skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
kragen's comment hits the nail right on the head. Any software update system suffers from the ability to install a "rootkit" that can emulate the update mechanism itself to ensure its own survival. I was mistaken in thinking that CPU microcode was stored in non-volatile memory on the CPU itself, but the same idea goes for any area in which such rootkits can be installed.

The simple solution is to allow easy updating of that base firmware through a dedicated hardware interface. A socketed DIP isn't hip anymore (eww through-hole), but a USB device header on the motherboard would certainly work.

I'd feel better about trusted computing technology if one of their design goals wasn't preventing physical "tampering" but instead they provided unfettered access through a debug port. However, it seems like they're aiming for the exact opposite in order to facilitate naive software, theft deterrence, and business model preservation.
> Why can't you have a very brief trial where you explain the definition of assault and present the uncontroversial evidence of the assault, and that's that?

The reason I've heard that assault charges aren't always filed is that there has to be, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact wording, "sufficient reason " to believe that the accuser can and will carry out his/her thread in order to make it assault.

The situation often cited for this is a 90 lb weakling gets drunk and threatens to beat up someone who fights in MMA for a living. Since the thread isn't credible this technically isn't assault.

On the other hand, if I shove a gun in your face and threaten to kill you then that very much is assault as my threat is very credible.

Some where in between is the line between assault and just being a dick, which isn't a crime.

This is often why many verbal assault cases aren't tried.

The other, unfortunate, reason is that court time is very finite. Prosecutors can only take so many cases to court and prosecutors know that people will often make these types of threats for a short period of time and then just leave that person's life.

If that's the case then the situation often resolves itself and they don't have to take up their valuable court space with this case.

It sucks but that's the way things are:(.
If you want to understand the context behind all other books on military strategy written since Clausewitz (any book written in the last hundred years), you must read Clausewitz. If you want to understand why the US Army was so dead set on failing to anticipate the next war and continued to train for symmetric war until very recently, you must read Clausewitz. If you want to understand why the new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual written by General Petraeus, Lt General Amos, and Lt Colonel Nagl is so celebrated, you must read Clausewitz.

You should also read Petraeus et al's Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The difference in tone and scope is staggering. If you want to understand military strategy going forward, you must understand Petraeus's book. I assure you, it is on the nightstand of the President and every military officer (and not because it says that on the cover, but because I'm one of them).

If you are running a startup, read the Petraeus book as though you are the insurgent. If you are at MSFT or Google, read it as though you are in the US Army.
Well, the question of legality is just that, a question. The terms of services specifically stated that you must not upload music that you don't have permission to let Muxtape use.

This is what I remember it to be, but archive.org doesn't have muxtape.com yet (from http://wiredformusic.blogspot.com/2008/03/muxtape-barely-leg...):

Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes.
Users may not upload multiple songs from the
same album or artist, or songs they do not have
permission to let Muxtape use. Individual users
may not create multiple muxtapes. Accounts not
meeting these restrictions are subject to
termination without notice. Muxtape will never
reveal your email address to a third party.
Muxtape is alive.

Wasn't there some ruling that said that websites that host user contributed content aren't liable for copyright infringement, iff they comply with take down requests in a timely manor? I would think that would apply here.

Also, if I remember correctly, by the end of the original muxtape, they were linking out to Amazon for purchases. I wonder how much money was actually paid out to record companies from this?

Another tought: would muxtape have been able to get a license similar to the one Pandora uses for it's service?
Fix the bug!
What a bunch of senseless drama.
Agree and understand.. after brief basic use can use the biofeedback feature alone (i no longer use the "game" aspects) with simple finger clip... (get "grapher" option) and then may not even need that...
Interestingly, these robots aren't that smart. It just goes to show how much you can build by engineering a whole system, and not expecting a single robot to be that intelligent.

For example, the vision system is essentially built with fiducials (markers like QR codes) on the trays.

These robots could do nothing in your basement. I'm not saying this is bad - it's actually awesome to see more real robotics companies selling products. My point is that I really look forward to robots that can perceive their environment better and manipulate objects in it with dexterity. That will really knock your socks off.
Stardoll: Lost and Naked
There was a post recently on a class that examined Starcraft strategy. That might help.
The best I have read is by B.H. Liddell Hart:

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Meridian-B-Liddell-Hart/dp/04...

He also wrote respected volumes on the world wars and biographies of Rommel and Scipio Africanus, among others.
Takuan Soho is also the one who brought enlightenment to Musashi, according to the stories (much about Musashi is fictionalized).

He also has a pickled daikon named after him.
"Woodworkers are pretty smart and safety conscious."

I agree, but there can times when control slips. This is anecdotal, I know, but my Dad cut his arm off with a radial arm saw when I was 3.

My brother was a baby and he wasn't getting much sleep, so my Dad was pretty distracted at the time. He's very careful now. I sent him this video and he told me later that it gave him the shakes.
Austin Road Signs Hacked
dupe of item?id=455507
I largely agree with you. If I "hate" C++ so much, why do I program in it? The answer is that sometimes I need my code to be very fast, and C++ has language features making abstraction easier than C or Fortran. I think the main reason people choose C instead of C++ is that it is common to overuse C++'s language features, and if you target C, this is impossible. Otherwise, just take "new" and "delete" and write the rest of your program in C...
How is free choice unmaintainable? There are people of both genders who like casual sex. Am I missing something?
Why you should ask more questions before you give any answers
Linus has wrought three public miracles:

1) He had the chutzpah to just sit down and write a straightforward kernel for the 386, with no intentions of pedagogy (minix), research (mach), or circlejerkery (hurd).

2) He pioneered the distributed development model in the late 90s that made it possible for Linux to bloom.

3) He sat down and advanced the state of free version control a decade over the course of a weekend.

His initial writing of Linux is the least important of the three, if he hadn't done it someone else would have. The remarkable thing is how he kept it going.
You can google the field manuals (FM) of the US Army and Marine, they range from operation of guns and marksmanship to strategy, to leadership. All great reads.
Sony's Net Profit Drops 95% Q4 2008
According to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374416

Git is particularly bad for large files, while good old SVN handles them Ok.
bugmenot
That's why I like YCombinator, and consequently why I like Hacker News: it avoids that level of immaturity. All the HN users who have YCombinator-funded companies tend to have great conversations. I can't think of a troll here who also was part of YC.

That said, this is the exception. I can't think of many more online groups that are this adult.
To impress potential investors and acquirers.
Wasn't there some ruling that said that websites that host user contributed content aren't liable for copyright infringement, iff they comply with take down requests in a timely manor? I would think that would apply here.

That exists for sites that purportedly have a purpose other than copyright violation. Muxtape was made specifically to play other people's music. It wasn't billed as a site for musicians. That means most of its content was geared towards illegality.

Another tought: would muxtape have been able to get a license similar to the one Pandora uses for it's service?

Probably not. Pandora's deal exists because it helps people find new music, and because people can't directly play whatever they want. The other big deal, Last.FM's, allows only three plays of a song before that song is locked off. A completely open model like Muxtape's couldn't have worked like that.
I dual-majored in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at a 95% engineering school. Cheating occured very often, and I would venture to guess that a majority of the students cheated at some point during their college career, usually in the form of finding a "crib", or previous test from that professor and memorizing the answers.

In my opinion, the greatest cause for cheating was severely unrealistic expectations from the professors. They often expected a far greater amount of memorization and understanding than could possibly be accomplished in the amount of time given to learn the material.

When confronted, their answer was almost universally that "you will have to know it in the real world, and people's lives could depend on your work." However, this logic is severely flawed in that, in the real world, we are given more than 2 hours to complete a set of tasks. And we have the internet and textbooks at our grasp if we need a refresher on a specific equation or concept. And others will be checking our work, especially if people's lives depend on it.

This discrepency between professor expectations and real-world expectations I think gave many students the view, "if the professors aren't playing fair, then why should I?"

As a result, I saw much much less cheating when the professors "played fair", meaning they made the tests open-book and/or open-note. However, there was probably also much less legitimate understanding of the material come test time. So, I'm not really offering up a solution. Just my observations.
Yet another instance of media hype.

FTFA: "And so they had to break in and hack into the computer to do it, so they were pretty determined," said Hartley.

It's been widely posted on various tech blogs lately that the default password for these signs (which is rarely ever changed) is "DOT". Plus you can apparently factory-default the sign by hold 3 buttons of the programming fob.

Before the world of electronica, this was simply called "mischief".
Amen. Proper computer vision would revolutionise .. well, an awful lot of things. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like Manna, though .. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Already posted (cnn link): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456303
My absolute favourite in this class of books is:

Infantry attacks, Erwin Rommel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_Attacks

Don't let the word "Infantry" in the title fool you. It is an engrossing account on how to use armed forces to your advantage. He supposedly was working on "The Tank in Attack", but never made it that far. A good substitute is The Rommel Papers, which was published posthumously by his family.

The Rommel Papers
http://books.google.com/books?id=JE8VFsdxNGgC
Marshall Brain has some interesting ideas, and I actually agree that there might be some disruption from lots of jobs getting roboticized. That said, Manna is completely implausible. He takes some trends in political correctness, like banning smoking, to a ridiculous distopian degree of somehow justifying prison for almost every human because they can't find jobs.

I don't think there is an upper bound on the number of people working in creative fields. It is a question of how fast the people can move to them.
Just search for the headline on google, and click through that way. No registration.
Why the hell would you want to version and branch and merge one huge blob? The point of this is that it's versioned just like it was a straightforward filesystem mount.

You can't take forked vmware snapshots and merge them back into one another, or track changes from their shared parent, or anything less primitive than vanilla snapshots.
A new iPhone lurking in the shadows?
yoga is a form of exercise, so it has higher success rates than meditation alone.
Site and MySQL backups via cron
And CVS handles them far better than SVN.
Already reported here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450479

Then repeated here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454348

Third time lucky?
looks like this is the company page:

http://www.creative-lines.com/
"I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn’t even let me cross the threshold."

We try pretty hard at Justin.TV not to do things that aren't worth our time, so this really jumped out at me. The (former) president spent 15 minutes of his valuable time giving someone a lecture on what to wear?!
WEF 2009: Mark Zuckerberg thinks difficult times require a tie
Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like.

I think the better way of putting it is "Look at the Internet; that's how the world really is like." YouTube is not the world. Many people never comment on YouTube. (For the record, look at the comments on classical music. They're cultured and sophisticated an learned. Piano virtuosos comment on amateur videos giving tips. Isn't that incredible? My favorite pianist comments on videos on YouTube. That's marvelous.)

Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.

Kind of a bizarre way of putting it. Isn't the idea that if you can't deal with insults, you just make a community with fewer insults? Freedom and all? Freedom from insults is also a potential solution.

You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.

Right now, my professor is having a discussion about the suicide on Justin.TV, a YCombinator company. So here's one classroom that's been affected by something that I read on Hacker News.

What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.

Wow. Not at all. If you think trolls are as powerful as elephants you've got to take another look at the world around you. If 4chan is considered powerful, then Google has to be looked at too. I'll take a million trolls to a company that's making a lot of people billionaires and is doing some social good with their work, too. I think the billionaires have a bit of elephant in them too.

This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.

It's that way until somebody reading this decides to fix the problem. The cool thing about the Internet is that one person can change it all. And Hacker News is an incubator: it's a place for smart people to talk about things.

It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.

It's already old. The most-visited sites online are sites like CNN and Fox: the ancient bogies of the media. They won't last forever, but the sites that replace them will not be the Gawkers. The replacements will be just as civil and just as everyman-friendly.

And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.

Online it's more, "If the music gets too loud you can always create an alternate universe where you dictate all the rules."
Surely that would require you to know the hash and the IP :/

If you only have a hash, how can you brute force it? How do you know when you got back to the correct IP?

If a system is only spewing out a stream of hashed IPs, it doesn't seem too easy a problem to deduce the original IPs.
Services Worth Paying For as a Startup
If you're on a Mac, get Things.

http://culturedcode.com/things/

Beautiful software, incredibly easy. I can't deal with get-things-done software, but if I had to use a program, this would be the one I used.
Eclipse Foundation snuggles up to Microsoft
Jetty Web server flies to Eclipse
Well, I agree, but I don't think he meant Manna to be taken as a realistic story - more like a hypothetical exploration of extreme best-case and worst-case scenarios. I found it pretty interesting and certainly thought-provoking.

I'd need a defintion of what a "creative field" is before I agreed with you on the second paragraph, but definitely concur with the general point - people will adapt, new industries will spring up. The robotic revolution might be more jarring than most but yes, we'll survive, and personally I can't wait.
"Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat."

So much for the environment and reducing waste...
Exactly. I think you can say at least that the value of a web app can be much higher much easier if combined with hardware or a desktop application.
PHP 5.3 Beta 1 Released
Gethostbyname_r()
A quick rant about gethostbyname_r() being a pain in libfreeradius-client.
$19.99 "Premium Gaming" Section to Hit App Store?
But oh no! My job was producing those useless goods and services! And if people don't buy my useless goods and services, I won't be able to make money, which means I won't be able to buy food, which means I'll starve! PLEASE, SOMEONE, STIMULATE THE ECONOMY SO I DON'T STARVE!

The depressing thing about the great depression of the 1930s, as well as the current potential one, is that there may simply be not enough important things to do to keep everyone busy.

This seems to be the entire premise of the society present in "A Brave New World".
Creative endeavors include making music, books, plays, film, code, and stuff for etsy.
Wow, I never knew GW was such a stickler for formal dress and punctuality. That kind of goes against his cowboy persona. Interesting though, I love reading about stories like this. All presidents have interesting quirks.

> "I’ll never forget going to work on a Saturday morning, getting called down to the Oval Office because there was something he was mad about," said Dan Bartlett, who was counselor to Mr. Bush. "I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn’t even let me cross the threshold."

> Under Mr. Bush, punctuality was a virtue. Meetings started early — the former president once locked Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out of the Cabinet Room when Mr. Powell showed up a few minutes late — and ended on time. In the Obama White House, meetings start on time and often finish late.
The list:

FreshBooks
Basecamp
DreamHost
WooThemes
Animoto
Angelsoft.net
StreamSend
Remember The Milk
Amazon Prime
Amazon Web Services
Joe’s Goals

The article also recommends the free Google services:

Docs
Calendar
Mail
Analytics
Reader
As The Going Gets Tougher, the Toughest Companies Get Going
Perhaps not Goddess of Programming, but The Lady (of Discworld fame) could maybe be apt for a Goddess of Startups.
When IBM Beats Facebook And Twitter: Discover Relevant People Within Your Network
meetings start on time and often finish late

Er. This is an impossibility, right? I mean, if your meeting finishes late, that means your next meeting must start late too, right?

Sorry to be so picky. Just the logic of that sentence was worrisome. It would work with only one or two meetings a day, but as president that obviously couldn't be the case either. If your meetings are ending late, they're also starting late.
You shouldn't be using gethostbyname anyway -- it's a deprecated interface. And you definitely shouldn't be using gethostbyname_r -- it's not even defined by POSIX.
It depends on who you're trying to protect against. I immediately assumed the government trying to find out who searched for $STRING, implying they have full access to everything else as well.

Seeing that you have the hashed IPs, I assumed you have access to the database and probably physical access to the machine. In that case you would just look at the code, or subpoena a programmer, for the hashing algorithm.

It wouldn't be anywhere near as easy if you were dealing with some custom algorithm, especially if it were salted, but I can't really think of a situation where you'd have the records but not the rest. Why would hackers be trying to find out which IP searched for what? It's a government thing, surely.
2008 record year for skyscraper construction worldwide
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people. The cool thing about the internet is that one person cannot change it all. Everyones voice is equal. Nobody can change it.

CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.

And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.

The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.

So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.

The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?
I have difficulty using web-based apps because they are just too slow for me. I am a bit of a speed freak, tweaking and overclocking, etc. -- but I do value my time and I've never used a web-based app whose speed pleased me.

If I have a choice, I'll stick with desktop applications forever.

Sure, they're the right solution sometimes. But that doesn't mean I want to use them if I can help it.
How Netflix got started
Oh sure point taken, if you have the hashes and the hashing algorithm, as you say - it's only a 4 byte input, wouldn't be too hard.

You could make the hashing algorithm change over time, which would make things a little harder to reverse.

Perhaps my original comment was a little knee jerk, just seems like a problem that has been solved.
The doomsday argument
The first beta released of PHP 5.3 was packaged today. It includes new features such as late static binding, closures (minus OOP closure support), namespaces, the ?: operator, and __callStatic().
These internships are generally a few weeks to a few months in duration. It's actually more like paying for a hands-on, supplemental class at an exclusive trade school.

For technical folks, it's easier to get a foot in the door if you demonstrate competency & have the grades. For those trying to break into marketing, publicity, etc., an internship is as much a requirement as a BA.
I think he's saying that if you know the hash function, building a reverse lookup table for every IP address is feasible... just look at all the web accessible reverse md5 tables
Which has the most alternatives/competitors. Git or Linux?
checkout Raphael js it provides cross platform svg type drawing, pretty sweet and that way you can target everyone.