skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Starting 2 years ago, every month or so all the security people in Chicago meet up at a bar (usually Hopleaf). Our turnout started around 15, and now tops out 40-50. The idea has since spread to NYC, San Francisco (I made it out to a BaySec last month), and Boston.

There are already Ruby and Python users groups in Chicago, but I can't bring myself to go watch a presentation about coding when I could be playing with my kids, drinking, or both.

If there were a casual hacking/startup meetup in Chicago, I'd definitely go. If there was a site to coordinate one, I'd participate. I've gotta believe there are more startup people in Chicago than there are security people.
This only works if everyone stops supporting IE6 together.

But if your site doesn't work on IE6, and your competitor's site (of comparable quality) does, you're going to lose traffic to him.

I mean, this is basically the prisoner's dilemma. Nobody wins unless we all win together.
Google avoids £100m UK tax
maybe b/c of sexual frustration? lots of hackers don't get laid that often. it is one of thing that eludes highly logical people, that getting laid is more art then science.
Where does the article or the ZTail site show indication of linking to Amazon's products?

I have also read that Amazon does pay for referrals to buy goods anymore.
Huh, as I was flicking through the photos, I was thinking how awesome the site was....then I saw the t-shirt photo; Grats guys — how'd the interview go?? :)
Ubunchu The Ubuntu Manga
It's a romantic comedy that happen to feature the linux distro Ubuntu.
ADD ME 178764042
ADD ME 17876442
Coming to an interview with the usernames and passwords for an AcmeCorp account at "major" social media sites Acme didn't "think" to claim seems like a good way to get escorted out of the building.
I guess I have always looked at Amazon as a portal to buy other merchants' merchandise. ZTail is doing that.

Do you think it is in ZTail's best interest to add Amazon? I read that Amazon does not pay for referrals anymore.

The truth is, I posted the article right after I read the TC article, and was super hyped about it. I thought to myself: "For once, I might actually buy some stuff from ZTail as opposed to Amazon" (Big deal for me). Looking back, I agree that this idea is certainly interesting but not revolutionary.
I submit that hacking is also more art than science. Way more, even.

Can't go blaming my garden-variety social anxiety all on the left hemisphere, after all.
powerpoint presentation == You aren't getting the job.

I'd say more, but personally the interview would be over
the second someone mentioned powerpoint.
Joke is on the rich.
There's some really incredible things people say "a friend of theirs saw." Here's a regularly updated page with 25 of those things people swear their friends were eyewitness to...

http://www.snopes.com/info/top25uls.asp
What do you think led to the success of your meetup?
Sure. Sexual frustration is a given. Although not just among hackers. I'm just wondering why there's been a confluence of similar articles in such a short space of time. I'm not complaining about the articles. I think they're all interesting. I just find the timing curious.
Quantum physics, game theory, finance ... this paper is relevant to fully half of my interests!
It would be certainly interesting to bring a USB drive to an interview at IBM, where they don't allow USB drives due to security concerns (or so I'm told).

Ace the interview indeed.
I think this is unethical and it won't work anyway, the people who still have IE6 have ignored warnings like this for years or don't have control.

I saw someone using XP the other day who didn't know that other browsers existed (other than IE) and Safari was even installed but she didn't know how it got there (I suspect quicktime) or what it was. The IE(7) she had crashed on virtually every link she clicked on due to an old toolbar that probably only worked properly with IE6. The machine was also dead slow due to 512MB memory and loads of task-tray stuff.

Although she already had IE7 I could easily imagine, similar users not being capable of doing upgrades especially on dial up or not wanting to because it might break.

I would have thought the best thing a lot of people could do for the web is actually offer to sort out a few of their non-techy friends computers, which I think would be more effective than a warning message.
It doesn't seem very radical at all. It seems like the slogan he's attacking is thoughtlessly radical, since it amounts to saying "Be an absolutist; if you can't find common ground, your opposition must be neutralized or destroyed." Is it really radical to say that this is not a healthy view?
Tell that to Circuit City:

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/02/23/from-good-to-great-...
Ever tried to attribute your sexual frustration to something? Do you attribute it to others getting laid more than you? Or maybe to the fact that everybody is just always talking about it?
Glad-that-you-asked-let-me-tell-you-what-I-think.

* We held it in a public place. Three other cities tried to clone ChiSec, but held it at office buildings. Think about a first-time guest: there's no risk of embarassment walking into a bar and not finding anyone. But knocking on an office door at 6:30PM? None of those meetups lasted more than 2 dates.

* No RSVPs. I was going to go to a Chicago Ruby meetup a few months ago. Then I saw the RSVP list. A few mojitos in my living room started to look a lot more attractive. Not to mention: it's 6:15P the night-of; what, you don't want the people that just found out to show up? Every time I've ever had people over, it's always the ones I rope in at the last minute that make the party.

* No presentations. Find the best presenter you possibly could, and at most 60% of your regulars are really interested. But next month, you're not going to get the best presenter you possibly can; you'll succumb to the Unix User Group Syndrome and host a talk on "Systems Administration Programming in Awk".

* No sponsorships. We get asked. Of course we don't. This probably doesn't even bear explaining.

My other suggestion is, go quarterly, not monthly --- at least at first. If you do 4 back to back monthly meetups, and attendance starts at 15, dips to 8, then 10, then 8 again, you've set a bad precedent. If you can build up a quarterly meetup and get 20-30 people in the room... well, if you pick the room right, 20-30 people actually feels like a crowd.
I think its a great idea! I know that I'd be willing to travel a distance if I only knew about these events ahead of time.
Congress may repeal 'Alternative Fuel' subsidy that led to increased diesel use
It is quite obvious from the article that "poor" was used there in sense of "not rich". Like, when one says "I'm a poor student" he doesn't necessarily mean he lives in cardboard box and hunts for his lunch in city park.
This structure, condemned this weekend as “unfair” and “unacceptable”, allowed Google legally to avoid paying £110m of UK tax in 2007, according to research by an expert on corporate tax avoidance.

So Google followed the rules the UK set up, and now they're in trouble? That doesn't make much sense. Corporations don't have a responsibility to behave in the ways the government wishes it had actually told them to behave.
Although I agree with your original statement that a home generally makes a poor investment you seem to go off at a tangent with suggestions I feel are unrealistic.

There is no reason why a local utility company (using your own source would suggest that these new reactors are going to be at the community level rather than the individual level - and I'm sticking with the idea of a utility company because that seems the best way to manage a community resource) would refuse to sell to people renting in the neighbourhood.

As for the water perhaps you could save a little money over a long enough period but I'm sceptical it's going to be a significant factor.

Growing your own food may or may not be a potential advantage depending on how much land you had. Although you can grow some food on any patch of space as large as a window ledge you aren't going to save much, if any, money in such a space. If you're really looking to save money and/or feed you and your family you'll need more space than most people, home owners and renters alike, will have. Your best bet would be an allotment which as far as I'm aware would be available to renters as well.
Dude, I agree with you, but who is dishing out the hatred? For the sake of Pete, why have I been maliciously down-voted?
M bank and the tax site don't render correctly in Opera but work with IE6. If they can't be bothered making them work in a 100% ACID browser how do I know it will work in IE7?
I'm thirding recaptcha, only because most people who roll their own captcha solution somehow forget that there are some people out there who can't read or see captchas for whatever reason. Meanwhile, recaptcha takes care of most problems with reloads and audio captchas.
For Thomas: there are some; they all end up dying. The Jelly bar nights are the closest to one, but they're very high on freelancers.
Me and my friends created groupieguide.com for managing these kind of things. We would be more than happy to help setup something like this.
Would it be too much work to also have a listing of everyone's startup? I've thought about scraping profile pages or simply allowing people to freely add their information.

I know TechCrunch has this sort of thing, but there is a lot of clutter and also it would be nice to have, say, 50 listings on one page with brief information about each.

How could you avoid clutter? Tie it into HN so that when a user who is associated with the startup earns karma, their listing gets placed higher.
You can probably get away with either as long as you remain consistent throughout the document.
Haha, The PM's at my office actually would pull a reverse on that technique. Noting a flaw they would just say something like: "Oh no problem, the engineers at competitor X probably just got lucky when they did it..." the guy in question was very smooth so it was a challenge to your pride without seeming overly jerky.
For me there is (latest Safari on Leopard)
I migrate between Calgary and Kelowna and Vancouver. Would definitely be interested in something like this.
mediocrity != good
I think you misunderstand. I'm not talking about tomorrow when I say these things will be possible. I specifically said "within my lifetime". I'm 29 now.

But they will all happen. There are just too many ways that we know exist for it not to happen. It's inevitable. Maybe it won't be these reactors, or maybe someone will invent a more efficient system of generating power. But it doesn't matter. We are on the threshold of a world where power is no longer an issue and that is going to change a lot. When it does you’ll want to have your own land.

Oh, and no, I don’t think an apartment owner is going to rush to do new construction on a building built in the 70s in order to make his/her tennant’s utilities cheaper.
I'm reminded of VMware's x86-to-x86 binary translator. In some degenerate sense, this thing is a "compiler", whose input is supervisor-level x86 code, and whose output is sandboxed x86 code. You might imagine a layer like this performing all kinds of fascinating transformations on the input binary, ala JVM/transmeta. VMware's BT, however, is more concerned with preserving the presumed-good properties of the input binary, than with introducing new goodness of its own. This lack of ambition also had the nice side effect of making performance relatively easy to reason about: there were various things the guest could do to incur virtualization-induced overhead, but those overheads were close to constant per-occurrence, so you could just multiply frequency by cost to get a swag at a workload's overhead.
I think that this is useful if you massage it for your own needs. Changing some of the terms and deleting some of the other ones that don't make sense for your business you can create a contract that should work well. I am not a lawyer so I cannot attest to how enforceable this contract is (especially in your country/state) versus one drafted by a lawyer. In California, a verbal contract is enforceable so on the surface this seems like it would be as well.

As an aside, the severability clause is a good one to have in any contract.
Yes man is being fooled, fooled in to reading this article in order to buy in to their product.
All great points, I would add "You need to learn to speak the language of engineers, marketers, and managers" This is usually the biggest challenge for designers. Many get stuck speaking a language of aesthetics that fly over the head of most people. I manage a design team and have a rule during reviews not to use the word "Like". This forces everyone to be objective and use terminology that makes sense to many stakeholder groups.
"Best practices" or "good enough" is fine for non-critical and support services. You should concentrate your efforts and originality on what is important and unique in your situation.
First, grammar correction is hardly adding to the discussion about the article's content.
Second, it is a fairly common practice to pluralize the names of companies in countries that are not the United States. It throws me every time I see it too, but I kind of like it becuase it helps me remember a company isn't some monolithic idea, but a collection of individuals.
Recommended viewing: The Prestige.

Spoiler alert

From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/synopsis

Angier, who only ever cared about the glory of wowing an audience, went to more terrible extremes. In his version of "Transported Man," he created a double of himself every time he used Tesla's machine, and he rigged the trapdoor to drown the one onstage. He never knew if he would be the Prestige or the man in the box. The room where the machine is being kept is filled with water tanks, all of which hold a drowned double of Angier for every time he performed the trick.
Because people find useless pendantry an annnoying waste of time? The text is on a third party site! What do you expect anyone here to do about it?

Mail the author if you feel so strongly about it. In your comments here it would be better to respond to the meat of the argument presented, not any minor grammatical errors it may or may not contain.
Reminded me of Ise Shrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine) and also Shirky's reference to it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs). The point there is that function is also a meaningful definition of is-ness.

Besides, aren't all of the cells in a human body replaced every x years already?
Phusion Passenger 2.2.1 released
> so, my approach is to require a hash of <request text>+<session id cookie> as a per-call signature. javascript on another domain can't access the session id cookie and so won't be able to generate this signature.

If the security relies on other javascript not being able to access the session cookie, why is it insecure to use said session cookie by itself as the per-call signature?

Who can see the signature but not the session id cookie?
Using a fancy word to make academic work sound important is fine with me, but the arbitrage metaphor is weak if not outright incorrect denotatively.
That's not true: I've spoken single sentences and Japanese people would tell me, "when you spoke just now I thought you were Japanese."

And for what's it's worth, he spoke more than the above (e.g. when he was imitating the instructor).
A big part of the problem with "best practices" is that the term becomes carte blanche to justify a particular decision without understanding the reasoning behind it. It's sad that it's become a kind of seemingly-authoritative buzzword.
Squeak is free.
Yes. Maybe you could add a poll to this thread?
PUT is supposed to be idempotent? So an "increment" or "reverse" request should technically be a POST?

Absolutely. User-agents are allowed to retry PUTs transparently -- it's only for POSTs that they're supposed to put up a "are you sure you want to re-submit this form? Bad stuff might happen" dialog.
I think it's a kind of feed-forward system. If a person sees a couple sex-themed links on the front page, they are more likely to post another link with that theme.
The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions
I certainly couldn't. Perhaps they rely on blind people having heightened auditory senses.
Not.

We on YC News respect style, in various forms. We don't respect whining. I've been on YC News longer than you and can see exactly what you're doing; it's not cool.
c.f. http://www.dailymugshot.com/
I think the blog makes an interesting point, though the author seems to frame justice differently than I might; as "the thing that benefits <my group>", whereas I think Rawls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls) would frame justice as fairness that does not infringe upon one's basic rights (given a social contract etc. etc.). Given that perspective, it's difficult to argue either side of something that is based on a different conception of justice.

But...escalation to war over this definition of justice seems like a failing of rational thought and possibly intentional blindness to another's perspective -- so theories of justice and social contracts which assume rational and reasonable humans don't really come into play, do they?
> If someone assumes having the wrong opinions is evil, then the discussion is likely to be uninteresting and achieve nothing more than hurt feelings.

One approach is to start with "Let's assume that I'm evil and you're good and discuss only what is correct/leads to better results." That makes many of the rhetorical games worthless.

And, if you play your cards right, you get to conclude with "Hmm, I'm the evil one but your approach ends up with {horror} while mine leads to {smiling bunnies}."
Brain cells aren't normally replaced regularly, AFAIK, so they're an exception to the rule.
Bots will definitely attempt to submit any form they encounter.

And captchas (or any other additional signup question!) decreases signups pretty significantly
I don't think that's a feed-forward system ... Sounds more like a positive feedback loop.
Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways
A significant portion of OCaml's performance happens because it infers types, including a big picture "understanding" of operations with higher-order functions, and all types are hard-wired at compile time. The downside to this is that, until what the compiler infers makes sense to it, it refuses to compile. Once it does, though, you've already jumped to something like the 90th percentile of C performance (and eliminated several categories of bugs), and once you're familiar with the idioms of its type system, writing the actual code is pretty easy. It's a very concise language. (I didn't really get the type system until I read _The Little MLer_, though. Same series as _The Little Schemer_.)

Also, if you're thinking of his recent article comparing Markdown-style text processors, that's a problem domain for which OCaml is particularly well-suited.

OCaml's optimizations aren't really an SSC effect, though - the compiler is actually designed to communicate about what it understands, and thus what optimizations it's able to make. The real danger with an SSC is that it does deep optimization magic, but in a way that makes you lose perspective of what actually made it possible, so making informed design decisions becomes harder in the long run.
The Real Pirate Bay
http://www.flickaday.com

from his thread "The Story of My Startup"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479352

But dailybooth looks superior imho. Good luck!
If the "casual sex is destroying the foundations of society" guy hits this thread please ignore him.
Adding to that here's a few things we've learned about hosting good meetups from starting Jelly in Chicago...

Consistency is #1 - have it on a consistent day and time at the same place every time you do it, especially in the beginning. Its easier to spread it by word of mouth this way and easier to catch people who just show up because they heard about it

Having it in a public place with the possibility of food and drink is incredibly important

Do not publicize it to anyone but your friends and acquaintances, keeping it to people you know is a good group filter. The way it grows is everyone who comes invites their friends too and you meet their friends, friends of friends etc...its a simple quality filter that can grow very quickly. friends vouching for something is the best way to verify that its worth your time as well. To this end, twitter is easily the most useful tool for this type of meetup (this may be a chicago thing as all sorts of people flock to any event on the radar since we only have a few)

That said, welcome everyone who shows up.

NO PITCHING NO SELLING, HAVE FUN, good business relationships come from people you know and like not people you sell too and trade cards with

Have the meetup even if only you and one other person show up and keep having it, people will come eventually and even if they dont you still hung out with a friend for a while. People get discouraged if you let the meetup lapse. A new person showing up to zero people will have a negative reaction but showing up and meeting 2 people makes it a worthwhile night for them. Meetups are like startups, sometimes in the beginning you just have to do it even though no one seems to care or be paying attention, hang out with smart/good people and the word will start to spread
I'm doing startupdrinks and freehackers in Montreal, Canada

there's a website where people can register and see upcoming events http://techentreprise.com/Montreal/events

there's also local version for major tech hubs.

imho, the events are very easy to get off the ground (although I'm not the typical user case, since I had montrealtechwatch which had a big readership base)
A great example of a readable and effective contract I've found is the terms of use to the Patently-O blog:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2006/01/patentlyo_blog_.html

It does a nice job of using the formal legal language but also introducing each section with a human readable explanation.

The contract terms in the article are good in that they are human readable, but they lack legal precision. Consider the copyright assignment: "you own the graphics and visual elements" but "we own the XHTML markup, CSS and other code." There are plenty of ambiguities (if someone copies the layout, whose copyright is infringed? are the licenses exclusive? are they revocable?). Two judges could read this contract to mean substantially different things.
"Regulatory arbitrage" is widely used when referring to the exploitation of legal loopholes. Sometimes they call it "jurisdictional arbitrage" instead. The metaphor may be weak, but then people talk about "statistical arbitrage" and that's an oxymoron, so...
What I find really entertaining is that there has been a lot of recent "internet press" regarding modeling social phenomena using toy quantum game theoretical models, and that somehow in these toy models which have a more complicated notion of equilibria, its not really mentioned that

1) these 2 player models are too simple either way to do a satisfactory job of truly modeling / having predictive properties for human behavior.

2) We (humanity) barely understand the full spectra of classical games and the proper complexity of computing equilibria in diverse useful special cases, and given than in general quantum complexity theres at best a quadratic speedup, cf en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm , I suspect that the extra power is at most a quadratic increase in how succintly you can express any given model (or maybe its fully an exponential boost in the number of states you can succinctly express, only time and science will tell)
I have to agree here. Comments that add no value whatsoever ought to be down voted. At worst, your comment should have been left at 1 point. Personally, I thought it added some intellectual value raising the question "have or has?" And with a click...