skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also wish I understood why Tcl was not more widely used in the early days of the Web. HTML is a string-based protocol, and Tcl is optimized for handling strings -- it's an absolutely natural fit.

Bugzilla, for example, was originally written in Tcl; but for reasons I have never been able to discover, it was completely redone in Perl. Anybody here know why?
I made a CLI for domainr a few months ago, too - https://github.com/connor/domainr

Very nice.
The first screenshot is just misleading...
The hard drive is soldered to the chassis, it cannot be removed.
floats, block vs inline and adaptive layouts.. for sure it is not easy but we are working to solve that in http://www.froont.com.
A minimum spec 2010 macbook air came with 2GB RAM. Trying to do C++ (for example) development in 2GB of RAM would get very painful. I'm sure several other languages would as well.
Two Mules and a Plow - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
I don't really get what you're saying. We should continue to check email 50 times a day because there are children starving in Africa?
Can you call this guys "Hackers" ?
Come on, Macbooks, Ikea tables, and the most weird... cleanliness.

Where are the cups of coffee ? Where are all the cables ? The Model M keyboard ? I can't see any Donald Knuth books there.
Not to mention no one is using Linux there.

I'm not "ragehating" because of Macs or so, I'm just saying that it's weird to see a Hacker with a workspace like that :P
yes, 2600 still exists. I buy it sometimes.It's good stuff.
How Bad Publicity Can Be an SEO Win
I'm fairly certain you can do it in other languages, unless I didn't understand what you mean. In Python it would be something like:

for animal, color in zip(['dog', 'cat', 'bird'], ['brown', 'black', 'red']): print 'See the %s %s?' % (color, animal)

edit: eurleif beat me too it.
Nice. Warms your heart to see thoughtful software design to this extent. Who knows, maybe a few lives a year are saved by design choices like this.
I don't see how you can reveal the buyer. It doesn't take much effort to buy through a proxy entity.
Some stories exist just to give pleasure to headline writers.

I'm not planning to commit murder, but if I ever do I'm going to decapitate the corpse and stash the headless body in a topless bar.
Air Force space vehicle comes in for a landing
I'm not sure about recent versions but the first edition of "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" was great a few years ago.
A programming language runtime is a whole package; just because some elements of previous system designs are reused does not mean that we are "reinventing the wheel."

To pick Lua (my favorite of the technologies you listed), it has the following things that Tcl does not have:

- strict ANSI C implementation
- small implementation (15k sloc vs. 110k-160k for Tcl, depending on how you count)
- a fast implementation, with an even faster JIT

If you follow your argument to its logical conclusion then everything is just a reinvention of Lisp (including Tcl). But we have tools available to us today (like Lua) that are strictly better than Lisp or Tcl for some use cases.
The comment I made was about the value of historical people writing serial letters instead of just reading little one-of-a-kind snippets. But you are right. If I remember that set of comments correctly, it quickly wandered off into useless land as well.

If you'd like, happy to go back and flag it.

I'd like to view my responses as being consistent, but I know too much about how we all are screwed up to buy into my own bullshit. In my defense I believe my goal with that comment was to encourage people to read more history in long-form from the participants themselves. At least I think that's what I was doing. I know I went back and rewrote it a couple of times to make sure I wasn't wading into hero-worship, gossip, or partisan stuff.

I'm not that big of a Reagan fan. I'd view him in the top 1/3rd or so of presidents in the last century, but that's mostly because of his skills as a communicator and his ability to practice retail politics. Seems like the politicians that spend years doing some kind of face-to-face work like Reagan (working for GE and as governor) or Clinton (as governor) end up being at least more interesting as historical figures than the rest of them. Chomsky I have very little opinion about. He seems to like using his understanding of the philosophy of language to make political points. That's interesting to me as far as it goes. Hell, I'd love to talk philosophy of language, but I'm not sure that has anything to do with anything as far as what we're talking about. If anything, Chomsky to me seems one of those people who is still buying into his own bullshit -- but what do I know? As a famous person once said, a man has to know his limitations.

Damned internet. :)
The best way is to start from the beginning, in other words read "Smashing the stack for fun and profit". These technics doesn't work on current operating systems but gives to a great start http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html
I don't know if you really want to compare the NZD to Bitcoins as the NZD is a lot bigger than you might think.

Anyway, the New Zealand dollar represents 1.6% of all currency trades globally which is small but not exactly tiny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_dollar

Their M3 is also over 200 billion. I am not sure if that's in NZD or USD but 1 NZD = 0.7901 USD so the difference is not that important. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
Read as much as you can about assembly. Debuggers are your best friend. Pick a target (app, iPhone, xbox, whatever). Attach debugger and step through the code and learn possible entry vectors (buffer overflow, loading for arbitrary file i.e. pdfs, so forth). Once you have an entry vector you essentially have an exploit, the rest is developing that exploit to do something "useful".

Sorry for the shortness of this response, if people are interested I can throw together a couple of blog posts.
I know it was inevitable, but I find it rather disappointing that exploits have become such big business. I felt like the hacker/cracker community between the late-80s to mid-90s was just that: a community, which likely developed naturally because of the scarcity of information at the time. Sure, there were exploits being traded (and probably even sold occasionally), but I never got the impression that anyone treated it like a business.

Admittedly, I'm probably just being sentimental about my childhood, but that's how I remember it.
ouch. so much negativity.
Won't they just shift to the next most profitable illegal good or service?
Maybe this will convince the "Intelligent Design" community that an eye-ball actually could be the result of many iterations (via selection) of photo-sensitive cells.
This is a fascinating case.

There is no question in my mind that the resulting origami is art. There is no question in my mind that the paintings are art. The question is whether the crease pattern is fundamentally a copyrightable work, or a set of mechanical instructions. Software copyright exists in a similar space, and I'd be interested to hear a real lawyer comment on the parallels.
Hacker News: where we discuss advanced programming and elementary social skills.

I wonder if there's somewhere out there where it's the reverse.
Hey that's pretty neat. Would be cool to style it up so it's beautiful.
Stefer
I would be interested in seeing some of those blogs
tptacek (of Matasano) has a list of books on Amazon he has suggested for learning just that: http://www.amazon.com/lm/R2EN4JTQOCHNBA
When typography saves paper and ink. About Gulliver,Century Gothic & Ecofont
OK, now that you bring it up, yeah, I remember that.

But I didn't remember that it was named 'meteor'.
Having been a user of *NIX for over 20 years and a professional Systems Administrator for over 10, I have never once had a reason to use ed. Even the smallest embedded environments usually have some variant of vi available. The only time that I've needed to use ed was edlin in the dark days of early MS-DOS, which is very similar. This is borderline masochistic.
Nice ! Just included this tip in documentation https://github.com/hugodias/railStrap/commit/9fb4087173d04e9...
In k (kona):

a:`dog`cat`bird
c:`brown`black`red
{`0:,//("See the ";$x;" ";$y;"?\n")}'[c;a]

The string formatting is a bit ugly because I'm not using a dedicated format function, but foreach with multiple data structures is just f'[list;of;arguments].

In other words, it's one character: ' ("each").
True. Thanks for clarification. Actually, I never understood why "sticky bit" is called that way, wikipedia article gives an answer:

The sticky bit was introduced in the Fifth Edition of Unix
in 1974 for use with pure executable files. When set, it
instructed the operating system to retain the text segment
of the program in swap space after the process exited.
Linux voids your warranty.

Huh.

In a way I can see their point. You bought hardware, plus a licensed copy of Windows. You returned it without Windows.

But really, what does it cost to just re-image the disk? They don't really just resell RMAs without going over them, do they?
Even today 'ed' has practical uses apart from being the default emergency backup of the backup editor.

One situation where I always use 'ed' is when I reinstall a machine (with the same ip) and ssh tells me the keys don't match together with the line number in the file known_hosts.
It's easy as:
#ed ~/.ssh/known_hosts
15d
wq

(assuming the mismatching line was 15). Only sed would be faster if it wasn't for the time spent always looking up the "-i" (edit in place) flag, so I just use ed.

Also knowing a little 'ed' will make working with 'vi' easier, assuming 'vi' is not your usual editor.
I don't know if unix is the most ahem "specific" specification ever given. What specification of unix do you think the author was referring to? In any case, they have corrected themselves in the blogpost.
HN Meetup - Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk
Any fellow HN'ers in Dnepropetrovsk with interest in a meetup?

I suggest Sunday 24th at 19:00 (but I'm very open for other suggestions).

Someone else has to suggest a place since I don't know Dnepropetrovsk very well (yet).
Or Adobe EchoSign.

There's plenty of established competition in this space.
exactly! this was my initial feeling when I saw their first commercial. What stops an evil clerk of switching good square with tweaked one and collecting CC data all day long?
When there's demand for a product or service, supply will follow if it's profitable(1) to sell. Banning something, or shaming people away from doing it, doesn't eliminate demand. Supply reduces, cost increases. If costs gets too high, demand vanishes, and so does supply. It functions like any other market would.

To squash a market entirely requires extremely strict laws, punishment, and enforcement. Even then, it's impossible to destroy some markets if enforcement cost is too high, or is incompatible with the rules of a society (e.g. it's un-Constitutional).

For example, the U.S. spends billions each year on the war on drugs, and yet there's someone sitting right next to me in a coffee shop I could probably buy some off of right now. If $500 billion was spent yearly on enforcement, and police could do random searches of persons and property at any time without warrant, drugs would dry up. But at what cost? The loss of many of our rights, plus extremely high taxes, followed by an inefficient society spending so many resources on, well, "You can't stick that pill in your mouth." We'd become a military state with little else to offer, stagnating while the rest of the world surpasses us.

Black markets can be risky to engage in. If the risk of getting caught buying or selling an exploit was, say, 24/7/365 physical torture for 10 years, most people probably wouldn't do it. But a few would remain if it is worth the risk to them, or if they fail to assess risk (e.g. they don't comprehend it, or they ignore it; "It won't happen to me!"). The black market would "harden".

Mexican drug cartels hardened with guns, violence, secrecy, corruption, torture and death. You can theoretically calculate how many humans died in Mexican drug wars, per-joint you smoked, in 2011. That cost was built into the price you paid for the drugs. This "death cost" goes away if you legalize it.

So you're absolutely right; markets for software exploits will not go away unless it becomes unprofitable, or not worthwhile. Right now there are few, if any laws, banning it (asides from extortion, treason laws, etc...). Since many are vocally against it, they only have a few options to "prevent" it. Shame those who do it, buy them out ($$$), race them (white hats), or propose legislation to ban it (good luck). This market is likely here to stay for some time. If it remains legalized and becomes accepted by the general community, more people would do it, prices would come down, and so would earnings.

(1) Profitability can be defined as anything the supplier receives in return for their product/service which they deem "worth" something. It doesn't have to be money, but could be good feelings, increased social capital, learned knowledge, etc...
Everything-For-Everyone? [Xbox 720]: About those leaked slides
Given what you've said, what do you think about bitcoin? If you are so interested in virtual economies/currencies, this should be right up your alley.
Scalable and Maintainable CSS Approaches
check out http://www.ideaswatch.com
A few years ago I built a small circuit with a few low noise opamps attached to the reading head of an old reel-to-reel broken player, which had a few burned tubes.
I used it to extract recordings from my family made in the 60's and converted them to wav/mp3/ogg. The result was fairly good, considering the age of the reels and no particular care was taken to preserve them!
Something is broken, at least for me. It always resorts to XHR-polling instead of websockets.

http://pure-waterfall-1016.herokuapp.com/socket.io/1

Always returns xhr-polling method which really isn't ideal for this.
Fravia's portal on reverse engineering used to be a great starting point. Starting with Assembly and (old) Phrack articles as others have suggested is a great idea as well.
Have to say I had the same idea couple month ago (wanted to call it RapidSignature) and was researching. Because this is so simple to program and there are plenty of competitors - some like HelloFax give you this feature for free, others like SignNow (really awesome), I gave up. Further, I think they are misleading customers saying its legally binded signature. It can't be. If you sign someones document and they copy and paste it to some other document, you can't prove you haven't signed it. OR they may not prove you signed it. Anyhow, without your hand written "blue pen" signature, anything else is a photocopy that can be cut and paste and xeroxed.
Agreed, and if Roy Lichtenstein got away with his comic book reproductions I don't see how this lawsuit can be supported
+1 for the blog posts.
Is there some aspect of this story that is new? The article was published three months ago.
Legalize 'em all. It's unpopular, but it's the only solution that doesn't lead to ever-increasing authoritarianism.

Drugs don't destroy lives, addiction does. Prohibition drives addicts underground. This makes the problem harder to solve, not easier.

The legal status of tobacco and alcohol are proof-positive that biology isn't the metric that's used. It's politics and big business, pure and simple.
From my naive perspectice it seems that you can apply different age-verification techniques if your target audience is older.

From the article:
> Kremen believes credit cards might be a potential avenue to online identity verification. But Wiklund says, “Teens don’t generally have credit cards.”

If you are targeting an older audience, maybe age verification through Credit cards is a viable tactic?
Internet Archive Sues to Stop New Washington State Law
The more public the market is, the less effective it is. WabiSabiLabi tried (and failed) to create an eBay for exploits years ago. The item of value is the information, not necessarily the code. As such, the more information is provided gratis, the less it is worth overall. In theory, a nice principle, but it is directly opposed to the forces that drive the market.
Well, Tcl enjoyed a bad reputation for a while, mainly due to the "everything's a string" mantra leading some to believe it's not much use beyond that, RMS's flame war against it (which is why we're all using Guile now), and mostly the simple, but slightly odd syntax (expr, array and list functions).

Then you've got to remember that for a while, Sun owned Tcl. Pretty much the same period when they were hyping Java…

Also, the core Tcl distribution was still focused on scripting (embedded or not) and GUI programming with Tk. Modularity back in the days often involved separate interpreters with added featurs (TclX for example).

Compare that to PHP: Basically the same situation regarding additional modules, but they had everything related to simple web development in one package - parsing requests, handling pictures… You could use PHP to do scripting and even GUIs, and you could use Tcl to do web development. But once you're written off as a niche language, it's hard to escape that trap.

We've got a whole bunch of interpreted languages out there, but only a few of them are considered all-purpose languages. Ruby and Python mostly, even Perl has to fight a bit against the Unix scripting preconceptions.

Tcl wouldn't be the first scripting language of that period "lost". Anyone remember Pike or Icon?
It's not broken. Heroku free plan doesn't allow for websockets. The demo code on https://github.com/danzajdband/Tuiter/tree/master/examples/m... it's prepared to use webosockets first.
An empty alt can also just mean "I used a tool to generate this and didn't fill out the alt field" or "I just want this page to validate and still don't care".

Making the alt tag required won't make lazy developers/content providers any less lazy, so requiring it actually weakens the signal you're looking for.
Thanks Mike, I've updated the charts. It really looks better as a bar chart:

http://w3clove.com/charts/errors/bar
> Just as important as the 0days themselves is keeping public who bought them.

That sounds ridiculous, I think. As soon as that is made public, there will instantly appear another market where that info is not made public, and most buyers will switch to that new market, sellers will follow as well.
Ah, well that sucks but explains why it was occurring :)
It's not whether 'vi' is available (it usually is), but whether it is behaving properly. Situations do occur where any fullscreen editor will fail and where 'ed' will work as expected.
And at such moments, even though you don't know the full extent of the power of 'ed' you will be happy to know how to change a line and save the config file (and actually quit 'ed'; that's harder than it sounds)

An editor in need is an editor indeed!
I'm currently reading it. It gives a rather basic C introduction (I skipped it) but then it goes into explaining how to inject shell codes, using buffer overflows and getting deep into the assembly of programs. It's definitely great for a start.
Probably has to do with servers being locked up pretty tight and desktop linux not having a large enough market share.
Maybe a fun way to get started would be taking an old version of a shitty server of some service and try to find possible ways of breaking it by examining the source code. There are really thousands of assumptions each computer program makes about the external world and security research seems to work by giving those assumptions an examination much closer than the original programmers gave.

In the end I don't think there is too much to say about "exploit development" per se, it's all about identifying those assumptions that could be fruitfully abused, once you find a way, writing the exploit should be the easy part. So, I would take some amateur ftp server, or maybe something famous for its insecurity (I know wuftpd used to have a bad rep) and then basically try writing a FTP client that tries to break some restriction the server or protocol intended to keep. From there, you just have to learn to identify more assumptions, by studying programming languages, operating systems, network protocols etc., whatever might be helpful (and it always amazes me what kinds of crazy details people in security can take advantage of). Another aspect is exploring the assumptions of software you don't have the source code of, so basically reverse engineering.

I am more of an admirer of security work than a practitioner, so maybe other people can elaborate some more, but I hope this is a valuable starting point.
Hey, I attend Missouri S&T.

I was offered the opportunity to participate in this survey.

At the time I thought it was offered by the IST (Information Science and Technology) department which does some human computer interaction stuff. As a result I decided I wasn't interested because the IST department has a really really bad reputation on campus (rightly so - I'm an IST undergrad and have witnessed gross incompetence first hand).

Turns out it was done by the Comp Sci department, which has a good reputation, but not so much for its research. Still, they are competent people which is more than I can say about the IST department.

Anyways, I find these results interesting. I don't know how they got p2p statistics, as it is painfully difficult to get IT to let me download linux ISOs.

I also share the concerns about the parent monitoring thing.