skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can I jump in here and issue a minor clarification?

I am not a troll. I am a creative writer. I care much, much more about whether I'm writing in interesting and fun and amusing ways than I do about any pretense of formality, particularly in this piece. (I alternate between phases of more serious writing and more tongue-in-cheek. This is very much the latter.)

I don't like the suggestion that the instant a piece of writing stops being formal or serious, it becomes a troll piece. In this case in particular, I thought that there was a very specific reason to write it in the way that I did: Partly it's to highlight the fact that I think this particular criticism of Apple is a tad silly, for a variety of reasons. But it also deflates me, and indicates that perhaps this argument, while relevant, should not be taken as my attempt to speak the word of God.
Since high school cross country in the 1970's, we were told the proper distance running form is rolling heal-to-toe, while for the short distance sprinters the form is to land on toes or the balls of the feet. This could be one of those shockers where something I've learned turns out to be false.

Still, I'm still finding it hard to imagine running, say, ten miles by landing on the front part of the foot and not the heal first. Maybe we humans aren't naturally evolved to run ten mile distances. I give it a try, but I suspect I'll be a heal-to-toe distance runner.
That first blog post recommended using HMAC for communicating between applications, but then he said that he uses and recommends HMAC to store passwords in his database as well. I think that's what this post is responding to.
An Educational Extinction Event?
I can confirm that this is the case. They're actually very reasonable if you're important/controversial/popular enough to get ahold of a rep.
Ask HN: Getting started with Clojure
Hi all,
I recently decided to start learning Lisp, and after some very unscientific research decided on Clojure. I'd like to know about some good resources to start learning clojure. I come from a mostly C background.

Also, I don't believe in starting small and then gradually writing more complex programs, I usually just do a small Hello World and then jump directly into a decently complex program, and I'd like to do the same with clojure. Is this a good approach to clojure?

Ideally, I'd like to get started with a small GUI program.

Regards,
chaosprophet

Edit: I don't know anything about functional programming either.
You could try contacting Matt Cutts and asking him to put you in touch with the right people. He's pretty much the public face of Google for people like us....
Collaborative Futures: how FLOSS Manuals produced a book in 5 days
For a much easier on the neck and cheaper solution:

One 26" screen in the middle, two 24" screens rotated 90 degrees left and right of it. Raise the middle screen so the top aligns with the other two and push the other two down as far as they will go.

edit: one of the nicest benefits of this setup that I have found to date is to have a full-height email client on one side (right for me) and a full height browser on the left screen. It especially pays off when searching for stuff, no more scrolling, all the results on one page are visible at once.
or Don Dodge?
Reaching "break-even" is when the lasers don't have to be fired for the reaction to continue

No, that's a "self-sustaining" reaction. Break-even means that the amount of energy released in the reaction is equal to the energy necessary to fuel the reaction.
A "salt", unlike most uses of a nonce, doesn't derive its benefits from secrecy. The only* benefit of the "salt" is essentially to prevent birthday attacks on your password database, since any attacker with the passwords probably also has the salts.

*-Not strictly true. If a user is rotating through a sequence of passwords, changing the salt will obscure that.
Please no... It ended up with a simple language like Polish having latin2, cp1852 (or something like that), mazovia, mazovia2, and probably some more homebrew encodings. I can't even imagine what would happen for completely different scripts like Indian.

There are problems with unicode - ok, let's resolve them then. I still want to be able to address my email to the real name of person named in language A, living under address of country B, signing the email properly in language C. (where all parts use language-specific characters) Unicode is the first standard which allows me to do that in most cases, so I guess it's a step in the right direction.
I doubt it. Evidence only sways people who have based their stance on rational reasoning.
Like most geeks I was underwhelmed after watching the iPad presentation and was disappointed that it uses the iPhone OS and not a lite version of Mac OS. But after reading this article and many others it is clear to me that using the closed off iPhone OS is a no brainier for this tablet.

The iPad does everything that my parents currently do on their computer without the annoyances of a PC. If you look at my parents desktop it is covered with miscellaneous files. They don't care how anything is stored. They only want to do simple tasks and have everything work.

The more I think about it, the more that I realise that the current user experience on a computer is not pleasant. Especially for my parents who don't want to have to worry about defragging and keeping virus protection up to date. This is where the iPad will excel. As Steve says "it just works".

However the locked down aspect of the apple system and the potential for a monopoly is worrying so I'm hopeful that that Android and Chrome OS will fit into this New World market.
So why not support both and the people who DO want to support h264 and pay the fees can do so?

Then the browsers that don't support Theora are the ones that only have a subset of support.

Embrace, extend, extinguish and all that.
Exactly; hire someone who has a clue to minimally test their knowledge, e.g. have them write code on a white board to reverse a linked list (you'd be surprised at how many people with apparently good resumes can't program their way out of a paper bag).
Question:
All of these discussions are based on the hacker having access to your database. If you really don't trust your hosting company not to leak your database details, why do you trust them not to overwrite your administrative password with an appropriately salted bcrypt/whatever hash?
Sure, but I suppose their means didn't consist in a PCI Express card filled with FPGAs, like described in the article.
> "I'm not sure how this works, but if x264 has been getting along fine without legal tangles, then why can't Mozilla use this instead?"

Suppose my neighbor exceeds the maximum driving speed regularly but so far nobody has come after him. I am the owner of a truck company. Shall I tell all my drivers, "yeah go ahead and exceed the max driving speed, they're not coming after you"?
Starving Artists in the Age of Cesspool Content
IIRC this was on Hacker News less than a week ago. 4 points for simply repeating it? I'm startled.
With a developer licence you can install software outside the normal "sandbox".
I appreciate your optimism but I fear you haven't been following this very closely. This is not the first time this guy and his work has been completely tossed under a bus. The antivax people have known for a LONG TIME that this guy was being seriously discredited and chalked it up to "big pharma funded" witch hunting.

See for yourself: http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/01/naked-intimidation-the-wa...

This won't go away until serious and preventable diseases start frequently killing children.
An example of a good bit:

"It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very slowly."

This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more fundamental level with Squeak eToys. Or some of this:

http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/
The physically rotating wheel was surrounded by another wheel of buttons. the Click Wheel didn't appear until the mini. 1st gen: mechanical wheel with a surrounding wheel of buttons. 2nd gen: touch wheel surrounded by buttons. 3rd gen: all touch with a row of buttons under the screen.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1353 identifies the iPod (Click Wheel) as their 2004 model.
Or as the saying goes, "It is impossible to reason someone out of something that he did not reason himself into in the first place."
There is a great deal of evidence that humans not only can run long distances, but have evolved to do so. The idea is that before primitive weapons (bow and arrow or whatnot), this is how we caught food -- by simply running it down.

From other sources:

"Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet over long distances."

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us
This is what happens when someone who just doesn't get it looks at the well-publicized Pixar workspaces and says "yeah, lets do that!". I mean look at this thing - it's constructed with the design aesthetics of a garden shed and then they stuck it in a poorly lit, sterile off-white office (complete with those ceiling tiles that signal: "no imagination allowed here!").

These people either have no taste, or just haven't figured out that creating a creative workspace involves a LOT more than just building a cubby house and calling it good.
FPGA cluster brute-forces DES in record time

Even that isn't true. Deep Crack took 56 hours (matching the "less than three days" claimed in the article), while the combined Deep Crack + Distributed.Net effort took less than 24 hours.
If I want to play the violin, there are violins designed specifically for letting me play them with little restraint. There are books designed specifically to guide me through learning how to play. Most people would hire an instructor to teach me the basics.

That's all possible with a closed system. You can make environments specially designed to encourage tinkering, rather than leaving everything open for intrusion. You can write guides teaching people things that they wouldn't normally see on a closed system. It doesn't exist by default like it does perhaps on a system wherein everything is viewable, but you can still create it. So it won't kill programming.

It's not like Apple's declaring a holocaust on all other computers. If you're so obsessed with tinkering that you think it's worth fucking around instead of learning to tinker in more meaningful ways — though I must admit that from my biased point of view that always seems like the college graduate whose poetry reads like high school — the other systems are all available, and will be for a long, long time; it won't be long before somebody releases an open source equivalent of the iPad for stupid people to go around claiming is objectively better in every way and for ordinary tinkerers to buy and tinker with.

But I'd like to address this troll accusation, because I find it unbecoming. I am not a troll. I have been a productive and contributing member of this community for nearly two years; even though my respect for it has constantly declined, I come in here to debate with people all the time. I don't do it to fuck around with your head or to provoke people. I do it because I enjoy stating my point of view, which is frequently very different from the mass opinions here.

My blog is not written for Hacker News. My blog is written for the potpourri audience of artists and literati and young adults that enjoy long essays written about random subjects. It's not a coding blog, so even when I write about subjects that interest people here I'm not writing it in a way that'll appeal to readers here. This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News.

But that does not make it a troll post. I wrote a post last month describing fictional Listerine commercials. I'm sure if it had been submitted here people would have been boneheaded to announce the commercials were fake and I was trolling. There are smart people here, but there are not very diverse people.
Dear MBAs who want to work at startups
The work I do for you people amazes me:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/images/southw...
You might use Joel's test (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html) in reverse, e.g. if setting up software configuration management isn't one of their first priorities you probably don't want them as your first programmer. If they don't care about having a quiet place to work, they probably don't care very much about their productivity or the quality of their work. And so on.

Before the interview, ask them to bring in code and documentation (e.g. design) samples. This too might be inconclusive (I had to arrange with some companies that I worked for to allow this, in other cases the company had died and I got the rights from who they devolved to), but it's a good sign if they have a polished portfolio.

Ask them to attack a design problem in a domain you both have some experience with and look for good design and problem solving skills.
I guess once you can tell who is who, you can start targeted marketing.

Or collect data on people. Likely only a matter of time until you can build up a complete record, including name, address, social security number.
We had a 15 screen setup for a while http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardcunningham/859013515/
tried to run it from 32bit machine, but with 8 graphics chips (on 4 cards) it only left 700MB or so of addressable memory, so it crawled. In the end we ran it on a cluster.
We haven't agreed with anyone about what to call things like YC. "Seed accelerator" seems a worse name than "incubator."
I thought one of the statements in the article was especially interesting:

"NIF isn't truly about energy," Seife writes in his book. "It is not about keeping our stockpile safe, at least not directly. It is about keeping the United States' weapons community going in the absence of nuclear tests."

That's obviously a pretty pessimistic point of view, but when I consider the details of the test, including the immense amount of energy required to fire the lasers ten times a second, as would be required to start it according to the article, I don't see how it would be possible to get that much power back out, at least not using the traditional water to steam technique.
It's well known that Apple regularly tries to corner manufacturing on key components for a spell. If I recall Samsung had an agreement with Apple for a number of years for nearly all of their flash memory of a certain type.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/20/apple-once-again-squeezin...
Once you've raised the middle screen so it is top-aligned with the other two, aren't you finished? Why would you then push the other two down? Do you mean to 'push' all three down?
Thanks for the advice. Do you think getting a M.S. at my current institution would boost my chances of going to a better school?
I want to get started in Clojure too. Rich Hickey's talks on InfoQ have been making me feel kind of funny... like when we used to climb the ropes in gym class.

But seriously, yeah I'd love to find a project to play with its concurrency features and learn some gui as well.
Well the mainstream blades are catching up very quickly...

Also, some men use a double-edged blade or a cut-throat (very rare), which means dual monitor setups already break your rule.
Remote administration on the train to or from work.
Ancient Rome's swiss army knife
A look at Hans Zimmer's studio
If he said, "It is not productive for me to spend an hour learning how to change the font on my computer’s clock." he would be right.

He makes these sweeping generalizations about what is or is not productive for other people to do. By his definition all the people "tinkering with" open source Linux, Apache, etc would be "non productive" since perfectly good commercial alternatives existed (and still exist) for them.
It depends on the work you're doing. If he's not an artist, he almost certainly doesn't care.
I'd like to be as optimistic as you are about the latest follow-up on Wakefield's fraud, but see this research-citing blog post by a physician:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2962

"None of this mattered. Andrew Wakefield still enjoys a cult of personality among the anti-vaccine crowd that no revelation seems able to dislodge, even the revelation that at the time he was both in the pay of trial lawyers and working on his study, Andrew Wakefield was also applying for a patent for a rival measles vaccine. Indeed, the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism bestowed upon him last year its 'Galileo Award' as the 'persecuted' scientist supposedly fighting for truth, justice, and anti-vaccinationism against the pharma-funded or brainwashed minions of the 'Church of the Immaculate Vaccination.' In the meantime, MMR uptake rates in the U.K. have plummeted over the last decade, far below the level needed for herd immunity, to the point where, last year the Health Protection Agency declared measles to be once again endemic in the U.K., 14 years after the local transmission of measles had been halted."

See also this subthread here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053644

and its comments on the same blog post from Science-Based Medicine.
Much of the dislike for Microsoft is historical. At various points, Microsoft has beaten competitors by means other than making the best product at the best price, and some of us don't really like doing business with that sort of company.

There's also the fact that some versions of Windows have been less than shining examples of the art of computer programming. Perceptions of a brand take a while to improve. 7 doesn't seem too bad, but Vista wasn't exactly universally loved, and some of us still remember Windows ME.

As for price - my Thinkpad was only cheaper than a Macbook Pro because it was refurbished. I don't think it's fair to compare either to a lower-priced consumer-grade PC with similar specs on paper.
In that case (rotating the screens) don't get a Twisted Nematic display. I have the Samsung 2443SW, which, like the Samsung panels in the link, has a TN display, and it is simply not usable rotated 90 degrees. The color and brightness gradient from top to bottom is bearable in panoramic mode, since both your eyes see the same color on each horizontal line. Rotated 90 degrees it's simply awful, because each eyes sees a different color/brightness, and the angle between top and bottom of the screen is so much larger.
Looking at Amazon the iPod is most expensive:

iPod touch $269.99,
Amazon Creative Zen X-Fi Touch 32GB $229.99,
Zune $234.99

The difference for lower spec players is large with the iPod being twice the price of its direct competitors!

iPod nano 8GB $133.99,
Sony Walk 8GB $67.57,
Creative Zen 9GB $87.68,
Philips GoGear 8GB $69.88
Right, ok change the sequence.

Push the side ones down as far as they will go, then align the top of the center one with the top of the left and the right ones.

Sorry. That was unclear.

The reason why you want to push the left and right ones down as far as they will go is because that's already quite the height.

The nice thing about this trick is that it is a relatively narrow setup and still gives you plenty of desktop space.

It's about the width of a standard two monitor setup, only much higher.
Agent Smith was right.
Ruby Best Practices book starting its open source release early.
Pretty impressive since it's already hard to have dual screens working well on Ubuntu. Nice job!
Ask HN: How can I improve my email deliverability through Google Apps?
I use Google Apps for my start-up's emails. I've heard a lot of reports on my emails not making it to the inbox, getting marked as spam, or just getting deleted by spam systems. I've added the SPF recommended by Google but the problem still persists.
I really recommend that you check out the book Born to Run [1] which examines barefoot running and how we've evolved. It's been a while since I read it, but I believe it even includes a chapter about persistence hunting [2].

1. http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Use of Semantic Web Technologies on the BBC Web Sites
Because Apple does not throw its own weight around? Ok.
I haven't done any GUI's in clojure, but i think swing is best doc'd, stuart Sierra series:

http://stuartsierra.com/2010/01/03/doto-swing-with-clojure?0...

http://stuartsierra.com/2010/01/02/first-steps-with-clojure-...

--------------------

or SWT:

http://berlinbrowndev.blogspot.com/2009/02/doing-it-wrong-fu...

http://www.li-am.com/2009/08/button-in-eclipse-swt-clojure.h...

http://www.li-am.com/2009/08/swt-is-alive-from-clojure.html

http://www.li-am.com/2009/08/jface-examples-in-clojure.html

----------------

there's also bits on Qt and JWT, search for them
Stolen Twitter account offered for $1,000
Aren't encryption algorithms measured by the amount of computing power it would take to crack them? If so, given a limitless power source, we could be in for some real privacy trouble, correct?
Not sure about UTF-16, but UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. A lot of decryption requires having a general idea of what the message contains. If you know that the message is standard English text, then that gives you huge opportunities, like finding keys that make parts of the message decrypt to the word "the".
The knife is at 1:50
I have no advice to offer but I there's a discussion over at this thread which may be of use

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078750
Destination Phobos:  Humanity's next giant leap
The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?
This is the first I'm hearing about this, but I'm very glad that it exists.

I think the rails community, in general, is rather unapproachable from the outside. Something that simplifies the process of getting up to speed quickly will be greatly appreciated.

A quick example: where do you find anything about named_scope on guides.rubyonrails.com?
On a university budget things get a little easier :)

Very nice setup, I've done something similar with xdmx long ago, but with only 5 screens, the 5th screen, a mac is not visible in this picture:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.ht...

But I found that the 'wraparound' screen requires way too much movement, so that's why I've been trying to find ways to reduce the horizontal component.

For desktop work I think the 1+2 solution I described elsewhere in this thread is next to optimal.

This one is nice too:

http://www.jmu.edu/hyper/visualization/hardware.html

And I've seen another one but I can't seem to locate the link.
There is a difference between being able to dump tables and being able to alter tables. Generally a lot of people have read access to the database, very little have full write access.

The same goes with hacks. It's easier to get unauthorized read access than unauthorized write access.
Sybase: Why We’re So Positive
The field of cryptography developed in the context of nation-state actors and idiots who use crypto wrong. (Come to think of it, not much has changed.) In WW2, a lot of crypto was broken thanks to known plaintexts -- e.g., "Today's weather is..." -- or chosen plaintexts -- e.g., "Submarine sighted at...". This was made easier, of course, by the fact that military structures tend to use very consistent communications formats.

You're quite right that you can slow down a brute force attack by making the input data hard to recognize -- one trivial approach is to pad it to a large size and then apply an all-or-nothing transform -- but by the time this sort of mechanism was feasible, brute force key searches stopped being useful due to increased key lengths.