skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at the video and time it took to launch the calc.exe, it could be pdf/flash exploit that they are using.

Process count in process explorer started with 5 and at the end of the demo, it looked like they have 8. That tells there are 2 extra processes that are created (discounting 1 for calc.exe).

I tried to see if pdf/flash creates new processes but I couldn't verify. Perhaps a chrome developer could get a clue about what is happening looking at the video.
Sentiment Analysis vs Semantic Analysis
Just to add another data point - during a recent move, I was temporarily using iPhone + MyWi as my primary internet connection. Nothing particularly egregious - just basic web browsing and SFTP. This lasted for about a week.

That was at least 1 billing cycle ago, and I've yet to hear a peep from AT&T. My suspicion is AT&T is (currently) just looking for users with excessive data usage.
That position could be dominant because of a relatively small minority of Canadians who feel strongly about creationism who will actually vote on that issue.
There's a fundamental difference between physics and CS in that there aren't as many sci-fi aspects to CS theory. Think about what is popular in physics: time travel, parallel universes, teleportation, beginning/end of the universe/time, aliens.

What are the sci-fi things in CS? Really fast factoring and fast routing for a vacuum cleaner sales guy.

The one potential element is AI. But CS has largely abandoned what the public views as AI. And even when there's a public show of AI, think Watson, many in CS come and say, "that's not really AI". IMO, AI is where the public can catch on to CS. But AI isn't what's generally referred to as theoretical CS -- you won't see AI papers at FOCS/STOC.
These sources are the same ones that Apple released for 4.2, 4.1, and so on.

Maybe Apple just didn't modify any of the other tools/libraries used in iOS (or the other tools/libraries have a license that doesn't require the modifications to be released.
Hilarious. About flaws in Righthaven's court filings: I glossed over much of this criticism because these represent errors in execution, which can fowl up even the most well thought-out business models.

Proofread much? The idiom is "foul up". A "fowl up" is when ducks are in the air.

Second, this is the kind of worthless piffle that makes lawyers into bad jokes. It's based exclusively on the "how many angels can dance on the head of pin" reasoning that's divorced from ethics, morality or any empirical concern. It's all law, all the time. Fortunately, not all of morality is contained within the law.

Third: here's an "IP" lawyer being imprecise about "IP". He/she/it/them muddle copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret into a giant, ill-defined mess called "intellectual property". Only a lawyer could love "IP" because nobody else can afford to devote enough time to teasing out the meaning of the different usages of the phrase "IP".
It's APIs all the way down.
Scaling Node.js
For those commenting that the White noise is a factor:

http://www.simplynoise.com and also their downloadable thunderstorm soundscape recording: http://simplynoise.com/download.php?key=18336dd65313 (Google result, not sure why it thinks a donation has happened).
Understanding the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Part II
How do you know that WebCore on iOS still uses WAK?
> it always leads the same way....

To profit? I believe most people would get into bed with the government if offered the correct incentives. I probably would, too. It's unfortunate, but that's how things work. Is it immoral not to relax your morals to, e.g., secure a better life for yourself and your family?

(Apologies for being meta, but I've recently begun studying morality/ethics so I'm exploring ideas for which I currently do not have answers. Suggestions/directions are appreciated.)
A video of calculator showing up after clicking a link hardly constitutes proof of an exploit.

Considering the fact that they aren't going to publish the exploit, I just want to point out that this kind of thing could easily be fabricated. There are plenty of interests that benefit from unfortunate news about their competitors.
#LsmSF - App deadline in two days
There have been catastrophic events in that time that some believe acted as population bottlenecks, in particular the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba

Of course, there is much debate about the effect this had.

[edit] In a recent Seminar About Long Term Thinking, a biologist said that there is evidence the human population was reduced to a few thousand by the Toba event. That is the extent of my knowledge on the subject.
B-Squares: Modular Solar Powered Electronics
Yes, their birth rate assumptions would only yield the population milestones they suggest if the life expectancy was significantly below the reported level.
I think you'd be biting off the hand that feeds you. If you eliminate what is arguably a distasteful arrangement here, you also eliminate the incentive to continue doing it. You might get this bug for free, but you get a hidden loss, a bunch of future bugs that you'll never hear about.

Think about the audacity of farmers, who make a profit for food, which you need to live. But nobody thinks like that for some reason.

Earning profit just means you've done something for someone who really wanted it done. It's a necessary signal.
I don't have a clue about Linkedin's business model or if it would be good investment. I don't like the site itself so much - it suffers from a bad case of feature creep.

However this IPO will probably be a pretty big indicator of whether or not the big social media websites will be popular investments.
Daylighting Detroit's long buried rivers
Not to detract from the insight but:

Until very recently life expectancy at birth hovered between 20 and 35 years, but in the past century it has risen to 67 years

Most of this increase has been due to a precipitous crash in infant mortality, rather than a soaring increase in the median life expectancy. For example, even in the 1500s it seems a well-to-do Englishman (who lived a somewhat more hazardous life medically than even today's poor) had an average life expectancy of 71 if he made it as far as 21: http://apps.business.ualberta.ca/rfield/lifeexpectancy.htm
Apple TV can be easily hacked to run XBMC: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/20/xbmc-comes-to-the-new-app...

As for no apps, at $99 bucks Apple is easily taking a loss on Apple TV to get market share. As soon as Apple is ready, it would not be difficult for Apple to enable iTunes and apps for Apple TV.
It would be interesting to see statistics on how much the negative press actually affected LastPass. It seems likely that the sort of people who would use LastPass is also the sort of people capable of deciding for themselves how safe their data are.
The production environment can use the same Procfile. It's just a question of how declarative the language is and how intelligent the environment is WRT load etc. I like the idea of having all the processes declared in One Place.

Erlang OTP has been doing this forever; this is UNIX catching up.
I think saying it's not like 'Memcached' could be wrong. I can think of Memcached as a specialized case of LevelDB.
Uh, they did release it.

http://opensource.apple.com/source/WebCore/WebCore-955.66.1/...

The source is here:
http://opensource.apple.com/source/WebCore/WebCore-955.66.1/...

EDIT: I'm probably missing something, but it appears that the wak code was present since 1.0.
Zynga buys iPhone game engine development team (Cocos2D/Zapus Media)
My wife claims that I should charge my company for showering time given the number of times I emerge from the shower and start taking notes on an idea. Usually a shower follows two enormous cups of coffee.

I'd be curious to see a bit more detail on the physiological basis of this. I do plenty of things where you're able to zone out a bit, but none of them have remotely the same idea-generation rate as being in the shower. Can't help but wonder whether a big pile of warm water all over the body does something to blood flow in some useful way. If I could remember any physiology this would be the point to use an impressive word like vasoconstriction or vasodilation or some such. :-)
Tips for Communicating With Your Distributed Team
I would not have upvoted this, except it wasn't written by some paranoid academic... it was written by a (paranoid) software engineer.

When I tell close friends and family what I do for a living, any more I tell them that the core of my job as a software engineer is to reduce the amount of people required to perform business functions. At the very least, it is valid to consider the repercussions of this at scale.
Which government are you referring to?
Here's a map showing the locations of the rivers http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C417411359.PDF

I've walked the Bloody Run stretch in the Elmwood Cemetery while doing geneological research.
I don't think the Doomsday Argument is that interesting. It may be trivially true, but it doesn't tell us anything interesting or predictive. All it says is that the chronology of human existence is too complicated for us to calculate. That being the case, our working assumption can only be that we're at the midpoint of our species population line. But, keep in mind that this estimate is really, really horrible, it's only virtue being that it's better than all the others.

If someone gave you a trick coin, and you didn't know which side was favored, you'd have to assume 50/50, even knowing that you were certainly wrong. Knowing that one side is weighted doesn't give you any interesting information for one toss.

If you follow the arguments for and against the DA, it's clear this isn't about a well-defined statistical argument, but immediately devolves into qualitative arguments about our survivability. The optimists say, well, based on the average extinction rate it's extremely unlikely we'll die in <100 million years. The pessimists counter that we're creating technologies with extinction level capacities very rapidly. Either way, we don't have a way of gauging the predictive power of these claims. We can't run a controlled study of 100 human species spans.

And that's fine, because we need to argue about and introspect on the longevity of species, but brainteasers like the DA don't further it in any meaningful way.
I'd check out http://www.gettyimages.com (search under "Creative Stock" and only use "illustration")
Dont call it random
Ask HN: Is there a tech incubator bubble?
Every other story on TC or VC's tweets are about incubators and seems like there is a new one every week. I'm sure the economics make sense for them, but how many do we need??? When will there be so many people in these programs that they stop producing anything meaningful?
"Common Malthusianism" is a strange name to apply to a claim Malthus didn't make. Malthus didn't attempt to extrapolate current trends, he merely pointed out (correctly) that there will eventually be a limit to productivity. From "An Essay on the Principles of Population":

We may be quite sure that among plants, as well as among animals, there is a limit to improvement, though we do not exactly know where it is. It is probable that the gardeners who contend for flower prizes have often applied stronger dressing without success. At the same time, it would be highly presumptuous in any man to say, that he had seen the finest carnation or anemone that could ever be made to grow. He might however assert without the smallest chance of being contradicted by a future fact, that no carnation or anemone could ever by cultivation be increased to the size of a large cabbage; and yet there are assignable quantities much greater than a cabbage. No man can say that he has seen the largest ear of wheat, or the largest oak that could ever grow; but he might easily, and with perfect certainty, name a point of magnitude, at which they would not arrive. In all these cases therefore, a careful distinction should be made, between an unlimited progress, and a progress where the limit is merely undefined.

He then observed the tendency of humans to reproduce until the limits of their environment are reached and concluded that poverty will be the terminal state of humanity.

Malthus was merely wrong on this empirical point - humans are willing to voluntarily stop reproducing under certain cultural and economic circumstances. These circumstances involve modern levels of economic productivity, technologies (birth control) invented 100 years after his death, and western cultures. He wasn't wrong on principle, he merely lacked the data we have today.
Experimenting with NFC check-ins for Google I/O
If you're sure it is quite legit, why are you suggesting this? It is similar to what news networks do by adding a quotation mark to something they know is false just to suggest something they want to be true.
Shown HN: Design for Hackers (draft)
Hey everyone,
OMFGIFMBD! You might remember a few posts I wrote on design several months back that resulted in a book deal. Well, I'm happy to report that I have completed the draft of the book: Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty. A few tidbits I'll be talking about in the book:

- How to mentally navigate the hexadecimal color space.

- What the Impressionists have to do with Web 2.0 graphics.

- Why the golden ratio isn't all that golden, and how to use proportions in design.

- The insane effect that red has on your brain and decision-making

I made a little video greeting as well, if you want to sneak a peek at the draft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WjwIrh9N44

Anyway, I just wanted to give you an update as I know some of you are interested. Thanks so much for your support!
The race is on now between Apple and Google! Who will be the first to break ground on their respective paragons of green corporate campuses? I am giddy with anticipation!
Most of it(especially the javascript and webcore libraries) were present in iOS 1.0, and Apple was fairly quick on releasing the source then, so it was odd that Apple took their time releasing the source. The 4.3 releases took almost 2 months to get out.
I tend to do my best thinking when out for a walk. There's a greater chance of interruption, though, so I find myself increasingly heading towards less populated areas with fewer streets to cross.
Sex, yea you have to be careful.
Given that at least some of their customers will probably ask for this vulnerability, you have to judge whether this is a reputable company that would have a reputation to lose if they started spewing out false reports about their capabilities. It appears to be, so I would default to believing it.
Physical environment: quiet, comfortable, well lit, with the ability to have privacy as I need it for phone calls and just plain thinking. A personal whiteboard. And, silly as it may sound, a good bathroom.
Maybe I'm naive but it could simply be because they are evaluating it for internal use. The FBI and CIA don't want to use vulnerable browsers any more than we do.
Those are headers, not the implementations. If you find the .m files that go with those, that'd be awesome, but they do not appear to release them.
Agreed. Or to put it another way, that party could have been elected because the majority of people who bothered to vote were apathetic about the qualifications and bias of the Minister of State for Science and Technology and what implications that might have for funding science and industry.
I emailed them a little while ago about the text in all their articles being justified, (which is a nightmare for certain types of dyslexics, who just end up seeing patterns and losing concentration).

Apparently they've fixed it now, anywhoo my point is they also said they are in the middle of a grand site redesign, so I think, hopefully, they know about the dodgyness of the homepage.
Inspection of the provided WebCore binaries and the libraries that use them, Objective-C runtime information (often via Cycript; http://cycript.org/), and the fact they include headers (but not implementations) in the iOS releases.
> Oh, and if you're not aware there's already a SpaceX flight to the Moon scheduled for 2013

Wow! That's really cool. What kind of mass can SpaceX put on the lunar surface? Anyone cares to do the math?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,824058,00.h...

I was surprised to find this old article from Time magazine back in 1956. It concerns the solution to Post's Problem, which the article describes quite succinctly as:

| The problem: Does each non-recursive, recursively enumerable set have the property that every recursively enumerable set is recursive in it? Post himself thought not, but it was not until young Friedberg came along that anyone had the proof.

Can you imagine a mass-market magazine publishing such a thing today? Perhaps it's unnecessary, since anyone interested in computability theory probably pays attention to blogs like Scott Aaronson's.

There's a quote from from Gödel later in the article that may also speak to the problem of popularization:

| "Unfortunately," says Czech-born Kurt Godel of the institute, "he wants to study medicine. An achievement like this at his age comes only once in a lifetime.
2 days left to register for Lean Startup Machine SF
Agreed, no need to freak out, the sky's not falling. I expect Google will either find the spoit on their own, or pay what to them is a pitance to become a customer and acquire it that way. Sounds like a good company to have on the payroll anyway, doing what three years of Pwn2own hasn't managed to.
One for the FP people:

"Azamat say state of functional program is maintain by nomads with objective camel?! Is not make sense. Is crazy."

heh ;-)
Google Chrome hacked, sandbox finally escaped
They had the benefit of never having to accelerate the thing to escape velocity.
Scared? I remember distinctly the book ended with a "cautious optimism".

Yes, it points out a lot of potential problems, and makes it obvious that societies _do_ fail, and that we're not yet above that rule, but I wouldn't call it scary.
Is there a 'bubble' bubble?
I learned something today. I learned that Birmingham was Britain's second-largest city.

Anyway, best of luck to these dudes. There's certainly more than enough success to go around. Why Birmingham? Why not?

PS. Is there a YC-clone in Australia yet? Does anyone want to lend me a couple of million to start one? :)
What’s so special about Ruby on Rails?
I wrote this post after being asked the question on Twitter. What do you think - agree/disagree?
I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

That's so true. My morning shower is where I think about what my goals are for the day- it's also usually where and when I come up with the seeds of the best strategies for achieving said goals. If I haven't found a executable solution by the end of my shower, it usually won't come to me until 3am later that night when all other distractions are gone.
Ask HN: Which is the best static blog generator?
I've been running my blog, apas.gr, on WordPress since 2008.

I now want to start a new subdomain kind-of blog, for notes and more general stuff. But I'd like it to be based on a static generator like Jekyll or Stacey.

So, which is the best static blog generator out there? Preferably writing posts with Markdown.

Thanks, HN.

--btw: for some unknown reason stacey couldn't work
Police don't really "protect" anyone, their job is to cleanup the mess and investigate after the fact.
They are obviously hiding something. When they flip back to Process Explorer, Chrome is perfectly sized to cover everything in the window except the calc.exe. My guess is there are other processes running that they're trying to hide that were used in the exploit.
New iMac, MacBook Pro Support Thunderbolt Booting
I have heard awesome things about this event. Wish I could make it out to SF in time...
Yes, but some of those symptoms included things like gray hair. I also wore bifocals at a really early age. I got my first bifocals at age 30 and three years later when I got new ones the woman who fitted me said over and over "god you are young to be in bifocals". So being so sick aged me, tremendously. I heard that gray hair was indicative of things like a PABA deficiency and adrenal stress. I treated those nutritionally and I have less gray hair than I had in my early thirties.
I've attended two of these events so far (Chicago and the most recent one in NYC) and they are well worth the money. Also a great place to meet potential co-founders and employees.
> Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed A Very Few Hackers And A Lot Of Scriptkiddies' IP Addresses.

FTFY. (And true hackers would have been behind proxies or using a public wifi network anyway).
Amazon’s Cloud Player Now Works on iOS Devices
nice video. Nice job pulling this off.
I felt the same way until this comment below:

> http://www.vupen.com/english/services/
> As the world leader in vulnerability research, VUPEN Security provides weaponized and highly sophisticated exploits specifically designed for Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies to help them achieve their offensive missions using tailored and unique codes created in-house by VUPEN for vulnerabilities discovered by our researchers.
Note also the "under contract with VUPEN" part of the disclosure bit.
think he was being generic. as in "the man".
One could argue that money is more powerful than firearms. How much power and influence do corporations wield? I don't see many CEOs packing heat.
As has been pointed out you can always do what you want with your work, the question is whether you should be able to control copies of your work.

While there is some romantic appeal to the notion of a Galt's Gulch where the special creative people retreat, one should be cautious about the approach of holding your breath until other people's faces turn blue. It leads to dubious hyperbole like the member of the US House of Representatives who insisted that if we didn't extend Disney merchandising rights, we would be depriving society of its next Shakespeare. Ahem.

For a more scholarly discussion of the dubious merits of intellectual property, you can read Bodrin & Levine's book[1] "Against Intellectual Monopoly" -- it's available free on their site and other places.

[1] http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...
Vignature Launches Image Based Electronic Signature Service
Foursquare Teams With Google For NFC Check-Ins Via Posters At Google I/O
They use intimidation and other tactics to keep crime confined to certain neighborhoods. They have a lot of strategies geared toward prevention.

If the police fail to respond to calls in the ghetto then the crime in the ghetto increases, for instance.
Exactly. One of my pet peeves is the misconception that a life expectancy of 35 means a normal adult somehow drops dead at that age. (And leads to arguments like "Oh, don't eat a paleo diet, cavemen only lived to 35").

Socrates lived to 71 in ancient Greece. Yet you know him for being a philosopher, not for living 2.5x the average age (like living to 200 today -- you'd think that'd make a fuss).
I'd imagine that depends on which government you're talking about. Seems like selling the info to a foreign government could be treading into "espionage" territory.
I thought the point about creative writing being more than mere presentation of information was a worthwhile one to have brought out.