skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Don't Install BaseShield App Store
Many of you might have heard about the BaseShield App Store (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376676).

I recently installed it on my Windows laptop. During installation it accessed and modified the memory of processes associated with the security suite I had. (Symantec Endpoint Protection).

It claims on its website to be More than malware-free. The installer binary for Windows is from a company called "Secure By Design".

Then why does it access files on my PC, that has nothing to do with it? (that too, reading and writing into the memory of processes associated with my security suite).

When I tried uninstalling the program, it took a long time; told me to restart my computer to finsih un-installation; then produced an error message saying that some files could not removed.

I have a strong feeling that this app is nothing more than an elaborate piece of malware. I strongly encourage everyone to abstain from installing BaseShield App Store on your computers.
Labors of love with unproven revenue rarely get valued by the market as high as founders think they should be valued.

a) They've been taking money for less than two full months, after a year of playing the things-on-Internet-should-be-free game.

b) They sold $4,000 worth of domain names at a cost of $2,000 for themselves in October.

c) They describe the business as being on a "growth curve", which is an interesting induction from one data point. I would be worried about whether you've shaken out all of the freebie customers who were dying for domains, causing the sales to crater the next month.

d) Cost to duplicate the site is not high. Barriers to entry in the market are zero. The site has no defensible competitive advantage, certainly not one which will survive the founders departing.

e) Whoever acquires it will need to find themselves a Rails specialist and they're not cheap at the moment.

And for that they wanted greater than $40,000.
This man's reputation in his declared field is nowhere near his apparent stature in his own mind

Really? He is one of the coinventors of Kolmogorov complexity, and Kolmogorov complexity certainly does shed a lot of light on the relationship between information, randomness, and complexity. While he is clearly a big ego and a shameless self-promoter, I think it's also fair to say that he is among the foremost experts on K-complexity and related topics.
If I were to choose the lesser evil of the two. I thinki it would be Flash. As it seems more "open" than Silverlight. I mean look at the amazing piece of software that is HaXe and the slew of true 3D flash applications on the internet.

IMHO I never knew what Flex is all about. Even going to their website it seems a bit vague to me. Learning MXML adds a layer of complexity that I'm not willing to work with. AIR OTOH seems promising though.
I never truly understood what Flex is all about. Could someone please elaborate?
>> I can only assume that the reason it's not an option is because of the existing regulatory environment.

The usual explanation in telecom is the natural monopoly argument, also prevalent in other utility services with high cost of market entry and network effects.
Sure they do, it's not like they are secret. But most people don't want to take the time to understand scientific articles that aren't written for the general public, if even those.
IMegent
I smugly thought to myself "there's no way it would be able to figure out Hercule Poirot, it's not even worth trying."

I'll be damned, it got it.
One of the most interesting quotes I heard recently on NPR was someone from Obama's transitional team explaining that a green energy industry is win-win. Developing and deploying green energy will boost the U.S economy while reducing carbon emissions. Whichever side of the argument you fall on, fossil fuels won't last forever and greener tech tends to be applicable in a much wider range of circumstances making it convenient for the modern lifestyle.
BS. Each of the 10 chapters in the IPCC 2007 report on the science basis for climate change contains something like 15 pages of references. If you bothered to check actually those peer-reviewed journals you might discover quite a few papers.
++ for KohanaPHP. It's one of the most elegant and powerful PHP5 frameworks you will find out there. The devs are great!

Positives:
* cascading filesystem with built-in support for modules
* very clean and easy to use ORM implementation
* auto loading of classes
* easy to understand syntax
* HMVC support is currently in development
* open communication between community and devs
* flexibility ... you can pretty much do whatever you want with custom class libraries, vendors without much hassle.

Negatives:
* still a relatively new framework that is changing fast, but the current trunk branch is now stable.
* expanded documentation module is in development
You know, transmitting video has proven to be a pretty important tool for fighting world hunger and various kinds of oppression; when it's possible to see the problems other people are experiencing, it's a lot easier to empathize with them. So it might not be a great idea to let one company decide how our video-transmitting technology is going to work and who gets to use which parts of it.

To be more concrete, imagine:

"The video you have selected ("russians_in_tskhinvili_getting_shelled.wmvx") is not viewable in your region ("Georgia"). Please contact your system vendor for a software upgrade if this region is not correct."

"New Adobe Explosion 2012 offers video content providers a usage-tracking feature, which provides accurate statistics on the age and gender breakdown of their viewing audience, enabling video content providers to micro-target advertising content. *Information about users' identities will not be disclosed except pursuant to an order from a court in one of the following jurisdictions: United States, China, India, Saudi Arabia, or Germany.)"

"The United States Trade Representative is pleased to announce a new accord with Brazil, addressing both American media companies' concerns related to rampant Brazilian internet piracy and the new Brazilian military government's concerns related to subversive content from overseas. Under the accord, effective starting 2Q 2011, only properly licensed video codec software from Adobe, Microsoft, or Apple will be permitted in Brazil."

"We're sorry, but the license for the software that created this audio file ("Grandpa Telling Us About His Mother.flvx") has expired. Please contact the content provider to request that they renew their license in order to access the content."
I stumped it with Kaylee, too, and decided to add the question "Is your character an engineer?" Which it already had in the database. Then it asked me to evaluate the engineerness of 20 characters... and of the ones I recognized, most would be hard to differentiate from Kaylee by other questions.

That is pretty freaking slick, I've got to say. I don't even remember 20q.net having that.
Wasn't BaseShield funded in part from YCombinator - can we get some more information from the original team on this ?
Having never had a "normal" job per se (okay, I bagged groceries for a year when I was younger), I still find it hard to believe that it can take two weeks just to get something deployed. Maybe one day I'll finally truly believe all the stories I've heard -- two-week deployments, meetings about future meetings, etc. For now, some part of me still believes it's simply implausible and everyone is engaging in hyperbole...
He did get a Nobel Peace Prize for his fear-mongering, so I'd say he does represent the mainstream establishment philosophy on the issue.
This is a really hard to decipher blob of text. Care to point out some examples of offending entries and interpret what they mean?
"I have a strong feeling that this app is nothing more than an elaborate piece of malware."

Baseshield is funded by YC. They're perfectly legit.
Looks like a .csv copied over. Mind linking to a copy of the original .csv file?
I'm a "Lomborg skeptic". Bjorn Lomborg takes the IPCC predictions on Global Warming and shows that the costs of current proposed policies are likely to be much greater than their benefit in actual mitigated warming. He points out that much more good can be done if a fraction of the money currently earmarked to fight global warming instead went towards AIDS prevention, malaria reduction, and nutrition efforts in the third world.

Of course, it is not popular to discuss costs and benefits when discussing Global Warming. The kind of leftists who are the big green alarmists don't look kindly on economic arguments. However, I believe they are essential to making rational decisions. We should all have the goal of doing more good than harm.

Here's his TED talk on the subject.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...
It's kind of funny that the related articles include another one with a completely different thesis:

Has universal ageing mechanism been found?

A protein that causes yeast to age seems to have
a similar effect in mice too – the finding might
lead to drugs to reverse age-related diseases"
I spent 3 months at the end of recent deployment furiously developing an (arguably) game-changing app for the Army's secret intranet. I knew in advance it wouldn't actually get deployed, despite everyone up to the Task Force Commander loving it and touting its importance. The day came when it was "done" (of course I had become attached and there were a million things I wanted to add) and ready to be deployed... then the red tape tied it up until it was time for us to go. As is generally the case, our replacements weren't planning to do things our way (the country has gotten much worse since we left, imagine that) so the project was basically sunk.

I worked on it because I love programming and trying new things. Everything I was doing at the time was new to me so it was fun, engaging, and a learning experience. Plus, it beat the hell out of anything else I could have been doing in that wasteland ;)
Yup. Here's the essence of the log file:

SecProxy.exe from BaseShield App Store.(C:\Windows\system32\BaseShield\BaseShield\SecProxy.exe) performed operations on the following processes belonging to Symantec Endpoint Protection:

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection\SmcGui.exe

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection\Rtvscan.exe

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection\Smc.exe

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\ccApp.exe

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\ccSvcHst.exe

The operations it performed include "Memory Free", "Thread Resume", "Memory Write", "Memory Allocation".

I don't know why any app, let alone BaseShield would have to access and modify the memory of a program totally unrelated to it.
Wait a minute, didn't you give humans fire in the first place?
Try out some of the example applications at http://degrafa.org/samples/ and try to guess how long it would take you to write those samples using modern javascript frameworks vs how long it would take to write using Flex/Flash.
I think that blog's "About" page is one of the best pieces of academic writing I've ever seen, on a per-word basis:

>>
This is a blog about my research on privacy and anonymity. The title refers to the fact that there are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are.

This fact has two related consequences. First, a lot of traditional thinking about anonymous data relied on the fact that you can hide in a crowd that’s too big to search through. That notion completely breaks down given today’s computing power: as long as the bad guy has enough information about his target, he can simply examine every possible entry in the database and select the best match.

The second consequence is that 33 bits is not really a lot. If your hometown has 100,000 people, then knowing your hometown gives me 16 bits of entropy about you, and only 17 bits remain. But the real danger is that information about a person’s behavior, which was traditionally not considered personally identifying, can be used to cause serious privacy breaches in a variety of different contexts.
>>
MXML is to HTML as ActionScript is to JavaScript.
Customized version of http://ezmlm.org/
One of my least favorite things about Krugman is how he mixes in unsupported political demagoguery with good economic arguments, and doesn't bother to distinguish between the two. He gives you a few solid facts and arguments and then skips to his preferred policies, while skipping many steps in between, as if to say "if you believe these good points, then you must agree with my conclusion", even though that is not the case.
Here the .csv export of the Symantec's Tamper Protection Log:

http://mysbfiles.stonybrook.edu/~amenon/base_shield_app_stor...

and the .mdb export:

http://mysbfiles.stonybrook.edu/~amenon/base_shield_app_stor...
Old AIM screen name; I didn't want to add a string of digits to the end of my nick.
I would pick Flash for a number of reasons.

It has a lot better x-platform support for it's IDEs. This is important because if you are creating anything at all rich you are going to have designer and coders working on your stuff. Constraining them to a single platform reduces the amount of people who would be willing to work on it.

Flash also now has Flex which allows you to code and compile. Depending what you are doing this is great to have designers and developers on the same project.

Finally people are used to building stuff using the Flash IDE. While Silverlight might be the best thing since sliced bread I'd rather use a technology I know I can just find a contractor for in about 10 minutes.
I like campaign monitor. Have used it for a couple years. Great reports.
It is absolutely false that "scientists were freaking out about Global Cooling". In fact, thirty years ago, the scientific consensus was for warming, and there was grave and growing concern about the effect of greenhouse gases. Any review of the scientific literature from that period will prove this definitively. Fleck, Connolley, and Peterson have published on this point; you can probably find a summary of their findings online.

Moreover, even if "Global Cooling" was not the lie it is, this argument is meaningless. History is littered with discarded scientific theories. This is not cause for concern. It is the way that science works. What matters is whether current theories are correct. It is interesting to note, then, that current climate models accurately describe--among many other things--the cooling period you mention.

Finally, the statement, "Climates have always changed and they always will," is not informative. It's a blatantly bunk argument that since climate change is a normal occurrence, any change in climate is normal.
If you don't need to cram a lot of boxes into a tight space then 2U will usually give you better airflow and cooling.

Also, when those on-motherboard NICs die, you can more easily/cheaply add additional NIC cards to the 2U boxes.

In terms of power, that's actually the main limitation in most colo's these days. Some colos are down at 15 amps per rack, many seem to be in the 20 amps per rack, and some you can get up to 30 but you will pay for that one way or another.

Even at 30 amps per rack, for the kind of machines that you're talking about you are still likely to be less than about 20 machines per rack. I just spec'd a build out of the same horsepower & ram but with more juice for e.g., FC cards to a SAN and the safe limit was 16 machines in a 30 amps per rack colo and 8 machines in a 15 amps per rack colo.

Shopping around for power information can be tricky because some of the colos like to play marketing games to get you to think there price is better than others but the power charges can eat you alive if you need more than what they allocate in their base charges.
http://www.climateaudit.org/
What If the Recession Does Turn Into a Depression?
LLVM-Py: Build Compilers and VM's in Python
I should have been specific to Canada's two bills, C-60 and C-61, which both attempted to ratify Canadian IP law to the WIPO treaties. The U.S. already ratified to those treaties, which got them the DMCA.

Clearly our cellular plans suck, but the U.S.'s intellectual property laws remain more restrictive than ours (for now).
Ask HN: What besides Craigslist is a good way to find an apartment in the Bay Area?
I'm looking on Craigslist and a few other sites Google dredged up, but can't help feeling there's a better way to go about doing this. Anybody?
I love the simplicity of goingtorain. But, umbrellatoday wins out for me because it rarely rains here in LA. It isn't worth me checking each day, so umbrellatoday's text message options seems great -- now let's see if it works.
Anything but Symfony.
well, that's me, so thank you!
jimbokun and dmaclay,

It really depends on the application. Remember, the client is always untrustworthy. You can trust them with their data, but nothing else. In three-legged cases, like an ad or some other third-party developed app hosted in your page, you can't even trust the client-side to have unlimited access to the client's data! Plus, there are remote script hacks that potentially will compromise the user's state or other information.

a catchy acronym for what all the cool kids are doing in the browser with Javascript

At Yahoo, we call it Progressive Layered Enhancement. Start with working markup and server-side logic, and then enhance it in layers to add functionality for the browsers that can handle it, so that it always works, even if a layer is missing or broken.

Having worked on a Microsoft stack in the past, I can say that it was nice to have a single language from end to end. It just really sucked that the language was VisualBasic. So, I get the excitement behind GWT and Pyjamas. Not that the author is wrong, I just think he doesn't really treat the material very well.
I want to know too -- I'm moving there in January.

I've been looking on housingmaps.com and using earthify.org w/ Google Maps, trying to find a place that looks like it would be a feasible commute.

I can't decided if I'd be content to just rent a room from someone with an apartment (like I've always done in Boston), or if it's better to go for a full-fledged apartment of my own.
Sales reps-to-revenue increase "magic number" ratio for SaaS companies
phplist is what we recommend at work, since it's often easily installed through fantastico
How To Send Email To Any Cell Phone for Free (Cell Phone Carrier Email Format List)
"Finally, the statement, "Climates have always changed and they always will," is not informative. It's a blatantly bunk argument that since climate change is a normal occurrence, any change in climate is normal."

<sigh> You're right. Good thing no one made that argument. Too bad you didn't read what I wrote about that, which was, approximately, that most people really don't that (sadly, most people also can't point at Mexico on a map). No one is arguing that because climate normally occurs that all climate change must be normal. They are just pointing out, "Hey guys-- this isn't the first time that climate HAS changed-- so let's not rush to conclusions".

Scientific consensus 30 years ago was for warming? After Source? Here's a quote from that article (admittedly from Newsweek):

Meteorologists disagree [!] about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous [!] in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
Depending on the city, look for local management companies that own multiple complexes. I'm in Palo Alto and Vittoria Management has like 10 buildings (vrent.com). They will post them on their website before posting them on Craigslist. Things go so fast on CL that's it's not even worth it.
It's not abnormal. In rails I have deployed to a customer in 12 hours, starting from scratch. I was using my own framework though. In gwt, I have done this in ~24 hours.
These weren't simple apps either, not just scaffolding, but had complex user interfaces.
I wasn't referring to task difficulty, just the extreme time delay between when something is ready and when it is put into production.
Yes! I'm copying and pasting some code from various areas.

Here is an old and slightly modified mysql result set iterator that fits the purposed of the newer code that makes this example nice: http://codepad.org/nmD4pDES

Here is a windowing iterator, it gives the person the ability to shift and pop elements from the inner iterator, thus narrowing the field that the iterator goes over: http://codepad.org/IsE5U7cw

We can now do the following... http://codepad.org/nP0EEKxT
It didn't know who Dirk Pitt was. Universal litmus test for intelligence fails ;)
Notify me when it's up
I have an apartment in SF with a room opening up in January. Email is in my profile.
When I had to find a place, I wrote a script to alert me to new worthwhile postings.
Flex is many lightyears ahead of what JavaScript has to offer.

Then why are there overwhelmingly more Javascript apps than Flash ones?
10 must-know social business bloggers
Programmable A/V Receiver. Let your neighbors turn down the volume at your party.
Or freebase.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152484

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253283

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=269426

(Hat tip: http://searchyc.com/)
Walk around the neighborhoods you like, look for 'for rent' signs.
Project Deploy | Choose, Bookmark, Deploy
Weigh the risks of action vs. inaction in the 2 (simplified) situations (global warming true, global warming false) and you find that despite what may very well end up being the reality of global warming, its better to err on the side of caution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

Interesting video displaying this point, but I think towards the end it gets a little preachy.
Slightly OT, but can we expand this question to the Seattle area as well?
It's got "holy shit you're going to get sued badly" written all over it.
I had a look at Kohana after your posts, and I really like the look of it, especially since I was leaning toward CI however didn't want to learn in an environment which was supporting a mix of PHP4 and 5. If I'm learning PHP now, I may as well learn PHP5 and work in an environment which can fully facilitate that without having to bloat up and lose flexibility by supporting 4 as well.

Kohana really does look like a great framework, however after reading the forums and wiki a little I'm worried that if I begin learning now, I'll need to change a lot of what I learn in the coming months with the 2.3/3.0 branch (whatever they end up calling it) - and whatever I start building will have to change too.

This isn't a huge problem as whatever I build now will be mainly side-projects which are designed to push my learning forward (such as small e-commerce sites, rating sites, file uploader sites), however considering the changes coming soon (API etc) it's a little frustrating.

However, thanks to you two I've found Kohana which is absolutely what I was looking for. Cake is a little too bloated and complex, CI is more flexible and simple, however to appeal to a larger userbase must support also PHP4 and 5, while Kohana is very niche insofar that is all about 5 and thus very much less restricted.

I'd be interested to see what other people who have worked around these frameworks think of Kohana.
I am so pleased that you created an account to pass that information on.
I find an RSS reader is pretty good at this too.
Now what would be really nice is if there was a similarly-easy-to-use "notifymewhenitchanged.com". Every change-notification site I've seen thus far has required a cumbersome signup process.
I Got My Start
While it's not software, my company uses MailChimp for our newsletter/special offers emails. The statistics and guaranteed delivery is worth it.