skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gain access by compromising the website, fix the compromise so nobody calls attention to it after you but leaving enough access for you to map vulnerabilities on the inner network so you can target a small piece of malware to a specific computer and/or user in order to get more information on the control network, maybe piggybacking his/her authentication/authorization profile.

Rinse and repeat.

This is no secret. The really evil people who would be willing to compromise a nationwide energy distribution network are no script kids.
"I think we may expect something like.."

This would have been a very interesting article if it was backed by actual data. It's not. Shame.
As someone that worked with Mr. DeMar at Williams, I can honestly say that he was a "designer" in every sense of the word. He was an essential part of every design team, and a lot of times took a boring playfield and turned it into a highly entertaining game. It's really not fair to diminish the role of a programmer in these games.

You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game told a story instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success.

The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.
Outlook is the most used enterprise application used written by Microsoft. Azure could potentially be the next Outlook, in terms of adoption and usage (and could be the next cash cow for MS).
Any experiences with Google Checkout?
This would be a great startup. It would be amazing if I could walk into a restaurant with an app that told the somelier that I not only prefer my vinho verdes with an acidity comparable to Famega but a little more chalky, but actually listed the ideal mix of the specific chemicals involved. It'd be like having a painting created for you in real time to match your taste; sure it takes away from the art and the aestetic experience, but it'd be cool once in a while.
Today's Top Athletes: Human or Android?
As I said above, I'm not saying there is a connection now, but if MS plays it right, there could be a connection.
There are two things to consider
1) SIM lock that ties a phone to a particular carrier. A Google phone wouldn't have a SIM lock unless it were subsidized by a particular carrier.
2) GSM bands. The phone could be quad-band GSM and work on any 3G network. Some recent GSM handsets omit one of the four bands to prevent roaming inside the US between T-Mob and AT&T.
De Beers

Convincing people they need a carbon rock through a brilliant marketing campaign ("A Diamond is Forever" named best advertising slogan of 20th century by Advertising Age). This slogan convinces Americans and global consumers to change their courtship practices; that it is completely normal and expected to spend 2 months salary on a diamond engagement ring as a symbol of love.

Another ad urged consumers to hold on to family diamond Jewelry as heirlooms. This cutoff the aftermarket of diamonds and increased the market power of the firm.

De Beers then artificially keeps the prices very high. These carbon rocks aren't rare in the natural world. The company restricts supply through a cartel system. Less than 200 companies are allowed to buy from the firm.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/diamond5.htm
Love MMO - Eskil Steenberg's Development Tools Demo
Compression schemes have to decode predictably, but they don't necessarily generate the same compressed data. gzip -9 will usually use less space than gzip -1 and decompress to the same data.

What's probably happening is virus scanners are taking the easy way out rather than implementing decompression algorithms in their scanning engines (it probably looks better on traditional benchmarks too)
I think you have nailed it. I don't actually think we have a clue as to how the brain actually works. A while ago, we think it is like a telephone exchange, then we think it is like a computer, then we think it is like the cloud. The true advances in interesting computer results comes not from modeling the brain, but more from low-grade mimicking of the evolutionary process.
I know that's just supposed to be a piece of folky wisdom but it doesn't represent a very good understanding of how different AI is from our normal expectations.

It's not Data on Startrek. There's no reason for them to be walking around talking. You plug it directly into whatever you want it to understand: weather readings, big data sets, etc. You can 'program' it just as fast as it's processors allow it to consume. The analogy is how humans understand language or music although it's still far more direct.

Humans don't represent a upper bound on intelligence. The question isn't a computer as smart as a human, it's one several orders of magnitude faster or slower than one.
And I have a pretty extreme distrust of "Yeah, I know thousands of smart people have tried and failed, but I'm still sure it's a great idea!" See also: General purpose visual programming, 3D desktop or chat interfaces (and I mean true 3D, not "using 3D hardware for nice effects), "I'll just wrap a natural language interface around this and it'll be easy to use!".

Certainly both of our rules fire off, but for every time your rule hits, mine hits several thousand times.
Many believe in 'emergent' phenomena where if you put enough components together, put them in the right environment, and stress them properly they will react in unexpected and coherent ways that while describable and maybe useful from an external perspective can't fully be analyzed because the interrelationships are too complex.

People were building bridges before they knew why the atoms in a beam of wood stuck together -- it probably wasn't even a matter they contemplated. They built complex bridgess before knowing fully how to analyze tensions and torques in such a structure. Likewise people will probably build useful biological wetware components and assemblies before knowing fully how they work.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car. A buddy of mine did a case study on them during his graduate coursework and let me tell you; they got it right, at the right time, in the right places.

Here's a short article about the founder, Jack Taylor, and how he did it: http://magazine.wustl.edu/Summer03/mywashington.html
Crucial Questions for B2B Startup Founders: Workshop at Business of Software
I have ADD though not severely enough that I have to be medicated. Well I have to be medicated if I don't work out about an hour a day. Daily exercise seems to settle my mind.

Bear in mind I'm nothing like some people who have to be on a regular Ritalin regiment. I was only on Ritalin for a short time before I discovered my trigger for fixing it naturally was exercise.
I used to work for an egg wholesaler. We paid the farmers by the egg according to grade. We accounted in eggs.

Do you know how many eggs are sold in the UK?

We had to write a special class to handle eggs because we blew the unsigned integer on a VAX.
Well, the course description specifically states what is tested and taught for the APCS exam. I think you were hoping to get more of an "AB" curriculum rather than an "A".

You are simply in the wrong class if you "roll your eyes". You should look at taking a class at a local community college in something more challenging.

I have a few articles that covers problems in the APCS test at http://www.hscompsci.com

Unfortunately, the "AB" tested is dropped this year. The College Board lost like $700,000 per year because not enough high school students took the test compared to how many people they have to hire to grade them.

So yes, the "A" curriculum is pretty fundamental (though 40% of students flunk the "A" test each year)
You get what you pay for. Google Apps for Enterprise is $50/yr. Not sure what you pay for feedburner, but the bottom line is that Google doesn't sell support. You email them and you wait.

If it doesn't work for you, go elsewhere. It's obviously a business decision they've made by weighing the loss of customers like you against the cost of carrying a huge hands-on support organization.
They just released the source for one of the versions of c# under the apache license.
Two previous threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284

both have good info
If you want universal uniqueness you should be looking at 128-bits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier)
I've heard very good things about Amazon Payments.
I think Rackspace is hitting a sweet spot with hosted email and calendaring and 24x7 service.

I think there are many niches, yet untapped in hosted services, where the cost may be a little more than google, but the service may be a lot better (another example Heroku).
Yeah, Google apparently uses Digg as its CRM system.
SpiderOak is a "zero knowledge" backup provider.
This means that we do not know anything about the data
that you store on SpiderOak -- not even your folder or
filenames. On the server we only see sequentially
numbered containers of encrypted data.

This is really cool, and is a reason I don't use my dropbox for as much stuff as I would like to use it for. SpiderOak looks like something I would use for all my data, for this reason alone.
Writing Code that Scales
It depends what kind of access you can get from the site. I highly doubt simply compromising the website is enough (unless there are hidden or protected pages that allow you to control the network; something we cant assume either way - if there is your dead on, if not..).

If you have to utilize the underlying operating system in some way to access the network (for example gaining access to an internal LAN network) then simple website access probably isn't directly enough you have to take the exploit further.

Yes, there are plenty of ways you could try to leverage access to the underlying OS using the site - however there is no discussion of this in the article.

All Im trying to say there are a lot of assumptions from Data has to be transferred somehow from the power transmission grid to the front-end network to actually compromising the network. Nothing in that article is indicative of the latter being possible. and in my experience that is instantly a warning sign ;)

(I do this sort of testing for a living)
Paypal has a small value transaction system I believe. I think it takes 8% rather than a standard per trasaction fee + ~2%.

It makes it reasonable up to about 10$
When Engine Yard and Heroku offer this kind of service, all you hear about from corporate IT is vulnerabilities in the VM layer and lack of security in the "cloud". But when Microsoft offers it, it's the next big thing. So sad.
You should not have been down-voted for this comment. My argument against that is you don't even need smart people to be obsessed with Chordoma. Simple things that are routinely done for other diseases that are done by technicians could yield major benefits. E.G. matched normal tissue sequencing, having a tissue bank (people how want to research Chordoma have a hell of a time getting some), etc. This is mostly an issue of money. It would be like if somehow streph infections never appeared until last year but penicillin was still found long ago. A average mind might be able to deduce that anti-biotics are a good call.

Actually, i should probably add this to my argument on the page.
Lisp-style Macros for Ruby
Sounds like a great list of topics to flag.
I think Finkelstein's claim is that either Magnanti never worked as a call girl (which would definitely make the blog a hoax) or that she was the call girl but someone else (perhaps a professional ghostwriter) wrote the blog, which would also be hoaxy.
The layout is very readable! however, I have one suggestion:

Left align your photo. Follow the advice of this book by Robin Williams:

"Find a strong alignment and stick to it."

"Avoid using more than one text alignment on the page (that is, don't center some text and right-align other text).

And please try very hard to break away from a centered alignment unless you are consciously trying to create a more formal, sedate presentation. Choose a centered alignment consciously, not by default."

- The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice.
http://books.google.com/books?id=n1AuwXafMO8C&lpg=PT42&#...

Take a look at the chapter above she shows some good examples of how to integrate images into a layout.
Any business that disintermediates (cuts out the middleman).

Amazon, DELL, eTRADE, etc.
Even if different data are being generated, the compression is still predictable. There must be something in the gzip header indicating the level of compression (to ensure that the correct decompression algorithm is used). Point being, there's nothing stopping the AV program from figuring out which compressed signature is the correct one. It can even compress the raw signature on the fly.

On your second point I agree. I'll refrain from ranting about AV programs here, but suffice to say there hasn't been enough innovation in the field because AV companies are able to sell substandard products and still make good money.
Priceline.com get $1000+ CPM for deceptive links in the checkout process
This is a pretty big deal, if it goes through. It means free-even-for-commercial-use mapping data for the whole of the UK, rather than having to pay royalties to the Ordnance Survey or guess what Google considers acceptable use of their API.

There's another gem nestled in the article:
"It is thought transport providers, such as train, tube and bus companies, will lose the right to demand a hefty fee from companies such as independent travel websites and firms devising programs for mobile phones, who want to publish such information."

The wording is a bit unclear, but it seems to suggest the UK Government will pressure transport companies to lower their license fees for data about public transport services. That would be a bonanza for any number of exciting startups.

(For example, there's a journey planner website for trains across the country, but it doesn't know about other forms of transport. In London there's a journey planner for all modes of transport, but it doesn't go outside London. Bus routes, for example, are mostly available only as unscrapeable PDFs. It would be incredibly convenient to have a single service that could just get you from A to B by whatever means.)
+1 The examples are a bit dated but this book still nails it!
Yeah.

This is slightly off-topic, but I find it moderatly disconcerting that I'm a Rackspace customer and I didn't even think to mention the Rakspace Cloud Sites. They're also totally technology agnostic...

And they have good marketing! I wonder why my brain doesn't think of them first.
American Express Says It Will Buy Revolution Money
Eskil uses verse (http://verse.blender.org/) and has open sourced the tools he created which can be found here:
http://www.quelsolaar.com/verse/index.html
Everybody seems to be pushing these 2GB storage now. A couple of days ago I saw that Dell offers it along with new PCs, too.
I tested out your suggestion. It seems to integrate better your way. Changed.

Also thanks for the book recommendation. I'm going to add it to my (mile long) wish list. I am not a designer...
Agreed. Compromising the public facing web site is more likely to lead to compromising other front end sites for other government agencies (or companies that host on the same hosting provider, if that's the case) than to any particular compromise of power distribution network servers, but, still, the possibility exists to grab passwords, specific OS/browser versions for key users and using the website as a finely tuned malware launch point for those key users.

We must always assume the evil guys the other side of the router are evil, skilled and determinate.
Does anybody know if the eye-candy+speed advantage of E17 is still relevant, after the advent of the Clutter toolkit ?
Given that the toolkit natively uses OpenGL and people can hack compositing managers together pretty quickly for it(http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/07/26/so-you-want-to-build...), is E-17, still the "sci fi window manager" ?
8374874823748327491
Ask HN: How to hire a small network installation contractor
At my current job we have redundant Internet connections: a DSL line (hooked up to wireless) and a dual T1 (hooked up to ethernet). For the most part they work pretty well, and when we have problems with one we switch to the other.

The problem is that the whole setup is pretty ghetto. We have a consumer grade router and switch splitting the T1 to about 8 of the 24 ethernet ports that are wired in the building. We occasionally see dropped connections and other flakiness on the T1 which I attribute to either A) the crappy hardware or B) some of the wiring might be bad in the building.

We've always just muddled through this ourselves, but we're starting to see a little traction and we don't have time to screw around anymore. We want to pay someone to come in for half a day, assess the situation, recommend a router purchase, wire up and test the rest of our ethernet ports.

Should be an easy job, but the question is how do you hire someone like this? Any specific recommendations for someone in Palo Alto?
Correction: Outlook is to most people on Hacker News the most irritating ... To most people who don't read this site, its a tool that reliably does everything they need it to do.
This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?

Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server.

I didn't see any of those extensions available :-(

You can upload any extension you want!

The process is very simple. Here are instructions from our wiki: http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addo...

Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?

No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com

If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It's easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.
Is social media killing print magazines?
Introducing Bad Code Offsets
Scientists create the first programmable quantum processor
Cost less and give more, that's all it takes to steal customers from a competitor. Of course "Cost" doesn't just refer to the price, as someone who has "spent" their time trying to get support from Google can tell you. And "More" doesn't just refer to features or services, it's about the value to the customer.
Is this loading for other people? For me there's no response.
Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious
It will be interesting to see how this turns out. On one hand we have Mike Arrington who is wrong quite a bit. On the other we have the VP of Android Engineering directly stating that Google isn't making a device and won't compete with their customers. If I were a betting man I'd say Mike's going to eat it.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10387677-265.html
EPC Gen2 RFID tags have a 96 bit unique id that we store
You might also like "The Qualcomm Equation" by Dave Mock. It is the story of a few engineers in San Diego who got together and used CDMA to transform the industry.
These are also the largest numbers I've had to store, however 64 bits should suffice for a very very long time for twitter id's. If everyone on earth (assuming 6 billion people) tweeted 100 times per day, it would take over 84 million years to overflow 64 bits.
Yeh, that's a completely fair point - though somewhat different to the theory the writer was presenting. And I would say infinitely more likely (or at least something we can feel better making theories about)

> We must always assume the evil guys the other side of the router are evil, skilled and determinate.

No need to assume :D. They certainly are (though in some respects evil is a difficult term to use; cold is better IMO)
hackernews killed the server and it's really FUBAR (can't even ssh to it and try to fix it) sorry about that [edit: back up now]
Heh, I actually overran a signed integer 2 years ago in an app for a major financial company.

Yes, that's > $2,147,483,647

Thanks, subprime mortgage crisis!
There's a lower limit for how much processing power it will take to run a human-level intelligence. The highest that lower limit can be is at the level where we can simulate each neuron in a human brain; at that point, we can build an AI merely by simulation. It seems likely, though, that by the time we get to being able to simulate an entire human brain, we'll long have passed the actual lower limit for human-level intelligence, if we knew exactly how to build it. Assuming we survive, it'll be interesting to find out when we passed the lower limit with supercomputers, when we understand enough to figure it out.
I like the boy scout principle of "Leave the campground cleaner than you found it."

http://www.moserware.com/2008/10/boy-scout-check-ins.html

With all the maintainers doing this at the code, database and design level you shouldn't need to do a rewrite.

The problem is with 'immovable things' that necessarily accrete layer upon layer of work-arounds. If maintenance work allows 'immovable things' to persist in the application, at whatever level, the whole structure gradually degrades and a costly rewrite is eventually forced.
In some pics from 2008, he's playing with Nokia N810. But perhaps that went to hell after they embraced QT. Too bad, I always felt that the N-series and E17 would've been a perfect match.
How to create services in Java
The Revised Maclisp Manual (The Pitmanual)
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk (Read the reviews)