If it was government, why would they risk hacking more than one company from the same machine?
Edit: Seems more likely that the anti-hack claim is bs, as other comments are suggesting Google employees did the hacking from within the office. This would suggest the attacks against the other companies were on Google-run apps used by those companies.
If you go to Nart Villeneuve's blog http://www.nartv.org/, which Google's blog post linked to, he's got a cool pdf on tracking GhostNet (Chinese government cyber-espionage network). The command and control servers that were discovered in earlier attacks do in fact operate this way.
In tracking Chinese infiltration of the Tibetan movement, they discovered compromises in various embassies and other organizations in countries all over the world.
I agree. Given the information that was available yesterday, this all seemed very plausible. As more and more becomes available, it seems less and less likely to be the government.
Chinese government hackers are not script kiddies. They would not make that mistake, even in the made for TV movie. Chinese, indeed ANY, national intelligence agency is well resourced.
My guess is that either a lot of information coming out about this right now is being made up by people with no verifiable knowledge of the matter, or there is something that Google is not telling us. Could be both, but I'd put money on internet based know-nothing loudmouths.
Could have just been redundancy built into the command-and-control network. If you're running a huge spying program... why not? It's a lot easier for regular traffic to/from a google IP address to avoid attention than traffic to/from a personal cable modem.
And just saying what Google has said, the way they've said it, is pretty much the end of their business in China. It would take something like a glastnost event or revolution for things to change course now.
That's an awfully high a price to pay unless you're pretty damn sure the government is directly responsible, or protecting those that are.
Really, HN? As someone who is already only interested in HN for hacker stuff and not entrepreneurial stuff, please please do not add articles about snow donuts on HN!
Edit: Or I don't know, maybe create another HN style site for Quite Interesting news?
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
We've been through this over and over again. There's Hacker Hacker News on top of Hacker News that's using Bayesian Filters (as far as I understand) to display technical topics only: http://hackerhackernews.com/
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports"
This is clearly a non-exhaustive list.
"unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"
This phenomenon, as pointed out by the article itself, is not new.
Moreover, it is not interesting to hackers for any reason other than being generally interesting.
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"
This is exactly the sort of thing TV news would cover.
Yes, I was wrong to submit that comment according to the rules. I flagged the article, but when it has already reached #2 you know it's not coming down.
Hacker News died a little bit more yesterday in accepting that _Off-Topic_ article.
Oh, I didn't notice that. Still, the source code is available on bitbucket at http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/ so there's nothing stopping anyone relaunching it.
Seriously, the #2 and #3 right now are a review of Atlas shrugged and self rolling giant snowballs, there is the 'giant crystal cave', a pr piece from a british adult(ery) site and a wsj piece on 'terror'.
However, I don't find it interesting because I am a "hacker", I find it interesting because I am a person, and people are likely to find this interesting - it has nothing to do with whether you are a "hacker" or not.
When I visit Hacker News, I want to see news that is interesting, sure, but also related to hacking or entrepreneurship.
There are lots of interesting things in this world and like I said, it could easily make up enough content for another HN-style site. One that I would visit. When I wanted "generally interesting" news. As opposed to "Hacker" News.
Mine kept one cumulative list adding left to right and another summing right to left. This is conventionally slower, but conceivably faster if you do it in parallel, leaving the final loop to be something like:
for i in xrange(len(A)):
if right[i] == left[i]:
return i
The final loop here is slightly tighter, so as long as your parallelism didn't add big overheads, this will be faster.
The best case possible is to iterate the list once - you sum the list from left to right holding cumulative answers and if the final sum is zero, that index is a valid answer.
The worst case of the best algorithm is to iterate twice - firstly as above, and then again in the opposite direction, comparing values from the first iteration.
Might need some way of making explicit which libraries are available?
eg. if the programmer goes off and writes a multithreaded solution, they might only realise too late that pthread isn't included. Admittedly they should have checked first using verify, but you never know with interview pressure.
Unless it is stated explicitly, we do not provide anything extra but the vanilla programming language and standard libraries. It is more clear for some languages (e.g. Java, C++) than other (e.g. PHP, JavaScript), but we try to stick to the reasonable canonical set of libraries.
Edit: And won't this be a problem if interviewees can access the internet? The interviewers will have to make sure they can check the browsing history of the computer being used!
I don't mean the interviewers should shut off internet access entirely, but what I mean is that if they do allow access to the internet, they'll need to check the interviewee hasn't just googled for the solution to their codibility test (and they'll also have to make sure the interviewee can't delete their browsing history too).
I really don't get it, what does this guy mean by 100% pure functional programming?
Because we all know already that a program needs to print values or "do" something to be useful, so in that way no program is ever 100% pure - is that what he's talking about?
Or is he talking about 100% pure functional languages which allow functional ways of writing IO code, like Haskell?
In Haskell can't you still program nearly 100% imperatively, just by wrapping stuff in the IO mondad?
mysquare x = x * x
mysquarer x = do
putStrLn "Hey look, it squared"
return (mysquare x)
main = do
putStrLn "Starting program..."
x' <- mysquarer 9
putStrLn (show x')
Can't he just write his program like that?
Or is he just arguing that we should write programs in functional languages but just with an imperative style (no points-free and simple use of IO)?
What he means is that purity is more of a curse than a blessing. That the pure approach is not a good way to think about the problem. That you should use purity as a tool, but not dogma.
What I'm arguing is that you can still think and write with an imperative style using the IO monad if you want, so I'm not sure what the issue is.
Edit:
As an aside, I already know that "Monad" doesn't mean impure (having implemented an IO monad in my spare time to find out) and that was implied when I said "100% pure functional [...] like Haskell".
They are implemented purely, nonetheless they do allow side-effect (impure) programming.
His issue is precisely with things like the IO monad. At least that's how I parse this sentence:
"what's often a tremendous puzzle in Erlang (or Haskell) turns into straightforward code in Python or Perl or even C." (http://prog21.dadgum.com/54.html)
In my limited experience, the type-checking constraints in haskell make programs using monads unnecessarily hard to change. I just assumed I didn't know what I was doing; it's interesting that James Hague is agreeing with a lot more knowledge and experience.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that most Haskell code doesn't generate values, but "thunks" that evaluate to values if needed.
When you write
x = 4 + 5
you aren't setting x to 9, but creating a thunk that evaluates 4 + 5 at runtime. An Integer is a thunk that returns an integer and has no other effects. An IO Integer is one that does some I/O before returning that integer.
As I understand it, the only function that has the power to "do" anything (computation or IO) undernormal circumstances is main, which always has type IO ().
This is true, but not really relevant to the original article or the comment you are replying to.
When you sequence computations with >>=, like the grandparent does, you generally evaluate the left side of the operation before running the computation. That is the point of monads; sequencing computations and controlling the order of evaluation. Sine the rhs depends on the lhs, the sequence is "evaluate lhs completely", "evaluate rhs completely", and so on.
I think you are correct that the language does think of all expressions in terms of thunks, but I'm guessing `4 + 5` won't actually be run at run-time!
Since it's pure a decent compiler should be able to simply replace any `x` with the number 9 - correct me if I'm wrong :)
Any primitive (C code) however won't run until run-time, which is probably the pressing reason putStr doesn't run until run-time (and that's a good thing :)
Correct. Girls provide themselves when other women want you, but when you're in a dry spell and they might actually be able to help you, they kick you because you're down.
This is very one-sided and nothing like what I was trying to say. It's not entirely the "fault" of girls that making them smile is not enough.
The parent was more even handed when they mentioned confidence and social status. Yes, some girls maybe care about confidence a bit too much, but just the same, guys like myself can often do a poor job of acting confident (sometimes due to lack of effort conforming to norms).
