skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When that happens, the list of vulnerable servers is "everyone running SSH".

Agreed, but in between "bad guys discover vulnerability" and "he fixes vulnerability", can't he reduce the chance that he will be attacked by having SSH on a different port? It won't stop someone who's targeting him, but it might keep him off the radar of someone who's just looking for easy targets. From another post:

> "32,000" sounds like a large number on a message board, but write an evented port scanner† and see how big that number really is.

So is your claim that anyone looking for vulnerable SSH servers will scan every port they can on a given IP, rather than just looking at port 22 and moving on?

> I don't think it's hard to extract value from my comments.

With respect, you are not the best judge of this. (I personally don't administer a server; if anything, I want you to be correct because that will save me effort if I ever do.) When I read your posts, I learn your opinion, but I often can't work out why you hold that opinion.

Possibly you just write your posts under assumptions that seem obvious to you, but not to others.
f.lux doesn't work with 2 monitors; does redshift?
How has c# fixed null?
Probably not, but one scenario which might make a difference is if the language used is disclosed to users. Fans of that language might hold up that site as an example of "See what this language can do?!", which might attract other fans of the language to the site who might otherwise not visit. See Twitter in the early days as an example (both good and bad) of Ruby/Rails, which brought a technical crowd to the site, who are great early adopters.
Put them around ABnormal people that are more productive.
I'm sure if a team of skilled driver/mechanic hybrids was the difference between a mediocre or failed business, and multi-multi-million-dollar paydays, the market would be much more competitive and employers would feel the need to have such outsized "obligatories."

In other words, the subtle critique of the job market isn't really accurate. "What if clowns were hired like programmers?" "What if Wal-Mart greeters were hired like programmers?" Invalid.

More precise would be, "What if [carpenters|plumbers|machinists|general contractors] were hired like programmers?" The writeup on that topic wouldn't be quite so snarky, I think.
Sarah Palin terms Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘disgusting’
The most gorgeous and sexiest US politician who is not only famous for her sex appeal and beauty in the US but also across the globe rather Palin could also be termed the world’s gorgeous and sexiest politician. There is no denying in it. Well, Sarah Palin has hit Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California and actor, over his latest infidelity scandal that has been hitting the whole web and the media the world over.
This is a great write-up. I was more or less familiar with the basics of all this, but I learned a lot of details.

I wish something like this existed that explained all the tax/income issues for Canada..
The fact that only 1 in 8 Americans older than 65 has Alzheimer’s fails to register.

That's supposed to be comforting? Alzheimer's isn't the only way for your mind to fall apart, and a lower bound of 12.5% of that happening doesn't give me warm fuzzies. Aging really, really sucks and we need to fix it.
The compensation part is incorrect. It should be "Depends on experience".
I know many disagree with hiding comment scores, but in my view, the quality of discussions has notably improved since scores are hidden.

I would be interested in knowing how pg estimates the effect of this tweak.
Ask HN: how to find contract software development?
First time poster over here. What's up.

My question to Hacker News is how one goes about finding contract software development work. I would be interested in doing just about anything from small websites to big mobile apps (as long as the price is right, heh). I just don't know where to look for this kind of work, especially since I'm just starting out of college and realistically don't have much to show portfolio-wise aside from odd course work.

The main goal I have is to finally start making software for actual paying customers who care. I know I can deliver some good work once I get my foot in the door.

So, where does one find all these customers for contract work?
> Someone who can do business deals, write code, and do user interface design, is 5X more valuable to us than a typical backend engineer.

Absolutely.... If you can find someone who is _equally_ good at all of those. Very rarely (I personally have never) you will see someone _equally_ apt (and good) at both left (Writing programming logic, Solving tough technical problems etc. ) and right ( designing User Interactions, Doing business deals etc.) brained work. Humans are not programmed like that.

Sure there are people who can get by doing multiple domains, but they are rarely fit/enjoy/brilliant at all of them.
Yeah. Honestly, I've always seen the YC program as a much needed filter for the VC community rather than a competitor/disruptor. But it's always nice to hear from the founder that that's the case ;)
Someone submitted a post from my site: www.EpicLaunch.com a few months ago and it made it to the front page. I had no idea how this site worked so I tried submitting a few posts from EpicLaunch and consequently my site was banned from Hacker News. If I had known how this community worked I never would have done that but unfortunately I can't take it back. Any idea what I can do?
Quoth Altucher, "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?"

I was in undergrad at Virginia Tech from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2003. The total cost was less than $30,000 for all four years. Of course, keeping me fed and housed all four years cost more. I find his argument disingenuous, because only the elite private schools cost that much. Of course, it would be equally disingenuous for me to imply that everyone has access to a decent state school with relatively low in-state tuition. But surely that should be a part of the discussion.
I think the article is alluding to the wide span of requirements which is quite impossible to achieve in any field, even if you are a programmer. But thats not really the case in the real world, altough I have seen some job ads like that, where they sought people with experience in x86 assembly, C# and database modelling as well as front-end development.
The second you provide context you start providing clues that can be used to piece together the person allegedly responsible for this, and then once that cat is out of the bag it turns into a full blown he-said, she-said thing with legal ramifications.
My guess is the author was rejected and believes in specialization. You might want to reconsider your call for specialization--you'd be screwed when your specialty is obsolete and I don't think you'd like rigid specialization rules.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240687

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028327

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84091

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759653

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2216921

and much more if you search on google for:

site:news.ycombinator.com freelance
Jessica Simpson announces the location for her wedding
Jessica Simpson, the renowned and sexy singer, has announced her wedding date and she would tie the knot with fiancé Eric Johnson on November 11th. The couple got engaged in November last year in 2010 after dating romantically. It is being said that they are planning to throw a lavish marriage ceremony.
I'm not certain that Java really needs this. Developers that wan't a more functional style should consider making a transition to Scala or Clojure.

Scala can evolve at a much faster pace than Java as well, given that the core language is tiny and most of the language constructs are implemented as libraries.
The short answer is no. The only exception I can even think of in extremely rare cases where you program something in a language some company would not want to use and may potentially not acquire you for (which for most web languages it's not an issue), it should not dictate how successful your application is in terms of users, revenues, growth, and/or overall outcome of the company itself. You may run into scaling issues, maintenance problems, ease of training and transitioning new employees to code base or language as need, etc... but for most things, it wouldn't make much of a difference.

On the other hand, if you're asking flow of code, nuances of particular languages, available libraries, ease of hiring people, etc... to help grow what you're building, then it goes back to the age old language war debate.
Cert for https://api.del.icio.us/ has expired
Which breaks my FF plugin....the beginning of the end ?
If you read the small print you will see that his next blog post is going to be about exactly that!
If you were a driver, wouldn't you want to be that awesome of a driver?
Hiya Hackers! How did I make it all the way over here?
Thanks, noted. Updated the "action plan" in my question at Serverfault.
I know what it's alluding to. It's just 1). silly to compare hiring a programmer to hiring a car driver for many reasons and 2). very unlikely anyone would hire a job posting for a [front-end dev|HTML&CSS|customer support] (choose your own metaphor) who has experience in kernel programming, which is what this faulty metaphor is alluding to.

It may happen, but I'd be surprised if it's regular enough to be considered how programmers are hired.
This is ridiculous. Of course drivers won't have all that; they're just drivers. In computer terms, a car driver is not like a programmer, but rather more like a touch typist. Of course you wouldn't expect a person whose job is typing on keyboards to understand anything about how the internet works or what databases are.
Thank you for the feedback. The site aims to help two core target audiences.

I) Small Business - Businesses are starting to recognize the value of using social media in marketing. Facebook and Twitter especially are 'musts' for most small businesses. While these 'shotgun' approaches are useful, getting involved in niche networks/communities provides a much more targeted environment where it is easier to establish your brand and connect with potential customers.

II) For regular social network users, there is value in having a community and platform that is specialized for a particular purpose. If I like reading books, I may like to join a community where my profile is a bookshelf and I share reading lists and favorite authors. If I use a traditional search engine to find one, I come across mainly dead links, sign up pages, and other clutter making it hard to easily find the best one for my needs.

Rawsyntax - The second point you make has been a major concern in initial feedback. One issue is that Amzini actually has to create awareness that there are social networks for almost any purpose before its value becomes apparent.

Initial monitoring and feedback suggests Amzini has been able to pique interest and acquire new visitors, but metrics for repeat visits have shown signs of problems.

Now that I've explained the value/target audience further, do you see a need for such a service? And if so, how could the site be changed to better convey the value to you from the onset?
MobileSafari has fantastic HTML5 support. Unfortunately, a few important features are buggy or crippled; offline cache is very hard to work with (as detailed in markbao's length comment above), and WebSQL tops out at 50 MB (with very UX-unfriendly alerts at every 5MB of new storage).

I don't think this is intentional malice, merely simple neglect from Apple. Unfortunately, the result is the same. :(
Let's suppose you have three theories that fit all known observations.

F=MA vs F = (M+1/(10^300))A vs F = (M+1/((10+M)^300))*A

If you can't build an experiment that shows that tiny constant perhaps it's meaningless complexity and in some ways less true.
Doesn't Linux schedule interrupts on CPU0 by default?

I tried enabling RPS/RFS, which to my understanding, did this; load balance the interrupt handling among multiple cores. With this enabled, I saw little to no difference in connection rate.
But then again I'm guru, I might as well double check this.

Updated my little "action plan" in the original Serverfault question with this info.
I don't know where in London you are taking about, but I live in zone 3 in a 3 bedroom house and my mortgage is less then that...
I'm not certain that Java really needs this

We weren't certain that C# needed it. Until we tried it.
Here's a public repo, if nothing else it's a mirror https://github.com/nex3/arc/
I think it influences success, but predicting that influence... is not easy
I think you mean LINQ to SQL rather than LINQ - LINQ is a query language, not the ORM/provider. Last I heard MS were trying to deprecate LINQ to SQL in favour of the entity framework.

In practice a lot of developers end up using open source build tools like nant and rake in preference to msbuild as they tend to be more flexible in other build environments like TeamCity/Hudson.
Would it be possible reading it without having to download it?
The major thing that will influence the success of your Web startup is if you have fun making it.

So you need to choose a language that is fun using, that will let you prototype things quickly and that you feel comfortable with. This language for me is JavaScript and so far all the other alternatives have been just a pain to deal with. Node.js is just fun and simple as it should.

So if at the end you have a code-base that is not fun to work with, it will probably be hard for you to fix bugs and add features.

Stick with a language you love and it will influence the success of your startup.
What if you hire developers to maintain the code? Doesn't the more readable syntax affect the developers' performance?

(Honest question, not trying to start a programming language flame war.)
Alright, let's pause here and be scientific (i.e., have some semblance of mathematical formalism in this discussion). Do you have any reason to believe that the universe tends towards greater complexity as defined by Komolgorov complexity? It seems that the second and third laws of thermodynamics would suggest the opposite.

Edit: pjscott has restated my point more formally lower in this thread.
The problem with equality in Common Lisp is that the fundamental data structures don't come with enough semantics that one can tell, just by looking at one, what it is being used for. For instance, a list structure can represent a sequence, an unordered set, an s-expression (a tree of sequences), a binary tree of conses, an alist representing a map, etc. etc.

Using higher-level data structures, each with a clear semantics, clarifies the meaning of both equality and copying. For example, my FSet functional collections library for CL has separate types for sets, sequences, maps, bags, and tuples, along with a generic function EQUAL? that has methods for all these different types. Thus one can construct nested types -- sets of sequences, maps whose domains are sets, etc. etc. -- and compare them by just calling EQUAL?. In bare CL one would pretty much have to write a separate equality function for each such type.

A critical distinction, in order to make this work, is that between object types and value types. Objects have identity and state; value types do not. When used with user-defined types, FSet requires this distinction to be made explicit: you have to say whether your type is an object or a value, and you have to be consistent about it. This way, it's always clear when equality should be "shallow" or "deep": equality comparison of object types is always by identity ("shallow"), while comparison of value types is always by content ("deep").
A government could always make BitCoin illegal, which wouldn't technically break the system, but provide a huge disincentive for legitimate users.
Does anyone have a non-Scribd version of the actual PDF or a GDocs-hosted version they could link to?
Lego Technic Super-8 Movie Projector
I think this irrelevant in this context. If you are going to do a Startup and especially in a big city like Berlin, everyone you work with will speak proper German.

And of course those people will know some English, too.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Its far too easy to want to play with the latest and greatest tech, especially when you're already dealing with a bleeding-edge framework. And you're right, I did spend a long time setting up my 'perfect' project with automated deploys and tests...but that's for another post :)
There are probably much easier ways; extracting keys from a local device (but this may only be a break of a single device, not a class break of all devices, hopefully), or exploiting bugs in any of the trusted binaries to load other code.

The trusted/measured boot process on PCs (which is not actually used by anything widely deployed, as of 2011) is similar, but I think the Android device will have an easier time.
Which platform are you on? f.lux on OS X works just fine across many displays.
I would love to know which form they will choose or have chosen. A UK inc. or a German GMBH or mini-GMBH?
Oops, thanks... missed that last paragraph there.
Right. Let's imagine that Facebook was written in Perl, YouTube in Ruby, and Twitter in PHP, do you think they would still be successful?
I learned a lot about Forth writing JONESFORTH[1]. It's brilliant that you can write a full system in a couple of 1000 LoC that one person can completely understand from top to bottom.

After writing it, I learned a lot more about the Forth community, and how they despise my (perhaps misguided but well-intentioned) attempts to teach people about the principles of writing a Forth interpreter. Search for "JONESFORTH" in the comp.lang.forth archives for some examples.

[1] http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=summary
Honestly, that page pretty well convinced me that I have no interest in learning Forth. Possibly it was the "Since Forth needs few registers, a chip with many is just a lot of wasted silicon" bit.
Yes, RedShift does support that. I've just tested on a laptop with an external monitor attached.
And even if you can't attend any of those events. Dont visit Berlin without the c-base. Its a really awesome place to hang out. Same goes for the Tacheles. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunsthaus_Tacheles
Treatise on Font Rasterisation
It certainly seems in scope to me if we're talking about version identifiers, and it (along with several other examples) are clear situations where changing an identifier string could definitely lead to an automated attack that would succeed never being tried.

And you don't need to modify any binaries: The easiest way to change something like that is in a transparent proxy, but ie also supports changing via the registry, opera and firefox via about:config, etc.
it's actually just JSON data being saved into a standalone html file with a canvas element that is drawn onto, so it should work in most places.
Facebook and YouTube yes. I am unsure about twitter.
Thank you, and I agree!
"I learned a lot more about the Forth community, and how they despise my (perhaps misguided but well-intentioned) attempts to teach people about the principles of writing a Forth interpreter."

Could you elaborate on that? Why would they despise your attempt to help others?

Also, thank you for writing JONESFORTH. It's a very useful resource.
What do you mean by hardware hacker? Microcontorller programming (and building the electronic support circuits, of course)? FPGAs? Something else?

I recently got into microcontroller programming (using both AT90USB162 Atmel microcontrollers and PIC24H PIC microcontrollers). I use them for building/hacking/tinkering with MIDI controllers.

I'll give you a brief overview of how I started and what I'm doing now and then if you want to know more, you can comment or email me or whatever and I'll be happy to help, if I can.

I started in February, when my brother and myself decided to mod the Midifighter[1] he has. The Midifighter is interesting because, not only does it have an awesome arcade feel to it (because of its arcade buttons), but also it has been designed to be very hacker friendly: DJ Tech Tools (the guys who make it) have released the schematics under the creative commons license and the source code under the GPL. The circuit board also contains solder points for power, ground, four digital extension pins and four analog extension pins - so it is easy to extend.

What we did is built an extension which connects to these extension pins, giving the midifighter an additional 17 LEDs, 14 buttons and 8 analogs (4 pots/knobs, 4 faders) - actually, technically, it gave us 32 analogs, which we use for 16 buttons, 16 knobs/faders - though 10 connections are left disconnected.

The rest is in the firmware: shift buttons, banks, changing MIDI channel on the fly, etc. Also, the difference between the button extensions and analog extensions is purely in the firmware (and of course what we connected to them).

Some details for our mod can be found here[2], the modded firmware source code is on my github[3], more details, pics, videos to be put online soon.

This basically taught me everything I know about hardware hacking.

What I am doing now is working on a configuration (tool used to configure a midifighter from your desktop) as well as some awesome new firmware mods for existing Midifighter owners (eg, I already released an early prototype version of a mod which allows you to record keypresses and have it automatically play back the MIDI notes in a loop). My brother and myself are also planning our next MIDI controller hardware, which will be even more ambitious than the first.

So, from my experience, I would say the best way to learn is to just dive right in! Be prepared to make a few mistakes along the way (which may end up costing a few $, but its worth it for the learning experience - eg, we ordered a few of the wrong parts at first) and just experiment. The midifighter was a great way to get started because it is an open platform and a cool toy. You could just as easily start with an Arduino (a lot of people do!) or something like the Chameleon[4] (actually, the xgamestation.com website has a few cool electronic devices which may be great ways to get started!).

[1] http://midifighter.com/

[2] http://www.djtechtools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28014

[3] http://github.com/dublindan/Midifighter

[4] http://www.xgamestation.com/view_product.php?id=52
There are good coders, great coders, and just a bunch of awful ones. There's a difference in being able to code something that works, and something that works brilliantly, and even better at scale. That said, readability and good commenting in coding and documentation should apply in any language.

In Python for example, there's kind of a (mostly) default way of doing it. In other languages, not so much. But that doesn't mean the company culture can't push for something like this (a standard, at least to the extent in which a language permits doing so). Developers performance is more base on how they like working in a language (better to find true language agnostic developers), culture fit, personality, etc...

If you're outsourcing, that's a totally different set of traits and number of things to look for than if you're hiring in house (which I would recommend for the core team and in general anyway; hiring in house that is).
Hacker News is for entrepreneurs. I'm a start-up and do kernel programming as well as html and answerring the phone. http://www.losethos.com
Not in Canada. I pay about $80/m for 350 minutes, free evenings and weekends, 1GB of data, and "My 5 Nationwide". We need some more competition up here.