skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stuxnet worked. Very well. It was out in the wild, by best estimates, for over two years before it was detected. During that time it caused complete chaos within the Iranian nuclear program (to the point where some officials were executed on the suspicion of espionage).

This post and its backhanded compliments are very arrogant in a way that epitomizes everything that is wrong with the security industry. It is a game of one-upmanship amongst those who can talk the talk but not walk the walk. This blog post is basically:

Dear most successful team of virus and backdoor writers in history who completely changed the paradigm for what worms can do, I suggest you read this book that I probably know nothing about or haven't read and definitely do not understand.
Ps. here are a ton of links to stuff I googled that you didn't do,
pss. isn't it awesome that you are anonymous and can't respond to my criticism?
psss. Did you get the part about me being smart?

Pathetic. To make it worse, the entire industry is full of such assholes.
As it happens, "as it happens" is a way to lead into an assertion that tends to provoke casual acceptance. It's not all that different from "wouldn't you agree that", a mock-question that's often accompanied by a nodding motion; the combination frequently illicits a nod even from someone that disagrees.

Of course many of the commenters are offended by some of the ideas expressed here; that doesn't make the ideas more correct. It's not a question of finding things to disagree with, because inherently the commenters' shortcoming isn't that they are hoping to reveal a logical flaw in the argument, but that they were tricked into debating a troll in the first place.

Wouldn't you agree that people with outmoded or poorly researched ideals can do a lot more damage if they are clever enough to embed their ideas in layers of empirical-sounding academia-speak?

I'd take it a step further, but I don't want to be "that guy" who invokes Godwin's law. :)
Found this post recently at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1004995.

This report actually checked an average of all name servers on Pingdom for a month.
The full posting said:

I have been really down on Dynect because of their sales approach and their in-the-face cocky attitude. My very few interactions with them have been to immediately put down companies and competitors with complete BS statements.

But I have seen many people say how great the performance is. So did a pingdom test for all of their servers (used Twitter) and I did a test for all of my name servers on DNS Made Easy.

These are averages for "ALL" name servers.

DNS Made Easy:
Avg. Response Time
34 ms
Slowest avg. response time
58 ms
Fastest avg. response time
23 ms

Dynect:
Avg. Response Time
37 ms
Slowest avg. response time
59 ms
Fastest avg. response time
27 ms

Now Pingdom only does US and Europe testing... nothing in Asia where is looks like Dynect is stronger. But their network is no where as strong as they say it is. I have done as many trace routes as possible and I can never get a query answered in their singapore or australia locations.

So really... I do not get it.... Where is Dynect faster? Now I know this is only for the past month.... but really.... I think DNS Made Easy runs a hell of a network and they are a fraction of the Dynect guys (whom I have negative feelings about anyway).

Looking at tools like www.dnscomparison.com it looks like DNSMadeEasy is fastest some weeks, Dynect is fast other weeks, UltraDNS is faster some other weeks. Of course I'm not sure how "honest" this is as well.

But create a pingdom account... do some tests... be interested in seeing other results.

So far I say that DNSMadeEasy is as fast or faster then the ones that are many times more expensive.
Whatever the behavior is, it's probably in WebKit. I should test this out on Chrome and Safari as a first pass.
I have this same problem (only recently!) on my 1.6GHz Core Duo laptop. It only started happening recently in new twitter. I'm not sure what's going on but it's almost unresponsive.
> If somebody could honestly write that, I would read it (And probably upvote it too!)

Today, I met Jack, a former hobo from the east side who turned everything around when he got some seed money by threatening to cut a passer-by with a rusty can of beans. Less than a minute later, he used this to bootstrap his run-anywhere cloud access application, 'Beanstalk', which went on to make him the success he is today. There's a lesson in this for other entrepreneurs: are you hungry for success like Jack? Have you considered using every resource at your disposal, even a rusty can of beans?

Stay tuned for part two: 'Run your web company from jail and lower overhead by 98%!'
The text belongs to the screenshot right below. I look into clearing this up.

No mobile interface right now - the app is solely browser based. iPhone, Android, and desktop apps are in the pipeline and will be integrated as soon as I can figure out how to develop them.

Thanks for the feedback!
I've never known Eric Schmidt to get up in front of a crowd and try to hype up a new product. I may be wrong though.

If you're going to hop on stage and build buzz for your product, you better be pretty good at it. Ballmer gets brownie points for trying (most CEOs don't, and leave their marketing underlings to deliver equally boring keynotes).
Ask HN: How do you protect your idea? 
Since Hacker News is, in my opinion, the best community of businessmen and hackers, I have come seeking advice.

I have a website that I would like to release to the wild soon, but I don't know if there are any legal precautions I need to to take before I launch (do I need copyright, patent, etc.). What steps should I take to make sure that my idea is protected?

I'm asking for advice and/or pointers to any literature which I can read about the topic.

Thanks
Scala considered harmful for large projects?
Wow, he hit the nail on the head with the "hoodie" concept. I almost feel like it gives me a power boost.
Nice design.. like the others i think you should work on your logo. Ar u sure u just started designing/programming, it was really good.
You can get around the twitter's search limit, by requesting their timelines, which goes up to 3200 of their tweets - you can get 200 tweets per API call.

I believe http://snapbird.org/ does this for "searching beyond Twitter history".

But if you try this on all of your friends, it soon becomes very, very slow. Eg if you have 100 people you follow, and they all have ~2000 tweets (or that's how deep you want to go), you'll have 1000 API requests. That's for one users' friends timeline.
Ovolacto vegetarian for a decade here: Veganism is hard to do right compared to almost every other sort of meat/animal product light diet.

B12 and several other less prominent nutrients are not in great abundance in non-animal based foods, so you have to eat a lot of a certain subset of strange foods to guarantee your health, as you do need those nutrients

If you really are trying to make a lasting change, try vegan + fish (So no bird eggs, or milk based products), ovolacto (no meat or fish, but milk and egg based products), just lacto (no meat or fish, but milk based product), or just ovo(no meat or fish or milk based products). All of these additionally are much much much more easy order at a restaurant or to fix out of the rest of the stuff at a dinner party, both important social functions in human existence.

All of them are relatively easier to do than straight veganism (although pretty much any of them involving milk products leave you a huge channel for saturated fat intake, namely cheese, which may not help fix your issues).

I know for years I ate sushi occasionally until a bad experience the next day one time has made me leary to usually avoid it.
Most of the comments here seem to be of the form "Well, maybe Stuxnet isn't that elegant, but it got the job done and that's what matters", but is it really that bad of software? All the technical people I've heard discuss the software in person gush over how advanced and clever it is. Can anyone point me toward a more technical discussion of Stuxnet which could confirm/dispute the OP's view?
Very smart move this, rather than to figure out how to monetize it monetize it by selling it while the growth curve is still exponential.

Also, looking at alexa it seems as though the period of hyper fast growth is already a bit past:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/threewords.me

Still, it should fetch a pretty penny and to the right party it might be worth quite a lot of money.
Knowing the rate of page views would be good as well; having total page views is a bit misleading.
Funny, I failed to tie it back into his post, but that is the perfect way to look at it.

It does make me wonder how many different knots are common for one to be attacking at any given time (not moment, just in general).
This is an interesting idea, and I like your site design.

You have two types of users, the business owner who offers appointments, and their customer. You've done a nice job showing what the end customer will do to make an appointment, but you haven't explained what the business owner will have to do to get set up. The business owner is the one making the decision to use your service. I would change the How It Works section on the main page to be from their perspective, and keep the current How It Works to show what their customers will see.
Sorry to be so harsh, but this analysis is really lacking.

If you want to learn more about how to hedge bets, read about things like moment theory or the Kelly criterion.

Also, taking a measure like variance would be much more meaningful than just the spread of the payoff.
Why does everything have to be made into entertainment?
I believe the scrolling issues are tied to their use of position: fixed for the sidebar where that DIV has its own internally scrollable frame via overflow: scroll. The combination of those two are taxing on the browser's overall layout system which causes a dramatic slowdown on less powerful machines. Heck, it's even a little sluggish on my iMac.
probably because he wants to make more than $1K from the auction. Nothing wrong with Flippa...and I know from time to time they have a big value site listed...but as a rule...it's almost always complete crap
Venezuela has overtaken Saudi Arabia in oil reserves
I'm doing something like that on my app. Even requesting 200 tweets per API call, it takes a while to index when you have lots of friends.
Israel bought itself a few more years of a nuke-free Iran.

Do we actually know that? Is there any evidence that this delayed the program by "years" rather than a few months?
Looks nice, I'm willing to give it a spin. Reminds me of http://corkboard.me which was posted on HN not too long ago, but I've never found a use for ownerless apps like that.
Actual "directly measured" data:

http://www.quantcast.com/threewords.me
I think the people who act like copyright infringement of whole works are deluding themselves as to it's harmless nature, but people overwrought about the issue and trying to map it onto the real world crime of theft are not helping the situation.

Coming up with a new name that's not theft is probably a good idea, then we can mete the appropriate opprobrium upon that word instead of the too much of theft and the not enough of copyright infringement. This is definitely a goldilocks issue.
Thanks, everyone for sharing your ideas / comments / questions! Keep'em coming :-) If any of you wants to get in touch via email you can find my address over here: http://scr.im/sunnytrail
That seems sort of silly - I would posit instead, why should we care much about which causes any of them value (and their reasons why)? Why shouldn't Mr. Gates be allowed to allocate as much (or as little) of his funds to a cause which a) needs attention, badly and b) benefits a massive number of people in the immediate future, and long term?

Some people value the needs and well-being of others equally, or higher, than their own.
I wish the publication logos lit up when you mouse over'd on them. Just me?
- A company sets up a Reservv site and posts it on their website or business card.

- A customer wants to schedule an appointment with the company, so they visit the link (e.g. http://www.Reservv.com/Demo).

- The customer is presented with a list of services offered by the company.

- The customer is able to choose a date and time for their appointment from the available openings. Dates and times can be displayed in the customer's time zone if the company does business in different time zones.

- The customer decides how they'd like to be reminded (phone, text or email) and schedules the appointment.

- The business owner, employee and/or customer receives an appointment confirmation via email/text. When the appointment nears, the business owner, employee and/or customer receives an appointment reminder via email/text/phone. The customer can cancel the appointment via email/text/phone when the reminder is delivered.

It's a win-win situation for all parties involved. The business owner saves time. The employees are notified of new appointments. Customers can schedule at their own convenience.
Seconded. I've recently switched to Vim from Eclipse after having way too many issues with various plugins not working properly, Eclipse occasionally crashing and corrupting my project file, etc. Nine times out of ten it was a good IDE, but that ten percent of the time when it misbehaved boy did it screw me over.

I've actually started hacking a Vim plugin (JVM debugging integration) and boy is it painful. Making Vim more scriptable would go a long way in making me very very happy.
It took me about 3 days to build it. It's my first ruby / heroku app, so I learned a lot. Sinitter (http://sinitter.moocode.com/) saved me a lot of coding, though.
"verb (used with object)

* to put into one's pocket: to pocket one's keys.

* to take possession of as one's own, often dishonestly: to pocket public funds.

* to submit to or endure without protest or open resentment: to pocket an insult.

* to conceal or suppress: to pocket one's pride."

I don't think the negative connotations are exclusively British. I've heard the phrase said plenty of times "John pocketed something", when it meant he kind of stole it. It's also used with regards to politicians sometimes.
> Depriving the owner of their revenue is theft

That doesn't make any sense. You can't deprive someone of revenue, because (at least given a few assumptions of non-totalitarianism) nothing guarantees that a thing will produce revenue. Owners don't have a "right" to revenue, especially in a capitalist economy.

> ...just as much as deciding to occupy a seat on a train without paying is depriving the train operator of revenue and is theft, claiming that the seat is unused or that you doing marketing is bogus

No, the problem with taking an unused seat on a train is not that you are "depriving the train operator of revenue." The problem is that the seat is a physical good, and once you take it, the train operator no longer has it. You have taken the seat from them (not the "potential revenue") -- and thus prevented them from selling it to a paying customer, or doing whatever else they wanted to do with it.

To see this more clearly, note that it would be wrong for you to take a physical good from someone regardless of whether they planned to sell it or not. The moral problem with theft does not lie in depriving someone of revenue.

Software isn't like that. By obtaining a copy of a program, you're not taking anything from anyone in a way that prevents them from using it. In particular, if the software has an "owner," you're not preventing them from selling it.
> Presumably we'd only be killing off the originals once they were malfunctioning to the point where continuing to live was not a pleasant experience.

I see no reason to presume that; if it worked at all, you'd expect people of all ages to upgrade immediately.

> Further, once you did the switch at least once and had the memory of "waking up" in a new body, you'd have a lot more confidence that "you" would still exist after the transfer.

That rather is the point of my question... You didn't wake up, a copy did, you got killed afterwards and knew you were about to die. The point was to question the idea that you could ever be uploaded in a meaningful sense.

What I personally see actually happening, is people being enhanced to the point where implants make up more of their consciousness than the real brain does and they feel so disabled without the implants on that they no longer see themselves as whole without them. At some point, our idea of consciousness will simply change and then it'll be no big deal killing off the biological part and going pure machine, gradually.
Um huh?

Jailbreak user != pirate.

Jailbreaking occurs for dozens of non-pirate reasons, most commonly to allow tethering, or the installation of apps that apple does not like, or to allow the user to use a non-approved network (such as T-Mo in the US).

Also, does flurry now disambiguate multiple devices on the same account? I know I have 6 or 7 devices on my account [I too write apps for a living] alone...but I'm sure I only count as one sale. Seems like those people would also show up as pirates by your metrics.
Namespaces for Clojure's Deftype and Defrecord
I don't happen to share Nate's opinion that Stuxnet is embarrassing, but I think your characterization of him based on his blog post is pretty off-base.
This is inspiring to me as a designer who can't code, although I want to learn and have many ideas for projects. Well done for learning to program and actually building and shipping your idea!
Serious question. Why doesnt Facebook do any engineering talks anymore? Some of the coolest talks on infrstructure from the past few years have been from FB. And yet the only thing i can remember really hearing about their stack recently is that they were using HBase. Which really came off as more about marketing and hype about some products they were working on then truly geeky stuff thats come out from FB in the past. Anybody know? I wonder if its because Fb is no longer a startup? Which might the reason why we never hear about Youtube or Twitter anymore either.

Oh my other comment was just meant in jest. But thanks for downvoting it and killing all the worthless and meaningless HN karma points i had accrued!
No, it would not be a good idea at all.

Let's just for a second pretend that I'd be an interested party (I won't be bidding).

I would assume that most of the people bidding are not 'players', I'd assume that they would just try to get it for a song and a bit, the equivalent of buying Manhattan from the Indians because they're not aware of what it's worth.

Mark is a smart guy so he won't be going for that.

The second group of potential buyers would be more savvy and would bid higher, they'd be outbidding each other bit by bit, probably in increments of 1,000 $US until they ran out of steam.

With the last moment of the bidding already announced the real players would wait until the very last moment and would then bid based on what the highest of the second group has bid using that as a way to guide their decision, in the hope that nobody else would be bidding a similar amount.

In a 'blind' bid like this, assuming a party really wants to get their hands on it they will have to decide what it's worth to them to get it, rather than to let the market do their valuation work for them. This may very well lead to substantially higher bids.

If I were Mark I'd add two things (if he decides to make the bidding public, which I would not advise him to do):

- Extend the bidding with 15 or 30 minutes after every new highest bid

- keep the identity of the bidders secret, just show the highest bid

Since he's already under way and it is difficult to change the rules once the game has started I don't think that is a viable option any longer anyway.
I don't understand how "it's time to start looking at encoding for WebM" when it is also "time to start dropping support for IE6", and both browsers have comparable market share.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback and support!

That's exactly what I was shooting for with pocket. I have a giant whiteboard too, and it's incredibly useful. Since I made Pocket, however, I find myself using it less and less. Guess that means I'm doing things right?

Mobile apps are in the pipeline!
It makes one want a statically typed Lisp with a macro preprocessing step, or something.

You want s-expressions, like Ocaml and GCC use.
I think it's safe to say that most people simply think of cross platform BBM as being the most wanted potential cross platform offering.

Then, I recall RIM's lawsuit against Kik.

Aside from Kik, though, I think the obvious question would be: what about hardware sales?
Excellent designs! I am working on a new start-up (completely unrelated to on-line tutoring) and we are knee deep in the design phase. We want to apply to YC for the summer 2011 session and hope to have a beta ready for the fall. I am a business guy and my friend is a developer...neither of us could do as good a job designing as you have. We don't need the tutorview pages, but your home page and dashboard pages are very nice and we could use them as a template for our site if you are willing to share the them? It would certainly help us save considerable time if we could leverage your photoshop, html and css files. Email me at ted at advsportsmedia dot com if you are willing to share these. If we end up using them, I am certainly open to throwing a few bucks your way in return for helping us get a better looking product out the door faster.

Thank you,

Ted
Consumer Driven Genetic Testing: We Can Handle The Truth
Why is this so? It seems like I can do a CSRF attack via any BB as just a normal forum user who can place an href in a message. How does one do that with a POST? Sorry if this is obvious.
Camera Genius builders: What’s involved in building an iPhone app?
1. indeed. And he repeatedly babbles with authority.

2. I've seen some science on these subjects. Unfortunately it always was heavily politically connoted, and the data was terrible ( no, it's not statistically valid to draw a linear regression from a vague random looking cloud of points).

3. I'm not promoting ignorance; I'm getting sick of right-wing morons, be it the anti-science style of the social darwinist style.
Dilbert: Social products are declining
Re-opens.
Foundation42 cancels Appaloosa, cites "low acceptance" of Windows Phone 7
Same curve, so that pretty much confirms the drop.
How much revenue is generated from Threewords.me? Is it even profitable?

Also, I'm wondering how the process of transferring the actual website would go? Will the buyer usually take over the servers which the seller has setup?
Britney Spears showing hot in cotton sundress
A huge success would be if it derailed Iran's nuclear program completely and managed to contaminate the installations for the next couple thousand years, with enough warning as to avoid loss of human life, while forcing Iran to rebuild from scratch somewhere else and, at the same time, leave their authorities wondering what kind of bad luck hit them.

Of course, not all Israeli military want to avoid a confrontation. Military don't usually get medals for preventing wars.
I think it's safe to assume Iran will no longer control their nuclear facilities with Windows boxes...
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll add a section to show how that part works too.
Glad to see this already submitted :)

Yeah, I'm working on way too much stuff, and threewords.me started up as a side project that I didn't have any interest in continuing it long-term (more interested in developing http://supportbreeze.com and others).

The press curve has slowed, but a lot of users are still hitting the site (new and returning) — every new feature I get is hugely adopted within minutes.