skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by "humbling lesson"? If anyone finds an unpatched flaw and uses it to exploit some servers, then it doesn't matter who takes care of the servers. It doesn't matter if it's ptacek or a random admin. It's a new, unknown problem (if the claim about a 0day is real).

The experts at Matasano should know better than to leave sshd internet-accessible. That's what is humbling, because exposing the smallest possible attack surface is exactly how you defend against an unknown problem, and there's literally no good reason (besides laziness) to leave sshd exposed to the public internet.

Also they're "hacking" the frontend web server. Is that post really interesting in any way? They didn't get to any sensitive information (or didn't publish it). They also didn't get into any personal system, so I doubt there was any real harm done. (otherwise they would brag about it even more)

Or, they simply didn't bother going further -- owning the front-end web server is fairly embarassing for a company like Matasano.

Quite a few individuals store their credentials on front-end web servers, or even SSH to other servers from the front-end servers. Owning -any- server is often a very big deal.
Enlighten us, if you don't mind, as to which results from complexity theory indicate that these things are not possible. By my reading none of them say anything of the sort.

All the results I know of don't apply to computers any more than they do to humans, who reason no less algorithmically than computers (even if our algorithms are currently more subtle); these results tend to say that certain magic cannot be performed without invoking new classes of computation, which has absolutely no bearing on whether computers can do the type of practical research humans have been engaging in for our entire history.
"Blueprint Cleanse" aims to clean up Silicon Valley?
Gzip-ed bytes of code is pretty great, and relatively fair to languages with verbose (but isomorphic) syntaxes. It's aiming to count the information content.

A benchmark counting the unshared working set would be pretty decent, but quite unkind to news.arc -- counting all of Arc and most of MzScheme as part of your program. MRI Ruby programs would be totally fucked, since the mark-happy GC keeps any library code from being shared between fork()ed processes.
The copy of "The Age of Gold" by H.W. Brands sitting in front of me says you are wrong about married women's property in 1850's California. From the soft cover, pg. 283, regarding the constitutional convention held in Monterey in 1849:

`A proposal to permit women to keep control of their property upon marrying led to discussion of the relative merits of the common-law and civil-law traditions. "I am not wedded either to the common law or the civil law", observed Halleck, "nor, as yet, to a woman; but having some hopes that some time or other I may be wedded, and wishing to avoid the fate of my friend from San Francisco [a crotchety old misogynist], I shall advocate this section in the constitution, and I would call upon all the bachelors in this convention to vote for it." Enough did to win the measure's approval.`

So unless there was a constitutional amendment created a few years after the constitution itself that I'm not aware of, married women actually were allowed to keep their property in California. Indeed, the text from the original 1849 constitution states, in part:

`Sec. 14. All property, both real and personal, of the wife, owned or claimed by marriage, and that acquired afterwards by gift, devise, or descent, shall be her separate property; and laws shall be passed more clearly defining the rights of the wife, in relation as well to her separate property as to that held in common with her husband. Laws shall also be passed providing for the registration of the wife's separate property.`
It may be technically true but is quite misleading to say that English has permitted the use of "they" for "he" or "she" for centuries, as if literate authors in English have been using it in some consistent and recurring way over the years.

Yes, Chaucer did use "they" in this manner. He also used thousands of other forms of Middle English that have long since passed into oblivion. Remember that Chaucer wrote in the 1300s, when, for example, the word "knave" meant, simply, "young boy." A lot has changed since then. Relying on Chaucer as authority, then, is a real stretch.

Setting aside Chaucer, only scattered evidence exists of "they" being used to refer to a singular antecedent.

In Indo-European languages generally, the principle of concord is thoroughly ingrained - singular nouns, for example, need to be matched with singular verb forms and plural with plural. This is a transcending principle that is central to the grammar of all Indo-European languages.

For this reason, it is jarring to our ears to hear, for example, "Sally went to the store and, after shopping, they [instead of she] returned home". It is like saying, "Sally are a liar." Both violate the rule of concord and plainly sound jarring and illiterate.

In the strong pull to abandon the synechdoche of using "he" as a part representing the whole (of any form of singular antecedent), modern grammarians are really straining to find an alternative (as is the point of this article), but using "they" to represent the singular is such a blatant violation of the principle of concord that it will not fly as "good English" unless one is prepared to undermine a principle that affects not only pronoun usage but lies at the heart of grammar generally.
http://friendfeed.com/

-- MV
Yeah, but there's a companion angle to this. Carr explains well in "The Big Switch" about why centrally generated power made economic sense. But it only made sense just because the technology catered to that solution. It may be the case that, as with computer technology, market and materials drive costs of solar technology to zero. Then you might have peer cooperatives set up for sharing the load of home power consumption. Panels might become so cheap that whole neighborhoods go off the grid, or install their own distribution system. Decentralization of power generation becomes more economical than centralized power generation.

I watched some alternative energy documentary one time that had one of the contributors suggesting that half of all the roofs in Cali would have to be covered with panels to take care of the state's power needs. Uh well, ok.
"there's literally no good reason (besides laziness) to leave sshd exposed to the public internet."

Well, besides the fact that it's a whole lot more convenient to just be able to ssh into somewhere without frigging around with VPN or what not. For most businesses, I would say having accessible ssh (with good passwords, and a properly set up, up-to-date system) is fine.

But yeah, for a "security" business .. it's pretty surprising they let it hang out like that. And on port 22 and the www domain, too .. tsk tsk.
Harvard MBAs r good for something (tip on how 2 get into adult film industry)
Crock pots: Leading the way to a healthier lifestyle
The crock pot recipes is a type of cutlery that is used for cooking different types of meat over a period of time. Since the crock pot boils at a very low temperature, the cooking usually takes a much longer time to finish. However, the main benefit of using a crockpot to cook food is that there is no risk of overcooking and it does no need any supervision.
"He believes that his presence and example in the home is why both his sons decided to marry when their girlfriends became pregnant."

How about just not getting girls pregnant in the first place?
Are they though? Openiness would be making their own open platform and letting anyone play. They're fighting for the ability to wedge themselves into a proprietary platform.
"In our brain, certain impulses are carried via electricity, so they are as fast as possible (inside their structure)"

No, electric impulses in your brain are not carried in the same way as electricity in wires. Please read up on basic neuroscience before you talk about the nervous system. Nerve signals are passed by having one section of a nerve be depolarized (lose polarity, the difference in charge from inside and outside the nerve wall), which causes the next section to depolarize, and so on. Your basic electric wire uses a difference in electric potential, or voltage, between one end and the other, which creates an electromagnetic field that moves electrons.

You completely misunderstood the importance of time. I'm not talking about long-term development (and even then your average human infant of even 6 months is far more intelligent than most animals on Earth). I meant the speed at which the nervous system works as compared to a computer. If you read my previous paragraph, you can see that a computer is still much faster than the human brain. The brain's advantage is the complex networking of all the neurons. Science has already gone a fair way in understanding the brain, we can even decipher signals to let paralyzed people control computers. How much longer until we can start modeling simple brains, and then further?

And as for my speculations, look at what you're doing right now. You, and I, can instantly communicate over a host of different ways even if we are on opposite sides of the Earth. If we wanted to talk face-to-face, we could even see digitized versions of each other in video chat. If we wanted to meet in person, it's only a matter of ours for one of us to go to the other. What do you think people from a hundred years ago would say when you told them such things would be possible?

It may take a while, dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of years, but your speculations of the uniqueness of nature are narrow-minded. You say that modern computers can never match nature because they use 1-dimensional data storage. I've already shown you how such storage can model 3d interactions (it's not about the data, it's about the way it's processed).

Maybe we should call it fiction for now, but remember that the very idea of having a machine calculate an integral, much less solve protein structures, would have been laughable in the past.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722446
" those that start each day looking for opportunities and those that start each day looking to the past. I'd rather be the second kind of person."

Did you mean "I'd rather be the first kind of person." ? The sentence seems to shift in meaning when you change that word, to one that fits the paragraph more.
Twitter localized Trend topics (only from the people you follow)
I find the only way I can truly master a topic is when I have to explain it to someone else. It requires me to stop hand waving and have honest explanations for every part.

This paragraph really blew my hair back:

"In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress."

Don't ever not work on something just because you are an amateur and there are all these fancy experts out there. Even if you never contribute something new, it'll always be new and exciting to you.
You know who else made lists? Hitler.
Very relevant to today's bubble. Are we calling it a bubble ?
A better bubble?
This resonated with me way too much, which is kind of scary. My startup hasn't failed yet, as I haven't launched yet, but I truly understand the technical mindset issue.

I've been getting better at this as I have started to focus more on the marketing/business aspect of things. As much as I have learned in the past couple of months, with regards to the business side of things, I can't seem to shake the mentality of "it's just not good enough yet".

I may have a point though, as I will be competing against in house solutions, so I really have to come at them with a compelling reason to use my solution.

I guess the good news is in the next couple of months, I'll have the opportunity to be more formally educated on the business side of things.
Good stuff, but you need to add OAuth in there... Not everyone likes to post their twitter pass onto other sites.
Great post! I really liked the tips, very straightforward and simple to follow.

Have you tried chat and/or click-to-call solutions like liveperson's or eStara's? What's your opinion on these services? (even if you haven't tried them)
"500 milliseconds" sounds so much faster than "half a second".
This reminds me of Good Will Hunting: "You dropped a hundred and fifty grand for an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library"

A professor of mine is very interested in solving the cost problem of education, but internet-based learning is weak in a number of areas. He is well known for having an extremely painful automated grading system for Comp Sci homework, but that does not work nearly so well for other course (e.g. higher math or essays). The article claims they have solved this by peer review, but I would be interested to hear how they are making that work.

One of the other problems is the questionable value of degrees and grades in the first place: we as a society need to start evaluating people/employees based on prior results, like internships.

So yeah, more online learning is a good thing, but I doubt we will have online universities truly overtaking four year brick and mortar universities any time soon.
It sure seems simplistic, but again and again we suffer from policies against that simple rule. It's amazing (and depressing) how many problems can be explained by it, like politicians implementing myopic short-term reforms in order to win the next election (and the future be damned), or to appease some selected and influential group (and be the rest ones left to pay it)
I think friendfeed has almost all the features i would want, except a user base comparable to twitter. Most of the people in my network tend more towards twitter, so FF hasn't proved that useful for me yet.

Otherwise you can aggregate bunch of social network profiles already, and for the ones not supported you can add a custom RSS feed.
Just mount your Pre as a USB drive and drag your MP3s on if you don't like iTunes. Most music apps support that or can be made to support it anyway, since it's very common among other MP3 players. That's about as open as you can get. iTunes is just a nice bonus.
Well, the posted log, could be a complete fabrication. It certainly doesn't contain anything useful and may in fact be deliberately misleading.

I'm hoping that Thomas and the rest of the crew do perform an intensive and public analysis of the exploit. It wouldn't surprise me if the break was in Wordpress or one of the other application level programs.
There aren't many desktop apps that add everything in one place on the desktop.

For friendfeed, twitter, facebook, flickr you can use feedalizr (http://www.feedalizr.com/).

Some people seem to like Seesmic for FB,Twitter if you're a power user.
"you should follow me on twitter here" is annoying
First of all, I apologize for using HN as a venting outlet, but I suspect that other people may be feeling somewhat like me on this topic.

Ever since Dustin Curtis produced his article (http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html) I've noticed that many people have been taking up his results and using his call to action verbatim. His article is an excellent piece on user behavior research, and his results quite interesting, but it really bugs me that lots of articles now close with the words "you should follow me on twitter here."

You may ask why I get upset over this. The reason is that it sheds some light on the intentions of the writers. Seeing the call to action tells me "this person will do anything to get followers." I may be naive, but I would like people to follow me due to my interesting insights, and not because of some cognitive hack.

Articles that are otherwise inspiring then come crumbling to pieces once I get to the bottom of the page and see this blatant attempt at getting followers. In fact, it produces the opposite reaction in me, I quickly close the tab and forget the contents of the article or why I thought it was insightful in the first place.

I'd much rather see people trying other approaches, or even better, not try to persuade me with anything else than the content they produced. If what they're saying is insightful, I'll crave for more and will bookmark them, follow them, and tell my friends about it.

Dustin did a great job at finding this hack, and I expect to see "follow me on twitter here" at the end of his articles. He earned it. Everyone else, please find your own hacks.
That does not contradict.
Developer Color Picker
Inside Story of the Life of an Invention. The "PowerSquid" Part 3
Learning Web Development with Seaside
yes, many people who enjoy podcasts are forced to sync their iPods as often as daily.
Back to the Future; Lessons Learned from the 80's Fortell iPhone's Emergence
That is hyperbole; for all we know, the first human level AI (for however you define human level) might just want to read lolcats and watch sports (or study mathematics but not help us, etc.)
Microsoft to Bundle Firefox and Chrome with Windows?
...let's go shopping? (sue me, I loved consultant Barbie and I have points to burn)
IMO the sex offenders list is crap as it lumps a large range of offenses together.

Caught urinating in public? Had consensual sex at age 17 with your high school sweetheart^? If you got caught doing either one you end up on the same list as the child molesters and rapists. Lucky you.

And the sad thing is I don't see this changing anytime soon as any politician who tries to tackle this will be clobbered by his opponents for being lenient on those evil sex offenders.

^Given sexual trends among teens I'm guessing a ridiculous portion (I'd venture over 80%) of the people in America should be on the sex offenders list.
I'm not sure if you'll check back on your post, but if you do I think you might really enjoy http://www.sunsite.ubc.ca/DigitalMathArchive/Euclid/byrne.ht... (it's an illustrated version of Euclid's "The Elements").
I'd agree that this is mostly a PR problem; but for a security company, having your public site hacked is somewhat embarrassing.

But it is humbling, since this was probably set up much better than the average linux webserver. If these guys can still be vulnerable then noone can be confident. When it comes to computer security we are for the most part working with very poor tools and even less understanding when it comes to building systems that are both tractable and secure.
That's what most humans want as well but there is a system of incentives that keep people working. Needless to say the 'productive' versions of AI will end up with a lot more computing resources than the 'lazy' ones.
Why would there be any confusion over what the earliest version is? It would just be the initial revision in your source control repo.
Yeah, seeing "follow me on twitter here" has started to get annoying.

Still, I'm pretty dubious of the notion of "finding your own hacks". I mean just look at written english in most articles, they aren't comprised of just a list of sanitized opinions and facts. They're full of prestigious jargon, funny quips to pull the audience to pull the audience to the readers side or at least entertain (the same goal?), etc, etc; as far as I'm concerned, just more "cognitive hacks".

Shrugs
I think the only real chance of that happening is for the courts to strike these things down as cruel and unusual punishment, which I firmly believe they are.
Um...I assume you're speaking of Linux? Every major OS is written in C with a little asm. I think like one subsystem in Windows is in C++, but most of the code in every major OS is written in C. Which means your claim suggests that every major OS vendor is wrong, which is a very broad claim, my friend. Obviously C is best for the job.
I have not tried chat or click-to-call solutions, but they seem interesting. Depending on the pricing of the service and difficulty of implementation it might be worth it for us.

I have found that many articles talk about analyzing and optimizing cpc and cpm campaigns which is great for bigger sites with phenomenal traffic and online exposure. However, for small boutiques like Izola, I have found that these 3 tips have the highest value (income/time) ratio.
Ask HN: What's your definition of "Hacker News"?
As most of us know, submissions should follow PG's "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Nevertheless, in discussion, the question of relevancy often comes up. So, HN, what is your definition of "Hacker News"?
I'm a bit confused - how are you supposed to ssh in if sshd is not internet-accessible? If you're suggesting only allowing access through a VPN, what's the advantage? Is a VPN significantly less likely to be exploitable than SSH? Or are you saying that you should only be able to SSH in via the local network?
Financially, they'll clean up. What Lacy probably really needs is better food, less booze and more sleep. Same goes for anyone else wanting a "cleanse."
Building a quality bubble is like building quality software. Iteration is key, and sometimes you have to throw the first one away.
And they do not get a lot of kids either. (In most parts.) Though that does not seem to correlate. Fertility in Scandinavia is relatively high for European standards, and they do not care too much about wedlock any longer.
Although I've never been a fan of the beer, I love the marketing tactics Dos Equis took here. The humor is very relevant, as mentioned earlier, to the "Chuck Norris doesn't breathe, he holds air hostage" approach. These jokes are still is extremely popular, and Dos Equis was creative enough to put their own spin on it. If they got us all talking about it, then they must have done something right. I just hope they don't play it out like the Geico did with the cavemen.
Though the first human level AI won't stay alone for long.
Bootstrap Marketing For Your Start-Ups
A common solution is to whitelist IP addresses, or a range of them. This is obviously inconvenient in many cases, but is much more secure than allowing all to connect, especially in situations where there is a new 0 day.
Apparently This Is The Perfect Job
I don't think it takes any faith to say that a sufficiently precise simulation of the physical characteristics of the brain would produce output similar to that of a real brain.

To the contrary; saying otherwise would require faith in new physics (some sort of "spiritual energy"?) that we have no evidence for at this time.
This architecture may sound ridiculous now, but I'm glad researchers are attempting to redefine how a computer should work. The most troubling thing I see about Fleet is the difficulty of programming on it. That is, unlearning what we already know.
I'm sure they willif the pre's marketshare makes it worthwhile to do so. I just wish they had it for my Sony erircsson i810