skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huh? There are three people from Microsoft quoted in the article.

Of course the article has a tilt towards the interests of CIOs and IT managers -- it's on CIO.com. But I'm surprised that you don't recognize that's less about "does this individual really have the ability to predict the future" than "these are the guys building the most commonly used development tools." If a dev tool makes it easy for most developers to do something simply without the need for deep domain knowledge (i.e. follow a wizard), then by golly that'll be something that's commonly done. If the people who control the next round of dev tools think something is unnecessary, it will be left for programmers to do manually, "the hard way."
The lesson is simple, though: Don't trust an MD5 of any computer program. Oh, and PDF and Postscript files are programs, too.
MI5 alert on China's cyberspace spy threat
I think the lesson is simpler: you can't trust MD5 on data. And programs are stored as data, so you can't trust them either.

But the point is that you can't trust anything that you normally wouldn't consider to be programs either, like images and text files.
Probably not. Advertising is slowly becoming less like brainwashing and more like a valuable service to the consumer. Where there is value, there will be money. The only limit on that value I can think of will be reached when Google (or whoever) learns to read our minds perfectly.
I see 1984 in our future. Eric Schmitt is Big Brother!!!
Was this story killed?
(For anyone new to the site, you can get all the available Startup School talk mp3's with this feed I put together awhile back: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator-startupschool )

Ask PG: Speaking of Startup School, could we get the official video/audio from the last Startup School? I used my own poor audio for the last Startup School in this podcast feed, but it'd be great to replace it with the official video that was taken. Thanks!
Inventor makes energy efficient stove
Google asks reddit to remove #1 link inciting click fraud against Giuliani
MD5 is dead
Sha-1 it is, then. I wonder how long it will take the bittorrent protocol to switch.
sha-1 will eventually be compromised most likely

probably better to use sha-1 and md5 together, that way even if both are broken, it is very unlikely that an evil person will be able to create a fakefile that has the same sha-1 AND md5 hash as the realfile
to me it's not so much the casting but the misuse of CG... the monsters just don't look scary or convincing as much as videogame fake... the movie looked a lot freakier when you couldn't actually see the monsters; it became a joke once they were in full view

assuming that this was the director's decision, i'm not so sure he's a very good one
Well this is all good in theory, except that it requires the attacker to modify both the good file and the bad file to make them have the same MD5.

This is a more interesting attack vector for things like attacking digital signatures than untrusted binaries.
Ominous of selling out to the mainstream? Will Smith can do everything, he's the most popular man in Hollywood as far as mainstream appeal.
Anyone up for a meetup in SV this weekend?
I'm in Silicon Valley for the weekend (currently in Sunnyvale) so I figured it might be a good opportunity to meet some fellow news.YC'ers. Anyone up for some hacking, or maybe just getting a beer?
Fred Wilson: Why startups fail
No startup too small for Microsoft monster
I keep hearing all these reasons the Kindle "sucks". I would buy one the moment it becomes available. I'm guessing Amazon severely underestimated initial demand for the device so maybe it "sucks" a lot less than expected.
Does Disqus support News.YC? Or should I ask if News.YC will utilize Disqus?
There might be a limit, but until Google controls 100% of it they can continue to come up with products and steal advertising dollars from competitors.
Microsoft Acquires Mobile Focused Social Networking Site WebFives
7 Lies That Prevent Your Great Idea From Becoming A Real Business
Is this hacker news or SEO news?
CPU info:

Small Instance : 1x 2.6 GHz Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2218 HE w/1024 KB cache
Large Instance : 2x 2.0 GHz Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 270 w/1024 KB cache
Extra-Large : 4x 2.0 GHz Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 270 w/1024 KB cache

...but since each dual-core shows up once instead of twice in /proc/cpuinfo, instead of getting 2, 4, or 8 actual cores I think it's 1, 2, or 4. Not sure if this means on e.g. the Large you get 1 core on each of 2 CPUs, or both cores on 1 CPU (which could matter in the case of shared cache and also for memory access).

"2 compute units" means a 2 GHz core instead of 1 GHz, not 2 separate cores. So I suppose on the Small you get half of one 2.6 GHz core.

BTW, for Python people, you can use Python tools to access AWS (instead of the official Java tools):
http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-prefe...
If you can create matching hash pairs at will, the interesting attack in binaries is to distribute one that acquires a trusted reputation under the shared hash, then at a later date replace it with the problem one.

Not too bad of a risk if diverse hashes are often used and people promptly move away from any hashes that demonstrate collisions; could be a nasty surprise if the collision is privately discovered and sprung at an inopportune moment, or people keep trusting an older hash after collisions start appearing in the wild.
Bill Clementson's Blog: Lisp is for Entrepreneurs - Part 2 (Amazon)
BitTorrent has never used MD5.

RSA Security as early as 1996 was recommending against MD5 in situations where collision-resistance was important, because research had started to show weaknesses in its family of hashes. [1]

BitTorrent does use SHA1 (last I checked -- it's been a while). Recently, SHA1 has been shown to have problems, indicating that its collision-resistance isn't as strong as its design target, and might yield to demonstrated collisions soon. [2]

So BitTorrent may want to plan for a transition to new hashes sometime in the next couple of years. Possibilities for a next-few-decades hash could include SHA256/SHA384/SHA512, Whirlpool, or the to-be-determined winner of the upcoming NIST hash competition (like the one that chose AES). [3]

[1] ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/cryptobytes/crypto2n2.pdf

[2] http://www.educatedguesswork.org/movabletype/archives/2007/0...

[3] http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/index.html
heh, if you want to drive down to santa cruz my neighbor is having a bday party and hiring a stripper.

lol
Hacker News IRC chat room?
Anybody interested in starting one?
Because Google has proven that they know how to index, and cluster, information better than anyone else. Having all the information in the world at your fingertips is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for omniscience; you must also know which box the ark of the covenant is in.
For a while, we tried #news.yc on freenode. Now there are a few of us on #startups.
Go danielha!
At least Myspace knows how to handle their 404s.
Pulling Digits out of Pi
Perl on Rails
Ug, another one of those n-page articles with about 100 words per page, and no single-page option. I gave up after the first page.
I think hashing your sequence twice with different salt suffixes will make it much stronger, if not unbreakable for the next decade. Or am I missing something?

So, for input sequence t a better hash can be computed as

md5(md5(t + salt1) + salt2)

Once computers get more powerful just add one more step with saltN, and so on.

Upd: length of t can be included in calculation as well.
"when the electricity goes out, she can't use the Turbococina because it needs the fans to move air into the combustion chambers."

That sounds like a major deficiency to me. If the people have electricity, why not just use an electric stove to begin with?
Any pointers to a useful irc tutorial? I am trying to connect with pidgin, and have a message like this: freenode-connect: Received CTCP 'VERSION' from freenode-connect

But that doesn't seem to put me in some kind of IRC mode, because none of the commands from the tutorial at http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html work.

I feel stupid for not understanding irc, but I have never used it before...
Yeah, I also like Stevey's blogs.

But, as the quoted article exemplifies, he is about as passionate about programming languages as he is about text editors. He will write one blog article about Lisp and Erlang and how they would give you competitive advantage, and then another article about how Emacs makes you more productive than any other editor, and how using IDEs is for lesser programmers.

Now, I'm not sure about programming languages. But the part about text editors is plain ridiculous. There are great hackers who use vi (Paul Graham) and there are great hackers who swear by Microsoft's IDEs (John Carmack). How many lines of code do you write per day? 100? 200? 500? No matter how great a coder you are, the biggest bottleneck is the speed of thinking, not the speed of typing. I would even say learning touch-typing is an overkill, as far as writing code is concerned.

So that's the reason I'm not taking Stevey's rants exactly seriously. Tomorrow he may decide that eating the right kind of cereals for breakfast is necessary for achieving greatness, and you bet he will be able to make a case for it as convincing as he does for Ruby and Emacs. He is a very exceptional blogger, no question of that.
I use 'xchat', and it asks me which channel I want to join after connecting to irc.freenode.net. At that point, you type in #startups. Or you can usually do /join #startups from the command line.
Hey, pidgin supports IRC?! Trying.. yup, I got it to work! Pretty easy: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Protocol%20Specific%20Questi...

Feel free to mail me if you'd already read that, and I can help you get it working. I'm really glad I saw your comment, so I feel like I owe you :) Now if we could just integrate IRC presence into the IM interface..

> I feel stupid for not understanding irc, but I have never used it before...

I never got into irc until recently -- one of my friends recently said the difficulty in getting started is part of the reason IRC hasn't gone the way of slashdot or digg or reddit :)
I wonder if they are going to open source it? and if not why not, I pay my TV license so I expect it too ;p
My brother said once that he wanted a t-shirt saying: "I used Ruby before Rails."
Dynamic CSS via JavaScript
Efficiently computing locations from IP addresses
Thanks, that worked! The trick was to join via the "Buddies->Join a chat" menu, rather than trying command messages.
What's wrong with enterprise? Isn't that another word for a company that makes money, doing actual work?
awesome -- congrats bryan!
Thanks - see you on irc, I guess ;-)
You can also use www.mibbit.com to connect ;)
23 Surefire Small-Business Marketing Tips for 2008
The Case Against Hyperblogging
Don't scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart
Interesting follow up here:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=067a2e...

Even Big Co.'s like Microsoft and the GOOG have scalability issues.
Cuter scooter defined by electricity, portability
It's energy efficient, it's clean, compact and simple, and, above all, it's very cool.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with URLs. I was talking about the implications of implementing this in different ways and saying that there's no easy way.
Agreed. Although tagclouds still need to die :)
Hm. There are a lot of stoves to this general pattern. The electricity is only a few watts and drives efficient combustion.

Here's one from an American firm:
http://www.woodgascampstove.com/

Philips has one too:
http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2006/0602...

The Hexayurt (http://hexayurt.com) infrastructure package specifies a stove in this general class:

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/TIDES%20-%20Hexayurt%20Infras...

It'll be interesting to see if, when all is said and done, he's come up with something new, though. None of these stoves reach the 95% level of efficiency he was discussing in the article.
Sohail if you are so passionate about this space why don't you see if you would be a good fit for disqus?

Also, execution is everything...
the biggest bottleneck is the speed of thinking, not the speed of typing.

I agree, but I've had experiences where I get a glimpse of the solution in my mind and I struggle to get it down fast enough, afraid that I might lose it before I get it all down somewhere. In situations like those, I'm very much grateful for touch-typing, autocomplete, and terse languages.
Rock :-)

Let me know at donal.h at that gmail place.
So true about Madison. Great city when the temperatures are above, I don't know 25 degrees.

I miss the angelic brewing co. and the farmers market. Oh, the crazy stuff you could find during moveout and the broom street theater is ridiculous.
ha, I just used it to remember my username... :)
Your working environment influences your thinking. You don't have to be typing all the time for a poor editor to interfere with your ability to get things done. Try coding for 3 months exclusively in notepad and see how much productivity you lose. (Or note what other tools you wind up using to make up for the deficiency)

The information you have visible on the screen and easily accessible in a keypress or two is also critical to thinking quickly and efficiently. Yegge once mentioned that he had the perl documentation as emacs .info pages, meaning it probably takes him a few seconds to find a number of frequently used resources. That means he'll probably be better at leveraging standard functions than someone who uses Google. I find the split-screen function in emacs far superior than trying to have multiple windows windows open and arranged on the screen.

One way that emacs is superior to Visual Studio is the keyboard macro facility. I frequently find that I need to make some minor correction that needs to be repeated a few times. Either it's too small a change to be worth refactoring completely using language abstractions or a clunky macro system like MS word, or too complicated to be suitable for copy/paste or find/replace. In a lesser editor, you build up a subconscious resistance to making small corrections like that, so even though you may not be typing furiously all the time, the weaknesses of the editor still affect the way you think and the solutions you're willing to use.

start macro(C-[), search to semicolon(C-s, ;), kill to end of line(C-k), move to beginning of the line(C-a), yank killbuffer(C-y), move to beginning of line(C-a), move down, end macro(C-]).

This is a quick macro that moves everything after the semicolon to the beginning of the line, and can be repeated for consecutive lines as often as necessary. Suppose you had a section of code that looked like this:

do_thing(x, y, x); do_other_thing(a, b, c);
to_the_death(j, k, l); to_the_pain(wfb);
do_thing(c, f, e); do_other_thing(t, t, q);
#etc for maybe a dozen lines.

Suppose you need to swap the position of the functions on each line, such that "do_other_thing" comes before "do_thing" and "to_the_pain" comes before "to_the_death."

Without a keyboard macro facility like the one in emacs, you're stuck jumping around using copy-paste. It will probably take a few minutes, and when you're done you'll have probably lost your train of thought. So even though it may have had a small effect on the lines of code you produced within a given 5-10 minute period, it may significantly affect the trajectory of the entire session. After you get used to emacs, using a macro like this is as easy as typing a line of code.

Visual Studio has its advantages. It has a terrific runtime debugger, for example, and is great for visualizing data structures. But it's worth talking about, and Yegge has some great insights.
The book the "Artist's Way at Work" by Mark Bryan, Julia Cameron, and Catherine Allen offers an approach called "morning pages" that is similar to a log but helps to overcome writers block (as well as act as a refinery for written pieces still percolating). Some references:

http://www.artistswayatwork.com/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0688166350

http://paperartstudio.tripod.com/artistsway/id3.html

although the book encourages you to write them in longhand I found that typing on a laptop in a coffee shop or library or anywhere that was different from where I normally worked (to break association with work space) worked for me.
I use the firefox plugin Chatzilla, only because I'm on linux and don't like xChat and all those other IRC clients. When I'm using windows (which is like...never...) I use MIRC.
Actually, Gmail's reply button is placed physically before its reply to all button, and I usually find myself hitting that instead of reply to all.

Of course, it all comes down to how retarded your friends are, because they might hit it just to send everyone a message that you may or may not want to read. Personally I think it isnt about removing the button, just getting less-retarded friends.
Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest. - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr

I think people considering the switch to a new lang need to read No Silver Bullet, from those considering COBOL to those considering Rails or CL.
It's still a bad idea to associate blog-writing skill with technical and even interpersonal skill. It's also a bad idea to make too many assumptions about the reason why someone might choose not to have a blog. A guy with a family might not want to risk getting the wrong sort of attention, for example.
One Reply: GMail's conversation view (why isn't this standard with every e-mail client?)
thanks drew!
Concept-Oriented Programming
7 Tips for Evaluating Web Based Tools and Services
Double-checking Dawkins
PG uses vi? For Lisp? Has he gone mad?

Well, on second thought this makes sense if he's programming in Arc and Scheme these days since Slime wouldnt help much.

In theory I agree with you about editors. One tends to do more thinking than typing, but you need an editor that gets out of your way. I think the same applies to touch typing. Once I get into a state of flow I don't want to have any distractions. For now emacs isn't helping since I still need to lookup certain functionality. But it definitely looks promising.
it was easier for botler since it send requests to all users of the channel. Detecting bits that simply sit there and monitor all data might be harder. Although this might be a violation of the TOS on some networks.
This article makes an argument for having smart people, not for coding in Lisp. There's no indication that they couldn't've written something similarly powerful in some other language, only that they chose not to.
Your example is sort of self-defeating insofar as who would ever type code that looked like

do_thing(x, y, x); do_other_thing(a, b, c);
to_the_death(j, k, l); to_the_pain(wfb);
do_thing(c, f, e); do_other_thing(t, t, q);
#etc for maybe a dozen lines.

? And what IDE wouldn't make that pretty from the get go? And why would you have more than one instance of something like two functions needing positions switched when that could've been refactored out? Very artificial example, and even still doesn't demonstrate the strength of Emacs over somethink like Visual Studio.
I agree. But it makes me wonder, why did the "smart" developers choose Lisp and not something else?
Well, in the article, the smart developers actually chose C, too. And all of Google's smart developers are choosing C++ and Python. 37 Signals' smart developers are choosing Ruby. Ad infinitum...

We really need to get away from arguing for the goodness of languages based on the success of the people using them.
Ask YC:  When (if ever) is it better to submit to reddit/digg on a low traffic day?
Seems to me to be another question of "should we let stupid users do stupid things" and you can't really help that, no matter how many buttons you add or take away. The reply to all button is actually quite useful.
they actually looks pretty cool. If they can make em cheap then I would get one.
Just use SHA-2.
yeah I had an idea to do something like this too but when I researched it there were a couple of other startups doing it and I couldn't bring anything new to the idea and the services doing are great so I binned it. All in a days work for people in the startup space.
The Other Other Road Ahead
At the risk of misinterpreting what you're getting at: the lesson to take from NSB is not "Don't switch languages" or "Switching languages is ineffective".

The lesson is: "Software development is inherently difficult; don't expect that to change just because you switch to a better language."

Brooks readily embraces and promotes the idea that better languages are vitally important, to strip away complexity that isn't strictly necessary for the already sufficiently complex task of building large software systems.
My MacBook Pro makes me squishy
Facebook Beacon Isn't On The Coke Side Of Life
Don't scale.

Don't need a roadmap.

Don't do UML.

Don't do "X" where "X" is some Software Engineering principle.

Take shortcuts!

Seems to me that these guys don't want to do the painful and boring (but necessary) part of developing software.
Heh...

CTCP Version is just testing your client, so basically the server is just checking what irc client you are using.

Similarly, there is CTCP ping that you can ping someone to see if their connection is still alive.

Both you can ignore, you want to /join #channel, /part #channel, /msg nickname, and so on.
well said. well, the having chose Lisp part might not be the most interesting part, but deciding to write an application as an Emacs plugin is pretty interesting.
NYT: Facebook's Zuckerberg Lied To Us; Coke: Ditto
What OpenID Needs (Answer: Marketing)
You need to ride the train. Submit to news.yc on Sunday afternoon. Assuming your submission hits the top of news.yc, then submit to Reddit on Monday morning. You add a "reddit this" button to your post right before you submit to Reddit so that the people being referred from news.yc on Monday morning vote it up on Reddit. Then once it hits the top ten on Reddit, submit to Digg. You also put the "Digg this" button on your site at this time. Make sure you also have a Del.icio.us and a StumbleUpon button because you'll need the few extra diggs from these two places to hit the front page of Digg.

Now to hit the front page of news.yc, your post needs something to do with either entrepreneurship or Paul Graham. To make the front page of Reddit, your post needs something involving Ron Paul. And to make the front page of Digg, it needs to be a top ten list. So basically if you're serious about "riding the train", the ideal post should be a top ten list about Ron Paul Graham.
What happened to the Saved tab?
I just realized the Saved tab is gone from the top. Was there a recent code change that broke this or has this been removed intentionally?
GNU folks notice PDF functionality is missing, decide to do something about it
I moved it to the profile.
No; the reason to avoid most of these things is so that you can focus on something way more important: figuring out what the software should do. Exploratory programming is not a mere shortcut.
Re: "Also, how are you going to organize the different versions of your site? Will you just use the same URL for each page"