skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I Wrote a Greasemonkey script for Reader that adds a Submit-To-HN link.
Install it here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64117

I also threw the code on GitHub: http://github.com/fitzgen/reader-submit-to-hn

My two big time wasters: Google Reader and Hacker News. Now combined.

This script adds a little link to the bottom of each article in Reader (right by the "share", "like", etc... links) so if you like an article in Reader you can submit it directly to HN with the "URL" and "Title" fields automatically filled in.

The only bug I have found is that some articles (ones that use Feedburner, I think) use a google subdomain as a proxy and those won't fill in the right URL. Haven't found an elegant solution yet, you guys have any ideas? So far my ideas involve hidden iframes to let the proxy redirect and then grab window.location, but that seems more of a pain than just going and fixing the url manually. Feel free to send me a pull request on GitHub if you can find a good solution.

Other than that little thing, it works like a charm.

Take it easy,

Nick

Update: Whoah, fixed weird formatting.
Interestingly enough I have heard in a few places that there is a 'sweet spot' in terms of duty-cycle that extends the life of electrolytic caps... I would that that high-use electronics (or 'always-on' devices) probably miss that spot.
Realtime charts of EC2 spot prices
Clickable links:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64117

http://github.com/fitzgen/reader-submit-to-hn
I don't think tptacek is defending the AV industry; I suspect he's advocating systems that are either inherently virus-resistant or use whitelisting, which is pretty much the opposite of what we usually call "antivirus".

If we ever want to escape from the current computer security morass, we're probably going to need something like trusted computing, if not necessarily exactly what TCG is proposing.
Blocked on Facebook: Gawker Facebook Privacy Guide
I also have a ton of Google Wave invites (36 to be exact). Everyone that wants one already seems to already have one, but if you'd still like one send me an email to charlie@mudoo.net.
> because Americans don't let their kids die to avoid pissing off the environmental lobby.

Don't point that at everyone. I'm an American, and a father-to-be. I would rather deal with the issue in a way that is morally responsible, than just "do whatever it takes to prevent any harm from coming to my child."
Notes from the No Lone Zone - A computer scientist looks at ICBM security.
s there any nation that has had aid withheld explicitly because of their violations of DDT use?

Yes. Many nations have been told, in so many words, that if they continue spraying DDT they can go find health funding elsewhere.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11DDT.html?pagewa...

The above article cites Mexico, South Africa, Belize, and "[m]any African scientists and health officials" as having been pressured in this manner.
Evolution: like any other science it is predictable
Thanks, I'll spend more time on the design
Beware of the Sitting Trap in Learning and Schooling
A new social network for private networking will popup to fill the void facebook is leaving, just as facebook originally filled the need when myspace was at its peak.

I don't understand why facebook can't just keep doing what made it popular. The fact that it was a closed network for only real people you knew, not random internet "friends". Why follow in the footsteps of twitter when you already have something useful. I stopped using facebook once my friends list grew into the hundreds, trying to open it up even more is probably going to result in less usage.
Psystar is dead. Judge grants Apple's motion for sweeping permanent injunction
Consider the source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reiter

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=421

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/6786/
I'm an American, a father of two, and about as far to the opposite end of the political spectrum from Patrick as you can get, and if we're voting, I'm with him. Kill the damned mosquitos. I've had a kid in the hospital for something very serious before.
> My point was entirely about the very intentional misreading of the word "trick".

Except, as I've shown, it wasn't a misreading of the word trick. They accurately characterized their technique.

> by throwing in the irrelevant fact that they used the word "trick" in an entirely different sense from what you imply.

Huh? I "implied" that they intended to deceive and they did.
"Evidence that it is problematic ... is nonexistent."

Wow. What's amazing to me about this rant is how the debate has moved over the last 10 years from "it's not happening" to "it's not a big deal".

So, our massively complex ecosystem is changing in ways that our scientists don't fully understand and it's not a big deal? The ecosystem so complex that scientists have a hard time using the world's fastest supercomputers to try to model it. These real, verifiable changes to OUR ONLY ecosystem are not a big deal even though nobody knows the outcome?

Your position is that playing russian roulette with our grandkids future is worth it because the price of action is overwhelmingly expensive (or infinite). But that's wrong, it's not that expensive. The European economies that have reduced their emissions according to the Kyoto protocol have been doing fine. Reducing the world's carbon emissions is easy, cheap and prudent.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993769
neat advice. word up yo.
I think he's a great professor for sure and don't think that he's been 'selfish' or anything like that. He just happens to teach classes with great material.

I was mainly giving you crap about the fact that allll of your submissions have been VA-related. You have to sneak it in to comments and stuff, like I do with FAWN :)

And as always, Systems >> Theory :P
Using Flash to shim a webcam to HTML Canvas
Have you considered contributing to the PHP interpreter? This could be a interesting task that builds on your experience and showcases your talent.

Alternatively, you could work on the Javascript interpreter in Firefox or Webkit.
Plurk is blocked in China, so it's not so surprising that staff at MSN China don't recognise its UI.
> If we ever want to escape from the current computer security morass, we're probably going to need something like trusted computing

Limiting malware to an officially approved subset is a curious definition of "escape." And any program which causes my computer to deliberately act against my orders is malware, whether it was created by a script kiddie or a multi-billion-dollar media cartel.
Perhaps the protocol of e-mail will soon be getting its day again.
Gosh, I'd love to try IronPython in the browser, but Silverlight doesn't support my operating system. :P
Nobody here disagrees with that. What's funny is that it's the current situation that allows companies like Sony to do that to your computer.
That's my theory (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997886) as well...
This rules. I've been looking for something like this for ages, but never felt satisfied with rubigen or thor.
The site does look a bit bland. And so does the logo. So I'll agree that the branding should be a little better for something $6,000, but I'll also agree with the other guy in that there still has to be more. Reviews, or endorsements could do it.
I think his point was that you need to gain credibility, and more than usual since the potential audience is already paranoid.
Interestingly enough, bedbugs are making a resurgence too because of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedbug
Just as you say at the end there. It makes me grumpy that instead of being able to just pop open a socket to an XMPP server I have to jump through hoops. I give a specific example, but the principle holds generally. (What will happen of course is that XMPP servers will adapt to be able to run over web sockets. Speaking for the server I've spent the most time with as a developer, ejabberd, it's nearly trivial.)

Security and domain stuff I'm fine with (don't need random web pages open random connections to SMTP servers and sending out spam!), but we still end up shut off from a lot of useful existing stuff for what I see as dubious security benefits since it'll all be proxied and/or re-implemented to work with websockets anyhow.
I'm amused that there are no comments here yet.

sound of crickets chirruping
I do enjoy JS, but I imagine there are only 2-3 companies hiring JS compiler writers, so I bet the competition is steep for those. That would definitely be a dream job, though!

And as for PHP, I've taken a look into its internals, and that's some rough stuff...

Thanks for the suggestions!
by writing code, not by being quizzed on what parameters some random function needs to be passed.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997640
> I stopped using facebook once my friends list grew into the hundreds

Why didn't you just remove friends and then keep using it? That's like saying you gave up on using email because of all the unanswered messages you had sitting in your inbox.
> I choose to believe

That is the key phrase for me. You're sharing your opinion, which sounds pretty plausible, but hey, why should I take it over anyone else's?

That's where science comes in. It's messy, biased and often temporarily wrong, but it's the best process we've got for eventually getting to proven truths. This is a massively important subject, if you're right we're letting a lot of suffering elsewhere be neglected because of the resources we're putting into addressing AGW. Put together a paper detailing your models, assumptions and facts, or at the least promote somebody else's work.

Bjorn Lomborg is the closest person I can think of to your position, but he's got a pretty nuanced take on the likely effects, and he's gone to a lot of trouble to quantify the costs:
http://www.lomborg.com/

I want helpful references and links, material we can use to figure this out. Opinions on their own don't move anything forward. Debates with numbers and facts like these between the Economist and Will Eschenbach enlighten me a lot more:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/tr...
Homosexuality was a crime in Australia

And it still is: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/qld/consol_act/cc189994/s...
$5000 is a lot of money for this... isn't it?
> They're tamper proof to the extent that they can verify their own integrity.

They're tamper proof in that they are designed to physically resist decapping and electron microscopy.

Don't dance around this issue, it is a key one. The phrase "tamper-resistant" has a rather specific meaning among chip vendors.

I have read a substantial body of Treacherous Computing-related literature (I don't keep up with the field very diligently, I admit - my stomach is only so strong.) There is unending talk of encrypted electrical buses and display links. Would you like to tell me with a straight face that these ingenious measures are meant to protect against virii or intrusion by script kiddies?

> in the TPM-free world, we have basically no privacy

Speak for yourself. I suffer no intrusions into my privacy which a TPM would prevent.

> our computers are all controlled by people with enough time and energy to find secret flaws in the software we run

Even if this were true, it is much preferable to a world where computers are controlled by those with access (legitimate or otherwise) to a TPM master key. (Rest assured there shall always be a master key, regardless of what the spec sheets say.)

I'll take traditional malware chaos over media cartel totalitarianism any day of the week.
Of course we should take this with a grain of salt, because the Wall Street Journal is owned by the same company that owns Facebook's major competitor myspace. But of course the author is a responsible news corp. journalist, so she honestly disclosed the possible conflict of interest... Hahaha, just kidding.

Well, it is a given that whenever facebook stumbles and falls, the entire News Corp. media empire will be there to kick it in the crotch, but Zuckenberg has to take some of the blame for stumbling in the first place. Those privacy setting updates were a really really bad idea, and he should have reversed them as soon as he saw the negative blow back.
More back story and a discussion from HN on the topic yesterday - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995977
Tips for game designers
Let's posit that Sony (or another company) is in the consortium holding the TPM root key. They will then be able to install a truly undetectable and unremovable you-name-it.

You are quite correct in implying that a TPM would prevent a repetition of the Sony scandal. It would do this simply by preventing discovery.

Of course, it is also possible that Sony in particular would not be given access to the magic key. They may have to pay a steep tribute to, say, Microsoft, to slip the payload through.

Whether currently sold TPM chipsets are capable of such feats is immaterial. The camel's nose is in the tent.
I think you've over-simplified the situation to the point that it's a straw-man.

Different societies have different social contracts. There's what is legal, and what is polite / socially acceptable. In many Western countries, this kind of behaviour at a non-military company would be in shocking bad taste.

It kind of depends on whether your society thinks people > companies, or companies > people.
Introducing the Oracle-SimpleDB Hybrid
I think pornography is definitely the main market here. However, it's doesn't have to be child porn, as you imply. I think there's a housewife market. I think a lot of normal people would record more (ahem) adventurous videos, if there was a guarantee that those videos couldn't possibly, EVER, be seen by other people.

If it takes $6K to convince the wife to break out the whips for the camera, I think there's plenty of guys that would do it.
That quote pertains to acquiring funding exclusively for programs that will use DDT, and basically says that donors will be reluctant to fund something that involves spraying DDT. Unless the only people who bother to give any money to these programs are misinformed bleeding-heart environmentalists, I'm not sure how much of a barrier that is. Nothing is stopping say, the Cato Institute from starting a DDT spraying initiative to fight malaria.
There was an interesting, non-fawning (and less sputtering than the LL post) piece on Orwell and some of his work by Julian Barnes in the NY Review of Books earlier this year.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22414
It's 2009 and there are still app frameworks not using parameterized statements?
I don't think it is. People will often trade something for money that they really shouldn't. If a person has $a and wants $b, and someone will give them $b in exchange for $a, people will often give up $a regardless of the long-term consequences.

Apparently selling children was a problem for society, so it is generally not legal now. People made the wrong decision, and it hurt society, so now making the wrong decision is no longer an option, and our society is better for it.

I think selling your privacy for a salary is detrimental to society in the same way, so it makes sense to use the legal system to remove the option. Then employees can't be tempted into making bad decisions with respect to their privacy by their employer, or rather, by the threat of non-employment. Plus, people that care about their privacy will no longer have to be off-the-grid wackos, and their value to society is increased as a result.
Have been reading up on some Buddhist meditation of late and that focuses on the present moment.

Don't think about the past - Honestly when was the last time you learnt something by spending hours pondering the past

Don't think about the future - Future is always different from what you think it will be

It is about letting go really, once you can "Let Go" you are much happier a person
There's a difference between reasonable and unreasonable skepticism. A couple years ago there was a big debate about climate change on the xkcd forum. Fortunately, there was someone with some experience in the field itself.

There is always a question of what the scientific opinion is on climate change. He answers that question pretty well in this post http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15290&st=...
But if the company spent its time solving every theoretical security problem, it would have never had a product to make money with in the first place. It is a balance, and "zero tolerance" is silly.

(So is not using a modern database abstraction library. Even PHP has them these days!)
Orwell himself says,

"Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against."

So he is not claiming that he has attained perfection in his own prose. But he is not after perfection. He just wants to encourage us to write better.
er....startup wasn't really listed. i chose independent, but then i got a bunch of consultant questions i didn't know how to answer. meh.
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Glad to see more companies doing hardware. It's pretty intimidating stuff, but it's also really fun.

Site Design: Needs lots of work. It seems like an infomercial product. I think branding is key here, especially if you're looking to charge 6k.

Price: 6k is a nonstarter. If the equipment were expensive and margins were tight, I'd understand. Everyone wants hardware to be cheap and it's hard when you don't have economies of scale yet.

Implementation: Lots of different devices and I'm sure there's a certain level of complexity to this. I think you're on to something with the security aspect. I would try to make it a lot easier and a lot simpler. The 100gb of space is also way too low. I haven't looked through the specs, but SATA 2.5s with 500 are readily available. If you can somehow cram a 3.5 inch, you can get up to 2 tb.

Could this be done via the cloud? IP camera, sheeva plug, and encrypted recording to an overseas server? Require the private usb key to be used in conjunction with any software system its loaded on. You could charge a small up front fee for the camera+sheeva plug and recurring fee for recording. Kind of a TiVo for personal security.

</end ramble>
The sad thing about this is that I'm dreaming up ways to use it when I had no real use for it previously.

There is no rational reason for this.
In three years of using Facebook, I've never had a friend delete an account. Not once. And it's the only site beyond Hacker News on which I keep a consistent account. (I wouldn't keep a consistent account here if deleting myself was permitted.)

But I'm edgy and avante-garde and so I did disable my Facebook account for two days. Restored it almost instantly. It's not that there's an addiction, it's that Facebook is so easy to bend to your needs that outright deletion is stupid.

I removed all but ten friends and suddenly Facebook is a way of talking to friends and being vulnerable and the whole shebang. I've got no complaints. Literally none.
The reason why they need these draconian measures is that employees feel disenfranchised and expect to gain more by leaking secrets than by contributing work and sharing in the rewards. Steve Jobs himself would never leak anything - he has a stake in the outcome that the leakers believe they don't.
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Test for deleting
The good thing about Facebook is that as quick as they are to fuck up, they're even quicker at recognizing when users are pissed off and fixing themselves. They're even smart enough to differentiate between "Users don't like change" and "We really did an oopsie"; they've uncannily predicted which of their controversial changes would become more popular with time.

I don't know if this one'll make them change, though. Most people don't really want privacy anymore. My kneejerk, unthoughtout bet would be on their making it easy upon registration to decide on a blanket privacy policy. Make it easy for people to clamp up again but maintain the public status quo. Everybody's happy.
Its day has never really left. But there is certainly a reason why all my Facebook-using peers have flocked to Facebook as well.
It's amazing what a little fact checking can do for your perspective.

After watching 'An Inconvenient Truth', I was quite affected by the supposed plight of the Polar Bears. So I did a bit of research, and I found out two fascinating facts:

1. Polar Bear populations have increased massively over recent years.

2. Polar Bears as a species are older than the last time the Arctic Ocean was free of ice.

At that point, I began to suspect that I was being sold something.
Forgive me for being a bit blunt - but is that picture not just a painted mac mini? The edge has the inset line where the case turns from metal to plastic and the port area is the white plastic. Is this a Mac Mini + software + camera?
Spot pricing does look good when you don't need extra EC2 instances on a regular basis and when you can write restartable applications.

That said, spot prices are fairly much the same as reserved instance pricing, except with reserve instances you have an extra up front fee. I (and some of my customers) simply use reserve instances.

I also started thinking of ways to use this, but reminded myself to not get to distracted from current work.
Interesting. I'd second that. More to come.
Mmm,

Well, I believe that one can prove that these chemicals aren't absorbed by the human digestive tract.

I offer that one might INDEED experience "subtle, sinister side-effects" by way of substances which "merely" pass through the digestive tract. I know that eating fair quantities dirt or sawdust generally is rightly discouraged.

Of course, this isn't certain ... bu, bu, but my point is that we moderns haven't so far done well by offering ourselves for science's experimentation.

There might will likely be a tipping point, where this science finally delivers more than it takes away. But we ought to take concerning whether we've reached that point or not.
Community documentation of bad authentication practices of websites
> ... my point is that it is unlikely anyone would sell a device at a loss ...

Playstation 3, Xbox 360 . . . or are we just talking cell phones here?

Google's source of revenue isn't just selling the phone, similarly Microsoft and Sony's source of revenue wasn't from selling the console. It's all about selling the content and getting people to keep coming back for it.

Perhaps a $99 phone would be absurd for a state of the art smartphone, however making a loss wouldn't be absurd when google is making money off of every search you make, every youtube video you watch and submit.
This is wholly-fabricated nonsense. I worked at Apple for 5+ years and, besides for knowing what actually happens in these situations, there are a couple of dead giveaways that "Tom" was never an Apple employee (or, at least, not in Cupertino).
Basically the bulk of the article says malaria is better characterized as a disease of poverty than as a disease of warming. It seems to me that this is the best analysis based on our knowledge. Are there any reputable scientists who hold an different position?
An open letter to Stephen Conroy
How to protect a company from employees.
I am starting (together with a friend) a company in Mexico, we have been developing a web application by 1 year. We want to hire one or two programmers right now, What recommendations do you have to protect our application ?
Yes there is: if you have work to be done with a low priority and no deadline, it's perfect.

For example, I bet the EC2 bill would be cheaper than my electric bill if I wanted to run SETI@home on a bunch of instances when it dropped below a certain mark.

The tech didn't exist 2 weeks ago, but now that it does there is a whole class of problems that can be solved more easily.