skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
do you know how many web/ISP hosting providers are out there that give out non-root SSH access to their customers? or how many do shared PHP hosting that make it easy to run local commands on the server?

Yes. In the late 90s, I worked in security for a company that ran one of the largest (at the time) shared hosting providers.

do you really think all of those servers have been rooted?

If someone was interested enough to capture an administrator's user account, then yes, they have been rooted.

if your operating system has no local user security, you should really upgrade it or switch to a different operating system.

There's no such thing. The local user attack surface is just too large.

As related to sudo, it's silly to think that local OS security can protect you from someone with access to an administrator's shell -- even if using sudo requires a password.

Let me break this down into simple steps:

Scenario 1:

- I acquire access to your password.

- I log in as you, then use your password to sudo to root. Game over.

Scenario 2:

- I acquire access to your SSH key or an active terminal on your server. I do not have your password.

- Logged in as you, I notice that sudo requires your password.

- Since you use zsh, I add the following to your zshrc:

sudo () { /usr/bin/sudo sh -c "echo \"pwned. Game over.\" && $==*" }

- You log in, and run some innocious sudo command. You enter your password, and then get a surprise:

nupark@fish:~> sudo ls /var/cores
Password:
pwned. Game over.
tar-3493.core
nupark@fish:~>

Under what scenario will the password requirement protect you? If the attacker can't take advantage of the situation immediately, they can just as easily leave a landmine that you won't notice until it's too late, if ever.

Once someone has a local shell -- especially an administrator's shell -- the machine is effectively compromised.

Requiring a password for sudo is at best a minor speed bump, not an obstacle, and it results in the propagation of password usage throughout your infrastructure. Many of those passwords, once acquired by an attacher, will likely grant access to other, possibly more critical systems.
The refutation to Ted would be to spend some quality time at the Bellagio poker room.

Then again, Ted's likely just referencing people who at least have shreds of sanity in them.
What else will you do with $41M? Throw around at domains and @usernames
The Age of Mediocrity: Why Rebecca Black Is Everyone's Fault [OPINION]
It could be understood as laser-like (i.e. parallel, collimated, non-diverging etc.) focus (i.e. mental focus, attention etc.). In this case the expression is correct: it just means "non-diverging attention" and doesn't say anything untrue about lasers. I'm with you on exponential though.
it will be changing to "some [ who can afford it] will not die"
I think that people are hating on Color because of a combination of two different things:

1. They've got a buggy 1.0 application with no users.

2. They've got $41 million dollars in VC money.

Either by itself might be understandable, but the combination is worrisome.

For example, it's one thing if some angel investors invest $500K or $2 million in strong team with a half-baked idea. That's enough money to allow some hiring and a few experiments.

Or coming from the other side, I can understand why investors might put $41 million into a promising social network with dedicated users and strong growth.

But $41 million for a company which hasn't demonstrated product-market fit, and is still working the bugs out of their 1.0 release? I'm not sure what Sequoia thinks they see in this deal.
Talk about solving a burning market need..
"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction
The Bottom of the Roller Coaster
All of which you can do with your laptop. The tablet just makes the experience a whole lot nicer.

So, just like the article explains, you don't need the tablet, but it's worth the $500+ anyways.
If you intend to retire at 25 years old with only 1 million you will need to become a very sophisticated investor (and not lose your shirt in the process).
Update Java and you may get annoying McAfee scanner too
Only 8 more days till April 1st
>If they were doing it, we'd have heard from an engineer involved somewhere along the line,

If they were doing it in the US, sure. In China? I have my doubts.
kylebragger (forrst's founder) first introduced forrst with a small Tell HN invite session a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132947

Then a more wide-spread RWW article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440847

Grats Kyle!
If you type in enough 9's in the "cash on hand" slot, the "middle box" will get out of bounds. Should add some JS to make the fonts a bit smaller when there are too much symbols in the row ;)
Color really needs a desktop/webapp companion app which I can watch the pic-stream from my contacts of interest / places of interest / subject matter of interest...

I just installed it on my iPhone, but I have the 3G and it is super slow (all items are slow on this phone) -- Ill install it on my My Touch later - but as I set at my desk I would prefer a tab in my browser to view the photos as opposed to just my phone.

---

The conversation that is on this article - did that occur in the Color app?
Check out: http://www.undergroundhousing.com/

He built a house for $50, albeit with many salvaged materials and in the '70s.
Just like you'll surely use your oven instead of the microwave if you're not time-constrained because it's a richer taste experience.
Bill Nguyen demo'd Color to and within a day had $25M commited from Sequoia
Wow! His writing style is amazing.

Though I have a question about the metrics he uses for measuring the bubble based on valuations of Venture Capital raised.

During the boom, Venture Capital raised $200 Billion, but he is comparing that to the $50 Billion raised during the recession of the last few years. Those metrics shouldn't add up.

Also, he isn't factoring in the growth of Angel Investment, which is taking the place of early VC. Sure, each individual deal may be small, but there are (from what I've heard) so many of them, that it all ads up.

Am I understanding the dynamics correctly? or missing something?
Unless you are a very sophisticated trader (and likely even then), knowingly betting that a bubble will continue to expand is just gambling. You might get lucky and exit at the right time, but it's seriously -EV. That said, I don't really think the majority of small time investors think in those terms or are at all aware of how the monetary boom-bust cycle operates, which is why they get fooled into thinking they are better off when their nominal wealth increases as their real wealth deterioriates.
+100. It's been done though. It's called Mozilla.
I noticed this too but I figured if you have enough "9's" in the bank, you probably don't need to use a Startup Death Clock :)
there's even articles on forrst about node.js!

http://forrst.com/posts/tagged?with=node.js
If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed.
the point aliases is to make executing the command fast enough that you aren't conscious of actually typing the command, which is one less thing to distract you. if you go to a computer without the alias, you'll probably interrupt your thought flow with every command. so in many work/team situations, the (larger) cost of changing terminals outweighs the (smaller) benefit of aliases.
A little off-topic but can anyone tell me why this story never took off when I submitted it 16 days ago?

(I've read the FAQ). Moderators please feel free to delete it if this is the wrong place.
I think this is the first time I've ever seen a story on HN and wished it was on Slashdot for the comments.
Teenagers. And Japanese.

They will always use stuff like this. And funny thing abou teenagers - there are brand new ones being made by the millions every single year....

It's the Toys'r'us business model. Your customer base is brand new every single year.
Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Knowledge Workers
The transition isn't going to happen until the cost of IPv4 addresses is much higher than the cost of switching to IPv6. I would say that the cost definitely has to be higher than $11.25 per host.
Singularity is not going to eradicate death. Aging, yes. That will probably be gone by the mid-22nd century, if not before. Death of the whole brain will always mean what it does today: the end of one's earthly existence. Mind uploading assumes there can be physical control over qualia, and there's absolutely no evidence for that.

In the middle 3rd millennium, aging will be gone and death will be rare (very rare, and exponentially declining so as to make humans post-mortal) but extremely traumatic when it happens. "Breaking News: 134-year-old honors student dies in lunar train crash." 4th-millennium humans will probably store their brains in very safe repositories and control robotic, replaceable bodies through electronic telepathy. Some people alive will probably live to see this, and if I take my next rebirth here, I probably will as well. But I kinda hope not to "make the cut". A hundred years in good health I'd love, but I don't really want to wait around till the heat death of the universe to pass on.
Jailbreak Apple Tv 4.2.1(iOS 4.3) With New Seas0nPass [How To,Download]
Mac OS X may natively support "PC" Radeon graphics cards
In terms of being top of their industry, I would think that spending this kind of money on a domain would be accompanied by the conscious or subconscious thought that since we have such an amazing domain, we'll coast and let the traffic/money come in, vs. obscure domains/company names who have to earn traffic by proving their value.
Over 40 Million and you get to buy a vowel. Less than 40 million? No vowel for you.
If there would be a software tool to help you in your customer development process - what would be the most important features for you?
Have you considered the possibility that some people might enjoy investment banking?
link bait. "Super-rich" in the title when it was only 25M threshold for the article. 25M is hardly getting one into "rich" category. At 4% draw it is 1M/year, just 5-10 times a salaried employee level and even less than that if a family of 2 earners is considered.
Great, now when I see those insipid Microsoft ("To the cloud!") commercials, I'll envision some lonely guy with a bottle of lotion, logging into Facebook.
I highly recommend everyone watch this documentary. It was produced by Jamie Johnson (as in the heir to Johnson & Johnson) who interviewed his friends for their candid feedback on what it's like to be wealthy. None of them knew this would be a public documentary so they were pretty open without the typical political correctness.

Somewhat surprisingly to me, I found the most mature amongst his peers to be Ivanka Trump. She acknowledged her wealth, but at the same time made it clear that given her head start in life, she planned to work hard to make her own path in life. And judging from accounts from a couple people who went to school with her at Penn, she's pretty sharp. I liked her.

But most of the others seemed to fall into two groups:

1) At a loss for what they should do in life given the massive amount of wealth they knew they had at their disposal. One of the main concerns for this group is just not to lose the family's money. (Jamie Johnson himself and his father fell into this category)

2) An arrogant disdain for those not in their self-determined "class". This disdain is not necessarily reserved for the middle/low classes, but could also be applied to "new money" or those with just single/double digit million net worth.

All around, great documentary. Go see it.
Apple’s growth to drop to half of what it could obtain during the recession
Has there been any research into why knowing this information in no way reduces my desire to be super-rich?
As far as commerce, Etsy has done very well in the female demographic. Their membership is heavily female.
You can't always reply on the compiler inlining your function, and AFAIK there's no portable way of forcing inlining.
<<<<insta transitioning to new internet dating business model.

Mortal Kombat meets e-Harmony.

Fight for your matches, win your dates. Love is war.

The target market seems motley, yet distinct(ly desperate).

Ok...someone needs to do an Internet video spoof off this.
The Coveted iPhone Home Screen
I've researched building spaces with conex containers. I've not actually pulled the trigger and done it, but a lot of other people have. It is fairly likely that I'll build a semi-mobile office into one before too long, but I'm not a mechanical/electrical hacker, alas. If anyone is and would like to explore this, please drop me a line.
Proud to be an investor. Go Kyle!
If only it were this simple.
But this is ludicrous even for a hype machine. "Not since Google" is absurd for a social photo and video app.
Unless of course they don't violate the ToS and instead have a real person be your 'cloud' girlfriend.

If you mechanical turk out the role of the girl friend to a human using the same sort of technology that lets a chicken play tic-tac-toe [1] then presumably you can finesse the ToS.

Next we'll see a new startup for providing plausible deniability for ToS violations, basically you send someone a device with the instructions "When this light goes on push the button, if you keep your average response time under 5 minutes for the month we'll pay you $10."

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-12N3kVh3Q
Just checked, it's on Netflix Instant Play. Just added it to my queue. Thanks for the recommendation.
Why would you want to hate something you've never used just because they raised a huge volume of money?

Ignoring the fact that they just might be on to something huge (don't trust me, ask sequoia), a valuation like this could raise the valuations for other start-ups.
The World Needs Better SaaS Analytics
Basshunter's Boten Anna came out in 2006 I think. But yes, the rise of bots on our networks is inevitable. And they do not have to fool everyone all of the time, only some for brief periods of time. On-line communication is already formulaic and does not require a long attention span.

Really, this is just Eliza with a slick new cloud API.
Anti-aging, once developed, will be cheaper than geriatric care: the "ounce of prevention" effect. Governments will be pushing the treatments on people and opt-outs may eventually be denied social services (especially once the knowledge of how to treat advanced pathologies that are now common geriatric conditions fades away).

Very few people want to live to 100000, much less forever. What will produce the very long lifespans is the day-to-day iterated decision, which won't be life vs. death or stay-young vs. get-old, but well vs. sick, where there's an obvious victor: being well. There's the saying, "Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die." I disagree. Everyone wants to die (at some point in the future, possibly millions of years off) but no one wants to get sick.
This is a killer name and quite cheap IMO.
Why It Makes Sense To Start Your Company Outside of The Valley
I've never used redis-objects but it does look interesting. I'll have a play around with it tonight and update the post.

Thanks for the heads up.

Edit: updated.
Wait, is this a Customer Development interview? :-)

Seriously though, I haven't given that a lot of thought yet. But I do think there is a need for such a software tool, but I have neither bothered to look particularly hard for one, nor thought much about building one (other than, as I mentioned above, the idea of a quick and dirty Grails app with a very minimal feature set).

Out of curiosity... are you developing such a tool? Or thinking about it? If so, I'll spend some more time thinking about this stuff and try to give you my thoughts. Feel free to email me if you'd like to have that discussion offline (in case this thread disappears into the bowels of HN or whatever.)
Article summary: Color is an app. It might be successful, it might not. Sequoia believes, the internet doesn't.
This is why forks happen (I've forked two projects because of this, three if you count one I've deployed but haven't publicly released).
Bonuses? They don't pay themselves you know.
Btw, the best way to experience this is the original audio recording of DFW's speech: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAudiob...
I think the aspects of a business that don't scale are how user behavior evolves over time. It takes awhile for groups of people to try new things and figure out all the different/awesome ways to use something (Twitter and @replies, RTs, etc are one clear example).

There is some limiting rate for iteration...
> Women have money. Go take it.

What do they want?!? I could never figure that one out.
What nonsense, people have run out of ideas so VCs are desperately hoping someone else makes it. From their site: "Simultaneously use multiple iPhones and Androids to capture photos, videos, and conversations into a group album."

How revolutionary is this? Meh.
Fed argument only covers stock price as a consequence of scaring people that put their money into bank accounts.
Mind uploading assumes there can be physical control over qualia, and there's absolutely no evidence for that.

Well, the alternative is magic.
We have a death clock on our company dashboard. Cash on hand/burn rate/revenue are updated a couple of times a month manually. We have yet to figure out a way to get the data programmatically.
Color Will Be The Pin That Bursts The Startup Bubble
I'm going to be quick.

-Friend showed me app on iPhone

-Noticed similarities between Color and Path, does not provide any usefulness to me

-Realized I can now creep on people nearby without having to ask their name and friending them on facebook

-Excitement grew with media frenzy over Color and a few friends downloading app

-Downloaded app

-Constantly crashed when uploading photo

-App lost its novelty

-App deleted from phone

-Startup that created app has 41MM funding
I am commenting from the perspective of someone who is not in the US. Currently from the Asian region (excluding China), valuations are no where near that of the US. In Singapore alone, even with for a startup with vast customer based overseas is being acquired for only $10million. Yet, that $10million acquisition is more than enough to make the startup a superstar in our ecosystem.

Perhaps this bubble is only present in the states, but elsewhere in the world, valuations are still reasonable.
That game is _hard_.

Thexder HD was released on PSN recently, btw.
> "Salespeople are notorious for giving excuses when they don't meet the sales targets they agreed to."

This is the sister argument for "developers are notorious for giving excuses when they miss deadlines they agreed to"

The key point about metrics is having something to base them off; difficult with a new product unless you know the competition (and the basis on which their clients switch) very well. A better starting point would be to agree upon how the rep intends to make 5 sales. If they make them, all is well; if they don't, you look at a simple measure of performance like whether they attended the meetings expected of them and ask what the feedback was. Resist the temptation to micromanage KPIs if things aren't going so well: if you suspect your salesperson is failing due to laziness then either you're wrong, and you'll drive them away faster or you're right and you still won't make things any better.
I was tempted to mention the same thing. Sounded very whiny. A good reminder that proof-listening your recorded audio is just as necessary as your proofreading your writings before publishing/sending them.
John Romero started writing the design for Daikatana in February 1997 and it shipped in April 2000. I don't think that's much of a record.
I wonder if they're a back story on this one...
Thinking back, that documentary did kind of disabuse me of a few notions (like 'having enough money to never need to work = paradise', 'super rich people can't realistically have anything to complain about'). Although I probably would have figured those things out sooner or later. But it was a powerful film I agree. Another insight was when they said they only date their own class because they need someone else who understands their background (ie. not out of snobbishness, but more out of the need to be understood).
Except the laptop is faster.
Congrats on the seed! I have been a member of the community for a while, and love what it has to offer members.
Everybody's who is in it for a big exit pile of money 1.0 app crashs
"you'll surely use your oven instead of the microwave if you're not time-constrained"

So, if I'm time-constrained, you're thinking I'm going to type that email on my iPad? Again, this is a bad analogy. I think people really do need tablets. They just don't need them when their desktop/laptop is in reach.
One of my worst experiences in college is to have a lecturer run through some gnarly theory, after which you get the impression that you understand it.

Then he goes "whoops, I made an error just now", and everything has to be reassessed.
Storage primitives for the distributed web
>Everybody's 1.0 app crashes.

Apparently 1.0 is the new beta
Why would governments encourage people to stay alive longer? I can think of several reasons not to do so:

-there is an associated cost per citizen that may not be offset by revenue/taxes
-this will spur population growth, with all the associated problems
Square Enix launches Hippos Lab for smartphone game development
Real Manchurian Candidates suing CIA
Stripe looks promising but based on their FAQ they are available only to US based companies/persons for now, so they are not an option I can consider, at least in the near future.
His point is that a Microwave adds convenience at the expense of ability. In that a Microwave doesn't cook things as well as an Oven does but it cooks them faster.

In that same way an iPad adds convenience at the expense of ability. You can carry an iPad places you don't want to carry a desktop or laptop but it can't do as much as those devices.

Though all of this is beside the point because your original comment treated the statement "no one needs" as if he were saying "there's no value in" when in fact that wasn't what he was saying at all.
Is Mobile Phone Radiation a Problem?