skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1)
Recoverable: Only if I have backups (which I excluded in my comparison, and would be a fault on my side. But go with me here..). Otherwise I'd need to invest (see the word I used here?) time to create it from scratch. That's equivalent to an amount of money (the exact amount is hard to define, granted).

2)
'You can't value a project you're working on as your hourly rate * hours worked, it doesn't really work like that.'
Right. But it's totally okay to value ~worthless~ stuff you have according to market rates, although you didn't sell them yet? Why are we talking about ~12k USD here? That's just a couple of bits and bytes on a disk. Yes, he _could've sold_ that at a specific time for a specific amount equaling ~12k USD. He didn't. Why do you assign this value to a highly fluctuating 'currency' on your disk, but don't like me assigning value to a 'yet to be successful' project on disk?
By using your public key.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/152

You can also require a password AND a cert.
> you needed to be able to ensure secure access to the facility

This part isn't doable if you don't own the datacenter. Slicehost has a problem with this because they never owned the datacenters they used.
Didn't he pretty much develop Minecraft single-handedly? If so, I don't think it's necessarily "right" to share the profits with employees who joined after the work was done.

It's his money of course, he's free to do what he wants and generosity is always nice to see. To my mind though, it would have made just as much sense to give it to charity or anyone else.

I'd be much more interested to hear that he's giving meaningful equity to new employees. That way they could actually make life-altering money if they help create another big hit like Minecraft.

I doubt his employees will appreciate getting another $3 million split across dozens of employees if they help create a new $100M game.
Amazing how the sales keep going on... Last 24H 8845sales=176500€... http://www.minecraft.net/stats
sorry when you are motoring through code typing <?php echo $var vs <?=$var it gets to be tedious.

I understand for general php portability that its better to use the <?php echo vs <?=$whatever syntax, but less code is a good thing.
I do hope Twitter clarify this with a blog post, that's the kind of community responsiveness the management would have shown a few years back.
Domain names top sales ever
In my circle of friends I'm known alternately as smart and slow, for basically this reason. I get embarrassed by wanting to add something to a conversation and hearing "we moved on from that over a minute ago; keep up!" (to which I feel like replying, "we just barely got into it").
>It's not truly selfish to hurt others.

A minor quibble, but I'd say that depends entirely on the action and the circumstances surrounding it. "Pure" selfishness is simply the maximizing of one's own gain without regard for others. It does not imply helping or hurting, although it allows for both.

To draw from a geeky example, Shane shooting Otis in the leg so the zombies would attack the latter, not the former, on the Walking Dead was selfish. So, too, would a Google donation to the EFF be selfish. One action hurts others, the other helps, but both help the actor.
He knows a lot about how busy people feel and where the priorities of most people lie, as expressed by their actions, as measured, rather than their words.

So he's able to "measure" how many people don't buy from his company because they make it too difficult to evaluate their products? That sounds like a highly marketable skill in itself.
Today, PHP 5.4 are released as stable.
My goal in making money is to give money to charity (to fight existential risk; http://lesswrong.com/lw/8f0/existential_risk/). In trolley problem type scenarios where I could kill one person to save four, I would do it. So by the same logic, I'm willing to do stuff with undesirable consequences to make money if the extra money made more than cancels out the undesirable consequences after I donate it to charity.
Inside job is usually the answer for targeted attacks against inside systems. Inside collusion at a minimum.

I wonder how anyone can trust their linode systems after an admin account being compromised.

It would likely ruin their business to re-install everything, but that is the only way to know root kits have not been installed.
First and foremost: I'm sorry. We clearly didn't talk about the same thing and I misunderstood what you wrote.

My take: Someone was mocking Bitcoins with "But all that regulation is evil and it's the freedom of bitcoin that gives it the power" and I tried to make a point saying that _no regulation is involved here_ (laws? certainly). This is a wallet, it got stolen. Your credit cards are protected, your cash is gone for good.

You invoked PCI and I was (and am) unable to make the connection, maybe again because of a misunderstanding? I'm talking cash. Bitcoins are cash in my world (or - at least their value is equivalent to cash, if you choose to sell them).

From there we went downhill and I overreacted. Yes, for me 'state' is exactly what you posted. Again, sorry for the lapse.
Did Google Just Buy Chrome.com?
Yes, but will that help you if the attacker trojans whatever it is that is doing the decryption?

I mean, I'm very clearly not a crypto expert, but I do believe that this would be quite a lot like what Bruce Schnier calls 'the evil maid' attack. Instead of having a bootloader, you have a minimal Linux install, then you get a key to that minimal linux install, and that minimal linux install uses that key to decrypt your encrypted disk.

I believe that if that minimal linux install that does the decrypting is compromised before you log in, in theory, the attacker could then insert something in the code that runs after the data is decrypted to, say, send some of that data elsewhere, or, say, open a back door for them to log in and examine the decrypted data.

I mean, certainly, you are making the attacker wait for you to log in (assuming that they've only compromised the admin interface and don't have full root on the dom0) and that's another step you are forcing the attacker to take, and you do at least have a chance then of detecting the compromise and /not/ sending the key, so I'm not saying that it's worthless.

Of course, this is all protecting against a compromise of the admin tools that does not lead to a compromise of the dom0. If the attacker compromises the dom0 without rebooting it or otherwise disturbing the guests? they have access to your ram. They can snapshot both the ram and the disk and take apart the system at their leisure.
Australian of the Year Awards - Geoffrey Rush
Ask HN: What do you use to track consulting hours?
What systems or tools do you use to track your hours when working? I would personally love to have a local app that syncs to dropbox so I could use it on multiple machines I work from. I'm leery of buying random apps on the App Store so would love to see some recommendations.
LOL, bitcoin.
I think you forgot the GitHub link :)

Also I love the idea of distributed and fully dynamic network, I think there was some project like that in the past. They built distributed imageboard modeled loosely after 4chan, which was actively used by 1,5 people grand total.
"... Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown. This repository is currently disabled. For more details please see the takedown notice ..."

didn't take long ~ https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-03-01-instag... ... It's a bit naughty to post this here, a hacker-like thing to do but would be better appreciated at 4chan.
You can't secure against God. Of course it's technically possible for a Linode employee to do.
Some truth to this but i dont know i agree with everything.

We're a bootstrapped company too. Very small, just getting our product in good shape for prime time and getting feedback from customers on what it will take to convert them from free to paying customers.

Funding for us would save a lot of headaches, give us the ability to spend some money on UI and accelerate our dev cycles...but i'm sure it'll also create just as many.

The truth i see in this is where he talks about VC funded companies having high expectations. As a bootstrapped company you can target a very small niche, as someone with a significant amount of funding...you do need to have a little broader horizon...but is that so bad? Maybe not after the first 6-12 months.

Personally i think funding is all about timing. Don't take it when you need it, take it when you want it...
Probably. You disabled root login how, via the sshd_config file? If so, you're still screwed.

Even if you fully disable root, that's not going to stop the init=/bin/sh script.

Even if you fix that (securing grub?) you're still screwed because it's a virtual machine, and they can just mount the partition to another VM, and pull all your data/reset root that way.

So, maybe if you have an encrypted partition, no root access, secure grub, and real hardware (it's probably possible to dump the VMs memory by snapshotting it, then pulling the key out that way), you would be secure against attacks like this.

With a VM? No, it's not nearly secure enough for very important things.
When people are applying for a job you can be 99% sure they're motivated by the money.

I love developing software, and I even spend some of my free time doing it. But if I didn't need the money, I'd spend most of my days skiing.
Start up idea #769

Something that annihilates both mice AND giant insects
Sorry, the video points out no "human" differences. It points to humans saying they like Yammer, that's about it. I'm sure it is just fine as a marketing video, but don't pretend it conveys any information beyond "like", assuming one has ever used "social media" before.
Albert Einstein's Thoughts on Socialism
What if by having a desire to be "special" one was able to create wealth for himself and many others and was able to make a big difference in the world. I find your viewpoint to be flawed.
Sometimes failure is a great teacher too.
NSA Publishes Blueprint For "FishBowl", a Top-Secret-Cleared Android Phone [PDF]
I would not be surprised if the Linode "reset root password" function shuts down your VM, mounts the filesystem directly on the host, and edits /etc/shadow, and maybe the PAM configs if they're feeling real nice. Using something we can't mount (e.g. encrypted)? Not using /etc/shadow nor PAM? Sorry, we can't help you beyond advising you try and reboot in single user and ssh in to your VM console.
I don't play minecraft.
I'm not a fan.
I wouldn't know Notch if I tripped on him.

I gotta say hats off to the man. Doing something good for others at your own ( great ) expense when not compelled to do so is unusual. Most people would have spent it on themselves somehow. wtg man.
That's not strictly true. If you're careful and imaginative, with moderate effort you can commit a fair amount of highly random data to memory. You just can't expect to change it every month.

This may be oversimplified, but it's the correct horse battery staple.
> If all SF did was make cops walk a beat and arrest people for every petty crime (like NYC did) they could drastically improve things. After that, making sure every street was well lit with good street lamps would help even more. Hell I'd willingly pay more taxes if it was agreed that the SFPD motorpool budget was cut in half and officers were forced to walk.

Hopefully we won't have to elect a Rudy Guiliani or a Frank Rizzo to make that happen.
This is fantastic. Glad you guys came along. I was wondering why it took so freaking long for something like this to show up.
App Engine 1.6.3 Released
This release has plenty of exciting changes to keep you busy on your extra day this year.
Dynamic Code Encryption as an Anti Dump and Anti Reverse Engineering measure
My understanding of when they move money around in minutes is that they're basically giving you a short-term, interest-free loan in exchange for using their service. In reality, it still takes a day or two for things to clear.
If you're perfectly happy with your lifestyle, three million bucks is more than enough for you.
He developed it alone originally yes, but he retired in November 2011 and since late 2010 it's been developed (in part) by Jens Bergensten (http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Jeb)

Edit: also Mojang has revenue from the pocket edition of the game (for iOS and Android) that Notch has no involvement in, so it's beyond him being the only bread winner for the company.
I think this is valid criticism based on presentations I've read from past conferences. I've been trying to find out concrete information about building a petascale data store to contain log file data for ad hoc analytics and it's extremely difficult to get really good information.
It's partly a definition debate, but I think it's a mistake to try to label selfishness as everyone but selflessness.

If something is win-win, it's not selfish. Attempting to label mutually beneficial actions "selfish" is Ayn-Rand era propaganda. If an action is good for you, and bad for others, it's selfish. If an action is good for others and bad for you, it's selfless (though it might turn out to be a good thing for you - that's karma). If good for everyone (including you), or something that benefits you and doen't really effect anyone else, it's neither selfish nor selfless, it's just a smart move.

Ultimately, selfishness describes motivations, not actions. If you think Google's action was selfishly motivated (and they had no concern for the positive or negative externalities of their action) then it's fair to call their action selfish. But unless you're a mind reader, it's hard to make that call.
If this accomplishes what it seems to be attempting and makes erlang/OTP and the BEAM more accessible to the ruby, python and js communities while smoothing some of the language/platform's rough edges, I will be a very happy camper.
WikiLeaks Diplomatic Cables vs FOIA Documents
Hey, an Argentinean here... You REALLY don't know what insecurity is...
Inspirational Story from a Broke, Uninsured Game Developer
A Brief History of International Banks
if i didn't need the money, i'd still be building things.
If I had to guess, I imagine he refused a dividend and instead had the company issue the equivalent sum in bonuses to the employees. Tax wise it'd make no sense for him to take a dividend and then create havoc by gifting it. (At least, under UK style tax law.)
Jonno Rodd - Marketing Freelancer
Ask HN: Language inversion-- why do you think it exists?
The more I think about language inversion (the fact that the best languages, like Scala and Haskell, remain obscure; while C++ and Java remain mainstream) the more it puzzles me. Often the justification given for using Java is, "it has the best tooling". Well, that's completely reasonable. But how'd it get to that point? How did Java, despite the obvious deficiencies of the language, get the largest community in the first place?

It wasn't always this way, nor does it need to be so. In 1987, Lisp was the #3 language on the TIOBE index. Something happened that caused the state of language inversion we see now. I have a guess, but I'm kind of curious if there's someone out there who actually knows how we ended up in 15+ years of language inversion.
As someone who used to live in SF and now lives in Baltimore, this question strikes me as pretty funny.
Bad idea: Chrome is dangerous for the uninformed!

It still has a pretty serious security hole: Passwords are visible in plain text. A quick trip into "Personal Stuff" and "Manage saved passwords..." is all you need in order to expose this info.

I ran a quick test. Without straining much, you can click the "show" button on about 40 passwords in one minute. A quick Ctrl+P and the entire list is printed in plain text! It probably wouldn't take much longer than that to email it or transmit the plain text list via some other method.

If you have three to five minutes on someone's workstation you can walk away with the login information for absolutely everything they've done through the browser, banking, social, email, whatever.

What sucks is that people have been very vocal on the Chrome support forum about this particular issue and, well, they've been summarily ignored.

Maybe I'm missing something fundamental here but I just can't understand why Google would leave this huge gaping hole in there. It can't be that hard to at least provide one more layer of security. You should not be able to see any passwords without a master password.

I've looked at some of the arguments pointing out that this could provide a false sense of security. My point (and that made by countless others) is very simple: The way it works today a ten-year-old could steal all of your passwords inside of five minutes without even having to work very hard. A layer or two of security would make it so that a far more knowledgeable and seriously involved process (or spying software) would have to be utilized to steal your stuff. I vote for option #2.

I use Chrome as my primary browser, but I am not a civil servant at a government office. I am keenly aware of the security hole.

That said, I don't recommend it to family and friends because a non-techie will screw themselves in an instant with this browser. Imagine Uncle Pete taking his laptop to be serviced and having all of his personal login data fully exposed to the 17-year-old pimple-faced kid at the computer shop. Terrible stuff.

Google: Please fix this before it becomes the source of embarrassment and huge personal loss to lots of people.
For sure, It will get him a lot of job applicants next time he hires.
I advise you seek the services of a professional sys admin to secure systems.
Redwood City, CA

Tidemark has open positions for User Interface Developers, Application Tier Developers, and Computation Platform Developers. http://tidemark.net/company/careers

Tidemark is a well-funded but still relatively small startup in the Enterprise Performance Management/Business Analytics space.
It's certainly a grey area, but at what point is it safe to assume that if you get hacked, it's not going to be because your ISP got hacked? Say this happened to Amazon and it affected a company like Heroku or dropbox, both users of AWS? Regardless of what terms of service says, I'll bet there's some liability somewhere. And if there's a cut off, maybe linode should advertise that? "Hey, we're cheap, but you get what you pay for!" rather than "You're getting ripped off if you go with amazon over linode!"

If a bank gets robbed, I'm not liable for the cash they steal. But how about if I've got cash in a safe deposit box and someone uses a fake id to get into it, and the bank doesn't recognize the fraud? That's trickier. And if someone robs my house and I've got a bunch of cash under my mattress, that's another story too. I know the analogy doesn't quite hold up because it's kind of like a bank and a customer engineering a safe together (eg both could be at fault for a break in), but there's got to be some responsibility on Linode's part.
Some rather insane Python hacks: 5y of bad ideas by Armin Ronacher [slides+vid]
And now when they're hiring in the future, they have to wonder whether the candidate is more motivated by the money or the love.

I'd be surprised if Mojang didn't hire in the same way as most small companies with huge industry respect (like 37signals or GitHub). That is, head hunting specific people they want rather than the usual free for all job application process.

(Update: I need to clarify that 37signals and GitHub don't always hire through headhunting. They're just the type of company I was referring to.)
Building things for someone else according to their desires?
What people say, and what people do are often two different things!
You could do that before short syntax:

foo(array('source' => '/123', 'destination' => '/abc'));

Short syntax will make it less repetitive though. You can also use something like array_merge to emulate jQuery's $.extend for creating defaults.
Slides here: http://pocoo.org/~mitsuhiko/badideas.pdf

More talks here: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/talks/

I came across the PDF with the slides a couple of days ago, might have been HN or somewhere else, but after I finished reading them, there was a link to the video presentation at the end of the PDF :) Which is of course way more informative than some terse slides!
Another idea is to deliberately practice the skill of discarding opinions you've previously expressed, and cultivate a social circle where this doesn't cause you to lose status:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/overcoming-disa.html
Rdar://10597149: Xcode just doesn't work worth shit
I was probably too harsh, but frankly, just as you're sick of reading about it, I'm sick of every single thread on bitcoin having that inaccuracy.
What can I say, I'm literal minded - the misuse of words annoys me.

But I still believe the ecosystem as a whole reeks of pyramids and other scams

Oh, sure, that's kind of inevitable, it's a result of the lack of constraints and oversight. But personally, it's a part of why I like reading about it - it still has that feeling of a "wild west", populated by pioneers and thieves. Kinda like the Internet as a whole a few decades ago. Of course, it also means I wouldn't trust it with my money.

I am sick of reading about it.

Sorry, but then... why not just skip the link? There are a few topics I'm kinda sick of too, but I just ignore them.

But then I also think casinos and lotteries are scams so I am kind of outside mainstream opinion on a few things I guess.

Again, my literal mind jumps when I read that ; ) I can completely understand that you consider them immoral and/or predatory, but there's no need to call them a scam particularly - FSM knows there are plenty of other immoral acts.
This is almost equivalent to saying that the expected value of a startup increases with the scale you aim for -- clearly not true after some point.
er no, either. ITYM "according to an alleged discussion with a Linode employee".
> but at what point is it safe to assume that if you get hacked, it's not going to be because your ISP got hacked

If you co-locate your hardware at a data center and your staff competently secures your systems.
Invalid Argument (talk show for devs) Episode 1
The topic is the iTunes App Store and what it's like to develop for iOS. Guests: Caleb Elston (Yobongo), David Barnard (Launch Center), Matthew Bischoff & Brian Capps (Quotebook), Michael Simmons (Flexibits)