skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of curiosity, what sort of time frame does that translate to for a government agency such as the NSA?

Less than zero seconds. I'm sure the NSA computed collisions in SHA1 at least two years ago -- they had more than enough resources and they'd have to be idiots to not be interested in investigating the problem.
> Please stop complaining, and just get on with it.

Done! May I offer:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586140
Warning: a little long+rambly. At microlevel I don't see anything unusual.

At a more-macro level I do think Google (generally) treads a lot of legally-uncertain grounds, and thus often has something to gain from being targeted with (some types of) class action suits.

This makes me wonder if they on occasion do a brer rabbit -- "oh please don't throw me in the briar patch" -- thing, and are secretly hoping to get to where they can offer a settlement in a class action context.

Consider the Lane's case this way:

- there were some potentially problematic aspects of Google's ad services (to what extent are only "human" ad clicks supposed to be billed-for? what recourse -- with Google, or via the legal system -- is available to those who suspect they've been a victim of so-called clickfraud?)

- the service about which the uncertainty centers is Google's primary profit center (especially then; it's still the great bulk of revenues so far as I know -- does anything else contribute > 10% of revenues?)

- post-Lane's most of that uncertainty is removed: it's pretty much impossible for their USA customers to bring any kind of case on any kind of broadly similar grounds

Lane's was the first time I noticed this -- compared to more-standard class actions, Google actually derived net benefit from the suit and the settlement (in my opinion, of course).

In the author's guild case there's something similar (and more arguably a case of malfeasance on behalf of the AWG and AAP, also -- but again I've not been following this case super-closely).

Pretty much any scenario that lets Google keep doing what it's been doing with Google Book Search -- indexing, making a working book search engine -- is a win (as it makes that space unattractive for rivals); the present agreement seems likely to be modified but it'd have to be modified a lot before it becomes a net loss for Google's interests (again: in my opinion).

Hence the brer rabbit speculation: on the scale google tends to operate (all the web, all the world's books, etc.) individually-negotiated anything are to be avoided; class-actions that're "lost" -- but only a little -- have some strategic advantages.

This is to my knowledge the first major class action against Google since Lane's; given how well it looked like it might turn out for Google got me thinking about Lane's again.
Why would you want to issue a take down notice to one of the most well known IP lawyers out there? Big business thrives on settlements, not landmark court cases. How do you think big media got away with suing individuals for torrenting for so long? They forced settlements before an actual decision could be made. Hell, they even dropped cases they thought they were losing, not wanting to risk the impact of an unfavorable decision. Lessig wont settle, and that's why issuing a takedown notice to him is bad for Warner. Lessig will try to take the whole thing to the Supreme Court if he has to.
That's not the point I was making but it would be impolite of me to make a "woosh" post two days in a row.
Twitter Quitters Just Don't Get It
Everything JWZ writes, even the rants, have a builtin life-support and relevance of at least 10 years.

Maybe I'm just too involved with the community, but Lispers tend to make some of the greatest rants, aphorisms, epigrams and one-liners out of any other hacker group I know, even when they're downright hostile :-)
They seem to be going about the same task in two different ways. Alpha is built essentially by having an army of experts massage the data, and input it to a specially designed database. My guess is google will just apply what it knows about search to its newly available data, without messing around with it.

I'm suspicious of Alpha's ability to live up to its hype, unless there's significantly more to its inner workings than I'm aware of. It almost seems like a brute force solution to the problem.
It's an outrake
We clearly have very different understandings of the term "at all".

The "heavy" view in the profiler reported incorrect information when recursive function calls were involved. The default view (top-down) of the profiler worked fine, and the heavy view worked correctly when recursion was not involved. The core of the profiler, where the real work is done and the data is actually collected, also functioned correctly.

Rewriting the display-related code for the heavy view in JavaScript, addressing the bug in the process, is a definite improvement and it's great to see third-party developers contributing to the improvement of WebKit's tools. That said, I fail to see how you can refer to this as contributing a new profiler while keeping a straight face.
But why do java applications tend to be these huge, clunky, slow and memory hungry applications over and over and over again? Eclipse, any J2ME application/server and so on. Working on java applications has always been pain.
What VCs need most: A shift in policy
Right now (please call me on this sometime, it'd help me) I'm working on a clone of Burp, the industry standard web penetration testing tool, in Cocoa. I started with RubyCocoa, but I've ditched it for Objective C. It is (surprisingly) liberating to work in C after spending a year in Ruby; any time something looks expensive or naive, you just tell yourself, "what I'm doing here can't possibly be more expensive than what MRI Ruby would have done", and you go about your day. Highly recommended.

The last code I managed to publish was Ruckus:

http://github.com/tqbf/ruckus/

(a better description: http://wiki.github.com/tqbf/ruckus/crash-course)

Ruckus is a Ruby DSL replacement for Peach Fuzz, Mike Eddington's famous Python fuzzer library. It is distinguished by being about 100 times slower, using a DSL instead of XML, and providing a DOM-style interface to any packet format (you can tag fields, arbitrarily nested in a tree structure, with classes and id's, and then fuzz them using CSS selectors).

I have a JDWP JVM debugger (or rather a thin protocol driver) written in Ruckus if anyone's interested in seeing what it actually looks like. We never get to publish the actual protocols we build with this.

My programming "day job" (I'm one of 4 developers on the project) is Playbook:

http://runplaybook.com
What kind of people are startups (and big companies) hiring?
I see job posts for Rails, Django, iPhone, Python, Javascript, and User Interface developers, many on YCombinator. I am especially interested in finding out what kind of interns have been hired at your companies or colleges, but I'm pretty curious about full-timers, as well. What kind of people actually end up being hired? What did they do? Did they create a simple web app with an MVC framework? Did they create their own lisp dialect? Did they have very good grades? My biggest question, especially for an internship, is if creating a bunch of web apps using recent frameworks pretty good evidence of ability, or are interns and full-timers expected to have run their own very successful business for years (of course, in which case, they would likely not even look for a job)? I'm probably over-thinking this. :) I ask because it feels like the more I learn here on Hacker News and at college, the less I know anything. Thanks!
When you spent your precious youth creating XEmacs, mozilla, and netscape navigator, you're sure as hell allowed to have a pet nightclub; can you think of a better way to hack the popularity problem than to own a kickass music venue for hipsters?

Don't hate the playa, hate the game! ;-)
Google Chrome Ad
DES, RC2, RC4, Khufu, Khafre. Now can we get an analysis for something that isn't in the "don't ever use" list in Practical Cryptography?

I wasn't aware there was such a list... but if those were on a "don't ever use" list, I'd expect MD5 and SHA1 to be on the same list.

Because it is the case that hashes are less well studied (and thus possibly less "hardened") than our workhorse block ciphers.

Historically speaking, yes. If you stop a random man on the street and ask him what cryptography it, he's far more likely to say "keeping secrets" than "unforgeable authentication". Cryptographers have known for a long time that authentication is important, but because of the public bias towards secrecy, encryption has tended to receive more attention than authentication.

I don't think this is the case any more, however -- with these recent attacks I'd say that the state of the art of attacks on hashes is roughly on par with the state of the art of attacks on block ciphers.
Spock And Intelius? Uh Oh.
It sure helps.

EDIT: Do you know what secondhand embarrassment is? Go to an open mic and you are sure to experience it. I've seen some people who thought they were hilarious and were actually a train wreck.
then its a problem with the developer or the fact that they're using an outdated sifr. the newest version of sifr does this fine
Yeah, come to think of it, he has to be living somewhere while Jacking House decays, so maybe he's just in love with the location.
If you cared enough to read the sentence a little bit further, you would realize that it's "mostly because they are incorrect".

The other thing, that "Windows sucks, period"... Well... Millions of lemmings can't be wrong, can they?
His former employees express words of gratitude:
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=33862008116&topic=...
(shopping.com alumni group on facebook)
Six Degrees of Swine Flu
I didn't think his comment was negative. It seems weird that it's downvoted. However, since you mentioned it...

DNA is a weird spot. It's a great space. JWZ obviously tried to recreate a subculture that was never hugely popular but sort of maybe had its heyday and died in the 90s. The sort of only-in-SF cyber-industrial-goth thing. Front242, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire remixes. Every guy looks like Robert Smith with a top hat, wearable computer, and zombie boots. Proto-burning-man meets blade runner sort of thing.

It's definitely not a favorite for hipsters. It only comes close on mashup night, and even those "hipsters" are all 38 years old. The whole hipster in SF thing is bit of a hoax. All those hipsters are really web designers who went to Stanford, which wasn't really hip ever, but certainly hasn't been hip since 1999. What is now known as hipster in SF was called "yuppie" 20 years ago. It's just different brands of shoes and alcohol - even the tight pants remain the same.
Very cool. How do you think this compares to http://parselets.com?
can I email you at any particular address?
The section titled "Session setup/teardown rates" talks about using ACLs to block or redirect requests.
When People Don't Notice You've Changed
I started using an Ergohuman about 3 months ago and am quite pleased. IIRC (and correct me if I'm wrong), the adjustable lumbar support and/or headrest on the Aeron are extra. They come standard on the Ergohuman.

http://ergohuman.com/ergohuman-me7erg.htm

(PS: drewcrawford already linked an Office Depot rebranded version for cheaper, so please up-mod him too if you found this helpful :) http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/690690/Realspace-PRO-9...)
Entrepreneurs available for consulting in Seattle
A few entrepreneurs I know in Seattle are consulting on the side to keep their startups self-funded. I've created a simple list:

http://freeusall.com/

Everyone on this list kicks ass - I've worked with several of them. If you're looking for a great consultant and want to help a founder keep their equity, hire one of these guys!
You summed it up pretty well, but I would put it slightly differently: there is a point where the characteristics of OSX are no longer an advantage, but a hindrance, the same way as the characteristics of a more traditional Unix (or Linux) are a problem for those who are more used to OSX or Windows.

There is a time you have to get rid of the training wheels.
My theory is that he is just stubborn and can afford to let the house rot while he battles with the Woodside historic registry people.
"I respect this guy's choices. Obviously he feels the need to vent, and that's what the internet is for."

Not the internet as a whole, but that site of mine, certainly ;-)
"I'm back to hacking in C, since it's the still only way to ship portable programs."

Scrolled to the bottom, found that line and thought the article doesn't worth my time :)
There's a chain called "The Healthy Back Store" and that's where I went to try out chairs. I ended up buying the Nightingale CXO chair, which I hadn't heard of until I went there. They also have a good online store -- http://www.healthyback.com -- but obviously that's not a great place to try out chairs.
This was tried back in the days of the Clinton administration with Smith and Wesson.

http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/html/20000317_2.html

The rest of the gun-buying public declared a "S&W Death Penalty" and stopped buying anything from S&W.

Smith and Wesson nearly went bankrupt and the British company that owned S&W sold it off for a pittance to a small American gunmaker.
That email stuff is a blatant rip-off of Posterous.

The more I read about the new Friendfeed beta, the more it feels like a Frankentwitter, collecting various features from other services and injecting them into the Twitter UI. I wonder what they'll end up with. I hope it's better than Twitter.
Since there was no way to get the computer (it's a netbook) with the specs I wanted without Windows, that's pretty much the only choice I had.

And the Windows license proved handy on more than one occasion - for instance, my bank insist on an ActiveX control and Internet Explorer for certain operations.
So, I assume your computer has a steering wheel, just like your fridge.

Right?
A button might encourage the flames and flame-type replies, though.

Another option might be to add a section (right now there is "news" and "newest") where members can move their too tired/drunk/grumpy to be posting posts in order to keep them out of the main discussions.

*Disclaimer: I am certainly guilty of posting when too tired/drunk/grumpy to be posting, and I kinda wish that there was an option to delete old items. I don't really care about the karma aspect, but it would be nice to be able to delete.
I'm working on a programming language that has builtin support for reloading code at runtime. It'll also support various ways of modifying code at runtime, like with visual interfaces. The primary usage is for making interactive graphical apps, like games.

Intro is here:
http://andyfischer.github.com/circa/intro.html

code is here:
http://github.com/andyfischer/circa/tree/master
Startups hire people who can build things end to end once given a high level vision.

The other kind are who need spoonfeeding with specs, UI wireframes etc. Those people goto big companies :).

Having run own business is not required at all because you will be joining as an employee
i heard about the humanscale liberty from this slate comparison of office chairs:

http://www.slate.com/id/2131646/

i liked it better than the humanscale freedom, but ymmv. the liberty is beautifully designed - it uses your own bodyweight to ensure good posture.

drove 1h both ways across LA to sit it in before i bought one online for 1/2 the price that it was selling in the showroom ($700 vs $1400).

it was an awesome purchase - i could sit in it all day. i sold it to go digital nomad for a while, but when i pick a place to live, it'll be one of the first things i buy. jason calacanis' "cheap tables, expensive chairs" advice is bang-on imho: http://tr.im/k490

looks like the liberty has come down in price too: http://tr.im/k48A
Time Warner Expects to Spin Off AOL
Maybe there's a mole at Warner who wants such a case?
it's not probably flawed. it is flawed.

most of the posts i write are designed to stimulate discussion, debate, highlight an issue i think is worth talking about, etc

the comments on this post have been fantastic. i am already thinking about the problem differently, but i still think the VC asset class doesn't scale and that we have too much money under management right now.
In a digital age, vinyl albums are making a comeback
Most accountants will meet with you for half an hour to an hour for a consultation for free, especially if you're referred by a good client of theirs. Two things in play here: First, if your business is starting to make money, a good accountant should save you more than they cost.

Second, if you can get someone with a bit of business savvy to look at your basic operating agreement/terms with your partner before you get rolling, that can help a lot. You might not want to get a lawyer/accountant to review agreements early if you're cash strapped, but by God, you'll wish you did later when the inevitable difference of opinion strikes.

If it's not a primary source of income for either partner people will be more flexible, but it's the businesses that succeed and become quite profitable that you'll most wish you'd done better groundwork on. A bloody catch-22.

Quick advice: Interview a couple accountants now, skip the lawyers for now if you're dealing with a small amount of time/money. You can probably get a good accountant for $300-$700 for year 1, which should more than pay for itself later. Also, a good professional will teach you and explain things to you as they're doing it. I've spent a grand total of less than 20 hours of my life with accountants and lawyers I was paying, but I've learned a hell of a lot from those times. Seriously, one key business point you didn't know can be worth thousands to you later as you're becoming successful. Definitely get an accountant the first year you're profitable, interview and start thinking about it now.
Great idea, I have a ton of one-off side projects I'd love to share (and get some awesome hacker critique as well)

I've written a simple ruby worker management "framework" known as theman, which is a thin wrapper atop rufus-scheduler and god: http://github.com/jcapote/theman

Also, there's fieldy, a simple fixed-width field reader/writer library for ruby exposed as DSL: http://github.com/jcapote/fieldy

Lastly is AtomLog, a way to parse and expose ruby's Logger output to an atom feed: http://github.com/jcapote/atomlog
I've worked at a very large (60,000+ employee) company, so perhaps my background clouds my judgment somewhat, but I think requirements documents are quite helpful. The Software Functional Specification that was handed to me provided a good background to the problem space.

When I wrote the Software Design Specification (100 pages, oof...), I easily solved 2/3 of the bugs before I touched a single line of C code. I was surprised, since I didn't think I would enjoy the documentation process, but it really helped. I designed my module using English and pseudo-code, sent the spec around for comments, and when the spec was approved it was a (somewhat) simple matter of conveying a solid design into C.

Meetings still suck and should be minimized, but documentation is really essential. I always glance at the Design Spec for a feature before going into the code, since it gives you some solid background as to what exact problem they were trying to solve.
Why would you want to issue a take down notice to one of the most well known IP lawyers out there?

Why wouldn't they? He's really a law professor. Lessig's actual court track record is not as impressive as his writing and speaking. All his copyright cases have either been dismissed, or else he lost.

So, they probably know he's not that great in court. Thus if they beat him, they have the added bonus of sticking it to the leading copyright-reform spokesperson.
Facebook Among Top Phished Web Sites
Sign me up for the hype list. I tried one of those for a while; couldn't find a comfortable position to save my life.
It's natural for it to borrow ideas for features. After all, it started as an open version of Facebook's activity stream.
Right now I'm working on adding extensions to Chrome. The majority of the system is in this directory:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows...

And what I've been working on most recently is the code that renders little HTML-based toolbars. My most recent change fixed a race that caused them to not render correctly on the first run:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

I think one of the coolest parts of the system is the way that api methods are routed from JS running in extension processes to the browser process and back. The core of that is here:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows...
You might also like Artificial Owl: http://www.artificialowl.net/

It has everything from shipwrecks to abandoned nuclear power plants.
ISTR that the "rule of thumb" is that the NSA is a couple of years ahead of the mainstream for both Mathematics and computer tech. I don't know how valid that is, but it probably is a decent baseline for paranoia.
I've been working on my Z-Machine interpreter library again. It basically started as a project to turn Frotz into a Ruby extension (Frotz, probably the most popular interpreter, is written in C).

The code has undergone quite a few transformations now. Frotz uses a lot of static memory -- it's basically setup to run a single zcode program at a time. Which makes sense, of course.

For my library, I wanted to be able to run more than one program (or multiple copies of the same program) at the same time. So, I basically rewrote the core of Frotz. All the memory for a Z-Machine is broken up into structs which are passed around.

There were some fun memory management issues related to running multiple programs. The typical zcode program consists mostly of static memory (lots and lots of strings and code), so that static memory can be shared between programs. I have a test where I load something like 100,000 copies of minizork into memory and the process size "only" jumps to 118MB. Of course, normal code doesn't need that many simultaneous Z-Machine instances so garbage collection keeps memory pretty reasonable.

Last time I worked on dorothy, I setup a demo webapp here:

http://ifrotz.org

Which illustrates why I wanted to be able to run multiple programs. The demo runs minizork, dynamic memory is dumped and restored between requests. The hints, exits, and history feature is possible because the server "listens in" on your game and the games others have played.

Lately I've been working on more memory inspection stuff, and now I have to work on some of the unfinished Z-Machine features (I've only implemented the v3 screen model).

The code is on Github:

http://github.com/eki/dorothy/tree/master
Hey now, nothing Clojure can't fix.
This program is useful for when you dont want to do something.

Why not just, uh, not do whatever you don't want to do if you really don't want to do it?
According to one of the comments from slashdot, Lessig goes beyond fair use in his presentation:

----------------------------

He uses a 50 second clip of The Muppet Show's "Ma Na Ma Na" [1] which is a very short skit track of about 2:29 minutes. He shows it being set to an Anime Music video mash up of Vampire Hunter D Blood Lust. I can't seem to track down who would be the rights holder of this track but I'm guessing it's Warner. I have only seen 15 minutes of his presentation so it's possible there are other violations.

Larry: Non-free Audio Fair Use for music constitutes 10% or 30 seconds of a song (which ever is shorter) and it must be in a low enough quality (didn't investigate the audio on this video to find out if it satisfied Ogg quality of 0 rule). For the rest of the 15 minutes I saw you looked fine but this stuck out at me. Pick your battles wisely and adhere to this rule next time.

--------------------------

Source: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1216733&cid=27765265

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lgcQUQZBtE&feature=relat...