skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was that adding a character to something like "valve tangle hastens accept" is like adding a couple bits to something like "Av#12GH", and yet people feel like it's accomplishing something valuable. They feel that way because "Av#12GH" looks random, but "valve tangle hastens accept" doesn't.

Obviously the literal length of the string is not strictly relevant, and it was probably inarticulate of me to include that.
FB credits must have gotten some traction, because facebook games are only allowed to use facebook credits as premium currency...
So you describe in your post that the original hack involves modifying the client but now claim that it can't be done?

if (visibility = no), then {player = visible}

How about:

if (visibility = yes ), then { request player name }

Feel free to argue that this will require more than just replacing BNEs and CMPs with NOPs or JMPs. Or indeed making the executable bigger. Or indeed many other things that are "hard".

In addition, no one really knew how we were catching them

No: most people have no idea. The ones writing the attack know very well how you spot them.

You have succeeded in preventing the muggles from cheating and seem proud about it.
We should also point out that countries inhabited largely by caucasians never have these sort of COUGH EASTERN EUROPE COUGH problems.
I see. What is interesting is that most of the requests come from Samsung devices in Spanish-speaking countries, so I guess their keyboards must make it even easier to make the mistake.
The server should also never send clients data about other players not in their field of view (or in the immediate area, all depends on the game). To send the client any information it shouldn't have or to allow the client to make any decisions that the server takes and runs with is absolutely poor programming in the multiplayer game space.

That's the key point. I don't see any advantage in sending all that information, other than to correct for another bug which should never have been there.
No, this book is about x86 assembly language. You are thinking of the newer versions that use HLA.
Rep. Bartlett (R-MD) argues against using apes as guinea pigs
At the very least, real people do play the Sims.
I resent your accusation that I use gibberish for my passwords; I actually
use perfectly well formed executable code in perl.
Probably because that guy didn't read the article. Games can't post status updates and spam your feed, it all goes in the games page so you'd have to visit the games page specifically if you want to view anything game related.
Assuming that you actually invest it in something with returns higher than the interest rate. Also, it will still be more expensive than making the same investment with your cash on hand. It only works if you have both in play.
Ask HN: Is it OK to charge people for my product?
I have this cool idea, however it would be a stand alone peice of software. I'm worried that if I were to sell it as is, or offer it's use as a service on a website, that developers would balk at this. These days developers are very altruistic, producing amazing free software like rails, django, mongodb, linux, git, etc.

It seems that these days the primary way for startups to make money from tools for developers is to force them to use storage/bandwidth/cpu on the startup's servers, which isn't always necessary. I was curious as to HNs position on selling stand-alone software, particularly if it isn't GUI heavy.
Acer Iconia Tab A100 Price
Acer’s new 7-inch tablet is available in the U.S. market through SuperBiiz, first store in the country to offer the Acer Iconia Tab A100. The price is $ 333.90 for the 8 GB capacity.
This new tablet features a dual-core processor Nvidia Tegra 250, 1 GHz, 1GB of RAM and is running on the Android OS 3.2 Honeycomb
Tip: Don't spellcheck until the end - it destroys your train of thought.

I know, I know, the red line underneath misspelled words is really annoying, but over time it's easy to ignore
that's indeed a very good obversation. but i believe one this could be regarded as being cool. it's not cool in a retro sense, but in a technocratic, modern way. much like apple. nobody ever thought that coffee tabs could be cool but nespresso has proven them to be wrong.
I was talking about the Easy Bay group (http://www.meetup.com/EBRuby/), but now that you mention it I should join some SF groups. Come to think of it SF is only 30 minutes away from Berkeley where I'll be.
Do you find that you're writing a structured piece, or moving aimlessly from topic to topic?
Also: Yahoo, Intel, IBM, Philips, Qualcomm.

The only one missing all the fun now is Facebook :)
Naval Ravikant Discusses How To Get Funded on AngelList
> It provides opportunities unlike anywhere else. For example, there are 6 bars within 500 feet of my front door.

So... it provides an opportunity to drink? New York has that, too, and it's not blighted by urban decay. (Well, not anymore.)
The only thing that kept me from gaming on FB was stream pollution. I might actually play a few games on G+. I could even see myself developing one.
Warning: If you don't know what 'Bro Speak' is, be prepared for lots of expletives.
The purpose of the visibility feature was for positioning purposes. Determining player position is not a trivial task, and the information is not unnecessary, it was an engineering generalization that made certain game features easier to develop. It was not because of poor programming.

For instance, if you were to equip a Maya Purple card, all it would simply do is turn the visibility on, rather than the server doing a check for every player who has the card and changing the size of the packet for that particular person.

Walking animation is implemented by the client as well. If the invisible person was in the middle of walking and they were detected, how would you position a player with only their end position since initial position wasn't sent to the client? You can't. They'd just appear to the end position instantly, skipping the walking animation.

While you feel can feel superior to the developer and believe the programmers at Gravity are being bad programmers, you have to think about the reasons behind it, so you don't spring more leaks by fixing what you think is a trivial bug. It's sort of like a leaky water pipe. Fixing the leak in one area may induce pressure in other areas and cause leaks elsewhere.

"Let me give you an example of server load: On RO, potions can be consumed at a most, 10 per second. With 2,000 players all consuming on average 5 potions per second in Siege War, there are about 20,000 MySQL inserts per second, counting inventory and logs - which is taxing enough by itself."

I'm being nitpicky, but if you're using eAthena, I believe that inserts are batched rather than instantaneous. And each player is not consuming 5 potions per second on average, that'd be ridiculous. If you were to average it, it may amount to maybe 1 per second at most. 5 per second is only if you're tapping furiously. I'm sure if each person averaged 5 per second, all your players would either be cheating by packeting or have carpal tunnel.
I suspect that maybe an intro book skips over some stuff in order to present a good conceptual base rather than a fully rigorous, complete set of definitions and options.

Compare an intro to calculus book: it presents you with several differentiation or integration methods, yet when you come across the Lebesgue integration technique, you don't run to your intro book and claim "It's not in here, it's not actually integration!"

Again: please stop with the disingenuous stuff -- it's still not cool.

edit: Someone please explain the downvotes to me? Is it because im calling out a guy who repeatedly tells people to not appeal to authority is appealing to authority for that disingenuous behavior?
It is unambiguously OK to charge money to people who find value in what you produce. Many, many billions of dollars will be made this year selling software. I don't have a stat off the top of my heads for developer tools, but they're also a huge market.

There very well might be some folk on HN (or off of it) who will never pay for your software. That's OK. There are more fish in the sea. In particular, many of them work at companies which happily pay money to solve business problems.

Note that "solves business problems" is much much more likely to make money than "cool idea."

GUIs are not a pre-requisite to making money with software. It all depends on who that software is used by and what it does. There exists a particular company which sells 20 line shell scripts for several thousand dollars. The shell scripts control the operation of equipment worth six figures where miscalibration is a Really Big Deal (TM).
Here's what I don't get about your hypothesis... very rarely is there a single gene for specific trait in humans, right? Usually it's a combination of genes, and often the trait produced is the effect of their impact on embryology.

So wouldn't it be impossible (and possibly extremely dangerous) to attempt to change many traits by performing in-situ DNA rewrites?
Investors pushing Nintendo to support Apple's iPhone, iPad
Yes, you're right - it's a total linkbait title that is also inaccurate. Flagged althought it likely won't matter.
Value, value, value, value. Provide something of true value and your main problem will be how much to charge, not if you should charge.

If you're looking for more concrete answers, please tell us what kind of solution you're working on.
AeroQuad - The Open Source Quadcopter
We've come close in the US:

http://www.fool.com/news/2001/bayzf011025.htm

This was for Cipro for Anthrax. Bayer, at the last minute, gave in to some pricing concessions. There's also been talks about it happening during some H1N1 and avian flu scares.

A $100k pill that cures cancer? I'm not saying it would be taken by the gov't, but I think you'd have to seriously consider it.
There are lots of submissions about this, some with comments, some with different aspects reported. A collection of previous submissions and links is given here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2874651
Safecast launches map with 500,000 Japan radiation measurements
The question always comes up: what do you do about vi?

I leave it alone. I see lots of people eager to come along and show off a vim config file to remap the key bindings. Given more than a moment of consideration, you'll start to realize some of the drawbacks.

Besides, what's the point of remapping anyway? Save for HJKL[1], for which bindings did the physical placement of the keys play a role in the decision about which keys to use? I'll speculate that it's none (or close to it). So you're not really giving something up, except for muscle memory. If you're using Dvorak, you've (apparently) already decided that that isn't a petrifying side effect.

1. I've said it before, even the HJKL thing isn't so bad. On Dvorak J and K stay next to each other, but they move to the left hand (and down a row). H moves over a key and L moves up. One of the signatures of typing with Dvorak is the near-alternation of left hand/right hand. (The article even makes note of it.) That up and down end up on one hand and left and right on the other is pretty serendipitous, if you ask me.
NewNewTwitter Continues: Twitter Profile Mentions Rolling Out To All
Rbenv, an unobtrusive rvm replacement
That's when the USPTO published it. The filing date was Sep 26, 2002. Maybe the USPTO doesn't consider themselves serious anymore?
I would happily share meaningful (in game context) things, and I think those would convert better anyway.
Why don't we turn the patent review process into a public endeavor?

Hacker News / Digg style... vote up the novel patents and down the obvious ones, while commenting with conflicting patents or prior art... then the examiner can use this as input.

If the system is perfected eventually that examiner could be eliminated. This also would create jobs in the private sector as companies would be inclined to hire contributors to this process to protect their interests. You obviously need transparency to see who's providing this feedback to prevent abuse, but that's a minor aspect.

Finally, IMHO software patents specifically deserve more stringent guidelines for patentability. There's no intrinsic technological worth in a major percentage of software patents. "It's software, if you want a word processor I can make you a word processor"... if you want a button to tap and order something instantly, I can make you a button. Now, if you want a button that can be clicked by millions of people over a minute, there may be some novel technology behind that. These differences need to be isolated.
10 Most Innovative E-Book Apps to Lookout For
Ewww wierd
Currently I find web apps have better experience on iOS than Android: you can add them on the home screen like other apps, they can have icons and splash screens, you can make them really look like native apps, as Amazon did here.

It always stroke me as strange that Google didn't do anything like that on Android and honestly it looks like everybody is doing better mobile web apps than Google these days (Amazon, Twitter, even Facebook), which is pretty surprising as well.

One note: iTunes music files haven't had DRM anymore since 2009.
> You've got a ton of entropy there.

Nope - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873474
http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/11/broken-patent-system/#com...
If I wanted to host on Heroku and use MongoHQ, do these sites tend to implement the security you're talking about?
Yeah, it would be an opportunity for Google to nudge people off of legacy browsers. Some sort of message like "These games run best in Chrome, Firefox, and IE9" Better to offer the carrot than the stick.
I've got like 10 people in my Friends circle on Google+ and my feed is literally flooded. I suppose I could do some filtering (although I doubt that is what a typical user would even attempt doing). It just seems like it's harder to find out "what's going on" than with Facebook.
Sorry, wrong tab. Other submission was a link to the application. Any any rate, I'm wrong.
If you only request names for visible players, what use is seeing the invisible player? You wouldn't know whether it was your ally or enemy, and revealing everyone has terrible consequences as certain defense procedures can only be executed in hiding. Also note that hexing functions as opposed to flipping a value is very different.

Okay, some people might have known. However, no one could be sure unless they did a lot of hit & miss testing. Even if they knew, there's no reliable way to circumvent this system that I can think of. You need the name packet for the exploit to be useful (or guild packet... but same thing).

I'm proud because of the results, not because of the solution. We worked with the extremely limited resources we had and found a fully functional solution. You don't think that's something to be proud of?
It would be somewhat cool if ruby-build knew how to look for an rbenv folder to install rubies into, or if rbenv knew how to drive ruby-build to put rubies in the right directory, but otherwise it's pretty nice.
This is a good landing page (in my very, very humble opinion) but the blog post "LazyMeter: Not Another Task Manager"

http://blog.lazymeter.com/2011/07/31/lazymeter-not-another-t...

seems to do a good job of explaining the philosophy of the service.
It is targeted at solving business problems, however it would leverage opensource software. I look at github and I am very grateful for what those developers provide.

But it makes one wonder, why would they give this away for free if they could make money? I agree with the altruism and desire to give for the good of other developers, but i feel like you could do that and make a small profit.
I could not follow all the ramble, but he seems to think that patents are just fine, and all we have to do is implement the law better. But if the law isn't implementable or understandable by mere mortals, the law is wrong.
The only problem with this advice is that as the amount of memory available to the JVM increases, whenever a full stop-the-world GC occurs it will be longer. Granted, this generally doesn't become a problem until you're talking heap sizes in the tens to hundreds of gigabytes.
You know, I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. There's no real great reason to avoid doing it other than download size, and I doubt that's a huge issue. Right now I think they're just doing releases as a .tar.gz archive of the checkout files. That'd mean an extra "build" step at release time, but that's probably trivial to automate.

That said, the source text files for the documentation are included, and whatever markup format they use (reStructuredText?) is relatively legible. HTML docs would be better, though.
Would you consider the likes of Linode to be cloud? They basically only offer fixed sized VPS's that are very difficult to scale. E.g. if you want more disk-space you have to pay for an entire VPS.

I think this article is comparing apples and oranges.
yes it is.

Rails, django, git, etc. were all developed to build something that makes money. 37Signals was building Basecamp when rails was created. Django was for news websites.

Rails isn't why Basecamp makes money. It was just a useful thing that happened to come out of the development of Basecamp.

Build your product. Charge for it. If you happen to build something cool while working on your product and it is NOT core to your business idea, give it away.
I'm also curious what exactly you are writing about. I'm interested in writing non-fiction and opinion pieces, and I find that it takes me a very long time to write about stuff that requires research, math, attribution of sources and the like. However, writing opinion pieces that are entirely sourced from my brain go 3-4 times faster.
The references section is actually a big problem with patents. Having worked with attorneys in the past on patents, they actually want you to find all prior art and to put it in the references of the patent. Why? Because patents are rarely invalidated due to 3rd party prior art listed in references -- even if it really would invalidate the patent looked at objectively. But it effectively takes that prior art off the table for future litigation.

I'd be surprised if Google didn't list Kleinberg's work as it was really well known in academic circles at the time. But if Google ever sued you with PageRank, and you tried to say, "Look -- prior art in Kleinberg!" They'd just say, "The USPTO already examined it and determined it isn't prior art. Sorry." You could almost certainly do a better job than the examiner in looking at the evidence, but the burden is proof is so high for you at this point that unless Larry Page wrote in his code, "This is a copy of Kleinberg's work that we slipped past the UPSTO" you're not likely to invalidate it.
Randall's math is spot on in this comic.

Assuming the attacker knows the the password creation method (and the math assumes the attacker does in the first case), then the attacker knows the word list and the passphrase algorithm.

11 bits per word gives you a grab bag of 2048 possible common words. To guess the password, assuming each word is unique, the attacker needs to try

2048 * 2047 * 2046 * 2045 = 17,540,692,561,920

possible combinations. Initially, you'd think an eleven character password with totally random uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols would give you 66 ^ 11 combinations for 66 bits of entropy, but since nobody can actually remember such a random combination, the resulting passwords using these rules are much less secure than that.
Is it production ready? RVM is.
May I ask how did you find out about that study?

It sounds very interesting. I've got to try it sometime :).
> It's a lesson in what our society really values.

Not to be a jerk, but it's about what _you_ value. If you value money (or lifestyle, or whatever drew you to advertising) over whatever you were doing previously, you've had your way. If you don't, you have the choice to go back.

Don't feel bad about not working in the right industry; just remember that there are thousands of ways to help progress the state of the art, raise money or awareness for those progressing the state of the art, or even just helping people and their families dealing with cancers.

I don't work in a philanthropic job. I would like to, but value the financial stability of something further removed from pure altruism.
Should have qualified that - with Not always but often enough. Consider : AOL and Microsoft network from the late nineties gave way to the open web; Android is beating iOS globally in market share (~50% vs 20%).
Something thats been on my list of potential project ideas for a long time is a suite of tools built for distributed teams. From this article, I am now convinced that this problem needs solving.
FB acquired Israeli Snaptu (though they not located in Haifa)

http://www.snaptu.com/a/facebook
There are a lot of people making money leveraging OSS. Github is one example. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money on OSS. There is nothing wrong with writing for-money software on top of OSS (assuming you follow the license terms).

There are a variety of reasons why people might give code away for free even though they could sell it. The most common one is that "they" are megacorporation selling something other than code, and that investments in the OSS are of strategic value to them even if they're non-rivalrous (i.e. we don't need to be the only people using this for this to be worthwhile). Selling software is also a whole lot of work relative to writing software, as you're probably going to discover in short order.
~=
Check this out:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22~=%22

Any reason why we couldn't add ~= to the c spec so that we could say:

myVar ~= myFlag;

Which would do the same thing as:

myVar &= ~myFlag;
With significant advanced prep. No local law enforcement agency is ready to deal with an adversary who shuts their comms down tactically.
UnlistMy.Info
I think that very few people are aware that this Community Design thing even existed. It would be great if shining a light on it could generate some scandal.
Yes, that is a more accurate description. Thanks for the pointer!
But it falls into the same boat as any dictionary attack. Most people with a passphrase are probably going to use one from a song. 90% of them are going to use one of the top 1,000 songs, 90% of them are going to start at the beginning of a line. If we say there are ~20 unique lines in the average song, and most people won't use more than ten successive words even if it bridges a line, that's 1000 * 20 * 10 = a keyspace of 200,000. Trivial.

What this means is even if you decide you're going to be really secure and pick, say, the 30,000th most popular song, assume all songs have 200 unique lines (to account for sensical starting points in the middle of lines), and use 20 words from it, you're in a keyspace of only 120 million, which even if it takes 1ms to hash will be cracked in a day.

By contrast, four random english words chosen from the 2,048 most common has a keyspace of ~1.75e13, or 17,500,000,000,000.

Choosing a clever, unusual line from the middle of a very uncommon song is the passphrase land version of choosing a rare English dictionary word and replacing the vowels with numbers. If your hash gets compromised, it might as well be "password".
It's OK to use in warfare because it doesn't carry nukes. That's an enormous difference.

However, it is a good question to ask what this offers over ICBM equipped with conventional weapons. (The speed is about the same.) I'd imagine it's cost.