skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do computer science professors not understand the concept of white-hat hacking?

Unfortunately, if they were at all competent they wouldn't be teaching at a place like that. CS programs at minor universities are notoriously poor and staffed by whoever they could get, and it's not going to be anyone that can make decent pay working on current technology.
So, is there anything in this story that we didn't know from the indictment? Or any bits of the indictment that have been confirmed by NYT reporters talking to sources who were there? If the NYT is just summarizing the indictment, this doesn't seem very helpful at all.
>In what way was I wrong?

"I was worried that I'd done damage to my brain" implies that you believed your brain was at risk from meditation. You continued through the course, and yet your brain still functions. You assessed the risk to your brain as "high", you came out of it (presumably) without brain damage, ergo your threat assessment was wrong.

To put it another way, you were describing your mind state in a point in time which was incorrectly assessing itself. It turned out that you did not do damage to your brain. You thought your brain was at risk, and your own experience showed that you were wrong to assess the risk so highly.

Yeah, I have (strong) disagreements with the discourses - not just the kalapas thing, but the reference to higher- and lower existences, not to mention the dogma of rebirth. It's mentioned in passing, but it contradicts earlier claims of "non-sectarianism". In fact, it left such a bad taste in my mouth I left my first course (5th night). I went back and almost left again, but mastered my anger. The third time I was less angry. Now I just laugh - the Buddha (and Goenka) are just products of their time, communicating as best they can with the tools they have. The core observations, the core practice, doesn't require any of it.
Mine is currently reporting 1.4
Apparently, the answer is "Easily, unless it's all caps."
Didn't Steve Yegge have the same issue ? I wish there was less layers to important research, I always have a feeling that solutions would emerge if some people have met but they just don't know each others.
The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later
There are far more compelling advantages to dynamic typing than fewer keystrokes.

Static type checking attempts to use compile time information to make claims about the runtime behavior of a program. This technique obviously fails to the extent that the runtime environment diverges from the compile time environment. Dynamic type checking, on the other hand, has no such limitation: it has perfect fidelity to the runtime environment because it occurs within that runtime environment. Even if the runtime environment itself changes at runtime!

Here's a concrete example. You compile a Haskell program that dynamically links a package. You then install a newer version of the package, which has an incompatible API change. Your program, which reported no type errors, now has a type error (a static typist may not agree this is a type error, but a dynamic typist would assert it is). And if your program starts at all, it will likely fall over and die, because GHC's codegen is brittle against such changes.

Fortunately, we do not suffer this fate on platforms like OS X or iOS, where binaries routinely run on multiple prior and future releases of the OS, with their accompanying shared libraries, while taking advantage of newer features whenever available. ObjC's dynamic typing is a big help here: it's simple to express "call this method, if it exists." And if you call a method that does not exist, you get a readable exception instead of being sent wildly through a random slot in a vtable.

(And oh yeah, having a stable ABI helps too.)

So this is one of the big strengths of dynamic typing: it works even if you don't know where exactly your program will run.
That's one definition of a failure, but it could just as well be a definition of a raging success.

If more people want to buy tickets to a concert than number of available seats, is the concert then a failure?
This evening realized how dependent I am on SO. Trying to figure out how to dynamically set parameters for a CSS animation (turns out it's harder than it sounds) and the only useful answers I can find are on SO. Also very glad to have Google's cached versions.
Worth noting that the porous, "paper", type masks that you sometimes see people wearing (being in Tokyo right now I'm understating their prevalence), are entirely worthless for defending against viruses. They're too small for those masks to be effective.

They're good for blocking particulate matter though, so if you're trying to prevent blood spatter to the mouth, thumbs up.
What? I don't agree at all. I wrote something in my personal blog on the Internet. That's the bar. If you want to tweet, or write something in on your blog, that's also the bar.

But this is a kind of club where I didn't post those writings. And when I have discussed them, I've been civil as is our rule here.

We have two ways of saying "This is noise, not signal." One is to downvote. The other, flagging, is reserved for special cases."Shut up!" is not one of those ways. And if you count, my words here on HN have over 100 votes.

If you don't like what I have to say, argue with it and/or vote on it. That's what we do here. This isn't Reddit.
I believe you'll want this:
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

There may also be homebrew packages for the X11 headers/libs, but I believe XQuartz is the current popular way to do it.
Not really that little known as every biography of his references this stuff, and it provides the source material for a number of Feynman anecdotes.
Kim Dotcom's Mega.com now accepting registrations
No mention of Kim Dotcom or Julian Assange in the story. But that seems like higher-profile cases with the same kind of bullying tactics.
Dotcom Raid Anniversary Marked by New File-Sharing Site (mega.com)
Initializing variables to zero doesn't buy you much in terms of safety, IMHO. The value 0 isn't necessarily any more valid than an arbitrary value. Better is Java/ML/Haskell's rule whereby variables must be explicitly initialized before use. This can be implemented with a simple compiler pass.
Obviously, those guys aren't, kudos to them.
i would like to hope that valve (via the associated steamworks related SDK they provide) creates a set of tools that make porting to linux a breeze for developers. I don't care if they have to target a specific distribution of linux, and or only support a specific set of video cards. I m sure if they take the first step, build the momentum, they can get a snowball effect going.
> If NK ever opens up, you won't have the oppurtunity every again!

Thank goodness for that. The sooner the better.
I'd like to humbly suggest going into the growing education technology (aka "edtech") field. There are lots of startups here with big ambitions and hiring needs (disclaimer: I'm in an edtech startup).

Of course, there are lots of edtech startups that have meager ambitions and meager products too, but many are aspiring to be a part of shifting education.

Here's why I suggest something in education.

I'm not smart enough to be a medical doctor or theoretical physicist either, but I have the drive to make the world a better place for my children. And if I can't cure cancer myself, if I can improve the education system, maybe I can pave the way for someone else to cure cancer. Maybe I can do that in a scalable way and pave the way for all kinds of brilliant minds.

This system has its share of barriers too, of course. A lot of edtech startups are smartly starting with a small, doable solution. But many that I know have the ambition and drive to do much more.

There are LOTS of problems in the education system that need solving. If you want a list, email me and I can send you lots. If you go buy an educator a coffee, s/he can give you a laundry list too.

The field of education desperately needs people who have the drive and desire to make a change. Change education, and it will have a cascading effect into other fields too.
You can also pastebin it. That's what you should do.
It is easy sometimes to assume that all versions of linux are the same. Some linux programs that work on one distro dont necessarily work on others or dont work with the same effectiveness. One key example of this that I run into all the time is valgrind. It works on OS X, but I often get errors due to some action that I am trying being unsupported.
During undergrad I discovered the university's blackboard-like site sent plaintext passwords over http, and the majority of its use was over wireless. I went to the IT office responsible for the site, told them about it, and refused to give my name when they asked. After reading some of the horror stories on this page, I feel really lucky that the IT department didn't go further to figure out who I was and get me in trouble. End result was that quickly afterward their site forced https on you...
Dawson isn't a university. Its a CEGEP. In Quebec high school only goes until grade 11, after which most students do 2 years at a CEGEP before going on to university. It replaces Grade 12 and first year of university.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP
Iterators don't protect against iterator invalidation due to e.g. emptying a vector while you iterate over it. Accessing elements through an invalidated iterator is undefined behavior and can lead to exploitable security vulnerabilities.

Even modern C++ has very unsafe parts.
Happened to me in 2000 in France. Same sort of stuff. Didn't kill my career. Just went elsewhere. I guess the French education system at least had this that it couldn't ban me nationwide :)
What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending?
economic considerations

Erm -- look over there.

pile of money

Yes. I did research as a student and as a research programmer / computational biologist. I was just an author on a paper for work done three years ago. There will probably be another one being written up in a year or two.
“It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.” -- Eleanor Roosevelt
How are callbacks handled in this library? I prefer js anonymous functions to Procs & lambdas in Ruby.
Thank you for sharing this. This ones going to help us introduce the concept to some of my interns.
That's unfortunate, but I understand. If you go to Microsoft's developer page they have a good list of potential Hosts that you can use. I'm sure if Microsoft advertises for them then they are a good choice.

There is also Amazon, http://aws.amazon.com/windows/.

I found this on the internet, http://kevinfitzgerald.net/articles/umbraco-and-mono.htm and I am sure you have seen it too. Mono's beta 3.0 release looks promising, once it hits stable there is a good chance Umbraco will be less painful to use.
An ode to humility
I think you're being a bit unfair to google, apple, and even, as much as I don't want to say it, ugh, facebook. And I think this comes from trivializing communication.

It's easy to focus in on the seemingly least substantive aspects of the work a company does, such as reducing the idea of google into a company trying to pimp out your attention by way of ads. However, even while that's true it's not the whole story. Take youtube for example, as a part of google. It is also quite easy to trivialize of course, but it is rapidly becoming a nexus of communication. It's increasingly becoming the way that artists share their music, for example. And it's also becoming a host to things like first hand journalistic reporting, educational videos, and many forms of entertainment. How much have people's lives been enriched by the music, art, comedy, and scientific knowledge they've experienced through youtube?

And even if you restrict the subject to merely google search, how much have people's lives been changed by that as well? How many times has a google search helped someone struggling with a disease learn something or gain access to resources which helped them understand their treatment options or find a better doctor or care facility? How many times has a casual google search resulted in someone learning something important that they didn't know before? That sort of thing can affect someone's entire worldview, it can impact the entirety of the rest of their life.

There are things that bother me about the way google, apple, and facebook do business, but I don't think there's anything especially ignoble about their work in general. Much of what they do is to facilitate communication between people. Sometimes the result of communication is banality (e.g. "Check out this bowl of cheerios I made for breakfast, pls RT.") and sometimes it's farce (e.g. Jerry Springer), but sometimes it is the very essence of our civilization in the form of art, science, humor, personal growth, etc.

Edit: Also, I don't disagree with your sentiment in general, but I think it's a bit too harsh to paint companies that are having a significant effect on our world as trivial. And I think there are better and more positive ways to motivate people than the standard "you're wasting your life!" diatribe.
I want to look into something that is truly cutting edge and can cause disruption.

John listed many good projects. Based on ^^, other good places to look to help generate ideas:

Current notable movers:

* http://rockhealth.com (also check out their Events page in case you may able to get cheap access to conferences as a student)

* http://blog.23andme.com

And places to see what people are talking about/building:

* http://www.quora.com/Health-Informatics and all sorts of related topics

* https://angel.co/health-care-information-technology and all sorts of related topics

* http://mobihealthnews.com

* http://www.imedicalapps.com

And in general I'd recommend following any company/person you learn about from the above ^^ on http://crunchbase.com

Also feel free to shoot me an email tyler@thetylerhayes.com. I'm in the process of starting up my own health tech-related project (http://blog.stayinyourprime.com) so I've been doing a lot of research. Happy to share what I've learned and chat more about what you're doing.
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Is the C++ ABI issue ever going to be solved?
shall we all assume it was an sql injection? does anyone know what the actual vulnerability was?
Microparticles Allow you to Live Without Breathing for 15 to 30 Minutes
The ceasing of the property - doesn't that make Mrs Ortiz guilty of RICO herself?
1. It's a fact that there are many competing theories about why the DoJ were so passionate about this case.

2. There are also many competing opinions on which reforms would be appropriate or sufficient in the wake of what was done to Aaron Swartz.

3. It's not surprising, nor is it inappropriate, that Wikileaks would be advocating for more sweeping reforms and adjustments in how we look at the application of judicial force in these situations.

Remember that it is a core contention of Wikileaks that the channeling of power within and across organisations and the loci of that power and decision-making are at the moment dangerously obscure to the public. Of course they would be looking for signs of that in this case.

To the extent that there is evidence for ulterior agendas, it's important. Lack of evidence makes it, as you say, murky -- people see what they want to see. But it's also true that you can't find what you're not looking for.

To put it another way:
There are conspiracy theories but there are also conspiracies, and systemic mal-alignments of purpose. Formulating conspiracy theories without evidence is the opposite of helpful. But identifying unforeseen patterns of collaboration can help us reason defensively about situations we, as a public, will never have adequate information of.
Seems plausible to wonder if he was involved with Wikileaks, or Anonymous too.

The whole thing reminds me of the Sacco & Vinzetti case. They got railroaded on a bullshit charge, but they couldn't fight it because they (probably) had other stuff to hide...
Nope. I'm also not a developer.
As books go, this one is a waste of trees. The book is made up of a series of more or less disjoint pieces. Some of them are right off the wall. He's an AIDs denier - a loaded term, but you get the idea. I vaguely recall one about him being passed out in a cabin for some period of time and a brown recluse spider returning night after night to dine on a festering sore.

Hard to know if Mullis is a gifted technician or a lucky wanker. Say, compare the way that Feynman writes about himself: Feynman is kind of amusing and matter-of-fact; this book is irritatingly self-conscious about being un-stereotypical, and the book gives no sense that his famous technique is other than a one-off.

I assume that he had very little to do with the production of the book - it would be kind of a bummer to think that such a smart guy would be such a douche.
Show HN: Unemployment Rates with d3.js
> The agreement prevented Mr. Al-Kabaz from discussing...

No, it didn't, because he was blackmailed into the NDA. It's completely unenforceable. It was signed under duress and only benefited one party.
It's not every protocol that must handle arbitrary messages, that doesn't make them useless. Having a 9600 baud half duplex connection for messaging that requires low latency is quite different from 1Gbps Ethernet, and that makes every byte count.
Also see Katelyn Gleason's post on a recent Nick Grossman (of USV) post about things he thinks people can build in this space: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5043588
Inside Kim Dotcom's House
Just Sergey Brin rocking Google Glass on the downtown 3 Train in NYC
The most obvious is that people need to make a living

I think this is why YC and other incubators exist today to help developers financially so that they can work on Real World Problems rather than coming up with another photo sharing apps?

I also wonder why YC did not encourage devs who want to work in such domains. Aza Raskin's Massive Health is the one which comes in my mind that is doing something for humanity.
It actually takes a lot more to have a career in the sciences; the field is extremely competitive. More so than getting a job at Google or Facebook. I applied for a lot of computational biology post-docs (having a PhD in the field), and because I wasn't from a big-name university, didn't get anything, and wound up working for one of the so-called "WTF" companies.
Nothing is future proof - don't worry. We have only been programming for the last 60 years. C has endured 40 years out of that. That is no guarantee that it will endure further. But the point is programming practices has not drastically changed during the course of these years. As and when a disruption occurs there, almost all our current tools shall be rendered obselete.
Back in 1999 when I was a freshman in university, my school had a server for students to host their websites on and use Pine for email. The server did not give shell access... but then there was a security hole in Pine that would allow you to run chsh. So I did that, and got shell access. I think the worst thing I did (other than running ls in a few directories) was use it to connect to IRC.

Since I wasn't really trying to hide anything, so one of the IT guys must have seen me with shell access and reported me. My punishment was having my ethernet turned off in my dorm room (even though the incident occurred in a computer lab while the dorm's ethernet was turned not ready for use yet). I appealed the decision and met with the Dean, and she said I was considered a threat to the school so I should be happy that my punishment wasn't worse.

Anyways, the rest of the year in the dorm was spent playing a cat and mouse game. I used my computer on my roommate's LAN port, so they ended up shutting off his ethernet as well.. I felt bad about that, especially since they refused to give him internet access for the rest of the year. So I ended up making a 50 foot ethernet cable and running it through the bathroom into another person's room (Two 2-person dorm rooms were connected by a common bathroom). That got shut off, so I bought a new LAN card (to get a new MAC address) and connected to another ethernet drop. I was able to get online for the rest of the year, but that sure left a sour taste in my mouth for my school.

Edit: I remember one close call... over a break (I was one of the few people in the dorm), water came out of the shower drain and flooded our rooms. I came back from spending the day out to see the Dean going into our room to inspect the damage, and I quickly had to hide my 50 foot cable that went through the bathroom.
You are right, it appears to be C++-specific and looks like a typo in the link.

C++98, 17.4.3.1.2 Global names

- Each name that contains a double underscore (__) [...] is reserved to the implementation for any use.
There does seem to have been a change in the culture at MIT though. I can't find the article now, but I recall reading years ago about the student body being vocally opposed to one administrator in particular who didn't seem to grok the culture there.

I did find an article from 2007 about a case that raised questions about how the university handled hacking (http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N4/hackers.html), and a follow-up from 2008 titled, "Hacking tradition under fire?" (http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N66/hacking.html)

So clearly there's been some discussion a sea change in the culture at MIT. If true -- if it is even perceived to be true -- that will really be a problem for the school, as its status among technical universities owes a lot to its cultural respect for all forms of hacking.
"and—under civil law—the burden of proof is on the defense to demonstrate their property is innocent."

Really? I thought the burden of proof was on the prosecution side to demonstrate guilt.
I like how Google+ makes +1-ing and sharing that you +1'd something two separate operations. Sometimes you want people that have already found the content to discover that you liked it too, and sometimes you want to share something you like with your friends. It's nice that I get to decide.
How to use Newsstand as an app folder without jailbreaking
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Right, it seems like "easily accessing your pocket watch, and preventing you from dropping it" was a solved problem once. I'm not sure why we forgot, in the US.
The title is misleading. He wasn't actually expelled for finding the flaw; he was expelled because, after reporting the flaw, he ran an exploit program on the school's server without permission, allegedly to see if it had been fixed. Had he only reported it, he would not have been subject to any disciplinary action.
Found a bug like this at my school and reported it a few months ago. The guy who responded to me said he'd fix it but it's still live :(