skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really fast and well made (and tested) ORM. Grows your tables incrementally so great for prototyping, but performs fine as well. Using it for a bunch of medium-sized websites and apps and very happy with the speed of development.
Anybody here use Celery on their production system? Is it reliable/stable? Any weird problems?
Well, it's stereotypical for both hackers and hippies to have scruffy facial hair and hygiene problems, so I guess I can see how one might mix them up.

Hackers don't hug their computers, though.

At least, not when anyone else is looking.
Social network setNight sets out to improve your nightlife
Social networking sites across the web have long made efforts to try to be everything to everyone. The problem with that, for example, is that your Facebook wall gets plastered with plans you could really care less about and your Twitter stream gets diluted with check-ins and questions about where to go. But there’s a new social network aiming to take the planning of a fun night on the town out of those platforms and into one that can offer the best experience, with no other pretenses than just to ensure a great evening. And that social network is setNight.
Read my original comment

"but your dealing with minute hardware where every single ms of processing power counts. Simple encryption should be utilized [but then this might be easily hacked anyway ?] but for units placed inside the body [pacemakers and the like] - splitting the units resources between keeping the patient alive vs. encryption for wireless protocols seems to weigh more heavily on the former than the later given how unlikely - for the majority of the world - these 'attacks' are going to be."

So your solution is to increase security such that it compromises the functionality of the device itself through it's utility ? High security, poor battery life ? High security, high replacement cost ?

"Point 5 is the only one that I am concerning myself with." - and delivering insulin isn't important ?

Get realistic - security loopholes are only as important as what you are trying to practically protect and at what cost with what risk. This is what I am trying to make evident.

The assumption that every single manufacturer in the medical industry hasn't considered security of remote devices seems a far stretch to me given the prominence of medical litigation and the fact your dealing with someones life. Is a high security cost, high device cost, low battery life and therefore low adoption for patients and community accessibility acceptable? No, it's not.

The world is not based on everyone wanting to kill each other because entropy of serial numbers [which you nor I have any idea about] are low so they can hack insulin devices and kill someone. That said - it needs to be fixed with a balance to risk and all these other factors.
i rather have my phone, with enough info for identity theft, returned to me then the cops busting some file sharer or stoner.
This was the first thing I thought after reading that too. It immediately causes me to assume that the author doesn't know enough about programming to know much at all about its once and future skills.
> Rojadirecta can use its "large Internet presence"

Isn't its large internet presence largely rojadirecta.com ?

I wonder how this judge would feel if the US government suddenly "seized" his home address and telephone number; it's the nearest personal equivalent I can think of.
At that point you'll have one. Now try to make it it work through extreme weather - hot, cold, pouring rain, etc. Now make it reliable to shock so you aren't fixing thing every 50 miles or so. Ok, write the reference manuals so that 18yr old mechanics how to install, maintain, replace them. You've got some sharp mechanics there, but you have a few dumb ones too. The manual will involve breaking things down to a painful level. Setup logistics for contracts, replace/repair. Oh now setup a production line to make hundreds or thousands. And, by the way, that production line may or may get shut down after the first order. Or you may get another order for exactly the same thing two years later after the last one rolled off the line.

It shouldn't take 10 years, but it isn't a simple trip into a hackerspace either.
Awesome tool!

We are running some massively distributed tasks with it.
So the stats for the average website in the word are:

Pages Visited = 4.5%
Bounce Rate = 47.0%
AVG. Time on Side = 4:50min

Traffic Sources:
Direct: 36.8%
Search Engine: 28.0%
Referral: 19.4%
Other: 15.8%

Operating Systems (increase last year):
Windows: 84.8% (-5.1%)
Mac 5.2% (+0.7%)
Linux 0.7% (+0.1%)
Other 9.3% (+4.3)

I can only assume that the increase in Other-OS are due to the rise of mobile. Which would mean, around 9% of all traffic are from mobile phones? This number seems unrealistically high to me, what am I missing?
And this is what happens when a judge who does not understand the internet or business has the power to destroy someone's life.

Yes, they may be able to get the word out to some of their customer base. But a substantial fraction of the customer base that they had won't find them again. And there is likely to be real value in having the dot com.
My legalize is poor, is this judge suggesting this is the case in this particular case, or in the general case?
It could be used to scout targets.
which is bs, since losing a domain also makes you lose all the thousands of links going to it...would he expect the same of Google? After all, they also own Google.org, so they can just let everyone know to go there instead.

why am I not surprised that the judge is 70 years old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_A._Crotty
Interesting -- I was in the army (Non-US, but allied) years ago, and we were developing a lot of similar technology. RC Cars/Trucks with cameras, guns that shoot around corners, and surveillance balls amongst other things. They were developed for close-quarters combat, clearing rooms, hallways, that sort of thing.

The tech isn't new, but what's interesting I guess is the application they accidentally discovered. Strap a camera on a hardy RC vehicle, and have that be the sweeper in the front of a patrol checking for roadside bombs.

Interesting article, thanks for posting it.
I know I can't be the only one that worries for the future of the internet? I know the internet will be around for a long time to come, but the question is, will it ever be the same?
Not a good enough equivilent to be worth making. The US Government would have to seize his address and number, but he'd still have his house and phone, just in a different location. And in that (very odd) scenario, I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to let people know about it. After all, we've all moved house and changed our telephone numbers now and then.
and no discussion about how that thing works and how it can be used for unthought, cooler, ways? i thought this was the difference of news here and at reddit

can a store make a passive-checkin once you fill a form with your phone number?
What kind of documentation? Code documentation? Process documentation? Architecture documentation? Something else?

Anyway, I like the idea of a Wiki or something similar. Everyone can contribute to it, it's easy to setup and not much effort to put stuff inside it.
I can't help but think that Cappuccino, and GWT for that matter, would be much more successful if they decoupled language and toolkit. If objective-j would run on node.js, like Clojure and Coffeescript, it would probably get more traction.

And if the toolkits were language agnostic (meaning you could easily write in haxe, coffeescript, clojurescript, or any other language on top of js [1]), it would have a bigger market.

I know that Cappuccino and GWT are older than node.js, but it is not too late to change.

[1] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
Great news! Awesome software!
Why isn't Microsoft aiming Windows Phone 7 at the business market?
"Under federal law, the owner of seized property can seek its return if the government's continuing to hold it would cause a "substantial hardship" to its owner."

So the US can seize my laptop or large quantities of my monetary savings and I have no legal right to get those things back?
Nested associative structures in Clojure
Fwiw, I agree with you.

So I wondered why I didn't get an autoplay story, then I realized it's on ABC and last week I had ad block plus create an easy filter to get rid of their videos entirely. As far as I can tell, losing ABC videos is just not a loss, and it leaves a static jpg that ABC presents to browsers that can't do video.

What I've been curious about is can sites tell when someone has started playing a video, but clicked away from their precious video after a second or two?
They'd sell for a high price not necessarily due to price gouging, but because it costs a lot to sell to the military. The overhead of quality control, support, and all of the bureaucracy involved in dealing with a military customer would dwarf the actual per-unit cost.
I would think that protection (on the pump side) against the user sitting on the remote or the remote going haywire (e.g. rate limiting dosages) would prevent any fatalities.
I'm surprised the reveres isn't true that small RC planes or land vehicles are not being used as unmanned bomb delivery devices by the Taliban.

If this were to happen I'd guess Libyan rebels would do it since I see a lot of fabrication of weapons by them.
The Supreme Court already has laws on the books allowing that very thing to occur. While its unlikely to happen to this judge, it has happened. One of the more recent judgements determined that property could be seized even when it's not being converted to public property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
I would compare this to atdhe.net. They were a fairly large site that linked to streamed sports and TV shows until their domain was seized by ICE because it was a .Net domain. But they managed to stay alive, change their domain name, and get back in business as some other website (I believe it's now atdhenet.tv).

The point is that they were still able to get back their audience after losing their primary domain name.
That's not the inconsistency; Earth and Moon are in English, all the other celestial bodies are labeled in Latin.
How would I do it?

I would create a patent pool administered by a non-profit that only grants licenses (for free) to people or entities who do not own their own patents or own other entities which own patents. Owners of patents would not be granted licenses even for a fee. Patents would be donated to the pool as a form of charity.

No idea if that would work, but that's what I'd try. A key problem I see is that getting a patent is expensive, it's hard for individuals (from whom most contributions would undoubtedly come) to compete with companies who make a game of churning out as many patents as possible (IBM for example). If however it became large enough, and there were changes in the current system to make defensive patents less valuable, hopefully it could reach a certain critical mass where it would make sense for companies to gift all their patents to the pool in order to gain access to the others.

Startups without existing patents would of course benefit from this.
Same story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849064

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849438

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849525

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849570

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850338

Currently none of the HN submissions have comments worth reading.
1 guy w/ a rigged RC truck bears no liability. A defense contractor shipping these devices will have a team of lawyers chasing them around if it fails to find a bomb that kills someone.
This smacks of a "kids these days" article.

I remember similar articles in the 80s and 90s bemoaning how "programmers these days" didn't know how to use a protocol analyzer or logic probe, or didn't know that xor made for a faster register clear operation (or moveq for 68k fans), or any other number of esoteric trivia that, while useful in context, did not usually contribute significantly towards a programmer's ability to get the job done.

My first debugger was an in-circuit-emulator for a Z80. It was the size of a small television set, had a crappy UI, and limited functionality. Today's debuggers can be hosted on the system itself, and have become so powerful that most people don't know how to use them to maximum effect (myself included). IDEs check your code as you type. No more writing something in VI, compiling, tracking down the cryptic error messages your compiler spat out and trying to figure out where the REAL error is because the compiler is dumb. You're shielded from the ugliness underneath, and for 99.9% of cases that's more than enough.

Do "kids these days" really need to know the sound of a hard drive dying? The last drive I heard going bad was in the 90s. Since then drives have become so quiet that you'd need a stethoscope to even hear the arm thrashing (which is why I use RAID). And how useful is the knowledge that you can open up a frozen drive and spin it up with your finger going to be as disks are replaced by SSDs?

We live in the future, where things have gotten a LOT better. Do the new batch of developers really need to know assembly language? After moving to "fluffy" languages, I only twice found need to use it (once to disassemble a stack dump from a JNI crash, and once to monkey patch a buggy device driver). Twice in all my years since using Java, Python, PHP, Objective-C, Scheme, COBOL, VB, and C#. Was it damn handy to have the right skill at an opportune time? Hell yeah. Does EVERYONE need this skill? Hell no.

How about bit packing? Memory has become so cheap and plentiful that even routers come with 16MB or more. Beyond low level networking and peripheral protocols, what use is there in packing up bits and coming up with clever encoding schemes that make for complicated (and potentially buggy) codec routines? Saving one byte in a packet header is hardly the triumph it once was.

All the "kids these days" need to know is their algorithms, profiling, debugging, multithreading issues, and how to write well structured, maintainable code in their paradigm of choice. The rest is usually industry specific, and can be learned as-you-go.

Don't worry about the kids. The kids are alright.
The interesting question is whether Ormandy would research or publish flaws in a Google product.
US Postal Service Posts $3.1 Billion Loss, Warns of Default
Fannie Mae Wants $5.1 Billion More From US Taxpayers; $104 billion so far taken
I don't doubt there are some smart people who are trying to figure out how to kill each other. I'm just glad that's not most of us.

Edit: Although I guess I can extend that to human societies in general, not just hackers.

Edit 2: Man, no idea who manages to disagree with that.
Restoring Bletchley Park: birthplace of modern computing
I think patent pools are the quickest way to solve this issue in the short term. It won't solve the patent troll problem, but it will slow it down because everyone in the pool will have access to a vast amount of patents, so it will be harder for the troll to reach any company that participates in the pool, or at least there won't be as many trolls going after them.

But it should work very well in protecting the companies from the pool against large "patent aggressors", or even against other pools from competing firms. Think of it as NATO vs Russia+China.

In the long term, if patents don't get abolished, at least I'd like to see a law that allows companies to opt-out of the patent system[1], so they don't get to sue others, even if they become big companies, but others can't sue them either. This won't kill the patent system overnight, so big companies who are against abolishing patents, because they have so many, will still be able to assert their patents against other big (or small) companies who also have a lot of patents and don't want to lose them overnight.

[1]This opting out of the patent system idea came from someone else here on HN.
Read my original comment:

"2. "all he requires to perpetrate the hack is the target pump's
serial number."

Do we know how much entropy is in those? They could very
well be sequential or date derived.

As you can clearly see, I am objecting to the apparent assertion that requiring the serial number should be considered a mitigating factor if we don't know anything about the entropy of these serial numbers. Without additional information, we should not be comforted by this.

Allow me to be perfectly blunt to get across my point once and for all: I don't give a shit about insulin. I don't give a shit about insulin pumps. I care misconceptions about security, and improper security implementation. This article serves as nothing to me other than a vehicle to discuss these things.

Most importantly: I am more concerned with your apparent suggestion that "a serial number is probably a sufficient shared secret" than I am with anything in the story. Serial numbers, as a general rule, make terrible shared secrets.
This is tomorrow's oil.
Planned Layoffs Surge in July
New York City Hackathons
"I never said it wasn’t OK for “Google to try and buy the same patents to not be sued.” Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle — they’re all playing the game. If Google had won the Nortel patents, and used those patents to secure licensing agreements for other patents (from, say, Microsoft and Apple) — that’s how the patent game is played. What I’m complaining about isn’t Google playing the game, but rather their insistent whining about their competitors only after they lost the game."

Can't say I disagree.
A running tally of planned job cuts by European banks reached around 40,000
The notion that you can kill a person with diabetes by hacking their insulin pump is absurdly ridiculous. I can't think of an insulin pump that does not have a setting to limit the maximum bolus. In addition, the setting typically has a sane value and is enabled by default. Further, when a pump is setup with a doctor/nurse practitioner, this value is set to number that is tuned to the person with diabetes. There is also feedback when the pump is delivering insulin. I know this is the case with Animas and Medtronic pumps.

So even if someone got in range, had your serial number, knew the protocol and attempted an insane dosage, the worst that would happen is someone didn't notice the delivery feedback and hit the max bolus. While this would be worst case breach, it is not lethal. Within an hour, the victim will feel hypoglycemic, check their blood glucose and correct it.
Most people are missing the point of this story. The question is, why are these people trying to kill US soldiers in the first place? The answer is because the US soldiers are invading a foreign country that's not theirs. So who is really the bad guy? The guys killing the invaders or the invaders?

The guys at the toystore who are sending the RC trucks to the US soldiers - did they even stop for one second to ask "Why are those soldiers being attacked?" How did they come to the instant conclusion that the US soldiers are the good guys? How is this obvious?
Sure, it's possible, but I'd still consider it a hardship. One success story doesn't demonstrate that it's easy.
Hackers Take $1 Billion a Year as Banks Blame Their Clients
The UDP Firewall Punching Technique Explored
:-> I hope I didn't come off as critical! I often hang out with a feminist-leaning crowd, so that sort of thing tends to stand out to me. (The running joke is "The hardest thing about being a straight white male is remembering that not everyone is a straight white male.")

I'm actually just now working through "Rules of Play" by Salen & Zimmerman; it's nice to see the field of game design slowly maturing and accruing "serious" texts. It would be nice if we didn't need academia's help to legitimize our pursuits, but ya can't win 'em all.

I liked the separation you drew here: "The idea here is to use techniques of game design in a way which is integrated in the functionality of an application not focused on gaming..." It's an interesting way to frame the goal of a "gamified application": rather than the "game" being played for its own sake, there is an overarching goal, and the path to that goal possesses game-like qualities as an (apparently) organic side-effect. In the same way that "real life" can distract you from a game, you don't want the "game" of the app to distract you from the "real life" or "goal" of the app.
How a Potato Saved Shopify's Internet
to help you out, it sounds like you are looking to hire rather than a co founder. If I were to pick up and move and be considered a co founder - I would be expecting a certain level of equity, and at least the same amount of payment as you.
The wikipedia page on the Industrial Revolution cites textiles as one of the three main innovations of the period and notes that the rise of the cotton mill only occurred after the relevant patent on the spinning jenny had expired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis, but I really loved this line and agree with it "Our education system put math and science over research, reading, and writing skills when we needed the latter three for an information economy."
Great the legal environment we have created for ourselves prevents effective tools to be available to our troops.

I guess individual Americans are going to have to step up and fill the gap since contractors may not be willing, at low cost, to assume the liability.

I'd happily pay $500 plus the shipping to Afghanistan if it helps soldiers do their jobs faster and safer. I'm sure that I am not the only one.
Google could have joined consortium to take the Novell patents off the table. But Google wanted those patents for itself to defend against other patents they already infringed upon.

This is extremely disingenuous. It is likely that Google would need to obtain defensive patents whether it believes it violates any patents at all.
Just tie some explosives to it, like the RC-XD (explosive device) in Modern Warfare 2.
Do what "job" faster? Killing innocent Afghanis?
Litigation Finance: You might be financing the case against Chevron in Ecuador
What would you say to over 400,000 followers
make software patents like copyright: USE IT OR LOSE IT
This is 2nd time this year Google Docs is changing the look and layout of their interface. The first change was as recent as March this year. This is really bad.

Me, as a heavy google docs user, want some consistency. Managing and editing docs this is not some "lol cats" thing. I hope somebody from Google Docs team is reading this.
Government will not solve this problem. Companies should operate anonymously on the internet, and just ignore patents and copyrights. Then they can't be stopped and IP laws will become obsolete.
Google isn't complaining about losing. It's complaining about the unfair way it believes the winners won.
Really? Show of hands, now, who here cares about one (and only one) webapp?

Anyway, what's good for the webapp hosting business is good for web developers, and what's good for web developers is good for the technical ecosystem in general (and then the world). Of course going from VPSes to EC2s was a significant improvement. But that isn't as good as it gets. EC2 rates were cheap already, but when Az started the free tier it represented a significantly lower barrier to entry. That's good for everyone.

And seriously, come on. This is a way of making programs run faster, and not a little faster, but a hundred times faster. It's the very definition of technological progress. It's absurd that we're here arguing about whether it matters or not.
That sounds like an incredible waste with the overhead. I absolutely don't understand it. I think people in those power positions really need to stop treating the whole structure like a black box and realize it shouldn't be that damn hard to send some RC cars to Iraq to save lives.