skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The offer is actually 48hr to cover all timezones for Christmas :)
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Insights into North Korea's propaganda machine.
Fair question. A web service would indeed be a better solution. With a web service, you have a server-side application layer, and all database reading and writing is done by that layer. Sure, you might be able to authenticate and send bogus info to the web service. Even that can be made very difficult, e.g. by cryptographically signing requests or encrypting the data on the wire.

So if you do that, worst case scenario is someone reverse-engineers the protocol, including whatever cryptography you're using. And that person then sends phony data of the sort the game would really send, e.g. messages saying "I completed this level" or "I scored X points." Which, in the big scheme of things, isn't a huge security breach.

The difference between that and having an open MySQL server is that the open MySQL server allows you to read and write anything stored in the database. That's much worse than being able to spoof normal data the game would be sending anyway. In this situation, the worst case scenario would be total corruption of the database, as opposed to the player falsely accruing points or something like that.
SELECT * FROM smb_editor_author CROSS JOIN smb_editor_leveldata

This query is taking forever to finish...
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Are you going to give Mechanical Turks the login credentials for your domain's administrative account of record?

Because.. please don't ever do that..
Well, I wasn't primarily thinking about the internet pills. In many developing countries (particularly in south-east asia), something like 5-30% of all drugs are counterfeits without proper active ingredients (see e.g. http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7341/800.full). There are many skilled and motivated users (doctors) failing to detect the fakes because the packaging is identical.

Similarly, the rock climbers mentioned earlier in the thread probably would also be motivated to check authenticity?

I find the "a technical solution is not required" comment a bit odd. Spam is not a technical problem either, but we still use spam filters.
I might be hijacking this thread but if things dont work out with him, perhaps we can chat? I would love to get guidance or maybe to be bold, work together, im not sure if you are local, im in and around san jose, ca
contact me if you are interested: wahyu@mumuja.com
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Migrate away from GoDaddy.

I couldn't care less that they have changed their position when they started seeing people are migrating their domains from their services.

After all, let's not forget other "great" news about GoDaddy we've seen in the past.

Migrate, migrate and don't look back. Any company which supported SOPA doesn't deserve my money (or yours) in the future.

Who can say they will not be using that money to try to subvert the rights of the people in the future or that they deserve to be trusted now?
How About Elon Musk For President?
Eric Schmidt: We Don't Talk About Occupy Wall Street In The Valley
Congrats, that's a great project you got there ;-).
No, an organization that Apple is a member of supported SOPA. You can't infer from that what Apple's position was. Furthermore, as is noted as the very first thing in the linked article, that organization reconsidered.
Thinking about moving my domains - any suggestions on the best alternative?

Update: For what it's worth, here's a reddit link that lists a number of alternatives:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/no1ux/reddit_if_o...
Not my project, but someone who followed Stanford's online machine learning class.
Same here. I've moved most of mine to gandi.net. They are foreign sites now.
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I know next to nothing about this kind of stuff. If I wanted to create a stats + user generated level database system akin to Super Meat Boy (and I do) do you have any recommended resources to read?
"It's all about money" is a one-dimensional caricature that really doesn't reflect the way most congresspeople actually think.

Money matters, of course, but it's not the only thing that matters.
How Do You Defiine Yourself?
Urgh. I can't be the only person who is getting exceptionally tired of seeing self-congratulatory blog posts about GoDaddy rise to the top of HN.

Dear interwebnerds: the point has been made. Stop obsessing. Every time you get your knickers in a knot and write a crowing blog post about how you just put it to The Domain Provider Who Shall Not Be Named, you give them more name recognition, free press and SEO. So stop it. Transfer your domains, make your point to customer service if/when they call, then stop talking about their service.

Maybe you folks can spread a little more of your furor around to the other companies on the list...a list that includes most of the major providers of media in our culture.
No One Told the Customer
One of the great things that has come out of The Lean Startup movement is the focus on customer validation.

Too many organizations I work with either gloss over this step or skip it entirely...
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Absolutely true. The RAID controller would randomly lose drives and the driver for it would randomly cause kernel panics. We tried different firmwares and different kernels and made some progress, but never really got it stable under load.

However, that's the risk you run with single points of failure. Put all your data on one big box, and any failure in your RAID hardware, RAID firmware, RAID drivers, network drivers, kernel, RAM, OS, et cetera will take down the big box and thus take down anything relying on it.

The lesson I learned wasn't to make a super-robust single system, it was to have enough redundancy to stay up when something inevitably fails.
Thanks so much. I actually went on an OOTW tech info binge a couple years ago. I wish I had found this at the time!
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Facebook provides means to extend the Facebook platform by developing small applications that can be embedded within Facebook. Several APIs for different programming languages are provided, which allow to access Facebook data and functionality from your own Facebook application.
You could be part of the group that is against it and still profit from it.

I'm not personally for SOPA but lets imagine a hypothetical indie developer that is against SOPA, image their DRM-free game is on the same sites as Vivendi Universal, Vivendi takes down the site using SOPA and more people buy the game.

They're against SOPA but have profited from it.
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I will be looking for a Christmas Plateau on a netcraft report sometime in early February.
They're currently the only pure electrics that I know of with a range that will get me to the airport and back without a charge (the Leaf has an EPA tested range of 73 miles). The performance is incomparable. Fit and finish is good. They're expensive, but if we're just talking quality here, I think it can be objectively said that they're the best of that small field.
You probably aren't running 20 year old hardware that hasn't seen a software update since 1991. Some people are. Mostly people where the computer is incidental to the machine.

e.g. Back in the '90s the MRI scanners at my institute used VAX models that were well and truly obsolete even for the day, with tremendously obsolete versions of VMS because that was what was FDA approved and no changes could be made.

One can certainly imagine a device with a 6 figure price tag that communicates by telnet to a user supplied server. (Not our MRI scanners though, we weren't allowed to upgrade their software to support TCPIP.)
All I ask is that one Dragon serving the ISS has the Pan-Am logo on it and is designated the Pan-Am Space Clipper.

Whould be immensely cool.
Shockingly, no. A few months ago I started registering new domains with them, and was very surprised that you had to buy credits for your account instead of having an auto-renew.

I went with name.com instead when moving from Godaddy today. Name.com is about the same price as Namecheap, and they do appear to have automatic billing. The only nicer thing about Namecheap was the cheap SSL certs you could get with a domain purchase.
Read the source with a question in mind. For example, how does some software create a particular kind of file? (I did this recently for Pandoc's EPUB writer-- while this software is in Haskell and not Python, the same rules apply.) Do lots of searches for keywords that seem appropriate to your question. When you find a class or function, trace its execution until you understand it. Learn the difference between function calls and function definitions--hopefully the formatting of the source makes a distinction. [For example, in JavaScript, Douglas Crockford recommends whitespace hints for functions, "function name () {}" would be a definition and "function name();" would be a call. The space between the name and the '(' is the clue for the difference. This is not part of the JavaScript language per-se.]

Write down other questions or make notes about anything you don't understand. With most source, there's almost never any "best place" to start unless you have a question in mind. I don't think anyone can read source like a novel, because it is not a linear narrative--it is much more like a choose-your-own-adventure book. The longer you read and skim the source code of any system, you'll find that you know "where everything is" and just like a choose-your-own-adventure book, you'll slowly internalize when it tells you to turn to page 78 that the dragon is going to eat you without needing to turn and read that page.
in Australia, we get 20 days holiday, 10 days public holiday and up to 10 days sick leave, so up to 40 paid days off per year.

Holidays and sick days are cumulative too, and you're entitled to be paid for untaken ones when you leave your job, so log as you've worked there a minimum of 1 year
A frog that eats bugs from an Iphone
It depends on how deep you want to go yourself. At its easiest you could just drop Playtomic [1] in, we have support for most gaming platforms.... obviously I'm quite biased towards this option. :)

If you want something more flexible and you're doing mobile you can check out Parse [2], they're a custom database with a REST, iOS and Android APIs. If you're using Flash, HTML5 or Unity3d we have a bridge that lets you use Parse through our own APIs.

If you want to get right down to the guts of it I would get a simple Heroku [3], PHPFog [4] or AppHarbor [5] account depending on what languages you're most comfortable with or learning and set up a MongoDB database over at MongoHQ [6], MongoDB lends itself very well to user created levels in my experience.

Basically you need:

1) Scripts to save, rate, count plays and list levels. You want to either authenticate the user, or more simply just obfuscate the data you're transmitting to make tampering harder

2) Some kind of logging or queueing system where you will store the plays

3) Something that will go through your logs or queues and perform the $inc operations on your levels in bulk batches rather than doing it all individually

4) Indexes on your database that match your listing requirements

[1] http://playtomic.com/
[2] http://parse.com/
[3] http://heroku.com/
[4] http://phpfog.com/
[5] http://appharbor.com/
[6] http://mongohq.com/
If google would make an anti-SOPA doodle for their homepage, that would be awesome, and effective too.
Interesting data, thanks for looking it up+linking it!

Based on my very subjective experience living in both countries (France growing up + undergrad, US as a graduate student+working), I would say much depends on the size of the city where you live.

Living in San Francisco definitely costs much more than living in Lyon (2nd largest city in France) for me- if you look at the apartment alone, I'd have to shell out $2k+ for something I'd easily have in France for under a thousand euros in terms of size + proximity to businesses.

But then for the food + basic expenses (clothing, etc.) I feel like I spend about the same, although some things are more expensive in the US (public transportation, cell phone plans,...).

When I lived in Grenoble I lived a comfortable student life on 1000 euros a month- this would be nowhere sufficient to live comfortably with in SF. But of course the cities are of different sizes, so again this is very shaky grounds for accurate comparison.

I don't want to end up posting a novel here, but it's definitely an interesting topic on which I'd love to hear more insights from european expatriates in the US (or the opposite).

As for the cheese, you are completely right– and regarding the women, I don't want to belittle my fellow French women, but I would be lying if I said I hadn't found delightful ladies in SF :)
I think your question is very valid and I think the answer is that the "solution" depends on what your goals are. The author may even consider it to be perfectly fine if he has to reset these statistics regularly, or even move to a more protected system in a later version if it gets hacked.

His main goal was probably something like "put a system in to send me some analytic information, but spend as little time as possible on it and make no concern for security or performance."

Especially considering the developer may have had decent knowledge in some things like mysql c connectors, but not in php or something else he could use for the web service, his approach may have been the best approach to take. There's no way we can judge. I'm pretty sure that was your point. It seems like the mysql approach could have even come from an Agile methodology where the "story" makes no concern for security or performance.
Use Coral Cache to spare his bandwidth, add .nyud.net to the end of the domain name and it will be routed through the CoralCDN (http://www.coralcdn.org/).

e.g. http://www.hackermonthly.com.nyud.net/blah/blah.zip
In the words of Bloodhound Gang:

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I should probably note that at no point did I disclose the database credentials - other users discovered those and publicly posted them. I contacted Super Meat Boy several times before going public with this but they totally disregarded my warnings.
It really is surprising how bothersome TV can be when you're not used to it. I could hear my younger self calling me a pansy when I used the word gruelling in my previous comment. Of course it's not in the same league as real suffering like the illness you mentioned.

Though I do have to catch myself from being too much of a smug doesn't-own-a-TV guy. There's still plenty of distraction in my life that enters mostly via this computer. At least it is more wholesome and not actively evil.
Buy Unilever — Dow and Johnson & Johnson Support SOPA
Dow and Johnson & Johnson are american staples, we must encourage them to recant support for SOPA.
The idea of an 'open-source' replacement academia is compelling. Currently academia generally has partial transparency and a closed competitiveness between research groups, where replicating results is non-trivial (at least in the comp sci research field I am in where sharing source is not standard).

The analogy of a git-hub for experiments makes sense; research is about expanding knowledge freely. In contrast, the partial disclosure and under-sharing of tricks of the trade between research groups is about the entrenched interests of particular groups.

The article makes a strong case for a system that removes the inefficiencies of the status quo, that disrupts the current university system, because that institution is no longer serving its initial purpose as well as it could be.

However, what is less clear, is what financial system would provide incentives in the academia-github system? Would the traditional advisor/advisee relationship provided in PhD programs also be substituted for something else? Would more people be doing volunteer research instead of being paid for it?
Plateau or canyon? (Maybe even abyssal trench?)
I have no idea.

I'd start by asking Redditors how they manage their charity drives, and HNers if there are any Fundable.com replacements that work well.

I won't do any of this; I'm expressly non-political. I just think there's an opportunity here for someone who wants to make a mark on the system.
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Lots of devices where the focus isn't really on the computer side of the device. Phone switches and auto-dialers come to mind as examples I have dealt with recently.
> One thing nobody seems to be talking about is how these vehicles have much shorter livespans than a well maintained gas guzzler. The batteries only have around 100k charge cycles, and I read somewhere that the reality is the batteries of electric cars half their charge life in 5 years, and probably need replaced by 8.

You ignore that modern gas engines require fixing/replacement of clutches, transmissions, engine rebuilds etc. that an electric vehicle don't need/have. Those things wear out faster than a HV battery.

I know folks with 10+ year old Prius who still get 45+ MPG.

Finally Tesla warranties the battery for 8 years [1]. So after 8 years you might have to replace the battery, and the cost of which (given the rise of electric cars) will have gone down considerably.

[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/model-s-update-pricing-and-o...
Ask HN: has somebody already made a game to fight SOPA?
Somebody should have made a game to fight SOPA REALLY. If not, I'm disappointed ....
> Every worldview is based in faith.

This is just religious apologetic and it's not really true.

This is the definition of faith in this context:

> Mental acceptance of and confidence in a claim as truth without evidence supporting the claim or disregarding all evidence to the contrary

Religion is explicitly not based on evidence, and is explicitly not disprovable. You believe something despite no evidence, that is faith. Believing something as a best guess based on what actual evidence you have is not faith.
Can we take action against MPAA like we are against GoDaddy?
It looks like the GoDaddy action worked pretty well to get the attention of the US congress. The judiciary committee has now concealed their list of supporters.

http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/SOPA%20Supporters.pdf

I suppose they realize that it's doing them (congress and the SOPA supporters ) far more harm than they're trying to fix.

Here's how we can continue to get their attention. This is harder than transferring domains from registry to registry, but it's also economically more noticeable.

Do two things.
(1) stay home from the movies from December 24th to December 27th.
(2) call or write your congressperson and tell her / him that you stayed home from the movies and why. Mention the name of the movie you decided not to see.

How to find your congress person.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/findyourreps.xpd

Gizmodo still has the list the congress concealed.

http://gizmodo.com/5870241/presented-without-comment-every-single-company-supporting-sopa-the-awful-internet-censorship-law
It's not the number but the influence of the entities behind them. If stackoverflow, reddit, and arsetechnica are commenting on an issue, you can be sure many will agree and join in.
We sometimes delay "non-critical" advisories in order to send them out at the same time as others. In this case -- a DoS against a daemon which most FreeBSD users install from the ports tree anyway -- there wasn't much point updating the security branches earlier.
As I understand it, constant loud noise is a torture technique. They use it against soldiers and stuff. Nothing "pansy" about finding it hard to take. Humans weren't designed for "modern" environments. My dad is in his 80's and my mom in her 70's. They both spent at least part of their childhood on a farm. They keep their household a lot quieter than is typical of a lot of modern homes. I think a lot of stuff that gets labeled "ADHD" and so on is really normal reaction to a crazy distracting environment humans weren't designed for. But that's a whole 'nother ball of wax, I suppose.
I have been a big fan of Gandi.net for quite some time - they have an anti-SOPA [1] stand point for a while, their administrative tools are great and easy to use, and their support for the one time I required it was friendly and knowledgeable and last but not least offer a free SSL certificate with each domain.

http://www.gandibar.net/post/2011/12/23/Gandi-s-Opposition-t...
I'm amazed that telnet still lives after all these years.

I'm going to be asking if anyone objects to me axing it from FreeBSD soon.

I wonder if anybody has audited telnetd implementations on other systems for the same problem?

All BSD-derived telnetd implementations are likely to have this bug.
I guess the problem is that we don't have self-replicating mining machines, as far as I know. We do have ~7 billion self-replicating machines, though, many thousands of which would sign a giant pile of waivers just for the chance to live on Mars.
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Hmm. A bunch of people commenting here don't seem to realize that the reason that Mars has such a miserably thin atmosphere is because it has a terribly weak magnetosphere which is insufficient to prevent solar radiation from stripping away the atmosphere.

So, you can generate as much atmosphere on Mars as you care to imagine, but gradually it will all dissipate away into space, unless you construct networks of structures to contain it.

The most common theory I've read on this is that a massive impact on the Martian planet a few billion years ago not only ejected a lot of its material but also changed the magnetizing dynamo effect of its core (or halted it altogether, not sure). The sun then gradually blew the atmosphere off of the planet.

I'm a huge fan of efforts to colonize Mars; this is just one of the challenges of doing it that I know of. Terraforming in the sense that most people imagine is unfortunately not possible.
It seemed to me that "Merry Christmas" was a good way of covering "look at the 5 presents we just sent you".
The Fall 2011 Google AI Challenge (Ants) is over
Agreed - the benefits of ReSharper far outweigh the negatives IMHO, it does love RAM though.

If its slowing your machine down, there's a few things you can do like turn off code analysis which will help, you can optionally run this later.

As for the additional things it "adds", there's pretty much an option to enable/disable/customise everything.
Here are some histograms from before the finals of how different languages and countries did compared to each other: http://imgur.com/a/Li1b4
I'm going to dangle myself on a limb here.

If you consider the constraint that the indie programmer may have had incomplete skills to set up a proper service, saw this method as faster for any number of other reasons, or didn't want to maintain a proper web service, I think this could very well have been the right approach at the time. Judging from how much money this game has made, I think that's hard to argue with since time to market should have been the number 1 concern at the time and early on he needed a way to make sure people were able to complete all the levels and measure the difficulty curve.

When the developer responded that it didn't matter, that may have been because they don't need that data any more and don't even look at it.