skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is the work at Matasano (and security consulting in general) mostly attacking web apps? How often do you get to use tools such as IDA Pro to reverse binaries?

Either way, it must be fun doing that full time. Nothing in the world comes quite close to the feeling of breaking someone's system. The building excitement and anticipation as you realise you might just have found a place where they don't properly encode one protocol into another. The intense satisfaction when you get to demo an exploit. Unlike the rest of app dev, you can prove your attack is right.
> In the real world of mathematics, this is as stupid a question as me asking “Is there a mathematical size bigger than the amount of integers but less than the amount of real numbers?” [1] because you can’t answer it without going through a lot of trouble to specify the “axioms” (basic assumed rules for doing mathematics) you want used on the problem.

I don't think this analogy holds very well--a curious student could reasonably and earnestly ask about the continuum hypothesis, since it's not at all obvious from first principles that the answer depends so heavily on obscure set axioms. On the other hand, the order of operations question seems to have been designed to confuse people and stir up meaningless, unresolvable arguments over PEMDAS.
Jack Dorsey on 60 Minutes
>> The issue stems from the incorrect (but often subconscious) belief that there exists a Bible of Mathematics somewhere

Well, yes, I thought so. Most mathematical expressions are pretty standard and I'm surprising that there is no a definitive answer to this question.

The way I see it is:

6/2(1+2)
6/2(3)
6/2*3
3*3
9

If I wanted to apply 23 first, I'd write: 6/(23). Maybe I thought like that because that's how all calculators I've used work.
Is Your Startup Community Screwed When the Poster Child Leaves?
The title (on his website) contains the wrong formula. I've skimmed the post a few times, wondering why the correct answer wasn't twelve... Then I saw it :/
Computers will conclude the answer is 1 as they will prioritise the multiply.

Now us humans will get 9 as they will do the 6/2 and then multiply the result with the (1+2) for 3x3.

Now given the multiply is implied and computers like to have that symbol in many languages and the divide sign as again a form not overly used in programming languages, then it is clearly expressed in a form for human consumption. With that we imply the 6 divided by 2 is in its own bracket and will think it is 9, then we will think again if we know computers and then think 1.

Moral being whilst lots of brackets and braces can look untidy, they do clarify beyond doubt.
Looks pretty 'standard', but I love it.
If the expression were 6÷2x(1+2)=?, then my intuition would be to evaluate from left to right (division before multiplication). But removing the x symbol makes me want to perform the multiplication via juxtaposition first, just like if it were 6÷2x. Would anyone really interpret 6÷2x as 3x?

note: I had to use an x instead of the asterisk to represent multiplication, since I don't know how to escape the asterisk in Markdown.
Please consider this extraordinary advice:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.

2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. The second strategy is fairly easy.[0]

I used to do 1.) and now I focus on 2.). Its been very effective for my career and general happiness. I consider myself a dreamer and this philosophy leads me to generate very actionable ideas. If you can read code and understand what code does - you're well on your way to being in the top 25% of people working in IT. Getting into the top 25% of programmers is probably easier than you think.[1] There are so many careers where even a basic understanding of coding will give you a huge advantage. You'll be a superhero if you take these skills to a job where you're surrounded by non-programmers. Seriously.

One more thing: C++ is not a wise choice for a first language. Its fucking hard. Python is considered a good choice to learn programming.

[0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
When you have 6/2(3), it is not well define if the correct expansion is 6/(23) or (6/2)3. In my experience with math, the intuitive answer is that implicit multiplication takes precedence.
For example, say instead of 6/2(3), you had 6/2x. Following your convention, that would expand to (6/2)x, not 6/(2x). You might say that the () around the last number make a difference. However that would imply that 6/2x!=6/2(x). Which I find deeply unsettling if true.

Ultimitly, this is why we tend to use notation which uses placement to resolve these issues unambiguasly, without alot of parentheses.
I am from Balkans, Balkans conflicts were largely influenced and made worse from the outside, I would even say that they would not happen if there were not desire from Germany and other powers to make as much mess as possible.

Somehow Balkan conficts never got critical review from journalists and rosy propaganda stayed even to this day.

For example in present day Croatia there is only 7% of people who would actually stay to live there if they could go and live somewhere else. Danke Deutschland indeed.
I am very surprised that people would evaluate the multiplication via juxtaposition after the division symbol. According to that method, 6 ÷ 2x would be evaluated as 3x, which I find extremely unlikely to be the intention of that expression.
You wasted time on this by writing this comment.. not sure why you're discriminating others as idiots.
How to Make Tough Decisions Objectively
No, they won't. Computers will compute it as nine because they evaluate the parenthesis, then go left to right.

6 / 2 (1 + 2)

6 / 2 * 3

3 * 3

9
The only problem with that is we would have to get a lot better at building rockets first. Currently it seems to take a fairly large crew (and clean rooms and a lot of care) to get a successful launch off earth, and even then there are often glitches. Getting the Moon lander to launch from the moon surface was easier due to lower gravity and no atmosphere. But I can't imagine a rocket on Mars sitting there for a couple years with an automatic fueling station, and having it launch successfully after getting battered by dust storms and any other corrosives present on Mars.
Changing my operating system
> Could you post any helpful resources you used?

Not a lot initially. I did have a look at the LLVM tutorial, which is absolutely great, but I eventually closed that tab because I found it more exciting to think about these problems by myself (instead of devoting resources to always figuring out "why did they do it this way?"). It probably took a lot longer, but it was also a better learning experience. There is nothing fundamentally magic about this, one simply has to go ahead an do it.

It's a mixed bag, because I can feel there are a lot of inefficiencies in my code that exist either because I personally find it more readable or simply because I couldn't quite grasp the alternative at the time.

> Also, what was your experience with language design before going into this project?

None, that's a big reason why I wanted to do this. I did make a tool for pen&paper roleplaying before that could execute standard dice codes (http://rolz.org/) but that's nothing like this project. Over the years I made several domain-specific "configuration" languages for some projects, but again, this was different.

It did help a lot to break down the process into distinct steps that have almost no overlap. A lexer to convert a string of tokens, a parser to build a tree, an interpreter to execute that tree in place (not the most efficient thing to do but it was a lot of fun), and a minimal runtime library on top of it. For the runtime functions I did cheat a little, however, because there are a lot of Apache Commons function wrappers in there.

There were some decisions of probably questionable value. For example, when I decided that the language would have no commas and would use whitespace as a generic token separator. It's been surprising sometimes to deal with the consequences of those early decisions.

One of the things that surprised me was that despite the total absence of optimization, np doesn't execute abysmally slow. When I was banging out the code I was convinced it would degrade to C64-like performance levels ;)

I'm actually planning to add more functionality, as I've hinted at in the tutorial, up to the point where someone could conceivably do a web project with it. That someone will probably be me ;)
might be good if you made that more clear on the site
Mind emailing me at aaron@brethorsting.com? I'm building a replacement for Reader, and you're in my target demographic. I'd love to better understand how you use Reader.
I guess that explains why this website UI change would depend on the user's browser version.
Well, 6 ÷ 2x is similar to:

6
__
2x

You've explicitly put spaces around it.

However, if you look at it like:

6/2*x

Does 3x seems that unlikely?
EUR/USD chart after Cyprus Bailout
My (intended) implication was that answering the question

> What is 6÷2(1+2)?

without establishing the axioms of arithmetic is as impossible as answering

> Does CH hold in ZF?

without establishing some axioms of set theory.

Put another way, asking 6÷2(1+2) on the SAT is as ill-advised as asking an Introduction to Proofs course to tackle the Continuum Hypothesis with just some naive set theory.
f.asyncMap (item) ->
foo item
, (error, result) ->
# do something with result

The readability of that is terrible. I (and most people) can easily figure out how to make myself understood to the parser, that's not an issue at all.

The itch that CS scratches is severe, but I believe there is an opportunity to have something much better in terms of readability and predictability.
This is the problem with minefields: they hang around after the front has moved. I doubt they were being shelled and fired upon at that exact moment.
Is consciousness the Unified Field?
>>>The rational will transfer their accounts to more stable banks, e.g., in Germany

Ah, so Cyprus will just collapse on its own then without any repercussions elsewhere? I don't think so.
Chrome's Integration With Google Search
I don't think I've seen it argued before that (f x) is a more obvious form than f(x). Usually the argument for (f x) is premised on a lisp-based idea of homoiconicity (code/data parity).

The reason f(x) seems more obvious in meaning, to me at least, is that f is a thing and (x) is a message or application I'm giving it.
I find it interesting you feel this way.

In my experience, it is pretty well defined:

0. Evaluate (the inside of!) parenthesis, then

1. Evaluate exponentials, then

2. Evaluate division and multiplication operators, left to right

e.g. 1 / 2 * 3 / 4 = (1/2) * 3/4 = ((1/2)*3)/4

3. Evaluate addition and subtraction operators, left to right

Your issue seems to stem from the left-to-right concept (in order in which operators are encountered as you read, left-to-right).

Your example of 6/2x to me is clearly (6/2)x. What is 1/2x ? In my experience, textbook authors/professors/math teachers tend to be disambiguous and either use the horizontal line for clarity or use parenthesis.

I attended public schools in Ontario, Canada if it makes any difference.

Edit: Oh yeah, also I have never felt that implicit operators would take precedence. Interesting!
Lenovo teases next-generation ThinkPad X series
Seriously, guys. Your favorite RSS reader has been deprecated. Not only is this not the end of the world, it is something that one-million-percent does not matter. Let it go!

Worst case scenario: you try a different RSS reader, and it works okay. You are in no danger of missing that all-important news article or blog post that all your friends are reading.

I take it back. Worst case scenario: RSS itself implodes, is obliterated from the face of the earth, and now you have to visit news websites and (manually!) click the refresh button to ensure that you're not missing that life-or-death article or blog post.

Wait, hang on -- I take it back. Here's the really-truly worst case scenario: instead of sitting impatiently with your lips wrapped around the proverbial firehose, desperately afraid that your content-thirst can never be sated without Google's help, you go out and actually create some content of your own.

(Or just buy a fucking newspaper. Jeez.)
'Diab DS-101 Computer', Richard Hamilton | Tate
Gassée: still bitter after all these years.
Ask HN: Dealing with anxiety as a founder?
In recent months there have been a lot of posts about leading a balanced life while founding a startup. Things along the lines of

- "Only work 40 a week!"
- "Make time for friends, family, etc. outside of work!"
- "Keep a healthy social life!"
- "Get a lot of exercise!"

I understand the merit in those, and actually strive to do so myself. But as a founder (technical, at that) with anxiety issues I find I often struggle to do so--perhaps more than others.

Because of this, I worry a lot and can easily justify my 80+ hour weeks: "If I don't finish just this one more thing we won't make it!" It actually can be rather poisonous, as I can be anxious about the team I've built: "I hope Jim does X the right way or else we'll be in trouble..."

Any other founders with chronic anxiety have any advice on how to cope? I have previously (when I was younger, over 10 years ago at this point) been on medication for it and am considering it again. Anyone else medicate to handle it? How did has it gone?
I worked as an IT security consultant for a bit over a year and found it rather boring after a while. In theory, you do lots of interesting and different things, get to know many different technologies. Maybe it was just the job I was working at, but the actual penetration testing became pretty boring after a few months.

While it sounds compelling to beat up startups, startups are probably not the clients. Our consulting day rates were very expensive and usually only large corporations or the government could afford it.

You just go and check for the top OWASP vulnerabilities. Sometimes, it requires some creativity, but oftentimes, you get a "feeling" for a web app after a while. Many PHP projects, many open source software projects that got a few custom made plugins. And then it's a bit dull. Testing every single parameter of a web app with many attack vectors...

I have to admit that there was one guy at our company who did a lot of reverse engineering, iOS security, testing a DRM system for an ebook online library (key takeaway: you can't control the client. DRM makes it harder, but it is never impossible to crack the system as long as the hardware is not custom made or something), stuff like that. So this was quite challenging and changing, but this was rare.

One gem I want to add to the original post: If you're interested in SQL injection, check out sqlmap. That tool is a real breaker and worked wonders for us and we downloaded entire databases by having a tiny little sql injection vulnerability in the signup form of a newsletter or something like that.
I wish you guys had openings in the DC area. I've been interested in this stuff since college, when I would try reverse engineering using Fravia+'s tutorials. That's how I learned assembly programming.
Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244314
"To my surprise, making decisions about how scope should work was actually the hardest part."

Perhaps a thorough reading of SICP would enlighten you as to how scope should be handled if you don't want to run into problems with it.
Millennials Say They'd Give Up Their Cars Before Their Computers or Cell Phones
Have you ever tried to config a router that has debug to console turned on?

Makes me want to throttle whomever made this with no option to pause output.
The conclusion seems to be written before the research.
I prefer 6 2 1 2 + * / and 6 2 / 1 2 + * notation.
Everyone knew the Canadian combat military mission in Afghanistan was finally going to end in 2011, when the Tim Hortons' outlet closed down. Donut availability can have a predictive (or reactive) nature.
We definitely do both things. You wouldn't want to work here if you hated web apps. You wouldn't need to know your way around IDA Pro on day 1 (for reasons that will become clear in a few months, you'd be comfortable with the basics of assembly language within a month or so of starting).
So this thing is 192 days old?

Seriously? Did the guy go surfing for those 6 months or what?

I mean, this thing lacks utterly basic features like the ability to buy your own domain, the ability to show a photo gallery of your restaurant, and some actual customizations so your site doesn't look like all the others.

The site is really cool for a proof of concept, not a relatively mature site.
White House to world: Do as I say, not as I did with drones
Is "Breaker" in the title a Dark Tower reference?
Again, I think that's a very bad comparison - resolving this difficulty is not "impossible". You can choose whatever convention you like, and all that changes is the notation. Of course it's a bad test question, but it is not "impossible" or even remotely difficult for mathematics - it's just a matter of choosing a notation.

You seem to think that this question has something to do with the "axioms of arithmetic" - no, it doesn't, it's a matter of how you write things by convention. Operator precedence is not and has never been an "axiom". We can define plus to have the highest precedence, and get the exact same arithmetic we have now, written differently.

On the other hand, deciding the Continuum Hypothesis is "impossible" in a very fundamental way - Kurt Godel and Paul Cohen, two of the greatest mathematical logicians in history, proved that the Continuum Hypothesis is undecidable by mathematical reasoning as we can best formulate it, i.e. it is independent of the ZFC axioms. That's not a matter of choosing a notation for it.
I know SICP, it's great. However, arguments from authority only get one so far. I think it's definitely worth experimenting with different paradigms. And I'm not done yet. However, there is something to be said for not taking "the standard way of doing things" at face value all the time, even if that means arriving at the exact same solution in the end. To my defense though, different languages behave in different ways in this respect, so at least I'm not violating the entire collective wisdom of computing (just a part of it).
I just can't get passed the implicit assumption that this guy doesn't live in the real world. There have been prepay cellphones as low as twenty dollars in the U.S. alone for quite some time. And yes, they can text and have removable batteries. I own one of them.
Right, but you also had to explicitly add the asterisk for multiplication. I thought the same thing, but the remarks on juxtaposition do have a point. For example, if an integer were callable, you'd do the function call--2(2+1)--independantly of the division.
https://github.com/socketubs/leselys/issues/23
Samsung has no idea how to create an infographic
For example Germany. ( I am not sufficiently knowledgeable on the interior politics of the other eurozone members to assert with any confidence that they were purely motivated by their chance of reelection. )
This is not mathematics, this is symbol manipulation. The author is correct, the answer here is that it is a badly expressed problem - with multiple possible solutions depending on the assumptions the audience makes.

In mathematics allowing your audience to make assumptions is very very bad...people are terrible at making and applying assumptions - just look at any studies into eye witness testimony.

Machines are just as bad, as they are loaded with assumptions of their programmers.

As a Computer Scientist, I absolutely hate coming across badly expressed formulas. Abstraction is key - why are there parentheses around the 1+2, what makes those separate...why not just write 3?? - In fact there are no variables in this problem, it is constant, just give me the constant...or tell me why you have defined it this way.

Implicit operations and ordering may save you a couple of characters but generate essays worth of confusion.
Funny you say that, because as irrational as it is, I am still pissed at him for failing with Be.
Converting, Printing Digits In 7 Segment Display Format
Again, my point is that my interpretation depends on whether it's multiplication via the multiplication symbol, like 6/2*x, or multiplication via juxtaposition, like 6/2x.
I know HN thinks Google is much cooler than IBM, but is it weird that I like IBM's chances in ML progressing to AI? For one thing, Watson was a very impressive demonstration. For another, it has the old materials science know-how to create neuron-inspired chip architecture. And here's an important one: Fortune 500 companies with lots of valuable data trust IBM to solve their problems. Anybody here with other thoughts, caveats? Other companies with good shots at commercializing ML/AI technology?
> Bringing those places up to standard doesn't really give you anything new, although it does help those people. Putting humans on Mars is something we've never done before, and could lead to amazing technologies and opportunities for humanity.

I take issue with this. Technological advancement over the last few millenia has been driven by how many smart minds we have at the table thinking of new ideas and new solutions to old problems. To get more folks at the table, we need for them to stop worrying about how to avoid gulags, and get them start training in emerging fields. People in Vietnam studying computer science will bring more technological marvels to your world than sending a rocket and biodome to Mars, the problems of which could mostly be tackled by first building biodomes in harsh environments on Earth, or by finding ways to conquer disease and get fresh water to more of the world's poor.

Build me a sealab and irrigate the Sahara, you don't need Mars to start working on those problems, and those problems could probably help you learn really important skills for Martian exploration (and eventual terraforming) while providing more immediate technological benefits to humanity.
We work with lots of startups. We work with big companies, too, but that work is disproportionately with big west coast tech companies. The "east coast" BigCo work we do touches on trading protocols and order routing systems, which is fun for a lot of other reasons (wider application domain for findings, extremely high impact, complicated systems with message-oriented middleware, non-web inputs).

We do zero government work.

I don't feel like we're along in appsec shops for having this mix. I think one possible difference is between pure appsec shops like us, iSec Partners, IOActive, and Stach & Liu, versus general security practices. The work at general security practices might be more of a drag.

It's also the case that network security, being a race to the bottom (with Nessus and Metasploit "scanner jockies" and the like) is actively trying to push up into appsec. Maybe the web appsec work at a place like that is boring? We take it pretty seriously.

We avoid tools like sqlmap.

I'm answering this on the off chance that the conversation is a good glimpse into the working life of an appsec pentester (since that's what Cody's writing about).
Google spent this much time on trying to get dumb users to learn to search from the omnibox? I think there is a solid opportunity to target highly skilled users with high performance machines. You can use more shortcut keys for things, and you don't have slow down from casual/confused users
That would be cool. Please do!