skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sympathise.

I run a lot of forums and we use Stop Forum Spam to block spammers from posting comment spam. They are identified and reported according to three things: 1) Email address, 2) Username and 3) IP address.

The IP address is the most effective way to stop comment spam, and I only block people based on "Has spam been received from this IP according to StopForumSpam.com within the last few days?".

Understand that the vast majority of spam comes from several countries, and Tor.

I'm massively in favour of using Tor and having it as a privacy/anonymity tool. But... Tor is also heavily favoured by spammers and whilst the Tor exits are not explicitly blocked in the system I use, the mere fact that spammers use Tor heavily means that the IP addresses for Tor exit nodes are constantly being refreshed on StopForumSpam.com .

Anyone running any kind of IP reputation is going to have the same problem, and CloudFlare do run their own IP reputation.

It's nothing against Tor, but if an individual mixes their traffic in with a stream of spam, trolls, script kiddies, etc... and the behaviour of those users affects the reputation of the IP, then the innocent Tor users who merely want privacy/anonymity are going to be affected.

It's a difficult balance to strike, but any IP reputation system is going to score Tor badly given that it is used for so much abuse and bad stuff.
A surprising fierce critique of quora.

I'm not sure there's anything someone wanting to build a community can learn from this article. Which is a shame, because we should really be trying to learn from experience. It would counter the fuckin stupid ideas some people have. (ie: real names only to combat hostility and trolling. The obvious counter would be the comment sections of most newspapers.)
In this case,

looks up definition of mansplaining

Yes. Yes it is.

It is necessary to show his point. Not saying it is necessary in society. Cool your jets.
The article was fairly mature. However what would make me more skeptical about anything weev writes is the fact that he is an angry paranoid due to his drug use (http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2009/Oct/82).

His account of his gay hacking incident is interesting. How could he possibly know it was gay people who flagged his posts ? That's either paranoia, ironic trolling, or homophobia. I thought maybe he was just trolling when he says that gay people flagged him, but after reading the Lisa Simpson post above, I think he might actually believe it.

No intelligent person would do drugs like heroin if they did a little research and understood about neurotransmitter receptor downregulation. Basically, doing any drugs (including alcohol, caffeine or nicotine) will downregulate your neurotransmitter receptors for up to 2 weeks after a single dose (depending on the amount), resulting in the exact OPPOSITE effect of the drugs for up to 2 weeks afterwards. (With chronic use, the downregulation can take years to reverse).

In summary, he is one truly fucked up dude due to the drugs.
> Customers approach it in a different way and that can help them to discover sites that they wouldn't otherwise find through search and news.

Very much so, and a directory can be focused start into a very different approach to the rest.
I've noticed the lack of humour enthusiasm on HN too. I guess maybe as the article suggests it does not translate well internationally.
It may not be powerful, but it is quick to develop in.
> I'm voting blue.

lol

> Given that you're a Linux user, you should be familiar with Einstein's definition of insanity. :P

+1 - I just don't see any real solution to the problem. I do think that because Linux is more widely used it is running into the same issues Microsoft has/had where the vulnerabilities are more widely exploitable.

Diversity definitely has it's benefits.
Sexism is never necessary.

And what point would that be?
> Different currencies. The owners of Quora are being paid in US dollars, the content creators in both attention and reputation.

I think this is spot-on. I answered questions on quora for a while, but eventually left once I realized I was getting nothing out of it besides (some) "reputation" on a closed-off website. The reputation (and any associated ego/self-esteem boost) might be enough of a reward for some to justify continuing, though.

> Both attention and reputation are currencies that will translate to dollars more and more as we progress towards an, in-part, reputation-based economy.

I am not sure this is or will be univerally true. It does work for some people, though they seem to be a minority. Not every twitter-celebrity can convert that status into a way to support themselves financially.
I would be more impressed by your argument if these projects seemed to have any support or real energy behind them besides a handful of hobbyists and grad students. There's snake oil with far more funding and backing than these projects.
I can't find a way to stretch the definition, for the kind of open-source projects he is very clearly discussing, that isn't some sort of reductivist #NotAllSourceRepositories or something.
suphp might be exploitet, but only with stupid settings

https://8ack.de/guides/suphp_shellshock
Look at the research that the faculty of your CS department is involved with, find something there that interests you and approach whoever is heading up that research and ask them to be your supervisor. See if there is some piece that you can contribute without having to understand the totality of the research.
I've said this before, but kudos to the OpenBSD Project for shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden of maintaining core bits of our libre/open infrastructure. I can't think of anyone in tech who has not benefited mightily from OpenSSH and who will not benefit mightily from LibreSSL.

This article is a good reminder for me to get off my arse and cut my meager grad-student checks to the EFF and OpenBSD project.
To expand a bit further: this is an example of the "rabbit-hole" nature of mathematics. All but the most trivial theorems depend on previous results, and in most cases you cannot realistically follow all the dependencies until you get to the first principles, also known as axioms (and even then, there's the question of which axioms you are willing to accept!)

In order to be able to understand and appreciate mathematical proofs, you have to develop the ability to accept the truthness of a result - and to realize the consequences of it being true - even though you do not yet understand why it is true. You have to learn to accept the ensuing confusion as a natural state of mind (read [0] if this idea intrigues you).

[0] http://j2kun.svbtle.com/mathematicians-are-chronically-lost-...
If you know anything about the OpenBSD project it really isn't surprising at all.
"A reputation based economy is what we're moving towards", we should be resistant to that. I think it would be fair to say a "reputation based economy" is a synonym for crony capitalism -- I'll only do business with you if I know you.

This is a socially unfair economy at best, and at worst will generate inequality as social cliques will continue to preserve and enrich themselves and "the people they know". If we're going to move more toward social and economic fairness this isn't the direction to go.

I'm comfortable knowing that Whole Foods takes dollars rather than Klout points or retweets. That way anyone who can make a dollar can eat and not worry about starving because they failed to impress some arbiter of social currency. Reputations aren't fungible hence they are flawed as a just economic currency.
suphp, but only if your are stupid enough to switch safe_mode On

https://8ack.de/guides/suphp_shellshock
> So "Material Design" is "Flat Design" with shadows?

... and bright colors, yeah.

But it's really just a return to early 90s GUI design (flat, high-contrast, shadows): http://files.vforum.vn/2013/T08/img/diendanbaclieu-98580-tur...
Be sure to check with your CS department that you can work on your own idea.

I know at my university, if I wanted to work on my own project, I had to submit a proposal several months in advance. In addition to that, I needed to have an outside stakeholder who wanted to "sponsor" the project.

1. The idea needs to be technically challenging.

2. The idea must be small enough in size to complete in the allotted time frame.

3. An outside stakeholder must "sponsor" the project to mimic the real world of working with others such as a project manager.
Converting the SSL key from a file to a separate oracle is exactly how HSMs work, and they were existing best practice in securing keys. Keyless works the same way, just remotely, and using commodity stuff (although the local key at the user's site can live in an EKCM system, in an HSM, or otherwise be protected.)

As you say, it's a big deal for revocation. It's ALSO a big deal for auditing -- you know every time a session was initially negotiated, vs. if you give someone else the key -- you have no idea how many sessions were set up. It's also just a policy/compliance thing -- not needing to go through the process to be approved to store keys from organizations makes our sales process a lot faster.

There are some fairly obvious extensions to the security model which are in the works as well.

The reason why I think it's obvious there are security advantages to keyless is that we're using it internally. For us, consolidating our keys in a smaller number of secure locations is totally worth it.
Nick, I have a small IT business in Southampton with a branch in Poland (for cost efficiency). I've got good references, 10+ year of experience and more. Mail me if you want to talk - y@ke.mu
Ironically, Quora is a great place to look for an answer to that question.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Answers-Quora-feature/Why-do-people-ans...
I've posted what I did (as best as I can recall) here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/56afdedbf92ea98ba237

It's entirely possible I forgot something. I haven't built an RPM in years and didn't do it often in the first place. I almost didn't bother now except I can't entirely exclude the possibility that two RHEL3 servers that aren't going anywhere might have an attack vector hidden in them somewhere.

Edit: Changed link to fixed gist.
I'm curious if people would use exit nodes which specifically blocked comment submission on sites. I use Tor frequently, but never for posting comments.
Also if you know where to look (twitter, forums), you can find plenty of amateurs that outperform the market, and post their trades publicly.
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Ask HN: Startup CEO or algorithmic trader, which has more money?
For someone with a degree in CS: Is a startup CEO more likely to make more money? Or is an algorithmic trader more likely to make more money?

(http://www.quora.com/For-someone-with-a-degree-in-CS-Is-a-startup-CEO-more-likely-to-make-more-money-Or-is-an-algorithmic-trader-more-likely-to-make-more-money?share=1)
That's... A fairly long rant answering a short question ("what I think about Quora and its latest pivot").

Not that I'm here to defend Quora, but this level of heat makes me wonder whether the unnamed VC has some ongoing beef with it.
You need to focus on why you're doing this - It's for your degree.

And since it's only your BSc just do the easiest project that's not boring and get it out of the way.

Build the cool stuff later. A few years from now no one will care about your GPA, let alone your final year project.
Been running a software startup in the Midwest for about 3 years now and raised multiple rounds. In my experience, the difficulty is finding sophisticated investors, but maybe that's a problem unique to the Midwest.
This is GREAT, rarely followed, advice. A good technical advisor can not only break the job into smaller, manageable pieces but can also help you vet potential candidates.
Believe in Yourself: Ashley Milne-Tyte, Host of the Broad Experience
> I don't need work done for free - I am happy to employ someone ...

Then you want a contractor not a cofounder. One trades time for cash, the other for equity. To hire a contractor, google "hire a coder" then describe your requirements and cash reward on the sites that appear in the search results. If you really want a technical founder, become one: http://blog.samaltman.com/non-technical-founder-learn-to-hac...
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This article nails it. I remember when Quora first came out, I thought that it was a great idea, like a stack overflow for the masses. Fast forward to now though and I find myself avoiding it at all costs. Quora seems willing to try any and everything to fix itself except for solving its most glaring and obvious problem, its closed ecosystem. On mobile it is ridiculous when you do a search in browser and click a Quora link it forces you to install the app to see the answer. If you do make the mistake of installing the app you are then inundated with useless notifications about things you don't care about. I know that there is good information hidden in there, but its a terrible strategy to make people jump through hoops to access it. Meanwhile Stack Overflow became Stack Exchange with sub-sites for more and more topics thus transforming itself into what Quora could have/should have been in the first place. Its open nature has driven its growth to a top 200 Alexa rank while Quora seems destined to continue its semi-annual pivoting.
> It is not difficult to get some kind of honorary position with a research institute when you work in industry.

I think this statement is uh... a tad misleading. This depends a lot on your particular field of interest/research and companies you work for. Also, notoriety.
I noticed that as well, I was hoping it was ignorant shorthand for "has a public repository, bug tracker and website".

Also, it's worse than vim-emacs zealotry, those at least have the benefit of being extremely powerful expert level tools. Those frequently, and maybe rightfully inspire some zealotry.

That same attitude towards popular, least common denominator tools is better called fanboyism than zealotry.
> I've always found it funny how many of the people who decry Perl as being "line noise" will then go on to praise such languages as APL, J and K

This is not a reality with which I am familiar. I like the idea of APL; I even did some, years ago, but this feels strawman-y to me. Even in the J/K/APL crowd, the running joke is readability.
I saw the same blue tile post on my phone. I think some wires got crossed somewhere. The link gets redirected correctly on my desktop, but google says it encountered an error.

Here's the image: http://imgur.com/sFDCt7K

Here's the comment: http://pastie.org/private/v5jg4cs014bojf1synjgq
Thank you! We don't do auto-increment keys but is something we're considering (or at least auto column types like date created). We will definitely be adding more analysis features soon. One thing you can do (which may not be too discoverable) is select a range of number cells in a column to get a summary at the bottom.
What is the t/o stand for after the 2M?
Look for a local charity or nonprofit that might need some work done. Having real stakeholders, requirements, etc, is a great way to simulate what a real project will be like.
It means that it would be weird for there to not be interesting patterns all over the place, as you suggest. This is, however, subtly different from there being such patterns. In particular, the first one is stated independent from the effort it would require to find them, while the latter includes it.

In other words, maybe the right want to understand this is via intuitionistic logic where not (not A) is not convertible to A. So, it's certainly not the case that there are no interesting patterns... but you must show me one before I believe that they actually do exist.
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We don't do anything of this sort yet, but if you can get the data into a CSV you can import that into a table.
The author made "being on github" a hard requirement. I think it might have been made as a kind of shorthand for "on github or something equivalent" but you can't blame someone for taking the author at their word when they state it so plainly. And that stated sentiment is pretty insane.
So...

* it's broken on other platforms

* they broke features in their releases (no QA/testing?)

* they're making a new API based on requirements of their own programs that doesn't provide many of the OpenSSL features.

* they're using CVS, no public code reviews available. There's no evidence some of the changes were reviewed by someone other than who made the commit. (OpenSSL now does reviews)

* no public audit available.

* they have some hateful note about hipsters on their web page as an excuse after 5 months to not make it readable. So unprofessional it hurts.

* Most changes were done five months ago, with not much at all done for two months.

* The test/ directory has very few changes at all. No extra tests have been added.

* I can't find a release plan, architecture documentation, or any documentation a serious software project should have. (OpenSSL is working on these though)

Finally... their official distribution website doesn't use SSL. That's a major security issue of the face palm variety.

Not. Inspiring. Confidence.

The OpenSSL project on the other hand has been doing some good work. Please see the projects road map from July to see what they are changing. https://www.openssl.org/about/roadmap.html
From a distance I'd say APL* having one datastructure and many (cryptically represented) operations. Think Alan Perlis (NPI) epigram (http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html). Perl context sensitivity with many builtin types is like combinatorial explosion of cases and is harder to parse mentally.
I'm acquainted with the founders of Quora, and I don't think making "fast money" was a primary motivation in founding Quora. They set out to create a question/answer site with a better user experience and a better community.

The business model seems, from the outside, to be the belief that, like Facebook and Twitter, they will make money somehow eventually after becoming a runaway success, even it takes years to monetize.
No, not really. They pay about market in Silicon Valley. I believe Apple pays more, for example.
Also be sure to find out who will actually own your project once it's done! It'd be a shame to build something you'd like to continue working on after graduation only to have it be owned by your school instead of you.
Wait, so you're trading asynchronous, non-interrupt driven communication (email) for synchronous, interruptive communication (IM, phone)???

I do the exact opposite - I got rid of my phone, and rarely log into IM, and have trained all my coworkers to email me so that I can respond when I'm ready, without breaking my focus.

How has email gained higher interrupt priority than phone/IM?!
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I was an early 2000's script kid who got in a lot of hot water over my actions. Then three years later, right before I was to go off to college, two FBI agent showed up at my house to offer me a job. They went about it in an extremely sketchy way that made me very uncomfortable. I said no and called a lawyer.

The big thing I learned from that whole situation is that you should say as little as possible to law enforcement without a lawyer present.
"Economic freedom" is a loaded term that carries a lot of unexamined ideological baggage. It presumes without evidence that unconstrained markets allocate resources better than regulated markets. It's a strongly held belief that is impervious to experience.

Since "free" is better than "unfree", naturally economic freedom must be better than any alternative, right? But word games like this don't shine much light on what actually works in the real world.

What happens when free-market ideology meets the real world? Let's compare the labor markets in Germany and California.

The German minimum wage is about $10.78 at current exchange rates, 20% higher than California's recently increased minimum of $9.00. Germany has far greater and more intrusive regulation. German taxes are much higher. In almost every way, California has greater economic freedom than Germany.

What are the results of California's relatively greater economic freedom? California's economy produces a few more billionaires than Germany does, which benefits a small number of people. But the vast majority of Californians are worse off than Germans.

The unemployment rate in California is much higher than in Germany. More Californians want jobs but can't find them, or are working part-time when they want full-time work. Millions of Californians don't have health insurance or retirement security. More Californians than Germans are homeless, living in their cars, or in abandoned buildings, or on the streets, or in shelters. More Germans get at least four weeks of paid vacation per year than Californians.

Where is the empirical evidence that "economic freedom" delivers better results for more people than other systems? On the contrary, free-market ideology seems to create extremely good outcomes for the few at the expense of the many.
I actually disagree. If you feel compelled to do something cool, do it. This is a great opportunity to challenge yourself. And someone will care about the project you do -- you will. Never do anything but your best.

But to the other posters merit, if you can't narrow down what it is you want to do, then pick a "boring" thing -- it's better than nothing at all.
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Absolutely none of the responses to that question (thanks for sharing that link with the group here) distinguishes why I should post on Quora, with its annoying user interface and smarmily self-congratulatory culture, rather than posting here on Hacker News. I can get any of the benefits of posting on Quora with less friction, more civility, and more Google visibility here on Hacker News than I can on Quora.
I clicked it. :(
Right, but those aren't for day traders. Most of those strategies depend on holding for long periods of time.
It's an interesting proposal, that perhaps the things that degrade the reputation of Tor nodes could be blocked by Tor nodes.

Not just comment spam, but to have the equivalent of mod_security be run over an exit node and to deny traffic that triggers it.

This wouldn't reduce privacy/anonymity, but would avoid the IP address from having its reputation damaged (in turn enhancing privacy/anonymity as the exit nodes can be protected and thus prove more useful to good users).
Jacks and Oti
Thanks. A comment below about the problem with closing a photo and directed back to hn also directs correctly.

A post technically explaining what is happening would be worth my upvote.
IOS XR used to be QNX though, if I'm not mistaken?

I hadn't heard of these other Cisco products until yesterday, but from what I read IOS XE and NX OS also run on Linux.

Anyhow, getting back to my original point about FreeBSD, there's a few sources that have linked IOS to FreeBSD. But after doing some digging of my own on this topic, I've come to the conclusion that this is one of those urban legends that's proliferated for whatever reason. So it would seem that you're right about IOS being home rolled. Interestingly though, they do have other products which are FreeBSD powered (eg AsyncOS http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/email-securit...) but, as you said, not IOS
Just like you can find plenty of people who toss heads more often than tails.