skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Punishing people for purposefully disclosing private information that is clearly not intended to be public is the path to "everyone touching a computer will be in trouble soon?" You act as if he was just playing around on his own computer minding his own business when the big bad government broke his door down.

In Texas, they don't convict homeowners who shoot trick or treaters trespassing on private property: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/In_Texas_can_you_shoot_someone_for....

Don't act so surprised and imposed upon that a culture that very much respects fences sees something wrong with intentionally poking your nose where it doesn't belong, online or offline.
Imagine if the massive empty complexes along the 101 in Silicon Valley gets repurposed to be hacker spaces and dorms, imagine if RadioShack and Fry's makes a comeback and returns to their roots of supplying bare parts, imagine if 3D printers become affordable and everywhere, imagine if crowd funding sites can wire funds within a day, imagine if the distribution channels can also mail out products the next day.

Imagine the number of cycles microevolution that can be achieved throughout a single year.
I don't approve of his motives or actions either, but still, it seems that spending years in jail is a disproportionate punishment for the amount of harm he may have caused AT&T or its customers. This article says that they had second thoughts about how smart their plans actually were and ended up deleting the data rather than selling it to anybody. And it's doubtful that their actions had any lasting effect on the stock price of AT&T - data leaks are a fairly frequent occurrence among large corporations.
http://hnnotify.com/ sort of does what you want, but I agree that having following built in to HN would be slick.
whatever his intention was, data was publicly available

in one way it is no different than AT&T posting all the emails in a public webpage!

I think AT&T must be sued for poor security
India developing national cybersecurity architecture
Yes, that was my impression also, especially since there's no limit on the number of free dynos you can have (for different projects). I was actually surprised to learn that when I looked into setting up a separate staging server for my current project -- I'd thought the free dyno was one to a customer. Nope. The staging dyno is free; I just have to wait a few seconds for it to spin up if I haven't been working with it for a while.

So now I have 3 dynos (2 production, one staging) for $35/month, I can scale up or down at will, deployment is dirt simple, and I don't have to do the sysadmin crap myself.

It's an extreme bargain, IMO.

Now if the project takes off to the point where I need dozens of dynos all the time, that will be different, but ideally in that case I could hire a sysadmin. :-)
Functional Webstack Benchmark
I found the bit on "Context Coloring" very interesting (around 15:00). I want my editor to do that!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev
IOS 7 Crystal Interface
I never use Bing neither I am a fan of Jay-Z, that explains why I never heard about this campaign before. But, for whoever interested in Advertising, this lesson might give some ideas for the purpose of reaching a mass market with "Win-Win" strategy.
Agreed - I can despise his behavior, and how he handled this situation, but at the same time say what he did should not be considered a felony, and, based on what I read on the ArsTechnica article, it's not even clear if I feel like it's criminal.
Damn, I just came back from Japan, would've loved to go! Really bummed I missed the Tokyo meetup too. I really fell in love with Japan on my trip and would've loved to find out more about the tech scene over there.
But that article then goes on to say that they eventually chickened out and deleted the data without having sold it to anyone.
Yeah yeah. He should "man up" or something like that. Those bastard hackers, self declared trolls, activists and stuff...

Do you guys always know the full story behind the news and comment accordingly? If you do based on the articles you read around, I want to remind you that in Aaron's case what you could read about the case was less than half the truth and there are still things we're not sure.
Do you mean HSBC Merchant Services?

http://www.globalpaymentsinc.com/UK/index.html
Great work! Thank you. I've been wanting something like this. Would be great to see it evolve to handlebars templates someday.
I'm wondering these days if you can be any sort of hacker at all without finding some kind of vulnerability in your college's network.

For me, it was a way to steal the AFS space of the previous user (basically, they didn't expire the token... oops). I actually found the initial vulnerability by accident (something crashed due to network problems, reconnected and went, "WTF, those aren't my files!"), but I did find a good way to reproduce it on demand (yank Ethernet cord at proper time). Thankfully, I had read enough stories like this way back then and submitted the bug anonymously. This was ~2000 or around then, mind you.

I also tried to get university management to switch people over to using SSH way back in 1998, but it was something like 4-5 years before they eventually did so. I'm guessing they had no idea what I was talking about or why it even mattered back then, even though anyone could see everyone's passwords going over the wire with all the people who had to telnet for various reasons. Maybe they assumed that log file they were writing our activity to would catch anybody doing anything weird? It was cleverly named "resugol"--read that backwards if you're confused.
Send me a link to something you've built and we'll talk. My site is in my profile.
Wasn't it just email addresses that he published? I'm all for protecting personal information, but I find it hard to believe it's a felony for collecting a list of email addresses.
It is always "history repeating" with Kim Kimble.
When talking about productivity, it's important to acknowledge the difference between speed and progress. While working uninterrupted is great for development speed, it might also lead you down the rabbit hole, working with irrelevant features of your liking. I find that regular interruptions helps setting a new course before going too far in the wrong direction.

This is one of the reasons why agile methods work so well. Small tasks limits the scope of concentrated work, reducing the risk of going astray. Pair programming offers a watching party, who can guide and direct while you are busy tunnel-visioning some small method.
They also made 2 more movies, "D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes" (1999) and "Electroma" (2007).
Keep in mind that May 2011-mid June 2011, it rose by 10-15x (then proceeded to drop like a rock). It's current price is still about 1/2 of that high.
Well, there's also the size nuance here -- that you need to spend far less than you'll end up earning. For the non-Chinese speakers out there, it literally means "Spend [a] small [amount of] money, make big money," with the same implication found in the techie epigram "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning."
I know weev personally. He's "an unsympathetic defendant", and probably the 9th level Internet Troll, but his goal was fundamentally speech -- he wanted to draw a lot of attention to the issue, and embarrass ATT (hopefully enough that they'd stop being such fuckups about security), etc.

He wasn't trying to profit from this. If that had been his goal, he would have been a lot more stealthy.

It's arguable that he had "cleaner" motives in his act than aaronsw -- some people say aaronsw wanted to release all the files he recovered to the Internet (although there's no proof of that); weev just wanted ATT to suck less.

weev has said things far worse than what's alleged in this case (that they wanted to compile a list and direct market the users); yet, if you judge him by what he's actually done, he's just an asshole at times, but basically reasonable. Fortunately just being an ass isn't a federal crime (although I guess conspiracy to be an ass is).
The problem I have with these CSS mini programs is that a 'dynamic' site might not always load the css on each page, unless under certain specific circumstances.

i.e. what about ajax calls that result in a new div showing?

or a responsive CSS file with media queries depending upon the size of the screen?
The crime in question was accessing a computer system in an unauthorized fashion to collect e-mail addresses.

Yes, the distinction is relevant. Taking photos of my wife in public and publishing them? Creepy but not illegal. Walking through my door (locked or unlocked, it doesn't matter) to take photos of my wife in my house? You're lucky if you don't get shot.
So what? The reaction suggests that the next time he will pastebin his next hack all right. Is this what we as a society want?
Looks like I'm not the only UTS alumni who reads Hacker News...
> You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child.

It depends on the person, and their depression. The last item on your list did it for me.
> Imagine if the massive empty complexes along the 101 in Silicon Valley gets repurposed to be hacker spaces and dorms

I sympathise with your intent but that sounds like a sweatshop to me.
I did a write-up of my advice on the topic here:
http://www.doorkeeperhq.com/event-planning/organizing-an-int...

For a good overview of tech events going on in Japan, see https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=fvijvohm91uifvd9hr...

One thing you could do is try to support some local events. Some ideas:

* Give a presentation at a local event (English is fine; I can introduce you to event organizers in the design / Ruby community)
* Serve as a mentor for a startup weekend - http://startupweekend.jp/
* Participate in this event for event organizers: http://devlove-kansai.doorkeeper.jp/events/2338 (I'll be presenting in [broken] Japanese)

Feel free to follow up with me if you have any more specific questions.
Gmail's ability to wait 30 seconds before actually sending the email so that it can be canceled sort of provides what you want. I use it surprisingly often when I realize I want to review or re-word something that I just sent.
He didn't even publish it. He reported it to the media, so they saw it in order to verify, and he deleted the list.
It's really irritating - whenever I'm in China, I feel like I'm in a desert of the free information (see: GFW & Github) and when I'm in the US I'm in a desert of accessible components for EE work. Now that I'm out of college, and have a better idea of what a EE builders paradise looks like, I should see if Taiwan bridges the gap here.
It's not likely that someone would get a long jail sentence for breaking into your car and not taking anything. If they had never committed a crime before, they'd probably get a fine or probation. There are usually monetary thresholds for a crime to be considered "grand theft" (a felony) vs. "petty theft" (a misdemeanor).
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It helps me when I know what the site/business model is. Every niche and business is different and should take a different strategy because of this.
Understanding vertical-align, or "How (Not) To Vertically Center Content"
Okay, when I find a bug in your web app I will publish it anonymously, widely and embarrassingly for you.

That's because you didn't want to be friendly. You wanted to be hard. You wanted DoJ. Now you will be forced to want class action suit from your customers and bankrupcy.
Quite funny to read about maternity leave being an extraordinary perk - 6 months paid is the statutory minimum in Ireland and it must start a reasonable amount of time before the child is born.

Is it also true that there is no minimum amount of annual leave allowance in the US? You have to negotiate it?

edit Not to suggest Ireland is ahead of the curve here, paternity leave does not exist whereas it would in, say, Sweden.
So awesome! Our project at work is quite a big web-based app and we've been developing it for the past 2 years. So you can imagine there is always things to clean up. Will definitely try this!
What's the truth here? What did Hamed "do"?

Exposing a security flaw doesn't get you expelled. He had to have taken it one or more steps too far. I'd like to see the facts.
I don't think that violating digital boundaries without anything else should warrant long jail sentences (or any jail sentences at all). But I think there is value in enforcing borders in their own right, even if the punishment is nominal.
Should probably redo the slogan. It kinda rhymed so we picked it, but it obviously isn't that accurate :) A better slogan might be 'Testing Database as a Service' or something like that.
It's probably cheaper to pay a PhD candidate to create realistic visuals than to pay a graphic designer to create bombastic claptrap.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090007
Thanks, saved me a lot of time.
One more Tron movie please.
Not sure I'd want to throw my schema out of our infrastructure.

At the moment, our integration test run takes nearly two hours but this is rolling out the schema and the sheer number of test cases (we have over 1 million lines of test cases). Something that speeds it up would be welcome but this is not for us.
I don't know what Japanese programmers use for social network, but try making a mixi group for hackers and see if you attract any people.
But they did publish it. Just because they didn't _intend_ to publish it doesn't mean it wasn't published.

Right now the URL I'm looking at has "id=5095821" in it. If I change that to "id=5095822", I'm looking at something else published by Hacker News. But by DoJ standards, I'm "hacking" and have broken the law if HN didn't deliberately publish it.

weev is an ass. But he didn't hack anything.

These cases are trying to set a standard of "security by intent". There is no such thing. It's like my internet banking saying "To access your bank account, please type in your account number. Be careful to get it right or you'll be looking at someone else's account"
Uh. No you could already say that. You are also qualified to talk about how hard it is to earn money and find customers for whom you can deliver value. You can also now maybe talk about the balancing act that occurs when you take on outside money, start a new product, or look for customer money in places that are less-than-promising. Perhaps you can also talk about what it's like to have to do things you might find distasteful and work with people you might otherwise not choose, so the business can stay afloat.
The point is that no-one actually has those faulty assumptions. They are make-believe, and thus do not form the basis for any decisions that have been made (or will be made in the future).
I'm not sure who you're using but 1-day turns on PCB and assembly are not at all uncommon in the Bay Area.
You've never had real depression or suicidal thoughts. Consider yourself lucky.
Another question would be is: does harvesting emails embarrass the, in his words, the "unjustly wealthy"? Is it the CEO or one of the board members that is responsible for web server configurations?

Obviously pure speculation (mixed with cynicism) recalling this story of the email harvesting I have no problems imagining a conversation like this occurred:

PR Flack: "Sir, we had a little PR snafu today and millions of email addresses of paying customers were exposed."

CEO: "So what?"

PR Flack: "Well it looks bad sir."

CEO: "Fine, shitcan some 50K a year nerd in one of data centers and then issue a press release indicating how seriously we take customer privacy".
No minimum time off in the US. For most white collar jobs, 10 or 15 vacation days is typical (but many Americans feel pressure to not use all their vacation days). Some companies offer more, especially to employees with seniority. Government jobs tend to be nice about this, too. This is in addition to holidays -- about 8 or so per year is typical for these workers, I think (days like Christmas that most everyone in the company has off).

Those working blue collar jobs, however, aren't always so lucky. They might not have any vacation days or even holidays.
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Have you seen a therapist for cognitive behavior therapy? I could see that being effective.
Here's his expulsion letter, stating why he was expelled according to the school.

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/560325-al-khabaz-expu...
I am the Director of IT for the Saanich school district which has incubated this project. There is a lot to say about how we got here but this is a somewhat different project than most other open source student information systems (and all commercial products that we are aware of).

Firstly it is build from the ground up to work as an enterprise system. Meaning rather than just function for a district and its schools our system is architected to function at the provincial or state / district / school level.

The system is designed to accommodate cross-enrolment between schools within a district and between districts. As well it can accommodate continuous entry (year round schools) and is built for conventional as well as distance learning schools.

It is also has a sophisticated security model which considers users at the enterprise level, district level, school level or any combination thereof. In other words you can be a vice-principal at one school (with that view), a teacher in the same school (with that view) and a parent with children in another school district.

The system is also built to work in a distributed hosting model where the primary can be at one site and secondarys at other sites. With the next version of PostgresQL it will be possible to have multiple primaries.

There is so much that is different about this system from the standard SIS. With its capacity to function at the enterprise system it could accommodate an entire state or province.

Right now the system has been licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2) to ensure that we have better control of the code but we are definitely looking for input and help into the system and it will be available to other jurisdictions when it is complete.
Have a look at the documenation on our website and I will try and answer any questions or comments relating the the system.

Thanks for all the supportive comments.

Gregg Ferrie

PS if you wonder why this has gotten this much support in a relatively small school district we had already converted most of our servers and workstations to Linux-based diskless clients (approximately 2500 in 18 schools). All of teachers and students are used to using open source software including LibreOffice, Scribus, The Gimp and many more.
Not that bad. You can accesss any site like in the other countries. The only tool you need is a VPN account. GFW doesn't really block everybody. They can easily block the few big VPN providers but they've never done that. (I'm using StrongVPN). I don't think that's because they are ingnorant.
Great moments in failed predictions
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090007

A few days after reporting the flaw, he got caught using http://www.acunetix.com/ (web vulnerability scanner) on their network. He says he was checking to see if they fixed the flaw. I don't think he was intentionally being malicious, but his explanation doesn't jive with his actions.

I still think it sucks that they expelled him. But I am unable to logically see how he didn't break the rules.
Are you saying it's not good to think of your workers as being more like server hardware than like founders?
Everyone in a public area voluntarily exposes themselves to the public. Your images in public spaces are legal to record. If you disagree, try suing a security camera operator.
This guy could not be more right on his prediction. Game of the Year (GOT) 2012 was not a blockbuster like Max Payne 3, Far Cry 3 or Assassins Creed 3. Damn it was an indie game, Journey. As i can see, not a surprise for everyone.
Many facets of US employment law are different on a state-by-state basis, so "The US sets no minimum/maximum for ..." can frequently be true but vacuous.

Broadly speaking, salaried employees in the US can expect a statutory minimum of 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Fairly few states mandate paid maternity/paternity leave. They're available at many companies as a perk.

Broadly speaking, Americans enjoy broad discretion in negotiating the amount and format of paid leave. By law and custom, the practical minimum is ~2 weeks plus holidays for most white collar workers. We historically do not have European-style vacations as an expected feature of the social contract.
thank you, I was looking for something like this, have to keep the label "use with caution". but great work
Obama's Last Inauguration Moment: The President Pauses To Savor The Crowd
Well, isn't that just disgraceful. No wonder George Costanza was a half-assing burnout...
As our funding is completely from the school district we currently have the code on our internal Git. The code itself is based on the Education Community Source license primarily so we can keep the development relevant to British Columbia. Once we have completed the product we intent to release the code to be forked by other jurisdictions to modify for their own purposes.

Please feel free to have a look at the openStudent website for documentation about the system and please ask any and all questions.

gregg
I'm running a Hetzner server for 10yrs now. Debian, now Ubuntu. I've installed Redis, Nginx and some other stuff with apt-get and have an basic iptables setup.

Could you detail what I would not need to do when I'd chose Heroku? What "expertise" you are speaking of, apt-get?

I'm confused these days about cloud and how this would save me "full time dev ops". Could you elaborate?
HTTP compression samples
Oh I know, my family lives in China and I used to administer OpenVPN servers for them. Things have gotten a lot worse in the past couple of months as they start to deploy DPI and shut down suspicious connections. I believe my family uses Astrill for the moment which goes in and out.
The work is tedious, the industry a sweatshop, but the final output awesome.
Also - other places I have worked (NetApp notably) have had better benefits than the Google offers I have received. So don't read too much into the hype, there are several places that are on par or better when it comes to treating your employees well.

And yes, it is true that there is no minimum leave federally. I don't know about individual states. The Department of Labor is linked[0] on the wikipedia article about leave, seems to be an accurate source.

[0]: http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/workhours/vacation_leave.htm
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I don't understand how using an external attack tool is grounds for anything. If Hamed could use it to search for exploits an attacker could have used it to search for exploits.

Especially if a students' information had been previously exposed and the attacker had access to everyone's personal information / passwords!

-- Edit : after reading his expulsion letter, it seems he supposedly injected SQL on both occasions. One imagines they strictly forbid him from doing so again. Sure, he probably should have asked for a sandbox system if he wanted to do ad hoc security research, but it is still quite a logical leap to actually expel him.
Absolutely not, he should have checked with a lawyer first about how to accomplish his objectives within the framework of the law. Then he would not be in jail but instead making lots of money.

It's really not that hard to compile a list of email addresses from a public API in a way that doesn't violate the law.
ex-prj.com is a cool idea, I like it.