skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The term one-hoss shay in John Walker's crisis letter (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349676). I didn't know what it meant, so I looked it up and found that it referred to this poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes gives this description:

"There is a practical lesson to be got out of the story. Observation shows us in what point any particular mechanism is most likely to give way. In a wagon, for instance, the weak point is where the axle enters the hub or nave. When the wagon breaks down, three times out of four, I think, it is at this point that the accident occurs. The workman should see to it that this part should never give way; then find the next vulnerable place, and so on, until he arrives logically at the perfect result attained by the deacon."
I'm sure many people here will be able to obtain one of those if they try hard enough.
The most important passwords I have are the ones for online banking and the like where you certainly aren't going to be doing bloody 25 billion attempts an hour.
HCI Remixed
excellent points!

One thing I would like to add:
In India, during booming times one problem startups face is finding good people at affordable rates. The demand supply equation is so bad that someone with 2 years experience in any sort of hacking will land a job that pays x+n where x is the current pay and n substantial percentage of it. Now in tougher times people would be willing to join and also stick around.
Wow! I was surprised. I thought my password would be much easier to crack. As it turns out, I'm safe for the next 20 days or so.
Its an amazing simple idea and tool!

So much data on there for us start-uppers to use for research, marketing, as well as building innovating services using the data. One could create a crowd sourced Rotten Tomatoes-esque site. One example of many what can be done with the data there!
Sync service Syncplicity raises $2.35M
Selling Ads on Your Twitter Background? You'll Love Magpie
This is itself the problem. There isn't any defined purpose for the up/down arrow, so people just interpret it with their own vague standards and act accordingly. Everybody will be able to make a case for their up/down votes and everybody will be right, but will also reveal very little, because you simply can't tell what the vote was on.

If you gather a bunch of crazies and give them voting buttons, the result will still be crazy. If you take away voting buttons from sensible people, the discussion will still be sensible.

The problem isn't that the voting promotes group-think. It's the entire premise of voting that is skewed. Once every while you can find a comment here, downvoted to oblivion, simply for stating an unpopular opinion. Before the issue of group-think comes into mind, you'd have to wonder what the down-voters are thinking, and further, how the way they think influences the overall discussion here.
It's $180 to apply.

Even beyond the large amount of money, the fact that they're asking for money from applicants (read: potential award recipients) undermines the credibility/prestige of the award.
Should Google Go Nuclear?  Clean, cheap nuclear power
Anatomy of a Facebook Ad Failure
Just looked through a few -- these presentations are excellent. I'd recommend them to anyone looking to learn iPhone development. (Not too surprising. Both lecturers work on iPhone development at Apple, and Paul Marcos has been teaching Cocoa at Stanford for a while.)
While I'm not surprised by this, it kinda sucks. If you are going to make mobile pages, being able to test on as many browsers as possible is a good thing.

With moves like this, Apple pretty much forces me to keep a Windows Mobile phone around as well.
We can do password guessing way better than brute force by generating strings using a Markov model instead of randomly. I wrote a paper on how to do this a few years ago http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/abstracts.html#pwd Some of the techniques have since found their way into John the Ripper. (and possibly other tools; I haven't checked.) The upshot is that you can't calculate strength with a simple formula like this. At best you get an upper bound on the time needed to crack, by a few orders of magnitude.
Part of me likes to believe that the mere fact that so many of us worry about this issue, wish to discuss how to prevent it, and so forth may end up being enough to keep it from happening.

I see so few comments here that deserve significant down voting, but the ones I come across that do have already been trashed to oblivion. Hell, I've had quite a few of mine own comments absolutely crucified and I feel no need to argue most of them. Comments aren't what I'm worried about, it's submissions.

Anyway, on the topic at hand: I agree that Zed did the morally right thing in the situation. Was it what I would have done? Probably not, but only because I don't much care for solving mysteries given almost no evidence or reason to believe something is actually wrong. As for reddit and "social news" sites in general, I stopped actually reading the comments long ago. I liken it to reading comments on Youtube; there is absolutely no redeeming value in it. HN, on the contrary, tends to have more value in the comments than the actual article some of the time. It's very surprising and may be the only thing keeping my rampant cynicism about "intelligence on the Internet" in check, as far as discussions are concerned.
You should be developing mobile sites, not iPhone sites.

Or do you think that making "MSIE only" sites too is an acceptable way of dealing with web-pages and users?
...find a comment here, downvoted to oblivion, simply for stating an unpopular opinion...

I agree. It's happened to me a few times. Unfortunately, you can't force people into voting based on the "quality" of an opinion over their moral, ethical, or personal regard for that opinion. All you can really do is hope there are more free-thinkers than drones.
A 'properly designed' DT fusion reactor creates much less waste than an equivalently powered nuclear reactor, and moreover, the waste doesn't last as long: with a half life of a dozen years, not thousands. This means that you can store the waste just about anywhere where the higher isotopes of the surrounding material are stable, and keep it there for a hundred years, and cycle it out. Since there's not much waste, and you don't need to keep it contained effectively 'forever', there's not much storage that one needs in order to power the world at a steady state.

Of course, the problem is what form a 'properly designed' DT reactor would take. This involves a materials problem that hasn't yet been solved: how to maintain structural integrity under massive magnetic and temperature stresses, while keeping enough lithium around to breed tritium out of outgoing neutrons. Not easy.

There are other forms of fusion, so called 'aneutronic' fusion, that would avoid these materials and waste problems almost entirely, but in exchange for a much harder plasma physics problem. Bussard, the one talking in the video, believed that the Polywell might be able to achieve aneutronic fusion, between protons and boron-11. This is generally regarded as difficult; if the electrons and ions thermalize, they'll lose energy faster than the fusion could create it. The Polywell could conceivably avoid this though (I worked on a similar project in aneutronic fusion while I was at Princeton).

There are two main technical reasons fusion power is still being pursued: it remains a possibility that it's cheaper at ultrahigh capacities (many GW) than coal or solar or wind (we don't really know, but it is in fact quite a possibility), and it's portable, meaning it could be used on submarines and ships (Bussard had funding from the US Navy, for example) and spacecraft.

The third, of course, is that academic and engineering disciplines, and especially those federal funded, have astonishing momentum. :-)
Thousands of years from now, we will be far more technologically advanced. When we run out of uranium, it will be orders of magnitude simpler to develop alternatives on the off chance that we haven't yet. I don't think finiteness of nuclear is a practical concern. When our energy needs exceed what our Dyson sphere can provide, we'll need an alternative to solar as well.

As for the waste issue... shoot it into the sun? I don't know what the tradeoffs are between renewables and nuclear, but if nuclear is far more feasible at the moment as I suspect, it seems pretty reasonable to go for it. I'm pretty sure we'll have a good solution to the waste issue within the next century or two.

(tl;dw, so I don't know if the video mentions any of this.)
Okay then, I should point out that the talk is about nuclear fusion, not fission.
Happy 20th birthday, Internet worm
According to wikipedia it was funded by this nonprofit, soliciting tax-deductable donations. http://emc2fusion.org/
Protect your mental health with payday loan
Just when you thought that things couldn’t get any worse, more banks went under. More countries are declaring economic crisis. It seems that the world’s financial problems are bound to get worse.
Oh it works just it often crashes (the whole browser).
I think the moral of this story is, "Don't listen to Arrington." I consider this possibly the most important advice ever, right behind "Don't light yourself on fire."
20 Ideas for Social Entrepreneurs
"As for the waste issue... shoot it into the sun?"

Ah, if the rocket explodes, which does happen, waste everywhere!

Also, strangely, it takes quite a lot of energy to get to the sun (you might think one could just 'fall into it', but you have to fight against the earth's orbital velocity!)
Oops. Seems like we were about twice more talkative and twice less attentive than needed.
This was posted before... "you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer" is not self-replication.

We don't expect this machine to be able to make itself out of thin air (though that would be awesome). But in order to be self-replicating, it must be able to build and assemble itself automatically from a set of input materials with no human intervention other than providing the input materials.

As it is, it is not self-replicating, it is merely "capable of producing some of its own parts to help in the later assembly of a copy of itself" - by no means an unworthy achievement, but let's call a cat a cat.

If it was able to produce all its parts but needed human intervention to assemble them, it would still not be self-replicating, merely "capable of producing all of its parts so that copies can be manually assembled".

Unfortunately, this machine is incapable of self-replication by design, since it cannot interace with an output product larger than or the same size as itself. Given this, it is even more wrong to call it self-replicating.
(A better link: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/103008-morris-worm.htm... )

When my friends and I got our hands on the source code of the worm it took us a while to understand it. It was ahead of anything else we had seen before and it sure pushed a few of us towards computer security. And it served as an early wake up call for sysops, something the Windows camp for example got too late.

Now virus and worm researchers have strong and careful methodology. Something particularly interesting today is mobile phone security research performed on Faraday cages:
http://radian.org/notebook/van-helsingfors (scroll close to bottom.)
so heroku isn't dead?
Download The Big Bang Theory Episodes for Free
Episode 6 will be aired on Nov. 3rd 08, this means that there will be no Big Bang Theory Episode this monday. Episode 6 has a very interesting plot, a young grad is attracted to Sheldon. One and all are surprised about it including Sheldon. It would be interesting to see how Sheldon handles this situation. After having a look at the pics it seems that Sheldon is enjoying the company of a new friend.
Very disappointing. I watched the whole thing, all the while expecting that the robot arm would attack the children and leave bleeding and broken bodies everywhere. What kind of halloween is it without a dose of horror?
Maybe he's trying to qualify for Godwin's law.
I expect similar things to happen when watching anything. I don't know why I let myself be disappointed so often :(
Wild. I just read today that the navy is funding EMC2 so that they can further their fusion research.

I also watched, just today, this vid: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760... , in which Eric Lerner talks about dense plasma focus fusion. He makes the point, towards the end, that DPF fusion is about (literally) a million times closer to obtaining fusion than even the Polywell scheme. The core of these DPF devices are about as big as your hand.

I'm not putting down the Polywell scheme. I just thought the link to Lerner's talk was interesting as well. (It's also 64+ minutes long.)
For what it's worth, I dropped out of a top CS program a couple years ago and never looked back. I am much happier now.

I've always wanted to do research, but I eventually came to see academia as a life with little to recommend it. Professors spend most of their time teaching, advising, writing grants, speaking, doing grunt work---not a lot of room for deep thought. And as a result of the publish-or-perish system, much of the work being done has no lasting consequence; I found this demoralizing.

I don't know if this rings true to your experience, but if it does, and you're seriously unhappy, consider quitting while you're ahead. One day there may come a time when you feel that if you quit you're a failure.

As for doing research on one's own, all I can say is that I'm trying to do some. I feel more inspired than I did in grad school, where my first thought was always "will this get me a publication?" On the other hand, I'm not producing anything publishable, so you be the judge. I do from time to time wonder if this makes me a crank, but my opinion is that you're not a crank until you're pleading with people to take you seriously.

I highly recommend the book Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt, which helped give me some perspective when I was making my decision.
I can certainly understand that some want HN to only be hacker tech stuff and nothing else. However, I hack and build IT companies because of their social value. I think most do. The tech is a conduit, not the end itself, regardless of how much we get geeky about the tech.

A 4 year U.S. election cycle is a big event and based on the extreme volatile economy, directly related to poor governance, I see some ties between hacker news and politic news to be meaningful.

You may not get paid to talk about politics, but it is a key part of all our lives. Perhaps if we spent more time paying attention to governance in the intervening 4 years, we wouldn't have such a mess on our hands.

My opinion is to let the existing voting system of HN follow its nature and see what happens.
Totally agree. I've found that one of the most depressing things is feeling like a "cog in the wheel". If someone sent me this letter, I WOULD open up the window and scream "I'm going to make this product the best I can", and trust that I will be rewarded for it as a shareholder. That would cast all what I have historically labeled as "cynicism" toward my employer away. I'd believe that they finally "get me".

I guess it's all about just getting the employees and management on the same page and attacking a problem - with a startup it is really easy, since the division between the two is pretty small and blurred. And that's why we love the startup lifestyle.
While the Autodesk file makes for interesting reading, I'd find Walker's personal opinions a little more credible if there were more material from other sources.

I've always been bothered by his attitude that he made no mistakes in how he handled an interview with an analyst who subsequently smeared Autodesk, after it lost half its market value in one day - http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_99.html
Indian iPhone users are getting a sloppy deal, *really* sloppy deal
Also you have to read 2 or 3 times as many words just to figure out what goes where. And I can't see what is broken about the way most places organize signup forms now.
Manipulation by pity is the single human quality I hate the most. It might be possible to build a complete personality on avoiding to manipulate others, ever; I'm trying to.
Idk. Wii has a web browser and it sucks and nobody uses it. I purchased it out of curiosity, and what a waste.

Without a reasonable keyboard, there's not point. And reading the internet off the TV sucks. I'd rather surf on my Moto Q, and that's saying a lot because surfing on that tiny thing sucks ass.
Big Screen Viewing at the Least Budget.
I want to move to Hong Kong to be able to use iPhone without getting incarcerated in a carrier jail!
Building the back-end of the Tour of California “Tour Tracker” using Flex Data Services
Kind of out of date, but it seems interesting, and I love cycling:-)
Typo on http://futuretweets.com/account/signup/:

> No problem, changes are you already have an OpenID url.

...should probably have "chances".

I dig the design.
Facebook May Be Growing Too Fast. And Hitting The Capital Markets Again.
I don't hear attacks like those mentioned in this article nowadays, prolly because of
1) widespread usage of FF/Thunderbird (IE/Outlook is still in the map thanks to BIG corporates)
2) More Macs
3) Hackers have been force-civilized at a correctional facility called Y-combinator HN.
Hell - no effort required.
Even gmail, etc. will reject a fair amount of spam outright, and you'll never see it; however, for those messages, the mail server won't even accept responsibility for the email, and the sender will instead get a failure notice. YC should be getting bounces if that happens.
Intercal: Hardcore hackers only
Wow thanks, I've actually seen the title of that before somewhere. Looks like an awesome resource.

I'll play with that over the weekend.
I've created wordlists from Wikipedia database dumps some time ago (http://benjamin-schweizer.de/files/wordlist-wikipedia/); they are pretty large and thus, useful for dictionary attacks. The wordlists are sorted, common words are on top of the lists.

I think that there is a typical password length, so you could improve the sorting based upon a multi-dimensional rating scheme. I'd use expected password length and commonness of a word as factors. Mixing these real words with computer generated words might speed up brute force attacks.

However, I'm not sure how to integrate ordered wordfiles with rainbow tables. Any ideas?
Thanks! I fixed the typo :)
After reading your comment, I immediately headed over to Wikipedia to refresh my memory on the Monty Hall problem. The results of my search are a good illustration of why I love the internet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem

The article is nearly 6000 words and includes diagrams, detailed mathematical explanations, a very detailed synopsis of the history of the problem, and links to like 50 sources.

All for a probability puzzle. Unbelievable.
Aslam Raffee, Innovator in Open Source Public Policy
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Yeah, because Zed now has a name and number of someone's ass to personally kick. I eagerly await a follow-up, YouTube video, and plausible movie deal. :D
I don't think the first worm is comparable to modern viruses, at all. For one thing, the intention was (mostly) innocent, but things got out of control (young folks are often completely blind to the "what's the worst that could happen?" side of things). For another, most folks viewed it as a necessary bump in the road on the path to wider spread Internet usage. There were numerous serious security flaws in the wild that simply were not being patched. I remember the aftermath of the worm, and most of my geeky friends thought rtm got a bum wrap over the whole thing, when it became a legal matter. (We were all doing far more willfully malicious things in our small town way. Phreaking, warez, etc. was how nerds without access to the Internet got up to no good back then.)

The worm is also part of why modern BIND and Sendmail have reasonably good security records. No one took security seriously until then...but for the Internet to be as successful as it has been, security has to be the first and last thing any developer thinks about.
It is all about political will. Germany has shown the world that it is possible. And it is made possible via a so-called feed-in tariff scheme. 14% of Germany's energy originates from renewable energy sources (mainly wind power). And Germany will reach 20% by 2013 and will reach 30% by 2030. Germany is now the largest producer of PV panels and among the largest producers of wind turbines. Gemany's alternative energy plan created a huge industry. So, less dependency on foreign energy, less CO2 emission and the creation of a lot of jobs. Sounds to me like a winning strategy. See: http://www.hermannscheer.de/en/index.php?option=com_content&... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
Someone should have done that many years ago, when TeX had a chance of succeeding as a mainstream typesetting language, along with allowing people to use their not-bitmapped, TTF (and later OTF) fonts without conversion tools.

I think now it's a little too late.
Zend Framework has an RSS reader. http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.feed.html
Congratz Jeff. You've made it. Your famous enough that people are trying to get famous by mentioning you.
rainbow tables are an implementation of the time-space tradeoff concept: you are trying to search through a space so large you cannot enumerate it. if you have already enumerated it, as in a wordlist, it is not meaningful to use rainbow tables. it's not a question of how; it's not even a well-defined operation.

that's great that you've made that list though.. i wanted word frequency tables for my startup which is an entirely unrelated type of project. if i hadn't found this i would have compiled it myself; thanks much :)

while your list doesn't have frequencies, i guess i can use the position in the list as a proxy for frequencies. but it's not optimal. any chance you can put up a list which also has the counts?
Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents (Scribd acquisition to follow shortly)
20 days? My password is safe for the next 1,688.24 days.
> Here's some free advice: never mistake rudeness for intolerance of utter nonsense.

To prove my post nonsense, you'd have to have come up with some supporting arguments against it, which your post did not.

You're still rude. The caps are unnecessary. If your argument was strong enough, you wouldn't need either.

Sure, there are people who use TeX. I didn't say they weren't any.

Crapflooding Hacker News to prove some people use TeX doesn't prove that most people can use TeX.

If you still don't get it:

* Submit your school work in TeX

* Submit your resume in TeX.

* Visit a magazine publisher and ask what they use for layout

* Write a book. Submit it in TeX. Some places may still accept it. They are by far the minority.

When you're done, check out
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, particularly the 'In Comments' section.
JavaScript Meets Ruby: John Barnett Explains Johnson
Much like the Facebook applications course Stanford offered last year (and still offers?)

iPhone (and Facebook) app development is the type of stuff that any sufficiently intelligent programmer (surely most Stanford CS students?) should be able to pick up from books, tutorials, documentation, etc.

If you've got the opportunity to study CS at Stanford, I'd focus on the CS fundamentals, not the latest trendy technology. Though if you're looking for a fun break from the harder stuff, maybe it's worthwhile?