skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basic social science articles always read like they're written by Captain Obvious.

"1. Do initiate flirtation with people of roughly the same level of attractiveness as yourself.

2. Don’t flirt with people who are unlikely to return your interest."

But on the other hand, there's really no easy way out (writing about it, I mean). I've yet to find a more "practical" approach that doesn't read like either semi-useless and somewhat obvious statistics ("try to position yourself between 3 and 4 feet away from your flirting partner"), or just oozes sleaze ("pickup artists", ESR etc.). Getting technical about human beings and our social interaction works quite well in a clinical, observing manner, but once it's meant as actual practical advise, it's very easy to cross boundaries.
>A "nice round figure" is suspicious. Shouldn't a well-researched investment cost an amount that sounds well-researched (i.e. a more precise figure and not something that seems rounded up to the nearest billion)?

This sounds more or a fallacy and less of an argument to me.

Would a figure like $9,999,989,567 be better?
Consider the possibility that governments can create their own exploits. If they have a large quantity of server side bugs the marginal utility of one more is effectively 0. It is safe to assume that they have existing capabilities in that area. Just mentioning a LAMP stack means SQLi as the most likely vector. No point in paying for someone to run sqlmap for you... ;)
I actually have a toy interpreter that does this: http://github.com/akkartik/wart#readme
Airlines in the developed world almost never own planes, especially in the dimensions of any typical commercial airliner. The other problems that plane ownership brings (besides routine maintenance, which the airlines do own) are outside the desired core competency of airlines. The leasing of aircraft to commercial airlines is quite an industry in itself, and the transactions often involve complex, multilateral bond financing. There are almost always complex financing arrangements involved. Few buy a 737 with a bag of cash anymore than one buys a skyscraper outright. It is done by some of the world's less creditworthy airlines, and American has a penchant for owning, but it is increasingly not the normal industrial practice. Investors go in on planes just as they do on any other massively expensive capital goods.

Thus, the key for a drug cartel would be to get the various intermediaries involved in the aircraft leasing and financing process (some of which are surely quite corruptible) to lease one to ShellCorp, or buy on the secondary market, as some have suggested.

The bigger mystery for me is how they manage to fly in the context of overall international airspace control and air traffic control. Like someone else said, a 747 can't take off and land on a desolate patch of grass. Law enforcement and intelligence aren't stupid; they know how much money is in the "air charter" business, and it definitely won't pay for a 747. Charter companies use much smaller aircraft.

Edit: Unlike airlines, drug cartels actually do have the cash to buy a $138m plane outright, yes. But that would set off enormous alarm bells, because nobody otherwise obscure does that.

Edit: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/business/10flyboy.html?_r=...
Some things are not be for sale. I own a replica of Jackie Robinson’s Kansas City Monarchs Negro League Jersey. I wear it to baseball games (where else?)

I once was offered $100, cash for the jersey at a Blue Jays game. I said “no.” The offer was raised to $200. Again, no. I explained it wasn’t for sale. The fellow offering me the money explained that “everything was for sale.”

I find such people manipulative. They have money, so they try to twist the rest of the world to play by their rules. I told him that it would take me four hours to earn $200, so it was worth four hours to me, right? He agreed.

I told him he could have the jersey if he worked for me for four hours. End of conversation right there.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/this-jersey-is-not-for-sale

This may or may not apply to your dream startup.
I'd be interested in a reality show where the episodes were all drawn from the same footage, but each one has a different `slant'.
Faster than real time
...origins which apparently have some relation to semantics...

No, the origins have nothing to do with semantics. The debate over who invented "email" is dependent on the definition of the word "email". If you define email in certain ways, Van Vleck's 1961 system was the first email system. By Chomsky's definition, Van Vleck's 1961 invention doesn't qualify as email, but Ayyaduri's does.
Make the world move faster
Have you ever wondered what it takes to make the entire world move faster? For instance, if something is expected to take 10 years to build, what can be done to make it to 5?

If you can acquire skills faster and companies/visionaries can find you quicker than the current timeframe (you know how long it takes to hire a developer or a designer), things automatically move faster. You definitely don't need 4 years of school to become a good programmer.

This boils down to creating a place where the entire talent of the world resides. Imagine a room where the top problem solvers hangout and they come by every single day. The value of the room is unimaginably high. The possibilities are endless - from forming a close knit community where people can learn from each other (like codecademy/treehouse?) to connecting them with the right opportunities (like interviewstreet?), solving real problems and many more. The crux being, build the world's largest talent hub.

We're starting off creating a site for programmers/problem-solvers with components and challenges that attract them to come back every single day. We've a great roadmap, a very ambitious goal and top tier investors backing us. We'll need talented folks to build a talent hub - this is like inception :)

About us:
We're a small team based in Bay Area. We've had 3-4 failed ideas prior, have gone bankrupt in the past and made (make) tons of mistakes. But, we learn. Ship, measure, learn, iterate. That's how we've been living for the last 2 years and will continue to grow and move fast.

Heads-up:
You'll be an early member in our startup journey. As you might know, it is not meant for everyone and the ride is really hard and strenuous. Highs are extreme highs and lows are real lows. The founders (we) are extreme workaholics and absolutely nothing matters more than building this platform.

If you're interested in talking to us, send us a mail to moveworldfaster@gmail.com with your programming profile and the biggest failure you've faced in life till now and how you overcame it.
I agree, the specification seems to set authors up for failure. I never understood why the language needed & followed by WHITESPACE to be escaped. It seems like it would be pretty easy to ignore this sequence in a parser?
Congressional Witnesses Agree: Multistakeholders Right for Internet Regulation
We tend not to bomb our own cities.
I've added Hugo Dias's project to the list of Rails starter apps at
http://railsapps.github.com/rails-examples-tutorials.html.

Building a starter app is a great way to get familiar with Rails. Which may be why there are quite a few. Maintaining a starter app is more difficult (because of frequent changes to Rails and popular gems). Which may be why the Rails roadway is littered with the carcasses of abandoned starter apps (remember Caboose, circa 2006?). The best are those (like Brian Cardarella's https://github.com/dockyard/sail_plan) that are maintained to support ongoing development by an organization.

Thanks for the kind words about the RailsApps project http://railsapps.github.com/. It thrives because of the active contributions from this enthusiastic community. BTW, I'll be announcing the newest release very soon, a Rails prelaunch app for startups http://railsapps.github.com/rails-prelaunch-signup/ (it's not quite ready for "Show HN").
>Even worse is when the offending design is completely out of your control, like the kerning on the sign at the Court st. subway station.

Don't see anything wrong with the kerning. It's not a typeset document, anyway, it's made by some craftman and/or artist as tiles, and this is the placement that he picked.

It's not like a bad poster made in Word with letter clinging together or something...
ceci n'est pas une origami
I would argue the magazines (such as 2600, which I absolutely loved when I was young) and books and oral tradition are all just ways of passing around specific and awesome anecdotes: it doesn't teach you how to do that, it is just interesting facts or entertainment for people who know.

What you need, instead, is a mindset: when you are at the supermarket checking out with one of those self-checkout machines, does some part of your brain start figuring out mistakes made in the mechanism that might allow someone to steal items?

If not, that is the kind of thought process that you need to get yourself to start doing: you need to keep asking yourself "if I were evil, could I do something evil here?", and you need to make it fun enough that you are doing it constantly.

With this mindset, finding exploits in software just becomes "teach me to program", as the kind of devious backchatter in your brain will just see things popping out "wait, what's to keep someone from cheating here and doing the opposite of what you say?".

The really epic hacks then just come from many years (the stereotypical 10,000 hours) of experience programming and trying things: it isn't because they read some magazine or learned from someone else. Instead, their midset just got better.

Think of it this way: it makes a lot of sense to ask "how do I learn how to use a violin", but "how do I learn musical taste" and "how do I learn to hear music in everything that surrounds me" are more awkward. The former is a skill, the latter two are mindsets.
Batik Bola Spanyol 4B
I thought modern OSs make stack memory non-executable, so this attack fail on modern systems.
A lot of existing capability combined with minimal utility (Linux market share is a rounding error). There is basically no interest.
Curious - how come AppDiem didn't take off? Something like that around early 2011 really could've taken off and helped with the app discovery problem. I know now there's a ton of players in the space but still!
well, if he was referring to 'unix' as specified in the Single Unix Specification (which incorporates IEEE Std 1003.1)

then all unix systems have 'ed'

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ed....

If arch linux doesn't include it, it's not a 'unix'; it's not even a good "not unix". So the author wouldn't have needed to correct his article but Arch would need to include 'ed' :)
What can .htaccess file do?
Studies Find Gossip Isn’t Just Loose Talk
The crawler/parser is a little behind so it will take a bit for new requests to go thru. I'm thinking of ways to make this perform better.
It's a interesting problem you guys are tackling and your progress is very impressive! I like the UI! And for sure it's good that more people are working to make web design more enjoyable. For some time I was wondering why there are so many new frameworks for coding emerging and way less 'visual frameworks' designers can use.
That's why we are building one – focusing on freedom and responsive websites rather than code, something Photoshop can not handle for sure. More at http://www.froont.com.
Anyhow we are living in very interesting times! Looking forward to see how Easel.io will evolve!
reddit level of depth here
As long as their dream is to solve a real problem I think you can do ok by it, but when you have someone dreaming about something that is useless, unless it is also your dream to build that useless thing, my advice would be to move on.
> we recruited 216 undergraduate volunteers
> we had the participants fill out a questionnaire (~15 questions that LITERALLY ask you if you feel depressed. so, the survey asks you "hey, are you depressed?" about fifteen times, with various wordings.)
> 30 percent of the participants met the criteria for depressive symptoms

Okay. Sounds reliably conclusive.

> Next, we had the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants for February. This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoring how they were using the Internet.

...how "they" were using the internet. During February. In Missouri.

> the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included ... “p2p packets”

O RLY

> By Sriram Chellappan (professor of computer science) and Raghavenra Kotikalapudi (software development engineer), IEEE

Pretty striking that they correlate fear mongering with file sharing, and then draw a line connecting to eavesdropping and traffic analysis. Is this article MPAA/RIAA propaganda? I can't tell.
Well of course, but that's just a trivial restatement of the problem. Anyone can measure dollar amounts once they have them; money is a measure. The question is how to assign such amounts.

For business value to be measurable means you have a function M(x) that maps x to money. The trouble isn't with the range of that function, it's establishing what the domain is and how to compute M.

People often talk about business value on software projects as if they have such an M when they don't. What they have is an imaginary M whose domain is "what I care about" and whose output is "what I want to believe". Such discourse is dysfunctional.

The truth is that you have M for the business as a whole and maybe for specific products (though I can cite cases where even that was dubious) and it typically breaks as you try to get finer-grained.
This is a good point. I went to a Dropbox talk, and one of the employees mentioned, in a similar vein, that a lot of users first use the app on a mobile device and never realize that there's also a desktop client.
> Another thing that I find missing is the ability to see your path in a Finder window, you know, one that you can copy and paste into the terminal window or another Finder window.

You can: View>Show Path Bar. You can click/drag any folder in the path to get a file: URL or file path depending on your drag destination. Alternatively, your current selection can be copied/pasted into Terminal.

> Directory and file sizes without having to use "Get Info".

Use list view, pick Size as a column (should be a default, you may need to rearrange to get it visible next to the names). View>Show View Options; check "Calculate all sizes" for directories.

> Preview pane.

Column view has it directly. Hit space in List view for QuickLook, move the QL panel off to the side, and continue browsing. In Icon view: View>Show View Options; check "Show icon previews"; resize them large enough (≥48x48, IIRC) and movies can even be played inline.

Though this may sound a bit snarky, I mean it as a serious inquiry: have you actually used the Finder for more than 5 minutes since 10.4?

No, DTerm is not built in, but that's okay - no one's stopping you from installing it, or writing a better one†. The Finder doesn't have Dropbox built in either, and that's okay too.

†for instance, one that does the opposite: keeps a Finder window for each tab and window in Terminal on the current working directory.
Allowing for a missing alt tag means developers don't even have to consider providing alt info, which is a terrible idea. At least this way they have to put something there, even if it's blank.
And then if we make it optional, now developers and software don't have to even consider putting any alt content.

At least requiring one makes them think about it. And tools can put in "image".
Two things: understanding and manipulating.

1. Understand what a program is. How the architecture of your computer allows it to run programs. How to look into the guts of a program - currently running or while dormant - and figure out how it processes any and all input you are able to feed it. What mechanisms are in place to prevent exploits.

2. Study bug classes and exploitation techniques. Information leaks are often important to remotely exploit code protected by ASLR. Build fuzzers. Use a tool like the absolutely incredible Vivisect recently released by visi at SummerCon a few days ago to see whether it is possible to get to a vulnerable code segment from the entry points you are able to find. Craft input to reach the identified bug, and leverage it to achieve arbitrary code execution. Never forget that while your focus may be zoomed in on a handful of opcodes that there is in fact an entire system environment in place and potentially at your disposal.

It's a daunting amount of information. Many of the best have been taught via something reminiscent of oral tradition, and like anything you wish to achieve mastery of you will learn faster with feedback from those with more experience. Most public hacker forums are about downloading tools for SQLi and have nothing to do with exploit development at all. But make some friends who are good at it and seek their feedback.

I guess start off by reading the corelan exploit tutorials, which go pretty deep pretty fast and may be a good start for somebody with programming experience. Simultaneously work through the reversing tutorial by lena on tuts4u. I think that may be a good start.
Does Haskell need macros?
I dream of a system with features such as iPython live doc, or Bret Victor's tangle. It seems an approachable goal nowadays.
Advanced social skills and elementary programming?

The "Countess Lovelace School of Young Ladies", where you learn proper ballroom etiquette and the language of the fan, plus a bit of SQL to work with your wardrobe database?

(Solving the "I've got nothing to wear" problem with a few self joins)
That's just one example. There have been plenty of startups, particularly in the consumer internet space, in which the names were generally accepted to be critical to the startups' successes. Mint vs. Wesabe is the most obvious example.
I'm reading it now, too. There are a lot of examples (it comes with a VM), but the book is still more conceptual than hands-on. The exploit-exercises site posted above looks pretty good.
Windows 8 tablet
This all may be eye-rolling advice but some of it is still worth jogging the subconscious about:

> When asked about flirting, most people – particularly men – focus on the verbal element: the ‘chatting-up’, the problems of knowing what to say, finding the right words, etc. In fact, the non- verbal element – body-language, tone of voice, etc. – is much more important, particularly in the initial stages of a flirtation. When you first meet new people, their initial impression of you will be based 55% on your appearance and body-language, 38% on your style of speaking and only 7% on what you actually say.

I can't be the only hacker in here who has wondered why a slickly produced shallow essay got more interest than the substantive essay printed on a static HTMl file set to 12 pt. Times New Roman/100% width. How Apple managed to succeed despite the respect of many an intelligent hardware enthusiast is a classic example.

This is partially related to attractiveness, yes, but all things being even, the presentation that is more thoughtfully welcome, accommodating, and empathetic...regardless of content...will have a surprisingly higher reach than we might expect
Switching to all USB was a natural consequence of all new gadgets and equipment coming with a USB connector, not a innovation by Apple.

And ditching the floppy was actually something you could not do on a Windows-machine until quite recently. I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but until Windows Vista, if you wanted to install Windows on a machine which had IO controllers or other hardware it did not recognize required to complete the install, you would need to provide Windows setup with drivers. And until Windows Vista those drivers could only be provided by a floppy. For real. I know it sounds like madness, but those were the breaks. PC vendors had to deal with that.

So basically until Vista, having a floppy-drive was a defacto requirement for a Windows-machine. And people didn't like Vista, so until Windows 7 you sort of had to play by those rules as well.

As for laptops, I find it hard to give Apple credit for innovating when all they did was the same as everyone else, make things smaller and lighter, only taking it a bit further.

So... None of your points have any substance to them what so ever. But you said those were the easy ones. In fact they were so easy that they completely missed.

With that out of the way, please feed my interest. Give me the real juice, the uneasy ones, if you like. Tell me how Apple in any way has done anything which can be considered innovative in the desktop space, which "the rest of the industry will copy"?

I'm thrilled with interest here.
Look at "Insecure Programming by example": http://community.coresecurity.com/~gera/InsecureProgramming/
I would say the "blame" is transferable indefinitely. The reactor is not responsible either, the enriched uranium is responsible instead, for the damage. But then uranium is not responsible either, the atoms are, that fuse (or fission), or the momentum (of atoms) can also be at blame. There has to be a line that needs to be drawn here.

Wrench can explode a reactor, but it is not made specifically to blow up a reactor. Stuxnet, on the other hand was specifically made to do the damage to fuel cells. Hence it's a weapon and wrench is not.
This is a bad example only because .ac.uk is technically a second-level domain, and anything under it would be a third-level subdomain of .ac.uk

Technically speaking, of course.
(I also am encouraged that style of speaking is only 38% of the equation...it's a lot of energy to break away from monotone)
The second edition is even better. It skips many chapters from the first edition that you don't really need and it goes into more detail in other more important ones to what OP is asking.
Orrick LLP's Documents
Yes, this exactly: MFS was a flat file system, and folders were just a UI convention implemented by the Finder. Folders could be arbitrarily nested, but only one file could have a certain name per disk. Given that a disk contained at most 400K this was not much of a practical limitation.
How is it better that every single image on a page has alt="image" or alt="asdfasdf", instead of a missing alt-tag?

If the alt tag was recommended - but optional - then a missing alt-tag tells you the developer didn't think about it (and who knows if the image is significant), while a present but empty alt-tag indicates the image really is decorative/insignificant.

As long as the alt-tag is required, a valid site will contain alt="" all over the place, and you can't know whether that's because the site developer was lazy (but was using validating tools) or if the site developer decided to flag those images insignificant.

Am I feeding a troll here?

(edit: It's like the difference between an SQL NULL and an empty string.)
Most beautiful hair style
Which of these hairstyles do you like the most?
Here's my suggestion

You create a toy exploitable program, and you start exploiting that

But before that, brush up on C and assembly (the basics of assembly at least). x86 is "easier" (more human readable I'd say but lots of quirks if you want to write, but easier than x86 in 16bit) but if you want to study exploits in other platforms they have some quirks.

That's "exploits 101" lets's say. That will cover the most basic tools you'll need and trying that is a great exercise

See the links other posted for "smashing the stack for fun and profit"

After that, you could try old programs and studying known exploits for specific versions (say program X has a certain exploit that works like that, so you could try making an exploit for that)