skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this option as well. My hand doesn't have to move at all to mouse.

http://www.amazon.com/IBM-USB-Keyboard-UltraNav-31P8950/dp/B...
A few random notes:

* The ideal size of corporations is an interesting subject. If central planning is so bad, why are some companies so huge? Why do companies get big if small is better? Why aren't we all just individual contractors, rather than employees?

* Free trade is generally seen as 'good' by economists, but a move in that direction may not be a Pareto improvement; i.e. while everyone is generally better off, there may be some people made (significantly) worse off. Technology improvements are the same way: people may be better off using computers than typewriters, but not typewriter repairmen. One strategy to mitigate the worst effects of this would be a bit of redistribution from all the winners, to the losers. Everyone is thus better off than before the move to free trade, or new tech, and the losers have some cushion to fall back on. Of course this presents problems of its own and is a long and complicated debate.
if they can cope with the fragmentation (which is already happening - with only TWO devices on market)...

it's funny to remember, though, that Symbian was the future when they announced it was open sourced. And then Maemo became the future. Then OpenMoko...
I can appreciate how effective these methods are, but I personally don't like the idea of stripping one of the enjoyable things in my schedule down to how efficient it is. Working hard is great, but I think there is such thing as too much of it at the cost of an enjoyable life (for me).
"You could even print it with a numeric keypad and make it dual-use."

It already exists:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Wireless-Keyboard-Trackpad-...
you just use one view. implement that view controller method i mentioned, and always return TRUE. you must do this for every view in your app, if you want them to all work in landscape modes.

that's all you have to do, as far as the iphone is concerned. of course you'll have to draw the view contents differently, when you're in landscape mode.
They were criticising it and bemoaning it. And there were arguably "better" products coming onto the scene.

Apple naikled every aspect though and sold it to the mass public. That is hard - but they had a foothold because of the Ipod market and years of experience in making "must have" products :)

I never said anything about transparency: I agree as it happens, secrecy IS one of Apple's biggest strengths.

Apple know what ticks customers boxes (as you say Itunes isnt the most perfect player in the world - but for many consumers it hits what they need perfectly).
Yes, I would use it. I spend very little of my time at the computer entering numbers.

Now, imagine that instead of the number keys or touchpad, there's a bit of extra desk space into which you can move your mouse. That would probably be even better. Unfortunately, decent keyboards without a numeric keypad are scarce.
I always wonder about these people who claim to have adjusted sleep cycles (i.e. 28 hours). Personally I find that I also drift to staying awake later and later if I'm not exercising during the week.

If I get in a solid hour workout daily (like I usually do), I'm out like a light in 5 minutes as soon as it's time for bed. Do enough physical work during the day and your body will have no problem passing out because it's simply exhausted.

I also love how he labels the 8-hour sleep "the waste". Any other athletes here will confirm that you can't possibly recover, build muscle, and have the energy for hard workouts with 20 minute naps during the day. Polyphasic sleep might allow one to just barely function, but it's hardly functioning at your best.
The issue is that the fastest MACs use AES themselves, usually with the same key as was used to encrypt. CBC-MAC, OMAC, GCM, Poly1305-AES, all generate a MAC block (128 bytes, which you can truncate to whatever) in part using AES with your encrypting key.

It feels to me like Colin has a legitimate point --- side channel key extraction would be pretty hard if you had to do it from HMAC instead of with AES --- but that the person who actually came up with a side-channel exploit in a real-world OMAC (EAX) system would get famous over it.

The person who breaks your hand-hacked CTR+HMAC code, which will inevitably contain flaws because it will get no real review... that person doesn't get famous. Her win was entirely predictable.
It's weird because I have met very, very few IT workers who aren't happy with their jobs. Maybe they'd rather be working for themselves or would change something about the process that's used but most people I know fundamentally love the work. I'll admit though in these times when I feel like I have slightly fewer options I tend to feel more upset about little things that I would otherwise let slide but I try to keep that in check. I can't speak for other professionals inside the IT umbrella but I love programming and most other programmers I know love it too.
Ask HN: How to disclose a phishing vulnerability
I am hacking together a proof-of-concept of a phishing attack on the sites of some financial institutions (mostly to make a rhetorical point). Frankly, it's not rocket science. I imagine if the phishers wanted to, they could have developed this technique by now. But I haven't found any record of this particular type of attack being disclosed to the public.

So: am I obliged to treat this like a security vulnerability? Warn said institutions of the problem, give them a grace period to make changes, all that? Or should I just announce it publicly? Morally, what's the right thing to do? Legally, am I on any shaky ground one way or the other?

Oh, I should also mention that I have no expectation of this information actually convincing said institutions to change their ways. It's not like an open port on their server or something, and I am guessing they've sunk plenty of money into their system and aren't going to revamp it because of one windbag on the internet. Honestly, I'm concerned that if they give any response at all, it will be to threaten me with legal action or something if I don't keep it quiet.
Don't solve with 15 minutes that which you can bill your client 80 hours for.
I think there are two major problems with "hacking" one's sleeping patterns like this. First is physiological side effects that can go undetected for a very long time and cause permanent damage. Lack of sleep increases blood pressure, for instance.

Or the effectiveness of the thinking process itself (which is more difficult to measure) -- I was told at school that when I sleep my brain "processes and sorts information". Well if you reduce the amount of sleep four times perhaps you become more prone to make mistakes when working (and lose time fixing them).
It's not about type fields and tag-and-switch. It's about the "if" statement. Let's be clear about how batsh*t crazy this messaging is.
You mean Lussumo?
> Could you imagine something like that happening in Castro's Cuba, Saddam's Iraq, or Communist Russia?

Also, Zimbabwe.
Why legendary game developer John Carmack shelved his ego and sold to ZeniMax
Is there a possibility of timing information being leaked if you verify a HMAC manually instead of using, say, CCM?
The original article's claims, and your counter-claims, need to be proven/disproven by a study of individuals practicing poly-phasic sleep for e.g. 10-20 years. Until then, we're basically in anecdote territory.
Pure research definitely leads to innovation. But I don't think there's any significant correlation between holding a monopoly and running a top-tier lab.

It has happened, sure.
But at least as often, it hasn't.
And a monopoly certainly isn't required to build a great research lab.
If you read their content (what little there is), it's type fields that they actually object against. I don't think they're actually saying "remove all ifs from code." If they are, then, yes, that would be batshit crazy. Instead of being crazy, though, I think they're just ineffective at communicating their message.
I'm curious if anybody has thoughts regarding the work of maximalists. The only person coming to mind right now is the prolix writer David Foster Wallace. Is his method of writing entirely flawed? Or are there cases where being over-the-top is preferable?
Ask HN: Formal education or self-taught?
There are consistent posts on HN from people wanting or offering advice on what types of math, algorithms, marketing, business, etc. books to read.

I'm curious how many HN readers consider a formal education to be the biggest factor in their ability to pursue the projects they are interested in, versus having a strong tendency to learn stuff on their own.

Or perhaps a healthy mix?

My own situation is that I'm mostly self-taught with respect to programming and algorithms and have learned most of what I know by working on projects "on the job".

I'm currently interested in some areas that involve heavier math and algorithms and I wonder how much a formal educational background (i.e. an MS in computer science) would have accelerated how quickly I could get into this stuff.

Thoughts?
Ask HN: The importance of heredoc
I wish to ask Rubyists and Shell programmers: Does heredoc still have a place? Is it still worth its syntactic weight? I can see how it would be great for one-off scripts producing a bit of text. But I can picture a number of ways to get almost the same effect (readable one-offs producing text) in a scripting language without complicating the syntax.
This is not surprising to me. Facebook just eats my time everytime I get on there. I now go there only about twice a week. I would rather spend my time on sites such as hn.

From the point of view of the head of a top US company, do you think that if they had such accounts that they would actually do whatever writing showed up there? Many don't even do their own email--this even extends to low-level managers in some large companies I know.
Apps don't just rotate. You need to configure and most importantly code it so that they rotate. For example, notice that when Safari rotates, the navigation bar and toolbar height shrinks by half. That is done programmatically. It's not as easy as just setting a flag and the contents will rotate magically.
(I'm a Mac geek so apologies in advance!).

Yes - I would use one, if Apple made it and it had a big multi-touch Trackpad that also somehow magically doubled up as a numeric pad when I need it. Oh, and it'd have to have the same keyboard layout as the existing Apple keyboards, cos they rock!
You might be right that the institutions won't take a phishing exploit seriously - after all, phishing is easy enough to pull off against most sites without exploiting any specific vulnerabilities (just send an email saying "Please respond with your SSN and password"). But what I would do is to send details to the vulnerable sites, and tell them you'll publish them in 30 days. If they respond and ask for more time for a fix, you can give it to them. Probably they won't respond, and then you can just go public knowing that you've done your best.
If the rest of the world wasn't so rigorously attached to monophasic, I don't see why it would be so difficult. It's not an inherently unworkable schedule, it's just that our work, commerce, and socializing all take forms that don't accommodate it.

Anyways, I'm intrigued by what he calls the "Everyman" schedules - they seem like a compromise between the rigid Uberman and the monophasic that the rest of the world uses.
It's pretty much universal with AdSense. If you know anyone who makes a significant amount of money, ask them about it. Or just browse the AdSense board on WebmasterWorld.

I have personally increased revenue by over 100% by making small color and positioning changes, and this is also fairly common (I cited 20-30% because I wanted to be super-conservative in my claim).

But here are some examples:

From Google's official blog: Removing a border from an ad doubled revenue to $650/day:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/05/unobtrusive-ads-can-boos...

Palette swap doubled clickthrough:
http://www.cyberindian.com/web-marketing/article.php?article...

Webmasterworld thread: Most people did not disclose percentage, but some did (85% increase, 100% increase, etc)..

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/14556.htm

There are endless examples.. just Google it.
The natural evolution from side project to full-time business
They also get the privilege of only interacting with quality people. It must be nice not having to deal with as many idiots.
Personally? I love working till I drop, sleeping till I'm done, and doing it again. Usually it means going to full vampire mode, which was much, much easier in NYC.
I consider the graph of "Time Distribution of 100 recent major inventions" as evidence of a decrease in the rate of innovation highly questionable and subjective. To see an innovation as major will clearly take time since it will need to be exploited. It follows that it is unlikely that anything recent would be considered a major. Even as late as the early 90's I doubt that e-mail would have been considered a major innovation and that was 20 years after it was developed.

During the 80's through current day innovation drought just off the top of my head I come up with the following: Scanning Tunneling Microscope followed by the Atomic Force Microscope, Super String Theory, RNA Interference, Carbon Nanotubes, iPhone (a convergence of many technologies in chip development and manufacturing, power storage, display technology and software), Statistical Natural Language Processing, Acceleration of Universe expansion, ....
Doesn't really say a lot.

Xcode is nice, there's a simulator, Interface Builder has lots of windows, and you need to program in Objective C. Nothing very insightful.
It's difficult because our bodies did not evolve to sleep to that schedule. Every account I've read concludes with "It's great! I'm happy with how it turned out! Oh, by the way, I don't do it anymore because it's so hard to keep up."

Read the thread I linked to, which is now at the bottom of this discussion.
And don't forget, lots of those 15 minute intervals can add up to serious money. ("Stovepipe" systems.) You can also set up an opportunity to bill for coming later in and "fixing" a seemingly intractable big mess.
after vanquishing all if statements, we're going to go after function calls.

And after that, we will eliminate source code, because it's too complicated. Everything you need to do can be done with 5x7 index cards.
RoughlyDrafted is extremely biased. I can't stomach the site and I'm an Apple fanboy.
thanks. always nice to hear.

steve
Without software, the hardware is just a bunch of ICs. I don't see the point here.
Are you familiar with Earthships? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship

There's a lot of interesting work done there on sustainable buildings, and I think there are ideas there that can be applied in non-earthship buildings as well.
Have you considered a trackball? It seems to me that attaching a large trackball to the arm of your chair would be far better than having a trackpad on your keyboard.

Example trackball: http://www.ooscare.co.nz/products%5C154_Kensington%20trackba...
Humans are naturally biphasic, but more in the 6-7 hours + .5-1 hours range. Which is why some cultures have a midday siesta.

Famous people who actually slept biphasically include Winston Churchill, who was by all accounts energetic, hardworking, and did not sleep that much overall.
I've never had a problem with heredoc. I'm curious what you mean when you say "I can picture a number of ways to get almost the same effect . . . without complicating the syntax". Would you care to illustrate your point with an example so we can make the discussion a little bit more concrete?
This is a very USA centric post. Nothing wrong with that of course.

"Locked in to a single vendor? Everyone signs a multi-year contract."

in the United States.

Here in India (set to become the second largest cell phone market in the world, behind China and replacing the USA by 2010), most (> 99.5%) phones are unlocked and so vendor neutral. You can switch vendors and phones independently. The Telecom Ministry is putting in place a regulation to allow phone number portability. This should happen in a couple of months and then you can switch service providers and your old cell number remains valid with the new vendor.

"I predict they will dominate the market for years to come. "

The US market. Sure.

"and signing up for the $99 iPhone Developer Program -- can build an app and sell it to the worldwide audience of iPhone users."

Rant mode on.

I'll be damned if I pay 99$ a year to be "allowed" to develop software for a device I paid for. AFAIK (correct me if I am wrong) I have to pay to deploy an app on my own phone.

Rant Mode off.
How do you know that your muscles only recover during night and not during day.

You could still lay on the coach and read a book and your muscles would recover as well, or not?
It seems ironic for someone who derides learning anything about computer science and finds knowing anything about the C programming language to be totally ridiculous and antiquated to be lauding a system that is primarily programmed in Objective-C (rather than VB6 or whatever), on a programming blog no less.

But to be fair, not much programming is talked about on that blog from what I can see so maybe it is more Engadget-lite-lite.
Is a CTR+HMAC code much more tricky to implement than EAX? I'd imagine it's just:

e := encrypt(x)
e := e + sep + hmac(e)

And for decryption:

e, m := split(e, sep)
if m = hmac(e):
x := decrypt(e)

The only thing I'd be particularly worried about is timing attacks on `m = hmac(e)`. Am I just being naive?
Bill Nye Explains the iPhone 3GS's Oleophobic Screen
My formal education gave me the tools (or at least the knowledge of the tools) that I would need to make sense of things that interest me.

Without it the bootstrapping would have been a great deal harder.
Do you know how recent SQL databases on small computers are?
Oh, heredocs absolutely still have a place. It's the right choice for any multiline string which might contain quoting characters.

And what's so complicated about the syntax? Even if you have never seen a heredoc before, it's generally very easy to figure out what's going on from context.
According to the NIH, Sleep is one of the events that modify the timing of secretion for certain hormones. Many hormones are secreted into the blood during sleep. For example, scientists believe that the release of growth hormone is related in part to repair processes that occur during sleep.

http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih3/sleep/guid...
without letting the clearly-dying giants fall and the detritus be reclaimed.

Same thoughts here. I wouldn't be surprised if "Too big to fail" makes it into history books as the biggest catalysator for the economic failure that we're witnessing.

It's plain old protectionism at work. The wealthy fear for their pole position, change is not welcome when you're at the top.
In the U.S. there is cell number portability. Also, sure you can jailbreak the phone but then that engenders a whole host of other potential problems to say nothing of the fact that that is untenable for most users.
No, mouse closer better..

http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html
Fuckers need to try cleaning chemical reactors.
The thing I've been thinking about recently is that when you're working on a very large project like the game I'm developing, I'm not sure I have the patience to work on a single project as a sideline for several years. I wonder if it's a case of blitzing it full time and finishing in a few months or not finishing it at all because you're so fed up you've moved on to something else.
Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty interesting.
Do not attribute to malice what can be equally well explained by stupidity.
heredocs are great. I use them all the time for metaprogramming. I don't see them going out of style anytime soon. Not sure what you mean about complicated syntax.

I supect you may be new to Ruby and confused by the heredoc sytnax. If so, this post has a review of some of the syntactical issues with heredocs:

http://log.gmarik.info/2007/12/rubys-here-document-heredoc-m...

Hope that helps.
So did anybody try to do directly the uberman's sleep schedule (6 times 20 minutes sleep)?

A friend tried passing to it through multiple core sleep phases, but failed miserably after one week.
Just do heavy exercise, you will require more sleep and sleep deeper. I don't sleep well unless I'm doing 1.5 hours of exercise.

Doing mentally stimulating work before going to bed is the worst way to sleep well. I need almost 2 hours of mindless tv or something besides programming before going to bed to sleep properly. Otherwise I have programming dreams.

Perhaps Dustin exercises a lot, or maybe he's always been more into intellectual pursuits.
I'll buy it, save for the music. Simple music is .. simple, `if it sounds good, it is good`.

Who after a certain age can sit down, turn on the radio and honestly enjoy the new cookie cutter tunes pushed out of LA? Good music changes the rules. See the hair standing on your arms - you didn't expect that chord change.

It goes further than that - Take a favorite piece. find a *.mid version of it. load it into a sequencer, take out all the dynamics and rhythm so the song is just chord changes, one per measure. It's unbearable. Unlistenable - except maybe to a student of music theory.

It takes a human ear to bend the sound and forge emotion clearly enough that the receiving end gleans something from it.

anyways, in music, more nuance is always better.
I wonder how this affects learning and memory.

anecdotes:

My wife and I are both very attuned to our learning processes, and we both notice immediate skill improvements after "sleeping on it". This applies to learning, retention, and even physical skills (sports and video games).

Because sleep affects cognition, being poorly rested can amplify all kinds of bad habits. When I'm fully rested, I'll think "let me sketch out a solution and plan my code changes". When I'm sleep deprived, I just jump in and flail. It's literally the difference between "oh, I know I should do X, but I'll just dive in 'cause that's fun" versus just doing X, and having fun anyway.

There were times in university where I would get up at 6 pm, and go to sleep at 6 am. I couldn't understand so-called "morning people".

Now, though, if I go to bed tired at 10:30 pm, I wake up rested at 6:30 am. It really is a matter of training. I rarely go to bed later than midnight now, after 20 years of rarely going to bed before midnight.

That feeling of being fully rested was a vivid surprise. My eyes open, and I realize I'm lying down, but I could just as well be standing up. There's no friction. There's no pain. I'm ready to go.

So, in summary ... be very careful about messing with your sleep patterns, and don't assume that you're somehow incompatible with the standard sleep schedule. i suspect that a lot of it is just plain old boring training, not sexy hacking.
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