skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. Just that you're less lazy. Nearly every SSH tutorial out there tells you to change the port. And if you're less lazy, you're also more likely to watch for strange activity. Which means they're more likely to be caught and kicked out if they try to turn your machine into a bot-spammer.

Going for the low-hanging fruit pays off frequently enough to make trying harder extremely inefficient in comparison.
I have my own micro-framework I made for bigger projects since I can't stand any of the main ones (though I've heard good things about Yii, that's probably where I'd go if I felt mine was inadequate). As with most things, the context of what you're doing matters. I'd guess most websites don't really need a framework, though once you start doing REST-y stuff that's when you should probably look into it. (Plus you get nice looking URLs for free when you go down the any-size-framework path.)
Here's another obscurity question: Does usings hosts files instead of public dns for domain lookup lower your risk?
Last time I checked - actually yesterday - the HTML5 is only used for the UI part. The audio is still done in Flash, maybe for the sake of DRM. I hate it, because I have my Flash plugin removed. I have to open Chrome just to use Grooveshark.
Now that I think about it, I believe I was remembering an interview on the Brain Science podcast with Douglas Fields[1], author of The Other Brain[2].

So sorry, but I don't have primary sources for what I said in my earlier comment...

[1]: http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/2010/5/12/exploring-g...

[2]: http://theotherbrainbook.com/
I'll just leave that here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking

Not that I use or endorse it.
Let's be clear: I'm not complaining, nor am I talking about personal experiences of discrimination -- I don't know if my resume has ever been circular-filed because of my degree. But since I left academia I have been surprised by the number of people who have explicitly told me that they consider a PhD to be a black mark on a resume. I think a lot of people have had one or two bad experiences interviewing/hiring PhDs, and they associate the degree with the incompetence because it's so rare to interview someone with a doctorate.

For what it's worth, I don't find the tech industry to be more or less meritocratic than any other -- we certainly like to pretend that our hiring methods are hyper-objective, but I've seen lots of hiring decisions that just boil down to opinion and intuition. Non-meritocratic things like pedigree and 'who you know' matter a lot, even amongst engineers.
If you're dealing with international travel, you have to read the fine print and be worried about jurisdictional issues, etc. and figure the bureaucracy risk in to your calculations...

e.g. you buy your insurance in France, problem happens in US, and it turns out your insurance only covers you in france. Or you need an apostille-authenticated copy of local police report, plus a certified translation, yadda yadda...
I tried these, but ended up with Google Code Classes: http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ind...

worked better for me.
Thanks! Same to you. Feel free to keep me updated with your research projects.
Suggestion for Google Reader devs
PyCon India 2011 is in Pune
The next Pycon India conference is in Pune.
i. For day to day happenings, join http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon

ii. If you are only interested in volunteering, join the Pune python group at http://groups.google.com/group/pythonpune?hl=en

Bookmark for the 2011 page -expected soon at http://in.pycon.org
And you know what? ... thats okay.
I think a lot of people just turned off by the whole
"Frameworks are the right way to program, and if you aren't doing frameworks then you're doing it wrong!" attitude of some in the community.

I think if you let people be, they'll eventually find their way to these frameworks because the amount of time and effort they save you is just too hard to ignore, once you get to a certain point.
More succinctly: Make it work, then make it fast.

Trying to do both at the same time is usually slower, in the long run.
"T" Creates Just About the Most Minimalist To-Do List Possible
Thanks for supporting the dissenting opinion. :)

I've had to grow a large staff in the dearth of available people in the 90's and we did just fine technically. Mentoring and leading isn't just managers. Picking people that are able to conceptually and effectually lead in their technical role, (while more challenging to find and often harder to manage), are great force multipliers.

Hiring is an art best practiced by the person on the hook for results, not an HR or hiring consultant or some other source. You really need to build a village of skills, personalities and often sense talent before the individual is even aware of it.

I love team building and I love helping individuals rise to excellence. Probably the single most rewarding aspect of my career.
Taking Brain-Computer Interfaces to the Next Phase
Ruby with Passenger can be used for a simple website. Throw in Sinatra with Datamapper or ActiveRecord and you've got a lightweight setup - with better options for string manipulation than PHP :)
XML is proof that Greenspun's Tenth Rule applies to data, as well. :)
This is a failed study.

He should have removed "Port 22" from the config file to get any significant results. Right now it only says that if an attacker gets an SSH-like answer on port 22, it's very unlikely he'll try on port 24 as well.

This is unhelpful because if there's a bug in OpenSSH, then even an OpenSSH "reject all on port 22" configuration* might be compromised.

I think it's very much more likely that an attacker, when not getting any answer (or being instantly rejected) on port 22, will portscan the server to see if any other ports are open, and then try the non-standard port, which in this case is 24.

* I'm unsure if this is possible in SSH (like reject all root logins), but anything non-standard might trigger the "no SSH @ 22" response, so I'm hypothesizing a best-case-scenario config.
This is my main issue with it. It shows releases which increment major/minor version number but not all releases (by this definition) are equal.

Ultimately all it says is Chrome do lots of smaller releases, IE few bigger ones, the others in the middle.
As a Brazilian, I am well aware of the reason for the policy. Two wrongs don't make a right.
"Modern browser", "open/not open", "killer", "dead", and recently, "Quora" articles can probably be ignored if they're the focus of the title. They're pretty much always petty arguments. I think I'd respect these sort of articles a lot better if they skipped the rhetoric and just focused on their point. "IE is not a modern browser" is a great soundbite, but it also means that's what rebuttal articles will focus on. "IE is holding back the web by not implementing features the majority of other browsers are" is less catchy, but it conveys the actual focus of the article. Sadly, I think most tech journalism would distill an article like that into another meaningless soundbite.
Printed Photos the Blind Can 'See'
Damn it, if I had known when I was 18!

OTOH, I guess since the common opinion is that most bad guys are boring drug dealers, it's fair to say that if there are people inquiring about how to be Batman, there probably are ones interested in becoming one of his arch-enemies (which is probably less difficult, too :)
Wow, 2007 was a bad year for browser releases.
Cryptographers debate role in 'post-security' era
What advantage does having a hard firewall give you over using iptables?
Umm there is something else - most of the crooks in Batman seem to be burning some midnight oil studying and practicing - right down to the ordinary mobster level.

So a real Batman in real world, where criminals are not all competent in many fields (except crime OFC - at least when Batman is around) could get by with lots lower skills.

Also a lot of skills overlap... Take this guy for instance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnClWxkcS4g) I guess that he has quite some of necessary skills to be a batman. Come to think of it - MOSSAD operatives probably are quite a representation of actual "batmen" - with tech and all :).
Algorithms can’t solve CS gender gap
Absolutely. The value isn't in the minute gap in fees, it's in the rights and the relationship.
Apple's Subscription Policy: Platform Evolution, Right vs. Wrong
Obama sets $126M for next-gen supercomputing
Yes, that's why all data is not safe.

About Linux repositories: Debian's is tightly guarded indeed (although you can find the newest stuff in Sid, and usually install it without problems, even though you're using stable or testing, since only the dependencies need to be upgraded, not the whole OS to Sid).

The difference between Linux distros and Apple's App Store is that you can add third-party repositories whenever you want. And many of them are trustworthy anyway, since they are maintained by reputable community members.

Also, Debian packages are just zip archives. You can download and check out the contents of every available update. Can you do that with OS X or Windows?

So yes, walled gardens are fine, but let users choose to get out of them. Let users jailbreak their phones. Sure, void their warranty, put warnings in iTunes, but give them a device-specific way to do that instead of playing games of wack-a-mole.

The majority wouldn't go for the jailbreak anyway, since most people go with the defaults; but I'm kind of pissed that I have to wait ages before new kernel or other exploits are found and that are untethered, such that I can safely upgrade. Even with a jailbreak, I still buy stuff from iTunes and I'm still an iPhone user.

So why does Apple hate me so much? (not that the same thing can't be said about some Android phone makers, but we're talking about Apple).
Samsung Mpower Muzik 219 FEATURE REVIEWS AND PRICE | TECHGADGETSITE
Might I suggest Jammit? You can write a rake task that packages all the assets, uploads the files to s3 and deletes the asset folder. Change the asset host to your s3 bucket or Cloudfront. Whenever you deploy, do 'rake deploy:assets' and you're set.

http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/
So leaving it port 22 lets your server blend in with the crowd, making it more secure... by obscurity!
Amazon Payments is often overlooked as a fine alternative to Paypal, for those who have had issues with Paypal's... inethical business practices. Moxie Marlinspike uses it to accept donations for example.
In this pic you can really see that IE has HUGE gaps between releases.
It would be pretty cool if you extended it back to 2001, when IE6 was released - then you could also show the rise and fall of Mozilla and the birth of Firefox.

Even better, roll it back to 1991!

Edit: and another pony request - how about putting the release date in the tooltips (yyyy-mm-dd) to clarify any confusion about when exactly it was?
@Thomas, Original - I agree completely. The boss chose the theme for other style elements. The main problem I am having is adding a element (CSS?) that styles the content links differently than the sidebar links. Since everything on the sidebar is a link making it blue would totally change the style of the page.

I need to do some research on how to make just content links underline/colored.

thx!
They are toasting to the New World Order and how much power and control they have over our personal daily lives.
12 Coolest Predictions of 2012
so nature does backward propagation!
The bubble isn't in tech startups, the bubble is in big VC's herd mentality chasing dumb valuations on the big social media companies that haven't IPO'd. Investors throwing money at those funds are fools.
I think the point of the calculator is to get you to request a quote for another merchant provider from FeeFighters if your rates aren't as low as those in the calculator.
You're assuming a human attacker, which is not the case for the vast majority of probes and attacks. Bad guys don't generally sit there with a port scanner going from IP to IP.

This is all scripted stuff we're talking about.
I was just about to say this.

Shockwave / Flash / nearly every other application in the world tells you your software is old, and asks if you want to update it, and it will keep telling you this until you check the "don't tell me again" box. Which few people do. So instead they get irritated that it always pops up, and get used to clicking "no" because they didn't want to deal with it then, and don't want to deal with it now. A year passes, they get a virus through an old exploit, and they blame the software instead of their habits / their IT department's dogma (which is not always incorrect, but frequently problematic).

Chrome, on the other hand, keeps itself up-to-date in the background, at all times, and doesn't ask you to deal with it. It doesn't even inform you it's doing so, aside from a minuscule little up-arrow on the wrench that disappears on the next launch - no progress bars, no delay, no "restart now", no alerts, nothing. There's no question if someone's using version X or Y; they have the latest of their branch. Period. Or they'll get it in a day or two, and problem solved.

Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel". It's apples and granite, or oranges and wolverines - there's no comparison ("apples are sweeter than wolverines").
I'm currently involved in a RaphaelJS-based shiny website.

Our implementation is also time-competitive with flash efforts, despite the immaturity of the tools.
> Toyota's Recall Crisis: What Have We Learned?

How completely unreliable our media can be when it comes to anything not having to do with Jersey Shore or American Idol?

Forgive the snark, but the idea that a company lost all that money, sustained such damage to their brand and image built over so many years simply because of a media that failed to do their jobs makes my blood boil.
Let's Balance the Budget
I didn't even think of that.

To be honest I would much rather have it be a sincere (but perhaps incorrect) observation than a sarcastic remark.

I would never down-vote someone's sincere gander, no matter how misguided. Sarcasm on the other hand is mockery or contempt in the guise of cheap humor and I don't think we need more of that.
The problem with automatic and invisible update is this:
say you are using chrome in your company as the interface to an internal tool of some sort. Since the tool is used internally it's messy and one day chrome changes and now, automatically and invisibly, no-one can use it.

I'm not saying chrome's way doesn't have its upsides but there is also a good argument for mantaining older releases.
These really do reflect the most significant releases of each browser, regardless of arbitrary major/minor/micro version number changes... Firefox 3.6 was as major a release in that universe as Chrome 8 was in theirs.
Yes. Obscurity works. I mean it's not perfect, but otherwise, why put camo paint on tanks? Why not just paint them bright pink and let them stand on their own defensive capabilities?
It seems like a number of superhero comics (which I am lacking in citations for) have focused on the idea of the superhero as more a symbol rather than a person. Any worthy successor can pick up the mask/costume/cape and continue fighting crime in the name of Fooman, and thus Fooman becomes a legend rather than a single person. In the words of The Sandlot, "Heroes get remembered, but legends never die."

The Dark Knight had an interesting take on this with the impostor Batmen in the beginning using guns, and the real Batman showing up to stop them. (There's something to be said about culture and intellectual property in there too, but that's for another day). I'm sure there are plenty of other good examples as well, but my knowledge of superheros is rather sparse as I was unfortunately never that big into comics.
He should instead put ssh-faker ( http://freshmeat.net/projects/ssh-faker/ ) in front of his sshd, and then any attempt to connect from an IP not already in /etc/hosts.allow will fail to even get to see his sshd, much less attempt to exploit it.

The advantage of ssh-faker is that if you are logging in remotely from somewhere that is not your normal haunt, you can remotely add an entry to /etc/hosts.allow to let yourself past the gate.
The floor mat replacement was a red herring. I've used aftermarket mats in cars without proper pins, and it's a matter of using your brain to not get them tangled up in the accelerator (which is actually hard to do). Stupid people do stupid things, and the stupid media celebrates stupidity for the sake of stupid viewers.
My advice, and I've been doing security for about 10 years now, run SSH on the normal SSH ports. Keep it patched. Install a good password policy. Centralize your accounts in an LDAP database. And then, perhaps restrict the SSH access to the few accounts or users that really need it. Perhaps you could use a jump host..

The obscurity approach doesn't actually increase security, it does increase the difficulty to use and diagnose things (it's just another step to remember and your network is just a little bit different form everybody else') and it might give you some artificial sense of being more secure. Plus there are off the shelf tools that can monitor and even dynamically repair those attacks on the fly (IPS products) and when you start using different ports those tools don't all work the same way and some won't work at all, in that case the obscurity would actually reduce your security and reduce the effectiveness of other tools you use for security.
My '09 Toyota Corolla has hooks that keep the floor mats in place. The only way to jam the mat underneath the brake pedal would be to do it deliberately.
You might want to post to erlang-questions mailing list for comments. http://www.erlang.org/faq.html

Thanks for posting. It's great to see more and more people into erlang.
There is another side to this risk. Perhaps you do lower the risk of compromise by changing your port. But you also increase the risk of locking yourself out somehow (especially if you use other tricks such as limiting IP ranges).

This may seem unlikely to you, but so is being compromised if you're security conscious, which you obviously are if you're thinking about changing the port (you'll stay up to date, disable password authentication, etc).

Most security problems occur when you overlook something. For example, you're far more likely to be compromised through a vulnerability in a web app you don't use a package manager for and so don't receive automatic updates for. Or through a user who set a weak password or compromised another machine with his key on it. And so on.

I think that on balance it makes little difference when you consider the real reasons why people get compromised.
Meh, happens all the time.

http://www.google.com/images?q=marvel+vs+dc
Sprockets 2 (not yet a gem, point to git) makes a lot of this easier. You can put extra extensions on your files to get them processed with ERB or similar before they're served, so you can actually append auto generated asset versions to URLs in CSS files if you want. It also sends appropriate status codes when there's a stale version (410 Gone).

Sprockets 2 behind Amazon CloudFront does asset handling almost exactly like I want it done.
Just out of interest, if you're going to need to talk between C#, C++ and Python, why not just use HTTP and JSON? Unless you have truly crazy performance requirements that should be more than fast enough for most purposes, and it's really easy to work with (debug in the browser etc).
I suppose it would be possible to learn faster than by just going the official route. Does Batman need a detective license? I think not.

I wonder if there are cases of people leading batman style lives. Or even maybe Dexter style lives (going about dishing out illegal justice in their spare time).

One thing that comes to mind is from a movie I saw (maybe smoke signals?), where the native american tribe (living in modern times) had a traditional role of some people disguising and teaching other people a lesson.

As for the signalling problem, maybe something could be built with modern technologie (SMS, mobile internet, social networks).

In fact today I had this thought, fueled by paranoia: what if your child was abducted, but could send one last distress call. I suppose police wouldn't be able to block the roads in time to catch the abductor, but what if by a snowballing flash mob effect, all people would take to the street and blocked all roads until police would arrive? It would be a kind of distributed batman effect...
Oh there have definitely been studies on it (a good review: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2062484/), and without a doubt they communicate. It's just that this paper didn't really address that.

What was remarkable about this paper was that they demonstrated action potentials (basically, the neuron's relative charge depolarizing) could start not only in the soma, but in the axon.
Less load on the server, plus probably fewer vulnerabilies and simpler admin on the firewall device. I suppose your mileage will vary.
A surprised or excited look would have been cute overload.

Very cool. I like it.
I should be there once again! Always a great event.
Aav   zcv  Music, Lyrics, Videos and Trailers - Tanu Weds Manu album
it's certainly a little syntactically ugly. I'd much prefer it if functions were first-class and I could write something like "widgets.any? can_frobnicate?" or "any widgets can_frobnicate?".
Reformatting Bad HTML
I have used http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ to recover a disk which failed due to mechanical head failure. The cost was O($3000), expensive, but less costly than trying to reconstruct the lost data. I have also used Steve Gibson's spinrite program (http://www.grc.com/intro.htm) which does very low level recovery and repair.
YMMV depending upon exactly what kind of error you have.
The interactive map doesn't allow one to account for increased economic growth. That's the argument behind supply side economics. There are two books that best lay out an approach to fix the budget deficit by cutting taxes. I know this sounds crazy, but I encourage everyone to give them a read. I've also included JFK's speech to the New York Economic Club (He'd be with Republicans today on fiscal issues). Even if you read them as a mental exercise, it will help you understand why Republicans advocate cutting taxes:

JFK's address to the New York Economic Club:http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkeconomicclubaddr...

Econoclasts by Brian Domitrovic: (This book shows why when Bush 43 cut taxes it didn't lead to growth. Mundell's policy mix is key) http://www.amazon.com/Econoclasts-Supply-Side-Revolution-Pro...

The Growth Experiment by Lawrence Lindsey
http://www.amazon.com/Growth-Experiment-Policy-Transforming-...

I don't disagree that spending is the main culprit of the budget deficit, but there is a way out of our predicament that few if any are talking about. Historically tax revenue is equal to about 18% of GDP. So in order to have a balanced budget at 3.73 trillion we would need a GDP of 20.7 trillion . To balance our budget, assuming no growth in spending, it would take 7 years of 5% growth. It would take 5 years at 7% growth and if we could get to 8% growth, agreed to keep the budget at 3.73 trillion, in year five we could pay 300 billion of our national debt down. In my opinion, growth is literally the only way out of our problem without devaluing our currency. The tax raises necessary to fix our problem would choke off our ability to grow.
Check out the gear thingy under the total volume slider that says "More options? We have some, try the comparison with Paypal Pro..." ;)

Apparently, when you were looking for a merchant account, you weren't using FeeFighters to bid down your fees ;) or you would've gotten a better rate.

Try us out!
Ruby4Kids: Another initiative to teach kids with Ruby
How One Man Tracked Down Anonymous — And Paid a Heavy Price
Maybe the next generation of supercomputers can figure out how to pay off the debt this funding creates.