skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What exactly is going on? Hacked site.
I followed a link to what I thought was landolakes.com and was rapidly redirected to a pharmaceuticals site.

How strange I thought, and checked the link which appeared to be legitimate.

Then I Googled drugs site:landolakes.com and got pages of hits that reference various pharms.

Today it seems fixed. Does anyone know what this vulnerability is/was?
Artists willing and freely entered into contracts with the record labels. Many artists continue to do so everyday.

Record labels aren't any more or less evil than VC firms.
Come on, Malcolm Gladwell isn't being ghostwritten. Anyone that good doesn't need a ghost writer, and if his ghost writer is that good, he's not going to be ghost writing instead of writing his own stuff and building his own name. Even if he were using a ghost writer, Gladwell didn't go back and read through?
Eine sexy Fee erfüllt sexy Wünsche
"assume they could earn approx 10% a year via "safe" investments."

An instrument with a risk adjusted return of 10%/year is called a junk bond.
I'm working on a sheet music app (wonderwarp.com/opus) and it's been irritating to discover how much old music is still under copyright. Like, pretty much the entire genre of jazz. Hopefully more of it expires soon.
Wouldn't any law against at-will employment be tantamount to slavery?
FishVille Tips & Cheats
I've seen exploited servers in the past with odd .htaccess files, performing redirects to spam sites depending on the requestor's source IP or some other identifier. Not sure how the server was exploited originally though.
Why not ask the administrative contact for the landolakes.com site? Why would Hacker News readers have any idea what happened on an obscure website that none of us have probably ever visited?

Anyway, there are an infinite number of ways sites can be hacked. It was probably just a dumb mistake, as nearly all of the hacked sites I've seen have been (when I was contracting, about a quarter of my clients hired me for forensics and cleanups on exploited servers). Weak passwords, old versions of software with known exploits, unnecessary service running that wasn't properly secured because no one was paying attention to it, etc.
You notice it says that it is still available? So if it says it's taken couldn't you now go use their pass phrase? I take it it only ships it to their address, but still seems like it would be a hassle to fix.
If you can cook, you can roast coffee. It's not that hard. My advice to new cooks and coffee roasters is the same. Eat your mistakes.
Ask HN: Did you have more luck with tech or niche blogs when you launched?
Techblogs that cover startups, like techcrunch, mashable, etc.<p>Or niche blogs that somewhat cover your niche. For example a wine blog, if you have some wine social network.<p>Which did you have the most luck with, getting coverage?
This is an increasingly common SEO trick that Google doesn't seem to be that good at picking up on. Or at least they are unable to detect it for a few days.

I don't think there is a specific vulnerability here, just whatever vulnerability the black hat SEOs can find to exploit.
Great post.

IMHO, the answer is a definite Yes: ethics can be taught. The further removed from the humble worker the management becomes, the greater the risk of unethical behavior. It's all about structure. The reason our economy (USA) busted in late 2008 is because the "management" class of people became too disembodied from the standard middle-class worker.

The first problem is that Orwin neglects that the main goal of business education is to teach people management skills. So we can usefully teach people to devise management structures that minimize wrong-doing on the part of their employees, even if we can't change the characters of future managers themselves.

It's not about changing "character" so much as allowing transparency in the process and what's expected. It's very interesting to observe who totally freaks out over policy and such that promotes transparency . . . cliques and class-stereotypes dissolve under the lens of transparency.
A recent example of your second point is with Twitter lists, all Twitter clients became instantly obsolete, and the clients for the iPhone moreso since they wouldn't be able to push an update for 2-3 weeks, as a developer I would find that extremely dissatisfying since I wouldn't be able to give my customers the best possible service.
Looks like DB caches indeed.
I have to give that project some major props. It was the most painless install I have ever done and it is simple to use.
What does the AP test cover? If the test glosses over the same issues, it might be the fault of the testers rather than your teachers.
Gatejumper: Q&A site about building online businesses
Would Anyone Pay for MySpace Music?
You're right, Artists still feel they have to sign "that" contract, in order to make it BIG. This is because of the misconception the music industry has put out there, knowing too well that artists will fall for it.

Good analogy on comparing record labels to VC firms, but I believe one is still more evil-er than the other.
Analyzing structural brain changes in Alzheimer's disease
Tell HN: #HNBeginners on irc.freenode.net for beginning hackers
Hi HN! I was motivated to start an IRC channel dedicated to people who were beginning to program from my earlier post. I think it would be great to have a place where we can all come together and get started.

If you're a beginning hacker and looking for others to help you or just a place to hang out, feel free to join in. Looking forward to hearing from you!
When I was young in the 70's artists either entered into a contract with the few major labels, or they remained unknown. The oligopoly owned the big studios, they had the major venues sewn up, and they had the radio stations and DJs. That's not my idea of willingly and freely.
Thats simply not true. I know a guy who was the president of a division with >80m in revenue a year, and was "laid off" with 5,000 other people after 28 years with the company and never a negative performance review. His boss went to bat with finance people but lost. There is a formula and sometimes it says people at level X can't be paid greater than Y, and if they get paid greater than Y, they are laid off. Often the reason they are paid greater than Y is because they are good at the job. Not a smart way to do layoffs, but becoming more common because it is easier to fire top down than bottom up a lot of times.
Using SWF/XML Charts with PHP
This is the best link I've ever seen on Hacker News.

It's honest, it's filled with good advice, it has warnings that people should be at least aware of (e.g., "mentors" who provide an hour of advice and expect an equity stake in return), and it's very, very well written and is a pleasure to read. I knew the author had some serious writing experience when I read the post, and sure enough, he has background as the founder of an online literary publication.

Thanks hariis, and thanks Paul.
Google Submits Second Proposal for Library of the Future
Hey everybody, I just wanted to let you know I've created #HNBeginners for those who are just starting out and or those who would like to contribute and help other people out who are just getting started. Please drop by if you can!
Turning Predictions into Opportunities
Well I figured that the site admins would not likely reply to some random person asking about how their site got hacked.

I asked here because I thought perhaps a curious person would read this and find it interesting.
Corporate IT today is a microcosm for the way established corporations become sclerotic and fail to compete with new businesses.

When you're building from scratch on a green field, it's easy to buy the most modern and efficient technology. Most corporations didn't build out their IT infrastructure until the early 2000s. Once you've invested in these systems, you're stuck balancing the cost of maintenance against the short-term cost of starting again, and the latter rarely wins.

This is why Windows XP and IE6 aren't going away anytime soon, but it's also the reason the last few steel mills in the US are going out of business with century-old equipment while cutting edge plants are built in south-east Asia.
The tough part is finding a tidy syntax for representing said bidirectional cyclic graphs.

A programming language with support for arbitrary graph literals would make me happy.
I wouldn't think that most of the queries are executed that often, given that the "sites" are so unique.

I'd be curious to hear more about how they utilize caching.
The logic is flawed because the company behind the example he used -- ID -- doesn't make Apple hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Their software doesn't sell Macs. In terms of bottom line, ID doesn't really matter all that much to Apple.

But, Verizon would. They could easily double or triple Apple's iPhone revenue next year -- perhaps to the point where they'd have a bigger market cap than Microsoft -- imagine how that would make Steve Jobs feel. What the author is claiming is that Apple would drop a Verizon deal just because they were badmouthing them. That's bad business and Apple is not that stupid. For example,Microsoft office is still for sale in the Apple Stores.

If you ask me (and you haven't), Verizon's ad campaign was an attempt to make sure that when they finally go to the bargaining table with Apple, that they'll have some ammunition -- if they have an android-based phone that has considerable market share, then they're in a better place from a bargaining perspective.

I'll even go out on a limb and make the claim that Verizon increasing their early termination fees was, in part, a way to keep people from jumping over to the iPhone to, once again, increase their bargaining power when sitting down with Apple.

Verizon wants to increase profits. Apple wants to increase profits. Verizon + Apple = increased profits for both.
You could go to an HN meetup or maybe attend a conference. You may need to work on selling yourself because your post did not indicate (to me) what value you will bring to the partnership.
Ever since the beginning, Apple has had to ram their features down the throats of society.

Today, they have developed sophisticated ways to do this like their slick marketing videos where soft-spoken people walk you through the scary world of new features.
We all have some bad luck or an accident from time to time, and it's easy to blame fate and move on.

When it happens this often, it's not fate - it's you.
That page doesn't show Super Monkey Ball; it's a prompt to download iTunes.
I downvoted it. It is a crass overgeneralization, clearly based on stereotypes that have been reinforced by the narrow opinions of a couple of your friends.

I lived in Asia for more than six years. Speak Mandarin. Married locally. The idea that Asian women tend to "demand less attention," or what you refer to a "Fresh Off the Boat" Chinese girl giving birth will urge her mate to "don't wory about the baby" and "make sure you get the money" is absolute, utter B.S.
cant. they chose a "non commercial" license.
I kind of assumed this from Verizon's latest ads for the Droid, which focus primarily on attacking the iPhone.
Developer evangelism is marketing, not development. To view this through any other lens seems silly. You wouldn't think badly of a marketing agency that was effectively able to promote two competing companies -- they're just doing their job well.
Yeah I've not studied that interpreter so if that's your specific interest no luck sadly; rank is an easy idea but wouldn't surprise me if there's some trick to it in an implementation that short.

I think it'd be easier to untangle if you already had a working knowledge of the language but given the line-noisy look of J I can't blame you for trying the shortcut.

The interactive J labs are very good. You might also find the J for C programmers discussion of rank particularly helpful if you are looking at learning by understanding an implementation.

I figure the array languages will make a minor comeback soon what with gpus / larrabee / etc showing up on the horizon and what with more-versatile input devices showing up (making it easier to go back to funky symbols instead of line noise).
Is this worth unblocking reddit for?
Just to clarify, the issue in this article isn't exactly expiration or lapse, it's just the possibility of transferring ownership.
True, and all of the flash content on the web shows me a prompt to install a plugin, and therefore can't be referenced by URL either.

Meanwhile, Flash gets no mention in the article?
Yeah, I think perhaps the problem is that I'm a NOT "hot"

(narcissistic & self-obsessed == LeahCulver.com variety of) female;

I wish my work could just speak for itself without all the marketing hype and baloney.
The war on file sharing hits Australia
Just because its so cool, Lessig's OSCON speech on copyright:

http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/

Favorite quote (paraphrased) "Disney didn't want others to do to them what they did to the Brothers Grimm."
Except that I can't actually access the app from that URL, so I wouldn't consider that equivalent.

Rich apps like Google Wave, however, can be accessed directly in the browser, as can apps like Gmail and Google Latitude. It's unfortunate that the majority of these apps are developed by Google, but frameworks like iUI and jqTouch bring this kind of functionality to the broader web.

I think it's silly to suggest that Apple's app links that redirect to iTunes are somehow equivalent or equally meaningful as fully functioning applications.
With regards to (2), I can't believe he wasn't using Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera. I work at a (non-web based) MS shop, and even there you'd be hard-pressed to find a developer or hacker type who touches IE. Those who do use IE are only using it to test IE compatibility.
Oh? What is he then? (I read evolutionary psychologist off his wikipedia bio)
Adding themes; adding offline access; adding IMAP, POP, and SMTP support; allowing labels to be treated like folders; allowing forwarding; adding in-browser chat; adding keyboard shortcuts; adding online preview and viewing of many documents, including notably Microsoft Office formats; adding contact groups; adding muted conversations; adding to-do lists; integrating with calendaring (Gcal didn't even exist when he wrote that article, let alone integrate tightly); and adding synchronization with BlackBerrys. And that's off the top of my head.

Gmail's UI may be roughly the same as it was in 2005, in the same way that Outlook 2007 is basically the same as Outlook 2003, but the actual experience has markedly changed and improved--certainly enough that I think his claim could be reasonable then, but moot now.
I suppose that depends entirely on how the parser was implemented.

You could write a scanner that doesn't use regexes.
It could just read in characters one at a time and hard-code the logic for matching tokens.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the standard html parsing libraries use regex libraries internally to match tokens.

If you used a scanner generator like lex, you would specify your scanner using regexes and lex would generate code that expands those regexes into an automata. I guess that also counts as using regexes, only they're compiled down at compile-time instead of at runtime.
Yikes. I completely missed that one and did not think to search the history for a non-topical post. Sorry about that.
Deploy and load balance your Rails/Sinatra apps automatically via Bonjour
I understand what you're saying, but it strikes me as a very tortured and flimsy excuse for the App Store's presence in the article.

By your reasoning, there's no URL for GIMP either. Does that make it part of the URL's death knell? (I wouldn't consider a URL to an Debian repository to be much different than a URL to an App Store, after all...it doesn't take me to the program, but it will allow me to configure a special piece of software to obtain & install the program for me.)
RockYou Raises A Whopper – $50 Million In Venture Capital
If you look closely, it does appear that you need a PIN in addition to the passphrase. (not to say that a PIN is foolproof)
Was reddit blocked, or just disapproved of?
Did he get paid all through this?

I've made my share of excuses, but I don't get paid if I don't actually work.
Seeing the timeline of the transcript was interesting. He (Andrew) segmented the entire transcript into five minute segments, and then they start filling in. At first, I thought he was doing it all himself, but it seems like the whole point of segmenting it is so a lot of different people can do the transcription in parallel. So either he farmed it out to Amazon Turk, or he's got lots of college student friends.
No, although I did have a chuckle at the idea of a 'weeding rehearsal'.
Personally, I couldn't believe that they put generics in Java, after the weirdness with C++ templates, and all the problems they buy you.

Java very definitely jumped the shark when they added generics.
How hard would it be for iPhone to switch to CDMA?

I wonder if Apple has some kind of exclusivity deal with AT&T that may prevent it from working with other providers.
Given that many of these walled garden technologies use web-content within applications (a lot of iphone apps are nothing more than site-specific browsers with minimal custom UI chrome), and that most of them restrict access to programmer and debugging tools (enforced by law on devices that promise DRM to content-providers). An iPhone, an XBox, a PSP or any other device that can serve as a general purpose computer but does not allow the end-user to do so is taking away freedom 0.

You may be willing to make that choice in the short term, for this year's fad gadget, but will you want to be locked into it?
Presentation Summaries from Philly Barcamp 2009
Angel interviewing many of the speakers from BarCamp Philly 2009. Summaries from the speakers themselves.
In the article, he mentions the concept of a Mexican wave and how it starts to get going and then slowly trickles out.

From this I got the idea of measurement in "wave" and then the obvious "wavelength" jumped into my head and it stuck for me. Now that I have taken a sleep, I quite like "wave energy" too.
I completely understand where you're coming from, but I didn't want advertise myself, I figured this wasn't the right setting for me to do that.

But, I will work on selling myself and my passion though.

Thanks
"... Agreed on all counts. Never heard of him until the news he was fired from MS, read his goodbye blog post that was pretty Microsoft-friendly, and threw up in my mouth a little when I saw this new one. ..."

Which means you probably didn't look very hard.

"... The companies were much higher quality than I expected. The founders were nearly all coders and hackers but did a surprisingly good job at presenting their idea, target market, and business model ..." ~ Don Dodge

Don was around YC around 2 years ago and while initially thinking the YC model was a joke, he changed his mind by observing. That's what you want isn't it? People think one thing, but change their minds after observing. Fluid thinking instead of fixed mindsets. ~ http://searchyc.com/don+dodge+bootload
I use Mechanical Turk.
Oof. How can you let someone waste that much of your employees' time?

(It isn't totally clear... was the guy getting paid hourly through all this too?)
Visualizing the Fortune 500 in America
My eyes got much better after I started playing tennis. I think the act of tracking the ball is basically the same as the eye exercises you're suppose to be doing every 30 minutes (looking in the distance then up close, etc).
A tiny collection of more quotes : http://www.slothmud.org/~hayward/mic_humor/mic_quotes.html
Coding With Confidence: Adding TDD to Your Toolset
But Eco's perspective is more nuanced than "Internet untrustworthy, books good" or the like. On the second page of the interview is where he gives a little gem on how to train a discerning mind, a modern version of classical rhetoric exercises:

Eco: Yes, in the case of Google, both things do converge. Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance. There, the masters may not necessarily have been able to explain to their students why a painting was good in theoretical terms, but they did so in more practical ways. Look, this is what your finger can look like, and this is what it has to look like. Look, this is a good mixing of colors. The same approach should be used in school when dealing with the Internet. The teacher should say: "Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information." If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others' mistakes.

Notice he seems quite familiar with Google and its limitations. As for his educational suggestion, it's excellent in teaching a multitude of high-level skills (research, referencing, comparison, synthesis, re-explanation, skepticism, etc.) but this level of education needs a teacher willing and capable of engaging in dialectic or Socratic dialog with a student.

I agree with you that the Internet has made information and knowledge far more accessible than ever before - for those who know where and how to look for it. For many/most other people, it can be even worse than previous propaganda channels of print, radio, or TV. The sheer variety of the Internet guarantees that if you don't want other perspectives and prefer company that thinks like you, you can readily limit yourself.
I really don't know what Amazon was thinking on this one. How is remembering some goofy passphrase and a pin, in addition to your Amazon password, any easier than just your Amazon password. This seems like a solution in need of a problem.
Ask HN: any SDKs for embedded secure processors?
I'm currently using JavaCard smart-card chips to prototype my research project (MIT PhD). My performance isn't that good because I can't access the processor directly.

Does anyone here know of a SDK that I can get my hands on (I'm an MIT PhD) that would allow me to run code directly on the hardware? (I'm hoping to use a mixture of C and direct assembly.) Due to the nature of my research, I need a secure platform, like the smart-card chips.

I'm asking this on HN because I've ran out of places to try. Big companies like Atmel don't want to work with me because I do research, or maybe I wasn't very good at pitching my project.

If you want more information about my project -- I'm researching the design of a secure chip resembling the TPM in that it works in conjunction with an untrusted computer. My design is better than the TPM in that it supports arbitrary computation on the chip, and doesn't require a secure binding to the computer. My design is better than existing smart-cards (e.g. JavaCard, MultOS) because it can run untrusted code, and the code doesn't have to be embedded in the chip when it's issued.

My first paper on the topic: http://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/pubs/cardis08tem.pdf

OSS code (MIT license): http://rubyforge.org/projects/tem

Thank you so much for reading!
Deconstructing Apple's Copyright and Trademark Guidelines
My app ShoveBox is on NYTimes.com for some reason
Eco does not seem to think all that highly of Dan Brown: see this essay on his personal website:

http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/about-god-and-dan-brown.html
God isn't big enough for some people
This doesn't sound much different than where it seems we are conditioned to be headed... just at a very slow pace.