skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are publicly readable access lists secure?
The scenario I'm thinking of is actually low tech, but I suppose the answer would be general. Let me explain the problem by way of example:

The university campus uses access lists signed by faculty to allow after-hours access to various office spaces, and security simply authenticates the student by comparing the human in front of them to the name and picture on the photo ID. The downside, which I just encountered, is that the access list letters may become outdated and so, in my case, I had to call the director of the lab and ask her to call security (naturally they didn't authenticate the caller :-D)

I was wondering, is it secure for, say, the chair of the physics department to submit a signed access list letter that simply points the security department to a URL on the physics department's website?

More generally, let's say there's a system where access is tied to an authentication system. If the authentication system involves a 1:1 token (like a photo ID or a password), and the access list is only writable by trusted members who are trusted through an entirely different mechanism (like the university's LDAP or physical access to a machine), is there any reason the access list itself can't be publicly readable (eg, posted on the website)?

So, in the case of the student trying to get into the lab on the weekend, is there any reason the department chair's access list letter couldn't read like this:

============================

From: Dr Heavy Duty, Chairman, Department of Physics

To: Lieutenant Cranky, Security

Subj: Access List for locked office spaces

please refer to the following URL for a continuously updated list of people I authorize access:<

http://university.edu/Physics/AccessList

Signed /H Duty/

============================

I suppose there's a corner case where you don't want to allow physical access to the webserver based on an authentication list kept on the webserver, but even then, short of cold boot dumping memory, the server itself is pretty good at controlling access.

Thoughts?
I attended this OSCON session, and while it got off to a slow start, by the middle/end I felt I'd been treated to some major new insights about a performance-impairing drug-like addiction to stress that may be very common.

So, I hope he puts his slides up in an easier-to-view format than a ZIP download, and if you start viewing them, don't bail out early until at least 2-3 slides after the one with the 'cognitive flexibility test'.
Riding Rails: This Week in Rails (July 26, 2008)
I don't think there is anything lame about your comment. The article in question explicitly involved IQ, and (because of differential representation by position) implicitly involved race, so your comment was relevant and on point, whether or not any given reader agrees with you.
Read this: http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2007/03/28/buy-when-...

Baron Rothschild was big on it :p
Despite my love for higher level discourse, both YouTube and Digg are doing fine without it. You don't die when the average vocal user is rude online. That's almost the definition of mainstream.
Silly question, Wired. Would you ask why NBC keeps the Sci-Fi Channel alive under that name, or why Disney/ABC keeps ESPN alive under that name?

It's branding. "Google Video" has a certain meaning to viewers, and "YouTube" has a different meaning.

Even if they get the same backends, it would make sense to have more serious and educational videos on "Google Video", while music, entertainment and amateur videos live on "YouTube".
New Facebook Layout Is Smart
Awesome photos. I just hope they don't take away Jupiter like they did to Pluto.
When I read that part I immediately thought of your essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular."

Maybe there's a bit of psychology at play here. There might be a lower out casting of nerds if the popularity gap is smaller. Going off the essay, maybe it's far more acceptable to become more intelligent (both intellectually and scholastically) in this type of environment.

If that's the case, it sounds like a school full of nerds who are cool with nerds--sign me up!
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/25/analyst-predicts-merger-of...
Could you explain why having a classmate that didn't speak Finnish natively is helpful for keeping up the bar?

Suppose you have an excellent transfer student who could do everything you did, but not in Finnish. Wouldn't your interaction be some kind of training for effective communication? Assuming again that said student is excellent, you would expect them to pick up the language in about a year, and wouldn't expect they become a hindrance during, would you?
Your Business Brickyard
Recommended by Seth Godin.
Old School IBM Slides
Phreaking docs are required reading for any honestly inquisitive hacker.
I messed up and I updated my post saying so: http://eisokant.com/2008/07/26/my-startups-secret-recipe/
Not mentioned in the article, but you can drop determinism to satisfy 4 other criteria for optimal voting: http://rangevoting.org/GibbSat.html
legally-enforced homogeneity

Honest question: Would you want to live in a country with legally-enforced diversity?

(Because that's where you're living.)
This kinds of stuff makes me wonder - if we send enough fungi onto other planets, can it adapt to live there, too?
Curiously, Scobledober's blog is mostly unreadable without Javascript.
Intelligence is certainly very complicated. For the sake of this discussion, I was taking intelligence to be "intelligence as defined/measured by IQ tests". Perhaps I was being sloppy and should have used a different word.
Internet Fame: The Voyeuristic Ouroboros
Fred's off.

Steve has been the subject of accusations that have crippled his company's stock this past month. Fred Wilson -- another fiery character -- would have shot back with the same passion.

For the record Jobs has publicly stated that he's fine; we know there were minor complications in a recent surgery, but that the rough patch is behind him. Fred can have his doubts about that story, but that disbelief doesn't make it a lie.

Til we know with any measure of certainty that Steve has side-stepped the topic of a major health issue, honesty's got nothing to do with it.
Tenerife Skunkworks: q/kdb are now available to all
New DNS exploit now in the wild and having a blast
Interesting idea. I always just wrote a python script to do the translating and transfer.
Google buries Digg deal. Marked as a dupe or just lame?
Digg has sixty+ employees and was recently described as close to breaking even. So they make money, they just also spend it all.

Also for those who haven't read Sarah Lacy's crappy book on Web 2.0, Kevin has already cashed out some shares.
I was thinking more about elementary education. I also excluded exchange students since they probably don't take the test. You are right. It could be helpful in other ways, but probably not in the scoring of PISA.

I would assume that learning won't get any easier when you don't know the language. If you get bad start early on, it can hurt you later on or even frustrade you. So even it might be small aspect, it seems that PISA-test rewards for homogenous.
Screenshots, anyone?
just go to www.new.facebook.com and see for yourself.
I hope someone recorded it, and it shows up later. There's a lot in the slides but, they're just slides.
The question is too vague to answer. What kind of 'diversity' and how is it 'enforced'?

I haven't emigrated, and I prefer more open immigration than either Finland or the U.S. allow.
I think you may be getting Montessori mixed up with Waldorf. Information on the montessori method is widely available (start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori, google for more). My son goes to a public Montessori school, and if I want access to the materials, I just ask the teacher. Everything is open, and parents (including prospective parents) are very much encouraged to observe the classroom.

Waldorf is kind of weird and secretive and expensive, and based on suspect and outdated science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
Scoble writes like Steve Gillmor with smaller words. I'm not sure what the point of this article is. The whole point of Venture Capital is to invest in small companies and grow them to a point where they can raise more money through other means - typically IPOs or acquisition. That they're failing badly is more about the US economy than some "VC disease."

So I guess what he wants is for investors to invest bucket loads of money for decades on promises and hot air. Or he wants someone to subsidize iphone usage...

My favorite part, though, is when he starts touting long dead products (Visicalc, Pagemaker) as examples of the kind of success that comes from a long term perspective.
Sounds like education in East Asia as well, except classical musical instrument lessons being the only extracurricular activities, which are almost as demanding as schoolworks.
In this vein, you might find this Robert X. Cringely article interesting: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070831_0028...

Money quote:

Video conferencing has been around for a couple decades, but telepresence is different from that. You can see the entire other side of the conference table, for example, and the people who are sitting across from you appear to be life sized. They can see you and you can see them. When another person speaks to you they can look you in the eye. Body language and emotions are easy to detect and the sound of each participant seems to come from his or her direction. You can watch the people who aren’t talking to see if they are even paying attention. It really is tele-PRESENCE and the fact that you are looking in a video screen is forgotten after a minute or two.
Apple, liking to preserve quality don't allow clones. With iPhone cloning, the VCs would see a market, and this is an issue: to clone or not to clone?
As another Dane I can say that a lot of the things that Paul laments in his essays do not exist in our schools. Honestly we grimace at the notion of a 'prom queen' or a 'homecoming' celebration of a sports team.

I think in part we feel it absurd in the extreme to focus so overtly on physical prowess in an educational context, and another part of it is that it just goes against our very egalitarian culture.

Ironically, where the higher focus on actual study works in favor of a nerd, the egalitarianism works against him. Lets just say I became a crack pencil artist courtesy of countless and countless hours spent waiting for the class to catch up.
I'll give you a hint:

It is a dynamic language with closures, higher order functions (lambda), map, join, the option to work in an expression-oriented manner, and the ability to modify the language to suit the task.

It's worth noting that a couple of the languages in the other list (the not "inferior" languages) lack one or more of those capabilities. What's trendy is not always the whole picture.
True. We don't have any athlete superpower or fierce popularity contests. I don't even remember that if anyone had been bullied over being good at school. Of course some kids are more popular than others, and there are always few tough guys, which are mostly regarded kind of sad cases.

But still for a half-nerd like myself, school was not a very intresting place to be. I was more interested in the real world and computers. School is like mundane job where you go because you have to, you have no control over it and nothing is real. Equal minds is great thing to have, but it means that you can't have so many best minds.

While our education may excel in PISA, still even our schools are not very inspirational places, which I think they should be.
Likewise. It turns out to be pretty easy to do. I even did it in PHP the last time I did a migration, as a way to teach myself the basics. Turned out to be more verbose than the prior Perl and Python code I'd written for the same purpose...but it worked, and still only took a few hours to write and test.
It's like saying math is about numbers.

Isn't it? I saw where you were going with the astronomy/telescopes analogy, but you lose me on the numbers bit.
I keep posting about this, but cambridge has an excellent public montessori elementary school (prek - 8).

My problem is the single mom thing. I have a bunch of ideas (and they are all BRILLIANT!) & a great co-founder, but I need to have inexpensive health insurance, and I don't have a life partner willing to pick up any slack. In order to afford the rent on our one bedroom & work crazy hours on a y combinator start-up, I need to save a few thousand dollars. I'll be mid-30s by the time I feel comfortable applying, but that's ok. Last summer I met a founder in his 30s, and it didn't seem to be a problem for him.

In the meantime, it's nights & weekends, which can also be fun if you like your project.
i go to digg when i need hand relief
[insert name of company] is dead. You heard it first here!
What's with all the one-liners?
Long live [insert name of company]!
Bingo, there is something very attractive about a small community.
therefore every growing community is doomed to die?
Then why is the US the most innovative country in the world? I am not saying the others aren’t, but overall the US is the most innovative regardless of the poor schools. Maybe it doesn’t really matter who earns the top scores, it is what you accomplish with it.
My Business Venture - Enterprise Web 2.0
Still playing with Ruby on Windows
In the financial world, we made potential acquirers sign non-disclosure, non-compete, and lockup agreements that usually lasted for a period of 12-24 months.

It's Google has enough negotiating leverage to get out of signing all of that.
1.Marian Woronin of poland ran 9.992
2.According to The Economist several groups of immigrants to America(italians, swedish, german etc) showed an iq of about 90 before integrating to society and about 100 after.Black americans seem to be stuck around 90.One possible explanation would be that they have a harder time integrating(if a swedish immigrant learn english good enough he can hide the fact that he is "a squarehead", what does it take for a black person?)
Math is about sets and relations and functions and logic, ..., and, yes, numbers. But many branches of math aren't particularly or specifically concerned with numbers (e.g. linear algebra, group theory, topology), and even those which seem to be (e.g. number theory or real analysis) can be thought of as about sets with particular properties (the mathematician's ideas of the integers and the real numbers are* just ideas of sets with particular properties).

[* are == need only be. The mathematician is allowed to be a realist about numbers and think that there are the real numbers etc., and that these are what she is reasoning about.]
Your neighborhood or mine? Is it okay if the good and decent men of congress choose your neighbors? Or should nationalist groups like La Raza be in charge of determining the country's composition? That's what I mean by "legally-enforced diversity": Powerful people, deciding for other people, whether they are acceptable, or whether they should be numerically marginalized.
lol math IS about numbers, dummy!
I've just summarized the article.

Language Snobs stress the superiority of one programming language over others. Some languages are extremely guilty of this (Lisp, SmallTalk, Python, Ruby, Scala, Haskell, etc) while others aren’t (Java, C#, VB, BASIC, PHP, Perl, C, etc). The snob languages talk about why they’re so great, and the other languages just point to what has been written in them as proof that they’re great (or at least good enough). </quote>
What the hell is he talking about? VCs routinely fund companies that don't have a business model or any near-term path to making "buckets of money". Twitter being a great example.
Tech At Work Doesn't Equal Tech At Play | My Philly Network
Online, Are You Really Reading?
'Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good,' - Sarah Lacy - NYTimes Review
A Souped-Up Model T May Have Been the First Mash-Up
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.” Wait a sec, who is responsible for writing up this history and making sure we all get a copy?
Does it start with a 'P'?
No I meant Montessori. The Wikipedia article and the information on montessori.org provide a short description and a few example activities, but neither contain anywhere near enough insight/information to make a rational evaluation of the program. So far as I can tell you pretty much have to accept everything on faith.
The Google Software Update Agent
How every conceivable action can be justified as "maximizing shareholder value"
Read A Mathematician’s Lament (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256176). It does a pretty good job (among other things) on explaining what the math is all about.
Hasn't Julia Allison been writing for some time? I know almost nothing about her, but there are like 10,000 women more attractive than her trying to do what she did, and she succeeded. My guess is she did a lot more than nothing to accomplish that.
Technology + Transparency = Helps you hire better
1. No accusation was flung - I just wrote a tidy summation of what happened.

2. This is not a "sock puppet" account. As I said long time (silent)reader. Never have I felt the need to respond to a comment until I read that utter ignorance and saw that it went unchecked.

3. The only thing I am angry with is that this comment is being given credence on a site that deems itself the treading ground of intellectuals. It's quite simple really, his comment amounts to the proposition "Black people are more stupid than whites"; if this is a proposition that's falseness is even a question here, perhaps I would do best to find another place to spend my time.
I've come to understand that sensationalist headlines like this one, "X is dead", actually mean "X is no longer interesting", once you take out the sensationalism. Even pg is guilty of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

If his essay was titled, "Microsoft is no longer interesting", would anybody still read it? We all know Microsoft is no longer interesting. But if you say 'dead', you can write an essay explaining WHY something is no longer interesting and still have everyone reading. Good job.
I think the main reason google walked away from this deal was that $200 million is simply too much money to spend on a acquisition that dosn't have a net positive effect throughout the company and the web. The fact that they walked away at the time they did shows you that there was were red flags that were raised somewhere and a serious reconsideration was in order. Theres also the issue of digg's technology...
The funny thing is is that if the GOOG acquisition had went through, and Kevin's stake was (as conjectured) 30%, he would have made exactly the sum the article she wrote predicted.
Seriously, as much info about Montessori as you want is out there, and unless the school you're dealing with is a little shady, you should be able to walk in & request anything without paying tuition. You can also find a lot more than those two sites on the internet.
Yes, and then you used the term "inferior tools" to refer to the first set of languages, which wasn't in the article.

I'm saying the classifications don't make sense:

If the point is "people who use the languages get things done", then Ruby and Python clearly belong in the first list, as there's plenty of code in those languages doing work in all sorts of fields.

If the point of the second list is the superiority of the languages due to purity (Smalltalk, Scala and Haskell, I guess, but not Lisp) then Python and Ruby don't belong in the second list. If the point is capability (where "dynamic" is a capability along with all of the other goodies, shared by almost all of the second list languages), then Perl belongs in the second list and Scala probably doesn't, since Scala is the language that has the least in common with the others in the list (which is not to say it has significantly more in common with the first list).

The point of the article is probably valid, but the lists are flawed. No matter how you classify the languages, at least a couple of the languages are out of place in the lists they've been put in. Leaving Perl, Python, and Ruby out of the picture altogether would have left a gaping hole in the argument (as they are quite good and powerful tools, with which lots of people have written useful code), but cramming them into the wrong slots also makes the argument weaker. So, I guess what I'm saying is that the argument turns out to somewhat weak...huh! It seemed so compelling to start with.
"the massive downvoting of the parent comment is a dishonest enforcement of political correctness."

I don't read Sailer's blog, but from what I understand it's mainly devoted to proving that African-Americans have lower IQs because of inferior genetics. Now you might say, well if this really is true, then wouldn't denying it be intellectually dishonest? Here's the thing though. The black-white IQ gap has been almost entirely explained by controlling for SES and other factors. Anyone who spends all day quibbling over the last two or three points clearly just has an axe to grind for other reasons.
Rumours of [insert name of company]'s death have been greatly exaggerated.
If you are asking if enforced diversity as it exists in this country today is ok, as in one cannot be discriminated against based on nationality, color, creed, or sexual orientation, then yes. I prefer that to a nation where tiny city states can determine whether or not they want their neighbors to be all white, or bosses can decide if they only want to hire men. That's totally fine with me, even if it needs to be legally enforced.

La Raza is not a nationalist group, but an organization to help disadvantaged Latinos. Do you know La Raza members?
its funny that the published date on this article is Jul 27th.. I thought today is 26th!!
I'd say it's more that the smaller the community, the greater the chance that the community as a whole can agree on what constitutes signal and what constitutes noise.
PISA 2006: Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World Executive Summary [pdf]
Their research was rather thrilling at the time.
I disabled my account years ago and then my school disabled my email so I can't re-enable it. Just as well though, I don't really want to go back. It's kind of like how when you start programming video games you don't play them as much anymore.
FTA: "We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers' objects. However, we didn't have the same protection in place to detect whether this particular internal state information had been corrupted. As a result, when the corruption occurred, we didn't detect it and it spread throughout the system causing the symptoms described above."
I'm curious about competitiveness: Are your grades public? Do people know how much other people scored in tests, etc.?
I did not equate publicly or otherwise "failure to denounce x with believing x". Indeed (and listen well here), failure to denounce x, if one knows x to be false, is WORSE than believing x.

This is the mechanism by which ignorance persists. The above is the opposite of education and what makes it even worse is when the silent party has the demagogue-ic status to immediately educate the many with a simple statement.

I don't know what you believe - as I said before I won't speculate. All I know is that if you knew lexlibra's comment to be nonsense, your silence (and calling it lame (and my comment 10x lamer) - sigh - just an embarrassingly juvenile response of the type I thought you sought to avoid here) says something you perhaps didn't want it to say; if you didn't know - I really should be spending my time elsewhere.
I see what they did there
A Look at Rails’ Complexity
Memory corruption.