skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still think it's a little odd that they wouldn't want to simply achieve both goals at once by telling people about it. That would still mean that they would be less likely to preemptively pull the trigger themselves, and at the same time would deter the US from attacking them.

Not to mention, if I (as the US) knew that this system was in place, I would probably be a little less terrified that the USSR was going to randomly decide to attack (since this is clearly meant to be a purely reactive system). This would subsequently lead ME to be less likely to randomly attack, etc, etc.
Favorite part:

"Foot-Shooting Prevention Agreement: I, (your name), promise that once I see how simple AES really is, I will not implement it in production code even though it would be really fun. This agreement shall be in effect until the undersigned creates a meaningful interpretive dance that compares and contrasts cache-based, timing, and other side channel attacks and their countermeasures. (Signature) (Date)"

That being said, for my PHP+MySQL bretheren:

http://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/encryption-functions....
Complaining about "Ivies" in the context of CS theory is a bit goofy. Princeton is in the top echelon for theory, but I'm not sure the other Ivies would crack the top 5.
Did you care about this guy before he died? Or are you just using his death to grandstand on some anti-environmentalist rant?
What would people consider Steve Jobs?

I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a CS degree.

What did/would Steve do? Isn't that what this should be about? =)
I think critics tend to compare pair programming to those moments when they are most productive. One programmer in flow may be able to really crank something cool out in a day or so. He might even work 25 hours straight to do it, and really get it out there. If he spends the next week polishing, tweaking, and adding very little functionality, he doesn't include that in his comparison to pair programming. He did it in 25 hours, it took a pair of programmers three days, the pairs are slower, even though the pairs are done and have moved on to other, important stuff.

Pair programmers who work 6 hour days can finish a lot of useful functionality in a week or two. They also have social lives, get to take long lunches, go hiking on the weekends, etc., even though they are very productive. This is why I prefer it. Plus, it's totally sustainable, and it comes with a built-in training methodology.

I used to think that everyone really should start pairing. But I'm more in the camp now that people should form little organizations that pair and basically put everyone else out of business. If it's more productive, places like hashrocket are going to become the leading shops for software. Their employees are going to make twice the market rate, have social lives, good friends at work, interesting problems to work on, and relativley low stress. If it's not more productive, they'll probably eventually have trouble competing.
The article's explaination is not convincing so the question still stands.
How did you test these?

Are you attacking a "site" (as in spoofing passwords till you get lucky) or actually cracking known hashes.

Im assuming the latter (because of the length of time). In which case you could add some straight cracking stats into the mix as well just to emphasis the point.

For example you can generate a Sha1, 5 character rainbow table (which holds all the hashed passwords for a particular keyspace) for the lowercase charset in 13minutes.

And then use it to crack hashes in under 1 second. :)

Upper/Lower 5 chars can be attacked the same way with 40 minuts table generation and, again, under a second to crack.
This is why storing plain text passwords is evil.
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Since I wrote one of the "here's how you could fix your pair programming" replies, I should clarify that I don't think pair programming is the only way to work. I'm not doing it in my job right now and don't particularly think I should be.

If you are pair programming either by choice or circumstance, it's useful to know some tricks to make it work better. But if you've tried it and don't think it's the right thing, then you should do something else.
MacArthur Fellows for 2009
If only these opinions were carried in the WSJ, FT, etc.
My father is a sales engineer, which means he covers all the technical stuff of a sale. His employer is behind in paying commissions my father needs, not simply wants. In my experience of growing up with a father who worked as a technician and then as a salesman, I see this as a change for the better.

This method removes greed as a motivation, promotes selling helpfulness to the customer (rather than ripping them off), and stabilizes the pay of the sales guy who just had a really tough quarter but still has to pay the bills.

Sure, a well placed bonus here and there for outstanding team-work, a huge sale or contract, etc, would be a good motivator. But, I think the commission-ship has long since sailed.
Nice flash animation explaining AES:

http://www.cs.bc.edu/~straubin/cs381-05/blockciphers/rijndae...
Why do people insist on having short (<12 chars) overly complicated passwords? The passphrase: "totallysecretpasswordthatyoullneverguess" (or other similarly-long phrase) serves as a much more secure pass-phrase than the hodgepodge of non-alphanumeric characters people suggest that good passwords are and is far easier to remember.

The only impediment to decent passphrases are services that limit how many characters your password can be.
Joe the Developer is entrusted with writing code that can cost people money and cause damage. In some cases, it can endanger lives and businesses.

Joe the Developer doesn't need a certificate, but "we the people" (as in the people who have his software inflicted upon them) would rather he did.

The certification argument seems to forget whose benefits from certification. It's not the developer - it's the people who are able to ensure that there is a baseline level of competence among software developers entrusted with certain kinds of development work.

I'm all for certification.
it's fine. You could have the rss link more prominent. Nice work.

SearchYC also have rss feeds.
I do research in an area that is tangent to CS theory. My experience with meeting some of these people is exactly this: they will not pay attention to you if you are not from their clique.

Also, every time I visit this blog I see comments on the same theme: that theory-oriented conferences are managed by a clique, that others don't feel welcome... So, my general feeling is that they have deep problems in their community (and I don't mean theoretical problems).
you are ignoring the fact that if the awareness of the doomsday machine rose above suspicion, then Americans would take steps to attempt to locate and preempt the machine
They were bought by Rackable earlier in the year:
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...
Sorry but the fact that twitter did this to Techcrunch must be masking people's views here, otherwise I can't understand the comparison with someone's diary.

At the end of the day I value journalism of this kind which is in part investigative and doesn't, to my uneducated eyes, appear to have any personal cost. I'm not sure how interesting it was in this case, but in general "wasn't supposed to be published" is about a fraction of the rationale that needs to be there for a media organisation not to publish.

At the end of the day, TC broke a story here and leaked something Twitter didn't want out in the open. They took a hit on traffic and, by extension, to their exposure which as a media company presumably is a measure that affects revenue. Therefore Twitter deprived TC of revenue as punishment for publishing information they didn't want to see in the public eye.

That's a bad thing, for me, for a media company to have done and it is unusual + interesting.
Hey HN, checkout my little Free/Opensource StackOverFlow site
Shapado.com (http://shapado.com) is our (me and a couple of friends) attempt at providing a free as in freedom replacement for stackoverflow (SOF) with some improvements. It's coded in rails and uses mongodb.

What we have right now that SOF lacks somehow is:

* Multi-topic: We think it’s overkill to create a new site for every subject like SOF does with serverfault and others so shapado is not limited to programming, we have a set of pre-defined categories such as technology, science, politics and more.

To visit the programming category, just point your browser to http://programming.shapado.com/
As each question can be tagged, you can even combined tags and categories that way: http://programming.visualbasic.shapado.com/ ;) Possibilities are endless. You can also combine tags, categories and languages such as http://programming.es.jquery.shapado.com or http://es.kde.shapado.com/ to get all questions about KDE in Spanish.

* Multi-language: the site is available in English, Spanish and French already. We expect more to come with the help from the community.

* Reputation: Like SOF, we have a reputation system. For now everybody is free to do everything, actually, unlike SOF you will even get points for simply posting questions or answering but this will be disabled once we get a substantial userbase… so go and ask your questions now to get loads of reputations points! We will also require a certain amount of reputation points to do certain actions in the future.

* We will provide data dumps of all our questions and answers plus an API, so that there is total data portability. Note that all the data on the site is under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license so technically you can already scrap your data and take it with you ;)

* You can freely install it on your own server. Make sure to grab the source here (http://gitorious.org/shapado) or get the torrent here (http://foss.hexagon.cc/torrents/48220-Shapado_1_0), it has most of the necessary dependencies to run shapado on all platforms.

See the full announcement here: http://blog.ricodigo.com/2009/09/22/shapado-a-foss-replacement-for-stackoverflow
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The idea is simply to illustrate the sorts of time involved in guessing someone's password using a brute force attack. If I were attacking hashes then rainbow tables would definitely be my main worry!

In this case the main worry is websites (email, banking, etc...) that don't implement rate limiting on their login forms and therefore allow people to make targeted attacks with fairly simple hardware. Because this is out out of the user's control it's very worthwhile choosing a difficult password...
What does this add to the discourse about mutable state? Is there any genuine insight here, other "hey it's kind of like about time"? If so, it ought to give rise to some new construct or technique that helps solve the problem, or even just a simplification of some well-known example.

I guess he's trying to popularize the first principle of functional programming, but he's doing it in a confusing way that will inevitably breed further confusion. Look at the absolute silliness of the title for evidence of that.
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Don't forget the satisfaction of helping people! When your widget fills a need, not merely a want, in a company or team, you can feel good at having met that need.

There will always be the slimy, rip-his-granny-off kind of salesman because people are like that. However, the flat-pay system would reward the good kind of salesman more often than the bad kind, and would bolster friendly competition within the company.
Working in technical support my colleagues and I all knew who were good customers, and who were bad customers. Our manager knew too. He would back us up with raises and options. Making unhappy customers happy is not an easy job (especially given our bug list at the time).

Years later, I still remember one who called almost once a week with a new issue he had dug up. Admitting he was right and promising to fix the bugs did not make him happy, or make him go away. We all had a theory that he was calling so often because he was lonely and wanted someone to talk with.

Taking a longer view, I think being a nasty customer is it's own punishment. These people are miserable or sad, and lording over a service or hospitality worker gives them only a pyrrhic victory. The server or tech support moves on with their life. But the asshole is still an asshole.
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If he's using his device for development, then it is possible that he has had beta builds of 3.1 running for a few months.
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Most of these seem to be easy means to rather shallow ends, to me at least. Paying my sixteen-year-old nephew to do these things for me would be easier, and just as satisfying.

The only activity on this list I actually enjoyed was learning how to pick a lock. Not as a means for breaking and entering, but as a skill and an end in itself.

To me, it is all about learning to create something, preferably with a certain artistic value. Over the last few years, I have:

* Designed and built a clock (out of wood, steel and ropes).

* Designed, printed and bound a few notebooks and diaries, and two books.

* Improved my writing skills; both fiction and non-fiction. Wrote several short stories and started a working on a book.

* Bought a fountain pen, re-learned proper penmanship and developed a personal script.

* Learned how to run correctly and started running barefoot (I run 50 miles per week now).

* Borrowed my uncle's SLR camera, learned a lot about photography.

* Wrote, recorded and edited a short movie with some friends.

* Studied music theory and started playing the piano, albeit with to much ambition. I'm just not able to express myself through classical music. These days, I prefer to play blues on my guitar, or jazz standards (1930s-1940s) or stride piano when the mood is right.
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That's definitely a good point! I've come to the habit of short, complex, passwords simply because of websites that tell you that your password must be between 4-8 characters... Banking sites are notorious for this, even though mandating a maximum password length doesn't really help them.
In Obie's defense, he is one of Rails's original "imperious douchebags."
It's a joke: (one of) Turings enigma-decrypting machines at Bletchley Park was nicknamed "Bombe". (and it was a mechanic brute-force attack, far from a Turing-machine)
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That's actually true of computer science in general. Ever turned up to a web conference? Or an OO conference? or a Java conference? I guarantee you that I feel as out of place and excluded in any of those forums as I'm sure you do in a theory conference.

The thing about any "community" that is well-defined enough to justify having its own conferences is that it has its own set of foundational assumptions and jargon, and conventions. If you don't know these things, you're going to have trouble participating at a high level.

I don't think it's so much that people will not "pay attention" to you - it's probably just that what you are saying isn't very interesting. The thing about non-theory CS people interacting with theoretical CS people is that they usually present exactly the same arguments/problems/ideas that everyone else does. Believe me, you get _really_ bored by the seventeenth time you have to address the question "but what if the theorem prover has bugs in it?!", pronounced with the swagger of someone who believes they have just hit upon a novel idea.

I imagine that if I turned up to a gathering of high-energy particle physicists, I don't think they would pay much attention to my thoughts on the subject either.

It's not dismissive behaviour, either. It's actually just a common mistake within CS to believe that you can turn your hand to any part of CS - you're essentially participating in a very high-level discussion.

To answer the original question, I've found people in the top echelons of theoretical CS to be extremely patient and friendly.

I asked some really silly questions of top researchers (in one-on-one or small group situations) as an undergraduate that probably deserved to be answered with disdain - I still cringe in retrospect. The most biting retort I ever got was "Oh, that's covered in <such-and-such-a-paper>, which is worth reading if you're interested in this". Hardly a telling-off. For the most part, people have always taken the time to explain things from first principles, or re-state them in ways that I could understand.

The idea of the ivory tower is a bit of a misconception. You're talking about very, very smart people who are usually more than accommodating when it comes to answering genuine questions or just engaging in discussions. I would jump at the chance to talk to them about anything and everything - it'll be interesting to say the least, and they are some of the nicest people you'll meet in CS.
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I'm not sure that "perfectly entitled to perform" statement holds up. "Legally" entitled to perform, yes... "Morally" entitled to perform, hmmm.

It does seem Twitter was willing to deprive a benefit (read exposure/revenue) granted to TC on the basis the documents were leaked. In the future if TC had interesting/harmful information on Twitter to reveal they would decide commercially whether to publish by taking into account any negative impact for them in exposure on twitter.

That's unhealthy isn't it? Twitter would be less likely to receive negative/unhelpful press than other similar companies on the basis they can punish those who do it.

I know I'm deliberately talking up what happened here but it is an interesting question, to me at least
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From the article it sounds like Facebook made a huge investment in people to build the bespoke (software) infrastructure that they needed. eg. A bespoke in-memory database, their "own storage system called Haystack that's completely built on top of commodity hardware", etc.

Facebook have an order of magnitude more employees than Twitter which probably makes those kind of bespoke uber-scaling advancements feasible.
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As the story points out, the fact we removed this material was announced shortly after it occurred, but the details of how it was done are new.
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I think this still fits into the comparison with garbage collection. To really get the benefits of garbage collection, programmers had to switch from C++ to Java (or something else). Hickey, I think, is suggesting the same is true of time management, so he created Clojure.
Don't worry, I didn't feel offended. If I make a mistake, it's mostly assuming sarcasm in stuff that's meant in a serious way, not the other way 'round.

You should have provided some flimsy anecdote, though, just to complete the emulation.
> DateDatum lastUpdate = now (); //... doSomething(); lastUpdate = now();

Yes, this highlights the crux of the argument:

MutableDate lastUpdate = now();
doSomething();
lastUpdate.changeInPlace();

versus:

ImmutableDate lastUpdate = now();
doSomething();
lastUpdate = changedVersionOf(lastUpdate);

In the first case, when someone reads lastUpdate they get a chunk of memory that could change right out from under them, with no clear recipe as to how to obtain a consistent value. In the second case, they get a consistent value they can use without worrying or synchronization. The first conflates identity and state, the second separates them.

Now, all is not right with the second case, as there still aren't coordination semantics for putting new values in lastUpdate:

TransactionalRef<ImmutableDate> lastUpdate = now();

or

AtomicRef<ImmutableDate> lastUpdate = now();

or something similar would fix that. It's not a matter of removing mutable memory, but one of using it in a way with clear coordination semantics, other than "good luck with that".
wiki for Clojure solutions http://clojure-euler.wikispaces.com/

nice ;)

Actually, on serious note, a great way to compare if your clojure code looks anything like it should.
Ideally, I would agree with you. But at the same time, when I think of the people I know who have certifications, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't trust any of them to write code I would depend on for anything. The systems for certification that are in place today, are IMHO, lacking real credibility. There will always be people who try to beat the system, because they DO see a certification as something that benefits them - it gets them a job. As long as that's the case - I place a lot more emphasis on my personal experience with a person, than what certifications they can show me.
Empirical study is a tad tricky in a field where experimentation would probably be considered wildly unethical and you wouldn't be able to set up a control anyway.
In my experience pair programming works best when used on hard problems. If you're doing the sort of coding where there is no complex problem solving involved and you're basically limited by your typing speed then pair programming is probably just hindrance.

However for the sort of hard complex problem that is pushing you to your limit and requires hours of thought, testing and prototyping to produce a dozen lines of production code I find it can be enormously effective if paired with the right sort of person.
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'Ivies' is used (erroneously)* as a blanket term to descibe a number of elite institutions (think Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, top LACs, etc.)

... connotation.
How exactly is "not convincing", compared to the alternative?
I dunno if it's just me, but for the anal-retentive bastard in me, I ESPECIALLY hate seeing typos in PDF. Inexplicably, I am much more forgiving of them on web pages, as in HTML files and the like.

There's a sense of permanence to a PDF that just makes the mistake all the more heinous.
Reposting from other passwords thread as I feel it's relevant here also:

Why do people insist on having short (<12 chars) overly complicated passwords? The passphrase: "totallysecretpasswordthatyoullneverguess" (or other similarly-long phrase) serves as a much more secure pass-phrase than the hodgepodge of non-alphanumeric characters people suggest that good passwords are and is far easier to remember.
The only impediment to decent passphrases are services that limit how many characters your password can be.
> Pair programmers who work 6 hour days can finish a lot of useful functionality in a week or two. They also have social lives, get to take long lunches, go hiking on the weekends, etc., even though they are very productive. This is why I prefer it.

This is a non sequitur. You can work solo and still get lots done, have a social life, go out for lunch, have fun on the weekends.
perhaps, but this is talking back during the cold war (maybe today would be different). I would think that we'd be too afraid to try something like that during the cold war in fear of starting a legitimate war.

But again, maybe that would be different today, and we might not-so-politely ask them to disarm the system
Let me get this straight. Did he just claim that managers need to be willing to fire someone for having bad breath? And he has the nerve to accuse others of tolerating anti-social behavior?