skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Inertial Containment folks are going to go for exciting a hohlraum with their 192 lasers. I don't think blasting a precisely machined gold-plated metal cylinder every second is going to be economically viable.
Very good point - especially for the first one. They won't need someone's help. Mainly, our help.

One could say Steve Jobs has "taken" the market from us, now controlling even the developers. Yet I believe, as the post pointed out, that theres an escape hatch through using the internet as a delivery mechanism. HTML5 and responsive web apps are truly the future there. Learn UNIX programming if you haven't.

This moves the developers, from say, GeekSquad and "Best Buy Optimization" rip-off services to productive application development. One could argue that this will make the smart smarter (as the barrier to entry is higher) and the "dumb" (less experieced a better word?) interested in something else.

I think the iPad is "meh" because to some degree we haven't seen what it will do to the landscape yet. We've been focusing on the technical aspects of the device - and putting up against a rubric we've built over the last 30 years. I believe Jobs aims to change that rubric.

Other people have said it - computers are complicated for laymen users and they want it to act like an appliance. Hes giving it to them.
So, if you have a hash, and your salt gets compromised, is there a way to re-salt without losing all old passwords? I'm thinking specifically of frameworks like rails where you can have hashes applied auto-magically.
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I wouldn't be surprised if Apple in fact is enjoying these cost savings. They just don't happen to be passing them onto the consumer, rightly or wrongly.
The Algorithm Chasers
http://codahale.com/a-lesson-in-timing-attacks/

Suggests 20us over internet, 100ns over lan. Are there more complexities to comparing HMACs than are mentioned in this article? I.e. anything else to think about other than not short-circuiting your comparisons when bytes don't match?

More discussion (including from someone called Nate, presumably the same person tptacek is referring to) at:

http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar-discuss/browse_thread...

And a paper which I can't read without paying:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MSP.2009...
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I think their point was this:

When using a Pico FPGA cluster, however, each FPGA is able
to perform 1.6 billion DES operations per second. A cluster
of 176 FPGAs, installed into a single server using standard
PCI Express slots, is capable of processing more than 280
billion DES operations per second. This means that a key
recovery that would take years to perform on a PC, even
with GPU acceleration, could be accomplished in less than
three days on the FPGA cluster.

So, they managed to brute-force DES a lot faster. No crypto breakthrough, please move along. :)

This should have been titled "FPGA cluster brute-forces DES in record time" or something like that.
It's worth re-reading, but imagining as if he was talking about Google Chrome OS. It all pretty much works yet there's no lockin at all.
Microsoft & Internet Freedom
The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever
Close to Fusion Energy: Focusing 192 lasers on one little target
Reminds me of an interview with that Brit director who directed "The Body in Question" documentary. We was talking about doing some Public Service spots about HIV in both Britain and France.

In France, his spot involved showing naked bodies, though no full faces or naughty bits showing. Lots of sexiness. But there was to be no mention of how horrible a disease AIDS was and all the terrible things it could do.

In Britain, the spot involved lots of talk about AIDS and the horrible things it might do, but there was not to be any kind of sexiness in it at all!
I'm wondering about the possibility of building dynamic multi-touch interfaces for any scriptable desktop app.

The iPad has high speed wireless connections and so at least potentially could act as a very powerful input peripheral client for many desktop apps talking through a server running on a "real Mac" (or even Windows).
If they can reach create a controlled fusion reaction, a commercial reactor would be designed to continually feed fuel into it to continue the reaction. Reaching "break-even" is when the lasers don't have to be fired for the reaction to continue.
In "olden times" (I guess around the fourth empire), common wisdom was to hash like this:

salt = getLongRandomString(); hash = sha256(salt+password); save_in_db = salt+"$"+hash

Thus, while you don't publish them, salts aren't "secret". That's based on the assumption that a cracker would have to bruteforce each password in turn, and that takes too much time.

But no, you can't re-hash with a new salt without access to the plain-text password. If you could, so could the bad guy :)

Disclaimer: IANAC, and if I were building security for mission critical stuff, I'd ask someone who was.
One minor issue, I think. I noticed on page 7 it says:

bcrypt(cost, salt, pwd)
state <= EksBlowfishSetup(cost, salt, key)

I guess the symbols "pwd" and "key" are synonyms there, right?
I agree with the premise, but would also caveat that Catcher was a much better read for me when I was about the same age as Holden was. I could identify then with his feelings, with his inability to succinctly sum up his thoughts, with his need to accentuate things that really didn't need accentuating, etc.

The style worked for me (even though I'm decidedly not from the era of its original readers) because even though the vernacular is dated, it was still relevant to the mannerisms I spoke with in my teens and (maybe) early twenties.

Reading it again now, in my thirties, it is dramatically different. Not because I've read other books that imitated the style, or because it has become cliche, but because I am very far removed, mentally, from how I was when I first read it.
Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality?
Sure, but the personal attack 'known troll' bit is over the line.
The "Frenchies" also claims its effects is observable in scans, which is quite a bit more than just saying "we have a bunch of anecdotes".

More importantly their criticism centers on the Brits relying on self-reporting based on subjective experiences in trying (or not trying) to locate it, and an assumption that if the g-spot is real, only some women would have it.

If the g-spot is real, and all women have it, but some factor other than genetics determines whether or not they'll find it or not, and be able to stimulate it or not, then the British study falls apart.
I didn't miss the point. I'm afraid the article is right, and it makes me concerned about the future.

The hood of a modern car isn't physically welded shut, but many cars have become so specialized that only a dealer or specialist mechanic can afford the tools to work on them. Any serious tweaking and tuning requires either hacking sensors to lie to the ECU, or a custom, programmable ECU since the factory ECU is a black box.

I want the mainstream to care just a little bit about these things, because if they don't, I won't be able to get products without the hood welded shut. Sure, there will always be specialty hacker-friendly devices, jailbraking and the like, but those are big steps to take for someone just starting to explore. There's no easy gateway drug like discovering the terminal on a Mac.
I agree. The cloud server's gives you full access to everything save the hardware.

IMHO, i would prefer a native ruby on rails blogging cms but currently there is nothing nearly as polished as wordpress. Typo seems to be the most developed right now, but it still has a long way to go.
Critique against mouse and keyboard rings hollow. It's stuck around so far because it "just works" for a large number of apps.

But there are a large number of apps where it doesn't. Also, the "workstation" form factor is inherently stationary, and it soaks up all of one's interaction -- to the point where it's often easier for a computer user to "interact" with someone else sitting in the same room through an IM client.

Limitations of the hardware is touted as a "great opportunity"

[Citation Needed]

I think he's touting the new interface possibilities. What "limitations" specifically are his new "opportunities" and where does he say that? Seems like a stretch for glass is half-empty from a text about the glass being more than half full.

As for the 3rd part of your post, I find it ironic for some reason.
This is only half-trolling. There are some very good ideas here. I think the author is absolutely correct when he says that the endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people, and that they aren't completely wrong in that assessment.
Not fluff once you get beyond the intro. The very first thing after that is "Rapidly deliver Java SE 7 with many new features" and there are lots of hard specifics about all sorts of things. While I haven't read it it all yet (only overviews) it looks good.

In the area I'm watching, they have for JVMs "Run natively on Hypervisors" and for Sun Ops Center "'Bare Metal' OS and Hypervisor Provisioning".

Worth a look if you care about the future of Java (bleah) or languages that run on top of JVM (yeah!).
IPhone certificate flaws
Research papers on conversion rate optimization
A Brief Overview Of Baby Acne
> Not when those open systems risk confusing and alienating people who just want to check their mail.

Speaking of mail, I would like to be able to host it at home, where it should be. (It's private, after all.) Thanks to the walled garden policy of blocking the outgoing SMTP port (and no one complaining, because web mail is soo convenient), I can't.

If Trusted Computing ever becomes the default, it won't be long before using open systems becomes a major hassle. Because, you know, they are dangerous, infected by viruses, used by cyber-pirates, in a word, suspects. Just like home hosted mail servers.
The reason why is that Qualcomm and most 3G chip manufacturers bundle GPS, as it is required by federal law for 911 service. Just adding a standalone GPS module to the Wifi version would probably cost about as much as adding a 3G chip.

Btw, does anyone else find it striking how much patent licensing adds to the cost of a device? I'm pretty sure Apple is passing the $130 3G upgrade along at almost cost. These 3G chips have been out for years now and probably only cost about $10-20 to manufacture, yet every 3G cellphone manufacturer gets raped by patent licensing costs to the tune of $100+.
Something that could "remote control" any app through some form of App-specific remote window sharing would be a good start. That would sell very well for awhile.

I think there's huge potential in this:

http://www.insteon.net/

I note that they have an SDK and what looks to be a whole bunch of PC apps. The iPad could communicate with your home Mac or PC to a USB dongle which acts as hardware interface.
> The last internet archive snapshot was in April 30, 2008 but it gives a good feel for the kind of info that was there.

Perhaps. Remember, the IA embargoes their copies for 6-9 months as part of the arrangement with AltaVista.
Well, apparently there's a market for "safe-for-work" URL shorteners, huh?

Could be a nice weekend project for an aspiring Hacker.
Put a camera on the next generation. Augmented Reality is where it's at. Imagine an App like a Frommer's guide that did information overlays on whatever you were pointing at! Then you could zoom out to a map view and see what was around you, then zoom back in to a "Street View" to where you want to go.
I know about that, but I meant in the beginning. I don't think it was a factor in them making it big.
Well, he probably knows how to write the letters A-E-S and we all know what that means…
Massmodz.com founder arrested by FBI
use the mouse for precise on-screen pointing without getting your hand in the way of what you're doing

If you're a developer or a similar tech-savvy mind, it should take you all of about 30 seconds to come up with an alternative for precision pointing in multi-touch. (It would have to be app-specific at first, of course.)

"but the specter of having a small user base for my experiments always discouraged me."

Why does that matter? Not everything is about how many people adopt it. If you can make a small group really happy that counts for something too.

Depends on the size of the user base, and its composition. Having a small, unimaginative, not-savvy, highly conservative user base is no picnic. Been there, done that.
I think the disservice was more that Chrome OS is locked-down Linux vs scaled-up Android.

It should have been Android all the way up -- handhelds to desktops -- freeing the market to throw all sorts of crazy hardware variants into any number of form factors.
Reduce Blood Sugar Just With 3 Tips
SharePoint Server and Project Server 2010 Installation
I have troubles understanding that. What does know and manage the costs mean? Surely every manufacturer knows how much their supplies cost? Of course if you have more options (inhouse dev, other suppliers), you have more leverage and control. But there is a limit. I still don't see what is to learn from the snippet - that if you control the whole production chain, you can make it big? Hardly?

Switching to Intel was a huge success for Apple, if I remember correctly.

Also, for the iPad it is only the chip that Apple creates themselves. Or are they also creating their own IPS panels and SSD disks now? I wouldn't be surprised if the panel cost more than the chip.
I bought a mac book because it could run windows. I installed windows on it and i have tried unsuccessfully to get into the mac side of things. The dvd player doesn't work under windows, so i boot to mac to watch movies and such, but I always go back to windows.

Under Mac, I don't like the way the mouse moves. I don't like the window resizing. I don't like that I can't maximize a window. I don't like it isn't really all that stable. I get the spinny rainbow wheel. I've seen other people's macs lock up in the middle of a presentation. I find the mac constricting.

You may disagree with me, which is fine. But to say that people use windows because they are forced to isn't true. I use windows because I prefer it. Maybe it's just familiar. I dunno. I started out on Apple IIe's decades ago, but I don't really have a problem with windows. I think most microsoft issues are religious. When you add up the hardware and the software for a PC, they're much cheaper than macs. The hardware is nice, but I probably won't buy another one for myself.

EDIT: I do wonder sometimes if I'm "holding myself back" by not learning another environment. I do understand the advantages to *nix and another reason I bought the mac was the underlying kernel for the OS. Perhaps I just got locked in. I don't find it unsettling though.
I was rather upset to find no awesome pictures of walled gardens included in this post.
Mostly summarizing Mozilla's position (probably for the benefit of the original dutch audience) and adding their support.

Two minor mistakes/omissions:

* Opera has been clear from the start that their support of Ogg Theora is ideological not financial, i.e. they believe in W3C promotion of open standards

* Safari can play HTML5 Ogg Theora if you install the Xiph Quicktime component: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

They could have mentioned the Java fallback for Theora on IE and Safari (if they don't have the plugin) but it's only recently been rescued from clunkiness by some Wikipedia funded work so I can't really blame them:

http://www.kaltura.org/project/HTML5_Video_Media_JavaScript_...
I question point 3 as well. Android was underway long before iPhone was announced. While you can say future Android development might have been influenced by iPhone, the project was started with zero knowledge of Apple's plan.
Are you sure they won't allow bluetooth mice?
Sadly, this will only put a small dent in the anti-vaccination cloaked as autism advocacy movement.
Clearly the NSA has had such capabilities for a long, long time now.
When a bunch of devs are underwhelmed at first, but then start to see possibilities in moments of calm -- this is a sign of a game changer.
Gartner measures all apps of apps stores worth 4.2B dollars in 2009
If it's through ATT, if it's anything like the iPhone, that's $30 a month, and there's a restriction of < 10MB downloads. It won't be $15 a month.

You didn't watch the presentation, did you? It's indeed under $15 a month for 250 MB a month. Plenty for IMs, emails, and the occasional Skype call.
The way that such chaining is possible is that each "query" (e.g., Users.order(...)) returns not an array of data, but a query object that one can manipulate still further.

That sounds just like the IQueryable<T> interface used in .Net's LINQ.
No mention of MySQL -- a notable absence given the overall level of detail.
What's the best way to keep up with what's going on with Rails 3? I've been reading your articles, and wycats', and I'm subscribed to rails-core. But when I tried to make an app yesterday, the most basic hello world app with one scaffolding didn't work. I posted to rails-talk yesterday, and nobody answered... any thoughts on this? I'd like to keep a little bit ahead of the curve, and possibly contribute if there's still low-hanging fruit...

EDIT: And it's not like I expect anything to work in a prerelease either. But I couldn't find anything directly on Lighthouse, but I don't know if that was because I was searching for the wrong terms, or if this is being worked on by someone, or any other number of things...
I can immediately think of a multitouch stats application. And yes, I am a programmer.
These houses don't prevent collaboration - they can be moved around, windows and doors can be open. The difficulty with open spaces/cubicles is that when you are not collaborating, some people won't think twice before interrupting you. When pair programming, it is different: the barrier to interruption seems higher when two programmers are working together. I think the type of 'zone' or 'flow' is different when pairing, too: not quite as deep, but easier to slip back into if you surface.

I have a really hard time zoning out chatter around me, and far too much of the chatter is completely irrelevant (e.g. personal grooming, youtube videos, etc).
As a developer for Android devices, i must say this article makes me really sad. How can a developer be satisfied with limitations and just put the "but it's how it is to be more secure" stamp on it.

I find it ironic that an Android developer is saying this. Android only has what, 256MB of available disk space for 3rd party programs? That is extremely limiting for all kinds of useful apps that might need a local database, or for large apps like games.

Also, the Android marketplace has similar limitations to the App store, but none of the safety. Google can and will pull your app if it doesn't like it, however, their post-release approval process lets malicious apps get through. There's already been one phishing app released. It seems like Google has all of the bad features of an open PC (viruses, worms, malware) and all of the bad features of a sandbox (complete control over code execution, unless you root your device).
Fantastic! We're trying to fill a position right now and compared to the sorry state of the resumes we receive (all from EE and CS PhDs with industry experience, mind you) this would be a killer.
Are you so sure? With iPod, at least, Apple has made it extremely difficult for competitors to undercut them. For example, they got bigger discounts from RAM suppliers than any of their competitors, because they were placing a bigger order.

Quickly googling "zune prices" and "iPod prices" right now, for example, I see a 32GB HD Zune listing for $269 and 32GB iPod touch for $259. Microsoft can't even by the crappier, but cheaper version in the market because they don't have the scale in this market that Apple does.
I've often wondered how you know when you've actually found the solution.

The massively parallel algorithm iteratively decrypts fixed-size blocks of data to find keys that decrypt into ASCII numbers. This technique is often used for recovering the keys of encrypted files containing known types of data.

This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, what if I didn't encrypt ASCII numbers? What if it's, say, an email message that's predominantly text in, say, UTF-8 or UTF-16?

And it seems to me that as we develop richer ways to encode data, it also makes it correspondingly difficult to decrypt that data.
There aren't as many pseudo doctors as there are pseudo scientists. This bit of pseudoscience is not as resilient as intelligent design. I think this dent will quickly kill the movement.
Great. And thanks for the link (should have searched for that).
"This is only half-trolling."

Would a half troll be something like a half elf with a troll father and human mother? :-P I believe such a player class exists in the game Arcanum.

More seriously, the author drowns whatever valid points he may have in trollish blather.

As to the "endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people," the value of tinkering is to the tinkerers.

Non tinkerers making vlaue judgments on its utility is irrelevant to its desirability to tinkerers. I think music is irrelevant so you shouldn't get to play your violin? A more viable argument is that I shouldn't have to subsidize your violin, not that my judgment about your musical tinkering being "a useless waste of time" is "not completely wrong".
It's true that the British study fails if g-spot sensitivity (whatever that means) is uncorrelated to genetics. That's a legitimate critique of the study.

However, the claim that they've seen the g-spot on scans is silly, at least based on the pubmed literature I've found. Several different studies, each with a small sample size, observe different physical features they interpret to be a g-spot.

To claim it's been observed is nothing but data mining.
Quoting him & disagreeing with him calling iPad platform an "incredible opportunity" - gets me downmodded.

I laughed a little.
I'd much rather have two decent panels than those six cheap TNs. Especially considering the poor viewing angles you'd end up with that setup. The colour degradation is going to be absolutely awful.
Personally I don't think it's right for a man to have more screens connected to his computer than he has blades on his disposable razor...
Apparently it does not have a cursor.

I've read that in several places now so I'm assuming that it is true.
Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones has a backgrounder app. Give it a try. What they don't tell you is that it sucks, maybe because the iPhone doesn't really have the ram to run apps in the background or maybe because the iPhone OS wasn't designed that way, but for some reason I'm leaning towards the former as an explanation.

I found the Backgrounder app to be a great way to multitask on iPhone OS. First of all, it gives you a visual indication on the icon of every currently running app, including the Apple ones that are always running like Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod. Second, it's very intuitive and easy to use, you simply hold the home button down for 1 second instead of quickly pressing it, if you want to background the app instead of just exiting to the home screen. Third, it passes the number one use case very handily: I can listen to Pandora while surfing in Safari seamlessly, and it almost makes my iPhone seem like a functional computer.

iPhone 3GS with backgrounder is seriously a powerful device, and lets me have an insight into how powerful the iPad will be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fanboy. I won't be buying an iPad until I'm sure it can be jailbroken, and probably not rev. 1, because I'm sure rev. 2 will have the missing features like webcam, etc. I'm just saying that a jailbroken iPhone/iPad will be an impressive device.