all code you write works and all theorems you state you can prove). But I didn't know how to stop it and let it cool. Meditating solves this, supposedly.

Also, as of late, I have been feeling really un-concentrated. It was like I needed multitasking at every moment, when I was proving something I needed to switch to another paper and try to prove that, and then switch to something else. I wanted to disconnect and try to focus better. So far, I feel like I'm improving in this aspect, but it depends heavily on how the day is going.

As a simple side effect, this will also help my hip flexibility (which is quite hard right now) and my overall posture (in sitting meditation you need a very good upright posture).

I'm trying to see if I feel any difference from "before" (I have several batches of logs from last year with productivity, thoughts and so on hanging around that I will be able to put to use).

These are more or less the why's, which I will need to address in some post soon, thanks for making me see it!
Well, sort of. Most projects at Google have headcount budgets that they can't go over without management approval. But even if you have the headcount, you still need to find people.
Meh. Do you really think learning programming languages is hard? I think with C, C++, Python, Scheme, CL, Haskell, Racket, and ML under my belt it would take me about a day or two to adapt to new syntax and then you'd be back in the same position you started in.

I just wouldn't worry so much about experienced students or give them something extra to work on if they wanted it. I started programming when I was 9, meaning I had been messing around with Linux, systems, programming languages, and algorithms for a full 9 years before stepping into my first class freshman year. My professors did the proper thing and used the finals from the freshman year CS courses to propel me to upper level courses in my first quarter. Don't try to work against experience, work with it.
Have you considered going to a larger company/brand like Dove and getting them to buy it? Your audience seems right in line with their audience and they probably already have a budget for "social media marketing". A good way to reach them might be a big-brand social media consultant like VaynerMedia.com. They could facilitate the sale and make a commission on the amount. I know someone who knows Gary over at Vayner so if you're interested, I could try to make the connection.

Alternatively, I can connect you with an investment banker who specializes in selling internet based businesses, though I'm not sure if he'll be interested since he typically deals in the 7-figures range... but I could run it by him if you want.

I just think having a simple private auction without attracting the right parties to the table might not get you the maximum the site could get. Just my thought.

Anyway, congrats on the success so far and good luck with things. My email is in my profile.
> - This is clearly a MVP, i suggest to put some time/money in the site layout when the back-end will be complete.

Actually I really like the layout and design. It just needs a little polish but I'm sure that will happen over time as singer responds to feedback.
That could work, but I am afraid of losing interest of people based on that. I guess these are good things to vet out in a private beta.
I was thinking about this at the negotiation stage, before hiring occurs. I can't imagine that an employer would try this after the hiring stage.

As for salary information, there are other ways to know how much someone else is making without accessing "confidential information". You can find out socially (e.g. from them), knowing their performance combined with position, etc.

EDIT: It is worth noting that these are facts I consider when I am interviewing for a new job, not something I put into practice. I wouldn't tell my current employer this information about a perspective hire, nor would I as an employer ask for this information.
> In general, because the regulatory functions are aware of information asymmetries that could lead to large numbers of people transferring a significant amount of wealth to smaller number of other people.

I doubt this is the actual principle upheld. You have just described the role of insurance, as provided over the last 300 years or so, as something regulators want to prevent. You have asymmetrical information and a massive pool of people transferring premiums to a smaller group (the insurance companies themselves). Then, when there is a payout, you have the smaller group transferring massive amounts to yet smaller individuals (the ones who experienced catastrophic loss).
<i>Really</i> wet!
Yea but I have to learn Javascript anyway (client side apps) so why hate on it just because it could be better than it is? It's not that horrible of a language, I mean it's not nearly as bad as PHP and loads of people like PHP while almost everyone hates on Javascript.
Danchev found hospitalized in Bulgaria, local news report
Antoine Dodson (Bed Intruder) as Modern Art
Of course if you take quotes out of context they're going to look a lot worse. Plus his lack of tact, or a strong grasp of english isn't helping. But his arguments aren't that outrageous.

His main argument is: women are more social than men, and thus are more strongly influenced by social factors limiting their career choices.

This doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. And honestly, a cursory glance at the state of the world seems to support this opinion. Now of course, it may be completely wrong, but I don't see how this is a sexist position.
Android got around this by giving people 15 minutes to get a refund. That would make it so there wouldn't be much reason for the pirates to contribute to valid purchases.
IIRC, octave-forge didn't help that the plotting/graph tools were either slightly different or nonexistent.
Whether he leaves the company or not is a given. My beef is that I believe that Steve Jobs is dying, and the company isn't being forthright about it. I'm a nurse working in critical care for the last 17 years, and every single recent picture of him I've seen, I think to my self, "He's dying".

I could be wrong, but in 17 years of this business, I've never heard of anyone being cured of pancreatic cancer with a liver transplant. It sounds very much like a "Hail Mary" cure. To start, organ transplants are very rarely a cure for anything. What they are is a devil's bargain where they exchange the disease that's killing you quickly and get rid of your immune system instead.

But, cancer patients usually gain weight after they are in remission. So, my guess is that Steve still has cancer, and he has no immune system now.

So, I believe that Steve is dying. And, I don't think that the company is being forthright about it. I also believe that lack of transparency and honesty is terribly irresponsible since their stock price has been skyrocketing the last couple of years[1].

I don't think that the damage will be solely in the PR department. The company has created a mythology of Steve Jobs being not only the public face of AAPL, but the soul of the company as well.

Couple that with AAPL's notorious secrecy/lack of transparency and you're going to have big problems with Steve gone. AAPL was able to manage the antenna issues of the iPhone 4 while eating a bit of crow. But, when Steve is gone, then next antenna type problem they have is going to be read by the media as "Steve is gone! AAPL is going down the drain!" in the media.

ref:

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AAPL
Looks like building a wiki is becoming the modern "hello world!"
I thought this was interesting, because we speculated here on HN about his disappearance and probable mental illness after his bizarre last posts were published.
Collection of Programmer puzzles
I'm surprised to see a suggestion of CouchDB - with the deep integration of BigTable with App Engine, I think it'd be unnecessarily hard to use anything else.
You don't understand what idempotent means. An action is idempotent if repeating it does not change the result. For example, multiplying by zero is idempotent, 0 * x is the same as 0 * 0 * 0 * 0 * x. But of course it changes something, as 0 * x is clearly not x in the general case.

In the http case,
GET and HEAD should not change any state (be safe and idempotent), PUT and DELETE should change state but be idempotent, and POST can do whatever it wants.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html
Well, I sincerely hope no "hello world!" ever needs to pull libraries.
Huh? What's the point?

I hate to break it to you, but the world of human affairs is not governed by such simple dynamics.
The most stealth cracking countermeasure I ever witnessed was the application would XOR some of its UI messages with the hash sig of the application binary file, so if you edited the application binary file directly the crack seemed to work just fine ... but then the application would gradually go insane. The cracker who finally posted a working crack was impressed with how simple and devious the countermeasures were.
Yes it is native, and no javascript bindings have been made for Android's webkit engine. It is packaged as a UI control that you overlay onto your application window and receive gesture events trhough it.
Is it really twitter that is helping out Tunisia or is it just other people observing the event just tweeting about it. Like we saw what happened in Iran there seems to be a correlation but the causation is sort of fuzzy.
That's what I meant by saying that Apple and Google are similar. At Apple the small projects are combined into a single solution (hence lots of 'features'), whereas Google launches their applications independently and only later integration might take place.
Since this is your alias, I hope you won't mind my curiosity--when did you leave the company, and do you have any thoughts about leaving?
Disqus makes a request vio OAuth to authenticate you via Facebook. It then stores the authentication token which will authenticate you to Facebook in the future until you revoke it.

Also by putting the Disqus javascript widget on your page you will probably have cookies for: example.com disqus.com and example.disqus.com (if example was your disqus site name).
Nice one Brett. Congrats.

The notebox is one of those nice ideas that goes to my "I would love to use that, but why didn't I think of it?" categories
The Guardian's Political Censorship of Wikileaks
That's true, how dare they build something that facebook has had a stab at!

But seriously, people might not have the people they want to talk to about tech or something else on facebook, so if your twitter followers are your crowd for X subject this is a pretty cool way to have a chat with them.
Have used both a it's a +1 for Devise from me. Also think you do really need to give some attention to the logo as I almost couldn't see it at all.

That said, congratulations on a good start. Keep on truckin!
Thank you for the kind words =]

The title on madebyloren.com has not been set yet because I'm still working on development. Madebyloren is my second attempt at a Ruby on Rails app. I figured building a blog engine from scratch would be a good exercise and not very difficult (plus highly customizable to my needs), so I went ahead and did that instead of wordpress or another premade engine. Considering I only worked on it for a few hours one day (designing and coding) I think it turned out okay.
The source on the disruption to the nuclear program wasn't from analyzing the worm, it was from:

Three UN diplomats who were sources to an AP story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101122/ap_on_re_eu/iran_nuclear...

A "former top IAEA official":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11...

Iran stopped all uranium production, according to official IAEA report:

http://www.isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Ir...

IAEA again:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/8378260/iran-tempor...

Head of Mossad and Hillary Clinton both announced:

"that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years."

(from the very NYT article)

And no less than the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"Iran's enemies used computer code to make "limited" problems for centrifuges involved in uranium enrichment at some of its nuclear sites, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday"

http://israelinsider.net/profiles/blogs/ahmadinejad-those-wh...

but he would say 'limited', wouldn't he. Afterall two weeks earlier they were vehemently denying that Stuxnet had any effect.
Not really. Firefox on Windows XP. Needs:

- smaller font (too much scrolling)
- darker font (not enough contrast)
- proportionally spaced font
- left margin way too small
- right margin doesn't need to be aligned
- white space between bullets

Didn't mean to pick, it's just that this design is so different from the Groupon emails I enjoy getting every day :-)

I also wanted to point out some of the best advice I ever got, that even for a programmer, there's a lot more to life than programming, especially while you're still in college and so much else is readily available. Once you're in a cubicle, you won't have as many opportunities to learn other stuff.

[EDIT: I refreshed and it looks great now, all except the left margin. Wow, I feel empowered. Thank you Peter and thank you Groupon.]
Unfortunately this sort of success results in publicly perceived failure. For more examples, see y2k.
> It seems to boil down to "girls are mad"

I read that as: "girls like to work with people". May be you are the one who think they are mad and felt the above post a little too personal.
I'm also very against the War on Drugs, but for different reasons: while it's true that you can't regulate away the demand, it's not only unreasonable to regulate what things I put in my body, but also, by making them illegal, you cause all kinds of other associated crime and violence. The world would be a better place overall if drugs were legal.

The situation around an unregulated financial industry is much less clear. Without any regulation, I don't imagine that the world would be a better place. At least, it's not as clear to me as a world with legal drugs.
I agree with olivolive. You have a nice layout but the only thing that is lacking is not clearly showing who the product is for. Maybe have two big tabs visually that shows how it works for customers and businesses.
Thanks for your feedback.

I tweaked the abstract a bit to reflect your point.

I'll do a follow-on post on how to explicitly reduce the lambda calculus to Turing machines and vice versa.

Most of the hard work is done with this post.
its not spam! its a little project I was working on, there is no material gain to be had!!
Being a software developer and being an exploit developer are two entirely different things. Professional exploit developers DO NOT ship unless it's perfect. Malware authors will ship even if it's not perfect, because the target is not technically advanced and can get away with it. If you're targeting a nation-state, you best not compromise your intent, how you broke in, nor how long you've been there for.
> I'd really like an online service that could merge my note taking habits on my computer seamlessly with my note taking habits on my phone.

That's what I'm shooting for - iPhone and Android apps are in the works.

> However, for an app that's purported to work well on a phone, I had a terrible time trying to read the website on mine. I'd suggest looking at the site from a couple mobile browsers.

I hadn't even thought about this. Sorry for the confusion, but I didn't intend for the app to be viewed in mobile browsers. Currently, it is optimized for desktop browsers with mobile app syncing planned for the future.

Thanks for the feedback!
Recruiters Rethink Online Playbook
> real intelligence services don't brag

Not being heads of state, I don't think either of us is qualified to guess on the 8-dimensional chess being played here. Israel, if they are indeed behind this, is home to some of the brightest computer scientists on the planet. They already pulled off an impressive feat. It's pretty obvious that accomplishing the obfuscation described would not be outside their abilities.

So if they didn't bother, I have a hunch they had their reasons. They could be technical, and that would be the simplest explanation. They could just as well be political or otherwise strategic. I don't know, and neither does anyone else outside of the Israeli and US intelligence communities.

But whatever their reasoning, it's cheap, Monday morning quarterbacking to call an unprecedented and successful operation like Stuxnet embarrassing. Its exposure in the Times has nothing to do with technical competence and everything to do with the fast pace of information flow in the 21st century.

We all know about Operations Opera, Spring of Youth or Wrath of God, it's possible to read about them at length and I'm not sure anyone can dispute the competence on display there.
My own theory is that after watching Iran kill themselves for a year trying to figure this thing out, they sent out an update of Stuxnet that made it easier to discover as a way of showing their hand.

By that point, according to most reports, the program had been set back by three years (as effective as what a military strike would have been, according to the NYT article).

It was hidden for almost two years, then suddenly discovered - at which point dozens of security companies around the world deconstructed the worm in a process that took weeks.