skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The method (rainbow tables) is not new, no. There have been several efforts to produce a complete set of precomputed tables for GSM's A5/1 algorithm. What he did was finish the tables.

I haven't watched the video of the talk but I'm curious how he did it; I thought that some of the distributed-computation efforts were furthest along that path to completion.

Anyway, finishing and distributing the tables is not an insignificant achievement and makes A5/1 functionally much less secure, even if from a pure-math/academic perspective, the "break" occurred several years ago when the attack was first published.

Like many users and IT folks, I'm less interested in academic cryptography (though I find it interesting) than in the functional, in-the-wild side of things. The existence of a theoretical attack using precompute tables matters a lot more when those tables have actually been produced and distributed in a usable form. That's the case now, so that attack moves from being a theoretical one to a very real one.

The next step would be for someone to package the attack in the form of a script-kiddie-usable utility that would perform interception/decryption using an off-the-shelf GSM USB modem. I have my doubts that the mobile carriers and handset manufacturers will take any significant steps towards mitigation of A5/1 until it's not only broken in the academic and hacker communities, but the technology to intercept calls is in the hands of every moron with a casual interest in snooping. That seems to be how these things go; they'll drag their feet as long as possible, until the public pressure becomes unbearable.
I totally forgot that EC2 has Windows support; that pretty well removes my argument regarding hosting needing a dedicated box.

You make a good point about tossing Visual Studio on a netbook, I can't think of a reason it wouldn't run, but it's still got the requirement of carrying my own gear with me.

Honestly, it's not a big deal in the end, I just remote in to my main machine on the rare occasion that I have to make a fix while I'm on the road; I would just prefer to be able to do it anywhere regardless of what machine I've got handy.
Honestly, I think it's seems like a great check list for finding holes in one's background and education.

If you could make it into a wiki, it would be good since then the hole's in the author's experience could also be filled.
Life Plan
You might want to consider that your brain has limits:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/12/willpower.php

I don't want to say "you can't do it" but I remember from my school days hitting the wall and there was nothing I could do about it until I'd had time to rest and recharge.

Here are some interesting links about gumption I've collected over the past few months (mostly from HN):

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/burnout/
http://sivers.org/dont-fight-it
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006569.html

In short, 10 hours of mental work might be your limit. I know that if I can squeeze in 10 solid hours of good creative mental work, I've had an extremely good day. Most good days I'll eek out 6 hours. Average days are probably around 4.

You might look at options to reduce that 10 hours somehow. Some people drop out of school, some just skip a class a day, some drop a class from the schedule altogether, etc.

You also don't talk about what your 11th hour is. Finding something interesting to you, especially if you're out of gumption, will be critical.

When you're full of mental energy, you can do anything; when you're out mental energy, your choices of what you can do are limited to easy things that are interesting.

Good luck!
Github's strength is that it allows for incredibly easy collaboration. If you want to make a change to any open source project, you just need to fork it, make changes in your copy, and send a pull request to the original author. Neither Google code nor SourceForge offers such a simple contribution mechanism.
In all cases, this means that a function called twice in a row from the same point in a program may return two different values--and that's exactly what the author is saying is a flaw of imperative languages.

For Haskell, this is false. In order to get two different results from the invocation of the same function you must pass in two different arguments. The monadic functions work by yielding a new version of the world, as it were.

Here's a nice explanation of Haskell IO that makes sense to me: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IO_inside
Is it surprising that terror plots requiring larger cash outlays, improvisation and greater precision tend to be staffed with better-trained/smarter operatives?

It's not like they're sending architectural engineers to die in pedestrian human-bomb attacks. They just do it in the cases where the operative needs to understand/learn how to package, nitrate and detonate a crude explosive under stress, or learn to fly a plane.

Only through selective reporting do engineers appear over-represented.
I see the main point, and I try not to use globals when I can, but I can't help but recall a quote I read from somewhere: "People who are afraid of globals are usually afraid of girls, spiders, etc."
Back in the day, I was working on my master's using Oregon Pascal on a Vax 11/780 (cost: ~$20,000). I purchased Turbo Pascal for $49.00 out of curiosity -- not expecting much.

The whole thing came in a standard white box. The disks (I think 2 5 1/4" floppies) were sandwiched inside the manual which was as thick as the shipping box. A couple of promotional pieces and my receipt. That was it.

Happiness -- because it worked just as well. I remember thinking "How can this be?"

Little did I know that it was time to get off the beach and seek higher ground.
If Gates/Buffett really believe that the government is deserving, why have they arranged their affairs to pay as little tax as possible? Including (but not limited to) essentially zero estate tax?

Forgive me if I'm not convinced by an argument that suggests that others should be compelled to do something the proponents of the argument relentlessly avoid.
You're technically correct - just like the the 'Linux is a kernel' people are also technically correct.

However most people refer to 'OpenOffice' meaning OpenOffice.org, in the same way they refer to 'Linux' and mean a Linux-based OS.
Linq is my favorite ORM, by far.

Mostly the fact that I can "query" any data source (an array, a file, etc) in the same way I query a table. Lovely.

DataMapper is great. Doctrine is good. Linq is my fave.
> while practically of the same content

Not the same content at all. One states firmly, the other opens a discussion. One claims that the only two reasons comments get downvoted are a lack of humour and an anger problem and is little more than a trollbait insult to the downvoter, the other questions whether the result of the downvoting process is the same as an ad-hom attack on the commentor and is not an insult to anyone.

Next you'll be telling me there's no difference between "wanting not to do X" and "not wanting to do X".
GCue2tracks 0.4.3 su Ubuntu e Debian
I agree; many of the brands listed are not "tarnished" so much as "diminished".
The Case for an e-Congress: Who Says Proximity Ensures Good Governance?
Why you should fire yourself
Ask HN: Simple Explanation of Bayesian Logic
Anybody know of a good tutorial/primer for programmers about how to use Bayesian constructs? I looked on Wiki and my eyes immediately started to glaze over.
Registered_companies size vs. citizen size
Enchilada Programming Language
because engineers don't get laid enough - everybody knows this! ;-)
Wasn't that Groucho?
Clickable link: http://bit.ly/5h9nfZ
>Unless the tools/languages are tremendously better than what is available for free/cheaper, I don't particularly understand the value in...

There's tremendous value if it's what you already know. The opportunity cost associated with learning and becoming reasonably competent in a different development stack can be non-trivial, especially if you had 5 to 10 years of experience with a different stack or set of technologies. I've yet to encounter a new framework/API/stack/language which I've been able to move to in only a few weeks and be 80%+ as productive as what I already knew, as there's often lots of useful minutiae, subtleties and new concepts you need to acclimatize over time.

>You're excluding an entire class of software engineers that primarily work on UNIX-based (including Mac OS X and Linux) systems.

The converse also applies. Granted, a competent engineer can learn anything, however you're initially inclined to pass on them because of the associated ramp-up time.
Should change the title to begin with "I want..."
I think the best introduction remains http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes, by our own Eliezer.
Assuming your students are good people, of course.
Interestingly, creationists with advanced degrees often turn out to be engineers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
Simplistic heat-maps using Vecto
Amazing Stories of How Toys Developed
One of the examples from the documentation to give HN readers a quick idea:

var model = [
{name: "Lisa Simpson", id: 1},
{name: "Bart Simpson", id: 666}
]

DIV(
{id:"demo-div", width: "60%"},
OL(
{style: "list-style-type: upper-roman"},
forEach(model, studentDetails)
)
).display(out);
out.flush();

function studentDetails(index, value) {
return LI(
value.name,
A(
{href:"/student-details?id="+value.id},
"details "+(index+1)
)
);
}
My sister is building an E-commerce website with Asp.net and I should say it's really pain: A lot complicated and very slow (although her laptop is 1 year old).
+ Hosting are quite expensive, hosting prices for dot net are enough to make you choose PHP.

If you are going for a small project, choose PHP, pyhton or Ruby. If you are building a giant app for a company, you'd better give Asp.net and SQL server a try.

For me, I use .NET to develop Windows application. Right now, I made a barcode software, no more and I should say it's the most advanced and coolest IDE + language (C#)I have ever used. For speed, it's Okay.
I think none of the above understood your problem. I have the same problem and my solution was to keep in the university library and study with my peers. Today life is distracting (emails, facebook, TV...) so you won't resist it.

Another solution is to sell your mobile, tv, laptop, xbox... you'll find your productive mode.
To be fair, I think their argument is more accurately phrased: the government is more deserving than the heirs (after a reasonable threshold, natch). Or, more generally, society is more deserving.

I don't see a logical conflict in their preference for private charity over government redistribution.

Honestly, I don't think any proponent of the estate tax would mind if the practical result of a high estate tax was that the rich just gifted their estates to private charity to spite the government. Government is just the only group with a sufficient cudgel to enforce the practice and sufficient reach to ensure that otherwise-undirected estates do give back to society.
Yes but QEMU also does much much more. This is more specific.
I've found that there are no tricks. It's mostly just sit down and start working. It'll take about 5-10 minutes of steady concentration and suddenly I'll drop into the zone. There is no substitute for "just do it" as far as my personal makeup goes. I used to try all the various hack your mind stuff that comes out every few years. But when it came down to it there was no substitute for just sheer concentration on the task at hand.
Pascal wrote it first, though not very shortly. He actually wrote Mes Révérends Pères, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de se suivre
de si près, ni d'être si étendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a été
cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que
parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. which in English is My Reverend Fathers, my letters have not usually followed so closely,
nor been so long. The small amount of time that I have is the cause of
both. I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the
leisure to make it shorter. (Source: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=177502)
I wouldn't call HP so much a printer manufacturer as a manufacturer of subscriptions to disposables.
Just to chip in a link, this explanation was the one that made Monads click for me:

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...
"...to win share against Linux and OpenOffice.org...". Looks like somebody is scared. I like that very much :D
But seriously, who would take that job? Somebody who understands a lot about Linux but then decides to "fight" against it?
You should really refer to the language as Common Lisp to avoid confusion and annoy less people.

disclaimer: I'm a CL zealot myself and not in the slightest annoyed.
Heh. Hobbyhorse time: this is one case where we definitively know the answer. It was indeed Pascal.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769624

What's not so well known is that the line had a polemical edge to it. The next sentence is, "You know the reason of this haste better than I do", which I assume is related to the fact that police searches were being conducted to try to prevent the Letters from being published. Considering that the first line of this letter is "Reverend Fathers, I now come to consider the rest of your calumnies," one imagines that the addressees weren't particularly pleased about it being "a long one".
Hosting is available for $5/month for ASP.NET. Granted its probably not great hosting, but neither are the $5/month PHP/Linux solutions. If you want an entry level box on EC2 its about 2x the cost, but still only about $80/month.

.NET speed is about the same as Java, it all depends on your architecture.
I'm not really sure why this is hacker news. So Microsoft's hiring some marketers to look at OO? What did you expect them to do?

I hate how the author drags the old "they're infiltrating our open process" argument out again. Sun, IBM, etc., all profit from OSS and are given a pass.

To me, the real question is this: given that OO is free, so what if anyone uses it? Sun's strategy seems to be to come up with a reasonable clone to MS Office and give it away. I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish: they're not monetizing it, so why does it matter if they're taking marketshare away from MS? And they're not even very good at that: they're mostly behind MS's featureset every release. So what's the benefit for them? Corporate goodwill?
you should first chose the platform (asp.net, PHP, python...) and then decide which language to work with.
He "plans" to be CEO of Apple in 15 years' time. He thinks he'll be "on the radar" for this on the strength of

1. a startup doing VoIP;

2. another startup enabling designers, artists, photographers, etc., to put their portfolios online;

3. another unspecified "game changing technology startup" he hopes to start, although he doesn't have any idea what it'll be.

I venture to suggest that this may not be very realistic.
ets:new(global_state, [set, public, named_table])

Now we've got a named table that any process may read or write to. It is possible.
"If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" :)

Even though I'm not religious, I think this is true, especially with respect to startups.
You can run Server 2008 on EC2: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/amazon_ec2_windows_server...
Thanks Mike for providing such a useful module!

Some plans I have to add to this module (if you don't plan too already):

Add support for:

* Pass a font-size, bold, italic, bold+italic and spacing to paragraph method to modify font

* Pass a table row header to table method

* Specify table column widths

* Change text alignment for table rows/headers, etc.

* Change text style in table cells

* Ability to change background color for every other table row

* Create method to insert a page/section break

* Create a method to add an image at a specific position in document page

On one other note:

I'm not 100% positive, but thumbnail.jpg/thumbnail.wmf may result in inadvertent disclosure of sensitive data if using this to generate report documents...
Vecto being http://www.xach.com/lisp/vecto/ which is used to do http://wigflip.com/easystreet/ and http://www.xach.com/moviecharts/ (Avatar is doing well!). And Zach also does http://wigflip.com/, all with SBCL.
Would you have tackled it first while trying to build such a library? I'd have started with 6502 or m68k as well. x86 is pretty huge, take a look at the x86 ISA docs sometime.

(We're talking 3-5 PDFs at 500+ pages each iirc, but that includes x86-64. Even if you go back and look at say the Pentium 3 manuals they are still quite large.)
Science Center sued for rejecting anti-evolution film
The company I work for uses .NET for our hosted CRM solution (www.eSalesTrack.com), and before that I used .NET at the bank I worked for for our online banking application. I use Python/Django for all of my own personal projects, some of which I almost plugged here but since they don't have anything to do with .NET I'll refrain.
I wonder how $40 of advertising revenue per internet user per year is even feasible. Many of those users are children who can't buy things without a credit card. I can't imagine that the average amount of money spent on the internet per year per user is greater than $40. But I may be wrong.
8 Amazing Jquery Plugins For Twitter
Is it really?

Do you think those firms would be doing it without Apple's insistence, assistance, & guidance (not considering their money)?

Did it look like anyone else was working on manufacturing processes like Apple is?

If you compare Apple's computers & devices to those of every one of their competitors, you'll see that it's not just a matter of Apple's check-writing abilities.

HP, Dell, Sony, Creative, Google, Microsoft, Palm, etc., are all just as capable of writing huge checks as Apple.

But their hardware doesn't compare in style, design, quality & fit and finish. They have seams, chunks, feel cheap, have poor tactile experiences with the moving/sliding/closing pieces, etc., etc., etc.[1]

I don't think Apple's manufacturer partners are doing it all on their own. It's gotta be more than check-writing.

Or, all those other companies are still so stupid they don't realize what game they're playing.

[1] (They may win in terms of specs, but that's not what I'm talking about.)
Brittany Murphy besides Jimmy Sullivan “The Rev” dead of Natural Causes
Yep, I think this was just on HN recently: http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-mani...

I hadn't realized how accurately that describes my productive/unproductive periods.
One of my pet peeves (and it is Microsoft's fault for such a terrible naming scheme) is how people use LINQ interchangeably with LINQ to SQL. LINQ is a language feature used by other frameworks (LINQ to XML, LINQ to Objects, etc). LINQ to SQL is an ORM.
Ask HN: Dealing with comment overload
HN traffic increased lately; though quality didn't decrease significantly. The matter isn't here, but in comments. For example for the tutol story there had been 100+ comments (and they are long also).

I just can't read/discuss with other people if I come back a little late (after the story is flooded with comments). This makes me nervous and unable to keep with the discussion.

We should find a solution to that. May be an algorithm that matches users and those shows only comments of your matched-users to help you discuss out of the crowd.

What do you think? Just let it how it is now?
I am using the erlang nitrogen framework and am overjoyed at how fun it is. Give it a try!
Except that deserving isn't a binary attribute. So pointing out the government is undeserving isn't sufficient.

My point is that we as a society have entrusted government specifically with the job of redistributing wealth to better society and that makes them the better of bad choices.
The opportunity cost associated with learning and becoming reasonably competent in a different development stack can be non-trivial, especially if you had 5 to 10 years of experience with a different stack or set of technologies. I've yet to encounter a new framework/API/stack/language which I've been able to move to in only a few weeks and be 80%+ as productive as what I already knew, as there's often lots of useful minutiae, subtleties and new concepts you need to acclimatize over time.

If all you know is Microsoft, then that's all you can do, and the organization's technical direction will almost certainly model that initial decision.

However, if you have the luxury of choice -- and I think most people do -- I'd advise against it. The short and long-term costs of Microsoft lock-in are decidedly "non-trivial". The considerable investment in staff, licenses, and technologies make it very difficult to migrate to a non-Microsoft stack in the future.

The converse also applies. Granted, a competent engineer can learn anything, however you're initially inclined to pass on them because of the associated ramp-up time.

In my experience, you're entirely locking out engineers who use Linux and Mac OS X when you move to a Microsoft stack, but you're not necessarily locking out Windows engineers when you use a cross-platform stack.
Fully agreed. I've been very impressed by the clarity of that article and recommend it often in online discussions of research methodology.
I've been in a position several times now where I could have used one of their products with little to no alternatives even close in price and every time I thought 'over my dead body'.

Never ever in a 1000 years will I buy something from X10. They're not quite in line with SCO in my book but they're up there.

(nothing really gets close to SCO, I'm surprised they're not the #1 slot in this list).

Microsoft and Radio Shack definitely deserve to be on the list too.
In addition to selective reporting, perhaps the terrorists who are trained creative writers get caught much earlier so we don't hear about them at all. Or when they try to create explosives, they blow themselves up, so we don't hear about them. Or can't think of any way to take destroy an airplane because they don't know how they work, so they never get anywhere.

When people ask why so many terrorists have engineering degrees, they really mean why do so many successful terrorists or high-profile terrorists have engineering degrees.
I was one of two founders of a co-working effort in my area. Although I later left the project, it was successful in that it's still active, still profitable, and has brought people together from diverse backgrounds and helped them to form long-lasting business relationships.

Best of all, productivity definitely does go up in a good co-working environment.

I highly recommend doing this.