skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think hobbyist development of exploits of the kind that lead to Sub7 has mostly fallen out of fashion, to be honest. Most of the stuff out there these days seems to be commercially-driven scamware and phishing and its developers don't have the same incentive to make their code as 1337 as possible. So 90s-style exploit kits and RATs are quite unusual in 2012.
The worst problem with Perl as a language is hiring for a good Perl programmer. It's easy to hire a mediocre Perl programmer, mind you, sometimes even a mediocre programmer who's really good at Perl specifically and knows all the packaging tricks and whatnot so he can get through the interview before falling apart on the job, but really hard to find the good ones. It just doesn't have much mindshare at the moment (ugh, I used the word "mindshare", but it's true).

My last job was programming a snazzy Perl system. My current job is at a startup that my last boss helped found. He chose Ruby because he was tired of trying to hire for Perl programmers. After being involved with the hiring process over there as well, I'm inclined to sympathize. Honestly, we ended up just mostly advertising for programmers with experience in Ruby/Python/etc who would be willing to do Perl.

That's the only insurmountable-mountain I know of.

(Postscript. If you're the rare actual-really-good Perl programmer looking for a job, I am aware of two places willing to hire you, one in Sunnyvale and one in NYC. PPS. Sorry, probably no telecommute. But I don't work there these days so I'm not sure.)
We probably just have different ideas of what it takes to "define the future of the internet".

Pretty much nothing that amazon does will ever affect me personally, nothing wrong with that - amazon aren't even trying to define future of the internet in my eyes.

If amazon as a hosting company tries to interfere with their customers you bet they will be abandoned ASAP, doesn't matter if amazon has the best web hosting service it's still the sites they host that matter for the future of the internet and amazon has no control what so ever over that - so how can that possibly matter in this context?

The first post talked about Silk as an example of Amazons influence, really? Opera alone really feels like a small player yet Opera has way more than ten times more active users than amazon has even sold Silk-capable devices. Opera are also active in the development of future web standards, which I doubt amazon are. Again, nothing wrong with that - it's just that amazon have an entirely different focus and thus I get quite confused when you talk about stock prices - what on earth is the relevance? Seems to me that even Opera work way more towards defining the future of the internet than amazon does (or want to do).
I don't like your tone. I have no horse in the race and am not a doctor, but doctors aren't Gods. They learn certain foundational things (names of bones and muscles; organic chemistry) then they learn thing related to the practice that doesn't necessarily rely on any of that stuff. (Diseases; drugs)

For diseases, you should try reading through the Merck manual (available online). Everything from gynecology, oncology, psychiatric conditions, is all there. If your doctor does a correct diagnosis by asking the correct "dumb questions" that is already amazing. Why should a general doctor be more of an expert in every condition than a person who has it? Look up any individual thing in the Merck manual and it has 2-7 pages. Why shouldn't a person who has that particular disease know more about it?

Let's make an analogy. Say your computer has obscure memory errors because you work in a place that bombards them with alpha particles (or whatever). ECC memory is very important to you. And, therefore, I would expect you to know more about ECC memory than "anyone except two engineers doing active research in this exact condition."

It's just one tiny thing in a myriad list of things to know. There is no reason individuals shouldn't take control over their individual conditions and become educated on this subject.

Let me put it this way. If you have a pet guinea pig with asthma, then within a day of learning that you should (or at least could) know more about asthma in guinea pigs than your vet does, because guinea pigs are just 1 species he or she deals with, and asthma is just one condition. Why shouldn't you know more?

Of course, there are systemic things that are very hard for you to understand about what you're reading, and on this you might have a much poorer understanding than your vet...you don't know how the parts work together. it might be obvious to your doctor that asthma puts the guinea pig at risk of - whatever, lung cancer if you smoke near it or whatever, I'm just making it up - just due to the organs involved, whereas you don't know this unless you read it. The point is that you can read all about one CONDITION but not about the whole system, which is what takes so much time to learn. If you MEMORIZE 3 pages of facts about your condition and read them out loud, then there are parts that you would read aloud that say nothing to you, but are deeply meaningful to a doctor.

When it's prescriptions and proscriptions, it's obvious. ('don't feed it raw meats'). When it's general descriptions then it is harder.

Basically, the proper relationship between a person with a rare illness and a GENERAL doctor is, person: "I read that this condition also puts me at risk of a stroke. Could you tell me what that means?" Because you don't UNDERSTAND what a stroke even means, the way a doctor does.

Then your dr. can proceed to fill you in on the parts you don't understand...even though they might not have even recalled that your condition increases the risk of stroke. (or heart attack or whatever). They're not walking encyclopedias, you know: they're experts, just like any other expert in any other field.
I wish I didn't give a shit about this whole situation. It really doesn't affect me in anyway. However, when I do think about it, this is what comes to mind:

1. John and Dan started the podcast together

2. John came up with the name

3. Something happend between the two of them

4. John leaves, taking the show with him.

From a business perspective, I'm shocked at both John and Dan. John took the whole brand and said it was his and started monitizing it right away, presumably cutting Dan out of any revenue. Dan, is just letting that slide. Doesn't he have a right to half?

Johnny Ive can't simply walk away and use the iPhone design because he came up with the idea.

...anyway, like I said, I really shouldn't give a shit about this whole situations. I just think it stinks.
I'm just as skeptical as you, but...

Electric mopeds cannot go on freeways. An electric motorcycle is better for nontrivial distances.

On the other hand, an electric moped which cannot travel faster than 20mph also has an advantage: in California it is treated as a bicycle and can travel on bike paths on major bridges.

My main complaint: if neither electric motorcycles nor self-balancing motorcycles are currently popular, why would an electric self-balancing motorcycle be popular?
New Chromebook & Chromebox Are Good Enough to Grab Minds & Market Share
Interestingly, there's only one big image per agent :

-> http://clippy.js.s3.amazonaws.com/Agents/Clippy/map.png

-> http://clippy.js.s3.amazonaws.com/Agents/Links/map.png

-> http://clippy.js.s3.amazonaws.com/Agents/Merlin/map.png

-> http://clippy.js.s3.amazonaws.com/Agents/Rover/map.png
Read the section of the book _Catch-22_ where the Syndicate's pilots bomb their own airport because the Nazis outbid the Allies.
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
--- John Wanamaker (1838 - 1922)

This is why advertising has been such a profitable business. That's because targeting of traditional advertising system is not good. As a result, traditional marketing has to be attention-driven. You have no better choice other than throwing trillions of dollars to attract attentions, and hopefully several percent of the attracted attentions will be finally converted to your new customers so that your business can continuously run. As a matter of fact, a huge amount of your marketing costs are completely wasted, and it is necessary due to low efficiency of the advertising model. This well-known fact is clearly shown that the low efficient classical display advertising model need be disrupted and replaced.

Fortunately, with the help of Internet and advancement of information processing technology, targeting will be significantly improved, and it has to be improved. However, it could not be attention-based, because attention is intrinsically low efficient on targeting. It has to be intention-based, which is intrinsically well targeted and accurate. For instance, with prior knowledge of your intention on buying some orange juice in front of a Trader Joe's, I will recommend you some good juices. It will be interesting information to me instead of advertisements. On the contrary, it will be totally annoying to me if you shout out at me about some high-end computers just because you know I'm a computer science student or a software programmer, but you don't know I just bought a super cool Macbook last week and don't need a new computer in next few months or even years.

To solve the targeting issue, intention-based marketing systems will be an ideal alternative to current dominant attention-driven marketing systems. Attracting attention is surely helpful. But it has to be complementary, not the primary driving force. It will be intention-based and intention-driven systems that can significantly improve targeting accuracy and marketing efficiency. That is the future!
This is getting rapidly less true. Perl used to get dinged for having "funny" syntax like the prefix glyphs on variables, infix if, etc... That was in a world where the language mindshare was dominated by Java, which made its name by simplifying C++ and not making any weird or unconventional choices in syntax.

These days all the cool languages have funny syntax (hell, Ruby lifted most of perl's weirdness directly), sometimes (as with coffeescript) it's touted as a feature. So go back and look at perl with modern eyes. I think you'll find most of the conventional wisdom about its readability was more about the conventions than the wisdom.
Makes sense. Then maybe it would be a good idea to link to the HN discussion at the end of each article?
Hey qeorge, thanks for the comments.

Flightfox exploits inefficiencies in algorithmic search using good ol' people power. That means, for the most part, material savings of time and money.

Clearly we're not talking about 1-hour flights between US continental cities. Instead, when you fly abroad, especially stopping in multiple cities, our experts can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. They can make better use of frequent flyer miles, get you into first class for the very first time, construct RTW itineraries to places you never dreamed, and even give you first-hand destination advice.

A recent NY Times article suggested almost 50% of people spend more than 2 hours finding flights, while 20% spend 5 hours. That survey was done in the US, where there's a skew towards domestic. In our early research (and experience living and flying throughout 6 continents), people absolutely detest travel search. This is also why traditional travel agents are regaining ground.

Flightfox, in its current form, is just the beginning. We thoroughly believe that human interaction, and especially crowdsourcing, will regain popularity in travel and flights. It's one of those industries where there's too much inefficiency, wasted time, and latent value.

todd
For half a century, especially in America, we've been hearing about the "future of transportation" in the form of some car, or car-like non-mass transit device.

The numbers don't work out, the logistics don't work out, and the infrastructure doesn't work out. The future of transit is obviously not cars: not normal 4 wheeled cars, not flying cars, not fancy gyro stabilized two wheeled cars.

Ideas otherwise are quaint turn of the century throwbacks that ceased making sense anywhere in non-rural a very long time ago.
Yes, it is fundamental to it's function. Basically it acts as a terminal system to your google applications and the wider web.
This is true so long as you don't count the latest version of Ubuntu. Unity is a train wreck because it makes the same set of false assumptions that Win 8 makes in terms there being one interface that will work for tablets, phones and PCs.

A year ago I would have agreed that Ubuntu was poised to take up the slack that a lackluster Windows 8 launch would create. Now they just come off as another vendor trying to copy the success of the iPad. As a person who used Ubuntu as his primary desktop for development, I've had to move to another distro (Lubuntu) because Unity/Gnome 3 actively enrages me. I'm not saying that to be dramatic, either. Every time I've tried to use that thing I feel like I have to wash it off my hands. I realize that this might not be as big of a deal to a completely new computer user, but how many of those are really left?

As an aside (and I don't mean this to start a flamewar) Gimp is not a suitable replacement for Photoshop. Gimp has all the same functions as photoshop (and some more, in fact) but that user interface is so bad that it's not really a viable replacement. Sure, there are plenty of people who disagree with me, but I think you'll find most of them are engineers and not people who work with images for a living.

If you don't believe me, look at what happens when Adobe itself makes the slightest change to any of its products. Its user base is immediately infuriated and threatens to revolt.

EDIT: Fixed typo.
Greg Brown will help you become a better tech writer: Tech Writing Study Session
Need? No. This isn't about the receivers in this situation. Other people aren't waiting for your permissions, and they don't need to be told that your opinion is your opinion. This is about the way the sender communicates their own internal understanding of their belief/knowledge states.

If other people never hear someone linguistically marking their belief states with reliability indicators (even when their statements clearly need them by common phrasing norms), then the listeners will have much less reason to believe the speaker uses any reliability metrics internally, and that is just sloppy thinking. This is, I believe, the reasoning behind listeners believing that speakers who never use something like "I think" are "know it all's" who take their own opinions as gospel. If you want people to know your internal knowledge representations carry proper markers of fallibility, communicate that part of the representations in your words. That is the common norm, and other people aren't mind readers to know you mean different.

Also, listeners can make good use of reliability markers from speakers, and so would like them. Such markers can communicate helpful information (close or distant source, checked validity or not, fits well with other knowns or not, reasoning from one person or checked over by many), so why leave them out? Inclusion costs so little, and omission risks unnecessary confusion.

This is basic communication practice; if you don't mean to communicate to others that you consider yourself very certain on some matter, then you shouldn't send the type of messages to others that you know they will interpret as you saying you are very certain on some matter.
This is what happens whenever I debate "libertarians". I mention overarching tendencies, only to get replies about fine logic minutiae. I'm guessing obsession with details, and blindness to the big picture is also a trait of Ayn Rand fans.
As a father of two amazing girls, I feel exactly the same way. Granted I have less/no time to play video games and go to parties, but nothing has ever come even remotely close to motivating me to create things and become a better person than my children.
There was a brief moment in the video where they pulled a support out from under it to demo the gyro-stabilization. Clearly, the rolling prototype doesn't have a kick-stand, but I would suspect some kind of auto-deploying twin-leg kickstand would be added for production. Something that deploys when you turn the ignition off, for example, since you wouldn't want those gyros running all the time just to keep it upright in storage.
If someone is working for a like-selling network and using 100 FB accts to earn their pittance, they'll constitute 100 active daily users.
I've been running businesses that work a 4-day week since 2007. Two of those businesses were acquired (one in 2008 and one in 2011).

I'd say that's pretty good proof that it's not just sustainable, it's also very smart.
New Samsung Chromebook & Chromebox review: Chrome OS grows up
Search engine Million Short showcases Web's supporting cast
Thank you for the follow-up. Even though Unicorn does support TCP sockets, it is irrelevant for our JRuby apps as I believe (IIRC) it won't even install under JRuby due to being written in C only, with no native-Java or pure-Ruby alternatives available. So it's not a Web server that can be used for serving JRuby apps.

Now, since you've extracted the capabilities of Unicorn out into something that isn't coupled to a Web server (and it's written in pure Ruby, so is portable), we should be able to use it as a shim between nginx for managing Trinidad (Tomcat) instances. Very much looking forward to giving it a try - thanks for your efforts!

EDIT: Whoops, guess I spoke a bit too soon. I get this error:

NotImplementedError: fork is not available on this platform

I think a typical workaround on JRuby is to use the posix-spawn or spoon gems. If I have some time this next weekend maybe I could test this a bit more and maybe formulate a patch. Example posix-spawn usage [here][1].

[1]: https://github.com/ddollar/foreman/blob/master/lib/foreman/p...
I would argue that memorization for a lot of 'useless' constants is in fact, useless. We had the same curriculum in Romania during the communist era, where Ceausescu forced everyone to memorize as many trigonometric functions as possible and physics constants.

I personally don't see the need for memorizing items I will not use more than once. It clogs my brain and impedes my memory.
The problem with that is there is no way to compare it to what could have been.

Let's assume that one or two manufacturers get a monopoly on computing and control everything that can be done with bits and bytes, of course people will be happy whenever there is a major improvement to these platforms.
Being critical doesn't mean that one cannot be respectful.
You can use anything you want for templating. I tend to use Mustache (via the stencil library) for my templating. A lot of people also use Enlive.
I'd love if my SaaS clients would use a Chromebox so that I only have to worry about keeping the app running. If you use a computer just for a web app, having the overhead of having to properly keep Windows running and updated is quite taxing (regardless of the issue, it's your fault if they can't log in to the inventory system).
Current high schooler in the US here. I feel that today the trend is definitely more towards looking things up as opposed to memorizing them. For example, in my chemistry class, we always got a periodic table (with weights) and were given things like Planck's constant. We did, however, have to memorize some of the more basic ones such as speed of light and Avogadro's number. With regards to math, all tests involving more than trivial amounts of math you get a calculator, so I have never even thought of memorizing logs or exponents.
Yes, absolutely. A friend of mine makes his living optimising COBOL programs on IBM mainframes. It turns out there's a pile of cash to made offering to take a look at people's code in return for a cut of the first year of savings when they're paying by the CPU-second.

Nothing beats a mainframe for throughput & reliability and lots of the code is still COBOL.

IIRC SocGen has a vast amount of code written in some awful monstrosity of an internal language that nobody else has used for decades, but the cost of changing everything over to something more modern is so prohibitive that they just keep on accreting over the existing codebase.
The future of TV as seen in Super Hi-Vision
OK, where are you going to find a $225 non-subsidized ARM box? Same logic applies. I see nothing even close to that range. A tablet or smartphone with these specs is going to run you $500+.

And you need to check (or better, run) a few benchmarks before making pronouncements like that. Per-clock, SNB beats the A9 in my OMAP4 phone by about 2x on stuff that fits in the L1 cache, and a bunch more on things that spill out (the phone SoC has absolutely nothing like the L3 cache on SNB).
I believe you can sign in as a guest, but it won't save your browser settings. Since ChromeOS is all about having data "in the cloud" and keeping as little mutable state on the computer as possible, I guess this makes sense.

Can we coin an abbreviation for "in the cloud"? I put it in quotation marks to avoid the unconscious eyerolling that I do when I use that phrase in a non-ironic fashion. "ITC"?
I have a question for Matt, if you are still here. How did you get in touch with Genzyme? What do they have to gain by helping you? Developing a recombinant therapeutic drug is an exceedingly expensive and technically-difficult undertaking. Why are they developing a treatment for a condition for which the potential market size is one single patient?
The phrase you may be looking for: do all that stuff at the "last responsible moment".
If there's a meta.stackoverflow.com, have you considered some sort of socialization.stackoverflow.com? Then you can not only say "buzz off" but specifically give someone a place to buzz off to. It'd be one of those pragmatic concessions that keeps the idealism moving along and whatnot :)
Copying Buckets With The Amazon S3 API
You might be right or you might wrong for bootstrapped companies but in my experience working at different small and big companies working long hours really don't translate into profitability and productivity.

In general I saw that developers working on "a secret sauce" (i.e., engineers in Oracle working on RDBMS, etc.) are not working more than 35 hours a week while developers working on some generic CRUD crap work all days and night.

Now the challenge is to hire developers which can work on or develop your "secret sauce"... which is point of this post.
India's hottest new startups for 2012
Scaling Crypto in Python
If you're the rare actual-really-good Perl programmer looking for a job, I am aware of two places willing to hire you, one in Sunnyvale and one in NYC.

Most of the great Perl programmers I know either have full-time jobs or have little desire to relocate. (I'd entertain interesting short-term telecommute gigs now and then myself.)
What are you two plotting?!
This may be old, but I just stumbled upon it.
I have never really used StackOverflow, so from just a casual observer's point of view: It seems that allowing discussions would deviate the site into another commodity forum (there are already hundreds on the topic of programming), at which point they've lost their marketplace edge. I suspect they are trying to protect against that.
Apple will never open iOS, although they may "open" it. They've spent half a decade refining the protections and hardware/software against jailbreaks, they're not just about to throw away all that infrastructure.
Opera is up 27%
What's more expensive?

1) Paying $20k-$50k to a recruiter, per person
2) Taking good care of your team so you get tons of applications for every job opening, from very talented people

Keep in mind that there's also a huge cost to attrition. Every person that leaves your company, because the culture is so-so, costs you a huge amount in time and cash resources to replace