skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Step 1. Send Gmail user an email for some free Porn, Get Rich quick, etc

Step 2a. Ask them to create a username/password for their free Porn

Step 2b. Use the password to change their Gmail account login, download all their other account information and lock them out.

Step 3. Steal all the money from their bank account using the information from their Gmail account

Alternatively:

Step 1. As above

Step 2a. Show the user lots of free porn, etc to keep them on your site.

Step 2b. Do a scripted dictionary attack against the user's account to change their password using their cookies.

Step 3. As above

The essential point here is that using a non-cookie session based url identifier for things that change the state of a user's account is a must. At Yahoo! we call it a "crumb". Essentially print a unique (at least to the user) and verifiable key on your pages. Check for that key before accepting any requests to change stuff.

E.g:

Linking document

<?php

//This should really be a chunk from /dev/random
$secret = 'unicorns';
$time = time();

setcookie("timestamp", $time);

$crumb = sha1($secret . $time);

?>
<a href="doAmazingStuff.php?crumb=<?=$crumb?>">Do Amazing Stuff</a>

Action Document

<?php

$secret = 'unicorns';

if (isset($_GET['crumb'])) {
$crumb_val = sha1($secret . $_COOKIE['timestamp']);
if ($_GET['crumb'] == $crumb_val) {
amazingStuff();
} else {
showError('Crumb is invalid');
}
} else {
showError('No crumb to validate');
}
"No answer. This doesn’t happen, not to me."

Apparently what's happened is that Robert X has gone mad. He's jumping at shadows. Let's review the article:

* Neokast engineers leave the company

* Neokast CEO has a birthday, for some reason does not mention painful and embarrassing evisceration of his company

* various Neokast people ignore his pokes on Facebook

Ergo, some rich and "technically deep" company has purchased the IP and threatened everyone involved with runiation if they dare log into Facebook again. Obviously. It's the only possible explanation.

I think the last scoop Robert X got right was Apple's switch to the i386 chip. Everything else has been insane ravings and egomania.
Do any folks on HN have any interesting optimization stories or unusual application domains?
@jackdied that's brilliant advice!! thank you -- will bear in mind for the future.
Um... Angelsoft = toilet paper? Symbolic? Ironic? Just unfortunate?
I like the site, so it's kind of a shame for me that you called it "Da Button Factory". It just feels childish and cheesy.

Was there a reason for "Da" instead of "The"? Programming isn't "gangsta" rap, after all.
@lacker I did mail python-dev, but wanted to get general public criticism too...
Creating an fMRI archive for later historical studies could be interesting.
Just a thought...

You know, I can't help but be reminded of the movie Layer Cake ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/ ), where the main character, a drug dealer kingpin, points out that drugs will be legal some day, and that people like him are just ahead of the curve as far as making a business out of giving people the drugs they want.

Thinking of it from this angle, if drugs were to indeed be legalised (as in, like cigarettes - not just decriminalised), the possibilities for innovation, product development, etc, would be pretty enormous. You want to build a product that people just keep coming back to? Here it is.

Sure, eventually, this market would become like food or, at best, cigarettes - with smaller margins, and not much innovation. But it would take a while, I imagine, and in the meantime, there would be a lot of potential innovations, experimentations, etc.

Just a thought...
You might say by the same argument that single-line lambda expressions take care of 90 or 99% of cases, and you should revert to using named functions for the rest.

I don't think either is true -- if you have more flexibility in the syntax, you'll do more with it.
Actually, he's said the year 2029 for a long time now.
Cycles of peaks and troughs in growth rates are normal.
@sah Nice! Sadly it wouldn't ever fly in the Python context, but I like it nevertheless!
Wrong again. Harvard and MIT were founded in 1636 and 1861. Stanford and UC Berkeley were founded in 1885 and 1868. The Boston area saw much of its population growth occur in the 19th century. The Bay Area saw much of its growth in the 20th.

So, the Boston area has had more time with its universities, rich people, and population base to develop. Yet Silicon Valley developed faster and came to be the bigger innovation center. Again, I suggest there's something else at work besides the presence of top-flight universities, rich people, and time.

What is interesting is that New England was a major force in innovation during the second half of the 19th century, helping to drive the industrialization of the US. So, whatever factor that brought innovation to the Bay Area had to have been strong enough to unseat the existing innovation centers.
"What physical features make space work?" is a very interesting question indeed. It is at the core of research by Christopher Alexander, especially "A Pattern Language" - the book that inspired the pattern movement in software design.
This doesn't look very good, as it focuses on Ray, and not on the issue. I'd rather hear what Kevin Kelly and others shown have to say about the tech. I don't care what they think about each other personally or politically.

I think Kelly is right by the way (he's the guy with white hair and a chin strap beard). There has been too much focus on this guy, and the hope he brings to people. It should motivate people, but only enough to learn or tech more engineering to get there faster with practical, immediate action.
Please, please stop with the "cuil theory" meme. It's dumb.
Every time I see the words 'fMRI', I want to scream. They're an extremely blunt tool which people are using like a scalpel.
You wouldn't want to have to declare named functions for the bodies of built-in control flow constructs like if/else statements and for loops, right? All of the reasons why also apply to why you might not want to declare named functions in order to pass them to other functions.

Read some Ruby code that uses blocks for an example of how passing anonymous functions can become a very clear and natural idiom. In Ruby, you can write your own simple control flow constructs in the form of functions that take a block -- in fact the idiomatic way to iterate through a collection in Ruby is with a function rather than a built-in control flow construct.

In languages like Lisp and Smalltalk, where functions can naturally take more than one in-line block, you can write any control flow construct yourself.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=evbart

There's been considerable discussion on this already. If you feel that it's worth the chance to pitch for the amount they charge, take it. If not, don't.

I think it's a bit opportunistic - there's very little value add for the entrepreneur's point of view. But they've made a value-prop, good or bad.

That said, a small percentage on overall funding might not be a bad idea from a feel-good stance. I wonder if it would be enough to compensate for revenue lost from its current model, and how they would deal with people going outside of the system to close deals.
When is openness and transparency bad?
Looks very nice. Note that the preview produced in "CSS Background" mode doesn't seem to work in Opera. (9.6) Niche browser, I'll admit, but good browser support is not asking too much from a service like this.
You can also try this http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ if you don't want to mess up with browser installations
Amazing place to meet people doing cool stuff in interactive media / music / film. I went last year for the first time and my only regret was not having gone before. I suggest coming with a mind ready for learning and a notebook for jotting down notes and ideas--it's very fertile ground for thought / brainstorming.
The reason no other language does that is because no other mainstream language uses newline and indentation to indicate blocks, which makes all general-purpose multi-line anonymous function syntaxes inherently ugly and non-Pythonic: where should the new block's indentation begin or end? I also regard it as a relatively minor problem as there's little cognitive overhead from simply naming a multi-line function, and I can see advantages in encouraging naming for complex functions.

Having thought about it for a couple of hours, I don't think there is any good solution for adding multi-line anonymous functions to Python. The suggested syntax feels non-Pythonic, is inherently unexpressive and difficult to read, only useful in a few select use-cases while not solving the holy grail of 'pleasant anonymous functions', and the single problem it's solving isn't common enough or big enough to need dedicated syntax and could already largely be solved with a named function. The fact it enables 'misuse' via Ruby-style iteration, going against Pythonic ideals of 'one way to do things', doesn't work in its favour either.

I don't think analogies with decorators are good either. The advantages of decorators is they transform something otherwise difficult-to-read and unexpressive into something easier-to-read and more expressive, whereas this makes something that's easy-to-read less expressive with the only advantage being terseness. Python, unlike other languages, focuses primarily on clarity over code length.
I think what would make Facebook kick ass is if they could find a way to keep you updated on what happens in groups where there is conversation you actually want to participate in, without blurring your inbox with crap.
Never ever pay to pitch. Not in the tech world at least.

Angelsoft is trying to monetize the introduction business from exactly the wrong direction. If they add value to Angels, let them pay.

The good Angels (and VCs) will always talk to you for free.
> Chris Pieper began looking for an academic job in sociology about six months ago, sending off about two dozen application packets. The results so far? Two telephone interviews, and no employment offers.

This doesn't sound like anything new to me. I did my first post-PhD search in 1996. Sent out 105 applications, got 5 interviews and 2 offers. (My degree is in math, BTW.)

> "Many of the universities I applied to received more than 300 applications," he added.

I heard "more than 1200" quoted back in '96.

All this is dispiriting, to be sure, and it does point to troubles in academia. However, it should not be surprising, to anyone who has done their homework. And there is no need to blame the recent economic decline.
The Collapse of the VC Ecosystem & What It Will Look Like Post Recovery
That's an interesting issue.

If you take cigarettes into account, notice how much processing and additives companies add to a standard cigarette and how much engineering goes into growing the actual tobacco plant. If drugs were legalized, all that would be rolled into the `drug market'.

I don't do anything, but I still think the current drug policy is extremely sub-optimal. What worries me though, is when corporations get the green card to manufacture drugs like pot, all that untested engineering, preservatives and additives that are intended to make it more effective make their way into what people consume. If you think about it, mostly all current drug production is as 'organic' as it gets (as far as I know at least).
Right, but let's consider the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is a contraction in a healthy economy. It's normal, and probably necessary. A depression is something worse. We don't know yet if this is a recession or a depression.
Becoming Indie (on the iPhone):  i360Dev Presentation
Why would things suddenly get "so complex"

That's the nature of exponentials. It will look like we have a lot of headroom to spare, but in a couple of steps - wham.

Exponential doubling run backwards:
100% - full.
50% - one step earlier.
25% - two steps earlier.

Two doublings before the limit, you look around and see 75% room to grow into - why would there suddenly be a problem, there's so much room for manoeuvre, stop worrying.
Personally I think it's one of those predictions.

I explain why here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...
Graduate school in a New Ice Age
Is anyone getting it?
My mom is extremely unlikely to watch a film called "Transcendent Man". I doubt if the technical people I know would be interested. Even the people here at HN are skeptical.

This film has a feeling to me of a ... startup trying to launch on technical impressiveness. Only a few people will care, and they have probably already heard about it.
You would do this with VVR, SRDF or SnapMirror, depending on who you bought your storage off. Physical standbys at the database level (a la Dataguard) are much nicer from a management perspective, because at any time you can choose to take a consistent copy by simply stopping recovery at the end of the next archivelog.
Opera has several different levels of cloaking, and it can really through a UA parser for a loop.
Opera can declare itself solely as Opera, or as IE but still mention that it is Opera, or as Firefox but still mention it is Opera, or as IE or Firefox without mentioning it is Opera, or whatever the user wants to type in there to be clever.
You don't think drug manufacturers do this already? Anything that isn't in plant form is practically guaranteed to be cut with something else.
You should export as a alpha-transparency PNG-8 not PNG-24. The reason for this is that IE6 won't render any PNG-24 transparency it just makes it all opaque. However with PNG-8 IE6 will make all alpha transparency transparent.

This means IE6 users get a slightly chunky rounded corner and users with better browsers (IE7, FF, Safari, etc) get a smooth alpha transparency.

My good friend, Nicole Sullivan, has a great presentation on this topic (http://www.slideshare.net/stubbornella/designing-fast-websit...) see slide 55 for PNG optimization.

Nicole also worked on a tool with another friend, Stoyan Stephanof, http://smush.it . Smush.it reduces the filesize of your images without losing quality by removing unnecessary bit data, and I think, metadata. For some of your buttons it was carving 14% off the filesize. It might be worth integrating that in for your users.
Once you know rebirth, it's not interesting any more.
Wow, where has that been all my life?

Thanks a lot for that tip - that's going to come in really handy.
Some fraction of pot all sold includes other drugs to alter it's effect. Still, making pot illegal when over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect has caused many people to distrust just how dangerous other drugs are. IMO, when people distrust established "drug facts" people fall back on antidotes. If your friend has tried "X" 3 or 4 times at party's and seems fine, then it must not really be that bad...

Personally, I think pot should be legal and Cocaine / Heroin / PCP dealers should be shot. But, people tend to dump all "drugs" into the same bin and have zero understanding about how bad some of that stuff really is.
The nice thing about being Ray Kurzweil is that he can keep making predictions on the most simple things and get them right. So much that if hes wrong on any he can easily push them aside.

Technology won't slow down, it can't, not even a depression could slow it down. The information is too available and the school numbers are still high.
How is this study using fMRI as a scalpel? I think the resolution is more than good enough to isolate activity in decision areas of the brain, which is exactly what they're doing.
Let me know if you'd like a pdf of this (see email).
Scraping script, plotting script, and original data are at

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~mokelly/other/grab_HN.zip

Enjoy!
So their customers will continue to be artists. But what makes them believe artists will continue to need big labels' services in 2011 as they've been needing them in the past?

I am just failing to comprehend where do they add value. Marketing dollars? I don't see anything beyond that. And if that's true, how is it different from VC-startup model then?

Labels appear to be just investors who ask too much in return and the only way they "die" is when more effective "investors in music" appear, and now, suddenly, it appears that their "death" isn't about distribution channels at all.
Your estimate on software sales is correct. The 360 currently clearly beats the Wii on attachment rate (games sold divided by consoles sold). I'm not sure where the PS3 figures into all of this; in any case, Sony are the big losers of this console generation so far. Hardware that failed to live up to expectations (and the fiasco with IBM licensing some of the expensive tech to Microsoft, who then made it to market before Sony) generally relatively poor sales, etc.
As a first guess, which the researchers themselves offer, the marker of internet savvy that they found was the frontal lobe processing, which is roughly that used in decision making, synthesis, and discrimination, is invoked. In other words, during internet search, savvy users constantly assessing the credibility of sources and validity of answers. This gives directly two principles which Google has used to dominate the market: authority, as encoded in page rank, and the swift checking of relevance and credibility, as helped by the short blurbs of relevant text, the back-links to similar pages or pages that link to it, and the quick viewing enabled by Google cache and 'view as html.' Anything further improving these processes would likely be a significant improvement in user experience.
Last time I looked at web frameworks in python, they all wanted to create 60+ files, and wanted me to edit things everywhere to actually get started. This kinda turned me off using python to actually do anything relating to websites.

Compared to getting started in, say PHP, the learning curve in python is absurdly high
I'm very curious if, during this demonstration, you were actually allowed to directly interact with the system or not?
The problem is you may be right, and Wii still makes a healthy profit margin. For xbox/ps3 the console is sold at a loss to be made up for in games yes? But the bulk of the top selling games are not made by sony/microsoft. The profits get slimmer and slimmer.

For Wii, the hardware makes profit (owned by nintendo) and NEARLY ALL of the top selling games on wii are made exclusively by nintendo. So even if, as you say, you only ever bought 2 games ... Nintendo is not complaining! I don't have the figures to claim nintendo makes more money than anybody else, but i think its clear their margins and business model is much healthier/sound.

Source: (a reputable business magazine that i cant remember)
In my experience any moving part in a computer (fans, magnetic platter hard disks) will eventually fail, and printers are certainly no exception to this. Like the Office Space fax machine, all printers I've ever had to interact with have got paper jams or problems with paper feeding. I believe the printer at work actually came with a contract with a repairman that would come and do magic with it when it failed, which was often.

An ideal printer would have the minimal amount of moving parts. Currently printing consists of taking a slip of paper and moving it vertically while moving the printing head from left to right. Some companies are researching alternative printers, here's one which has eliminated having to move the printing head: http://silverbrookresearch.com/l-en/technology.html

Now if some company could manage printing entire pages at a time and somehow eliminate having to move the paper very much, things might actually work quickly and without jams.
If I understand correctly the businessplan goes like this:

1) Keep alienating consumers and digital music outlets with courtcases and other mafia-like behaviour until CD-sales approach zero. Make a bit of money, and since music is going to be free anyway, who cares if consumers and the future marketing channel hates us.

2) When CD-sales are low enough give the music away. The sites we are now suing will play along once they get our stuff for free. And those guys over at Apple don't know what they're talking about when they tell us that consumers will gladly pay for music if it just works. We don't really believe that they have digital music sales in excess of $1 billion.

3) When we can't make any more money from CD's well change to 360 music deals, and we'll get a cut of merchandise, live events, etc. Of course well have to find out how to do world tours and other stuff we haven't got a clue about, but we'll worry about that later.

4) During the roll-out of the above we will ignore the fact that artists hate us and are fleeing our labels. They'll surely come back once we get our new business model going.

I mean seriously - is this the best they can do?
I have no idea if the average Japanese programmer is any worse than a European or American one; what I can say with some certainty is that the average European game programmer is quite a bit better than the average programmer. Probably because game programming pay in Europe is terrible compared to "normal" programming. (you're talking by a factor of 2-4) So European game programmers are in it for the love of doing it. Maybe that difference isn't there in Japan?

What I can also attest to from first-hand experience is that the Wii SDK stack is/was riddled with problems on pretty much every level. I don't know enough about other consoles to say how different this situation is, but it certainly strikes me as out of date.
it's deeper than that. when you enforce laws that the people routinely break and come to regard as trivial you undermine the legitimacy of your enforcement of other laws. In essence you lose the ability to claim that laws are for the people's own good.
>> So, as you become more comfortable with the Internet, you actually use more of the brain. <<

Ok, this sounds like an interesting observation (although I wouldn't call that counter-intuitive). What else did they discover? Couldn't find much more there...
I haven't thought much about the effects of big business on a legal drug market. It might be beneficial though.

My views on drug policy border Libertarianism. If you want to significantly damage yourself by using hard drugs, that should be your right. If you hurt other people while high I would be in favor of very tough consequences. I'm not totally sure whether that would increase drug related crimes though, so that attitude might not work.

But I would be extremely disgusted by any person or company who decided to manufacture hard drugs like meth or cocaine. So I'm not quite sure how comfortable I would be with a multi-billion corporation selling hard drugs.

Allowing corporations to sell hard drugs might actually work out well. Right now drugs can be cut with materials such as glass and even cheaper drugs like meth. So legal hard drugs might actually be safer than the illegal version. And any corporation that successfully sells drugs would have to compete with gangs, and other violent organizations. This would mean that criminal organizations would probably lose a lot of market share.
You are very smart guy, but I feel - just feelings - that you make this offer, because you don't believe it?
Here is another way: line up all the drug dealers and shoot them.

Then line up all the drug users and shoot them.

Problem solved.

(I am being serious.)
Snakes on a Cloud
Will you be first in line? Then we are talking!
"they all come from reputable brands. We have options from Canon, HP, Brother, and Samsung."

I think HP printers are junk, at least in the below $500 range.

I recommend buying a Xerox laser printer. In my country I've seen a Xerox all-in-one color laser printer for about $500. It's more expensive than ink printers but you save a lot of money since toners are cheaper than ink.

Aside: How can HP be called reputable? I think they're just living off on what's left of their reputation. Every HP device I've seen was shitty and full of bloatware.