skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What do you mean by "querying the top level .com servers directly"? How are you doing that?

First, ask the root servers for the authoritative servers for the TLD you are interested in:

$ dig @f.root-servers.net www.google.com

[...]
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com. 172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net.
com. 172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net.
[...]
com. 172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
a.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.5.6.30
b.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.33.14.30
[...]
m.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.55.83.30
a.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:a83e::2:30

[...]

The root servers don't know about google.com, but suggest you ask
[a-m].gtld-servers.net, which are authoritative for .com. (Other TLDs have
other authoritative servers.) So let's ask l.gtld-servers.net:

$ dig @l.gtld-servers.net www.google.com

[...]
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
google.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.google.com.
google.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.google.com.
google.com. 172800 IN NS ns3.google.com.
google.com. 172800 IN NS ns4.google.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns2.google.com. 172800 IN A 216.239.34.10
[...]
ns4.google.com. 172800 IN A 216.239.38.10

[...]

The above is an example of a registered domain ("I don't know about
www.google.com, ask ns[1-4].google.com"); if the domain is not registered, it
looks like this:

$ dig @l.gtld-servers.net no-such-domain.com

[...]
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;no-such-domain.com. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com. 900 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1301905185 1800 900 604800 86400

[...]

Of course, [a-m].gtld-servers.net are run by Verisign, who could use this information for front-running. I'd be very surprised if they did, though. (DNSSEC may make it possible to query for the existence of a name without revealing it to the answering server, but I'm not sure - I'd have to read up on the protocol.)
what's left when you subtract lack of ethics?
>It's just kind of unsettling to have heard him talked about as a genius so many times yet to have never heard it acknowledged that he was so profoundly mistreated.

At the time, being homosexual was considered a mental disorder. This is how we used to treat people with mental disorders. Now, go to your nearest insane asylum and see if we're any less barbaric today. Be prepared for disappointment.
Zynga had $850 million in revenue in 2010, why would raising $500m seem extremely risky?
I like the idea of demonstrating the impressive size of Wikipedia by printing a book. However, the article withholds important base information:

* Which paper format and size has been used? (Letter? A4?)

* How big are the page margins?

* Is it printed one-sided or two-sided?

* Which font and font-size have been used?

* What line-distance has been used? (100%, 150%, ... ?)

* What does the "0.01%" refer to? (to the number of words, or just to the number of articles?)

Without this information, the given facts like "5000 pages" are almost meaningless.
So they're redirecting the money towards universities? That's great -- in principle, at least. Research is their core business.

However, in the current financial/academic climate, I suspect that universities will simply withdraw internal funding from these departments (because, well, the CS guys got their money now) which would result in a net loss.
Jim Lovell: "Everything You've Ever Known Is Behind Your Thumb"
>I wonder if our descendants will be apologizing for some of our actions once we're all dead?

We lock people up for smoking a plant that grows naturally, laughing about the fact that they may be raped by other men. I would say it's almost a certainty (at least I hope) that our descendants will be at least as shocked at what we do as we are at those who came before us.
I do not think it needs much more "taking off". The site has 9300 paying members (according to [1]), which I assume means they're profitable. I get the impression that the founders aren't looking for more than a lifestyle business.

[1] https://auth.whiskeymedia.com/world-tour/
In the light of this article, Google should have a play area with only limited network and processing power for publishing betas of new products.

For example, anything that's Google Search or GMail or similar must meet some performance, stability, and realiability criteria but those applications would also get to run on the big clusters. Conversely, it wouldn't matter if a beta-toy is a bit buggy or hogs down the servers on the playground since it's just playground.

Some users would bear with the unfinished tone and start using the apps there, and at times it would happen that one application would gain lots of momentum, and Google could consider fixing and lifting that one to the full service level.
It's always good to have an open discussion, but I don't find it convincing when an anonymous guy on Quora based on second-hand unverified information claims that he knows better what is good of bad for Google.
Anybody writing, for example, Python code to solve these sort of problems in the real world would instantly reach for numpy. Which, while not part of the core language distribution, is pretty close to being a standard library for most python programmers. I'm sure several of the other languages have similar libraries that are being ignored in these benchmarks. Without taking things like that into account, theses results don't say too many useful things about real world performance.
How to get a career in open source
Quantity Always Trumps Quality (2008)
"In the early hours of Dec. 3, 2010, the X-37B became the first U.S. space vehicle to make an autonomous runway landing from orbit." I find this snippet far more interesting than the speculation about what the mission was about. Maybe I don't even want to know what it was doing, but it's good to see that the military is still pushing technology development. Also see: autonomous drones.
Congrats, and kudos for adding to the knowledge pool for learners. You should consider making .mobi and .epub available as well.
In my experience, by far the simplest way to get jobs in open source is the direct way -- work on projects that companies are interested in.

For example, there are probably at least 100 times more companies looking for "ffmpeg developers" than there are actual ffmpeg developers in existence.
Posted when it was new 973 days ago. Decent comment thread there. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=265520
The mac version of Chrome seems to work fine.
The autocomplete shows data that seems to be from instantdomainsearch, but clicking the search button or pressing <enter> opens a new window with a GoDaddy page. Unexpected and undesirable.
Moving Insurance and Coverage
All licensed movers must provide liability for the value of goods they transport, but you have to be aware of the amount of protection provided and any additional charges that may apply.
According to http://www.rob-matthews.com/index.php?/project/wikipedia/ it has 5000 pages, consisting of just the WP featured articles. No example typeset pages are given.
Only 5,000 pages? I have books that are over 2,600 pages that don't even break 2.5" (eg Machinery's Handbook). Even using standard 20lb printer paper, my calculations don't have it breaking a foot. They must have used something like card stock, just to add shock value to it.

Seriously though, turning Wikipedia into dead tree media is something that should be taken more seriously. Without much effort, relatively interesting primers on subjects could be put together with relatively little effort. Think "Cryptographic algorithms" or "Battles of WW2" or "Countries of Africa" Collect and curate a selection carefully, and throw it up on some place like lulu.
"I hope this guy does go ahead and create a OpenGL UI toolkit"

Rather ironic, given that Bill Spitzak at Digital Domain (who did the VFX for Tron) created FLTK for Nuke which has now replaced it with Qt...
You're welcome! Thanks for writing it.
Great, another excuse for the undereducated masses to weigh in on critical decisions in energy policy, monetary policy, and other areas where quantitative training should be very well required.

Don't trust experts? I'll take my chances. Know what's more blinding than knowledge? Having no idea what you're talking about! Like 96% of internet users, who think it's their god-given right to explain world events with their conspiracy-driven thinking, emotional ejections, and numbers off by one or more orders of magnitude.

Say what you will about my parents' generation; at least they knew not to form and promote opinions in fields they had no goddamn understanding of whatever. If you're in the top 1% of the population by intelligence, curiosity, and diligence (e.g. Richard Feynman) you will occasionally be able to scoop experts. Everyone else... should probably not be told at a young age that their opinions matter ex novo.
You're offended by papers exposing the "War on Terror" for the farce it is?
if you ignore the weather you risk freezing to death or dying of heat-stroke.

I don't think he's saying ignore the weather, he's saying don't use the weather as an excuse for staying at home, when all you have to do is dress appropriately .
I wonder how these statistics would look like if he really charged 1$ for each copy. It's risky to extrapolate, because people are surprisingly resistant to paying for stuff online, even if the price is extremely small.
7digital (London UK) is hiring developers

http://about.7digital.net/Careers/DevelopmentTeam/Developer

Company:
7digital is a leading digital B2B media delivery company based in London and operating globally. We provide Cloud-based services, MP3 music, ebooks and video services to a wide and diverse range of partners around the world.

Stack:
C#, Ruby, JavaScript, ASP.Net MVC, NHibernate, Windsor, StructureMap, OpenRasta, NUnit, RhinoMocks, ReSharper, NDepend, Cucumber, RSpec, Rake, Selenium, Watir, Git, Subversion, SQL, Solr/Lucene, MogileFS

Team:
You’ll be joining a team of extremely enthusiastic developers who enjoy what we do. Among other things, Pair Programming, TDD/BDD, Refactoring, and Continuous Delivery are deeply embedded and we’re constantly striving to improve the way we work. We know typing is not the bottleneck, so among other things:

* Have around two sessions a week spending time doing things like Katas, Dojos and discussing practices and technologies.

* Each get up to two days “innovation time” a month we can use to play with new toys or product ideas.

* Attend conferences and community events, both as participants and contributors (we’ve even shown off our processes at events like XPDay 2009 where we got some great feedback).

* Regularly retrospect (as teams and the department) on how we can improve the way we work.

http://about.7digital.net/Careers/DevelopmentTeam/Developer
These companies can afford to set up big labs with lots of PhDs and
pay them to do whatever the hell they want with little accountability

As an anonymous commenter has already pointed out, with the possible exception of some parts of MSR, there aren't any industrial labs where you can "do whatever the hell you want". I was offered a position at IBM research and they were very clear from the outset that they had a specific set of projects they wanted me to work on. In fact, these projects had less to do with my research work at grad school and more to do with what I'd done in my previous life as a software developer. These sense I got from talking to the researchers at IBM was there is a clear expectation that IBM research would directly impact the company's bottomline. The group I was to be recruited into was helping solve some of the hard problems that the rest of the organization simply doesn't have the expertise to solve.

I dunno about other fields but in my area of work, which is computer architecture, MSR, Intel and IBM have all written important papers that have directly influenced the design of many current-generation microprocessors. So, I'm a bit hesitant to suggest that the labs have failed or that the model is broken. The model could do with some improvement for sure, but then again, what couldn't?
> then I think everyone is seriously under evaluating the power of online publishing

Well actually I believe it is not so much "online publishing" than "free publishing" that is under evaluated, especially concerning programming books.

The thing is that when you want to teach yourself a programming language, there is a ton of free material online, so you don't want to go buy a hardcopy of a book (except some really exceptional material sucha as sicp, and others). It is especially true if it is not your first programming language, so you don't need all the "algorithm" stuff, and are just looking for a quick reference, some idioms, and a lot of code examples.

The only issue with the stuff you find online is that there seldom is a unique comprehensive source of information. You often have to jump between different tutorials in order to grasp certain concepts (can't help to mention the concept of monads in Haskell, which is a perfect illustration of what I'm saying).

So I'm not surprised that a tutorial covering many topics got so many hits..

> .. or charge about $1

Doesn't sound like a good idea. The problem is not with the price, but with the effort required to pay. I don't have a paypal account, and I don't plan to get one just to buy a tutorial, when I have tons of other ressources online. This is very different from the "apple apps" that cost one dollar: the cost is the same, but the effort required is much smaller.
We do need to pursue it, but a short-term oriented market based system just can't do it. There is too much financial risk in the kind of research that needs to be done. And if you do ever manage to produce anything, everyone else can just copy it. So the best strategy in the market will always be to not spend anything on research and just steal from those who do.
"More minimalist effect" in the maximalist market
A university that has a reputation for doing this will attract less funding.

This isn't a new phenomenon. Most of the money that comes to successful departments comes from research funding, usually from the big funding agencies, and the risk is more that the university admin lavishes attention and resources on the most visibly successful departments, and so sacrificing breadth and the strength of their interdisciplinary work. Look at the recent Kings College London fiasco for a recent example.
Indeed.

Diveroli didn't even get bent over - he bent over himself. The article really spells out how clueless these guys were. This image springs to mind (http://www.just-whatever.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/dont...).

Its a minor hobby of mine to learn and reason about military and political history. And you have always keep in mind that everything you see and hear is a lie and a feint, covering another lie and a feint and that truth lies several layers deep. Gears withing gears and feints within feints.

These guys broke all the rules in the book - the government saved their asses by taking them in. Otherwise they would get same treatment as their Albanian partner did. It's not like they were the first to try to one-up their "partners". In this kind of industry one can even gain traction, but one must know that there is always a bigger and meaner fish out there - and that it will come after you.
Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene
This, to me, boils down to "triangulate, differentiate, execute better, and compete", in fewer words. Or even more concisely, "be realistic".

I don't think this is invalid, but at the same time, it seems like it's suggesting that, rather than searching for a need you want solved and framing it in terms of a realistic goal and whittling it down to a compelling product, you should be identifying someone else's need and building that product.

A fun idea without a plan may need some serious thought and modifications to make it a compelling product, but I think that perhaps a compelling idea with no fun is pretty difficult to make fun.

Perhaps my core philosophical objection can be summarized in contrast to this:

> Any sufficiently big market will give you tons of interesting ideas. Why do you need to come up one of your own?

I don't think this is a market-driven approach, in the sense that the market is merely setting the context, and it's still interest-driven, and you're still searching (and hopefully coming up with) ideas you find interesting. Just identifying exploitable needs isn't necessarily going to expose something you're going to enjoy.
Anonymity through two lenses
'Up and coming' Researchers generally improve their reputation by schmoozing journalists, doing conferences and so on. If for example, you didn't want to do through someone like ZDI you could just post the bug to full disclosure. If it's a big enough bug, then the media will come to you.

Unfortunately in this industry 'rep' isn't earned, it's about who shouts the loudest, and it leads to some uncomfortable situations.
Similar story here in Australia. Not surprising given the similarity between the two countries (though I note there are also some significant differences as well). Probably the most notable is the relatively small population compared to say the US. You'd think Canada actually has the greater advantage though.

What annoys me the most, however, is that the US and Australian governments allegedly signed a free trade agreement. Copyright laws were altered here to be more compatible with the US, though it has certainly not altered the extortion sought by distributors. Many US e-commerce sites including Amazon for non-book/dvd products won't post to Australia. I'm pretty sure they'll post to US territories such as Guan which isn't far off the Australian coast. Close enough that some Australian company run fibre there, to take advantage of surplus capacity they had. So free trade agreements don't really change much for consumers it seems (however, it should in theory reduce barriers for Australian companies to sell in the US and vice versa).
Yes, it should be the official webmaster's day.
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If your complaint is about politics work, then I would agree.

Otherwise, I personally find it more troubling that some people say "well, I haven't spent 20 years studying this I guess I just have to believe what I'm told". You can't just believe what you're told either, you have to know the confidence level of the underlying field. Is this a hard science? It is just a bunch of computer simulations studying something that has far too many variables to ever be rigorously tested?

The best thing we can do, IMO, is be open minded and not be so final about things that can't actually be tested.
Preferably staying out of the way by providing the right abstractions. Even a huge library can feel light and flexible if the design encapsulates all the unnecessary details and translates well into the way we think about the problem.
Why not? In my opinion and experience, market can be source of interesting, fun and money making ideas. I had no experience of A/B testing, it started as purely from an exploitative point of view but now I am still enjoying more than anything else in the world. Am I an outlier? I don't think so. If industry that I had picked were about document management or software backup, I would have still enjoyed it.

The path to excellence is fun, no matter which road you pick.
I think this was posted a few days ago, but it has led to a mildly interesting discussion so I have no issue with it.
Yuri Milner Portrait
Slammer is a really old worm. It exploits this[1] vulnerability so it's not surprising that it's dying off. The entire worm is small enough to fit in a single UDP packet as it just generates random IP addresses, launches itself on UDP port 1434, and if the packets hit a vulnerable windows 2000 server, then the exploit kicks in and we have a new infected host to propogate the worm.

Bearing in mind that the vulnerability exploits a weakness in a very old no longer supported version of Windows, and that the patch came out 9 years ago it's not surprising that slammer activity has decreased.

There are a number of possible reasons for this - for example, maybe there were just a few infected servers and these have been taken offline, or that some form of filtering has been put in place at the ISP or country level so ISS' sensors no longer pick it up, but the reality is we just don't know.

All worms have a shelf life, perhaps slammer's just reached the end of it's one. 8 years isn't a bad run. After all, how many Morris worm infections does anyone see these days?

[1] - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-039....
That might be true, but it's worth at least looking at Apple's App Store, and noticing that if you make it easy enough, lots of people _are_ perfectly happy to pay 99c for 10 or 20 minutes worth of entertainment.

If Zed could find an easy enough way to let people give him just a little bit of money for his work, I suspect quite a lot of people would do so.
The latest results aren't available yet, but the most recent word count of 6 billion dates from Nov 09. 0.01% of that over 5000 pages would give 120 words per page. Something is missing.

Nor does the "0.01%" refer to the number of articles. The author's website says this is a printout of the (English) "Featured articles" (currently 3235). Neither dividing that by the number of English articles (3.6M) or total articles (18.1M) gives 0.01%.

So I can't see where they got 0.01% from.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

http://www.rob-matthews.com/index.php?/project/wikipedia/
You were offended that some people simply had no idea about this?!
There are fishy companies that sell print-on-demand "books" based directly on Wikipedia articles, mentioning the source only in small print. I guess most of their customers don't realize that they buy something available for free on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing
Hell, if I'm reading his twitterstream correctly, he's had 299 people pay him either $14.99 for a digital copy or $29.99 for a paper copy.

I don't know just how elastic the price/demand curve is (or what distorting effects the option of "free download" gives to that curve), but I could easily imagine more that a lot more than 10 times as many people might have chosen to pay ~$1.50 instead of ~$15.
Just a note on (b): ease-of-use can also disrupt an industry, by making it accessible to people with less skill/time. It's not that it becomes less tedious use for existing users, but a step-function, that it becomes possible to use for non-users.

[The reason this (and low-cost) are potentially disruptive is because they target non-consumption: people who aren't customers of incumbents, and so acquiring them doesn't provoke a competitive response, while you grow strong enough (e.g. improve product performance/features) to potentially defeat those incumbents. The same effect also makes it easier to get started.]
Not that amazing if you account that had they not been dealing in forbidden goods they wouldn't be able to deliver, not to mention earn anything for themselves.

What you said is like saying that Count Victor Lustig's sale of Eiffel Tower was completely legitimate - except for the fact that he was not a government official.
This advice aligns with my current views so much that I wish I could send back this advice in time to my younger self.
Wow, great perspective. I agree with you completely.
Which is More Important? - منتديات قروب الساهر
Ask HN: Should 'spelling' of Node.js be standardized?
Too many possible variations at the moment: Node.js node.js, Nodejs, NodeJS, nodeJS, etc. Personally I prefer NodeJS, remove the period and keep it capitalized since it's a noun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_density#Conversions

5000 pages of 20lb paper would be 0.485m tall.

2.5"/2600 = 0.024m, which looks like 4lb paper - seriously thin.