skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For this hacker crowd (in general), the ROI of a university education isn't fulfilling the promise proclaimed on my former high school walls, that college grads will make 1 million more in their life time than non-grads.

That being said, I can't wait to start college next year. For learning to be independent, for networking, for taking courses like Accounting I and II.

That being said, I am going to college starting next year but for 2 years I have been watching podcasts through iTunes U. Learning economics from berkeley, CS from Stanford. Thanks to the web, my professors are not limited to my university. :P
Right, but if SHA1(m) = SHA1(n), then SHA1(SHA1(m)) = SHA1(SHA1(n)) also.

The converse is not true. There will be cases where SHA1(SHA1(m)) = SHA1(SHA1(n)), but SHA1(m) != SHA1(n). (Or does SHA1 somehow guarantee that this will not happen?)

So it seems to follow that the chances that H(a) = H(b) when H(m) -> SHA1(SHA1(m)) must be higher than when H(m) -> SHA1(m).

Am I missing something?
The best thing I liked about PageSpeed as against YSlow is that it provides very specific action items. Very novice website owners can also follow the instructions.

A good addition would be the Printable Version of the report the way YSlow provides.

On Page Speed Activity tab, it seemed to be all messed up. It did the activity profiling for all pages open currently in the browser and not only for the specific page open in the current tab. Bug ? or did I miss some settings.
It only activates the sonar if it is under water:

http://trueslant.com/milesobrien/
Astalavista.com hacked, including details
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Pay rent or get a permit? SF bureaucracy scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner
College is valuable as hacker incubation period, even if a degree is not attained. You have a lot of time to hack on a lot of things, hopefully without worrying about rent quite so much (be it through parental or federal/stage aid/loans).
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Page as it appeared on June 5, 2009 12:15AM EDT:
http://pastebin.com/f751e9f5b

The post is a little low on details concerning the actual exploit used, but there's pretty massive carnage. Let's hope the admins have offsite backups.

For those who don't know of Astalavista, it was a popular website for "hackers" with relatively low-quality content. It started in 1994, and was one of the first search engines for computer security information. It hosted software exploits, and quickly degenerated into a forum for sharing software cracks, spyware, and virii.

Being a security-related website, you'd expect the owners to be a little more careful, which is why this is interesting.
For anyone in the Bay Area, the Stanford Senior Project Fair (which this site was written for) is tomorrow, and it's open to the public.

http://alpha.sitesincommon.com/meetups/1

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs194/faire/index.html
Claims that conditions other than back pain and closely related discomfort can be treated by spinal manipulation are obviously bogus. That said, spinal manipulation has the same effect as cracking your knuckles, which does result in pain relief and increased range of motion[0].

There is also significant evidence for the efficacy of accupuncture for treating several conditions, including migranes[1], nausea/vomiting resulting from chemotherapy[2] and improving success rates in in-vitro fertilization[3]

Most of the objections seem to be centered around the fact that modern science has no explanation for how these things work. We don't even know what makes the noise when joints are cracked[4]. The scientific and medical communities tend to be understandably reluctant to accept things as true without plausible explanations for how they work. That said, it's probably harmful to deny patients treatments that have been demonstrated effective simply due to a lack of understanding the mechanism of action.

[0] http://www.jmptonline.org/article/S0161-4754(07)00059-0/abst...

[1] http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab001218.html

[2] http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab002285.html

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18258932

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_joints
I don't think it's the future of media. Just content that works for the online medium. Fans having the ability to interact directly with celebrities is something people want to do.
Chrome Now Available for Mac or Linux : Hackers Only
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Get the right products from Showscreen for Screen sharing and Desktop Sharing.It is very easy.
Its the (other) hacker news this week on HN.
Funding space travel on the other hand is something that would not exist without public funds. So it's outside of the effecency debate.

If activity X is to matter in people's lives, it needs to be scalable. To be scalable it needs to be profitable. Since the U.S. government does not operate on a profit motive, the spending on the space program will have as little long term impact as the Zheng He fleets. You should read this article: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-f...
university won't go away if govt joins in further in cooperative exploitation, like requiring degree/certificate to do something

like, what if the average mom is required to have a degree just to cook regular food? because otherwise she's unqualified and can 'danger' her family

altho it seems that certification is required for lucrative professions (we prolly won't see degree is required for cooking, gardening, plumbing, etc) ... to protect the incumbent

anyway, we won't see law and medical schools going away if the artificial limits, exams, certifications still exist (those further making these fields harder to enter -> more lucrative)

like it or not, education (and religion) is a form of social control.
SAP has all it's business logic in the middle tier, and I wouldn't call it trivial.
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Sometimes that makes a lot of sense. The GPL's viral natural can cause serious problems. for a business Everyone at Microsoft is banned from even looking at GPL'd code.
It looks really useful. Much more than Yslow, and Yslow is great too.

I posted an example http://dodeja.posterous.com/762803

It even gives images that are optimized and JS that is minified. Developers <3 Google
Our heroes have always played games, but the games before were wars. It got us this far. You're not merely looking at a problem with our society and culture; you are looking at a universal aspect of human nature.
Indeed. I figured this particular piece of news would interest both types of hackers, as it contains technical details you wouldn't expect from a standard defacement. It's rather similar to the urge to rubberneck at a car crash: it's both horrific and exciting at the same time.

If my assumption is incorrect and no one is interested, I will humbly tuck my metaphoric tail between my legs and refrain from posting such things again.
The common man's opinions determine the elections, though. It's the common man's money that funds NASA and provides grants to researchers. Whether you care or not, the common man is a powerful force in determining the future.
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Backups were zip files of the source listed by date. They were kept on the CTO's laptop because he was the only one allowed to see the source, everybody else just got the function they were working on.

The code was written in C++ but the CTO was a Fortran programmer! So no inheritance, no function overloads, no private data.
And no malloc/new - there were several global buffers of different sizes statically allocated at startup and you used these, managing your own pointer offsets
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For those of you who have been using the daily Chromium dev builds, this build seems identical except for the minor branding change (Chrome vs Chromium).
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I am curious why this post is getting votes. Any reason?
Part of the deal is that all of our goals have to be falsifiable. That is, you have to be able to point to a goal six months later and be able to say, "I didn't meet my goal." So an example of a falsifiable goal would be to get 1000 RSS subscribers. A non-falsifiable goal would be organizing the world's information. Because there's no way you can be held accountable if you don't succeed.

So in general we each set our own falsifiable goals, and we're responsible for helping each other succeed. So in the sense that there's a performance standard to be met, your punishment for not meeting that standard is not accomplishing your goals.
Steve Jobs on track for June return
That type of respect for quality makes HN great. </circlejerk>
I have a sister and a step-sister who are both chiropractors. Apparently there are two disjoint schools of thought within chiropractry, at least in Australia.

My sister does the science based stuff that's mostly about the back and very closely related things, while the camp my step-sister belongs to believes that all ills come from and can be cured through the spine - including cancer, etc ...

They went to different universities, one university having the what I call the "science" focus and the other one having what I call the "crazy" focus. My sister chose the science focused university because the crazy focused university scared the hell out of her.

A bit strange that their qualifications are the same on paper.
Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems for Approximately $884 Million
Good stuff. Thank God the Mac version doesn't have that awful blue color that Chrome has on Windows. When Chrome is ripe with all features and add-ons like AdBlock Plus, Firebug and GreaseMonkey -- FF will have to shape up.
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.
I think that the main problem of webapps at the moment is that webapps are like islands : generally you can't get your data out of the webapp, you can't take the data of a webapp to put it into another one.
I completely agree. I actually quite like what you've done with the TripAdvisor meta-search, it's certainly close to what I would've done. :)
well that wasn't very nice
well it doesn't make sense when we don't modify the GPL projects and when we don't distribute our code
Wow. Wind River is way bigger than I ever realized.
I agree, but ideally you're goal should be to avoid these environments in the first place.
I installed Chromium on my Ubuntu box the other day. It is missing many features (plugins, bookmarks weren't working right, options missing, etc), as I expected from an alpha build.

It looks pretty good so far, though:

- It's really fast (compared to Firefox and Konqueror - yes I use KUbuntu)

- The UI looks similar to the Chrome on Windows (which I really like), except that it has an extra title bar.

- It didn't crash as I spent a few hours using it instead of firefox.

- It was really, really easy to install: Simply add the repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Then:

aptitude update && aptitude install chromium-browser

Can't wait till they get plug ins and extensions working... Then I won't miss Firefox at all.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Google started applying a bias to search results, pushing fast sites up the list?

I would definitely appreciate that option. I hate slow web sites.
That's less than 3x revenue. Isn't that low?
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This article would be a whole lot more comprehensible if it had a link or explanation as to what he's talking about. I had to go and look it up: MS wants to call netbooks by the term LCSN (Low Cost Small Notebook), apparently for Windows marketing purposes.
It mainly deals with Scheme, but http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1086393 examines implementing continuations on VMs that don't support them.
Could this level of unbalance have an effect on our genes? I've read of species that fluctuate, every 5-10 years, the genetics odds of male/female based on the gender ratios of the population.

It seems possible it could happen to humans if this got out of hand in the future.
I also liked the specific action items. Like which exact css selector is inefficient. Also liked it called out the exact images that could do with compression, what % can be gained and even a sample compressed image!
In a Java environment, in late 2007, we began work on a new application. I was told not to use Spring and that the application should be developed in Struts 1.

Thank god I left after a year.

Going forward, when you interview, you should ask about development environment, version control, testing practices, etc. You should ask to talk with some of your future coworkers.

If an environment is toxic, riddled with politics, poor engineers and bad coding practices, it's admirable if you try to change things - but you probably won't succeed. You're better off leaving and finding a better place to work.
True, but this only works if you then switch to Python and get all the Lisp/Scala/Clojure/Erlang programmers' knickers in a bunch. (I'm not English, by the way; it's just that the Brits have a gift for odd metaphors.)
Next Test - Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers
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hell, i tend to find any reasonably detailed description of the process of exploiting something to be pretty interesting.

gives a fairly good idea of how to not make the same mistakes, if applicable.
This somewhat concludes the whole point of the hax0rs:

Quote: "plaintext passwords? yes, those so called "security professionals" who charge you $6.66 / month to register at their hack-proof portal, save your passwords in plaintext... brilliant!"
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According to this article:

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

Genetic research reveals that:

Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

In other words, throughout most of history, most men did not have offspring. Although 32 million surplus males is a lot, it probably will not have a profound effect on the gene pool.
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An enterprising individual, requiring the consent of the shoe shiner in order to collaborate, might offer an investment.

The government, able to force its demands, seizes a tax.
That was painful to "watch" happen to them. Lesson learned. Do NOT f* with hackers...
Brutal indeed. Not only did they expose all aspects of astalavista, they actually trashed and dropped everything.

As bad as astalavista is, is it right to reciprocate and trash their server? It seems as if the hacker sunk to their level.

Are there legal ramifications to something like this?
Paul Graham and Y Combinator are on the cover of June's Inc Magazine
Several southern Indian states have achieved even more impressive population control (below replacement level fertility in a part of India that accounts for about 30% of the population) without any coercion at all. Even in northern states, fertility is dropping at a pace that has surprised demographers. I bet fertility would have dropped in China the same way voluntarily.
I think scrolling down that was more suspenseful than any book I've ever read :)
"Are there legal ramifications to something like this?"

Uh, yeah, of course. Good luck catching them, though.
You should add latex capability to text entry. Most scientists can not live without it especially when it comes to writing stuff that has any remote connection to mathematics.
I'm thinking I was not the only one reading the title as altavista.com and I was really shocked.

Thanks for the background info on the site.
Interestingly, it may be that one could pay twice as much per teacher and still end up with a lower cost per pupil overall, as administrator overhead plays a large part in the regular cost formulation. $125 / 30 students ~ $4k, a fraction of both the DC metro public and charter school cost per pupil (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/dc-vouchers-better...).
They did have off-site backups, which the hacker found and erased.

One strategy that I employ to mitigate this is to have my backup service connect to the production server, rather than the other way around. That way if your production services are compromised, your backups remain untouched (on a machine that's running no services, behind a firewall, etc, and for all intents invisible).
And it seems like Chrome includes update engine, unlike Chromium.
also developed by the one and only microsoft.
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.
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Depends on the right combination of usefulness and simplicity.

I'm assuming this is web-based. Here's something practical at the implementation level:

1. It doesn't have to be true REST-ful. But it should be as easy as forming a GET URL string, or if appropriate, POST with simple, string payloads unless it is binary data like images etc. i.e. no XML attachments please. Twitter, Posterous are good examples of these.

2. Return results in JSON and XML. Prefer JSON. It is easier and more efficient (yes, it's a hunch, no benchmark done) to get a dictionary/hashmap from a JSON string rather than XML. And the quickest way if I want to use such an API quickly and easily is to load the results into a dictionary/hashmap and grab values from there. Twitter is good here.

3. If you provide the API with results in more than 1 format make sure they work the same. The Twitter API is a great example of what your API should not be.

4. Make sure they work. At least fix them quickly, this is a web-based API, and web-based means they can be fixed quickly. The Twitter API is a great example of what your API should not be.

5. Give developers enough time and warning when you make breaking changes. The Twitter API is an example of what it should not be. Posterous is a great example of what it should be.

6. Don't make me get a developer key/ID please.

7. Versioning. Don't bother. Yet.
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mysql> drop database ... (x9 databases)

My jaws literally dropped when I got to that part.. that's gotta suck, even for a crude site like Astalavista.
Do you really only look at one file at once? My laptop's display is ~1600 pixels wide; that's enough for 3 terminals, all viewing different files, if I keep them at 80 columns wide. If my terminals are wider, I can only see two files at once. When I'm using multiple displays, I'll generally have consoles in one display and a browser in the other, or six consoles (my brain is small, so I need lots of files open to keep track of how things work). 80 columns is just a nice width for reading things; it's about what a book uses, and it's what most people are used to. Why not stick with it?
Congrats PG!

And what a suave picture :-)
Really? Most of my experience is on trading systems handling thousands of real-money transactions per second, and stored procedures are the only proven approach.
Yes and the fact that there are always smarter people with more time on their hands than you out there on the internet.
http://www63.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+india+v...

It still looks like India is on track to surpass China's population though.
Try the Unarchiver: http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

It's one of the first things I install on any OS X system. Great unarchiver that takes care of most (all?) the common archive formats, although I run into the occasional password issue. It beats StuffIt without a doubt.
The interesting bit is if you read his letter with the attached question and answer session, he talks about how trivial items that could be discovered by a student on their own shouldn't be patented. It's a great point because it seems there is a mutually exclusive situation here: either teachers (starting from grade school) are inhibiting students from becoming creative with math and making proofs, in which case they are told to just learn existing material (that is presumably patented and in the course work) so as not to deviate from the other children. Or they are offered the other option in a software patent free world of ideas where they can think for themselves.

Lockhart's Lament: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499
It's cut from the same tree of course. However, the official builds have crash reporting and auto updating.

Unless you're actually building from source and writing patches, please use the official builds. We do look at the crash reports!
It looks really useful. Much more than Yslow, and Yslow is great too.
I posted an example http://dodeja.posterous.com/762803
It even gives images that are optimized and JS that is minified. Developers <3 Google