skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading the main article and the link you provided, my interpretation/understanding is:

* The idea is to trick the web server into keeping a connection open and waiting for data, e.g. by keeping on sending pointless headers, not sending enough (< content-length bytes of) data in the body, etc. Unlike a SYN flood or so, this doesn't require much traffic from the attacker.

* The reason this works is that apache has a limit of one thread or process per active connection, and there is typically an upper bound on

* The way to fix this once and for all in apache et al would be to handle socket I/O asynchronously, thus lifting the 1:1 ratio of connections to threads/processes.

Is that accurate? I'm mostly curious so that I can try to avoid any such pitfalls in any server software I might write.

One way to fix this in apache without breaking too many existing modules and extensions might be to use fibers to hide the asynchronicity and schedule them in the "blocking" I/O functions which would actually use non-blocking I/O underneath. (I don't actually know the apache architecture, so I might be wrong about the blocking I/O)
I can see why some people find it disappointing, but why would you find it humiliating?

Disclosure: I met a lot of women online (including the one I married) and generally enjoyed it, but I'm always interested in hearing other perspectives.
Burd's key observation: "cure for today's ills is simply removing the obstacles to a free health-care market." (from referenced WSJ article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124536722522229323.html )
This deal has been circulating for a while but Gizmodo/TC fail to mention that upgrades are specifically excluded in Bing Cashback's terms. Now, that's not saying you won't get it, but it's something to be aware of if you're counting on getting that money.
Parrot is a very different idea. The idea is simplicity for ease of implementation. I'm pretty certain that almost any other system that didn't have this goal in mind would be too hard to implement for practicality.

An interpreter for this code should be extremely small, really.
Why is this better than C + SWIG?
This is an incredibly old css "trick". Its also completely annoying. Yes, 4 years ago I implemented this on an old corporate site. Today? I'm building my sites to be adaptable across browsers and leave the nit-picky details of the rendering to them.
Why the focus on celebrity and conflict?

The cited blog post is better: http://irgupf.com/2009/06/19/semantic-technology-search-pane...
The IE8 comparison is very misleading. They give IE checkmarks for "security," "privacy," and "ease of use," where Firefox and Chrome get none. What, so Firefox and Chrome have ZERO security and privacy? Wow, thanks for warning me, Microsoft!

The truth is that all three browsers have security and privacy features, which are too complex to be reduced to a single checkmark. Firefox at least gives some quantified argument on its pages: "An independent study shows that, in 2006, IE users were vulnerable to online threats 78% of the time. Firefox users? Only 2%."

It's interesting that this comparison doesn't concede a single category. In "performance," they say, "hey, let's call it a tie!" Actual timed measurements of Javascript performance show that IE8 is WAY slower than the competition.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/27/ie8s_javascrip...

http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics....

Microsoft's browser comparison truly is deceptive. I'm glad they're moving people away from IE6, but they're far from having the best browser our there.
Looking for a cofounder for MobMov. Featured in NY Times, NBC, more...
Project: mobmov.org

Disruptive film distribution: challenging traditional cinema-based licensing and distribution with a widespread community-powered network of car-powered drive-ins.

I don't know if this is really the crowd for it, but my mobmov project is showing some serious potential to finally take off. But I don't have the time or resources to drive it. I'm looking for a true founder-type to join me.

I've been running it for over 5 years. Without any PR at all, it's been written up in Time, AP News wire, BBC, New York Times .com front page (last week), BBC radio, NBC tv and tons of other places. We have over 12K in the mailing list now, and our SF/LA shows draw 150+ people. I've been approached by several agencies looking to sponsor, but nothing major has panned out yet (mostly my fault for not following up).

How is it a business? Well, for starters, we have a nationwide network of both chapter drivers doing shows and members interested in watching movies. We're one step and a few phone calls away from doing trailer deals, sponsorships ("lit by InFocus"), charging admission or membership; heck, disruptive film licensing and distribution are a possibility.

I'm posting this because, frankly, while I enjoy running the shows, I have no time at all to 1) work on the site, the code is a good two years old; so much can be done with it, geolocation, sms, etc 2) make the calls and connections needed to make it a "real" business.

If this idea excites you, and you see the potential, and you're a talented entrepreneur, email me: bryankennedy@me.com

I'd be interested in seeding it with some capital as well.
Ask HN: Coders' guide to the investment lingo
Being a coder (and not having my own startup either), I sometimes have a very hard time reading articles about VCs, angels, investment and such. Basically, if the article is full of terms like "liquidity", "preferred shares", "dividend accrual" or "exit strategy", the most I can hope is to understand the general tone of it.

What reading (books, sites, etc) would you recommend as a good way to start educating myself about these concepts?
I said "prolific", not "good". Though, Asimov is likely my favorite author, and ordinarily I'd be loathe to mention Anthony and Asimov in the same breath. Just goes to show that both good and bad writers can be more successful just by virtue of writing a lot.
Here's how I read that statement:
IE6 and IE7 were only the "best IE yet" at release due to how truly awful each previous incarnation was. IE7 is a lousy browser, so calling it the "best IE yet" at the time was like saying that chewing on tinfoil is more fun than chewing on rusty razor blades. It might be an accurate statement, but it doesn't mean you're enjoying that tinfoil. IE8, on the other hand, actually feels like a step (admittedly a smallish step) in the right direction.

Similarly, Windows 7 is actually more _usable_ than previous Windows. Vista was shinier than XP, and had a couple nice features like integrated search, but there's a reason Dell had to start selling machines with XP licenses again.

I think the author intended the statement to be something like this: that Windows 7 and IE8 actually _deserve_ the title of "best ___ yet."
Twitter Business Model Revealed?
Sure, but aren't you the guy whose claim to fame is taking DOM API's written by people who think in C++ and translating them into JavaScript? Get to work!
I agree that the article isn't very helpful. Here is a benchmark for you:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/27/ie8s_javascrip...
I agree that people should read Jeremy Pickens's post at IR Gupf--that's why I wrote a "quick bite" on my blog which a teaser excerpt and a link. Evidently Jeremy is getting a lot of readers today (including Mark Johnson, the program manager of Bing), which makes me happy.
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/16588637/download
That isn't legal PHP.
Here's another test. Out of 10 browser versions tested, the only one that IE8 beat was IE7.

http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics....
This is part of Daniel's "Blogs I Read" category. The focus is indeed Jeremy's post. It's not TechCrunch, trust me. :) The Noisy Channel is a fantastic blog, and is among the few websites I read regularly.
It struck me as a backhanded compliment as well. Especially given that part of the Bing marketing push has been focused on relevance so say what is essentially "we're glad that someone is working on improving search in ways that aren't related to relevance" is definitely a compliment and a tweak at the same time.
This is a nice example for the (not so) subtle brain damage that java has inflicted upon a whole generation of developers. John points out nicely how the insanity even creeps into other languages when nobody's looking...
ATL startups hope this cloud is rainmaker
That is what I ended up doing. Except this is raw data. Usually NLP researchers work from corpora that are already segmented into sentences and tagged with part-of-speech tags. I had to go through the hassle of segmenting and marking up the Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg.
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s Double Standard For WordPress Plugin Developers
Android Users Are Stickier Than iPhone Users
Hey, I don't get the humiliating part either.

Why are you disclosing that you met and married a woman online?
The Pig in a Ham & Eggs Breakfast
You're essentially saying that the market is too big to take on without big funding.

In the vein of what rjurney said, is it possible the niche you're filling isn't small enough? If you try and capture the whole market with big funding and the big guys come in and take your lunch, you still fail. If you learn how to meet the needs of a niche, even if the big guy comes in and chases the whole market, you'll still meet the needs of your niche better than anyone, and can grow into an adjacent niche.
Calif unemployment climbs to record 11.5 percent
Put a reverse proxy in front. You should do this anyway. Modem and other pokey connections effectively do the same as this DOS.

http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html
Yes, I done exactly this.
it is actually 20GB uncompressed and takes 5-6h to parse.
http://appraisalmind.com/articles/wikipedia-word-frequency-l...
Would you consider making it available to others?

Perhaps the UCI Machine Learning Repository would accept it. If not, I'm sure I could find a way to have it hosted at my university.
Try door to door canvassing for a month (or three). After returning from some travel I picked up a job at greenpeace to tide myself over. Any inhibitions to putting myself out there and selling were hammered out in the three months I fund-raised for them. They train you, support you in the field, and most importantly make you _practice_ selling for 4 hours a day. There's just no replacement for experience. I needed a little strong-arming to get out and learn how to sell.
Walking the Amazon (river)
The author does say neither sides' lawyers acknowledge it. That indicates to me there's some reason to dispue it. If Watt doesn't dispute it, why isn't he quoted as saying so?

If it's not shoddy journalism, then it's shoddy writing.
I completely agree.

In fact I'm not sure what his argument really is here. Right now Flash gets updated because people run into a website that says "you need a newer version of Flash for this" and they want the content enough to push the update button.

So when HTML5 browsers start coming out and those IE6 users run into sites that say "you need a newer version of [insert browser here] to view this" I find it hard to believe those same people won't click the "update" button on their browser if they want the content bad enough.

That means, as time goes by, HTML5 browsers should have around the same penetration that Adobe Flash has.
The China study was interesting. The rice-eating south and wheat-eating north did about equally well, but the meat-eating upper class did not.

As for that link about Japan, it contains a pretty serious error. My guess is that the authors may have confused the caloric density of dry rice vs prepared rice.

Though fish intake has been pretty stable and the intake of rice has drastically declined in the past generation, people in Japan still get several times more calories from rice than from fish. It's also worth pointing out that as meat consumption has gone up, so have the rates lifestyle diseases. I've lived most my adult life in Taiwan, and the same thing is happening here.

>"there were a number of changes in the Japanese food supply: in 1961, 90% of the caloric supply per capita per day consisted of 90% vegetable products, and 10% animal products. In 2002, the ratio changed to 79% vegetable products, and 21% animal products. Rice appears to have given way to other grains (such as wheat) as well as increased intake in meat products. However, fish products appear to have maintained their standing as a constant in the Japanese food supply.

While the daily total calorie supply increased through much of the 1960s, it then stabilized, and then rose again in the 1980s. The supply of calories from rice declined from over to 1000 calories per capita in the early 1960s, and then declined to 618 calories per person. Calories from fish rose, and then largely stabilized. Fish accounted for just over 173 calories of per capita calorie supply in 2002, rising from 112 calories per capita in 1961."
http://www.japanreview.net/essays_fish_and_rice.htm

My take on it is that we'd all be healthier if we were eating as if we were on WWII-era rations, but few people have the will power to live like that voluntarily. It's much easier to try to convince ourselves we need to eat in a way few of our ancestors could have afforded to.
-> "A good developer would never put the end of the digestive system right next to the start of the reproduction system - not even if that would require fewer lines of code (which it undoubtedly did)."

Whatever point he's trying to make in this post - and I'm not going to take the time to try to figure it out - I'm sure there's a simpler way of saying it.
I can agree (and this is not only for GEeks), simply here's why

Creating an application is fun, there's no monotony on it, in fact you don't repeat code, if you need it again, you can recall it.

Grease ebowl tasks are annoying and boring so no one wants them.
There is this, though:
http://code.google.com/p/app-engine-patch/
I don't think I would force this on a published page either, since it's basically a personal preference.

But it certainly could be done by one user for his/herself. Safari and OmniWeb let you set default stylesheets, and Firefox will recognize one too if you create a [profile]/chrome/userContent.css file.
OK, I'm about to order it, but I feel as though I might be a little unprepared for its contents - is there another book that I might be able to use to warm up?
So... you basically just hold open all the TCP connections at once? How anticlimactic.
The Perfect Mobile Phone Is (Nearly) Here
I didn't quite follow, perhaps an example to help me? Is there a specific place where the code would become shorter?
I like James R. Newman's "The World of Mathematics." It's a four volume set and you can often find it at a used bookstore for next to nothing.
In fairness, it does involve some HTTP, so it's not a pure TCP DoS. Anything other than apache on the same system is unaffected.
Send a free postcard through blurtt.com
Just use coupon code "tryme" at www.blurtt.com

Let us know what you think!
I may just not understand the abstraction. Do you have an example of what a library function would look like in this environment, and how you would want it to translate to other things? Try implementing "print", for instance.
There's really nothing new about this sort of depletion attack, and it's easy to launch in dozens of different ways in a line or two of code. (As far as a 'tool' to do it, I think the 'ab' benchmarking utility bundled with Apache suffices.)

In response, you block/throttle origin IPs, and decrease timeouts so zombie connections are dropped more quickly, and increase the capacity to serve or shake-off troublesome connections without locking out legitimate traffic. An inbound reverse proxy, as joshu suggests, often makes this easier -- and keeps such enforcement cruft from complicating the primary server.
Slowloris.pl HTTP DoS - Linux iptables workaround (sort of)
The name of this release led me to discover that Yet Another Perl Conference will be at Carnegie Mellon, starting with the Parrot VM Workshop tomorrow in the same building from which I'm typing this right now.

http://yapc10.org/yn2009/wiki?node=Parrot%20Virtual%20Machin...

Looks pretty interesting, but don't think there's anyway I can attend at such short notice, given pre-existing Father's Day weekend commitments.
I don't understand why you want young people to stay on the dole for 2 years? Shouldn't they being doing something productive? I think that the constant age segregation throughout school and college is actually a major hindrance to most people. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, there are already programs for people that want structure (college, peace corps, military, volunteer work, etc).. I'd personally prefer to have them do something that delivers value, than doing something that makes them feel good but is ultimately wasteful. I also think its wrong to take money from others to subsidize programs that aren't available to them; think of the minimum wage worker whose taxes help send others to college while they're stuck trying to scrape by.
rules provided by 'l3u' (not me)

Of course this does not prevent dDoS and is not a solution of the problem. but it seems to stop lonely script kids for some minutes while migrating to immune httpds/proxies.
For those of you who don't recognize the name -- Paul Tudor Jones is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. He made most of his money trading commodities, but he now manages a massive multi-strategy, multi-asset class hedge fund.
It's entirely likely that match.com's setup drastically reduces your response rate in a deceptive fashion. If you contact 500 people on match.com and not a single one responds, you'd probably be humiliated.
>> Mibbit certainly does not have any incentive to block proxies, it's interested only in ad views.

Mibbit blocks all known web proxies, tor, etc and has done for a long time. You really do think the worst of everyone don't you. I wonder what that says about you? :/
You should block email from webmail clients. I hear they're very easy to use.
My own version of this childhood theory was that everyone has the same favourite colour, but our brains saw it on different parts of the spectrum. So my favourite colour is what I call blue, and you see the same colour when you look at green.
You really do think the worst of everyone don't you. I wonder what that says about you? :/

That he's either Danish or Australian?
What this says is that Microsoft is willing to be very deceptive about a free product. But you can't blame them at all, it's just a web page. Even if this deception actually has some demonstrated effect on browser market share, those market share changes will be based on the personal decisions of people to switch. It's not like Microsoft has gone and deleted everyone's IE7 and Firefox installations without permission.

Remember that any source of information should not be implicitly trusted. [Trust me! ;) ] If an individual decides to believe Microsoft's statements without doing any further research, and downloads and permanently switches to IE8 based on lies, then it's that person's problem.
I think ab will send a full set of headers and not tie the server connection indefinitely.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you completely and stand beside Freenode's decision.

As someone who is an ircop on another network with a few thousand users that also blocks Mibbit, abuse is not a red herring at all.

The last time Mibbit was unbanned on the network, it was used repeatedly for users to evade channel bans and harass users. Implementing a non-standard protocol that only Mibbit seems to use is not a valid answer to this problem.

IMHO, its a sad day when a single, relatively new client (that displays ads/produces income for), feels that it is important enough for a network that has been around much longer to bend its policy to work around. And then have the gall to accuse the network of wanting to make a profit itself?
Channels were free to block mibbit, or require that users be identified to join the channel.

In any event, this was never about Mibbit being used for abuse. It's about Freenodes own agenda.
Yes, but since it's Apache, anything like this is big news.
I've actually spoken to several users who found that to be true. Even if silly, from the point of view of someone who knows what IRC is. Which is far from everyone.

//edit: don't care much about karma, but I am curious as to how pointing out that not everyone knows what they're doing on IRC gets me downvoted.
I always found it weird the file extension is .xht instead of .xhtml at as in http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

I would never have guessed why.
Implementing a non-standard protocol that only Mibbit seems to use is not a valid answer to this problem.

WEBIRC is the standard solution to this, and it existed long before Mibbit did. It's also about as simple and obvious as a protocol could be: the web server simply forwards the user's IP address on to the ircd at the start of a session.
Legalize it,
yeah,
yeah,
and I will advertise it.

(and tax it)
>> "Implementing a non-standard protocol that only Mibbit seems to use is not a valid answer to this problem."

We currently have WEBIRC setup with 454 IRC networks, representing around 200k users. I hardly think that's a "non standard protocol that only mibbit seems to use" is it now. All modern IRC servers support it out of the box.

I don't think I indicated freenode was planning to make a profit out of their client, you'd have to ask them about that. I wish them all the luck.

This isn't about me, or money, etc. This is about them cutting off users, who used mibbit to connect to freenode. IMHO that's a bad decision, and not a nice open friendly thing to do.

It'd be like hackernews blocking opera users if some spam submissions were submitted by opera users.
That's unfair. It should be noted it also beats IE6.
Asynchronous image loading with jQuery
I'd like for DNSP implementations (which allow users to lay claim to a URI) to support OpenID in the sense that it is a provider of identities. It can't be a consumer though, since an OpenID identity cannot (necessarily) talk DSNP.
I'm sure they really care.
(funny) On violent video games
Duh. Of course Automattic has designed their platform so that it benefits them, and of course the rules they set developers don't apply to them. It's their platform and ecosystem. If you think they're being unfair, go play somewhere else. I honestly don't understand rants like this. It's like people think that they're entitled to something just because they want it. If you can't make money on Wordpress because of Matt's restrictive stance on paid plugins and themes, then you can't make money doing that. Go do something else!

Life isn't fair, and business sure as hell isn't. Business is about tilting the odds in your favor, not making sure everybody is one big happy family.
Thanks, I did try Googling, but I didn't really like the results. A good event I know of is not on the first two pages, and a lot of the results seem not very relevant (for example an event that takes place in Mumbai in October). I thought there would be some de facto site where people go to discover events, and was hoping someone would point me to it.
I'm appaled that the hate of 37signals around here runs so deep that people have actually downvoted the above comment.
You might be interested in this paper presented at SOSP on AjaxScope by some guys from Microsoft Research

http://www.sosp2007.org/papers/sosp095-kiciman.pdf

Check out page 2. Interesting table. IE7 is 3 orders of magnitude (i.e. 4870ms instead of 6ms, with Firefox 2.0 at 116) slower than Opera at String+ operations in Javascript.

It's interesting. AjaxScope is pretty neat as well.
The book:
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law

Helped me tremendously - I was in the same boat as you and gave this book a shot - Easy to read, good as a reference as well;