skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't agree more.

I worked for an online gambling company for several years in the analytics area. I saw young players rise meteorically, win millions (not exaggerating) and eventually go broke.

Almost everyone is human. Once losses start to mount, it's hard to play with according to the program and stay emotionally detached while your world is crumbling with every lost pot.

Never underestimate the cheaters. Most online poker players don't understand how rampant collusion is. Dumb colluders are easy to spot. Smart ones will stay undetected until someone gets greedy. Almost everyone is human. It's hard to maintain discipline.

I myself thought about playing online professionally. After I realistically evaluated my chances and my stats, it became clear that I would make more money on a guaranteed basis by being a consultant than a professional poker player. When you have a family that depends on you, stable income becomes very important.

Online gamblers live a very unfullfilling life: you are staring at several computer screens many hours each day, you don't really create anything and you have wild swings in your income. With exception of few lucky, hard working, disciplined and possibly intelligently colluding players you will not make good money in the long run.

In the short run, impossible is nothing. Play that tourney, enjoy a night in a casino. It's good fun if it's not your job.
Encryption without authentication is useless.

It's mostly useless. Anyone trying to eavesdrop needs to expend slightly more resources, and needs to take the risk that there was some out-of-band authentication that they aren't aware of.

Firefox gets a lot of grief (from idiots) for refusing self-signed certificates by default, but it's a huge credit to their security team that they've resisted the pressure to ease up.

No, it mostly gets grief (from sane people) for not also refusing plain HTTP under the same pretenses.
On Its 16th Birthday, The Story of How the Wiki Was Born of Apple and the Mac
Concerning just intonation scales, this paper boils down to saying that, if a given ratio appears in a scale, then ratios with prime factors removed tend to appear in the same scale.

Since intervals whose ratios' numerators and denominators high LCMs tend to sound dissonant, it is not surprising that these complex ratios are present only when the simpler ratios are already "taken". Seems like the same evolutionary processes that result in languages with simple speech sounds may be at work here.

As far as even-tempered scales go, this is silly.

From section 2.2, on reducing even-tempered scales (think, transcendental numbers) to just intonation scales (ratios):

> In an Euler-lattice [...], unison vectors can be found which represent very small ratios,

...of COURSE if you approximate the tones with very small ratios, they will likely form a convex lattice, since very small ratios are all near the center of the lattice!
On having used the app and having talked to people who worked with Bill Nguyen.
No offense, but I'm guessing you're not particularly great at poker. What stakes do you play?

I don't mean it derogatorily, but I don't see how any talented, high-stakes player could believe that the game has fewer meta-lessons than soccer game organization.

Have a great day, low-stakes donkey.
So first, I don't get the analogy of Sequoia as a friend in this scenario. Especially when the project house is a data mining application.

Second, I found it difficult to enjoy the ride when the product, as released, was buggy and difficult to understand in both UI and user proposition.
It comes down to bankroll protection.

With midrange professional players, I don't think you really see those kinds of crazy swings. Once you reach a certain level, you start doing dumb things, like playing head-to-head games at ridiculous stakes against players you're equally matched with.

Which is why poker doesn't scale well. Eventually you're not going to hit a level where you don't have as clear an advantage over your opponents. Your profits will eventually end up capping out. You either need to find a new angle or start gambling like a degenerate to further advance.

Players like Matusow aren't going to scale down their stakes when their bankroll starts to shrink dramatically.
I found your comparison of Netsparker to Metasploit disingenuous

I have no position on whether he should mention his product in a news thread about SQLI, but he was responding directly to bjg, who said:

That product looks awfully similar to Metasploit ( http://www.metasploit.com/ ) , no?

How is it different?

So, his "comparison" was just responding to someone saying "Hos is it different?", literally.
> $41M distributed among many different startups would be better for the tech ecosystem/community as a whole

In what ways? How would that be true? It's a free market - you get what you can get. You can argue fb doesn't deserve its valuation either, but there doesn't seem to be same amount of disbelief and schadenfreude-seeking.
From a strategy perspective, it matters hugely to anybody in or thinking of launching a startup.

If there's no bubble, then the current happy days are likely to continue: lots of money chasing after good ideas, huge rewards for the winners and so as a result easy access to angel investments and high valuations. Yay! So it makes sense to think of a strategy focused raising a lot of money on great terms.

On the other hand, if there is a bubble, a very different strategy is called for. One option is to sneak in and raise money at bubbleicious valuations before it pops. But that risks setting expectations with investors that will be impossible to meet in a post-bubble environment -- a recipe for a rocky medium term. Another option is to batten down the hatches and focus on getting to cash-flow positive ASAP to leave yourself in the best position to pick up the pieces as other unsustainable companies crumble. Or as I said elsewhere in the thread, maybe it's a good time to be contrarian: work out where the bubble is likely to be, and position yourself differently so that when it pops you can be there as one of the first exciting post-bubble companies. And it's also possible to take a straddling strategy, ready to go either way depending on whether or not it's a bubble.

Of course it's impossible to know for sure what the answer is. But hearing and understanding various perspectives (right and wrong) and others' reaction to them really helps map out the strategy space and highlight the best places to be.
How about not starting the timer until you see mouse activity on the page?
Yeah, I wonder why Ellington didn't get more traction.
I agree. It's kind of a bummer.

That said, they set themselves up for it-- I'm amazed that (through a combination of common sense and user-testing) they couldn't anticipate the backlash. They should have either launched something that amazed/delighted users or stayed stealthy until they could. A private beta, some user testing, and a survey or two should've alerted them that they had an app that would confuse/alienate users. The funding or 2-star offering wouldn't have resulted in this kind of backlash alone, but together... Ugh.

They've now got years of runway-- Here's hoping the hole they've dug is small compared to the mountain they're going to climb.
Its very common for high level rts players to also play poker. During the time of starcraft broodwar before starcraft 2 launched there was not much north american/european interest in the gaming scene. Professional players use to play poker by day to make money and starcraft by night to practice for their next tournament.
The first time you connect to an SSH server, your client will display that server's key, and prompt for instructions.

Notably, SSH will not automatically connect. It asks first. That's why it's useful. Additionally, SSH is such a niche tool that its users can be expected to be security-minded -- for example, by checking that the fingerprint matches the expected string instead of just clicking through.

If browsers automatically trusted a page the first time they hit, attackers can just redirect the user to http://paypa1.com/ and feed them a fancy, green-url certificate.
The issue with finance is that people are using huge amounts of leverage to place bets. If they werent allowed the level of leverage that they are using (i.e. 1:30) there would be a whole lot less "money" in the system. The financial system is allowing people to assign value to intangible assets 3-4 times removed from an actual physical asset. The main issue with that is that it has the capability to take us all down.
In that case there is no reason for any distro of linux to exist. Just one should be enough. There is a lot of reinventio in the space of linux and that is a good thing IMO.

This is just a beginning. A first attempt at what they want to do. Future iterations might bring out something nicer. Again as I said, if it doesn't market will tell them so.
I'll throw in an unsubstantiated hypothesis that this happened with popularization of Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
> I'll wait for the day when he announces he's broken it.

And so will a massive part of the Computer Science/Mathematics/Physics community. Answering the P vs NP question is kind of a big deal. :D
The only difference between the SBCL decls + noopt version and the decls + optimizations version, at least when I compiled it with SBCL 1.0.40.0, is the number of generated nops used to align the beginning of the inner loop which really shouldn't be noticeable at all. I'm guessing the 60ms difference between the two is just noise rather than the appearance of a difference in code generation.
I think that it isn't necessarily to be the first to declare it, but people want too see it coming. Where the first tech bubble surprised a lot of people and they lost money. If you know your going to lose some, it doesn't hurt as bad. Kind of like playing roulette. You expect to lose but it feels good when you win.
NY vs. LA Cartoon : http://slithytove.com/media/pictures/callahan.jpg
Show HN: Onflood, a location-specific social network
I decided to spend part of this weekend exploring short-term, location-specific social networks. Here's what I came up with:

http://onflood.com/

Onflood grabs your location using the HTML5 geolocation API. It then creates an adhoc messageboard based on the number of messages in your area - the more messages there are near to you, the more closely-focused on your geographic location the system will be. So you shouldn't ever see a blank page. I don't want anyone to feel lonely!

Possible use cases include:

- Conference back-channels

- Communication during protests and demonstrations

- Finding out what's going on in a strange town

There's a lot more I'd like to do with this (ActivityStreams, its own API, login via OpenID, Facebook, etc), but I thought I'd pour myself a whiskey and open this up for feedback right now. Let me know what you think!
Replicating SSH's UI is not the point here.

> Notably, SSH will not automatically connect. It asks first. That's why it's useful.

How many sysadmins really do check their newly installed server's fingerprint? They just type "yes" on first connect and grab the server's certificate. I believe very few people actually do manual loopups when SSH pops the first-connection warning.

Most hosting providers will send you cleartext passwords for your server by email. When you log onto that server for the first time, there is no easy way to tell if you're the victim of an elaborate MITM attack. So that's happening right now.

> If browsers automatically trusted a page the first time they hit, attackers can just redirect the user to http://paypa1.com/ and feed them a fancy, green-url certificate.

Indeed they can. Nobody's suggesting otherwise. By the way, I can do that today, by registering a cert for paypa1.com, just to see how many people actually take a second look at the content of the certificate.
Even if the CA is cheap and sloppy, an effective attack requires MITM through subverting DNS. This requires the attacker to either have access to the machine or access to the routing equipment. If the attacker owns the machine then it is already game over.

So the remaining threat is if the attacker gains access to the routing equipment, for instance a public WiFi access point or a government.

In the case of a government doing a MITM attack, then the easiest way is to subvert the download sites, so that firefox, MSIE etc includes CAs that the government is in control of. There is no solution for this attack, since both TOFU/POP and CAs are subverted.

In the second case, where public WiFi is under control of criminals, then TOFU/POP has more general applicability. In fact, a change of CA is probably a sign that the connection has been tampered.
An invalid certificate is far more likely to be an attack than a misconfigured server.

If Firefox silently accepted self-signed certificates, and presented the same UI as an unencrypted page, attackers could intercept requests to https://paypal.com/ and very few users would ever notice.

Additionally, automatically accepting self-signed certificates would render ideas like "HTTPS-only cookies" useless, because now the browser would happily send them to anyone who asks.
Notices are out... did you get in?
How Grooveshark Uses Gearman
I know this isn't Reddit, but "The gravy orb hovers once again over London" put such a smile on my face that I'm forced to upvote you for bringing a tiny bit of joy to my day.
Euclid - Letting Retail Stores A/B Test.
Sorry, that was probably a bad analogy. Either way, the ride can be enjoyed as a bystander. If you don't like it, don't use it. I totally agree that the UI is so unusable I uninstalled the app, but I am still interested in seeing how things turn out.
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Good post. It is amazing how much one person can do.
A universal grammar for music? It sounds plausible, and the philosophical implications would be profound.
From elsewhere (with context): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375985
For those interested in more publications in my dear field of music information retrieval (MIR), see the ISMIR conferences: http://www.ismir.net/. All ISMIR conference papers are available for free! Great place to learn about the state of the art in music transcription, source separation, classification, search and retrieval, and more.

Also, Computer Music Journal (CMJ): http://www.computermusicjournal.org/
I think I kind of know, but for the uninitiated, can someone tell us what the potential practical consequences of this hack could have been?
Yes, JNMR is peer reviewed. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/nnmr
The middle hops are much (much) harder to MITM than the initial hops. If hackers control the bank's internet connection then they get everyone's bank info, which is absolutely the bank's problem (and as such they would take measures to prevent it, like third-party monitoring of their certificates from other points on the Internet). As for governments reading email, the current CA system hardly prevents that. Under this system, you could detect MITM after the fact by using a trusted channel to compare the client's saved cert with the server's real cert. That would expose large-scale MITM tampering.
I thought the most interesting part about this was that he claimed to be a 21yo Iranian who took sole credit, while having a problem with the lack of controversy surrounding the Stuxnet US/Israel project.
All of them, it seems.
Yes, they ARE watching you
RIP Paul Baran, Father of Packet Switching and Internet pioneer
The Danger acquisition didn't really make sense from an engineering perspective - the Sidekick was a great phone - 5 years ago.

MS doesn't have the greatest track record with consumer products (Xbox not withstanding).

They OWN the enterprise. While I'm not sure the resulting products would be all that great (though everyone usually has great things to say about Windows 7 Mobile), it would be an easy sell to an enterprise.

Chinks in the apple/android armor:

1) Right now, enterprise applications have to go through the App Store (for both devices). It would be pretty powerful for enterprise to be able to push their own applications at their leisure to their phones

2) Existing tie-in to blackberry servers.

3) Android phones irritate me b/c you need a gmail address to even set it up. This is just an additional requirement for enterprise phones that shouldn't even be there.

4) Dev tools that people are familiar with. Objective C experience is harder to find that C#/.NET experience (Android is wash here with Java).
In Play did you set application.mode=prod in conf/appliction.conf? If you don't do that then you're measuring something that doesn't matter to anyone.
A good time to mention the NAI Opt-Out page:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
I've just skimmed the article. If you know music theory (scales, intonation) and a little math you can at least get the gist of it. I agree with mycroftiv's comment. It's nice in the sense that it formalizes in a new way some knowledge we already had, but it doesn't seem to be anything new or surprising.
Psychotherapy 32x More Effective at Increasing Happiness Than Money
How Free Is Your Will?
Bookmarklet to make HN comments collapsible
Great work, however where is the link to the book on Lulu.com so others can order a copy? I tried searching on lulu.com for both "on lisp" and "onlisp" and there were no results.
There's an interesting spin on this in Brooklyn's Russian immigrant community: there are companies that will give you fake references--and a crash course in the job you're supposed to have done.

Apparently they do a pretty good job. Since immigrants from the former USSR are usually pretty smart, skilled, and hard-working, they can be very rigorous and not lose students. An acquaintance did this many years ago: she learned SQL Server, and got references for a couple years of SQL Server experience, and now works at a Fortune 500 company.
Technical Debt is Johnny Cash's Caddy of Software
I chose 7 because I knew that no one else would, so I decided to re/un-skew the results :)
Those sure are some misleading bar charts.
> In fact, now that they've identified star convexity as a candidate for a universal, the next obvious step for an avant garde musician is to create music out of pitches picked from non-star-convex sets :)

Interested in doing something together? :-D
I disagree with you sir. I think the plug was fully appropriate given that others reading this story might want to scan their own sites/app and not want to look around for something.

If you don't like it, downvote it...but given that it has been upvoted some 15 times as of this writing, I think the community agrees that it provides some value.
Semi related question: how do these guys keep their millions, from a banking and tax standpoint. Is it no longer illegal to gamble online in the us?

If I was him I'd be socking away a % monthly for saving and rainy day funds
I'm hoping for some good answers here, because I'd love a better way.

I always put universal elements first (body, img, @font-face, etc.), then I just organize it top to bottom by page location (i.e. header, content, sidebar, footer, etc.). I also tab-indent so that elements within another are indented and "contained" underneath, making it easy for me to move from one section to the next. I also write the CSS horizontally, only making a new line for a new element.

I should also note that I'm a n00b :-), so this could be a horrible way to do it.
And it was fixed basically as it broke.

22:28 Ryan_Lane: restarting apache on singer
22:19 Ryan_Lane: pushing new star cert to singer
21:55 RoanKattouw: SSL certificate for secure.wikimedia.org expired about an hour ago, no ops around. I've just texted Ryan
Check your emails now, you should have heard by now!
I do it by widget and layout.
6 Apps That Would Keep You Updated To The Tech Universe [Android] | Tech Savy's
You can generate and use a restricted (read-only) AWS credential with AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management). http://aws.amazon.com/iam/
Paul Baran, one of the key figures in the creation of the Internet, passed away on Saturday at his home in Palo Alto. His passing is a great loss; his presence made our world better.
This appears to be the essay you're talking about: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"
Slightly related, but mainly a formatting issue, I format my css files as such:

.foo { x: y; a: b }
.bar { m: n }
.baz { background: blah blah url(xyz.png) top left;
x: y; i: j; }

instead of the more commonly seen:

.foo {
x: y;
a: b;
}

.bar {
m: n
}

.baz {
background: blah blah url(xyz.png) top left;
x: y;
i: j;
}

My format takes up less vertical space in the editor. Sometimes, I can get my entire CSS file into a single page on the screen, reducing the amount of time I spend scrolling and searching. I do split lines when they go off the edge of the space, as seen in the .baz example.
Sounds like an idea but I don't think it will happen. Normally one can get a discount on kegs so no need for that. Kegs are only bought during public events (rush week, house parties ..etc) when they are an abundance of people at the bar. The same happens at Freshman Events.

Also the older groups have good backings (alumni, club owners/promoters, student fundraisers)... definitely no need to cut corners like that for delayed cheques.

Student Clubs' Stores (http://www.havenbooks.ca/) are more likely to buy used text books.
I don't know when HN became a place where hackers felt afraid of plugging their products - given that we are all hackers trying to build/sell products - where appropriate.

I don't get the big fuss.

If it was a story about Bingo Cards, and patio11 plugged bcc.com I am pretty sure you wouldn't be all worked up about this.

Let's just calm it down a notch and not try to be kingmaker's here.

If the community found the plug abhorrent, they would downvote it. He would get the point.

Although, to be quite honest, now you have given his product even more promotion and visibility so it's a net positive for him - not sure it's the result you wanted in the first place.

And given that I would likely do something similar, kudos to him for every extra dollar he has earned from your rant.
To be honest. With firebug's ability to tell me what line and css files the style on an element is coming from I don't find spending a lot of time on organization to have a ton of benefit.
I do it more or less the same way, except I try to separate the layout from its content (I'll put #header, #content, #sidebar, #footer together, and later on define stuff that is specific to the content of e.g. #header).

Also, when having quite a few properties for a selector, it's quite difficult to read when all is on one long line, so I use new lines for each property.
beej71 your comment is dead, but I presume this is the usenet post you were referring to: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.video.sony/browse_t...
There's no strategy for winning. You don't get it by spending the most. It's just gambling.
I would recommend trying to get some contract work on the side. This should let you test the water without jumping in with both feet, and help you build a solid portfolio.