skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say it backfired, but after releasing we did discover that some Flash obfuscators used on games behave almost identically to a JIT spray attack. This is a shame because their obfuscation technique doesn't really add any value, but it does hurt performance, consume very large amounts of memory, and negatively impact stability. We've adjusted the detection to accommodate, and will make further adjustments as necessary.
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Totally agree - but I still think some amount of sacrifice is necessary at the beginning, when you finish your education and start with 0 (if you're lucky, some have student loans).

Unless you have wealthy parents that is.
They can very easily stop including the Flash player with every version of Chrome. It seems like that would solve some obvious security problems.

This is hardly an impossible feat.
From observing commentary elsewhere on the web, it's clear to me that the excessive focus on the fact that she was created as a sex object is peculiar to HN.

What other commentary have you seen? Everywhere I've found any more than a handful of comments, the sex angle is mentioned repeatedly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dou4Gy0p97Y&feature=relat...

http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/disturbing-and-poignant-vid...
The movement is legit, Kony is a crazy mofo, but Invisible Children is a huge money scam. They only donate a fraction of their profits to the charities they claim to support.
By that definition, every loser that hasn't yet lost is a winner. There is no way to tell the difference except hindsight. I bet the dinosaurs told themselves that they were totally different than all those other weak-ass species that had joined the annals of history 76 Myr ago...
As far as I can tell, he's not saying that one should never sacrifice... just that if you do, try to align the situation so there is a payoff for YOU down the line. Education can be one of those things.
[HOWTO] Tomcat running on the PogoPlug (Plug Computer)
Ask HN: How much should I pay a web developer?
I'm trying to hire a web developer as I want my resort in the Philippines to have a website that has the online reservation option.

according to my research, Filipino web developers earn 3-4 dollars per hour. But I've learned too that web developers on odesk usually ask for fixed rates or per project rates.

Does anyone know how much is acceptable?
The reason you have to start looking in settings.py and urls.py is because you used "django-admin.py startproject". Why would you do that? Probably because it provides a nice and common layout with some sensible default configuration.

But you don't have to use "startproject". Here's an example: http://olifante.blogs.com/covil/2010/04/minimal-django.html

No, I don't recommend you to do that. Use Flask, Bottle or any other lightweight framework/library you want to use. Just don't get hung up on how the Django docs suggests you structure your project. It's all still Python.
Stack vs. Heap
Amy Hoy calls this concept "stacking bricks" - working on project after project until you have a wall of success. Overnight successes get a lot of praise and press, but they're rare. Extremely rare. And often times a fluke rather than the result of an uncannily talented person.

You can also educate others ("sacrifice" your knowledge) while also increasing your success score. In fact, most of the people I really respect on Twitter, for example - many of which I've never met - I respect because they've taught me something. And almost all of them are financially successful.
Ask HN: need a writer/researcher for travel site. Recommendations, experience?
I'm looking for a writer/researcher for my travel-related website. I need someone to research vacation locations and write short articles. Does anyone have any experience with hiring writers? How much do I have to expect to pay? What are good websites/or writers you can recommend?

Any help/tips appreciated, thanks.
Obviously intelligence tops out at the high end of a sigmoid curve - there's only so much matter and energy in the universe to convert to computronium - but that's no reason to suspect any value smaller than that as the limit. It must eventually level off, but the point at which it levels off may be hundreds of billions of times more intelligent than a human.

So the fact that intelligence is limited, doesn't in any way mean that hyperintelligence isn't possible. There is a limit, but we have no reason to believe that limit is on anything like the same order of magnitude as current intelligence.
Code Completion in Textastic 4.0
[Photo] اجمل صور تهاني عيد الام 2012 - بطاقات معايدة لعيد الام 2012
If you ever played Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain you'll see where this story came from. (Also if you read the article you'll see its also inspired by Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity.) Heavy Rain was a dark and gritty detective story with situations a lot more messed up then sex robots. Someone here was disturbed that the writers of this video came up with this story. That's the point, not every story is going to make you feel happy.
A great improvement over the previous design, and more importantly it's approximately 100x faster to navigate.
My startup is already doing this (for all couples, not just married ones) and our date subscription service is launched in SF:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/03/becouply/

http://www.becouply.com

https://www.becouplydates.com/
There is an amusing passage in "The Black Swan" about how a turkey would estimate its own life expectancy as Thanksgiving draws closer...

Don't confuse the fact that we've been lucky not to go extinct yet with evidence that we won't, especially when you being around to make that inference is conditional on said luck.
Down the line - and as early as possible.

I personally don't think that education is a self-sacrifice activity... or if it is, you're studying the wrong things. University is a gigantic opportunity to make vast numbers of valuable connections, learn lots of interesting things, develop as a human being, and even gain some valuable credentials that will make earning money easier.

Of course, it's a bit overpriced in America at the moment, but that doesn't mean that education in general is a bad deal. On the contrary.
True, but people rarely brag that they met their partner online. Relatively little word of mouth.

As for car sales -- this is a field notorious for how salespeople con the customer, probably for the reasons you specify. People pick the type of car they want, and then endure the shenanigans at the dealers of that brand in their area.
Mozilla is still ".org"? That seems odd.
A Card-Counting Mix of Bibles, Blackjack and Cash
I have no idea what the rates are for web devs in the Philippines but based on my own experience there are significant risks with using oDesk, Freelancer.com or any other freelancing sites for your first, major web development project. Instead, I really recommend finding someone local with a good portfolio and reputation. Pay them well to get their loyalty because yours is the type of site that will need regular maintenance so you can't afford to burn your bridges.
And If The Internet Went Black?
You can also educate others ("sacrifice" your knowledge) while also increasing your success score. In fact, most of the people I really respect on Twitter, for example - many of which I've never met - I respect because they've taught me something. And almost all of them are financially successful.

But that's not self-sacrifice. As you say, it increases your own success score. Being perceived as an authority on subject X (which teaching it to others tends to do for you) is directly valuable. None of those helpful-and-successful people would be helping if the help was anonymised - because then it'd do nothing for them. That's perhaps been one of the big improvements of StackOverflow - making the value of helping others more obvious and "bankable"...
Well, when Mozilla and others argued that "IE9 is not a modern browser", a lot of other people laughed at them because they thought IE9 doesn't need to support "many HTML5 specs", just a "a few good ones". Now you see the consequence of that. The reality is that IE9 is still about 2 years behind in HTML5 specs adoption, and you can easily tell that from the HTML5test.com site.

Also, IE9 is still a pretty niche browser version. If they were to find an alternative for IE9, then they might as well find one for IE8, which has a much larger market share.
Unwise Microwave Experiments
What's the purpose of this 'pleasure' construct in the AI's mind? If it's able to calculate the value of a utility function in order to set the 'pleasure' variable, and it bases its actions on the value of this 'pleasure' variable, why not just cut out the middle man and have it base its actions directly on the result of the utility function? The variable functionally buys you nothing, but introduces this problem that adjusting the variable directly can cause the AI to take actions inconsistent with its utility function.

Without the variable, the problem doesn't happen. The AI values collecting ore. If it has enough self-awareness to reliably modify itself, it knows that if it modifies its utility function it is liable to collect less ore, which is something it doesn't want. The action of modifying the utility function naturally rates very low on the utility function itself.

You don't want to murder people, so not only do you choose not to murder people, but if you are presented with a pill which will make you think it's good to murder people and take great joy in it, you will choose not to take that pill. No matter how enjoyable and good murder may be for you if you take the pill, your own self-knowledge and current utility function prohibit taking it.

The model of intelligence described can be thought of as self-limiting. Luckily it is not by any means the only viable model of intelligence.
Thanks for the love. The kickstarter should be starting soon. Also a full schematic will be posted around the same time if anyone wants to order the parts themselves.
It is what humans have done for generations. Heck some parts of the world still do it. At least we use metaphorical ones. This guy is a crook and deserves the opportunity to make a lot of money doing something else.
What about this?

"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF

That's 54 jumbo jets a day.

I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.
"Things that go boom" must be official TSA terminology. I've heard it used by screeners on multiple occasions at different airports.

They're probably not permitted to use the "b-word" out of concern for spooking passengers, much as passengers are not permitted to use the "b-word" out of concern for spooking the screeners.
> The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse,

Google, today, after all is a stock-holders company that is aimed to generate PROFITS, and maximize those. It should be kind of obvious that at some point they (as a company) will try to maximize cash coming in, and minimize going out (spent). Therefore, their product [search] is narrowed towards the ones who push the most obvious questions/search queries: what do they play in theatres, what car to buy, best lcd tv, pharmacy near me, etc. Thats probably 90% of search queries they getting. I say, as long as they work in this zone and make sure simple queries return the best results, they are winning - winning biggest chunk of market and smile on shareholders' faces.
How we read Do Androids Dream with Electric Sheep, or any other novel by Phillip Dick about androids? Or maybe seen Bladerunner? He frequently [and effectively] works with this topic a lot.
Of Natural Extensions And Fighting The Eureka Moment
Thanks for this. In that case, how much should I pay an American web developer?
“GMail has become painfully slow. [2]”

“[2] This sentence originally read "GMail is painfully slow." Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the correction.”

heh :)
If you happen to already be subscribed to the mailing list in question, sure.
Fallout: The game that almost never was
The really interesting question is whether this will further exacerbate inequalities or whether society will necessarily have to transition to a more "socialist" model if work no longer needs to be done.
It matters because including flash with chrome is an act of realism. If the user runs firefox, safari or another browser they're still going to be susceptible to the same bug - it simply won't be attributed to the browser because the user was the one that installed the plugin. By including the plugin by default they're solving a significantly larger problem than zero days, namely users that fail to update their plugins on a timely basis (or plugins that fail to provide a reasonable upgrade path). If the security world insisted on a technical interpretation (you shipped it so it's your bug) it would be effectively discouraging a process that is net security positive - and that's the reason a distinction is made. Note that even VUPEN - whose business of selling fully weaponized exploits makes them a natural enemy of better security - tacitly admits the difference by refusing to admit the use of a flash bug. If they really considered it a non-issue they'd be freely admitting what they're exploiting. The difference? High security chrome installations often in use by the kind of targets their government customers have will frequently have flash disabled or set to click to play.
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I think there is a necessary discontinuity between a self-modifying solver algorithm that acts within an internally-consistent formal framework; and an intelligence that is able to modify the formal system itself. On some level this might be considered analogous to self-awareness. Past that discontinuity though, my guess is that all bets are off. There are many historical examples of the depths of madness that may be plumbed in unfulfilled pursuit of a formal goal.

To your second point, absolutely agreed: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/only-he-was-fully-awake...
About "why is my Macbook fan so loud?", has anyone successfully attempted to clean out dust from inside the laptop to reduce the fan noise?
Five-essential-phone-screen-questions - steveyegge2
James Dyson reinvented the vacuum. Now he wants to remake the economy
Moebius, aka Jean Giraud, aka Gir, Has Passed Away
They die because they can't afford clean water, so there's no money to be made in solving that problem. Capitalism does not have a heart.
It's embarrassing what passes for journalism these days.

Worse, this is slander on Sarah's part. The notion that he's a rip-off artist has a distinctly negative impact on his name and good standing as a developer.

Particularly when it's the exact opposite case. Pinterest is more of a clone than Reform.
Thank you all for the good advice. I think in my heart I knew some of this (as far as working hourly), but have made the rookie mistake of underbidding to get the contract. I feel bad about it because it makes things worse for everyone if too many contractors do this. If they had been paying the hourly rate in my profile, they would have gotten 11 hours from me. So far I've put in perhaps 100 hours.

I am going to try to move up to the $3000-5000 range and I want to be prepared, because if I find myself in a hole there, it will be 10x harder to dig myself out.

It would be nice if we had a resource like "pitfalls to avoid as a contractor" with some real life examples that would tend to only be learned through experience. For example, I had no idea that GUI programming was so time consuming. I had basically written it off as being "just design" so I didn't take it seriously.

But it's sort of like painting a house, the real work is in prep, stripping, priming, cleanup, buying tools and brushes, training, just on and on. The actual painting only takes a few hours. I think that's why people scoff at the idea that painting a house costs thousands of dollars.

That's how this project has been for me, so I'd love to hear more insights like that.
Working at Microsoft (in Windows Azure), this was the first outage since I joined the org, so I did not know what to expect from the company in terms of transparency on this outage. However, given other presentations or papers on the Windows Azure technology and how open they were publicly, I expected a good job here.

Bill Liang's post confirmed how transparent Microsoft wants to be with its customers, what is really nice. And I appreciate how seriously Microsoft is attempting to learn from these incidents and putting measures in place.
I thought about this too!

Disease are a serious case.

But its shameful that at this stage in the evolution of human kind we have people dieing of hunger and malnutrition.
If you have an unlimited supply of energy, you can pretty much recover whatever. The only elements hopelessly lost are those that involve nuclear reactions.
Thanks for the reference.

Of course, every sailor knew the Earth was round. Just take a morning off and watch the boats going out of a fishing harbour should your location allow this...

I found that pg quote useful as well, in a 'look for local advantage' way. Plan the next step based on how the weather and sea look today. Tomorrow it might be different.
Fair point, but like I said, if everyone works in bubbles they will all have to deal with this over and over again in different ways. Since these game companies are not actually doing anything for the platform itself, like sharing their libraries for dealing with the issues, they of course will find it painful.

This reminded me completely of the pre-jquery era where if you wanted some advanced JS functionality you'd have to reinvent the wheel over and over in dealing with browser inconsistencies. After years of bitching and moaning people finally released libraries to deal with the issue.

These companies have the right to complain, but complaining will not actually help solve anything except give them a way out avoiding the the complexities of porting platform-specific code to another platform.
The way you do a voting system that works is by copying Canada's way. We don't need computers in voting.

Step one: Public list of every single polling location.

Step two: Communication to the public that observers are freely admitted. Post a notice that some extra women will be needed in some areas since some Muslim female voters only identify themselves to women.

Step three: Public voters list that show who in the county is eligible to vote.

Step four: Communicate the polling day well in advance. Hire people from the local community to handle the actual taking of ballots.

Step five: Polling day. Starts off with every observer verifying that the serial numbered ballot box is empty. This happens for every box. Person walks in. Every observer increments the number of total people coming in. Person identifies themselves at the registration table with government ID and as a backup, utility bills or statements of note from public members for the homeless (A priest could verify that a homeless person lives in the area, for example. In some places the homeless do not even need to be verified), every observer crosses that person off their own copy of the list. If the person is a female Muslim, only women observers get to verify the identity of the voter. The voter then gets a piece of paper with the options clearly printed in large print and goes to a private place that has a poster that shows how to fill out the ballot. The voter puts an X by the person they wish to vote for. Folds the ballot and brings it to the ballot box. The observers see that the voter put the vote in the ballot box. Once the box is full, it is sealed with a tape that matches the serial number of the box and is left in open view to observers until it is time to open them and count them.

It is now known that how many votes is in each box, how many people voted, and the total number of votes for each candidate all with open access to Observers from the public (but more usually, the political parties).

How fucking complicated is that? Paper, pens, ballots, observers meanwhile we satisfy the only possible complaint (Covered Muslim women) while never ever having allegations of ballot stuffing. The only allegation that comes every now and then is the homeless vote, but it really doesn't matter in the grand picture.

Do we have other problems? Sure, of course, yeah. But things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocall_scandal happen everywhere and if the public were more informed to our process then they wouldn't happen at all. You can always call elections Canada to verify a polling station relocation.

Keep computers out of voting. I want every vote counted by humans. Not just paper ballot receipts held to check in case of allegations of voter fraud. No. Observers and humans do the counting. I don't see the point of public encrypted votes.
Classifier Showdown
These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time.

These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas:

- distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore.

- synthetic food generation a la star trek

- desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself

There are more, lots more. People outside the valley bubble have real problems.
How is ChromeOS doing?
Good point. Outside of sacrifices to your well being (health, family, etc.), what other actions do you think diminish your success score?
Sorry, Sony was a great engineering company, worthy of being respected, until they sold out and became a content creation company. Look at how the hobbled the mini-disc years ago. Sony deserves absolutely no respect these days.
Rethinking PowerPoint: The New Wave of Presentation Tools
a lot of people view the project work that they do in college as "sacrifice". but really? if you have a challenging curriculum, those projects become successes (perhaps your first successes) that you build on professionally.

your friends new coworkers ask "wow, this new kernel hacker came out of nowhere!" but you say "well if you had watched them through college, it was just success building on success ..."
صور ايباد 3 الجديد 2012 Ipad 3 رائع جدا
Something revolutionary is coming to the world of football.
Even barring the inability to create life-like characters without serious investment, there are other problems, like animating them. But I'm reminded of the early days of the Ill Clan and machinima.

You would think a small team could have san animator to produce the needed animations, a few operators to control movement (and maybe voice), and a director. But I really haven't seen much movement in that direction since visual effects and YouTube became so accessible. But that's shop heavily comedy it's... Well, maybe not annoying, but unfortunate.

Anyway, my point was that I can still easily see a future where people download actors and write, choreograph, then compile, feature films in their bedrooms. And for a few programmers, I think it's a perfectly achievable goal.
Show HN: single page sites for creative freelancers
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