skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using Twitter (or some other public messaging bus) allows the bots to connect to a control channel that is already highly available and accessible (heh, Twitter... yeah, I see the irony). This should make it somewhat easier to hide the bots behind a couple of proxies (if you want to mask your identities).

The IP(s) of Twitter are also less likely to be blocked, and the protocol itself (HTTP) is probably less restricted than IRC on sketchy networks, and also less likely to be blocked by firewalls and/or routers around infected PC's.

It seems like it is partially a "because I can" experiment, and partially an attempt to adapt and change the way botnets operate (and are thus detected).

The thing, to me at least, is that this seemed to obvious. With all the noise on twitter and spam and marketeers, it would have seemed easier to setup a bot-based Twitter account with a glossy marketeer profile that basically just RT'd other garbage SEO/marketing spam junk. Then, randomly slip in these encrypted commands. Maybe even break the command over a couple of tweets/RTs to make it less obvious. You would have a sort of steganography kind of encryption, with the data hidden in plain sight.
Your "feedback" button on the left of the main page overlaps the "Stop sleeping through outages" text when my browser window is not full-screen, this could be moved a little to look more professional.
It's probably meant the same way as McDonalds saying so many billion served. A lot of people come in more than once.
Dell Battles Microsoft’s Claim that Linux Netbooks Fail
In an effort to stop the open source Smartbook movement, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer issued statements saying that linux netbooks are four times more likely to be returned. Which is false.
Can someone explain how this works? Do they use the GPS + compass to detect what you're looking at or do they actually analyze the image data. I'm thinking it's the former.
physicsforums.com the largest science question and answer site, a partner of Scientific American and sited as a source for a number of wiki entries has been repeatedly rejected as not significant enough.

It seems wiki won't let you create an article about another web site.
You're summarizing a podcast that you didn't bother listening to?
My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful things it does, like cause flamewars.
Classic issue of "how do you measure the penetration of open source". I've been installing Firefox as part of my distribution's packaging system for the last few releases. Since this is a download from a distro mirror, Firefox can't really include these statistics, but merely estimate. I'm not sure this qualifies as "interesting math".

On the other hand, the only place to legitimately get Internet Explorer is from Microsoft, so it's easy for Microsoft to count.
The thing is, at least for me, we learned these concepts in college, but it was only in terms of getting the right answer on the test. They only provided the abstraction, not its basis in reality.

This would have been very helpful to have a grasp of for my research in university where I had to explain eigenvalues and eigenvectors to fellow computer science people. It probably also would have helped me understand what the hell my own code did.
I disagree. Tasting put a huge load on the TLD registries, requiring upgrades that us legitimate domain owners ended up paying for. Also, tasters are not going to start buying tons of domains, since tasted domains are by definition unprofitable to hold.
Probably GPS + Compass + Accelerometer. You need to be able to detect the angle of the phone as well (looking up, level, or down).

The iPhone doesn't have the processing power to do meaningful real-time image recognition.
I think it's interesting that so many people on HN recognize Les Paul - it shows how many hackers are music lovers as well, which is definitely a curious data point.

RIP Les.
At O'Reilly - Public Critique = Better Products
The Ubuntu distro was founded by a South African, Mark Shuttleworth.
Perhaps the article was a more minimalist way to say we need to head in the direction towards minimalism in order to find the optimum. But that would've taken too long to say...
"If you're satisfied with what you're doing and you're not particularly curious about new technology and don't really care, upgrading sounds like a hassle..."

That's why developers should make it worth the hassle by simply not supporting them. Twitter is a good example of a way to do it. At least with the old design their rounded corners didn't show up in IE and only showed in firefox, safari, and maybe Chrome.
This was demo-ed two weeks ago at defcon, its probably using the same thing KreiosC2

http://www.digininja.org/projects/kreiosc2.php
Wikipedia notability tag:

If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted.

How long does an article have to correct itself before the deletionists have their way with it? It seems to me that when plenty of reasonable people agree that someone is notable, and the problem is external links vs. reference citations, the {{Notability}} tag isn't the best way to highlight this and in fact is distracting in a destructive way.
The best thing about my linear algebra class was that the professor warned us about this up front. Yet, I still was not prepared for the onslaught of new words, and the bad part of the class is they were all defined in terms of more mathematical words, not concepts like this rubber band example.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery"
- Winston Churchill

How many more examples do we need of the failure of socialism ? It took 80 years to admit failure in the USSR and they didn't have a private sector (like we do) to prop up the economy.
I mostly agree with roqetman's definition and I will add that my definition of introspection extends to the analysis of one's self in general. Analyzing oneself is often fraught with self-deception as we can only analyze ourselves using categories that are limited to our finite experience. This doesn't mean it is waste of time, but it carries the danger of us deducing way too many ungrounded truths about ourselves.

Meditation on the other hand I view as a letting go of this kind of analysis.
IHS is the Indian Health Service? They don't care about that because Indians have no political power. It's unbelievable the kind of corruption and incompetence that exists inside that agency.

FWIW, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and medical care for soldiers are all pretty good on the US scale.
All these AR apps get a lot of buzz/press but in the end they use unsupported APIs and won't get approved. Worth the PR perhaps.
If a billion downloads today is much larger than what it used to be, then yes, I would see it as an estimation of growth.

I see easily how can it mislead people, but, really, I don't see it as enough reason to not promote the software that way. 1 billion downloads is really something to celebrate, and I would celebrate it even if it has a potential to mislead some people.
Just another data point: I've been testing a pre-release version of reMail for the last month without any real problems or crashes. My setup: gmail (not IMAP), iPhone 3G, 3.0 OS.
I can't imagine a hinged dual display being "sexy" enough Apple. If you absolutely need a keyboard, get a bluetooth one.
The quoted sentence above is from the documentation linked here.
Yeah they are all good, but the syntax while more concise is actually more difficult to map to a non programming mindset.

Objects in their very naive form area pretty straightforward concept to get (Oh a Car is a type of Vehicle).

Iteration is more natural than recursion (I prefer recursion, it's elegant, but it's not how people think to start with).

And most users won't run into the boundaries of variables when beginning learning either.

The one thing I will give credit is that the syntax is less voodoo, but I still think the ideas of assignment and a mental model of state combined with the imperative "Do this" approach is easier for non-programmers to understand.
Thank you. Well, I sort of just bumped into this article while reading Wikipedia and I thought that it might be a nice addition to HN. Glad you liked it.
Michael Vick:Buffalo Bills no pursuing
Anthony Peake to air on Sovereign Mind radio Sep. 3
if anyone out there is building this, we would love to extend our api recommendations to you -- contact me if interested (jared@graffitigeo.com)
Men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction
AFAIK, real estate falls into that category. (To be fair, I was researching, not actually attempting to buy online)

Certain categories of food would also fall into that category, especially if you're not in a major city (e.g. fresh seafood, delivery for some types of cuisines).

If you're looking to find some blatantly obvious material good which would be easy to sell online, in the hopes of making a quick profitable business, I'd reckon statistics are against you.
Firefox does do diff updates.
Calculate customized CPI based on your personal spending pattern
I thought upvotes were for comments that were worth reading, not comments we agreed with?

I probably should have gone into more detail about what it was I thought was fantastic, I guess. Thanks for the feedback!
I totally agree. I'd love this kind of thing in the UK.
The notability guideline supports the non-negotiable verifiability principle. In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content. With that, the amount of blatantly false content. The burden of weeding out that content falls on people who could otherwise be improving articles on subjects of note.

I think something people miss about WP is the fact that, at the end of the day, all the articles on this massive free volunteer project are published under an encyclopedia's masthead. It really is an actual encyclopedia. It's not the Internet. If something survives in WP, it's supposed to be good. The project is fundamentally opposed to bogus articles; in fact, the project is about not having bogus articles.
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/recur/recur.pdf
How is a tag destructive? It is, for what it's worth, plainly obvious that the article needs improvement.

Stop taking tags personally. They're about the project, not about the subject.
Those people are still out there; you just don't hear as much about Real Hacking as about more accessible, mainstream stuff.

Also, get a blog.
> I don't trust large sections of my country and you don't have a solution for dealing with the people who decide to spend their money irrationally.

I've got news for you. I don't trust YOU to decide how to spend their money or my money.

Yes, people do dumb things with their money. However, they do dumber things with other people's money. And, since the potential damange is greater in the latter case than in the former, that's double-plus ungood.
I know what an equivalence class is, thank you. How does that make the map from (say) R^3 to itself that sends everything to 0 a "kind of equivalence"?

It gives rise to an equivalence relation on R^3 in a fairly natural way, as indeed any function gives rise to an equivalence relation on its domain: x~y iff f(x)=f(y). But that doesn't mean that it is a "kind of equivalence".

Now, obviously, "kind of" is vague enough that saying "an endomorphism of a vector space simply Is Not a 'kind of equivalence'" would be too strong. But I would like to know what, exactly, you mean by calling something a "kind of equivalence", because I'm unable to think of any meaning for that phrase that (1) seems sensible to me and (2) implies that endomorphisms of vector spaces are "kinds of equivalence".

(Looking back at what bonsaitree wrote, I see s/he said "of any kind of equivalence", which I unconsciously typo-corrected to "or any kind of equivalence". But perhaps I misunderstood and bonsaitree meant something else, though I can't think what it might be. bt, if you're reading this: my apologies if I misunderstood, and would you care to clarify if so?)
I'm a librarian, so I can speak somewhat to this. Ender's game is a good book, if violent. I've got some below. Talk to your local librarian, they might have some good suggestions too.

Will he do fantasy? If so try:

The Hobbit

Narnia

Artimis Fowl

Discworld (by Terry Pratchett)

Sci-Fi:

D.A.

Jumper

A Wrinkle in Time

Heinlein's Y/A stuff (Have spacesuit will travel)

Akiko

Little Brother

City of Ember

The Eye, the Ear and the Arm

Uglies

The Giver

Try some Manga too, if you're not opposed.
I would also like to point out that Cuban has incentives to have his fan base think of him as patriotic: he wants patriotic people to consume his NBA entertainment and think well of him.

Just because someone posts something on their blog, does not mean it is what they truly believe. It is only what they want to appear on their blog.
I don't think this submission is going to go anywhere, and that's too bad, because I think this is the most Hacker-News-appropriate summation of where the news industry is. It even ends with a a hacker-y prescription for how to run a successful news operation today.
Firefox already uses bsdiff to generate binary diffs for update distribution. Courgette looks like a promising way to shrink those updates even further. (Details in the discussion linked from: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504624)

I can't find a reference, but I think the "one billion" count only counts full downloads; updates installed via "Check for updates" aren't included in the count.
What lovely irony that this appears on wired.
so freaking cool. congrats guys.
You're mis-reading Johnson. He's not saying that patriotisim is bad - the word "last" is important.

Asimov's "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent." has a similar trap for those who don't read critically.
All in favor of creating HackerNewsLand?
What those two bubbles have to do with India's progress?

Also, I am not ignoring core issue. Your solution is that someone in Washington DC should decide how to spend money and solve problems for people living in a country as big as America and I am suggesting that we treat people like adult and let them take care of themselves and minimize the role of government in our lives.
"In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content."

Absolutely not. The difference would be as follows.

With the notability guideline, ten million monkeys bang on their keyboard:

"Delete, NN"

"Delete, NN"

"Delete, NN"

"Delete, NN"

etc.

Without the notability guideline, the same ten million monkeys who are already reviewing these articles at least enough to type a brief vote in a discussion will bang out:

"Delete, not verifiable."

"Delete, not verifiable."

"Delete, not verifiable."

"Delete, not verifiable."

While the latter requires more keystrokes (and thus in aggregate represents significantly more effort on the part of the monkeys), it is otherwise not distinguishable in purpose or effect from the former. At least, it isn't distinguishable so long as WP:N is only used for articles which cannot be verified by referring to reliable sources (hint: that's a bad assumption to make).
a dollar made at the end of a gun and a dollar made because the purchase was a pareto improvement aren't the same thing. that you could equate the two means that you equate logos and pathos.
Incidentally: that Markov chain thing? Suppose you make a Markov chain out of all the world's web pages, where each step moves you from a page to a randomly selected page it links to, or (occasionally for a page that has links, and unconditionally for a page with no links) to a completely random page.

Then the entries in that unique eigenvector -- equivalently, the long-term probabilities of landing on each page -- are basically the Google pagerank. (I'm sure Google's pagerank computation has lots of tweaks in it, and they certainly consider things other than pagerank to determine their search results. But pagerank was their original key idea.)
Local Privilege Escalation On All Linux Kernels
You might be right, but I think you confused Wikipedia's goal with Google's.

I looked (casually) and did not find anything on Wikipedia that said its goal was "to collect and provide the totality of human knowledge, for free."

There's a whole huge article on Wikipedia that contradicts this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISNOT
Future Perfect; iPhone Could Rewrite Definition of "Business Smartphone"
AR has been done for ages with head mounted displays (lightweight is mostly a factor of time+money the AR rigs or 80's were not light but the ones from 2000's are)

Google "Wearable Computing", "Professor Steve Mann", "MIT's Media Lab". http://www.eyetap.org/
Try Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 9 if you like long complex music. 4 parts 30 min 16 min 14 min and the forth at 28 min. The Adagio is good.
Actually, he was making the comparison. Consider, someone who sells weapons is doing exactly what he is talking about: selling people what they want. Economically, this can generally be considered a decent position. Unfortunately, its morally a bad one. My point was that is essential to consider both.

Just because someone produces a product that serves a client base and produces a profit doesn't excuse moral issues. Similarly, just because Mother Theresa was not making a profit does not mean that she did not produce a net good. The two are apples and oranges but must be used in conjunction, not exclusion.
Hacker Dojo - community center for hackers (Mountain View, CA)
ok, Is vidwo upside down just for me? If not, wtf?
Very well done. I loved the paragraph that began with "Fast forward to 2009..." in particular.
That argument isn't just false, it's prima facie false.

In the WP:V case, some articles are stricken for being nonverifiable. Others are kept despite being nonnotable.

Wikipedia is now charged with the task of maintaining and article about Thomas Ptacek. That article is fine right after the AfD, of course. But 3 months later, it claims that Thomas Ptacek is the inventor of ketchup salt. Some WP volunteer has to catch that and scrub it out.

That overhead doesn't exist in the WP:N encyclopedia we have today, because a Thomas Ptacek article wouldn't survive AfD for notability reasons.

This problem is the whole point of WP:N.
All Of Statistics by Larry Wasserman. The material is presented both very succinctly and rigorously, and overall it's the best statistics book I have come across.
Ah, well, at least you associate "liberal" with socialist. Lots of progress made today...
Fine. Those who want to die, be my guest. Those of us who want to live forever, we'd like the option anyway, please.
Trust Digital Announces Enhanced Device Management and Security For iPhone 3GS
Tools like Paros http://www.parosproxy.org/index.shtml will spider/scan for some common attack patterns.

It's also definitely nice to have a dedicated qa person (preferably someone familiar with the code) trying to break your site, both manually and with tools like Selenium http://seleniumhq.org/
It would be really awesome if they (or someone else) did something similar in London. Cambridge is not very far from here (60 miles or so) but still, there are a lot of developers and would-be entrepreneurs in London and I believe the program could be even more successful here.
Digsby Joins the Dark Side, Uses Your PC to Make Money
"But 3 months later, it claims that Thomas Ptacek is the inventor of ketchup salt. Some WP volunteer has to catch that and scrub it out."

And with the notability criterion, lots of WP volunteers have to spend lots of time trawling AfD and typing "Delete, NN" over and over and over again. Meanwhile, unverifiable information pops up and must be removed from articles about notable subjects just as much as non-notable subjects.

So how, precisely, does Wikipedia save effort under this plan?

Or, more accurately, why do you believe that more effort is involved in:

"Nominated for deletion due to: not verifiable/does not cite sources"

than in:

"Nominated for deletion due to: not notable/does not assert notability"

In both cases, research must be done by multiple volunteers to assess the claim and come to a decision. But in one case the criterion is relatively objective; in the other it's an invitation to highly-subjective flamewars.
Since you use music analogies...

I don't know that I agree with you. I think the term "hacker" is being mis-applied to a large group that sort-of, but not quite, embodies that which is "hacker".

Much like rap/hip-hop was once underground but is now mainstream. The mainstream stuff that you see out in the open everyday is a non-authentic watered down version of that which is real, and which still lurks in the underbelly clubs of the cities.

The hackers of the early 90's learned computers somewhere in mid to late adolescence. The hackers today grew up with computers, but they are not the same thing.

Interesting and well thought out post, but I don't think it really stands up to scrutiny, except to expose the fact that the definition of hacker has warped and changed over time.
Another case of science telling us what we already know?

:D
Upside down for me too. Seriously weird.

This is with Movie Player on the latest Ubuntu.
Larsen and Marx Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Mathematical-Statistics-I...
You have an awesome job.

D.A.?
Living forever is only hell if you remain human. By the time I turn one million I will be an entity of nearly infinite wisdom, more powerful than the God of the Christians.
Your fears are ones that one could have about any market. But in general, free markets seem to work better than any of the alternatives across a wide range of markets, and I really doubt that health care would prove an exception to this.

It won't be perfect, of course, but a perfect system doesn't exist. I'm absolutely appalled that I'm paying (on average, as an American) over $1.5 million over my life for the present system, and can't imagine this would remain the case if pricing and outcome transparency were drastically increased. I think that quality and service would improve, while cost would decrease.
Putting some reality into genomics hype
Jonathan Eisen's response to the recent PR around Helicos previously discussed on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754997
Because WP:N cordons off a whole huge swath of human knowledge and says WP doesn't have to bother keeping articles about it accurate; it can just be removed wholesale from the encyclopedia.

WP says, Pokemon yes, Thomas Ptacek no. Pikachu must be yellow, not green, but it doesn't matter if Thomas Ptacek invented ketchup salt, because WP doesn't have to cover it.

I feel like you're kind of having to go through contortions to avoid this fact, James.
Digsby has never kept secret the fact that they were considering grid-computing as one possible way to monetize their product:

http://blog.digsby.com/archives/68

The license agreement is simply worded so as to make this possible.
I agree...but we are still out there. I think one of the problems is that "hacking" / "hacker" has become a synonym for "programmer" / "software engineer".

But there are still real hackers out there; like people that sell 0days just to eat and buy new fancy toys and such.
Go for the cheaper ones...don't go crazy or worry too much though. If you can get .cn for china, that's probably the key one after .net and .org. .info or .mobi are mostly irrelevant.
A few months! Aw. That's the only feature missing that I can't live without.