skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article and the linked NIST page were not specific about the BIOS flaw, but based on Google searches for "bios security flaw," it seems that even the worst ones (the CompuTrace Lojack flaw and Johanna Rutkowska's Intel flaw) require the attacker to have already compromised the operating system. If an attacker can compromise your computers' OSes, then disabling the hardware is probably the least of your worries.

By default, the major PC operating systems follow Ideas 1-3 of the "Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security" ( http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d... ) in terms of executables. While you can reconfigure most common OSes not to follow these ideas, most home and business computers will follow the default configuration out of convenience.
There's nothing the XP computer can do to fix that, as it is the victim of the delays and needs the cooperation of other hosts that are to some degree involved in causing the problem. As I understand it, ECN on the Mac enables the Mac to cooperate with queue management elsewhere (the Mac could be doing its own queue management without ECN, but probably doesn't). The Quake trouble indicates the bottleneck is an overlarge buffer on a router you both share. You need your shared router to do some queue management (CeroWrt is a good platform for this) so that large downloads don't increase delays for all connections. If your ISP modem has bloated buffers and you can't replace it, you may be entirely out of luck.
There was an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike Rowe was recording the narratives in a hotel room by simply going under the blanket of his bed with the microphone. I'm sure there was additional tweaking production value, but this is good advice!
Interesting results.

While it's not surprising to me that the pure java implementation was far and ahead better since: 1.) Java's much faster than Javascript, and 2.) Netty (which Vert.x is based on), has been doing high performance async IO for years before node even existed in extremely high performance environments.

What is surprising however, is that javascript on the JVM w/ vert.x is faster than V8 with node. In both cases I would assume not much JS is executed, since in Vert.x most of the executing code is still Java, with a tiny piece of JS scripting on top, and in the Node.js case, I was under the impression that most of the executing code would be the C code that powers its HTTP server.

Does anyone with knowledge of the node internals know what's going on here? Is Node's HTTP parser just slower? Is its reactor not as efficient?
Announcing The Simple iPhone App
货源信息网
"Bringing down websites is what children did in the 90s, it will change nothing."

The same can be said about most action attributed to Anonymous.
Quite interesting. Is the Vert.x API compatible with CommonJS and/or Node modules? If not, I think it will suffer from the same chicken/egg problem that WebOS had with apps.
If there really was a strong market demand (and supply!) for preinstalled Linux laptops, why hasn't any reseller stepped up to fill this gaping void?

They did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC - and those things sold out. Repeatedly. In multiple locations. Then all of a sudden, Microsoft backpedaled on Vista and binning XP, stripped down XP a bit (including the price tag), and most importantly, strong armed the vendors. Lo and behold, you can't get a netbook with Linux anymore.

Let's face it: the demand is there. Linux has worked just fine on the desktop for well over a decade. The market failed, and the legal system (in the form of patents and copyrights) isn't helping. This is why monopolies, overreaching copyright and software patents are bad things.
Check http://techiest.blogspot.com/ dude its insanely great!
Submitted and killed earlier as blog-spam:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3944856

Significant discussion there, including the fact that it's a hoax: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945848

Quoting that link:

I contacted the curator at the Lincoln Museum by email.
His reponse:

This is entirely a hoax. Clever, too. We have an official
statement to that effect due within the hour. -James

James M. Cornelius, Ph.D. Curator,
Lincoln Collection Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum
112 N. Sixth St. Springfield,
IL 62701-1310 217.785.7954
http://www.alplm.org
Original Dev here. This is still rough around the edges. There are views that aren't implemented for certain events and masonry behaving oddly sometimes when filtering.

I hope you all like it thought!
Comparison between OpenOffice 3.4 Vs LibreOffice 3.5.3
Ask HN: How to overcome hurdles of first engineering internship?
Hello wise engineers. I just started my first "real" job as a software engineering intern. I'm a CS student, and in school our projects are typically quite small (up to ~2,500 LOC) but I'm now working with one repository in the order of 100,000 LOC. My supervisor is sympathetic to me being overwhelmed, but I'd like to dive in and get hacking as quickly as possible.

What would you suggest a new intern do to get acquainted with a large code base, considering s/he hasn't worked with one before? And/or more generally, what advice would you give to first time interns looking to make a good impression? What valuable lessons would you pass on?
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when the homeless rise up and reject Elaine's castoff "muffin stumps". This is not food! We are too dignified to eat the stumps left by the customers of your Muffin Top Cafe!

That "Only donate what you would buy" dictum is just as misguided.

I did buy it once. I just don't need it anymore. Maybe someone else can find some use for it.
Blocked at least in Austria
Just the mathematics department, no?
This concerns only the math faculty, not the entire university.
Checkers! http://techiest.blogspot.com/.
I don't know. But when choosing a system I wouldn't chose SVN for svn:externals. Git has submodules which I find nicer.
It is a well known tactic -- make the price of obeying laws high enough and companies will disobey them.
*objective -> subjective
$0.10/GB is way more than market rates for bandwidth. Dedicated server hosters such as 100TB.com charge about $200 for 100TB, ie. $2/TB or 0.2 cents /GB, resulting in a grand total of 1.6 cents for a 8GB movie stream.
Try this idea:
http://ma-seo.com/?p=31
Is web development for kids?
cssarrowplease.com 1323 tweets and 173points in HN? Somebody created a web page for displaying an arrow? Seriously? Next thing is 1k likes for displaying a popup which in most Widget libs is just new AlertBox("Hello world");
Is it me or the web is full of people who get excited rewriting UI components in a technology that was designed for documents (HTML/CSS)?
You think so? I think Gambling irresponsibly is considered bad, but Gambling if you can afford it is pretty fun.
I think this post misses a number of things. For example, take peer review. The system is not perfect--but peer review takes time and expertise. It's not as simple as a "like". When I review an article--I check for consistency. If necessary, I go through the references. At times, I make sure that errors have been propagated correctly. Then, there are broader issues such as relevance. In short, it's labor intensive and sometimes there are bad referees--but overall, I think the system is better than a simple comment system. In modern terms, you might call it "curated" content--the referees and editors help increase the signal to noise ratio in the sea of papers that are submitted.

For conferences--while the presentations are important, so are the conversations in the halls, at dinner, etc. It's useful to have face to face conversations with your collaborators and to make new ones.

There have been some changes--like for initial program committee meetings for conferences sometimes take place using webex/gotomeeting given the diverse timezones/countries of members. Some experimentation has been done with using second life for the first stage of grant reviews--but at the end, physical meetings are necessary. For conferences themselves (in physics), you are paying on average less than $1000--even for conferences with ~10,000 people. But--conferences do cost money to organize--I made a mistake for the first workshop I organized by charging too little...

Things are gradually improving--slides from the invited talks are hosted online for the major conference from my field. Mobile schedules could be improved...

Others have commented on the EC2 question--but one other thing to consider is whether their architecture is suited to a given problem. We're investigating this now.

While Hadoop is good for some problems, it may not be appropriate for others. This is generally true of a number of the points in the article--use the right tool for the right job--don't just use it because it is new...
Ask HN: Please Review my Startup: RankBoards
We just launched www.rankboards.com and would welcome feedback! Jordan Crook gave us some early feedback and wrote an article on us here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/rankboards-a-pinterest-for-opinions-brings-ranking-into-the-imagery-equation/

Elevator pitch: Rankboards is a real-time leaderboard for everything.

Revenue: skimlinks for now

Would be great to hear feedback on general idea of site, virality, and user flow.

About/General Overview of Site:

We love to rank people, things, and experiences. People magazine ranks the sexiest men alive. Forbes ranks the richest people in the world. US News ranks the best colleges. Award shows like the Oscars, Crunchies, and Emmy's rank people and celebrate the winners. There are literally thousands of rank ordered lists out there. Who makes the list is usually determined by a small group of elite people. Not anymore!

RankBoards democratizes the ranking process and allows you to vote for your favorite people and products in real time. Award lists and shows are static. They are updated maybe once a year. RankBoards is a constantly changing, evolving list, of the top people and products. It is always current.

You can vote on general boards like best new movie, best rock band or best actor, or you can create your boards for your profession or town. You might create boards for the best teachers, dentists, or restaurants in your area.

You can also create individual boards to express who you are and who you aspire to be. Share your favorite movies, books, and music. Take things a step further and express places you want to visit, goals you want to accomplish, and people you admire. You control the order on your individual boards – no one else can vote on them.
Very similar to a tool I was considering building a while back. Good luck!
Rust isn't finished yet. It's about to get 'regions', which come with custom allocators.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3948850
If you're looking for another "wow" factor in programming languages, the following links may interest you: http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/ http://piumarta.com/software/maru/ http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm and of course http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

Their way of doing things seems to require a 1000 times less code than current mainstream techniques. They can do a whole language stack in less than 2000 lines of self-implementing code for instance (not super-optimized, but fast enough). Compare with GCC or GHC. Even Lua is bigger.
Yes, but unfortunately it can only be a single expression.
If it truly is a bubble, it must be the very beginning and people still have their sanity. Otherwise, this chart would look a whole lot better: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet...
OK, NCSA was wrong to add those tags to Mosaic without going through standards channels or making them "experimental" and accessible through explicitly temporary syntax. However, I have not seen any evidence (much less the hard proof we have as Microsoft is concerned) that they added those tags with anticompetitive motivation, especially considering that Mosaic predated the browser war.
And in Germany. Whats a good proxy to see it anyhow?
Ask HN: Suggestions for modern hosting providers with a decent resseller program
We are a small web development team. We generally encourage our clients to buy their own hosting with their own credit cards but sometimes(for smaller clients who do not care much about such details) we have no option but to buy and manage hosting for them.

We generally go for Webfaction(sometime Dreamhost), both have affiliate program but no reseller program. We are looking for a modern shared hosting provider(similar to WebFaction) with following features.

- ability to run PHP, Python, Ruby apps
- provides shell access, git, etc.
- Has nice reseller control panel
- we should be able to give access to clients individually as well

Earning reseller money is not the main reason for us, but ability to manage our clients from single control panel and give our clients access controlled control panel.

Thanks!
There's always going to be some parts that are just the difference between good and better (or perhaps bad and less bad) rather than working and non-working. For example in an iron that can spray water there could be a piece that breaks up the water into a wider spray rather than a solid squirt.
I still think the cut-over from legitimate growth to fad/fraud-driven is murky, but you're absolutely right that it's trivial to identify fad/fraud long before the bust.

That said, my feeling is that betting against the bubble is ultimately as bad as betting with it. Either approach can reap enormous gains, if you get the timing right. Which shakes out to: broad bets are little different from gambling.

And I think investment shouldn't be gambling. As such, the 'best' (in my terms) approach to a bubble would be to hold onto your money while it grows. Then, when it bursts, pounce on the depressed prices of the good investments.

It appears to me that Buffet learned that lesson after the dot-com bust and has been executing that plan on grand scale since 2008.
Well like I said, google or even a targetted search on Github/Sourceforge will reveal a TON of libs. As for a GUI... I don't recall any free ones coming up in my search a few months back.
58 Best Startup Quotes From MicroConf 2012 Day 2
Olympic Opening Ceremony Tickets | Opening Ceremony Tickets
The title on HN is incorrect. Only the mathematics department is canceling their subscriptions, not the whole university.
New UK Cookie Law Means Your Business Website Is Illegal
Right, didn't mean to say that he was, just that the knowledgable could name technically better players who weren't anything like as important.
I testes this and I found the application to be very well wtitten and the ui is impressive. It didn't take long time to create an app, but I was a little disappointed that the end application didn't aggregate the data, but rather kept each data source in a separate tab.
MicroConf 2012 Day 1 Summary
AT&T announces the launch of Samsung Focus 2 Smartphone
AT&T is all set to launch its new Smartphone, Samsung focus 2 that will run on 4G network. This is yet another offering by technology giant AT&T that will give its customers one of the most attractive and robust handset of the current century. This attractive looking handset will be available later this month at a price of around $49.99.
Trust isn't necessarily about grudges or emotions. Microsoft has had a long history of being very web-developer un-friendly; providing terrible tools for debugging, making it very difficult to test different browser versions, not implementing features that developers asked for because users (who wouldn't know about them) weren't asking for them, turning old browser versions into mandatorily legacy software (abandoned on old operating systems... like windows 2000, XP, etc.), not doing more to encourage people to upgrade, and just building a bad browser.

Mozilla, google, apple, and opera, have shown that it doesn't need to be this way. They have put in the effort to earn the trust of developers. Microsoft has not. Microsoft has shown a pattern of not listening to or caring about the web developer community. They seem to have not viewed their browser as a product in itself, but rather a tool to help sell their operating systems. All other concerns are secondary. That means web developers (or let's be honest, even users) have not been top of mind in the strategy that has traditionally been applied to Internet Explorer... corporate strategy has. That's fine, it's their prerogative to do so. They've had the market position to use IE as that kind of tool. Other companies playing the underdog have instead had to build their browsers and manage their strategy to provide the best possible product in order to win market share. I TRUST that they understand it is in their interest to do so.

Is Microsoft starting to play catch-up? Yes, and that's great... I hope they continue to do so. But they have not EARNED my trust that they have my interests as a web developer (or even a user) as their top priority. IE9 is a good effort, but it just hasn't been out for very long. I need to see a longer history of improvement and earnestly creating the best product and listening to developers. I believe their best interests are now served by building the best possible product... I just need to see more track record before I TRUST that they understand this.
Why older people don't like younger people's music
House prices here in Toronto are totally obscene. I genuinely don't understand how people are forking over $500k on average.
Yeah, pretty slow because of that (at least on my computer). Definitely not an html5 showcase, but impressive that they were able to pull it off without canvas.
Actually Twitter and Groupon both make a lot of money off those people. Revenue != profit. Groupon is spending a ton of money moving into new markets. Now, I don't love Groupon but saying they don't make money is just wrong.
He was something of a groundbreaking musician, establishing new concepts and then moving on to yet more new things, while others picked up his ideas and ran with them. His "Birth of the Cool" music, for example, really wasn't very popular at the time he did it. As I recall, the recordings weren't even released until years later, because it just wasn't expected to be well-received. In retrospect, it was great music, and helped set the stage for a whole sub-genre of jazz.

He was also adept at discovering / identifying great up-and-coming musicians and associating himself with them, to the benefit of both parties.
Anyone get this to work?

The xcode project I downloaded not do anything but start a black screen even though I setup 3 data sources.
Ultimately, the issue right now is nobody really knows how much users are worth. There's a lot of speculation that if your site has a lot of users (20 million or more), your company is worth a lot of money. Even if you really have no idea how to monetize those users without pissing them off. There's an assumed value there that may not match up with reality.

Facebook's IPO is relevant here. Once more information comes out, we'll have a better idea of how large user bases (like Facebook's) can be monetized and what it takes to extract the value. Things could go either way after that, and it all depends on how the market reacts to this information.

My hope is that the software industry can weather this storm, and that its now diversified enough to deal with investors pulling out of the startups amassing users and shift to focusing on startups selling to SMBs or enterprises. There's bound to be some collateral damage here, but hopefully it'll be minimal.
I said the chance was "small", you are saying there is no chance but let's examine that a little more closely. First of all there is no country on earth that doesn't have some chance of descending into tyranny in a fairly short timespan if things go bad economically, we've seen it countless times. I wouldn't let your patriotism (I presume) blind you to that fact. So if we take the best governed countries and say the chances of dictatorship are "tiny", and in some of the less well governed first world countries it's "very small", then it's probably being quite kind to say an incredibly corrupt South American third (second?) world country on the brink of economic disaster only has a "small" chance of going badly.
The site IS banning german users. I see a fat warning info screen instead of the game.
They are idiots, should be hitting the justice site or the people who brought the court order about in the first place. Hitting Virgin for complying with a court judgement which they initially opposed is rediculous.
If you're doing systems level programming, you shouldn't be counting on anything being portable anyway. Reimplementing it is worthless for projects are on a single OS. If you're implementing the OS, then these decisions need to be made anyway, independent of the language.

You should be coding to(or with) the OS you're working on. If you're doing multiplatform stuff, then #defines with a naming scheme work, and are already the standard practice.
thanks, tweet sent!
Regarding the use of integers as bit arrays, it would be nice if the syntax supported referring to a subset of the bits, similarly to bitfields in structs.

Example based on the syntax from the article:

x: int<+32>;
x[0:6] = 42; // Set six bits starting with lsb 0 to 42
What about an #hacker-news irc channel?
What about an #hacker-news irc channel?
Seeing these numbers (although as the author states, the data needs to be taken with a grain of salt since he didn't try to set up a more "proper" test environment) really makes me want to take a serious look at vert.x, but what you mention here is my main concern.

Node is a joy to use because of the NPM, and all the available libraries. I'd hate to lose that.

That said, so long as it has a solid websocket api, and I can do routing in it like I would express, I'd give this framework a shot
The difference is that this time there's only a few hot .com IPO's that could "pop" (ZNGA, GRPN, LNKD) and most of Wall Street is really skeptical of those already...just look at their charts.

If it is a bubble and it doest pop, it's really only going to affect the tech jobs market and the ridiculous valuations at which tech companies can be acquired or raise money. So it will be like 2-4 years ago when we all thought Mint.com was an enormous exit, and 12 million for Reddit was more than fair.
I should also express my dislike for any article that promises to fix something in 30 days, 24 hours, or overnight...
Show HN: Find and Play Podcasts in Your Browser
The images arbitrarily expire after about two and a half months, and then (last time I used them at least), there's an interval of time where they don't put up new ones. I don't have time to download 11 GB of disk images every three months, and I certainly can't have MS arbitrarily making it so that I can't test in their awful browser for months at a time.

If you want to support IE, owning a copy of Windows is not optional.
There's a lot of comparing apples to oranges going on here. It's difficult to compare the current state of the world to Bubble 1.0. There's over 5x more users on the internet now than when the first Bubble hit. In fact, for a lot of those Bubble 1.0 companies, their biggest problem was that they were too far ahead of their time. There's a lot more attention bandwidth now on the internet, which can support higher valuations of more startups. I don't see people moving away from technology in any significant way any time soon.

The other problem I see is that people are looking at an isolated outlier and making predictions based on that. If we remove the one 1 billion dollar deal (which looks like it could actually have been competitive with FB and cost FB way more in time/money to compete down the road), we're not really seeing any examples of Bubble like behavior, other than what we should expect to see with a growing sector.

Some tech companies are focusing on growth over profitability, with the hopes of being acquired. In almost all cases, those aren't billion dollar+ moves. I haven't seen any broadcast.com like deals. The scale of deals/exits is different now than Bubble 1.0.