skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The rule is, "data in motion should be secured with TLS, data at rest should be secured with PGP".

Isn't this more of a heartfelt wish than a rule, though? It's restrictive enough to be impractical, I would guess even for security researchers. Do you use SSH to access remote machines?
> You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.

What if you get started by writing HTML and Javascript code into a nice online editor - something like Bespin, or like those many different sites where you can code in all sorts of languages using a web-based front-end - and you get to publish your results to a web page and see the results immediately?

Does it get any easier than that?

Code - publish - save to home screen - "hey dad, check out this application I just made!"
In a very real way, it did. Fifty or sixty years ago, people prepared food largely from scratch. Now, a large proportion of the population of Western nations prepares food by poking a hole in the plastic cover, closing the door, and hitting "Express".

The microwave let people who didn't want to spend their time cooking do more interesting things. Is their life worse for the wear? Only because food prepared as a frozen dinner is inferior to food prepared by hand. The same is exactly the opposite of software. Software prepared by a professional is almost always of superior quality to a script that Bob wrote in his spare time. Maybe not if Bob is actually very good a programming, which leads into...

Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.

This is patently false. The iPad is not a primary computing device, and will not replace a laptop or desktop, which by (current) definition is open to these things. Apple is not holding back the iPad-hosted compiler and shell. There is no iPad-hosted compiler or shell. Additionally, the development environment which does get you from 'here' to 'there' is openly (but not freely) available. You can write and run any application you choose, the same way that Apple does, via the Developer Program.
The Flash plugin for IE is ActiveX, but all Flash plugins for other platforms use the same Mozilla NPAPI plugin system, whether it's Firefox on Windows, Safari on OS X, or Chrome on Linux.

Both Windows Flash plugins have the same good performance: it ain't an API issue.
I think that's slightly incorrect. The proof M is looking for is of the following statement: "P is an algorithm that solves the problem and T is an algorithm that is guaranteed to output, for any input, an upper bound on the running time of P for that input." There's no requirement that P should be proved to be faster than some other program.

Anyhow, your criticism of the result's limited applicability still stands. I can't resist offering another nitpick: it's curious that the author neglected to mentioned that the proof system must be sound.
Not to nit-pick but I believe it's "I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space". "Drug store" is a decidedly American phrase.
Netcraft confirms it...
yes, and no dvds to scratch when you buy movies. I wish the iphone had better parental controls, so you could flip on a child mode and hand it over when in line. since ou can't override the button, there is no real way to provide this functionality, either.
If your problem doesn't fit into PGP or TLS, refactor your problem.

There are high-level crypto libraries (though none that I recommend without hesitation) that provide essentially the same features as PGP. If you're going to make a concession, perhaps that's the one you could consider. However:

* I don't recommend doing so, and

* It's not that much of a concession, because you still have to wrap your application around the cryptosystem, not the other way around.
Well, the question how to get data off of it. Which I answered and got hammered on and now sit in negative karma territory for my trouble (thanks guys! downvote abuse is awesome!). But whatever, apparently actual answers aren't valued.

Getting data onto them (such as scanning barcodes) is a separate question.

Apple claims all of the existing app store apps will work on the iPad. But I wonder how many require things like the camera to function?

http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/05/red-laser-the-first-accur...

That number is actually probably a bit lower due to "broken by design" problems like this.

I'd wager that we'll see an iPad camera accessory offered within 6-12 months that connects nicely to the 30-pin.
Seconded. It seems that any constructive discussion around the iPad is ignored or actively thwarted. Everyone seems to want this to be a flame-war when we should really be looking at the implications should the iPad succeed: tight control is what the markets want. But we're months from discovering that.
Salted hashes are not that much better than unsalted hashes, but HMAC itself isn't meaningfully different than just using a salted hash. You have to know the key to complete the hash, just like you have to know the salt in a salted scheme.

You know you're getting into trouble with someone's understanding of systems security when you start talking about "secret salts".
Here, I got something for you: I was thinking about it earlier, and I was wondering how I'd get something to print from the iPad, being that there's no normal USB connection. And it hit me in the face: Why would I want to print? If it's something I want to give someone else, I'll send it to them through email. If it's something that I'd want to refer to later, I'd just have my iPad with me later.

The iPad kills a lot of the reason for having paper.
> In general, hashed password storage is a tough game to win in an absolute sense. So, we are effectively left with slowing the attacker down to the point that it isn't worth their while.

And? Public key cryptography is impossible in an absolute sense, because there are algorithms that compute the private key given the public key. In fact, we have a good definition of "perfect secrecy", but the only cryptosystems that meet that definition must have keys that are as long as the message, which is impractical. Slowing the adversary down is how practical cryptography works.
"I suggested that IDE features are language smells."

I love this quote.
Some of those apps might be LOGO or SCRATCH simulators.
Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that there actually was continent spanning state condoned genocide?

(Hint: there wasn't. There were all sorts of local wars of conquest. They amounted to diddly squat, however, in comparison to smallpox, which was completely unavoidable.)
White House to outsource NASA work
I posted a comment to the blog this morning, suggesting that many users don't want Flash because of its poor performance on non-Windows platforms, and mediocre performance on Windows. Unsurprisingly, the comment wasn't approved.

Still, I stand by what I said: show us a Mac Flash plugin that doesn't use ridiculous amounts of CPU, that doesn't drain my laptop's battery or peg a core at 100% just to show a few ads on the page. Show me something that doesn't require browser vendors to work around just to prevent browser crashes, and then maybe, MAYBE, I'll consider Flash on the iPad a good idea.

How Adobe can continue to do such a half-assed job with the Flash player on Mac and Linux, and then act all surprised and indignant when Apple shuts them down, I'll never understand.

Oh, and as for their native app generation – they can compile Flash apps to native code that doesn't run well except on the iPhone 3GS. If they can't make native iPhone apps that are fast enough to use, what makes anyone think they can make a flash plugin that is?
The bit about the Dell tablet is spot on. With Apple actually hitting a reasonable price with the entry level iPad, I think this will put tremendous pressure on other tablet makers and netbook vendors to push down prices.
I just TAed an introductory security class. The crypto project involved building a secure channel, and messages were authenticated with HMAC. We authenticated E(msg) || HMAC-SHA-256(msg) by computing HMAC-SHA-256(D(E(msg)) and bytewise comparing it against the sent HMAC-SHA-256(msg). This was based on Practical Cryptography and seemed fairly intuitive to me. How is it drastically insecure? (I fully admit that I don't know practical crypto, hence the conformance to Practical Cryptography.)
As the iPad exists today, it's impossible to use without a laptop/desktop. If one day it evolves to the point of being a standalone device, I imagine that it may also be capable of running its own dev tools.
So?

UTF-16 is a lot more work to support. For example, do I store the BOM in every string when I store a name in a database?

It's harder to handle UTF-16 because of all the nulls.

And since Chinese stores an entire word in a single character, I'm perfectly fine with their words taking 4 bytes. An average word in English uses 5 letters.
Looks...strangely...familiar...
I already don't print.

(uhm, except once every 2 years when I renew my apt lease).
Alex Payne seems not to have noticed the price. At $500, he can afford to buy one of these and a 24" iMac for less than the cost on a 13" MacBookPro. Or he buy a Dell, or - really - anything he wants.

Then again, perhaps Alex Payne noticed some EULA fine print that says buying one of these forces you to discard every other object you own with a chip inside, and swear absolute allegiance to this ONE thing.

I suspect, instead, that Alex Payne is simply being an idiot.
In a world where I can load my cell phone up with 4GB of flash for ~$10, I don't think anybody really cares.

For network transmission, even gzip compression will take the sting out.

Oh, I know it's not free. I'm not saying it's free. I'm just saying it's nowhere near the pain point for most people. The days of using a computer and fearing that you might type a report for school so long the machine will run out of memory are long gone.
I print via WiFi, but if I didn't I could print via Bluetooth. I don't think its a coincidence that Apple has made Bluetooth versions of their peripherals. There are very few things that USB is required for anymore (mostly flash drives and software dongles).
Why do you need exactly $1000 ?
Why is it interesting? It seems like the logical way to go: simplify technology for the masses.

It isn't like the computer mouse added amazing new technical feets when it was released but now it is a very powerful accessory for many
Bytewise comparison is timeable. Your comparison needs to touch every byte of both the candidate and the real MAC.
It's full-circle for Apple...they _never_ liked openness. The new iPad, with all the closed-ness and proprietariness of it isn't shocking by how new it is...but how oddly familiar it is. The Apple I knew (and resisted) from the 1980s to the mid 2000s was decidedly and deliberately closed, and in complete opposition to the open systems and PC world. They might go back to that model, at which point I'll go right back to not using any Apple products. The world will (hopefully) always want open-ness. If Apple won't deliver that, someone else will.

I'm less optimistic about consumers. The iPad might indeed be just what 'regular' consumers want....a new kind of fancy TV set. If so, the iPad is just right for them.

The dark cloud for me is that parallel. When TV was introduced, people had grand visions of an informed society, brought together by broadcasts of useful and enlightening knowledge. It ended up being an ad-selling jukebox of near-useless crap. We've projected the same (and even larger) hopes and dreams on the new technology...but the trajectory seems all too familiar.
"We'll give you a shitty experience and if we become popular, then you don't get any choice on top of that!"
There's always Linux...
Amazon Posts Strong Profits: Q4 earnings up 71%, sales up 42%
It's a fallacy to compare the computational bounds of encryption algorithms to the human failures that break encryption systems.
I wrote about this at my blog (http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/a-closed-apple-pla...) but here's a quick recap.

Since technology advances faster than consumer demand, the differentiating factor for purchases changes over time. First it's possibility, then power/flexibility, then price, then convenience/usability. iPods and mp3 players got cheap enough that the usability of th iPod/iTunes Music Store became the deciding factor and there was no demand for undercutting it on price.

Also, the music use case is so well defined that there wasn't much room to compete on flexibility. PCs have miles and miles of flexibility, but by defining the role of the iPad as music, movies, books, and games (basically media consumption), it might be staking out a territory where it can outperform everyone rather than compete with commodity devices.
I always reach for Buckley's, out of all the cough medicines I've ever had to use it genuinely works the best. However, I hate black liquorice, but will readily take a shot of sambuca or ouzo, so perhaps I'm not the best person to say I don't mind the bad taste.

Moving from the UK to NA has taught me one thing, everyone appears to want an incentive to take medicine here. It's bizarre. Anyone with any minor upset is encouraged to down a pill that tastes like cherry or some other asinine flavour. I understand why childrens medication is flavoured, but adult medication, really? Honestly people need to grow up. Buckley's has something going for it, you're disincentivized to take it so you're actually going to allow your body to do the job it's supposed to.

When I grew up, the most flavorful 'medicine' I remember was Flintstone vitamins. I believe I got lucky at ~13 when kids cough syrup started getting popular, which incidentally had reduced paracetamol levels (acetaminophen) for children, unlike the flavoured medicines marketed in NA.
Wikipedia:

---

Although it is widely believed that the word football, or "foot ball", originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, this may be a false etymology. The historical explanation has it that the word originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot.[2] These sports were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports more often enjoyed by aristocrats. This explanation is supported by the fact that the word football has always implied a wide variety of games played on foot, not just those that revolved around kicking a ball. In some cases, the word has been applied to games which involved carrying a ball and specifically banned kicking. For example, the English writer William Hone, writing in 1825 or 1826, quotes the social commentator Sir Frederick Morton Eden, regarding a game — which Hone refers to as "Foot-Ball" — played in the parish
of Scone, Scotland:

The game was this: he who at any time got the ball into his hands, run [sic] with it till overtaken by one of the opposite part; and then, if he could shake himself loose from those on the opposite side who seized him, he run on; if not, he threw the ball from him, unless it was wrested from him by the other party, but no person was allowed to kick it.[3] [Emphasis added.]

However, there is no conclusive evidence for either hypothesis regarding the origins of the word.

---

So, it's not as clear cut as I thought, but there it is.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as "a load of rubbish" though I certainly thought it was a snooze. But I've always seemed to have a big impedance mismatch with "great literature." I think this is because I've never grokked the language of symbolism. For example (and please consider this a rhetorical question) what's the deal with the houndstooth coat? He goes on and on (and on and on) about it. What do hounds teeth have to do with anything? Why not a terrycloth robe? For that matter, what the fuck is a houndstooth coat? And why rye? Why not corn? Or wheat? Would The Shortstop in the Azaleas have conveyed the same message?

Those were the sorts of things that were foremost in my mind when I read Catcher, so clearly I missed the point, and I'm still missing it. But I do find it kind of fascinating that so many people get something out of it that completely eludes me to this day.
I'll link to my comment in another thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084790

Summary: You also can't get started being a surgeon by taking your pets apart and putting them back together, but people still go through years of medical school and become surgeons.
I doubt it. Canada has had special tax treatment for small businesses, including a capital gains exemption, for many years, and it hasn't had much effect. The simple fact is that when people are considering launching a startup, they generally aren't thinking 5+ years ahead about how much they'll be paying in taxes.
Happened to me a month ago. There was in fact a lot of information on the net on how to fix it, but none of the suggestions worked. In the end only a full reinstall of OS X (done for unrelated reasons) fixed it for me.
The rule is, "data in motion should be secured with TLS, data at rest should be secured with PGP".

And even that attitude can be dangerous. A while back I was getting depressed at the usability of tarsnap so I began to think about how I would design some secure backup system on Windows. "Ok," I thought, "I'll build stuff on top of GPG." The trouble is, any way I imagined doing this, even taking out features like deduplication, I would have leaked the filesizes of every file backed up. If the FBI wanted to scan for anybody who had some popular illegal porn collection or whatnot, they could tell just by looking or a certain distribution of chunk sizes. And anybody listening on the network would be able to get a weak idea of the filesizes just based on timing. I have no idea what Tarsnap does about this; I am guessing the blocks it hashes for deduplication purposes aren't the same as the ones it sends to the server, and I presume it doesn't stream stuff to the server as it scans the filesystem. And there are probably several other things it does that I wouldn't even think of.

(But even then if some government found that a protest movement was distributing USB sticks with 3.167 GB of information after it gets zipped for backup, it could just look for people uploading that approximate amount of information to the backup server. It seems like people who have a true reason to be paranoid simply shouldn't do online backups.)

I would change the rule to "Data in motion should be secured with TLS, data at rest should be secured with PGP, and don't even think about doing anything weird."
For me, the iPad isn't a computer. It's more of a really cool gadjet which will let me see webpage, play games and watch video in a really cool way. It's a tool I will use when eating and travelling.

It seems like people aren't arguing about the right thing. It's like saying the iPhone sucks because you can't use vim, compile or use grep. Or that a microwave sucks because you can't put a big cooking pot inside.
"Lets get the data sorted out"

The data HAS been sorted out, by people who have spent the better part of their lives studying climatology. And among the group that has spent the most time studying Earth's climate, there is broad consensus that a) Earth's climate is warming and b) increased CO2 levels from human activities is the primary cause.

The great thing about this debate, if you're a lobbyist for industrial groups opposing any action to limit CO2 on financial grounds, is that you don't have to prove all those people wrong. You just have to cloud the issue enough to create the illusion of debate over points a and b. It's the PR equivalent of 'reasonable doubt'.
I always thought you'd be crazy to not pick First Round over any other VC fund, but this actually seals it economically (if you believe there's value in the FRC's portfolio).

Those guys are just so damn smart.
My comment elsewhere: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084669

Agreed - maybe even adding to your homescreen as a javascript bookmarklet so it's available offline.

Anyway, yes maybe the iPad wont inspire the next engineers, maybe it will inspire the next authors/bloggers/photographers/web developers/content creators.
Ask the Attorney - Formation Issues Part 1
The New York Times Without Flash
Clojure and Incremental Development
The problem I've had with writing stuff like this is that if you go too far out of your way to hide the fact that this is still just Javascript, you get a lot of people who don't realize that it is just Javascript and you can do what you want.

What if you want to dynamically create stuff? You can take the value of fab, use standard for loops and if statements and whatnot to apply things to it, then call fab again at the end and it'll all work fine. By hiding in a DSL here, you encourage people to not realize that, and take away the ability for these people to use the Javascript they already know to build the system. Another manifestation of this general principle is that you may get people who don't realize that they can define a function elsewhere then include it as an argument.

Please don't laugh or tell me this is impossible. I used to think that too. Experience has bludgeoned me over the head on this, rather against my will.

Magic really ought to be reserved for things that can't be done without magic. Method chaining is becoming a standard JS technique (even though I don't like it, for pretty much this same reason albeit more weakly as it is less of a departure) and I don't see a reason not to just use method chaining here.

If I don't miss my guess, as you develop this you're going to miss having it anyhow and have to switch to it anyhow. You're almost certain to end up having more than one type of thing go in those arguments, and the alternative will be either returning to method chaining, or using the first argument to do nothing other than switch on which method you actually call. (And that is honestly just silly because the language already has perfectly cromulent facilities for doing that.)
Yes it does. Engadget did a post on the blatant rip-off of both the Amazon.com website and Kindle http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/26/keepin-it-real-fake-part-...

Infibeam responded with a blogpost here : http://blog.infibeam.com/2010/01/uniqueness-argument.html
I reckon there's a whole bunch pushing non-unicode and not knowing it, but declaring UTF-8 anyway. Since the current versions of PHP don't even support unicode (at least, without going to very special pains) I suspect there are an awful lot of web sites just shoving out content in non-unicode formats, calling it UTF-8 and wondering why every now and then they see a funny question mark in someone's name etc.
> One example is the "XXX for dummies" book series. No matter how interesting the XXX was (Quantum Physics! Neurosurgery), I could never bring myself to buy those books - I was mentally bristling "Oy, who are you calling a dummy?".

Reactions to those titles are interesting.

I certainly have some of that "inner geekness" you mention, but I don't have any problem with the "dummies" series. My thinking is that, before such books were produced, if you wanted to learn, say, plumbing or fishing or football or beer making, then you learned from your parents while growing up, or you learned by working with an experienced practitioner, or else you never learned them. But now we have introductory material for adults, aimed at bringing them to the point where they can enjoy or be productive at some activity. I think it's great.

On the other hand, someone I know, whom I would consider rather less geeky than myself, feels very insulted by those titles.