skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like they first buffer overflowed Litespeed to spawn a shell (which was ironically running as a user 'apache'). The http headers that are being returned from Astalavista are consistent with this theory (in addition to the obvious output of the first binary run). Apparently Litespeed has a pretty dodgy security record after doing a cursory search.

Far more interesting was the root escalation exploit. 2.6.18 is a relatively recent kernel, and I haven't heard of exploits publically disclosing something of that caliber. Has anyone seen anything on securityfocus/bugtraq/milw0rm etc regarding this?
No problem

template <typename T>
class NotAPointer {
T* m_pointer;
T* set(T* p) { return m_pointer = p; }
T* get() { return m_pointer; }
NotAPointer(T* p) { set(p); }
}

Just outsource that and you're pointer free!
I see this guy every morning on my way in to work. Had no idea he was homeless. Pretty impressive and inspiring story.
Not as bad as where they found the backup plan in the bash history, FTP'd to their remote backups, and deleted them all...
Thanks. The guys who took those pictures were really impressive. They had a monitor displaying pictures as they were taking them, and the quality was amazing.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html
I definitely read "altavista" at first too having never heard of astalavista until now.
I was surprised to see that Google's automatic-update system for Linux is to just hook into the native packaging system (for Ubuntu/Debian this is APT, it sounds like they're planning Yum integration for Fedora, etc.)

I'm not sure whether to be annoyed that their installer messes with my system configuration, or to applaud them for not re-inventing the auto-update wheel yet again.

I suppose the advantage of Firefox's update mechanism is that the browser can present nice 'please shutdown now' dialogs; on the other hand, Ubuntu already refuses to upgrade Firefox while there's a firefox process running, so maybe this is a net win after all.
I haven't programmed Java besides some tiny things so I'm curious about #1. Suppose someone wanted to log all exceptions. How would you go about it in Java?
So you're saying that there is some fundamental, a priori reason for humanity to aspire to a higher level on this scale than it currently occupies?

What?
Congrats! Looks fantastic.
I think the goal would be to find a way to bring similar joy to millions that has a lasting positive effect, rather than two hours of entertainment.

I'm not denying that millions are entertained by sports, but it isn't "work" in the sense that work = force * distance. Distance in sports is zero, so it's a lot of force, but nothing comes of it. It doesn't go anywhere.

There are lots of joyful things, entertaining things, that actually move society and life in a positive direction. We need to spend more time celebrating those things and the heros of science and math for our kids.

If parents celebrated winners of the science olympiad as much as they celebrate michael phelps, then the world would be a very different place.

I think part of the difference is that with sports, you can see that it takes a lot of energy to train to win a swim match, but you can't see the energy expended to win a science competition. Intelligence is something we believe you either have or do not have regardless of the amount of training, but that's just not true.

It takes a lot of work and training and accomplishment to be a great scientist, just like it takes a lot of work and training and accomplishment to be a great athlete.
I was rather surprised when a family friend of mine told me that she takes in around a a $100k yearly. She is a middle school teacher(~10 years in the bay area). So teachers in many places actually get paid a good salary.
There's a nasty bug in the vmsplice() syscall in anything from 2.6.17 to 2.6.24.1. Exploits have been public since early 2008.

http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/5092

http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/5093
Verifying Zipf's power-distribution law for cities
Would this be like (cond) in lisp?

(cond
((seen-them in-tabular-format) '(you know they are great))
...)
And this is why it should be legal to shot bureaucrats on sight. How petty do you have to be to prevent a homeless man from bettering himself?
The difference is that Hacker News does not have Commenting Standards that state number of > to use for quoting, unlike his company which probably had Coding Standards stating number of whitespaces to use.
Working with code written by 3 people if one of them used 4 whitsepaces, other used 2 and 3rd used tabs is just terrible.
MIT's intro systems class has a bunch of the same papers, and some other good ones people might like. The list is http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/reference.shtml but you can find links to the papers through the schedule at http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/schedule.shtml
One of the files on their server is an exploit for that vulnerability. If they know about it, I would guess they aren't vulnerable, but who knows.
Don't forget theology. Otherwise, point well taken.
Chrome should soon be able to update without going horribly wrong. (This is more difficult than you probably suspect since we exec new processes for new tabs much of the time).

We certainly don't want to reinvent auto-updating when we don't need to. Sticking a new apt source into your system config is a /little/ freakly, but not nearly as bad as assuming that user processes are going to update system binaries.
According to The Brookings Institution, "a new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues.

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/9474/No_85_Sports...
HBR: Design Thinking [pdf]
I wasn't asked. But Steve and I had a bunch of usernames we'd log into for the first few weeks to submit cool links. I must have had about 10 that I'd cycle through (such is the life of the non-programming cofounder in the first month of a social news site).

The day when neither of us had to submit anything was a great one - it happened during that summer and gave us hope that the damn thing might actually work.
Note that all though this is "actual" Chrome instead of yet another Chromium build, it still has all the same limitations that the Chromium builds have, i.e. no flash, no changing default search, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny

In the old days, it was the quest to expand the U.S. from the atlantic to the pacific, but the pacific wasn't quite far enough. Now we must expand into the farthest reaches of space.
In fact, he's posted numerous collections of free tilesets and sprites, in a number of genres. For example, graphics from an unfinished RTS game:

http://lostgarden.com/2005/03/game-post-mortem-hard-vacuum.html

A 2D top-down medieval RPG:

http://lostgarden.com/2006/07/more-free-game-graphics.html

Graphics from Tyrian, a vertical shooter he worked on:

http://lostgarden.com/2007/04/free-game-graphics-tyrian-ships-and.html

The full list of free-game-graphics posts:

http://lostgarden.com/labels/free%20game%20graphics.html
The update also has an explicit license, in case you want to distribute any game you make.
Ask HN: do you write book?
Hi,

Did you experience to write some tech books? and what's the toolkits have you used?

-Jack
I was working for an airline website - which was weird, because I had been promised I would be working on something else. I bit my tongue and agreed to it, since it sounded like fun.

Then the Chairman of the company, a fellow who supposedly had a law & math degree, told me that he would be doing the design with me (???). I sat down as he started writing buzzwords on the whiteboard. I jotted down a bunch of nonsensical words like "powersearch", "hypersearch", "megametasearch", and tried to write down what each meant.

Once the buzzwords were out of the way, it was onto the real meat and bones - the design!... except, in his own words, "At XYZ, we design the database FIRST and then design the program on top of that". Think about it. No objects, no user story, no nothing - just "DESIGN THE DATABASE". So I sat slackjawed as he started listing stuff like "Oh, we can use an enum for the airline companies... hmm, I wonder if int is too big for the id, maybe we should use smallint?". I tried to steer him towards the more fundamental questions of "What exactly do we want?", but he was having none of it.

I spent 4 months working on that software, and 2 more months wasted in other ridiculous projects he had before I tendered my resignation.
don't forget velcro and memory foam
There's not a lot of things I miss from Mac OS X since moving to Linux, but StuffIt Expander's intelligent directory-creation is definitely one of them. It looks like dtrx is basically the same thing - thanks!
I'm sure the code to produce these graphs is impressive, but I don't see much value in the visualizations themselves.
Wow... I'd never heard of it. It's like nothing ever changes... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Of course we have heard of the comparison between gladiators and football players, but I never realized people back then were as vehemently opposed to that sort of thing as they are now.

I thought it was a growing consciousness, but really it is just me becoming more aware of people who agree with me... But people like me have lived forever and if it's been 5000 years without any change, why should I expect anything will change through the course of my life?
Protect Yourself With The Shoes
Slow for Google's crawlers does not necessarily mean slow for you or vice versa. It depends on location, whether logged in an not logged in users see the same site, the time of day, the functionality of the site etc.

They could adjust for the factors picked up by this plugin, but their importance is going to cary from site to site.

Also, it could easily be gamed.

Hopefully slow sites should annoy people and get fewer links.
perhaps the federal government should fund commercial endeavors in space like they fund commercial endeavors in sports.

Lots of people would pay to go to space if they could afford it. Make it affordable.
Offtopic, but please, don't use 'virii'. The correct plural is 'viruses'. 'Virii' is wrong for two reaons:

1) The Latin plural of word ending in -us is not -ii. -i at best.

2) 'Virus' doesn't have a Latin plural, because its meaning is like (in the sense of not having a plural) 'sand': it already denotes a multitude.
Nokia Mobile Phones: Mark of Elegance
Consolations in a Dark Age
Amazon on is listing this book for pre-order:

http://www.amazon.com/NASA-Apollo-Owners-Workshop-Manual/dp/...

Release date is set for November 1st, 2009.
Samsung i770 Saga CDMA
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How to Remove the .NET ClickOnce Firefox Extension
the description is pretty link bait, he didn't launch 145 companies, YC just invested in them.
Doesn't work with 10.4.11
Doesn't work with 10.4.11 (cross post from other thread)
I'm sure this is the magazine's fault, but the headline could easily be misconstrued: "Paul Graham has launched 145 companies. His formula? Smaller Cheaper Faster"

I guess it depends on what you mean by "launched", but if I didn't know about this stuff already, I'd think they were trying to tell me PG literally started 145 companies as a founder.

Again this is a knock on the magazine and not PG. They're probably just trying to sell more copies.
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You're advocating murder?

Anyway, yes, the system tends to fail when people work outside of the system. I'm not sure why this guy can't live in the subsidized housing until he has enough money to legally run a business and pay his own rent, though.
Corporate Flight Attendant Community
One day I got a call from my credit card company asking me if I would like to increase my credit limit by borrowing up to $9000 at their special rate of 15.9%.
Find Song Words
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Heh 13.33.33.37.
Like the client quoted in the article said, "Nothing like kicking someone when they are down."

Page A-1! I hope that means something good will come of this.
Chrome deb/ubuntu x86
I agree. "Paul Graham gave 3 months of rent to some people" doesn't sound quite as nice.
It says in the article that he refuses to live in subsidized housing.
Yeah, considering how last-decade astalavista.com is, I wouldn't be surprised if now is the most pageviews they've gotten in awhile ;)
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We could be even more confident about this if universities were not so thoroughly funded, controlled, and supported by the government. If they weren't, then sure, better methods of education could easily replace them. But the government will continue to invest large sums of money to prop up the existing university system. We can hope they fail.
I especially liked "philip"... one of the 100 most common boy names.

dark side of me: I wonder how many of those passwords work to get into those e-mail accounts...
Good point. The kernel version in the transcript looks like the version I've got on a CentOS machine, so it's probably patched. Interestingly, the strings ("r00tr00t", "Executing shell") from the local-root tool they're using don't appear anywhere online, suggesting that it's something private and potentially unknown.
The tool they were downloading appears to have been private. Hence the anonymized IP and hostname (anti.sec.labs).
state regulation of government funded day care is pretty brutal. public school.
when I read the title(before clicking the link), i interpreted this as "jobs are returning to New York" - indicative of the economy.
anyone else dumb as i am?
well, if they are gonna get paid 125k some quantitative accountability seems in order.
so you know what (who ?) "paul" is :
pointer-to-a-unsigned-long.

sorry, couldn't resist
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I'm Afraid I Can't Let You Do That Dave
Ask HN: Please review our startup: gpsAssassin
Wow Paul Graham Looks quite American. Not far off from what I imagined he looked like tho, quite a father figure :)
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Can you elaborate on the licensing work with Conde Nast? What was that and how did you get to the? Thanks!

Disclaimer: I read comments first before clicking the link, so haven't seen the video.
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Yes, great teachers should be paid well. But there's another side to this coin.

Teaching is a brutal job.

Parents complaining about grades and/or teachers. Student behaviour worse than its ever been (with administrators that do very little about it -- partly because of outside pressures). Every bit of interaction with parents, and observed problem behaviours with students, must be documented. Dates, times, what was discussed, what actions are to be taken.

Far too regular class interruptions for all sorts of things (ex. sporting events, pep rallys, dances, early dismissals, awards ceremonies, field trips, plays). Teaching gets much more difficult when a non-trivial percentage of students are out every day, and/or class time is cut short (or gone) for other activities.

Rubrics required for everything (a teacher can't just say, "this is C work" -- everything must be documented, and this makes the amount of grading work go through the roof).

Unending meetings, data collection requirements (you'd be amazed at how badly administrators want to put a number on your kids). State curriculum requirements. Standardized testing. Paperwork up the wazoo.

And I don't even need to mention that you better not need to go to the bathroom during class, because you can't leave students unattended. And between classes, well, you've got 4 minutes between bells. Better make it quick. And hope another teacher's not using the same bathroom you're heading for.

Higher pay for teachers would be nice, but that ain't the problem.
The other day I saw two SF cruisers pulled over busting a guy selling strawberries on the corner. I constantly walk past human shit, used needles and the broken glass of car windows and they're arresting a guy who's doing something useful?
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To me, it's an interesting unintended consequence of China's birth control policy.

Perhaps the government solved the overpopulation problem, but they also created an imbalance between men and women which may lead to social unrest.

Also, as China's population becomes older and retires, they will have a large imbalance in productive workforce.
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4 points by wysiwtf 4 hours ago | link

These tools (like YSlow) are oh so interesting when your clients install them in their browser and examine the site you built for them. Now, I'll get to hear complaints that we used too many inefficient CSS selectors (and that we're incompetent), ignoring the fact that a .0003 millisecond makes no difference to the client's website. It's not Google's fault, but I just had to sigh when I saw some of the rules (I'll expect a call by tomorrow haha). :-)
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The other day I saw two SF cruisers pulled over busting a guy selling strawberries on the corner. I constantly walk past human shit, used needles and the broken glass of car windows and they're arresting a guy who's doing something useful?
I think they do already have a bias towards faster websites, but as with everything else with google it's only speculation as things constantly change with these guys.
maybe it's just not indexed.
I saw some paypal details in there aswell, I'm wondering if astalavista used any of the same passwords to secure that account?
Why market risk is better than marketing risk
HN meets its first spam bot..
or bank accounts
So, a base cost of $125K/30 kids. Add in benefits for the teacher and you're at $150K. Liability insurance is another $50K. Rent per year for 1500 sq ft to house the 30 kids (the classroom is smaller, but you also need to amortize the cost the space needed for admins, gyms, halls, locker rooms, cafeterias, etc) is at least $30K. Supplies (books, sports equipment, etc) conservatively cost about $10K for the 30 students. And, realistically, you'll always have some administrative overhead (tech guys, librarians, lawyers, principal, secretaries, etc) which I can't imagine being less than $50K (amortized over a sufficiently large school).

That brings our total cost to, at least, $290K - which is about 10K per student. Still not too bad (although I'm still probably missing/underestimating some expenses ...), but at least marginally more realistic than your made up $4K/student number.

I like the idea of school vouchers and private schools too. But you have to be realistic.
just publish the business logic as a library and have standards that dictate its use

LOL!! Why not put the business processes in the standards too, then you won't need any code!

The point is, no-one running any apps against your database has a choice but to respect the business processes if it's all implemented in stored procs. You are protected from malice, from incompetence, from simple human error, and your auditors and regulators and shareholders are happy. Maybe no-one cares if it's only a website.

Also I am hilariously amused that you don't think stored procedures can live in version control like any other source code.
Yes, and they are also assuming that sudden popularity causes the sudden unpopularity. If the trend they describe is true and common, it might be because the large number of people who follow fads quickly don't stick with them for long, while things of real quality take longer to be accepted, but are worth keeping around. Therefore, the conclusion and advice should be to make a high-quality product.
I'm pretty sure YC does more than that...
I'm just saying the headline is ambiguous, and Paul Graham did not start 145 companies as a founder. I don't see why that seems to trivialize his role. It's not as if I said he doesn't advise the founders.

I know some HNers can get quite defensive of PG, but it really isn't necessary here.
Birth control (and one of its consequences, older population) are unfortunately only one side of the coin. Interestingly, Mother Nature "regulates" the population in a way that in peaceful times 51 to 52 percent women are born but at the war time, more male babies are born.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-12/why-does-war-b...

I suppose, the same (proportion of ~ 51:49) would happen in China despite birth control. The real problem is "Female Infanticide", due to bias in many "patriarchal" societies towards women as being somewhat inferior to men.
I can't understand how they animate the transition in Flash. Is it 3D in low-res?
or here:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article08-600
When a site is reported as 'hacked', am I alone in not wanting to visit it for a look-see? Aren't the same people who deface sites likely to try fresh browser compromises against rubberneckers?
How is this different from saying BestBuy and Fry's are copying one or each other.

When two businesses sell the same stuff there is bound to be some similarity between how they lay out their shops.
Teaching has very strong unions. Actually that's the main problem. Teachers here in the UK are effectively unsackable, yet at the same time their jobs are hell because the unions insisted on all sorts of trendy Marxist nonsense being taught at teacher training colleges.
The JavaFX Phone: The HTC Diamond
Why is it that the plural of "radius" is "radii" but the plural of "virus" is not "viri"? I don't see "virus" as inherently denoting a multitude in the dictionary. Just curious.
Definitely a much better method of handling backups. Completely agreed.
Furniture Storage Classifieds
Calgary furniture storage is the perfect place to preserve your Mother's furniture, until you find a place for it in your home.
It's easy to modify strings in a simple C function/program. That's all that would be needed to modify and display the "r00tr00t" etc you are mentioning.