skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Techmeme just crawls the sites in their 'network' for cross-linking. For example Techmeme has TechCrunch/Ars/Engadget/Scobleizer/etc in their network and if they link within each other then that pushes the story up higher (again, not 100% sure, just making an assumption based on what I've seen).

I don't think there is a real-time way to see how many sites are linking to another unless they're being crawled quite often by google/yahoo/technorati OR you have a script installed on their site to see the inbound links and gauge traffic.
Meh... I kinda like it. The white background mutes the effect, makes it subtle and nice.

Or maybe that just condemns me to the same designer hell.
Great stuff. All companies have moved away form this, I hope that the current economic situation will force companies to care about their customers again.
The thing I like about Komodo is the graphical debugger which even works for threaded Python. As an editor, it is okay and has the useful feature that it's interface is very similar on Windows, Mac, and Linux (it's built using Mozilla's XUL).
You made the same point a few minutes ago, and I replied to it; long story short, you're not correct.
"Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents, data I have collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control."

Uh... no shit? Why would a city with low rents have any impetus to impose rent control?

"There can be no doubt that rent control creates housing shortages. For almost 20 years, national vacancy rates have been at or above 7 percent--a figure generally considered normal. Cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, where development is welcomed, have often had vacancy rates above 15 percent."

Yes, but these are also sprawling shitholes. And: ridiculously high vacancy rates are a good thing now?

"Young people who migrate to New York or San Francisco usually must settle for paying $600 a month to share a two-bedroom apartment with several other people or commuting from a nearby city. Crowding is a manifestation of rent control."

It has nothing to do with NYC being an island and SF being a peninsula. And we'll ignore that if you consider an area the size of Houston around both of these cities, you start seeing affordable housing again - commuting 5 miles from another city is a bad thing, but commuting 20 miles from the same city is awesome.

"The goal in getting rid of rent control should be to allow the curve of housing prices to return to the elegant symmetry of the free market."

Ah, so it's an aesthetic concern.

This is just a ridiculous article. There are 3 cities cited as suffering from the supposed ill-effects of rent control, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose (and Boston has "overtones of the rent-control effect at the upper end", whatever that means). The data that illustrates the supposed terrible effects of rent control is the price of apartments on the market on one weekend, completely ignoring the entire point of rent control, which is to allow people to stay in their homes (which the article perversely tries to twist into people becoming "prisoners of their own apartment" - because people in great locations in NYC and SF would otherwise really want to move if only their apartments weren't so damn cheap). There's never any attempt to prove that rent control actually drives out affordable housing, there's only the "no shit, that's the point" observation that newcomers to an in-demand city with rent control pay more.

I moved to San Francisco last February, and I'm moving to New York in a month, so I'm not exactly a fan of rent control - I know my price is much higher than my neighbor's because of it. At the same time, though, I recognize that it's really shitty that I could take my programmer's salary and use it like a club against the people who were already living in the city. Why do I want to move to these places? Don't the people who were living there before me get some credit for making it desirable enough that I want to move there? Maybe I should be okay with subsidizing them.
sounds a bit like the company that makes GoreTex...

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/WL-Gore-amp...
Yes, I wonder why Ricardo Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler and Semco is not mentioned more frequently.

I enjoyed his book "Maverick" a lot: http://tinyurl.com/7l6mfp , the newer 'Seven day weekend" is not bad either.
All these mainstream media articles will be good for iPhone programmers for hire, no?
Actually, I'm not.

I have great respect for your security knowledge, but your consistent black & white views and your assumption that anyone who doesn't share them doesn't understand the technology is frustrating.

If I own a coffee house router, or if I am simply sniffing un-encrypted wifi packets out of the air in the coffee house, logging traffic is extremely simple. I can log all traffic, or just traffic to http pages with names like login, or checkout, and I can do that very very very easily. It will log tons data automatically, and let me comb through it later. As a newbie to linux I could do that. The barrier preventing me from stealing the info you send over http is VERY low, and virtually anyone can do it.

The attack you describe is much more difficult to execute. The number of people who could make that attack is several orders of magnitude smaller than the previous attack. Hence my risk is several orders of magnitude smaller.

You're arguing that because skilled safe-crackers can open a safe, people should just leave their valuables on their lawn chairs out front. Security isn't black and white. Nothing will be 100% secure from every type of attack. It's a matter of raising the barrier of entry for an attack high enough that it's generally not worth the trouble.
"The real story is the endless echo chamber of Silicon Valley"
Ct: C for Throughput Computing
Outdated Security Threatens Web Commerce
Still needs a correction - plc stands for public limited company and you still have that in there.
Organize Your Company With WizeHive - ca98am79's startup
Wow, what an amazing, entertaining, and well written article! Hit the nail on the head. I will make my boss read this! ha
What you're not acknowledging, anywhere in the above 5 paragraphs of text, is that all the security you're talking about getting from SSL in this scenario is security that the attacker is choosing to give you. When we reason about information security, we don't usually give the attacker that kind of advantage.

There is no such thing as a purely-passive attacker. In reality, no serious attacker is even going to bother sniffing your traffic; they're going to redirect it.
New York Times reporting on this:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/outdated-security-s...
>> When folks don't spend their money, they buy dumb.

> I don't understand this comment at all... please explain.

When you're spending your money on something for you, you have to live with both the costs and the benefits.

When you're spending your money on something for someone else, you have to live with the costs but not the benefits.

When you're spending someone else's money on yourself, you have to live with the benefits but not the costs.

When you're spending someone else's money on someone else, you don't have to live with the costs or the benefits.

In what situation are you likely to make the best buying decision? In which situation are you likely to make the worst buying decision?
That's interesting. When I was in Thailand a few years ago, I thought Tesco Lotus was a world-wide branch of Wal-Mart. I guess I never gave it a second thought until now.
And they go to conferences, and give speeches, and create user experience commercials, and (probably) hustle the media for articles. Hell they might even pay a PR firm! Or advertise!
> 6) Declare income resulting from wages of exactly zero yen/dollars for December 2009 to appropriate tax authorities.

I think honesty might be a better goal.
> Have you considered that the US is a desirable place to be because of dissent and people acting upon dissatisfaction?

So, dissent against Obama is necessarily good, right?

Dissent, like change, isn't necessarily good or bad. The specifics matter.
The Stupidest Moments in Tech for 2008
Out of all the hypothetical scenarios you could have chosen, you picked one where it is not only possible to intercept your encrypted data but really quite obvious how to do it.
Renormalizing Denormalized Data
The Dynamics of Full Disclosure
Facebook had this same "Quit your job, get easy money by building stupid little apps like this one!" buzz about a year ago. I actually know some people who quit their very well-paying jobs to take a shot at it...and unfortunately it hasn't yet panned out that well... Maybe the App Store's ability to provide direct revenue to devs will make this platform more sustainable, but I think it's more likely that it will be a similar pattern to FB (where the apps launched in the first two weeks and a tiny percentage of very compelling later apps will do well, and the rest will get zero attention)
Human beings are born with numbers in the brain
It's never so simple as "comment more" or "comment less". Some things are best explained by identifiers, and needing to comment them is a sign of poor code. On the other hand, some code requires domain-specific knowledge to understand why it does what it does, and as much of that knowledge as possible should be spelled out (or at least cited) in comments. I have written modules where no comments were needed anywhere. On the other hand, I have written modules where every line required a paragraph, a figure, and a short proof. The best guideline is that comments should say as much as it's possible to say without going off topic or repeating things that are obvious from the code.
PowerShell ABC's - H is for Here-String
(MSA Series #3) Work Provisions
Excel Financial functions for .NET in F#
This is underdeveloped, but something I've been thinking about on and off:

Hypothesis - there are klunky algorithms you can use that aren't all that good, but which are very cheap to run. Humans have a lot of tradeoffs like this built into them.

I can't think of great examples though. The strong natural link between fear and desire to destroy (rather than - for example - the desire to investigate) may be one. Yes, in the sandbox of one example the desire to investigate leads to better outcomes, but perhaps across the board that doesn't work for the amount of energy that we have available.

If I was buying a suit at that cost, I would have consumed more energy considering the decision to buy than if I'd been buying a pen, and that would influence whether I had the energy to travel for a discount.

My grandmother used to step back and analyse things by starting again and working forwards from first principles. Smart lady, but she didn't have nearly enough energy spare for things like doing the washing or cleaning her house.

Some of the things are very interesting and separate to this - particularly where the decisions we make are completely opposite by the free vs non-free. Decision tree hacking.
I note that references to the actual studies were given in the article.

I also note that your quest for "reproducible results" was definitely met in the England/Wales vs Chicago murder statistics the article reproduced.

I am of the camp that the term pseudo-science is a derogatory one, and should remain so. Otherwise, how else should we label such things as SETI and Human Induced Global Warming to warn the uninformed that the rigor of the scientific method as it's applied in every other field is not being followed in these , ahem, "fields"?

As for whether pseudo-science is an apt definition of what the author engaged in, I'm afraid, without reading the quoted studies, I must remain uncommitted. I did very much enjoy the article, however.
They describe the Tesco data mining tools in terms that make them look a lot better (to me) than they feel when you see the result in the store.

Tesco opened a new flag ship store in London, UK, close to where I lived, in Earl's Court. (This was a while ago, so I am sure they are better now. About 5 years ago.) This is in an area which has a number of competitors, all who had fine tuned what the store offered to the local market. The area has people with high income and a lot of (rich) immigrants, think Saudi, stock brokers etc.

The Tesco store's range of products was awful for the first 12 months. It was like they had drop-shipped a generic store, tuned for general suburbia, and then slowly tried to fine tune it. 50% of what they sold seemed to be the wrong stuff for the market.

They later opened a Tesco Express as well, just a couple of blocks away, and compared to the Marks and Spensers Food Only store down the street (which opened a year later) it was awful, really bad. I couldn't go in and actually buy anything I wanted there other than maybe milk. I have visited recently and the Tesco Express is still there, the same crappy collection of goods and hardly anyone seems to buy anything. Whereas the M&S is packed.

It could well be that the area, Kensington / Earls Court, has such a special set of clientele in it that the "standard" model of product provisioning for Tesco just doesn't cut it. But I could have easily come up with a better set of products to sell in there myself and I am just a customer not a retail specialist.

So I guess I am saying that I think there is plenty of scope for improvement.
This is not pseudo-science. It is article reporting on real science. Suppose X is linked to Y... suppose male aggression is linked to reproductive competition. Wouldn't you expect to see a graph like: http://media.economist.com/images/20081220/CXM534.gif
http://media.economist.com/images/20081220/CXM534.gif ? How else would you explain it? What are your Y, Z and Theta? Science is all about fitting theories to facts. You can have your doubts but you can't just write it all off as "fun".
I wonder what their $10,000 warranty applies to, I can't find any details on the site.
Yaw, I think that testing a lot of the ideas they threw out would be worthwhile, but that might take more than 4 days a week. ;-)

And, honestly-- they're keepin' it Real. Focus on low-hanging fruit, don't work too much, work on the stuff that you WANT to work on. They could instrument the hell out of it with A/B testing or they could move on to other products/ideas.

They're probably leaving a few bucks on the table by gunslinging, but I bet they enjoy their jobs more than if they went the other direction.
2009: The Year of Reputation Management?
But aren't these simply reporting requirements for a public company?
I would bet Copilot is pretty profitable too
Wouldn't universal prosperity be Wal-Mart's worst nightmare? Or sustained high gas prices? Or Amazon?
Many government policies could be seen as "social engineering", be they farm subsidies, tariffs on imports, spending on things like highways, subsidized communication networks like the postal system, education for people other than those born wealthy, meals for poor kids so that they have something in their stomachs at school and can actually try and think, and so on.

And, yes, some of them get 'routed around'. Other policies, whether you agree with them or not, affect the market more than the other way around. For an extreme example, see Cuba, where social engineering routed the market, with results that are disastrous in many ways. Other social engineering experiments, such as universal education up to a certain age in most western countries, seem to have been a net positive for society, even if they are imperfect.

Also, I think that some "social engineering", such as keeping people from starving to death, and ensuring they don't freeze to death for want of a warm place to sleep, at a minimum, should not be routed around.
The person who manages to get their "Live Chat" people to respond to questions about this (perhaps by asking as a "prospective customer concerned about stories in the news") is going win a Hacker News karma bonanza.
Comodo will just issue you an SSL cert for anyone
Ben Laurie is right though; the fact that shoddy CAs will cut you a cert for MOZILLA.COM (or presumably anyone else) without verifying who you are does kind of steal some of the thunder from today's announcement.

What's really fucked up here is that Verisign will never hear the end of it about mistakenly issuing a Microsoft certificate in 2001 --- it was just mentioned again in the New York Times --- but in 2008 Comodo can just mint certificates for random companies without checking, and all it merits is a blog post.
Eh. As much as I find Giles Bowkett to be insightful and amusing, he's also overboard. Embodies unpleasant class politics? I wouldn't go so far.

But it is essentially a meat market. And just like the biggest meat market in the US, Los Angeles, the meat's synthetic.
How many Facebook apps do end users pay for?
Rent control is one of the many well-intentioned Government projects that doesn't achieve its goals.

Government needs to focus more on 'social technology' (Karl Popper's term) -- on how to achieve the goals it aims for -- and less on arguing what the goal should be and then assuming that making it happen will be the easy part.

To those who disagree, I would appreciate to hear why.
This is a word-for-word copy of what's on Intel's website: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1514.htm

The bottom of Intel's page, however, has links to more information (blog, whitepaper, presentation).
at least spend a few bucks to hide your whois info

How do you do that?
Great points. I love how people think that because they heard of someone abusing rent control, that that's the norm. There is no system that isn't gamed in some way -- sure it's unfair, but is the net effect better?

Since CATO can obviously afford to do a proper study of the effects of rent control -- I can only assume that they know it won't support their idealogical position.
The problem is that economics turns into politics, and that attracts a wide range of people who are not hackers, and don't really care about it. And of course, yes, it's a system, but it's a big, hairy complex one that is also impossible to do repeatable experiments with in many situations. Even lots of good economics blogs, by real, serious, respectable economists are full of stuff like "my view is that... " or "I feel that ..." or "I think...".

I'd really like pg to comment on this in a definitive way, though. I'll start posting my own economics articles if it's deemed to be ok, and we'll see what happens.
tptakec is 100% correct, but I like to explain stuff to people:

The packets leaving your laptop are protected from being eavesdropped by third parties, but the party you're sending your banking password to is some asshole who now apparently runs a CA, and just issued a certificate telling your web browser he's your bank.
I don't think Tesco is up market enough for Earls court. Waitrose and M&S etc are always going to do better there really.

Tesco is a great middle-class supermarket for most people.
I just read someone who said "make sure your software is aspirin, not vitamins." iPhone apps are mostly vitamins. When the iPhone isn't as hot anymore and people have bought all of the $0.99 fart programs they can stand, and the app store is saturated with thousands upon thousands of apps that mostly do what other apps do better, it won't look so rosy.
Aside from anecdotes, do you have access to any data that substantiates the claim that "The rent controlled units went to people with high incomes and political power" -- can you put a figure on it (50%, 60%, higher?).

My grandparents lived in rent controlled apartments in NYC that they could not have afforded to stay in -- moved there in the 30's in neighborhoods that filled with gang violence -- but gentrified around them and became very expensive. There are anecdotes both ways.
These seem like heuristics that people use to avoid fraud and other social problems. They're 'usually correct'. And many of them learned from the society. For example, I bet children can start with a lot of social behavior expectations at new jobs that they would learn later are 'market behavior no nos'. Or that people who hold on to their houses and waiting for market prices to rise again are betting on a strategy that can work. The baseball ticket is a quickly expiring good, while houses can last for a very long time.
I think that's more a symptom of poor intra-company communication than a lack of data. In several other publications from various pro- and anti-Tesco sources, I've seen pretty much universal agreement that the datasaet generated by all users of the Tesco loyalty/frequent-shopper card is about the best data of that type in the world, and certainly the best in the UK.

Since they make such a big deal out of using the Tesco card, they have a unique ability to track Tesco shoppers across locations and times, and see who's buying what and where they're doing it - and when you add in all the other non-food services Tesco sells, the data can generate a very good picture of their shoppers. The brunt of all that is that Tesco is very good at finding patterns in sales, predicting what new products will take off (and in what areas), and when something will be popular.

From this, at least if you live in the UK, it's likely that Tesco has a better idea what you're going to buy when you walk into a supermarket than you do.
Sorry, the scenario we're talking about here, as laid out by you: "Not revoking certificates will negate all the security of SSL."

We're not talking about the scenario where a very smart attacker is targeting me with this security hole. We're talking about the impact of not revoking the certificates in question. At which point there is a very very small possibility that I will be targeted by an active attacker with the know-how to exploit this issue. The rest of the time SSL will continue to work as designed and will protect me from wifi snoopers and suspect routers.

There absolutely are passive attackers. There are people running open wifi points that log http form submissions with a "password" field, and then try the same username/password on a few major sites (ebay, amazon, etrade, gmail, BoA, etc...) automatically (working on the assumption that people use the same login/password on the many non-ssl authed non-important sites as they do for their important accounts). Successful login data is marked. I have met people running these. It costs nothing, is fully automated, and has very little risk.

They may not be "serious attackers", but the likelihood of one of them getting your mom's eTrade info is much higher than an active attacker targeting your mom.
Here's the Phoenix coming out against rent control: http://thebostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/editorial/d...

It's not at all an endorsement of the naked free market like Cato would want to see.
I think that if it doesn't involve political parties or politicians, it might work.

I mean, it's going to be hard to have a board about startups without talking about market theories, techniques of persuasion, economic trends, role of government in the creation of wealth, distribution of wealth, rational versus irrational buyers, etc. All of these are both economics and politics. We have to be able to talk theory, or the board is just going to be technical fluff, like who's got the best SCM system or what famous author X says about Facebook.

I'm really interested in why things work (or don't).
Ranting Considered Useful
IE8 has exactly that:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A95...
I'm sorry, I'm just not interested in talking about security in terms of attackers who are too dumb or lazy to carry out well-known, utterly practical attacks. You can keep saying that "the encryption part of SSL works fine with authentication"; if you add the phrase "as long as you're dealing with functionally retarded adversaries", I won't even call you on it.