skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Web application cracking really isn't all that difficult in our current age, especially with sufficient dedication and manpower, as the SEA certainly has.

There's simply so many vectors to get in. Every layer of technology you add is a potential layer of vulnerability. The state of security is appalling and people have been repeating this for so many years, but few other people listen (or they simply pretend to listen and convincingly appear as if they've taken precautions).

I doubt most of them have any particularly good coding skills. Large-scale Middle Eastern hackers and website defacers are primarily script kiddies. It's just that they have a lot of willpower and time to run vast automated attacks.

Actually a lot of high-profile attacks like this don't even involve exploiting the actual web application. Rather, they hijack nameservers, socially engineer domain registrars or find some external avenue or service to get in by enumerating open ports, seeing what's juicy and searching for exploits. They also phish a lot.

Information security is a very complex and intriguing field, but when it comes to merely cracking web applications from a purely practical point of view, it's relatively easy and especially so now that any wannabe hacker can just burn Kali Linux on a CD and read some tutorials on using tools.
Accessing and Preventing access to private members using reflection
> Unfortunately no matter how many people invent software that does the same thing as Hacker News but works much better and offer it up for free, nothing will be done.

We should name this - how about "The Craigslist Problem"?
> The Ph.D. program, in our times at least, is pitched as a quid pro quo: you produce some original research, something worthwhile and of substance, to add to the sum of human knowledge, and in exchange they gain access to an academic career.

Anecdotal rebuttal: The first conversation I had with my research advisor concerned the difficulty of getting a tenure track position at a research university straight out of Ph. D. school. In her words, "that sort of thing just doesn't really happen anymore in this field (Computer Science)."

There are no delusions of academic grandeur, at least in my neck of the woods. I agree that the Ph.D. may be pursued as a career maneuver, but if your end game is a teaching position at a research university your approach to the program has to be very different (and extremely more ambitious) than someone pursuing industry or other goals. And if you're pursuing a prestigious academic position, you are quickly educated on the slim possibility of attaining it, even if you're willing to post doc.
Money can buy the appearance of happiness, but happiness comes from inside, not from outside. It's a skill one can develop.

Recommended reading: Matthieu Ricard's book "Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill"
You know academy is not infallible and scientists are no saints. And boy, are scientists no saints. Passionate about science, please.

Go to Science Career forum (hosted by Science magazine) and see how urgent the need is to cull Ph.D. crowd.
A simple script written in JavaScript. You write code using our automation API interacting with websites making clicks, anything you would normally do as a normal person interacting with a web browser except using JavaScript to do it! And a lot more!
The Gates foundation offered a $100 million matching grant to Rotary International's Polio Plus program in 2009. The intial matching grant and subsequent increases have been matched by Rotary's members.

https://www.rotary.org/en/rotary-and-gates-foundation-extend...

The reason the Gates Foundation got involved was to help fund the final push to eradicate Polio.
Oh yeah, this happens to me on Flickr all the time, when holding the scrollbar (talking desktop browsing here).
cf 2nd definition https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aliterally
>I've read other researchers who say cats don't meow (in a non-growl way) with each other after they are kittens

I remember reading that domestication tends to cause juvenile traits to carry into adulthood.
https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/ab138be626728fbe1...

Can they change the 'lasts' parameter so that things don't expire as quickly?

Another idea.

To be more sophisticated, instead of killing fnids, could first
; replace them with fns that tell the server it's harvesting too
; aggressively if they start to get called. But the right thing to
; do is estimate what the max no of fnids can be and set the harvest
; limit there-- beyond that the only solution is to buy more memory.

(def harvest-fnids ((o n 50000)) ; was 20000

Can they change that number? Maybe that would help.

Another idea. Could you change it so that when they are harvested the functions are serialized to disk (maybe temporarily), and make fns a function or something so if it had been removed from memory it could be deserialized? It wouldn't need to be a serialization solution that would work for arbitrary closures, just something that would work for those cases, like timed-aform or whatever.

I have barely ever tried to use Lisp and I don't know much about this system so this may not make any sense.

Another idea. Use one of the Hacker News clones that people have built over the years that doesn't have this problem.
Hope the guy's okay and he turns up. It's sort of touching to see his coworkers come up with this. I wonder though, if he had issues with anxiety or depression, if the attention could push him away.
I was not aware the definition of nitpicking had expanded to include direct denial of the premise.

Though you will presumably chalk it up to conspiracy, that your comment was quickly dispatched to the bottom of this thread should give you pause.
> Smooth Gestures (lfkgmnnajiljnolcgolmmgnecgldgeld)

What in the world does the part in parentheses refer to?
> people care more about how much they earn compared to their neighbors

Evolution should select for this "comparative success" behavior, possibly even if its only advantage is as a signal for mating.
It is a common misconception that to be programmer one should read lots of books. It is as wrong as to say that in order to learn to swim or ride a bicycle one should read books instead of trying.

Only code by the very best people (Abelson & Sussman, Norvig, PG, Armstrong, Marlow, Odersky) is worth reading. Common crap found on blogs (especially about Haskell or Lisp) or github (especially PHP and Ruby code) does only damage by giving a very wrong impression of what programming is really.

There is a good hint: read the standard library of "extraordinary" programming languages - Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, Erlang, Scala and, sigh.. Clojure)

But the very same law holds for any art, be it poetry or music composition, or fiction - 95% is just stuff, a mediocre crap.

btw, ''The Mythical Man-Month'' has no code in it.) And the first two chapters of ''The Programmers Stone'' (which are the only worth reading) has no code in it also.
Nice, except it resembles Cryptnos http://www.cryptnos.com/onlinerevs/prod/ with most options removed.
That's not really suspicious, someone answered "thanks for coming", this was right after he was last seen in public.

His friends have stated that later on he communicated in private, with something that got them worried (not publicized). The search begun just a couple hours after that.
Python and Ruby are great because they have pragmatic communities which strive to produce simple and easy-to-use frameworks and libraries. This is also reflected in the languages, which are easy to read and write, and keeps things simple. Look at libs like rails, Django and pyparsing. These all acheive complex tasks in simple manners, while keeping turnaround time to an absolute minimum. Python has an awesome std library which accepts differences in platforms, countrary to the Java API which tried to find the middle ground. This makes python awesome as a scripting language and integration tool.

On the negative side, Ruby and Python threading sucks, since they both have global interpreter locks. And they lack static typing.
So nsa surveillance is unacceptable and must be fought but corporate surveillance is ok and should be accepted and used as a tool against nsa surveillance ? sad joke
> (As an aside, it seems that it would work most of the time in most of environments that I'd try, but for some reason, it rarely worked in one). So I needed to find a new solution.

'Instead of debugging the one environment, I'll just reimplement the entire service!'

Obviously. :-)
> I'm really shocked by the number of people in that site's comments that are comparing this to revolution in Syria or Egypt.

Welcome to America, land of the wish-we-were-as-brave-as-them.
What considerations have been taken into account to dissuade making HN open source? (I know there are some copies of older versions of the source on GitHub) (Arc code could be rewritten in Clojure (don't kill me!)) (I'm assuming there is some concern that transparency would increase ability for spam or 'gaming' the system)
This is quite nice.

Before we (https://www.tesla.im) switched to Firebase we had (still have) our own realtime system built with NodeJS, Websockets, Amazon SQS (as backup to ensure messages don't get lost) and a RIAK cluster.
> then your opinion about the academic system is irrelevant.

> But to compare it to the non-science world is a complete joke.

Huh? I'm having trouble understanding why you think that the points you are making and the points aortega is making are incompatible. aortega is more or less agreeing with your original point and shows how the startup scene and academia could be seen to be competing for similar, I don't know, type of persons from the similar talent pools. One is public funded, one is private funded. Are you implying that academia is the only place that science is pushed forward? You seem to be and of course that is untrue.

And besides, to say that a PhD is about science is vague. Surely you mean that a PhD follows the scientific method and uses scientific methodology - its problem domain may not be in the sciences which is what you seem to be implying.
1.5x-2x different is from apache.

the pure dispatching speed can be 10+x faster with C extension.
The problems with these master password implementations comes when you want to change the password for one site only. Sure, I can add a token in addition to the domain. But what token did I add to which domain? If I have to remember individual tokens I might as well remember the entire password.
A solution could be to generate a “salt” for each domain, but then we're no longer stateless…
Sorry. No, I meant that I was interviewing people from the perspective of an engineer, not as a manager or as a recruiter.
Nice idea. Reminds me of Zapier.

https://zapier.com/
Thank you for pointing out lobste.rs. I like it. Can you issue me an invite?
Docker has a facility to build containers automatically from source. As long as you have access to the source and it has a Dockerfile, you can rebuild the container itself after making all the changes you want (including security fixes).
The thing I always look for in post-mortems is an understanding of the failure of human systems. The technical failures are interesting, but it is the human systems that produced the technical failures. And will keep on producing other failures unless changed.

I hasten to add that I'm not looking for finger-pointing or blame. In retrospectives, I think it's always best to assume that individuals did the best with what they had. [1] But I think it'd be great if Dropbox asked themselves things like "How did we miss this bug?" and "How could have we discovered this recovery issue before it was on the critical path for a public outage?" Questions like that help you solve not just this bug, but all the related latent bugs that you got the same way you got the one that just blew up.

[1] A lesson I learned from Norm Kerth: http://www.retrospectives.com/pages/retroPrimeDirective.html
It seems to be a personal project. Since there aren't any meaningful consequences for writing a bug-ridden, unsupported app, it's way more valuable to reinvent the wheel than to become an expert in someone else's work.
Does anybody know what kind of operating system is running on the devices?
Cats think of us as big, dumb, non-threatening cats? I assumed they thought less highly of us.
I miss one feature - ffi, and this is not only limited to iOS - with a .dylib/.so/.dll and some kind of readable interface ("C") you can export functions for other languages. For exampe luajit, python (ctypes, cffi), common lisp (cffi), etc.

Another thing is "replacement" - switch one version with another. This way I've found that sqlite 3.8.2 was misbehaving for us lately, which points to be some kind of MSVC related error (compiled 64-bit for windows using VS2010).

Quickly switching to the previous one, without recompiling did another thing - I had to think less about other possible changes, since only one component changed - not the whole executable.

Then there are times where I wished everything was statically compiled :) - On all fronts (Linux, OSX, Windows) there are too many gotchas of pointing the right way to your dlls.

I seem to favor Windows (get the DLLs first from the apps' folder... well not strictly, but in general) - but then that's because Windows did not have good place to put the dlls to begin with (unlike unix).
I believe the meme is "Wow. Such ..."
I know, I'm not saying he's a bad person, I'm just poking a little fun at the mentality that leads to wheel-reinvention as the first and only conclusion.

I still think it's a cool project.
Well, it might also have something to do with money or control, as Firebase is SaaS, and this solution is open source software.

https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html
Could you give a quick explanation or a link that explains how that is set up? (closures stored on server)

Just curious.
And when enough people believe it, it stops being a lie.
A problem easily avoided by simply not being poor.
Yes. This was in India for campus recruitment. But if I remember correctly the job location was US + India.
I'm curious if the author will be forced to remove his code from GitHub, given the fact that even the use of the title "Rubik Cube" is copyrighted.

If anyone can shed some light on the fair use of a name please do. I'm especially interested if it is OK (from a legal point of view) for e.g. to write an article with code about an efficient Rubik's cube solver.
The otherwise well-written article omits to mention that most current PhD students should have thought a few moves ahead and not matriculated in the first place. That's the real problem. PhD programs should no more need to teach "how to be a consultant" than BA programs should need to teach remedial algebra and writing.
I'd guess it'd be under the hood tweaks related to building and maintaining the community (comments and stories)
Only as means to provide changes in people's lives, not necessarily only your own. It has nothing to do with possessions or consumption, and especially this exhibitionistic, public consumption which is pushed by the media.

Giving a new pair of boots or a new jacket to some poor school children in Nepal or India will definitely buy some happiness. New iPad for oneself, of course, won't. A long journey to different lands as a CBT for an addict will buy some happiness, while visiting the most distant and expensive to reach island in Pacific won't. Traveling remote Indian/Nepali/Tibetan villages will buy some happiness, while stupid yoga course won't.

I'm mountaineering guide and ex-addict, that's why I know.
"Political enemy" != "politician with legitimate differences in ideas"; "Political enemy" == "an enemy of the state because of (state's) politics".

I was purposefully exaggerating for effect with "biosafety of the planet" but only so much; because polio is a bitch. It is a nasty group of viruses that take a huge coordinated global effort to keep in check, and the moment you stop being careful, it'll spread around faster than you can say "sick stewardess on an international airport visiting friends".

Therefore, in my opinion messing with social acceptance of polio vaccination program might have a second-order effect of bringing polio back to the places it was already eradicated from.
I love London, it's one of my favorite cities in the world. There's an energy there like nowhere else. And it looks like that same energy was there in 1927. So amazing.
DuinoCube: the Arduino game console
Exactly. Additionally, it's very easy to implement a single-page-app-esque page button that simply hides one page to make room for another, then allows you to return to that page without loading any more data. Considering how rediculously easy that would be, I'd personally build it in as an option. I do realize though that it's trendy these days to simply omit all options and preferences in favor of keeping it simple.
> You reach the end of the feed, and a loading animation appears. More news loads. More pictures appear. You scroll again. The loading animation appears. More content loads. You continue scrolling

Then your mobile browser starts to lag and fucking crashes because it exhausted memory. Not to mention breaking the back button and the footer-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow issue. This thing has to die.

btw, Medium breaks text selection on mobile safari :/
Hi, I guess you can make your messaging more powerful if you add in an example automation code to show an use case.

It looks like a cool idea. All the best.
I use http://hckrnews.com/ only to avoid this problem.
Interesting topic and book although I highly recommended skipping this article in favor of the [NYT article cited](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/science/cat-sense-expla...).

This title and article are misleading, no where in the NYT piece does it say cats think we're "big stupid cats", just that they use their social norms towards us, as that's all they know. The cnet article is juvenile speculation.
I'm not sure if this is wheel reinvention, so much as wheel subset reimplementation. The latter of which is a very legitimate practice, quite frankly.
my cat trusts human females inherently but it takes her a long time to trust males

Huh. What's your best guess how she tells males and females (of another species: humans) apart?
It's likely a windows-based platform, as Windows has been almost exclusively the platform targeted by memory parser POS malware.
ha, it was done deliberately.

the government franchise agreement forces the train operating company (TOC) to provide a free WiFi service... it doesn't say it has to be useful, so the TOC reduces their data costs by blocking most of the Internet.

to add insult to injury it's a subsidised service, so I'm paying twice for something that's unusable.

and no, there is no other TOC and no other reasonable way to commute, so I'm stuck with it.
Won't CRISPR work in the future, instead of using viruses? It's almost there.
"No, your baby is ugly" - the lost art of being honest
We call that "Thud" where I come from.
In many ways this isn't surprising and has just been a matter of time. PoS systems are some of the least thoroughly engineered and least well protected yet critically important systems in existence. Hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions are processed through these often half-assed engineered systems.
This is factually wrong; universities are replacing tenured faculty with "cheaper labour" in the form of PhD holders from the excess glut. So, they are quite motivated to keep producing an "over-supply". The percentage of teaching staff that have tenure is a decreasing number over the pas ~30 years or so. Furthermore, the universities are getting comp'd on the tution of PhD students even though the students themselves don't pay fees. They do this indirectly through the "3 card monty" system of research grants, government subsidies, stipends & etc. Lastly but not leastly, the "prestige" of any political organization, hinges on the amount of resources and staff that come under the executive's aeigis. And so it is with departments at universities: large scale command of cash and IQ is a proxy for "power" and "verility" and all of the other stuff that people use to indirectly "measure themselves" against one another. After all, "prestige" is the measure of the modern university man...

see: figure 3, p7 http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2011-12Economic-Stat...
You're right. I forgot to put my pedantry hat on before typing that comment.
Javascript URL Object Generator
Just to clarify things a bit; our setup worked fine. The only reason we switched to Firebase was, being a small team, we didnt want to maintain all those servers.
Does that suggest you don't indent your code at all? Do you miss out on the cheapest visual cue to understanding your code? If you indent code already (with all the curly braces) then significant whitespace means your normal indentation sans 2 curly braces every time.
I'll be honest, I've never been a newspaper guy, but do people really go through them front to back or just scan the front page and jump to the section (sports, movie show times, etc.) they're specifically interested in?
I'd guess largely on some visual cues like facial hair and some ol'factory ones.
> i instead have to obsess over this tidying

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your comment contains plenty of spelling errors, incorrect punctuation and capitalization, and inconsistency (e.g., use of both "&" and "and"). In my experience, people who aren't careful with syntax tend to detest significant white space, which is understandable.
The true hacker solves the right problem. Expired links are just the visible problem. The real problems are more subtle: users voting up fluff posts, nastiness in comment threads...
Doctors save hand, attaching it to man's leg
Have you looked at the map for the IDL?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati...

That not jiggered by politics at all.
In the last mile, the effort is very impressive and laudable. Agents/Volunteers make a door to door visit or there is an announcement via public address systems about the visit in that area. The vaccine is oral drops and is very easy to administer for the volunteers who can be late teens too sometimes.

The vaccine is totally free and hence reaches even the poorest.

It usually happens in the Jan-Feb time and is combined with TV ads with prominent celebrities endorsing the program, though I don't remember seeing the ads any more.

Management of such programs over the populace of India by itself is worthy of praise. A similar process in India which is under rated is the election process. It is a worthy case study in management for any B school.
I was under the impression that fraud liability for card-present transactions today lies with the bank or card issuer, not the merchant.
Everyone in Norway becomes a millionaire
"How did we miss this bug?" and "How could have we discovered this recovery issue before it was on the critical path for a public outage?"

I am pretty sure they would have done that - just that they did not include in the post mortem.
Actually you are the one who is bashing him. He just merely pointed out that the claim learning to program does not necessarily make you smarter. He is not ridiculing, discrediting or otherwise attacking anything. He might even agree with you. Your claim that this is an attempt to defame this movement is illogical. Everyone has their own opinion learn to accept it, whether you agree with him or not.
Most likely by smell, that is how they identify each other and other animals, since their daytime vision kind of sucks. Sometimes they can tell when you're arriving way before you get to the door.
> If HN was focused on academia, we'd probably see more articles about why starting a business is a bad idea, and why getting your PhD is a great idea.

You clearly don't read many academic blogs, or the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The main reason I haven't published a new version lately is just that I've been too busy working on YC itself. It would take a day of work to strain out the bits of code we don't want to publish, and I don't have any spare days now.