skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not convinced that Iceland did the wrong thing - given the alternatives. Perhaps the foreigners who irresponsibly lent the money should be the ones bearing the brunt of the burden, as opposed to citizen-bystanders.

So far Iceland appears to be doing better than Ireland:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20936685

"By mid-2012 Iceland was regarded as one of Europe's recovery success stories. It has had two years of economic growth. Unemployment was down to 6.3% and Iceland was attracting immigrants to fill jobs. Currency devaluation effectively reduced wages by 50% making exports more competitive and imports more expensive. Ten year government bonds were issued below 6%, lower than some of the PIIGS nations in the EU (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain). Tryggvi Thor Herbertsson, a member of parliament, noted that adjustments via currency devaluations are less painful than government labor policies and negotiations. Nevertheless, while EU fervor has cooled the government continued to pursue membership"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_fin...
You are killing it. Python.org should be really dry. The language is too juicy. I really love the way it looks right now. Moreover, whoever designed the new one, did a half-hearted job. It looks obnoxious. May be there is a design which looks better, but this definitely is not it. It looks like some corporate-y site, and worse, a really bad corporate.
Airport posts Facebook pic of crash to boast about safety
On JavaScript and modules
Assassinating foreign heads of state, particularly those who have business interests closely allied with US corporations, isn't legal. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo doesn't deserve something as clean as a bullet, but for reasons of practicality, it'll do. (and, realistically, you'd have to eliminate the entire leadership; it's essentially a corrupt group who pocket oil wealth and rule through fear and oppression. However, they sell oil relatively cheaply to the US, so they're good guys.) Mark Thatcher, son of the former UK PM, essentially tried this in 2004, but was undercapitalized.
Building a Fashion Company on the Internet? Just Stop
If you aren't i'd be really surprised. At the very least your thought patterns are self-sabotaging and depression-inducing. There might be something else going on here too, that it would be good to check with a doctor about (bipolar?)

Your life isn't going to get back on track until you start thinking better about yourself. The reason you're so self-absorbed right now is because you're constantly beating yourself up; its a full-time job. Once you can have a little self-esteem and equanimity again, its going to be a lot easier to think of others and work projects and be able to achieve your goals.

At the very least go on vacation, or move; its easier to get out of ruts if you're somewhere new and different, for neurological reasons. Go somewhere new and remake yourself closer to the person you want to be.

If you do nothing besides trying the same thing you've tried dozens or hundreds of times before, that's what's really worrying and dangerous. :-(
OP might be a desperate narcissist. If he is the best thing he can do might be to give up being an entrepreneur, and find get into contributing to (but not starting, at least at first) open source.

I didn't see his post as being very humble. The humble thing would have been to bring his expectations more in line with reality, not to melodramatically call himself a loser.
"Die on mars" does not mean "die soon". This proposal is not a suicide mission.
The government also extended a bank holiday that was put in place to try to stop a run on the banks. The holiday was supposed to end Monday night. Now, banks will not be opening their doors Tuesday, as planned. There was talk that they might not open Wednesday, either.

[...] “As soon as banks in Cyprus reopen, people will rush to take all their money out, because they don’t believe this is a one-off deal,” he said. “When a bank run happens, the E.C.B. will have to pump in liquidity,” he added, “and what you will have is a shell of a banking system supported by E.C.B.-eligible Cyprus bonds, which will rocket the debt of Cyprus out of control.”
I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of "fixing" a country. I think Russia is a good example: communism fell, but that doesn't mean things have necessarily gotten better for the average citizen. You could replace the entire government of Equatorial Guinea, but that won't address the problems like poor education that underlying many poor country's problems.
Hi, thanks for your thoughts.

Authentication is a skill, and that's why other sites who decide to take on all secondhand designers at once usually have counterfeits leak through.
too much variation in style between sections. Some areas are very flat and 'Metro-ish' and then you have heavy gradients, extreme rounded corners. It just doesn't feel consistent. Looks like multiple designers were working on this and no one was talking to one another.
The Best Thing You've Never Hacked
Where do I apply? I would do this just for being one of the first persons in mars and be recorded in history books.
Some degree of analytics to determine how users are interacting with your online property, I understand. And, I understand that many want to source those analytics to a third party (e.g. Google Analytics).

However, the third party tracking that enables advertisers to notice a view or interest and then "haunt" users across multiple sites for days with ads related to that view?

That aggregate and warehouse such knowledge, building up extensive profiles that become their own form of property and that may be used and sold against the target user's own best interest? (So, you're looking at information related to diabetes? I bet health insurers would be interested in that...)

I have very little sympathy for those use cases.
No!! First Wave, now this. It's a question of trust & honest transparency. Why should anyone trust Google ever again?
? Just trying to help whoever wrote the title with their spelling, and being friendly about it. Looks like they caught it and changed the title.
> Assassinating foreign heads of state

But who will replace them? Didn't we try something like this during the Cold War multiple times and end up introducing even more totalitarian "democratic" governments?
Just for fun I took a crack at the maze problem and ended up with a (quasi-)linear time union-find solution. Maybe I over-engineered, but I'm very impressed if schoolkids are really learning about algorithms like that.
You can do it today: https://support.google.com/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

You can initiate the request from the other side (the new carrier), in which case it is forcefully wrested in a day. If google still refuses, you can complain to the FCC.

As for google penalties for holding your number hostage, given that the business is dying there's really nothing other than an FCC lawsuit (which, as you imagine, would be for a paltry sum)
If this stuff fascinates you and you're a solid software developer and you'd be interested in having this be your full-time job for awhile and you're willing to sink a little bit of your own time into ramping up, give us a ping. We'll help you get there.

This page has a lot of info on how we recruit. We're getting pretty good at turning systems programmers into breakers, and we love hiring from HN:

http://www.matasano.com/careers/

The great thing about this field is that it's always changing. A long-term dev job gives you a chance to master two or three different technology stacks. Your next three projects at an appsec shop might each be just two weeks apart, and each will use radically different technologies. Even (maybe even especially) with web software.

You could join one startup... or spend a couple years beating up all of all the startups.

Also: I understand why Cody didn't write it this way, but the reality is, if you're going to test web apps, Burp is the standard tool. You can use things like mitmproxy or even WebScarab, but most people end up in Burp. Burp is also extremely valuable for testing even if you're not doing appsec full-time.
Artisanal Framework Design
Ask HN: Why doesn't Microsoft update website use SSL/TLS?
There are real ways in which certain types of discomfort are useful, but many organizations have completely perverted this into "all discomfort builds character."

-To improve rapidly at a skill, you have to practice at the edge of your abilities. If you're a decent writer you're not going to improve by mindlessly writing what you already know for hours on end. Only the time you spend challenging yourself really counts.

-There's a decent amount of evidence that being surrounded by wealth triggers laziness. That is, if your office has opulent wooden desks, high-end art, etc., that sends signals along the lines of "conserve the resources we already have." While if your surroundings are a little messy it triggers an instinct to work hard and gain more resources. The Talent Code goes into detail on this. Note that all that matters here is appearance-this doesn't mean that you'll get more performance by giving your employees crappy computers, it means you'll be better off if your office looks spartan.

As long as a company only promotes "discomfort" in these two elements, that can actually be a good thing. But when you get to the point of physical discomfort, that's almost certainly a negative.
For lack of a better word, geeks.

Edit: People tend to have feelings regarding companies and institutions. People who are interested in tech and computers have stronger feelings about companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. At least in Google's early years, people had a tendency to see Google as a figurative Mom, more interested in providing the best search engine and some nice free services than making money at any cost.
I don't think I could do a particularly good job running the country, and wouldn't try (beyond a few weeks/months in transition). There are plenty of other African leaders in other countries, particularly elected in the past ~10 years, who are far better. I don't think there's any reason why EG wouldn't be able to come up with some domestic political leadership which was better than what they have now. The problem is the nexus of oil wealth and foreign support has allowed Obiang to remain for decades.

The less violent solution would be a trade embargo of the country (at least, not allowing them to sell oil).
I'm not really familiar with eBay's practices, but what happens if the product is counterfeit but advertised as original?
Wish i could upvote this a million times. People in general and men in particular are very bad at realizing they're depressed and seeking help. Your friends and family should know though. Ask them if you can, or just go and see a doctor. Having untreated depression is both dangerous and a really awful way to have to live your life.
Ghar punts on resolving conflicts. If the desrination directory or file exists it tells the user and moves on.
My email is my username at gmail
I have a similar script, but in bash, anyway I'll probably copy a thing or two from yours! thanks for sharing!
> Scraping together a suicide team and shooting it roughly in Mars' general direction is not the answer to this problem.

I think you misunderstand. While the linked article is brief, the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills, but to supply them for the next 40-80 years from Earth.

Because of the hilarities of the rocket equation, it is cheaper to send rocket after rocket full of water, breathable air, food, fuel, and other supplies than it is to send enough rocket fuel for a return trip. Like, way cheaper. As the article says, the technology for a return trip just doesn't exist; the technology for a series of one-way trips does.
I am not much into game programming. I edited the post to reflect that. Do you have any suggestion?
I count three M.Sc.'s?
The problem with logs is that programmers log the data that they believed, at the time they wrote the code, would be useful to help diagnose problems. However, many bugs arise from conditions that programmers failed to anticipate, and thus may have failed to log.

Also, there are important things that you just can't log for legal or ethical reasons. For example, no user of a browser would be happy to know that the current URL they were viewing or their POST data was sent back to a browser developer (or even saved in a local file) without their explicit permission.
almost certainly not - that's a novel, and one of the all time greats of the genre.
The email field doesn't show up publicly.
I think you are right. Medical procedures would likely go back to basics: Bad tooth? Pull it out. Broken leg? Maybe amputate.

However, with the right provisions fairly advanced procedures should be possible to carry out with minimum personnel. For instance, in 1961 a Russian doctor in Antarctica removed his own infected appendix [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-surgery
I am in the same boat, keep rowing, I know I am.
Focus, Cadence and Shipping
Could the prompt on the home page be made to be interactive? (CodeAcademy style?) Seems a great way to get people to jump in straight away… and no better way to learn than by doing.
this is a project started upon the release of Alpha back in August. Since then, we've had the good fortune of working with several awesome hackers in maintaining the code base. Enjoy!
Yeah,it's imperative to properly define your goal. You can't ever reach an undefined goal, and if you can't reach it, you've failed by definition. Tim Ferriss book "The 4 hour workweek" goes into defining goals pretty well, but don't neccesairily believe everything in the book, because some of it is just designed to make you feel good. Still, it's handy to start of with.
Can't help not quoting Matt Drance.

http://www.appleoutsider.com/2011/10/06/sj/

"And so more than ever, I find myself inspired. Steve’s untimely death reminds us we can never give up. He could have given up at any point in the seven years since his first cancer diagnosis, but he did not. The vast majority of Apple’s unprecedented resurgence took place while Steve Jobs stared death in the face. How many of us could have lasted this long at all, let alone accomplish all that he did along the way?

Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this Earth ended up being his most accomplished by far. Remember that whenever you think your best days are behind you. We can’t control when our lives begin, and we can’t really control when they end. All we have is what’s in between. Make it count."
Using Python and the NLTK to Find Haikus in the Public Twitter Stream
I would accept this as artistic expression if and only if they don't actually accept any money. If they wanted to make a statement about internet privacy then they chose the douchiest possible way of going about it.
Data in the driver’s seat
100% spot on. It's much easier to go from $1/mo to $10/mo than to go from $0/mo to $1/mo
Unfortunately, getting money back after receiving a counterfeit from eBay is not trivial. A third party authenticator must be paid by the buyer to fax a thorough formal document for PayPal to review. The process can be long and expensive. Even then, it's not guaranteed that the buyer will receive their money back as a result. Buying and selling designer items through auction sites such as eBay is fraught with risk. Mind you, a seller of authentic items can get hit with a fake claim as well.
Neil wrote Blockly and the maze demo for other purposes. (He has shown it off at Maker Faire before.) For this project he just adapted it.

https://code.google.com/p/blockly/
in the middle of writing you a mail.
Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate?

Also, how would a trade embargo "fix" a country? Perhaps it would force a dictator to lessen or hide civil rights violations, but it would not repair the economy or necessarily give people more confidence in their government.
I agree entirely for middle tier countries (which Russia was -- and, honestly, Iraq under Saddam was). For really defective places (NK, Somalia, EG, maybe Afghanistan under the Taliban, ...), your odds of killing the leadership and randomly replacing are much more likely to give you something adequate. It doesn't always work out, and it's hard when you have set yourself up for failure (like the US did in Afghanistan, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think just eliminating AQ and some of the Taliban leadership was doomed to turn out badly), but in a lot of cases it's beneficial.
You need a system to translate your ideas and dreams into consistent action. Don't feel like you to reinvent the wheel here. I recommend some kind of dayplanner/calendar system to keep control of tasks, there are electronic options today but I use the Franklin-Quest system (on paper!). Also, take a look at Ray Dalio's principles here;
http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

... as a system to translate those dreams and ideas into consistent actions over time. Dalio identifies some important, unavoidable choices that you must make to be successful;

1) Honest Self-Assessment versus evasion or rationalization.
2) Selfishness and your values versus Others and external expectations as the primary motivation of your actions.
3) Self Responsibity versus blaming others or wallowing in self pity.
4) Pro-Effort versus Anti-Effort, achievement is work.
5) Long range action and motivation versus short range mentality.
6) Adult versus a child's reaction to the inevitable frustrations of purposeful action over time.

Good Luck.
Did I just stumble onto reddit again or am I still on HackerNews?
Can you please describe what was so dishonest about Google's representation? What did they get anyone to do that cannot be undone with a click?
And do not underestimate how important this piece is: "...and keep us posted." As edw said, it sounds like you may need people to hold you accountable on your journey (and one of the key ingredients you may lack) ... use us in this capacity. By the way, that's me to a T as well. I need people around that keep me focused on moving forward.

Now go, and to great things worthy of honor.
Oh, hey! And if you'd like to learn to break crypto at the same time as you work through Cody's web recommendations --- even if you don't want to be an appsec person --- mail sean at matasano dot com. He's got a pretty kick-ass set of ~40 crypto-breaking exercises. Something like 200 people have started them over the past 6 months; only a few people have made it through the end.

(They aren't deliberately hard; they just cover a lot of ground --- you're starting with basic substitution ciphers and ending with RSA signature block forgeries).

I helped design them, and I'm really happy with how they came out. They're neat. You should see how many sets you can get through.

I hope it goes without saying that if you crush Sean's crypto challenges for fun and are interested in being a full-time appsec person, you will have our full and undivided attention. :)
> Also: I understand why Cody didn't write it this way, but the reality is, if you're going to test web apps, Burp is the standard tool. You can use things like mitmproxy or even WebScarab, but most people end up in Burp. Burp is also extremely valuable for testing even if you're not doing appsec full-time.

I actually forgot to update that -- it was on my list of edits. Done now, thanks!
I'm so tired of these blog posts where people completely miss the point of RSS, Google Reader and what the combination of the two means/meant.
pretty sure it was Japanese, not Chinese
Machine brains are already much "smarter" than human brains. For certain tasks, that is, like calculation. With increased computing power, these tasks will grow more and more. But will machines ever be REALLY smarter than humans? I will only believe that when I see it. This question might be (but does not necessarily have to be) related to the question of all questions: Can machines have consciousness, like we do?
This is absolutely true - the deposit guarantee schemes are not a bottomless pit of money, and are nowhere near able to absorb the losses of a widespread series of cascading bank failures.

It seems extremely unwise to publicise this fact, however - which is what this measure does.
I'm a geek ... and I think of Google as (my) "big brother".
I feel like I could justify the expense of Burp for a random freelance developer, even if they weren't billing out as a security tester. Like, I feel like we could convince Patrick McKenzie that it was worth his money. What do you think?
The Ordnance Survey doesn't even hold height data on all buildings in the UK. They've started a few isolated projects but nothing as a deliverable dataset yet. I don't think there's a US equivalent despite your link to NYC Open Data.

You might want to look to Germany and CityGML. You might discover some town datasets that are complete in height and geometry detail.

If you happen on a LIDAR data source you've then got to tidy up against the buildings but you will run into errors caused by the time spent between the two data capture points. There's SRTM but i'm sure it'll be too coarse for your needs. I'm sure there's a replacement to SRTM but the name escapes me.

There's LandXplorer - now owned by Autodesk which will generate models from oblique aerial photogrammetry. There's also CityEngine that'll create fake cities based upon road networks.

@AndyBMapMan.
So where is the grudge against airlines charging for checked bags?
... food ... water? Otherwise your life (before you die) would be rather short ...
You have good instincts here, but

1) In very large systems there are many many load balancers

2) Server "spikes" (eg swapping) can happen very suddenly, so distributing health info is a hard problem

3) Determining a priori which requests are heavy and light is also hard. Think about "SEO urls": they blow up the cardinality.

4) Even assuming perfect global knowledge, you are proposing to solve a variant of the knapsack problem.
My biggest fear would not be dying on Mars or on the way to it.

My biggest fear would be having the novelty wear off and coming to the realization that I just moved to a trailer park.. on mars.
I seriously thought this was going to be about diabetes or sugar addiction or something :-)
IMO, adding feedback mechanisms (e.g. LB polling app or server agent) are among the best ways to create smart, fast LBs without keeping a lot of expensive state. Calculating busyness is another question entirely but it's also a much easier problem to solve than stateful routers.
The cold war was a special case, as we had ideological reasons to pick replacement governments who basically sucked even worse than those they replaced. In a country where most of the decent people who could go into government are somewhat leftist, replacing a hard-line communist with someone who will resist the other leftists (for your own ideological reasons) is a lot more likely to produce a situation like Pinochet than just replacing a criminal despot with virtually anyone else.

I don't think the US really tried replacing with "democratic" governments, either -- just with US allied dictators. We supported a lot of really evil people because they brought stability and nominal pro-US interests. I'm not advocating that; I'm just saying get rid of some bad leadership with virtually anyone else, with no ongoing agenda. That is a far lower bar to cross.
Justifying the expense wouldn't be difficult at all. However, I think the free version is Just Fine (TM) unless you need stuff like the scanner or intruder (intruder works in Burp Free, but is limited to something like 1 request/second).