skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate your scepticism, but you might do some homework before revealing or announcing ignorance. cperciva is well-known in the relevant fields, and while it may yet be that scrypt doesn't get widely adopted, it won't be because it's not a secure system.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Though my understanding of the simulation I am living in is rather different than what Bostrom posits.
You haven't addressed the "peak credit" point. Deflation is upon us. Hoard dollars.
About 7 or 8, it was an Apple II GS :-)
Change the text entry button from "Sign Up" to "Try" or "Go". You can still ask people to sign up on the next page, but this change would give people the sense that they're quickly trying your service out without a commitment.
haha...I'm 22. That was back in '96.
I would really like to see Bruce Schneier's opinion on this.
Amazon is a book store, so their ebook service shutting down would be like Microsoft discontinuing Windows. Not too likely.
Ask HN: What Laptop Should I Buy?
I need to buy a laptop and cannot figure out what to buy. My requirements:

- Windows
- Supports dual monitors
- lightweight and doesn't have to have a big screen
- powerful, fast and reliable
I was actually thinking about this question an hour or so ago, in the shower. I believe this is pure coincidence.

I also believe that, given a certain amount of liberty, motivation is the most important single factor in determining the success of an individual. This depends on the definition of success, but is reasonably robust. In particular, it covers wealth and happiness (commonly used to judge other people's success and our own, respectively).
Make it run, make it right, make it fast. In that order.
RubyFlow is protecting you from great articles
A very expensive and unrealistic concept with modern tech. And would be very hard to use without a very good steady hand well designed extensions and a fine program to run it.
If you're for real, you're one scary motherfucker. I'm glad I'm not in the job market anymore.
Interesting, but I don't see how this could be very comfortable since there's no resistance, I could see one's arm getting quite tired by holding it in the air for long periods of time on nothing.

I'd much rather something like a falcon for 3D production, or better yet, just stick with a 2D analogue like mouse/keyboard and just use imagination.

It doesn't take that much to manouver in 3D space with a mouse/keyboard combo.

For those about to reply with something along the lines of "but you probably don't..." I use 3D software for several hours a day, every day. I would find something like this (having to move around the object in real space) would only end up hampering my workflow, not enhancing it.
I think we should do something about the bait-y titles on HN in general. Titles should be descriptive and succinct.

Maybe a better title here would have been "bcrypt's use of MD5 makes it insecure compared to scrypt". (I don't know how to best word the title; I would have not submitted the article, since I'm not an expert on security.)
I think I was about 10 and it was an Atari STE, I really wanted a Falcon though! I used to buy ST format and mess about with the programming listings that they put in there. I even managed to hook it up to a BBS a few times when my parents were out!

Eventually I managed to persuade my parents to get me a PC, I think it was a 486 with windows 3.11 on it.

All the cool stuff and technology that I get to use now, never comes close to giving me the feeling which those first couple of machines gave me.
Cassette tape was also the format of choice for my Atari 400, but I had the computer for a year before I got the tape drive. So for a year I had to retype my BASIC programs into the 16k of RAM every time the computer got turned off. On the membrane "keyboard".

Cue Monty Python sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13JK5kChbRw

I remember wishing I had an Atari 800, which had 64k of RAM and a real keyboard!
I too have been thinking about this same phenomenon, and I believe some day (soon), BCI + exoskeleton/ artificial wings will give us the true ability to fly like birds.
Uh, why him in particular?

There are other competent cryptologists out there, y'know :-)
Facebook Easter Egg
Login to facebook. At the homepage: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, b, a, Enter
Ask YC: best other hacker news sites?
I follow hacker news and new mogul... Craving more! Suggestions? What are the best other sites?
I've had a kinesis keyboard for ~9 years, and after using it for a few weeks I thought it should be required for any emacs user. Putting ctrl-alt (and enter) under your strongest digits just makes so much sense.
KIM-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) in 1979. I was 23.
Ask HN: Profit Sharing vs Equity
I apologize if this thread already exists (searched searchYC and didn't find anything on profit sharing)

What are your thoughts on investors getting a share of the profit vs getting equity? What percentage equity would equate a 10% profit share? How does this change from a short-term and long-term perspective?

Thanks for any input!
There used to be a thread, but I can't find it, but here's the academic hacker news:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/
It's stated that scrypt is 4000 times harder to break than Bcrypt (I don't know how this is calculated, so it's probably an estimate). Given that password cracking can be easily parallelized is this enough of an improvement?
Ask HN: Is there any good open source IM project (based on C++/Windows)
Is there any good open source IM project (based on C++/Windows)? I checked google's libjingle, it's good. Is there any other good one? I want to integrate group text-chat, group voice chat. Thanks!
cperciva is well-known in the relevant fields, and while it may yet be that scrypt doesn't get widely adopted, it won't be because it's not a secure system.

I'm assuming what you meant to say is "it won't be because cperciva doesn't know what he's doing."
In fact, Bowman had very little if anything to do with this latest redesign. This design had been around for months in beta testing already.
I was 7, it was one of the very first sony vaios...and only because i had installed linux on my parents' computer. :)
"Monopolies are nearly impossible without government backing."

As they say on Wikipedia, "citation needed".
If you are an open-source developer, you could write in license or documentation, `This software does whatever its source code states it does'. Joe the Average User don't need to to read through code himself; there are enough geeks on his friendlist to have this covered. In spite of reeking of RTFM-ness, this approach actually is about the only honest; all other ways of documenting are simplifications, approximation and literally shuffling dirt under the rag by assuming nonexistence of bugs.

However, due to to exceptionally high complexity, and hard to predict interactions between various software and hardware components of system, you need to put strong disclaimers in place: `Unless there are faults in compiler, libraries, the underlying OS your hardware' makes any responsibility very diluted and hard to prove at best. And let's not forget about the -- very uncommon, but occurring nonetheless -- random flips of bits in memory, which may bring the system down or silently corrupt code or data in unreproducible ways, regardless of software and hardware quality.

Only actual cure for software reliability is to use simpler systems, made up of loosely coupled components, where failure of one doesn't affect others, and it's easy to re-start from previous step. It's the big, opaque, monolithic, all-encompassing application or systems that bomb and trash your data that are the most problematic. Outlaw those.
Programming in canvas is not automatic (as opposed to manual). For graphic designers I still say canvas offers marginal benefit.
They do indeed discontinue windows just different versions of windows. What happens when XP suits you just fine but Microsoft decides that it costs too much to keep the activation servers running and you want to activate your legit copy of xp on a new machine. You are then forced to either:

1) Break the law and crack it. Doing this you will not be eligible for the updates that are there. In cracking it you are going to run a program that probably contains a virus/rootkit/trojan/whatever.

2) Reinstall the os every 30 days to bypass activation.

3) Need to buy/install a newer OS because you are at the mercy of a corporation with respect to DRM.
Doesn't seem like they're doing that well.

The Netherlands is a more interesting case. Booming in prosperious times, yet a stable unemployment rate of around 3% during this crisis (lowest in the EU).
I didn't see any examples of a case where design was "held back by a tyranny of data" in the article. Maybe a data-centric view is cumbersome, but Google clearly feels strongly that it's worth the price.

Designers should be free to create something innovative, but I see no problem with judging the results with real metrics.
France economic policy doesn't look so bad if you compare it to other failed policies and look at them in a myopic way.

So they throw in a graph with life expectancy and total public spending as a % of GDP. France ranks high on both (compared to the few other selected countries). Oh great. But correlation does not mean causation. Let's look at the country with the highest life expectancy in the world: Andorra. So do they have high taxes like in France? Anyone care to guess how much income tax they have in Andorra? ;)

The Economists seems to me like a magazine like any other. Just like a tabloid they write whatever sells.
I learned something in this interview that totally makes sense, but involved a scenario that didn't occur to me:

If you're on one AWS service, or a customer of somebody else (like Heroku) who is on AWS, and you access another AWS service (they used an example of a 3rd party mysql provider), you don't incur bandwidth costs.

I know right, no doy.

I didn't realize there was such an ecosystem of providers built on top of AWS (who are providers themselves.)
Java + XML, advanced tutorial
I just did a bunch of shopping two weeks ago, and ended up with a Dell Latitude E6500. Maybe a bit bigger than you want (15.4" widescreen), but very light for its size (5.x lbs depending on configuration). I got it for under $1300, very well equipped: 2.4GHz Core Duo, 4GB, 250GB 7200 RPM, LED-backed upgraded resolution display, 9 cell battery, Intel WiFi, nVidia Quadros 160 video, built-in webcam, Bluetooth, 1394, backlit keyboard, etc. The identical specs, with half the RAM and fewer ports, in a MacBook Pro 15 was $638 more (but it had a $150 rebate from Club Mac to bring it to a theoretical $488 more, assuming the rebate actually arrives...I've had very bad luck with rebates, and pretty much always get screwed, so I simply don't count them in my buying decision any more). It also came with a 3 year warranty at no extra cost.

I also got a Dell Mini 9 to go along with it for $50 more, as part of some promotion they were, and maybe still are, running. So, I have a tiny lappy for when I'm traveling light, and a big lappy for when I'm doing real work. I think it's an acceptable compromise for me. My prior lappy was a 12.1" widescreen model, and a little lighter.

I'm very happy with it, so far. Fedora 10 installed in a dual boot config without a hitch, and after installing the nVidia drivers suspend/resume began working. With the Open Source nv driver it failed to resume, though I read that's fixed in the next kernel release. Anyway, I opted to upgrade the WiFi to Intel to have Open Source drivers, so it worked out of the box, but the Broadcom WiFi it comes with by default is supposed to work with drivers from Dell; but they're closed source, and will always be something you have to add, which I didn't consider worth saving 30 bucks over. Even the built-in web cam worked in Linux right off. Since you're wanting Windows, you don't care about that, but Linux compatibility was vitally important to me, and this was the nicest new laptop experience I've ever had.

The chassis is really nice and simple. Some sort of alloy, so it feels quite sturdy. Massive metal hinges. Tremendous battery life with the 9 cell battery I upgraded to. Something like 8 or 9 hours when not working it too hard, though I haven't timed it out precisely. But, it's good enough that I don't even think about whether I have the charger with me when I take it places.

It feels as solid as the higher end ThinkPads I've used, and even has a nipple mouse. I haven't put enough time on it to know if it'll hold up like a ThinkPad, but I have an old Dell Inspiron that's over three years old and has held up well, including weathering a couple of pretty big drops. So, I feel pretty good about its reliability.

Comparing to the MacBook Pro, it is roughly the same weight (depending on configuration), roughly the same size (1" high vs. 0.95" in the Mac), and slightly less powerful on the video front (the nVidia Quadros 160 is roughly a 9300, though with lower power, and a few enhancements). Appearance-wise the Mac looks prettier, but only by a little. The black alloy with small silver Dell logo is very swish, and looks better in person than on the web.
I think no matter how well known the author, I would still wait a while. Everybody can make mistakes. Probably this scrypt thing has been tested to death by the community already, but the article doesn't give any references to such things, so how would I know?
Pop Up Guide to the Personal Computer
Hello :-)
He's the dude who made all the builtin scripts on FreeBSD that are also in OS X, duh!

file /usr/bin/* | grep Bourne | cat `cut -d: -f1` | grep cperciva
Reddit is a community. FriendFeed is many communities.
Our oceans are turning into plastic... are we?
An Open Letter To Newspaper Publishers
I wonder if, one day, people will realize that none of this stuff really matters. Write and comment your code clearly, think your designs through, and comply with your team's conventions so that people know what to expect.

None of this stuff (TDD, TAD, XP, Agile, whatever) is computer science. None of it is science period. They're all essentially shamanistic rituals which "work" by giving you a direction so that you can start writing code. If you find a methodology works for you, great! Use it! But all this squabbling about the one true path is nonsense.
I've read many entire books on my computer, mostly from Baen's free library.
Well, even if they compare multiple times the order will still be 'random' as in not easily predictable
How often do courses change? Couldn't you just do this once or twice a semester?
Common Java Cookbook
My 400 DID have 64k and a real keyboard (both add-ons).

I was 16, but that was 1982. No intertubes. No printer. No RS-232. Cassette tapes.
Very ultimate indeed. I've never understood gmail's status as an important/fashionable webapp. It's better than hotmail ~1997, but fundamentally the same.

And what possesses someone to write what is essentially advertisment copy for Google corp anyway? And who are all those commenters delivering high praise and wonderment to that guy for doing the same? Oh, gee whiz a calender!
I think authoritarian vs. non authoritarian is more useful than left-right. For instance in the US both of the big parties are authoritarian and are pushing big government. To me they are very similar.

That it is leftist doing censor ship is not surprising at all, just look at the history.

In the US both the term "liberal" has been hijacked by socialists. In the US the term libertarian is used for what in the rest of the world is still called "liberal".
Nice... Just a note though, to turn it off you have to log out and then log back in. Refreshing the page doesn't do anything.
I agree with "both sometimes make useful and thought-provoking points".

The problem is that these people create true believers. The world could really use sane alternate viewpoints -- and we mainly get lots of conspiracy theorists unable to change viewpoints.
Microsoft Layoffs - Cinco de Fire-O
Is Apache Commons a part of the standard Java programmer toolkit these days? This looks like it would be a good addition to the standard platform classes for things like strings and XML. I've been away from Java for years now, but Clojure is bringing me back into the JVM world.
The position of the pen could be tracked via infrared with existing tech, but you'd also need to be able to track the position and angle of the glasses in order to render the view correctly.

Also, I doubt that 3 infrared stations would actually suffice, since your body would occlude at least one of the sensors in most positions. You'd probably need several, and they'd likely need to be placed on the ceiling and walls as well as the floor for full coverage.

Not being able to draw on a hard surface would introduce a learning curve, but remember that people already accomplish some pretty intricate designs while never actually touching the surface - Graffiti, airbrushing, etc. I don't think that would actually be too big a stumbling block.
what kinda koolaid is the aussie government drinking? you would think that in 2009 people would know how the interweb works. tubes, ya know?

how can anyone exert control over what someone else links to? government forcing you to accept responsibility for what others link to basically chills linking at all. what if you link to a blog which has public commenting and someone then comments with a link to 'censored' materials. where is the list of censored materials? who knows what is censored? how do i know that something is censored and that i should not link to it?

this quote was taken from an article linked off the op, ( http://www.itnews.com.au/News/98679,conroy-requests-faith-in... ):

"Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has urged detractors of the Government's proposed Internet Filtering scheme to have faith in their elected parliamentarians to pass the right legislation."

here is a news flash: stop censoring! then i wont have to worry about elected parliamentarians passing the right legislation. this is like right out of a tolstoy novel or something.
To be fair, the original usage of the term "libertarian" in a political context was to refer to socialist-anarchists.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/

I guess someone did. :)

Although, I got the Sony when it first came out ( the lack of DRM in it attracted me) I am very satisfied with it
We can classify monopolies into three categories:

1. Natural monopoly - Returns to scale are large enough (or the market it small enough) that one firm can provide the product for a lower price than multiple firms. This is possible without government backing, but is basically harmless if entry into the industry is not blocked. The natural monopoly may be the only seller, but it still faces potential competition.

2. Artificial monopoly - Firms merge to monopoly, firms form a cartel, etc., in an industry without returns to scale. This is the kind of monopoly that people worry about, but in a free market, they are (or would be) very uncommon. There is always an incentive to cheat on a cartel agreement, and there is always an incentive to enter the industry if profits are above normal.

3. Government monopoly - Firms take advantage of government-created (whether intentional or unintentional) entry barriers to establish an artificial monopoly, or the government itself establishes a monopoly in the activity. Very common. For instance, heavy regulation might favor large firms that can more easily absorb the fixed cost of compliance.

If you are interested in learning more about this, look into the branch of economics called "Industrial Organization." The best textbook is by Carlton and Perloff; it is the one I used when I taught IO this semester.
"For a typical worker, that would mean earning $100,000 less over the 18-year period."

That is not at all a frightening statistic.
3%? Perhaps by the EU's definition, according to which someone who works at least one hour/week is not considered unemployed. The latest Dutch figure was 4.4%.

Of course, that's still only for people actively looking for a job, with less than 12h/week of employment, and within a certain age bracket.
Amazon itself could shut down. If the recession has taught us anything it should be that we can't expect companies to be immortal.
By this definition don't they have to block Google?
If I had the money, I would definitely buy an entry level SLR without knowing how to use it, then figure out how to use it.
Why I haven’t been blogging as much
Feel free to provide a counter-example.

As to the examples, every cable-service monopoly in the US has govt backing. The postal service monopoly has govt backing. Intel uses patents (read govt backing) to limit the number of x86 producers. The old AT&T's long distance monopoly had govt backing, lost it, and then sprint and others started.

Standard Oil almost made it without govt backing, but we'll never know if they could have held.
Or it could derail the sort algorithm in some way (infinite loop?) - the point is, it makes some assumptions and it's not clear that these assumptions hold.
IMO you're absolutely correct. It's generally frowned upon to select esoteric crypto algorithms of any type if another more widely tested one is available.

I have confidence in the author and high hopes for the algorithm but I believe it prudent to wait for the ink to dry before putting it anywhere it would matter. :)
Monopolies of physical items and commodities are hard without government backing, but software is not so clear-cut. Bear in mind that anyone with copyright or patents relies on the government (either directly or indirectly via the courts) for enforcement anyway.

The tragedy of the anti-commons as it relates to copyright is that very little older content has entered the public domain since the 1920s - I cannot legally cover A Gershwin song for money, say, even though the man is long dead - and much energy, both public and private, is wasted on nonsensical interpretations of things like the DMCA. If you are film producer (say) trying to cover your legal bases by licensing any and all copyrightable material that appears in your film, it can get very expensive.
I keep wondering how everyone deals with such large volumes of support email, especially for people who want to stay small.
I was around 8 or 9 when my family got an IBM PCjr. We got it for only $400 because we had a friend who worked for IBM and got discounts and it was already an older machine at that point (around 86 or 87). We never upgraded past the 128K of RAM it came with which limited what apps and games I could run on it. I spent most of my time on it writing in BASIC (which came on a cartridge, which meant I had a good portion of the 128K to work with) and later making attempts to learn C and assembly using some freeware compilers.

The PCjr must've had a bit of a following, because I used to get this catalog with all kinds of interesting upgrades for it that were intended to breath new life into it, long after it was obsolete. They had things like hard drives and replacement CPUs that were twice the clock speed.

Around age 13, I finally got a 1200 baud modem for it that I could only successfully run at 300 baud. But we finally got our next machine shortly after that: a 486/33 w/ 4MB RAM and a 2400 baud modem which blew the PCjr out of the water. The 4MB of RAM was a limitation when I tried to install Linux on it.

It seems I was short on RAM for most of my childhood. Though when my parents bought me my own computer right before I went off to college, I finally could breath a sigh of relief because I actually had enough RAM to run the things I wanted - it was a Pentium 1 with a whopping 16MB of RAM. Linux ran beautifully on it and I was pretty happy with it (as long as I didn't boot into Win95 on it, that is).
Regarding your first point... Only a stupid engineer would design a robot that could do his job for him. Robots designing robots? Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah... Terminator!
JPlayer: Fully CSS stylable mp3 player plugin using jQuery
My brother was given a copy of this book (as a child, in the 80s); it really is as cool as it looks.