skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Edit: Update 2

* Help yourself to other people's servers. Get a free shell account on a unix server and try to use it to the fullest. Chat with people in whatever MUD system they have in place. Try to circumvent security, build software on your account to go around network restrictions .. but don't be abusive. Try to tunnel a banned network protocol over a permitted one. Have your programs in your various account talk to each other. Leave backdoors, but not big, nasty gaping ones.

* Automate your social life. Write scripts to check your email, or parse RSSes of sites you frequent, or see any replies to your threads.

* Get accounts on shells that run on non x86 archs. Learn different assembly languages and have fun. Hack your router and game consoles, install a different OS than the vendor's ;-]

Update!

* Clone the basic unix commands in python and scheme. Coreutils from the GNU project should keep you busy for a while.

* Keep your code off of other people's boxes, including Google (with the appengine recommendations and all.) Sandboxed environments will not teach you how NOT to shoot yourself in the foot. This also goes for hacking in an emulator or a VPS. Learn on a real machine that you can touch and physically fuck up. A desktop is highly recommended, it will force you to open it up and change hardware. The first time you google a motherboard manual to flip a jumper or change a dead CMOS battery will be the day you realize the benefit of having total mastery over your machines.
Completely agree, mischief motivates you like none other.

I started out by making batte.net bots for Starcraft. They were super hard but there was plenty of open source code to leech and copy off of in the beginning. Later on, I managed to learn how it all worked and pieced together which allowed me to be able to write them from scratch. This was no easy task and I started proramming like this. It entailed understanding network programming, reverse engineering, how to code in general, how to send/receive packets, and all the fundementals associated.

Make a bot for anything or any game, scripting bots to do automated things that are annoying to do manually generally has a great sense of sanctification. Making an IRC bot is easy, start to get into more challenging things like non-plaintext protocols.

If that's too complex join a community that has already done this so you have something to go off of.

The most important thing is to do something you'll have fun with and still learn. Create something that either fixes a need for yourself or for you to gain an advantage in or something you'll get to see people use.
Don't see how that's possible without the OS exposing some kind of API, or if the browser latches on to that API. Either way, there is no portability here. Your best bet is Java, not JavaScript, or maybe just plain ol' Flash.
I've been thinking about profit sharing, not in the context of investors per se (who probably _should_ get equity), but the teams around various projects in my nascent company. I want to put things together quickly and formalize rewards with a barrier to ownership, investment and selling the company. The structure is generally one that maintains or ramps rewards for involvement and attenuates them over time (~1yr) as they leave. And the details can be explicit and open to all.

Thoughts in this vein?
I think you are complicating this too much.

Firstly, I don't mean particles; Just small enough bodies.
And near-lightspeed velocities are not necessary; Maybe 5% of lightspeed will do.

When the velocities are low you will probably observe non-relativistic two-body Coulomb scattering, which is mathematically no different from the Newtonian interaction between a planetoid and the Sun.

Dude, what does that mean? Can you solve the problem I raised or not?
To what extent has the medium house price changed over the last year or two, though?
Ask HN: Charging for an application
I've got an application that is part iPhone app (perhaps other smart phones in the future) and part web site. Believing in the start charging immediately philosophy, I want to do just that.

What I can figure out is how. I've written a blog post at http://softwaremaven.innerbrane.com/2009/05/how-to-charge-for-application.html that goes into some details, but I'd love feedback on the best way to move forward.

If I left something out, please point out my ignorance.
Empower the authors, give them tools to write and publish ebooks on their own in an online shop, like AppStore.

Make it easy and disruptive, like blogs, just write and publish, and profit!
What is the point of hiding the Flash interface in favor of a js powered interface? This thing still relies on Flash. IT is a cool demo but completely roundabout to add an extra layer of abstraction in the form of js.
You're the only other crypto person I know on HN. What did you think about that spat?
No, they won't. If _everyone_ is making less money, housing prices will adjust accordingly. What the article doesn't mention is that the 80s were an excellent time to buy a house.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeqrguz/housingbubble/
Could javascript convert an mp3 to a wav that any browser can play on the fly? I'm sure someone could make that.

The question is speed.

Given how awesome it would be for music sites on the iphone and other flashless mobile browsers, I'd love to see sometime try.
I was 12, and it was an Apple II+. Now this was 91 or so, so it was really old even then.
If html fails at typography (as you pointed out without any further explanation) then we should evolve html.

I insist, html is the answer.
Are you familar with MUD/Mushes?

Try writing one. You'll learn about concurrency, networking, parsing (some mushes have a built-in scripting language) and you will end up writing a lot of code.
I would imagine the act of using the app would itself become an obsession.

Hm. A better idea: every time you do a ritual, you make a pic/vid note of it on your app. The app can collate these into a graph of OCD behaviour by hour/day, etc, perhaps with a twitter feed.
What are your interests?

When I was learning to program as a kid (not counting Basic), I was really into text adventure games like this (http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/). I wrote an interpreter for text game worlds. It wasn't that great (I was 12 and it was in C++), but I learned quite a bit, and it gave me confidence for other stuff.

If you like math puzzles, Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) is great. Python Challenge (http://www.pythonchallenge.com/) is a series of fun puzzles that will also lead you through its standard library.

But, really, go with your interests. If you like logic puzzles, or making music, or 3D game stuff, or MUDs, etc., just pick something and run with it. Also, feel free to start small, you can hit the ground running once you have the basics down.
Ask HN: Looking for comments on my new site release
I've been a member here for as long as I've worked on this project and I always said I would ask HN what they though of my site or what I could improve on. From my own research I think that the online dating arena has room for more players. The users never have just one account and tend to cycle through multiple sites in kind of a circle of life. Anyway without further ado the site is at DiveIntoThePool.com

I'm starting out with a few other sites turning all ads over to this new venture and a small advertising budget. I'll be sure to blog the process and post anything I find very HNish

Thanks!
In case Colin's response wasn't clear enough: bcrypt doesn't use MD5 at all. It's a hack that uses Blowfish (an algorithm that is notoriously slow to "start up") where old Unix used DES, and tweaks the algorithm's startup to make it tuneably slower.

It's a hash function with a crypto-strong drag factor. A massive improvement in MD5's speed would be a win for MD5. bcrypt (and scrypt) are designed to stay on the opposite side of that tradeoff.
I have to 2nd this post. I learned a great deal about systems programming by learning about binary hacking and what not. See http://www.overthewire.org/wargames/
Curse is a really strong and almost sensationalistic word to use. If making less money because you happen to graduate during a recession in the US is a curse, what's left to those born in the poorest parts of the world.

While there may be a lot not to like about the US, it's still one of the best places to be if you want to make money.
I'd bet this originated from MS Research, who have plenty of people who have worked on/invented actor systems predating Erlang.
Red Code is also an interesting hackish programming environment one could clone in python or scheme.
Refreshing seemed to reset it for me.
I wonder about the change in marriage dynamics here.

Suppose you have a decade of fellows who, due to bad luck, are on a low-earning streak compared to those in the preceding years. Would this add incentive for the women of the right age, from the current decade, to marry men from the preceding "block"?

Alternatively, suppose all earnings are down, which means that relatively everybody is still about the same, within the current decade "block". Then women won't have much incentive to marry the older men.

But I think the previous case is more likely. Then we will have some kind of a gap in M/F distributions among the age groups. How would the current decade block's males adapt? When the women of the subsequent decade block enter the workforce, the males from the current block will have to compete with the males in the next block as well, but won't have much advantage from greater salary.

So it looks like a slow correction, a loss, to me, i.e. there will simply be an increased number of bachelors in this block.
RSA being broken is not optimistic
People with OCD are aware of the nature and extent of their problem, so why would this graph help? To detect trends over long periods of time? And if so, why?
He suffers as the protagonist in xkcd/386 does, except not just about the Internet.
"How can I find the creation date of a file?" is my favorite. So evil!
Only ironic if you take it out of context:

BARSAMIAN: ....You're very patient with people,
particularly people who ask the most inane kinds of
questions. Is this something you've cultivated?

CHOMSKY: First of all, I'm usually fuming inside, so
what you see on the outside isn't necessarily what's
inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever
get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff
they do I do find irritating. I shouldn't. I should
expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on the
other hand, what you're describing as inane questions
usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People
have no reason to believe anything other than what
they're saying. If you think about where the
questioner is coming from, what the person has been
exposed to, that's a very rational and intelligent
question. It may sound inane from some other point of
view, but it's not at all inane from within the
framework in which it's being raised. It's usually
quite reasonable. So there's nothing to be irritated
about.

I basically read that as:

Interviewer: Do you get angry when people ask you inane
questions?

Chomsky: Only when the person asking it should know
better.

Whether or not Chomsky and the interviewer's idea of what constitutes an inane question is the same as mine or yours may be grounds for criticism. But just quoting the bit that you did out of context is dishonest, and definitely fits with my idea of what constitutes an inane comment.
Interesting book, html6 should be able to display it exactly as intended. Even showing text upside down, and divs floating in the middle of two columns.

If not, we're not doing the right thing.
Open-source Erlang - White Paper
Vested equity might be a better choice for employees, since that portion of the profit would increase cash flow and the equity provides incentive for improving the company long-term. A profit-sharing rewards systems might be too much like performance-based sales pay and is shown not to be good for products in the long run.
Tumblr's Most Popluar Bloggers Have An Affinity For Publishing Adult Content
'Cone of silence' keeps conversations secret
A lot of people, myself included, kept far away from the iTMS for this very reason until recently.

Ironically it was Amazon that was providing the alternative to the DRM-laden product in that instance; I wonder who'll figure out a way to be the Good Guy w/r/t the Kindle now that Amazon has decided to take a crack at the DRM game?
FAQs should help that
what took so long?
I don't want to be come across as knee-jerky anti-Microsoft (I haven't used .NET; I admit ignorance there), I'm just surprised that it didn't acknowledge the one example of an actor system that programmers are likely to have heard about. It seems like it would be useful for comparison.

Besides, Microsoft employs Simon Peyton-Jones, among others, and they fund serious programming language research in various ways. I'm not implying it's dishonest on their part, I just found it a bit odd.
I would be interested in a citation for this observation as far as Coulter goes.
Bypass Rapid Share Waits and Limits
On the contrary, I bet that depending on the exact search algorithm, it would be possible to make some very specific predictions. To pick a simple example, say you use this technique on quicksort of the "pivot on the first element" variety. Given the nature of the algorithm, the first source element will end up near the center of the "randomized" list with high probability, not at all what you'd expect from an unbiased random permutation.

Granted, no real world sort is that simple, and it's even possible that the "clever technique" will produce an unbiased permutation for some sorting algorithms. But why waste time thinking about this when the Knuth shuffle, a proper way to randomly permute a list, only takes a few lines of code more and is so well-documented?
Not while you're growing. FAQs, knowledge base and a ticket system should be in place in any software shop. But while you're still hungry, all these support resources stay behind the fence, and used by you and your support staff. Users get friendly, personalized emails or even phone calls, even if the body of that email text (or the phone script) has to come out of a SQL database.
Excellent, let's hope you turn out more like LiveJournal though ;-)
Wasn't this done over and over on Proggit?
I have heard -- but don't have a source to cite -- that there are very few uranium mines currently in operation, because there was too much ore mined back in the 70s and 80s. The mining companies (principally in Canada and Australia) vastly overestimated demand; when TMI happened and the US stopped building new plants, suddenly there was enough on-hand for years.

Apparently there are whole ghost towns in Canada that just closed up shop as a result.

So it wouldn't surprise me if there hadn't been any U mining deaths recently, even though the mining is on average potentially more hazardous than coal. Keep in mind though, that even if Uranium was spectacularly more difficult and dangerous to mine, the volume of it that needs to be mined is so much smaller than coal, that it would still be a better option in terms of safety overall. (You'd just have to pay those miners a ton in return for the risk!)
Get the new macbook. 2.4ghz. Put Windows on it. Its a great machine.
I wonder what his revenue numbers are that he is embarrassed at how good he is doing.
Tools like GetSatisfaction can help (note: I have no affiliation, but have received good help there).
10-Year Anniversary
Sounds like a business opportunity. Every business needs a knowledge base, but they are too hard to get set up and for people to search.

It's a problem I've been thinking about lately (currently #3 on my list of problems to solve).
While only speaking from experience, I've noticed that many foreign PhDs in CS, Electrical and other engineering fields are increasingly electing to go back once they are done.

The main reasons seem to include being so far away from family and being in an alien culture. Further, jobs for PhDs are increasingly available in their home countries-- this seems to seal the deal. The tough immigration stance contributes to the discouragement since foreign workers have to "pause" their lives until they get their green card.
I can honestly say I don't understand that. Why pay the mac tax, then do away with 50% of the reason for that tax? I love my MacBook and OS X, which made it worth paying more. I can't imagine paying more for a windows machine.
If Amazon shuts down it means we've all been dead for weeks.
Sure, having used (and appreciated) Erlang I agree it would be interesting (I'm not a .NET user either or likely to become one.) I'm not surprised they omitted it, though I won't speculate why.

I just think it's worth reinforcing that there are interesting actor systems other than Erlang, and that some of the people at MSR deserve some credit in the area.
Changing html to support more exact and more advanced typographical features is a possibility. Problem: diversity and noncompliance of interpreters.

XHTML maybe? Some XML dialect? I can see these working if the toolchain (generators, interpreters, transformers) is tightly controlled or harshly forces compliance. Even still, I'd like my books to always look correct even if made by Microsoft eBook Publisher 2013.

Layout failure on the web is a minor annoyance. Layout failure for a e-book I paid $20 for is completely unacceptable.
First of all, calling me a "crypto person" is probably giving me too much credit. Two semesters of number theory (the second with an explicit crypto slant) make up the extent of my formal education on the topic. I've taught myself a fair bit beyond that, but I've never published any papers or anything.

That said, I'm mostly but not entirely on cperciva's side. At the granularity level of "disable HT" versus "put head in sand", I favor the former and think that Linux's choice of the latter was irresponsible. I also think all the ad hominems regarding self-promotion, cribbing from DJB, etc., were off the mark. However, your observation that a local privilege escalation vulnerability of any sort would be a more serious issue than the HT vulnerability, and that such is virtually guaranteed to exist, was a good one. The right answer, perhaps, would have been to disable HT in vanilla FreeBSD, and then re-enable it for PC-BSD.
It's a link to a story that was killed. You can turn on "show dead" in your profile to see them.
I believe this is inaccurate. After reading through the entire article and the page on EFF there is no indication of a take down notice for anything but a direct link to the 'offending material'. If I've missed something please let me know.
I am interested in build a system of this as well. Drop me a line if somebody want to start brain storm about it.
here's the answer:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#the-video-element
http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#the-audio-element

... but with the exception of IE (unless someone write some kind of activex to support it)
I'd drop you a line but your profile doesn't have contact info in it. My email is idoh@idoh.com if you want to ping me, I'd love to see what can be done to address this problem.
A lot of those problems require an advanced understanding of mathematics to properly solve; i.e., there is a "trick" that you would only know if you had familiarized yourself with it earlier in the course of your mathematical journey. But +1 for Project Euler!
I think the idea is that anything that can be measured can be improved.
Not to be read with coffee in one's mouth.
That's fine as long as you spend the time and actually read the whole message first. I've emailed so many companies which send me a fully canned response copied from their help section, but even worse they base that response on the first line of my message! Talk about frustrating, especially when you've waited x hours/days for that response.

If you get so many emails you're not taking enough care, it's probably time to hire somebody to do support...
Tell HN: this is a cool idea for webapp
I like the way it allows you to specify protocols directly
as state machines...
I really like the media temple kb and support system.
It seems strange to me that nobody's mentioned that a good chunk of society might actually enjoy shaking hands with one another. Even in the depths of germ paranoia, it seems silly to focus on other peoples' hands - there's much worse out there.
He says he's making enough to pay a year's salary to everyone in the company each month.

3 employees, let's say 30,000 euros (40,000 USD) per employee per year (data from http://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Country=Italy/Salary/sho... assuming he pays everyone as Project Manager, could be lower). That would be over 100,000 USD per month in revenues.
So, what tipped you off?
It sucks, but the faster these baby boomers face the harsh reality (of the mess they've created), the better. There's nothing to gain in whining and denial.

Generationalism is just like every other -ism. Not that you are being explicitly generationalist, you just give that impression.
Not the nicest design I've ever seen. But, I guess Plenty of Fish does very well on similarly ugly design. Maybe a case of worse is better.
Oh yes! I remember going through this over and over in the school library when I was in about 2nd grade, attempting to help re-fold pages so they'd pop up correctly.
Bright Future college grants favor wealthy
How about the "OCDers" take a look at themselves from a 3rd person POV and notice that what they are doing is completely useless and can be stopped at the source: themselves.

There are drugs that can help achieve the different POV perspective, if their minds aren't strong enough to do it themselves.

Seriously. And also true OCD = hospitalization. A lot of people have picked up the term and apply it to themselves when it shouldn't be.
Well it is nice to have the interface in javascript. Easier to build in to a normal page and change styling without having to open up a flash editor and re-compiling.
>> It's basically court decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was.

> That's simply false. And the massive corporations that seem most soulless and Dilbert-like, often are basically arms of the state ( ie, government contractors like IBM).

No, wrong.

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/index.html

Corporate personhood is not in the constitution, and being a 'natural person' came out as an unofficial side-effect of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, 1886 - A judge verbally said he thought that corporations had 14th amendment 'natural person' rights, that got added to the header by a clerk, and got quoted and treated as though it was caselaw. Perhaps you think we're arguing past each other, 'natural personhood' != tyranny, but without 'the right to petition govt', free speech, and be free from 'unreasonable search' etc, they wouldn't have nearly the legal protection & power that they do.
From the interview he linked to:
"Here’s the data that I do have: as of today (April 12, 2009) I have sold to 3798 customers for a total of $469,048 in sales. Sales keep growing steadily: the last 7 weeks have all been over $20,000, with a record $35k week for the first week of April. We are averaging around 200 new customers per week right now"