skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And all the fast hashes get broken eventually?

I'd phrase it as "because hashes have historically attracted less attention than ciphers, it took longer for us to figure out how much of a margin of error to design into hashes".

For both block ciphers and hashes, the vast majority of designs rely on iterated mixing functions, and long before the complete designs are broken cryptographers figure out how to attack reduced-round versions. There's nothing inherently broken about the designs behind either MD5 or SHA1 -- if you created an MD5++ hash which exactly followed the design of MD5 but used twice as many mixing rounds, I don't think anyone would be able to find collisions for it.
It isn't that common. If it becomes more common I'll write something for it.
How to Run PHP in Erlang nodes
An old Lisper told me his opinion that Naggum almost singlehandedly destroyed the CL community, by being both so smart and so noxious that his behavior became a sort of local standard.

On another note, Dan Weinreb has been actively working to create a renewed, less dysfunctional CL community. Which reminds me that I really ought to find a way to contribute to that.
Erlrc erlang factory talk
Someone Didn’t Get The Memo: Lead Paint In Toys, Continuing Problems In China
There are a couple possibilities. One is a legal regime that separates copy-rights from use-rights. One would be a system for letting people selectively share trade secrets without risking someone else making the same product.

Essentially, they would enforce voluntary constriants on future actions, when those actions are made possibly by access to information known by another party. This amounts to a property right, though like our current property rights regime, it is relying on a legal fiction as a useful abstraction.
One answer is that it's when we can increase the saturation point itself. To use your terms.
Is that picture really a photograph of a computer screen? Heard of a screenshot, guys? :P
I another news, the owner of the Polo team Lechuza Caracas announced that he has donated the corpses of his 21 dead ponies to an unnamed internet charity. "They will be used for research into the mundane", he added. Hacker News has learned that each pony will be shipped to a B-list IT blogger along with a baseball bat for an unspecified high-speed collision experiment.

sigh.
Please, no more posts about this. I reviewed the slides from the original presentation and didn't find it nearly as provocative as people are making it out to be.

I would like to compare this presentation of CouchDB with the one we had at JSConf2009 last week. The slides Chris and Jan used were hand-drawn, versus the polished slides in the Rails talk. There is no outcry about the lack of polish on those. It was nice that for once a presentation was given without using Keynote gimmicks.

CouchDB is a freaking awesome DB, and this whole "pr0n" thing is way being way overblown and talked to death and is coloring the community's perception of Couch. Let it drop, please.
(replying to this thread because the parent was killed)

I object to this submission being killed. I understand the desire to keep HN 'pure,' but Peter Thiel is interesting to hackers and founders in the same way that a PG essay is interesting even if it is not a direct dissertation on Lisp or startups.
Client location can already be approximated using the google.loader.ClientLocation API - http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/documentation/#ClientLocati...
To be fair, the list was regularly trolled by people posing as noobs asking innocent questions. The biggest weakness of the Common Lisp community, the eagerness to personally solve any and every problem with Lisp code (instead of thinking, "Damn, why should I have to do this?") made cll a great place to get help if you had a clearly non-trollish question. It's too bad the trolls trained the cll regulars to react aggressively against noob questions.
The original hypothesis made specific predictions (regarding the Higgs, if I remember correctly) which have turned out not to be true. Tipler revised accordingly, rather than doing something new, which seems like a bad sign, scientific-method-wise. :)
Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous, in the same way that religious conservatives like STDs such as HIV - because they provide a grounding in reality for some of their pathological whining and blind hatreds.
Clever but why not use Titanium App? You can use Ruby and Python.

See http://www.appcelerant.com/titanium-preview-release-pr3.html .
pg, can you personally help this fellow out? Its such as a rare occurrence, like you said, and its always good to be able to retrieve your account. I lost at least 2 accounts on Digg over the years(before I stopped using it) and was never able to retrieve them.
yes, that second paragraph is what i was referring to.

its not the best or ideal solution, but its a solution that would make the concept possible.
Javascript Coding Guidelines(via Apple)
Not really. We work out a few, here and there. But if people don't know how to improve on our system, why would a new system make them smarter? I think living at sea won't suddenly make people good at fixing bugs.

Maybe your plan is only to let the smart people join you, and hope they will all agree? I think that sort of plan is hopeless, both in figuring out who are the smart people, and then in getting them to agree. Intelligent libertarians disagree about large stuff all the time.
An interesting case of the deep-nested delay affecting a cool-headed and respectful discussion. Law of unintended consequences I guess.

I would respectfully contend that outside of micro-benchmarks (which kill Java because of long startup time and no chance to JIT) that Java is as fast as C++, and in the presence of lots of cores probably faster. This is again based in large part on my direct anecdotal experience, I would be very interested to hear about everyone else's experience in the matter.

But the real point is that with Moore's law now working on cores instead of mhz, single-threaded performance just doesn't matter that much going forward. Exponential increase and all that.

For a look at where this shit is going take a look a look at Azul.

http://www.azulsystems.com/
Kind of a tough problem since you don't give an email address when you sign up. You just pick a username and password. I can't really think of a reasonably secure way to deliver a new password in that scenario.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160
But then you lose your karma.
It's also a federalist system with unique geography and a smaller population than New York City. Their example might not be portable.

It's worth thinking of different alternatives, rather than generalizing from a sample size of one.

Hong Kong and Singapore are also good examples of well-run states that are completely different. Hong Kong has the same population as Switzerland.
Flickr: Designing Web Interfaces' Photostream
FWIW, I've seen it happen more than once, and I haven't seen a lot of investment deals.
Weaponizers Is Like BattleBots, Except With Cars And Real Guns
How do you know whether it's common or not? I've sat there several times trying to remember my password, remember whether I used Clickpass or not, etc. Finally, I just decide it's not worth commenting, and close the browser tab. (Posting under newly created account because I still can't figure out my old account's password.)
That seems like an inversion of how I've always seen it described. As far as I understand it, the Singularity is when the rate of advancement outstrips our ability to keep up. If we already can't keep up, but technology fixes that sometime in the future, I don't know if that's the same thing.
factoryjoe's UI-Pattern collection is one of my secret UI weapons.
Sounds just like comp.lang.javascript.
http://www.lispforum.com/ should be friendlier.

All the active lispers who are producing useful software not actually writing in cll; you're much better off finding them in the gmane mailinglists.
We log failed login attempts.
FriendFeed Removed Beta Tag, Now In Real Time Mode
I am in exactly the same position - I abandoned an old account since there was no way to do this.
New Google TechTalks explaining Chrome's architecture
http://www.memorise.org/
Yes, it's happened to me too. Mostly because I thought I'd signed in with clickpass, which I had, but had also created a password. It did come to me finally, or I'd be stuck using HN from the same machine.
I did. In fact that is the default solution: when someone forgets their password they email me and I reset it for them (if they put their email addr in their profile).
Disney Now On Hulu
Interesting to be reminded of this. I switched a few months back, and it really was a bit painful. I found it hard to concentrate when I could not maximize, and I spent some time trying to find some software that would solve this. By now I had totally forgotten I experienced it as a problem at first.
i guess they just wanted to take a more interesting perspective.I mean a screenshot of the Google website would be very boring...
About 3 weeks ago, I got so irritated with trying to log in from time to time that I sat down for about an hour and tested every fat-finger combination of the password I used that I could think of. I took me about 40 tries, but I finally found that I'd hit a letter twice (somehow in both fields!). I really wanted to keep everything under my account, so I wasn't going to just make a new account, but it frustrated me to no end that I couldn't just reset my password and move on. Since finding my password, I've changed it to something else, but also added an openid account, so on the rare chance this happens again, hopefully I won't be left out in the cold.
I had trouble recovering my password because the username is case sensitive, and I didn't realize it. I thought I was jeremychase and created a 2nd account until I figured out the case issue.
i've also noticed problems such as submissions and comments not going thru, though it has nothing to do with password problem but still...
I've noticed loopt in an NYC taxi: http://www.gpsbusinessnews.com/Loopt-launches-media-campaign...

Xobni was mentioned on Fox: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual...

But Bill Gates' talking about it was probably a much bigger PR win:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual...

Reddit gets mentioned a lot also, but I can't find any videos right now.

Those are the only ones I remember off the top of my head.
I wonder if they could start reprocessing some of the waste that has already been stored at Yucca mountain.
It's happened to me. I had to jump through hoops to get it back (a browser had it stored, so I set the browser to use a proxy, then had the proxy spit out the form including my password)
I'm curious how you know its not common. I know there are multiple posts on the suggestion board about it, including my own. (Work browser had login credentials cached, but I couldn't figure out what I used to log in at home. I think I finally just used work browser to set a password, cuz I couldn't remember which OpenID I used.)
I would say learn to program it yourself. The benefits are two fold, you get the program and the skills. The skills will last a lifetime!

Give a man a fish and he eats for a night. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a life time.
You'll have to hang on a little longer. Serious IPv6 deployment isn't going to begin until after IPv4 runout.
Reddit on CNN:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8gq69/ok_reddit_...
Well, more equivalent to crime, but yeah. What I was implying is that it costs money to punish drug use, so jurisdictions would tend to ignore it unless explicitly requested.

Churches would probably become jurisdictions, rendering that kind of mismatch moot. And hey, if some people require that much institutional pressure to avoid addictive traps, I'm certainly not one to argue (as long as it's not forced onto others).
Clojure is a Lisp, no question about it. And an excellent one at that.

But one has to remember that Common Lisp was created under a forced consensus. Several Lisp vendors and communities were brought under one roof and told to amalgamate their Lisps and standardize NOW, or they couldn't do business with the U.S. government. Many many people had to fight over what to keep and what to leave, vendors had to give up their competitive edge, systems were broken, and after 10 years of polishing and improvements the modern Common Lisp was born.

Take the cover of CLtL2 and look at the list of authors. The who's who of Lisp. If you go out there and invent a new dialect, negligently ignoring what came before, refusing to consider an standard core + your own vendor extensions, breaking what makes Lisp Lisp, like syntax, and even side stepping other Free Lisps that existed the day you started and were solving the same problem .. then don't be troubled if you're not met with a cheering crowd and greeted as a liberator.
Sounds like a good feedback mechanism. I am working on a startup and could use this. good luck.
I find the ideas of the Singularity movement greatly lacking in imagination. I think when we discover the true nature of consciousness, life, and evolution (which seem to be related), we'll be in for quite a fundamental philosophical surprise.
GoGaRuCo Fist Shaking
I think he misses the point. $12K is chump change. less than a month of contracting, at bay area sysadmin rates. The reason to do a ycombinator startup is the contacts. If pg was willing to trade me access to his contacts for 6% of my hosting company without requiring me to go into the 'sell to investors' rather than 'sell to consumers' market, I'd jump in an instant. (I've personally invested quite a bit more than $12K so far)
I'm sure he just uses another "following account"
Indeed. I think I only learned how to small-talk and "network" as a parlour trick (like Fry).

Fortunately I am able to form deep and meaningful friendships; anything above an acquaintance level is possible, but requires hard work. Yay introverts. =P
I've always wonder why we needed to get rid of nuclear waste. If it's radioactive enough to harm you, then obviously there's some kind of energy there. We just need to find out how to extract and use it (which is what the article is about).
I would argue that by putting such a high valuation on your advice, people think it's worth more, just as they have a natural tendency to think that they are getting a higher quality shirt if it is priced at $50 instead of $5.

Another point to note is that there is an incentive for all of the Y-combinator startups to say they had a good experience, because if they said otherwise they might be burning the bridges they built (which they would not want to do, even if those bridges are not worth what YC charges for them).
Really interesting to see that the author is the same guy who recently wrote this:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/29/10-lessons-from-a-failed-s...

His startup just died. I dunno if YC investment/credibility/free PR/advice would have kept it from dying, but I'd wager it'd help his chances by a meaningful amount.

People should optimize less for their magnitude of personal success (should their startup succeed) and more for the chances of their company's success.
Invite HN: New York City HN Meetup next Wednesday, May 6th
I'm in New York City for the week - just flew over from Switzerland and am trying to organize a small meetup next week for all hackers/entrepreneurs.

Starting at 6pm.

NewsCred will buy the first few rounds of beer! Please leave a comment if you think you can make it. Looking forward to meeting all NYC HN members and other interesting startuppers.

Location:

Lunasa Bar
126 First Avenue
(Bet 7th & St Marks)
New York, NY 10009
I fully understand you -- and I don't understand you at all.

If you got all of the revolutionary Lisp ideas, you don't have to worry about the rest -- currently I'm more or less forced to use C++ instead of CL (which is still my favorite language) -- but this doesn't prevent my mind to still 'think' in Lisp.

If you have some really revolutionary idea, and you want to break it through the history grown walls, you always need to introduce it in homeopathic manner -- but since your new idea is really, really much more ingenious than all of the previous ones, it will finally and actually replace the more limited ones.

But this takes time.

If you limit yourself to think either black or white, you will never win...
Some might consider that a good thing. I respect the karma of who has gained a lot of Karma in 2009 a lot more than people from previous, when HN was smaller and points were easier to get.
Browser War, RIA & Future of Web Development
Excellent idea! Desktop based GUIs should move towards HTML/JS/CSS like platforms. I think the biggest advantage of something like this is the ability of desktop utilities to be cross-platform and integrate better with web based and other desktop applications. Adobe AIR is a move in this direction. Adobe received around 1M downloads of AIR within the first few weeks (But its still too 'flashy' for my tastes (would personally prefer something like this)).
Which mailinglists?
Gives you an opportunity to practice another buddhist/zen concept: letting go
Microsoft makes Windows 7 RC1 availible for download.
I know it doesn't solve the problem now, but if you worry about forgetting passwords, SuperGenPass is a pretty good solution: http://supergenpass.com/

(I have not involvement with that site except as a user, but it's one of those things that I feel compelled to plug because it has made my life so much easier.)
Compiled Web vs. Interpreted Web
Beware surfers: cyberspace is filling up
i already know some of the stuff, but labarbera's style is very funny. also interesting to dedicated game masters ^^
Invention to Venture - workshops in technology entrepreneurship
Eric Schmidt on Google's New Plan for the News
I'm sorry, but this paragraph:

"Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

is just terrible. "[T]he extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

Even the most generous interpretation of that sentence is very illiberal. Well, if they don't agree with us and we're right, maybe they just shouldn't be allowed vote. They obviously don't know what's best for themselves, those women and welfare beneficiaries. Really?

And also is the 1920s really the decade we want to hold up as the last great decade in America?

The whole article swings violently between utopianism and nihilism. I find it very depressing.
If this op/ed - it's not an article - is correct, then theoretically, sure. Practically, good luck getting people comfortable with the idea of taking it out.

The interesting issue is that if we make it easier to reprocess spent fuel, then DPK and Iran and others might be able to get rid of their "civilian power" smokescreen and focus on just that part. Then, we're back where we started.
I was under the impression that time.sleep'ing all over the place was the only way to let threads do their work in python because that's one of the few ways to release the GIL. Is there some other way to get this done (that doesn't involve C modules)?
the MLs for any of the software/projects that you need help with. For the language itself, #lisp is both immediate and mild.
I think the value of contacts and credibility should not be underestimated. On both ends, really. You have to trust your investors as much as they have to trust you, especially if you don't retain 51%.

YC has a lot more credibility than most other entities when it comes to choosing the right startup or the right investor. I would be significantly more likely to accept an investor who was introduced to me by pg.
Wow, all the way from Europe and organizing a meetup. Good inoative.

Will be there!
I also reregistred because I forgot the password of my old account
This Just in: Mercury More Exciting Than Mars
60% of Twitter users leave after 1 month
According to analysts, research has suggested that more than 60% of Twitter users stop using the social network within 30 days, most of whom use it for commercial gain.

As you can see from the above graph, at this moment in time Twitter has a retention rate of 40% demonstrating that over 60% quit the micro-blogging service, for most they have had enough of the facebook shortened micro blogging service...
We know how to extract and use it.

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

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

The only problem is political.
Tried it in vmware earlier. I couldn't find a simple way to turn off font smoothing, only a 4 step wizard which kept repeatedly showing me text samples and asking which one looked best. Smoothed text makes me nauseous for some reason and I can't stand it.
Good grief. What a terrible, misplaced, unilluminating, demagogic analogy

Here's the deal: Companies don't define your legal rights; governments define your legal rights. Whether you like what Google do or not, they are a lawful company working within a country's legal framework. If people do not like it, their avenue is to elect representatives who will legislate a different more restrictive framework. This is what happened in the 70s with the environmental movement; you don't expect Exxon not to pollute; you bring in laws that make pollution illegal and set up the EPA to police them.

The problem with the Taliban is that it is the bloody government (or the effective government). A woman in a Taliban area has no legal recourse because the Taliban is the law.

If you don't like it, don't blame google; blame your lawmakers.
Ask HN: What do you use for HR (vacation, expense, recruitment, employee database etc)
We have grown to around 25 employees and till sometime back spreadsheets were working and we didnt really have many formal processes. Wanted to have a process. The main requirements i can think of are:
i) employee records
ii) basic payroll
iii) vacation applying/tracking
iv) expense submission
v) performance reviews
vi) recruitment

found couple of alternatives (both sas and software). Wanted to know what you guys are using?
I agree that extreamly radioactive substances tend to be valueable, but there is a lot of low grade waste that's not worth reprocessing. It's not cost effective to do anything with reactor walls after you decomission a reactor.

Granted these things tend to become less dangerous over time, but dumping that stuff into a large geologicaly stable hole in the ground seems like a great option.
Nuclear power is a solved engineering problem. France has been doing it for years. Here in the US the problem is so called 'green' activists who don't (or won't) understand the basic laws of physics.
I will almost certainly be there.
The sewing machine patents
2 points and no comments, and this article is on the homepage. May be time to update the algorithm. This GoGaRuCo stuff is getting old.
OpenBSD 4.5 released
We have a Google group for NYC HN peeps. http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc. Your best bet is reaching out there.

With that said I would come out for some beers!
Can you talk more about your experience? How are the last 3 days "heaven"? What was the "profound impact" on your life?