skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obstruction of justice might be a better charge than the case the police won't be able to make because they have don't have enough evidence.

Which of course assumes the police have your computer as the significant evidence. How likely is it that considering they have a warrant for your computer?
I'm afraid Aaronsw has gone too far. But there is an element of truth here.

The men who created the media empires were incredibly aggressive. Many of their business practices were rooted in organized crime.

For instance, Lew Wasserman, creator of MCA and Universal. He inspired terror throughout Los Angeles. No, he was not going to have you killed (despite one minor flirtation with the real mafia) but he could kill your career or your company.

Wasserman was every bit a latter-day Genghis Khan. And I think it's true that capitalism directed his energies into making movies rather than building a mountain of skulls.

There is an undeniable style difference between MCA/Wasserman and Google/Schmidt.
How will psychologists describe the iPhone syndrome in the future?
Fusiontables
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0xnk9zFQpY
You're entirely right, and said it better than my snarky response did.
I agree. Its highly unlikely that this was done on purpose with complete transparency to higher management. But I still wonder how the manager or the manager's manager of the project didn't see this happening. I am pretty sure the team and their 1 or 2 levels up researched plurk and its success in the region enough to recognize that it was copied. The product manager could not have missed this. I am sure a lot of people are under fire for this.
It isn't just SQL vulnerabilities though your comment reminded me of the best XKCD of all time (in the opinion of this man): http://xkcd.com/327/ [Exploits of a Mom]

Programmers are taught in school how to build software that works for expected user behavior. Security vulnerabilities don't come from expect behavior or a check would be in place to prevent it.

We need to push to have a software security class added to all CSCI degree programs. Force people to have at least a semester of looking at how to break things.
This article is too loose in throwing around terms. I'm pretty sure the title should be 'Classes Are Not Abstract Data Types'. An 'object' in the OO sense is a separate (albeit related) concept from a 'type' (class). OO is about behavior, not data. If that behavior is tied to an implementation, that is more of a design fault in the program than the language. We have always had abstract classes in c++, and we have interfaces in Java/.NET. The idea of separating the interface from the implementation is not something that we have been overlooking for the past 30 years as the author indicates. Maybe I'm missing something, but having the ability to define the data of a type separately from the behavior seems like a step back toward c structs with static methods to operate on them. The only difference is that you can group your methods into what should probably just be a class rather than a 'protocol'.
James Cameron: Man of Extremes
I don't believe in luck
I couldn't agree more. B2B can also be a lot more profitable in the long run and there are clear differentiators that can be built with a focus on vertical/niches.
I don't know where I heard or read this, wearing sunglasses tricks your body into thinking it is dark (no surprise).

In response to that, your thymus (?) which is influenced by light levels now diminished because you covered your eyes with dark glass, releases less melanin which makes your skin more susceptible to UV light. It's weird, your skin is more likely to burn because you are wearing sunglasses.

I believe it was CBC Radio quirks and Quarks where I heard it.

Also, (I mentioned over at Reddit) another interesting thing is the ability of the majority (95%) of adult northern Europeans to be able to digest milk. the next closest group are people from India where 50% of adults are able to digest milk.
Places Where You Can Retire and Live Like a King
I would use a URL shortener that included some description of the destination site. Perhaps just the domain name minus the top level. So something like:

xx.yy/nytimes-unique identifier

The shortness of the URL doesn't really matter all that much does it? From what I can tell they are used mostly for stat tracking. People are still mostly clicking or copy/pasting them. 5-8 more characters isn't going to hurt.
> cycling is fine in the US

My ER doctor friend says urban cycling is idiotic.

I do it all the time but you're kidding yourself if you don't realize it is extremely dangerous.

The more important issue in the US regarding bikes is the lack of density. It's simply not feasible to bike the kinds of distances most people need to go.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

I'm interested if you can name one mainstream economist or economic commentator, especially a famous one, who comes even close to being as factual and prescient as Mish.

This is just one site...the blogosphere was all over the impending economic collapse for years, while the mainstream economic journalists, many with economics degrees, had it exactly backwards. And if your retort is that it wasn't a big deal, all is well now, I recommend you do more reading and decide for yourself if that is true.
Cosmetic plastic surgery procedure
Cosmeticsurgerytechniques.com is an educational online resource providing a wide range of information related to different cosmetic surgery methods.
Teaching the computer how to discover and prove analogs of Collatz's conjecture
David Mark no longer works at SitePen.
You're right. His complaint, on the other hand, is that although you can use whatever "word processor" you want, you know that at the other end Microsoft will have full access when your colleague reads the document in Word.

Substitute "word processor", Microsoft, and Word with email client, Google, and Gmail as appropriate.
I've seen a lot of smart people who weren't good programmers.
Probably screwed up trying to say 6 times sweeter than glucose.
Some hack. (I'm guessing that's the joke here?)
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Xephyr
The bike counter serves merely to feel like you're making a direct impact -- "hey, I made that counter go up. Cool!" It just needs to make people feel good about biking, so they're more likely to do it in the future.
What he's saying is, "We failed miserably at having good process and procedures. Because of this we are going to lecture others, and point the blame at everybody but ourselves, in hopes that they'll stop pointing out how much credibility we lost over this."
Someone once (okay, I forgot the article this was in) recommended that for an engineering/programming office it's a good idea to get a pool (snooker, billiards, etc) table for a recreational area. This helps lessen eye strain as there are many different coloured balls at differing distances that one must focus on and thus relaxes the eyes.

Also if you have reasonably even matches players it's quite fun to play.
China's government sometimes reminds me of a big US corporation. Basically, the PR department is furious that an important interview didn't go through them. There's no mention of any content that would harm China's interests (other than maybe the "open blank window" bit).

I wonder if this editor knew it would be a career-ending move, and figured it was worth it.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 3
They didn't lose them, someone just noticed that they would send you your original password if you requested it and made a blog post about it.

The conclusion was that they must be storing passwords plaintext, although that's not necessarily true. IIRC, your opinion was that this was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
You have no idea how much I would love to backup my music to a solution like this, but I do not live in a place that provides me with a decent upstream connection. What kind of speeds do you get when you upload? It seems to me that 40KB/s is a bit slow to be doing full drive backups online.
Programming books in HTML format
"Fructose - Glucose Study Showdown [1] (a)13.9% increase in LDL cholesterol but doubled Apoprotein B (b) 44.9% increase in small LDL"

You don't make it clear here whether fructose is (a) or (b), though I'll hazard a guess that it's (b).
When I say "if everyone follows this philosophy," I include both VCs and college acceptance boards in that antecedent. Then, presuming you don't have a trust fund, the only way to get your start building stuff is to do it on the side while being underemployed; this is a net efficiency loss for the economy.
Actually I thought I paraphrased it pretty well but to I guess a direct quote is better.

"The config salt isn't present in my post -- I'm assuming a database breach, like that which usually occurs. The digest does include a config salt, of course -- this isn't the '70s."

I do agree this is a learning exercise. I also agree that as an attacker you still have to make a lot of presumptions such as maybe they did use a keyed SHA1 process or use Base64. Again, why is this not a legitimite question? He was not trying to trick you anymore than an attacker would have to guess/try/reason what the dev/secofr implemented.

You're a post count leader here but either I am overly sensitive to reading snarkiness or I simply don't understand. I have no problem admitting I'm not a security expert but again there are some good questions from others here. Help us out here.
Sorry, I do not know how that works, I am not familiar with web programming.
Cyber-security czar a waste of time?
Maybe it shows he actually knows what he's talking about! ;) Not that I agree with the article entirely...
> "Salts" have been password-specific since Ken Thompson invented them in the '70s.

Thanks, that's where my misunderstanding was. I've seen "salt" used (apparently, improperly) in cases where the hash is the same for all passwords. Even the wikipedia article seems to imply that use case.

The other part of my misunderstanding was that I was thinking of BCrypt as a deterministic function. Looking at an implementation, it looks like multiple calls to BCrypt::Password.create with the same value can result in different values, unlike how sha1($x) = sha1($x) for any $x.
>Look to the recent kerfuffle regarding AT&T's network for another great example.

Does anyone who isn't being paid money by AT&T actually think their network problems are because iPhones are poorly made? It nearly defies logic. The service is bad because the iPhones use crappy parts, which is also why the service sucks for non-iPhone smartphones?
That's the exact opposite of banning competing products from working on Windows. They banned Windows from working.
It's just showing what can be achieved in CSS, but I agree, I would use JavaScript for a real world solution.
Why are humans furless?

I loved the semi-aquatic-ape theory (that in foraging for shellfish we lost our fur as whales, dophins, hippos did), but I understand that one has fallen from favour.
I said it wasn't a vulnerability, or, if it was, it was a minor one compared to a real vulnerability; sev:low compared to sev:medium for a stored XSS flaw and sev:high for SQL Injection. And I believe that.

But if we're comparing one password storage mechanism to another, I get religious fast. There's a right and a wrong way to do it.

37s did it the wrong way. Now I understand they do it the right way. Good for them!
A lot of these comments are pretty harsh, but there is truth in what he says. There is a difference between Google and most preceding big companies. Google wins more by doing good work and less by deals and scheming that most big companies have in the past. When they crush competitors, they usually don't do it by deliberately trying to crush them, but by doing very good work, and crushing them as a matter of course.

Google wins the way better scientists do.

I don't think they're simply benevolent. I think what they've discovered is that focusing on doing good work actually makes you more dangerous.
Practice management software
Improve your performance with the help of practice management software from mckesson that provides better, more efficient and care for patient.
I'm fairly confident about this...partly as a fan of Cameron, but also because story/plot, although fundamentally important, need not be so complex or original to be good. As a quick tongue-in-cheek guide to previous work of his:

The Terminator: Robot from the future menaces woman from the present to protect own existence, future career as CA governor.
Aliens: return to th planet of the Aliens. Even with bigger guns, they are still dangerous.
The Abyss: Undersea explorers find intelligent life at bottom of sea, panic.
Terminator 2: Robot from the future menaces woman from the present to protect own existence, future governor of CA switches sides.
True Lies: Future CA governor is mild-mannered computer salesman by day, fights terrorists by night (should be familiar life situation to many HN readers).
Titanic: pretty heiress enjoys shipboard romance with handsome peasant until angry fiance catches her. Boat sinks, panic ensues.

Seriously, the fact that you can summarize a story easily tells us little about the process of working it out on screen for an audience. So while Avatar can be summed up as 'greedy humans want space oil buried under village of fighting smurfs, conflict ensues', the real story (as with most of his work) is what happens when an individual's experience of the world places them in conflict with the status quo, perhaps one that may not even exist yet. Critics may deride this as formulaic, but Cameron's main theme is the conflict between the individual and the social, which does not yield to simple analyses of good vs. evil.
He appears to ignore such evidence, assuming it exists.

I don't know much about the case; I'm interested in the OP's model of thinking about cases.
To run down prey without overheating.
So it's time to get rid of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Sugar_Program (tariff on sugar, making fructose cheaper). That's going to make some growers and states really really mad.
I more or less agree with you, but the elephant in the room is that he is doing this all over a network that began as the government funded ARPAnet, which I think takes the libertarian utopian edge off of your point somewhat.
Cueva de los Cristales - The Giant Crystal Cave
They did the right thing by pulling the website. How it happened in the first place is the real question.
My ER doctor friend says urban cycling is idiotic.

A friend of yours said something, so it must be true...

Most accidents are due to people driving their bicycles unsafely. If you drive safely, urban cycling is not dangerous. If you drive like a maniac and disregard traffic controls (running lights, riding on the sidewalk, going the wrong direction, etc.), then yeah... it's dangerous. Just like it would be as a pedestrian or motorist.

In aggregate, cycling is not significantly more dangerous than any other activity: http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html

(Despite this, I am in favor of laws and regulations that make the roads less dangerous. Cars should not go faster than bicycles in cities. If you need to get somewhere fast, use rapid transit.)
The statistics are a little bit off - the Chi-squared isn't appropriate for the example he gives (sample size too small), although it would be fine in practice. What you really want in that situation is the exact binomial test.
22 year old truck driver makes good. Highest grossing movies ever.
When you put it that way, it does make the arguments of software publishers sound much like those of other media companies struggling with IP management.
The server seems to be back online, but in case it goes down again (or changes IP or whatever), I have mirrored it here:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple
Yeah, I remember that better now. There were a lot of pitchforks that day.

37s has a great track record of listening to and acting on community feedback, which is all you can really ask for. I second your kudos.
and here's a bit more detail.

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html

More on the Man vs. Horse Marathon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
He implied he was using SHA1(nonce, password). He was actually using SHA1(k, nonce, password). You're taking a later clarifying comment he made and adding it to the main comment.

But who cares? This is silly. Secure password schemes don't need to protect a key file to avoid being broken, and they don't need you to know how Merkle-Damgaard works to implement without blowing up. Any password scheme that has a "config salt" is a vanity scheme. Adding a "config salt" is less secure than literally just looping 1000 times around SHA1.

Security schemes designed as exercises in vanity have a poor track record.
Not even a nod toward id Software. Sad.

Also, I have to know, what is "Scottish indenting"?
As they say, they contracted a independent contractor for the work, who probably couldn't handle the task well and took too many code samples from Plurk's source code
The Australian Government has greenlighted compulsory internet filtering
Since the European conquest of the planet, the fairer skin preference has been projected back onto many other groups of people, but is inherently suspicious given the circumstances within which we've learned about their cultures.
Everyone doesnt follow that philosophy, and he's advocating exploiting that.
They have taken down the site and are investigating the incident. The blame apparently lies with a third party vendor contracted for the job. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10415483-56.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE
But for a new site to be released like this, either

a> MS does not review the work of their subcontractors, or

b> whomever reviewed the new site was not familiar with their major competitor in the region.

Does either seem very likely?
Even if I were under 17, it still wouldn't have been illegal, since I was seeing it with them.

Just to be pedantic, it wouldn't be illegal to see the movie alone, either.
Spot on. At handgun distances (say under 20 meters) the issues of trigger control and grip are going to dominate the quality of the sights, as long as they are half decent.

Since good shooting practice is to focus on the front sight, thus rendering the rear sight fuzzy, that rear sight has to be useful while out of focus. Consider the classic Novak sight. The front sight is a rectangular post that fills the gap that is the rectangular notch of the rear sight. Also, the front sight post and two rear sight posts have colored (white or glow-in-the-dark) dots that form a 3-dot line that is parallel to the ground when aligned. This type of sight leverages our ability to spot horizontal lines, something that our vision/brain is very good at doing: lining up the top of front sight such that it is flush with the top of the rear sight and forming a proper 3-dot line that is in line with the ground. This type of sight is pretty accurate and permits fast acquisition.

It looks like the pointing-in of the rear sight to form the triangle is somewhat subtle. I am unconvinced that the headless triangle is sufficiently discernable whilst fuzzy. And it doesn't offer multiple cues like the Novak. And it seems like it would take longer to acquire a good sight picture.

Still, I could see how this would be very useful at relative fixed distances in the hands of a trained shooter.
Is SQL Expression Language not just essentially a different implementation of an ORM? I'm not saying it's bad, just wondering.

I assume it must be loosely typed? I use LLBLGen for ORM and I couldn't imagine living without it...you seem to have found a suitable alternative, but you are still using a tool of some sort to handle the "impedance mismatch", correct? Personally, I love strong typing, as normally my work is first modelled in the DB, so changes break code in the compiler, heresy for some, but I quite like it until I find something better.

And I've never found any majorly inconvenient performance problems using ORM. For 95% of things it works just fine and sclaes appropriately, for that other 5%, just drop down to stored procs or whatever works. Everyone like to think they're working on the next google or space shuttle, but most programmers (maybe not the people here) are doing pretty boring work...for me, managing the politics within my company is far more complicated than writing the software...YMMV.
The full report for the Live Pilot is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/24108352/ISP-Filtering-Live-Pilot-...

The report claims no degredation of speed, however it says that about 1 in 30 legitimate sites will be blocked.
They should make it fair and have the runners carry a horse.
Is Plurk a major competitor? No offense to them but I hadn't heard about them until today.
Definitely. That's one of my favorite features of http://www.icombinator.net/.
Well the competitor's site was banned from China. And what was the last time you visited plurk.com. The UI is not that unique and nobody in MS would have seen Plurk's code to realize it was a rip-off.

When you contract a third party vendor you give them a lot of trust including access to your resources and code. They sign on the dotted line saying they would follow Microsoft's policy for the same which is pretty strict and doesn't even allow the devs to look at 3rd party code.
TL;DR - they're smart and their whole world outside of work revolves around their profession and they've been doing it their whole lives.

You could write a "How to recognize a good [X]" article about almost any profession if that's your thesis.

Let's face it, the vast majority of work programming isn't that hard. A lot of programmers, perhaps especially the good and smart ones, might rationally realize that having a life outside of work--in other words, working a 9-5--often makes more rational sense than putting all of one's considerable intellectual energy into writing yet another CRUD (or whatever application du jour one normally writes) remix.
Did anybody else hear the SOAP Guy's lines in a voice that sounds like a cross between a used car salesman and Foghorn Leghorn?

Also, I like Google's protocol buffers library. It's straightforward, fast, has really nice bindings for C++, Java, and Python, and we know it's stable because it's what Google uses for most of its internal RPC stuff.

http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/
It long predates that. European slave girls (and boys) were particularly prized in the caliphate when Europe was a backwater.
What an excellent place to start (this thread/problem). This certainly requires some diplomacy.
Is this an Orwellian precursor or should we not get too upset about it? Should the Government really be playing internet police?
Well from your perspective it's probably not too bad a thing that people aren't booby-trapping their machines with novel explosive devices... But life would definitely be more novel if they were!

Underwear? Seriously? "It helps with airflow! Duh!"
Firstly, colleges are not in the business of making admittance decisions based on whether you are a good programmer or not; secondly, 40 hours a week is the standard for being reasonably well-employed, which leaves a whole lot of hours for doing your own thing in life (not to mention the years you're in primary and secondary school, during which many programmers build a pretty passable CV of personal work.)

I feel guilty even typing this much, because I don't think you're being intellectually honest at all. The vast array of open-source and free projects in the world speaks plainly about the ability of people to build useful things outside of work.