skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to point out, bad behavior doesn't excuse other bad behavior, and I wish people wouldn't argue using that tenet. Also, the fact that something was a norm at one time doesn't excuse it either.
The Quantum Earthworm
Yes, but HTML+JS+CSS has helped turn HTTP into an application environment, and not the content transport protocol it once was.

REST is popular now, but it's not a real protocol. There's SOAP, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore.

The web is undoubtedly missing a social content protocol. I predict one will gain popularity in the next couple of years.

EDIT tldr: Until my blog has an open and commonly accepted way to 'friend' or 'follow' your blog, how can we possibly say that we are "done" with online social protocols?
Having not used Windows 8 extensively, I can't say much about it, but I have to disagree about Windows Phone. I've been using WP7 for about two years now, and I really like it.

The OS actually has a lot of features built-in that you have to resort to separate apps for on other devices. And after some use, I don't find the icons any more mysterious than those found elsewhere... you can almost always pull the menu up to reveal the textual name for the icons if you need to know what they do, however.

From what I've seen, Windows 8 certainly needs some polish, just like Windows Phone 7 did when it was first released. I don't have any doubts that both products will continue to mature into things that are better, though.

Microsoft's biggest problem, in my opinion, isn't that they do a bad job - it's that they are too quick to bail out if things don't go their way right out of the gate. If they stick with the platforms they have in the market now, I think consumers will pick them up and enjoy them over time.
Five tech-related companies that may not see 2014
Plugged In: Computer reseller in growth mode in Austin
Why did a Train Carrying Biofuel Cross the Border 24 Times and Never Unload?
Oh, I see.
So it was more of a question that I could not observe how this would be built than its effectiveness per se. Thanks for clarifying.

On a side note, they mention one equipment like that in this novel(a hell of a good scifi): The Martian, by Andy Weir. Available for free online, really funny.
The thing is, email input validation is only one use case for regex and emails. Here's a more sinister one: you want to build a web scraper looking for emails to add to your spam list. Put a bit more generically, you need a script that can import email addresses from a broad and unknown host of formats, and it is impractical to condition the data beforehand.

I agree that the value derived from email validation for something like a new account registration is almost nil. Just do something like an email verification round trip, which not only validates the email could be real, but also provides assurance that the user has control of the email address used.

Note: My last name is O'Kelley, which is a bit of a pain when it comes to poorly designed computer services. Some sites will strip the ' and others will escape it so that I become Mr. O\'Kelley. The worst I've seen is that my school used my complete last name in my email address, so most sign up forms refuse to even try to accept it, even though it is a valid email address. It can be a pain if I need to use my .edu address for academic discounts or verification.
Buses and planes and trains and sidewalks are dirty too.
That's what I was referring to. Do mongomapper and mongoid have this problem?
Sample of Rapid Prototyping with JS | Web App Log
Thanks Greg, it wasn't that kind of question because I hadn't done my research! Flickr would be good, but it requires people to create an account and get to grips with using the site; I wasn't aware of Tracks but from what the site shows it's geared towards people with smartphones?

It would certainly be an interesting discussion and if I get round to it I'll let you know.
This sort of error can happen any time you have mixed units, though, and as long as some countries insist on not using metric, the potential is there. The potential goes away once you switch, so as long as the costs for switching and for staying mixed are both finite and non-zero, it makes sense to switch now and get it over with.
Yes, exactly. This is only directly exploitable if the user can submit a hash with symbol keys. Otherwise, it seems like it would take some unusual code path in the app to exploit the vulnerability.

The original post of the problem goes like this:

1. Gain an application's secret key, used to sign session cookies.
2. Inject a marshalled hash with _symbol_ keys into the session cookie, sign it with the secret key.
3. Now you can exploit the SQL vulnerability in the dynamic finders, assuming the session value is used directly as input.
I think the sentiment is that Microsoft now has an expiration date on it. You can't estimate it, but you could say that you are certain that they'll be closing their doors sooner or later. The OP is advocating that the company close their doors sooner, on their own terms, voluntarily. This would, according to the OP, good for the economy, though not good for Microsoft. I think we are seeing capitalism at work: Microsoft has run it's course, and is now just trudging along. It cannot pivot, and cannot turn back to a time when the software industry allowed it to flourish. In time, it will stumble, fall down and never get up. Then others will come along, take it apart, keep the useful parts going, and kill off the dead ends. This will happen slowly and organically. That's capitalism.
It's the difference between solving a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with the picture on the box, and solving a 100,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box.
So it only the only the dynamic finders (find_by_) that have the vulnerability, not Model.find(params[:id])?
It's been the case for three years now. Why would you expect change very soon?
Thanks - in 10 years time it would be ideal, but here in the UK and with half the guests aged 50+ there's a distinct lack of smartphones!
I will be buying this phone. Period!

Why? The very reason why I use linux on my desktop and android just never gives you the same feeling of being differnt from the rest of the world.
Good catch, somehow I thought the Newton was released later, thanks for the correction. Upon further research, Microsoft seems to have begun their handheld efforts with WinPad and the Pegasus project in 1994, which finally materialized as WindowsCE by 1996 in real consumer products. Apple Newton development seems to go back as far as 1987, with a consumer product out by 1993.

I also think what you say about them failing to support their products in the long term is very true. Until recently, Microsoft has been willing to let a lot of its products languish both aesthetically and in terms of functionality.

I think this ultimately still comes down to Microsoft's large disjointed nature and stubborn commitment to support legacy hardware/software, which made it less dynamic than a company like Apple that had a strong top-down unified decision making process that allowed it to push out cutting-edge products and aesthetics.
Well, you're assuming they would need a new UI. You know what would be really nice to have on a phone if it didn't take any real effort to get it there? bash, ssh, nfs/sshfs/samba, etc.

I know the typical user isn't going to care, but I could see how it would be a big win for developers, and as we all know, "developers developers developers."
Just went back to re-read the story, and it has been updated. The Mills and Boon chapter have been edited out! Where is the dramatic ending!!! OK, I can tone down my sarcasm now..
Those swiping gestures from the edges look incredibly cumbersome and awkward. It may look cool in a demo, but performing that repeatedly to use my phone throughout the day looks to be a bad experience.
Queue Webhook Events with IronMQ Webhook Support
It's quite simple Facebook is banned in certain countries and english isn't a native language for many of these countries. Considering this, the other local social networks have more specific features suited for the local crowd such weibo and qzone for china. Korea also has one. Weibo has more features than twitter. The principle of "less is more" doesn't work well with many of these other countries and their social networks.
"Spin off Xbox (and related Kinect products) as a separate company. It's a strong enough 'living room' brand, and I doubt if customers really care that it's a Microsoft product."

Kinect came out of Microsoft Research. If you spin off the Xbox division as their own company, I'm not sure how that relationship would still exist or how that would work.

"Make technology from devdiv as open and easily accessible as possible. E.g. give the drugs away for free as in beer, and also free as in freedom where it makes sense. Ultimately, this should drive adoption of products 1 and 2 listed above, and that's where Microsoft should be making money."

The developer tools makes a decent amount of money for Microsoft, far much more than their entertainment division does. Not sure why they would give that up. You can see Q1 for 2013 here: http://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn... Notice that Business Division brought in the most and then Server and Tools came in right behind that.
The app argument used to be more of a "thing", but they've made great strides over the years to get competitive there, and as a WP7 user, it's just about at the point where I can feel comfortable recommending it to people without feeling any regrets.

The OS itself has always been pretty great though, in my opinion - they took a lot of lessons from what Apple and Google did and used those to build a platform that does a lot of stuff right out of the box.

I think your comment about the iPhone 4 + case is funny. I see people carrying around these ridiculous brightly colored foamy brick-ish things that are iPhones in cases, and I wonder why they would put up with that. It doesn't matter how beautiful and lightweight the device inside the case is if it can never come out!
The iPhone 5 feels way too plastic to me.

?! Are you sure you didn't buy it from some guy in a trench coat behind a dim-sum dive in Shenzhen?

My iPhone 5 is the most solid, monolithic piece of consumer electronics I've ever seen.
In theory this should be super easy on most Linux systems because of the software repos.

On Debian based systems, on your existing development machine, you can do:

dpkg --get-selections > installed_stuff.txt

Then copy the file "installed_stuff.txt" to the new machine/VM and do:

dpkg --set-selections < installed_stuff.txt

It becomes a little more difficult when there are dependencies that aren't in the package system.

Another thing I've found useful is to have a git repo with my config files. Then on a new machine I can clone the repo and have access to all of them. I've been meaning to write a script that copies everything to the right location, but haven't got around to it yet.
I'm pretty sure that the injection only works when you can forge a session because sessions may contain marshalled symbols, and the dynamic finders only accepted symbol option keys as valid. You can't get Rails to construct symbols out of a params hash. Is this a separate vulnerability?
All you have to do is follow him on Twitter. The blog posts are always preceded by a flurry of Twitter chatter.
The 920 may be brick like, but physics being what it is, it'll land harder on the ground than an iPhone 5. I don't use the 920 with a case but never used the 4 with a case either. Most people at my office don't have cases on their work-issue 5's from what I've seen.
Apple doesn't have to work with OEMs, resellers, retailers, or (generally speaking) enterprises. Basically, all of Apple's customers are the consumers themselves, so Apple has a single consumer price. Microsoft has various groups of customers, and it adjusts the prices and products accordingly.
People could have said the same about Apple in the 1990s.

A company does not have to raise the white flag as long as it has some money in its bank account. Until it must declare bankruptcy, it always has some sort of chance to pivot and grow. It is after all just a group of people.
Our failed approach to Schizophrenia
Capitalism doesn't put an expiration date on companies though. Capitalism, in theory, is always there to provide new life for those who put the work in to make it happen.

Whether or not the current "renaissance" that's happening at Microsoft will be enough for that is hard to say... but to say that they are more-or-less finished and should just close up shop and disband is foolish.
Umm.. I didn't say that ActiveRecord doesn't escape user input. So, stop spreading misinformation about my post ;-)

The fact of the matter is, whether its in some dark edge-case or not, user-provided data is being used to compose a SQL statement that is being passed to the server. Escaped or otherwise, that's a recipe for an injection attack.
Driver software will be tweaked, reduce Radeon latency
imho (most of) those icons look better than glyphicons's vectorial ones in BS 3.0
Valve confirms Steam Box will use Linux (German)
Great device, I owned one of these as well. The communicators were my smartphone of choice until the touchscreen enabled Sony Ericsson P800 came out in 2002. Oddly enough, you can see a lot of the iPhone in the P800.

http://www.mobileburn.com/media/sonyericsson/p800_7650.jpg
Also, it's conflating too much together. The problem is unlikely to be that Windows 8 will not be strictly successful. More likely is that it won't be as successful as it was expected to be. Which is a horse of a different color entirely.

Tens of millions of people are still going to buy and use Windows 8, and it will still generate billions of dollars of revenue for Microsoft. And hundreds of billions of dollars worth of 3rd party software will continue to be developed for and used on windows for the foreseeable future. But this current stage of the OS wars is very dependent on inflection points and momentum, so if Windows 8 is less successful than Windows 7 then that could mean that Microsoft will be faced with smaller and smaller successes until sometime way down the road they actually encounter an outright failure in the OS market.
How We’ll Learn In The Year Ahead
And canal projects like the Erie Canal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal), which opened in 1821.
Why Journalism Tools Gather Dust
> I think the sentiment is that Microsoft now has an expiration date on it. You can't estimate it, but you could say that you are certain that they'll be closing their doors sooner or later.

This much can be said of any company. It's called the Organisational Life Cycle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_life_cycle
Microsoft is still providing tremendous value, so why should they close their doors sooner? The capital will get reallocated once it's no longer sufficiently productive at Microsoft, and there's no reason to do it any sooner than that.
This is partly the "innovators dilemma" taking over Microsoft and part mis-management by a bozo.

I have several friends who were/are at Microsoft - every single one of them has said some variant of this to me "we were not allowed to do X as it would compete with some key MS Office package" OR "that project was killed because it did not fit in with the Windows managers vision". Too afraid to innovate for fear of disrupting their Cash cows.

Bozo - Steve is clearly in over his head. Bill had the vision & the technical chops Steve is missing both. I was at a conference where he(Steve) was talking about cloud computing. It was was easily the worst 15 minute ramble I had heard on that topic - shockingly so.

however despite both points above - Microsoft will be around for a VERY long time. Just, not as dominant anymore.
My favorite quote: "I am a Founder, and to be a Founder you must be, first and foremost, an entrepreneur. The one overriding characteristic of an entrepreneur is a passion to accomplish a goal. We are driven. We create, build, and dream. When you lose those abilities and hire others who are more focused in their position to share percentages of your total workload as you scale a business, you lose what you are, and who you are, in the process. Founders have a shelf life. I am past my due-date."
no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)
Made me think of a recent stealth startup that somehow got a few hundred thousand signups before it launched... and then it launched... and failed. Went through a waterfall release process, and failed some more =/
I didn't say it wasn't a bug. It's a bug that indicates that ActiveRecord was written/designed in such a way that it trusts user-provided data to be executed.

And, yes, I would fully expect to be able to trust my data-abstraction layer to be bug free. Since Rails seems to have this problem regularly, I can't trust it and therefore choose not to use it for those purposes.

So, I think we agree here.

--- Edit ---

To whit, if you look at the bug report it says that the problem is when an application is passing user-provided data into the framework. They say "don't do that" and then apparently provide a patch to somehow get around if you don't (I don't know enough about the internals of rails to understand the patch).

To my mind, the problem is that Rails should be treating any data passed to it as user-provided data, rather than trusting somebody who just took a 21-day "hacker college" class to do anything other than just pass along user-provided data. The framework should be implementing this kind of security in a consistent and reliable way, rather than trusting you. That's kinda what a framework is for.
What you need is to separate components of a name that can be used separately. If your app wants to say "Welcome John" in some places and "How can I help you Mr. Smith" in others, you need to have FirstName and LastName fields. If you also want to say "Account details for John A. Smith" then you need another FullName field.

You can't have just FullName, because parsing the name for it's components is incredibly complicated. (E.g. some people have last names with spaces in them.)

A suggestion below says FullName and PreferredName, which would probably work for many applications.
I agree with most of the commentators below (especially enraged_camel)... I mean did the blogger put any actual thought into writing this post or did they just copy paste stuff that umpteen other blogs have regurgitated over and over a million times ?

I exercise regularly and it definitely helps me in other areas of my life but I wont just advise "exercise daily" as the solution to anyone and everyone who has any questions about getting better.

What has worked for me so far is to set just 1 concrete goal for the year or 6 months and break it down into the smallest possible pieces and act on it daily.

What doesnt work...
1. Setting too many goals... I mean cmon are you going to start mediating, execising, going out in the nature, maintain a gratitude journal daily ? Sure maybe for 3 days..but once the novelty/willpower wears off, you will be back to square one...

2. All or nothing... Either you exercise daily or you quit..All of us get trapped into the perfection trap and end up doing nothing.. I would rather exercise/meditate/scratch-my-ass 2-3 times a week until THAT becomes a habit.

3. Giving up at the first sign of failure and blaming yourself...
Too many people say to themselves "Oh I went on a diet but I ate that cookie..I am a failure... might as well eat the entire box and start afresh from tomorrow"/ "I just dont have the discipline, I am giving up"..
Know that you will fail a few times before you get the hang of it..which goes back to #2...dont focus on perfection, focus on progress.

That's it... Just 1 goal to be broken into smallest possible pieces...something you can act on daily...or perhaps a few times a week...
That's 1850. Between 1800 & 1830 much of the Southeast was still Native American nations, e.g. the portion of Alabama between Montgomery and the Georgia was the last part of the Creek Nation ceded in 1832.

The Federal and National Roads allowed stage travel, and that's what improved speed...for those who weren't walking. By 1850, other than the Seminoles, the Native American nations in the East had been conquered and rail road motive power had advanced.
More interestingly to me is that Apple has all but one of the top-10 laptops that is selling for over $500.
Well, as long as we're picking nits, an FSM accepts only regular languages, while a rail road diagram accepts context-free languages[1]. So a railroad diagram isn't really the "view" for an FSM. A state-diagram or state-transition table is (although the whole MVC analogy is itself kind of weird. Where's the controller?).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_diagram
Yes, it's the dynamic matchers only.
Google+ should be Google, in the same way Gmail and Google Talk are just the same Google accounts. Someone said here today how he found Hangouts complicated on mobile, because it wasn't well integrated into the OS, the way Facetime is. And that's exactly why Google+ needs to become synonymous with a Google account. Apple allows you do use any and all of their services with your itunes account, from iCloud to payments, doesn't it?

You don't have to use it, just like people don't have to use all of Apple's services, and as long as they are not too in-your-face about it.
Phones aren't required to make 911 calls. Consider the case of your MiFi access point. The Ubuntu phone could just be a smart access point.

We shouldn't let artificial restrictions get in the way of Free Software. The pre-alpha-Github version does not need to be perfect. It just needs to lay the foundation for perfection to be added later.
Forbes magazine is written by professionals.

Forbes Online blogs are pieces of junk written by "contributors" to get on the stock ticker news items. You could sign up and most probably get published as well.
True, but :find_by_id is closer to :where in that it doesn't raise exceptions upon not finding a record. I've seen it being used in a few places, especially in front another scope, like `current_user.posts.find_by_id`.
Is Canada’s nickel the next coin to be retired?
CBC article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/12/19/mystery-biodi...
"I really dislike the idea of "cramming" for interviews. If a person hasn't been developing problem solving and coding skills throughout their career, then it's hardly something they can read up on and develop in a week before an interview."

You're misunderstanding the issue here. For the type of things that matter in 95% of actual software, it's true that you can't learn all that in a week before an interview. However, those things are somewhat difficult to get across in a 60 minute interview, and good interviewers who can do that are rare. So they resort to algorithm questions because they don't require much skill to know. Which sucks but the interviewee can easily account for it by (re)learning that same stuff with a week of preparation, maybe a little more if they've got no experience in algorithms.
Microsoft has a lot of room to fall before it's too late to recover. Organizations as entrenched and resource-rich as Microsoft can't be taken out by a decade-long stumble.
That is exactly what Do Not Disturb does. It allows for whitelisting of contacts, both specifically in the Contacts app, and if they are very persistent callers (emergency, urgent).
To expand on your expansion: when a hash with indifferent access is asserted over a list of symbols (as is the keys) it will always fail.

1.9.3p327 :025 > {:a => "b"}.with_indifferent_access.assert_valid_keys([:a])
ArgumentError: Unknown key: a