skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, exactly, so if that is the case then hasn't the author skipped over the most important part about the work. That being the process they went through to identify each of these functions purpose? aka: the actual RCE work?

This is kind of a pet peeve of mine with many RCE articles. They always seem to leave out the difficult parts. In that respect I view most of them as bragging rather than providing much in the way of a useful tutorial or learning material.
I think the problem here isn't so much that the hint is repeated as that it's needlessly vague. You may have already solved the problem but in case you didn't I'd like to give you what I think would be a good hint because windmills in chess are actually really cool.

A windmill in chess is a tactical scenario where a the king is repeatedly revealed to checks by the same piece. A "revealed" check occurs when a piece moves out of the way allowing another piece behind it to attack the opposing king. This scenario allow you to move the piece freely while your opponent can only move his king. Here's a great example of a game with a windmill (and actually one of the great games of all time) The first check of the windmill occurs on move 19.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361
It seems that what you really wanted to do is to criticize the narrative of the story. But you end up criticizing the factual truth of the story. Those are two different things.

Just because the words chosen to describe this piece of biology invoke a certain association between words, does not mean what they describe isn't happening. The science of conflicts within what appears to be cooperation is sound, well-proven science.

The problem with these evolutionary biology stories is that narrative always implies as if this "conflict" is somehow conciously driven. That problem is mostly caused by human language, that is not well equipped to talk about conflict without implying some drive.

The author of this article could have put more effort in toning down the conflict tone, perhaps. I don't think that would have been really necessary, but that would qualify as goor criticism. But the facts are what they are.
Personally I use Google Maps to learn the layout of a place and then navigate as much as possible by memory.
Ask HN: What skills do I need to work at a startup?
Interested in seeing if I have what it takes to work at a startup as a programmer and if not see what I need to do to make it happen.

So I guess the question is what do you look for when hiring engineers? Are there any must have skills?
Green Man +
This page is barely usable and almost fried my mac. Kinda reminds me websites built with flash. Is there any other way to watch that video about ISEE-3?
> If it's nothing more than an expensive process they might not be able to afford, then why not short circuit it and attach money directly to the drugs to prove they're real?

The idea is indeed odd but this solution doesn't work. The point of expensive/complex anti-counterfeit measures isn't that they're expensive per-item, it's that they have a high fixed cost so they make setting up a counterfeit operation very expensive. They should be cheap or free in per-item variable cost, so that someone doing the real thing can amortize the large fixed cost over their large volume.
Discover Flask, Part 14 – Local PostgreSQL Setup
Ok, so my math was off, too, my point was that for Adobe that's actually a lot of cash, unlike for Apple.
They couldn't even if they wanted to, because where are these citizen applicants? If you are are smart enough to be an engineer you are smart enough to realize that it's an industry in terminal decline and that no-one is on your side - the government, the employers, the colleges, the professional organizations are all trying to flood the market and drive down wages.

Then you look at the other professions, medicine and law, and you see secure jobs and professional associations that fight for their members like crazed wolves. It's a no-brainer.
Well, afaik they didn't break their bones to do so before. Also, if Google is gone, no matter how small amount MS would offer for defaulting Bing, Mozilla would have no choice but to accept it.
You say "US poor" then say that you were in awe of "average Americans". Make up your mind.

Oh, and "most" = "majority" = >51%. World population = 6.5 billion people sans US. US poor = probably less than 10k dollars per year (maybe less at PPP). So at least 3.5 billion people should be making more. Middle class Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, etc, should definitely cover my claim, based on PPP prices.
My guess is that some of the attacks cannot be traced back to the actual source. The Netherlands is home to the largest internet exchange in the world where the cables of Europe, the US and UK all join. The other top attack sources are also home to major internet exchange points.
The 10 best SlideShares every social media enthusiast must read
I found that hint very helpful actually.

"It goes around and around"

Huh, I should repeat something.
RSS and Shared Links in Safari 8 (OS X Yosemite)
It has to be. (former NXE:3350B metro here)
I don't think that's off-topic at all!

With the recent efforts to improve access to programming for all genders this type of tag line may not resonate very well with some of your technical audience.

I would consider replacing 'mother' with 'grandparents'.
Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more
common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development
such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with),
testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow
that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so
exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice.

One nice trick your average actuary won't come up with is recursively exporting all your VBA code. The model I'm building is one big .xlsm referencing .xla's referencing other .xla's. By selecting the .xlsm in the VBA IDE we can export all code to a folder (with sub folders for every part) and put this in version control.

Unfortunately, unit testing remains difficult in Basic. I try to control the problems caused by a lack of test by regularly regressing the enormous amounts of output we have. If things that shouldn't change, change we know we have a problem. Of course, this testing can be automated.
Prostitution and the internet
For the purpose of stimulating the discussion:

The article also claims that he has a "photographic" memory.

--

But a true photographic memory in this sense has never been proved to exist.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-developed-what-a...
I suspect the first... looking at the code it's a "standard" canvas managed via d3js, and the implementation [0] isn't odd

[0] http://map.ipviking.com/ipviking.js
> I never thought you could describe one of the most natural processes in that light.

Nature contains the most disgusting things known to man. Most of nature is pretty disgusting in general, especially when observed from up close. Don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy :) [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
I guess that the situation is even harsher when there is more than one foetus.
N.C.A.A. Must Allow Colleges to Pay Athletes, Judge Rules
paywalled content.

but there was a pretty interesting link to an article about "sao-luis-reggae" linked, but has since been removed.
I would say don't go too overboard. If it's done nicely, it can look pretty good & draw attention to products you'd like to support.

For example, on my Elitebook I have an OpenSUSE sticker & on the palm rest (next to the "Core i7" sticker) I have a GNU/Linux sticker.
Richards has won an estimated $215,000 in his tournament career

Here you have a person that has dedicated their life to playing a game professionally and has attained literally the top ranking in he world. Yet in his entire career has made less than many software engineers make in a year.

That is why I stopped participating in Scrabble tournaments years ago. Casual play is fun but tournament play is about memorizing a dictionary. It was less fun than work and paid horribly.
Submitted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8135912
I'm assuming you're thinking about the functions that are named "DecodeRc4Key" and "XorDecode" and the like? I guess a lot of it is just reading the code (the disassembly, or the pseudo-C if your tool of choice can produce that), and possibly compare it mentally against things you've seen before, and/or to see how the data flows, to determine its purpose?

Also, in this article, it's more interesting to be learning about the overall structure of the malware piece, which algorithms are employed, and a small bonus about the c&c at the end. The author skips the usually boring details for us and presents a summary of his findings (xor, rc4, etc).

I'm sure there are other articles around that focus more on the low level mundane RCE work of actually identifying each subroutine, but that's not what this article is focused on. In fact, going further in the details about that here would have been a distraction, I think. On that note I agree the "...for dummies" headline is a bit of a stretch, though :)
[please read edit!]

I think GP comment is right to some extent. I went in with the "moving past the basics" and watched the whole video, it didn't teach me anything I didn't know.

I found the setting up of the positions distracting - it should either have been set-up in advance or he should have talked about the positions, named the openings and such, or kept quiet. You're watching moves but they don't relate to what he's saying until the position is set and we start the actual lesson.

The grey "move on" button was not at all obvious, standard "go" green would help.

When you complete the exercises it simply prevents you moving the last piece rather than indicating on the board that the exercise is complete and you did it. It doesn't look like there is more than one possible response either, which means that additional hints could tell you the next move they're expecting. The examples were facile until the "combining tactics" - then I did Bf4 (bishop from c1 to f4) and the exercise just sticks ... did I do it or is it glitch, there's no feedback. Should I click to move on? There's no affordance or visual indication as to what to do next. Similarly there's no explanation - AFAICT - why you did right [?] moving to f4 (protects c7 for the knight to do the king-rook fork?).

The quiz questions get the feedback correct, they show the answer in green (don't know what they do if you get it wrong ;0)) but the last question then goes to a further question "undefined", what now? Should I click the greyed out arrow to move on?? Is part one over?

The board: when learning usually you get piece move highlighting wherein you click a piece and it tells you the available moves via highlights on the squares. That's usually paired with ability to click the destination rather than dragging the pieces which can be a bit awkward.

Oh, just went back to first exercise to see if it did "move highlighting". The pawn when dragged over e3 changes the "undo" to "move on", now I can't see if there are any other valid moves. Perhaps I twitched, did I get it right? Which square was the right one?

Logged in, slight problem as I had js disabled, but easy to handle and not unexpected. Takes me on to "Tactic 14954" - I've done a move (Bf5) and board is frozen, did I win? Same as with the exercises. Is the board waiting for the server to tell it the next move, is there a js engine that's computing the next move?? I'm assuming it's done but the only available button says "give up", so ...?

Aside: Is there a way to export chess problems easily to a local chess board? That would be great, could use the videos, export to a local board with extra features and that would let you play on the positions and such.

It's a good start. Looks generally nice but there are some pretty big UX problems that cross in to genuine bugs in utility IMO.

[Using FF31 on Kubuntu]

Edit: Apologies, it appears to be a problem with FF31.0 for me, Chrome is working, giving feedback and such. Will let comment stand.
Trust me you do. I started using vimperator two years ago and never looked back.
Steam Sales have already proven that lowering prices leads to more overall profit
I have a friend who got me into the whole chess scene he plays online against computers and online chess players all the time he is not a professional or anything but pretty clever chess player I learned from how to play the game and now I can beat him pretty easily took some time though. But I notice people do things like Queens gambit or other tactics. When I play I play so I don't lose a bishop for a knight basically point based strategy and just try not to get any of my pieces taken out but I've never actually studied any tactics or anything like that maybe I am playing with it just no aware of it.
McAfee's Failure of Trust
Allowing some one to go of topic and derail the meeting is a sign of a poor chair or more likely some one who's never had any training in how to run meetings and unfortunately a lot of people in our industry have no experience of how meetings should be run.

Having an agenda an sticking to it is key and also if a meeting is going of the rails people need to step up and take ownership and stop the derailment.
What are you talking about? Who's them? What fix are you thinking about?
what? no you can't "entrepreneur" your way out of govt policies. and no, marrying for the sake of greencard is not an option either as sooner or later govt will catch you on that as well.
Interesting article. Currently where I work, a $10 bn IT company with 150k+ employees, this is a huge huge problem. The top management wants to bring the entire company under a single umbrella of processes, management practices etc. So far they have only caused problems.

Just to give an example, last year, most of the projects in the company were transitioned to Agile mode from the traditional waterfall. To enforce Agile, they MANDATED using White boards! There are audits in place where people check for each project if they use a white board. I tried arguing with the auditor "Our team is distributed, there are 3 members here, 3 in Mumbai, 2 in Chicago and 4 in NY. The physical white board does not make sense for our project. We maintain a digital whiteboard (in Atlassian's Greenhopper)."

I was met with a barrage of phone calls from managers who forced me to use a physical white board. I tried explaining , but apparently a process is a process.
Slightly off-topic, but I hope the credit card they showed in the video was cancelled, because you can see the last 12 digits as well as the expiry. And using the logos and text displayed on the back it would be trivial to work out the first four digits.
The next step was to figure out how to crack off the
security password so that the machines could be usable.
This basically meant figuring out the supervisor
password to get into the BIOS and removing the
protections. I should mention here that since I owned
these machines, this is all perfectly legal. There are
some standard tricks to getting into the BIOS such as
removing power to the CMOS (battery backed SRAM) to
clear the settings or certain maintenance key combos
that act as a universal reset. Unfortunately these
didn't work. Lenovo actually has a dedicated EEPROM
which retains its settings even after power is removed
and stores the supervisor password and other info in
encrypted form.

After trying out various techniques, I found one that
worked. For this particular laptop, you had to open it
up and expose the motherboard. After that, it required
removing a modem board to get to the security EEPROM.
Once the EEPROM was exposed, there was a technique where
you had to turn on the PC, hit the ThinkVantage button
to go into BIOS, and then immediately short the I2C pins
(SDA and SCL) on the EEPROM with tweezers. This would
cause the security software to crash and allow access
into the BIOS.

That was an interesting account, faced with a similar proposition I wouldnt know where to begin or what is safe. In fact I have a compaq laptop whose hard disk's firmware promptly auto-generated a random passwd and locked it up ! Apparently its a known bug. If you havent set up a hard disk password before the bug kicks in, you are pretty hosed, unless manage to pull off tricks such as these.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي و نكانا الزامبي اليوم السبت 9/8/2014 في كاس الكنفدرالية
That sounds like Charlie Stosses laundry (an ISO 9000 branch of SIS)
But without the price cut, those people might have bought other books.

As the article says:

But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more

Amazon has data that shows eBooks are better sold at lower prices because books aren't just competing with books. If that is not good enough, basic fairness states that a virtual good with no manufacturing, spoilage or delivery costs without a secondary market should be sold for substantially less than a physical good with manufacturing, spoilage and delivery costs with a secondary market that competes with new goods sold.
For software engineers, I believe grit and persistence is the top skill. Startups need people who take ownership of their work as if their lives depended on it.
Being more familiar with screen scraping than has haskell I'm surprised you chose it for that task. What made you choose it?
The egg box that updates a humble yet classic design
I wonder if app SSL best practices is hindered by Apple's requirements to self-declare crypto and get export permissions from the US department of whatever. It's quite the surprise speedbump for new app developers, being first presented with this form at the point of app store upload. I can easily imagine developers doing a search&replace of "https" to "http" just to avoid dealing with all that.
Great implementation.

We are using the same concept for our Local targeting basic crm + website tool. We may get a few lessons from your tool ;)
Why are there loops in the heliocentric orbit?
Author here. My publisher is one of the "big five" (not Hachette), and although my books are not affected by this dispute directly, it could be only a matter of time before they are.

The problem, as I see it, is that Amazon has so much of the market share not only for e-books but for regular books that they can dictate terms that are highly favorable to them.

While you could argue that those terms also benefit the reader -- for now -- the fact is that ultimately, consumers aren't served when one monolithic company gets to effectively call the shots. It may not be a monopoly in the legal sense, but in practice, it has many of the same negative effects.
List of some great books for startup founders
This one?

http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/sao-luis-reggae
When I start using a fresh installation of firefox I don't need to do anything to get my normal use experience back because I already restored my profile folder before opening Firefox for the first time.
Sounds really cool. Are there any technical articles/papers available for the public to read on what you're doing? Or are all the details (understandably) under wraps?
The `<Data Name="key">value</data>` in there makes me sad. It's better than the `<field name="key" value="value"/>` one of our partners uses at work but still...

If there's a good reason for it, it's just as much of a good reason XML isn't suitable for what you're trying to do.
Actually, severance is for keeping your mouth shut. If they were interested in op keeping his mouth shut, they would have offered a severance package. They did not so he can say what he will.
This does not sound accurate. Memory access dominates in most current programs, and it dominates by a factor of several hundred (meaning one memory access takes more time than 100 L1 cache hits). If you use more memory, by necessity your cache will be less efficient. In the vast majority of cases, it's not worth it.

https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

If you trade cpu usage for heap size, you'll lose in all modern cpus. In fact it's getting to the point where worse algorithms that are space-efficient are starting to beat the best known algorithms in practice, even if their constants are different. Dual TLB lookup when running virtualized doesn't help with that either.

If you can avoid a memory read with 4-500 assembly instructions (say a C/C++ function of half a screen), that is actually worth it. I did a test on my newest machine that showed that it's actually more efficient to run the sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm for prime numbers under ~800, than to have a table in memory with those primes.

It also means that you should easily be able to execute about a page of inlined C/C++ code in the time it takes the cpu to simply jump to a virtual function. Go and Java only have virtual functions.

Likewise, having programs work directly in compressed memory is actually a net-win. E.g. storing protobufs in memory and unpack single fields out of them when used instead of using unpacked structs directly is actually a win for even quite large structs. Not for megabyte-long ones, but you know, in 2 years there'll be a new intel micro-arch and who knows ?

Good luck keeping objects pointerless in Java. Or go for that matter (you can't use any interfaces or pointers if you do).

But don't take my word for this. Here's a trivially simple test. Gcc can compile java programs down to machine code. The memory model of those compiled things is different from the jvm. Take what you consider a slow java program, gcc it, and execute it. Note the 100%+ improvement in speed. (only really works for memory intensive stuff, of course). Rewriting it in C++ (assuming you know what you're doing) will get you another 100%+ improvement.
Inefficient on an individual level, but the adaptability and robustness is more on a species level. It's probably pretty efficient in that regard.

A high risk, high reward strategy that works out well for humans that survive and end up with large brains, but terrible for certain individuals for the reasons previously outlined.
Cool, tried it and actually works pretty smooth. Even some obscure rap vids ;)
Thanks, that's what i love about (rap)genius. Always some fan that does the lyrics!
That worked for Smyslov (7th World Chess Champion), who once quipped:

"I will make 40 good moves and if you are able to do the same, the game will end in a draw."
Ok, I get it, we're all looking at page design and visualisation issues, which is the kind of thing we do here. But isn't anyone going to just marvel and express wonder and astonishment at the sheer majesty of the extraordinary achievements described in the videos?
Judge Rejects $324.5M Settlement To Tech Workers
I didn't get the black/green dot as a symbol. I get that once people have been told what it is they'll start thinking "climate change", but is this really going to change the mind of the deniers?

When I was growing up in Canada, we had a public service announcement of an owl saying, quite simply "give a hoot, don't pollute".

Doesn't something simple like that say it all? Can climate deniers really argue with that? We have an environment, keep it clean. End of story.
Try getting moisture with your breadth on anything when its warmer than 24 C degrees..
Those two things things - private property and enforcing contracts - are goods, and it's not only government who can produce goods.
Laws and enforcement is not something that only governments know how to do.
Show HN: A functional library written in JavaScript
Needs examples websites - like right now.
What is your opinion on Google's move about counting HTTPS as a ranking signal? Do you support encryption of HTTP traffic, even on none-sensitive websites?
Got any jungle or hardcore?
Big Data's High Priests of Algorithms
No problem, I just did it at 25 °C with little effort.
If you go even further, our cellular milieu has similar chemical potential as sea water, so we are in effect walking bags of sea water.