skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Mac Pro's target market is probably among people doing research or running render farms"

and "Now if even hard-core enthusiasts like Matt and myself are turning to laptops and iMacs..."

Makes me think that the author's view of the world is very narrow.

Renderfarms are in fact a bad target for a Mac Pro -- part of the reason for the MacPro's cost is graphics hardware, which you don't need on a renderfarm... though that's probably going to start changing as the graphics processors continue to become compute clusters. That is, of course, why there's such a market for rack-mount headless servers.

Outside of research, there are as mentioned elsewhere in the comments the creative industry, which has much more need of memory, computing power, and graphics performance than the "hardcore enthusiasts" -- compositing and animation can be very intensive tasks... imagine the amount of data involved in just the models for the battle scenes in "The Return of the King" for example.
A great read on exactly this issue is A New Green History of the World by Clive Ponting. Noticed it is cited in the page linked but wanted to call it out specifically since I have read it and really enjoyed it as a history of human civilization from the perspective of resource availability and utilization.
40 Years of the Net
> I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs

Me too, and I have a Dell laptop in the mail that I'll be installing Ubuntu on and trying to use as my main machine.

But you know what isn't the same in all of these programs between OS X and Linux? Font rendering. I can get Linux to "OK" but OS X is always refreshing in comparison.
Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data
Am I the only one thinking, what's their business model?
Think about how flaky translation of written text already is, and then imagine doing a speech-to-text step first.

I strongly suspect this isn't ready for prime time, yet. And I'm guessing the potential for hilarious mishaps is fairly high.
Interesting paper. I wonder if patents are the best metric for innovation though...
Although I'm not a fan of using i in a mathematical formula like this. When I first saw it, it looked like they meant sqrt(-1).
you must have a fast machine... Try installing windows 7 or snow leopard on a computer with 2gb of ram and a 2 year old processor... then the eye candy won't really add to the experience.
To clarify: H(m || k) is insecure if you use a broken hash function. HMAC remains secure unless the underlying hash fails catastrophically. If you use a non-broken hash -- e.g., SHA256, which is what people should be using in 99.9% of situations -- then the attacks Nate describes are harmless.

That said: Use HMAC! It's like having good brakes on your car -- if you're lucky you can get away without it, but it's an easy enough thing to do right that it's not worth taking risks.
This is amusing, a somewhat related HN story (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910071)

If there wasn't a latin language, I wonder how much longer it would've taken for humans to have such rich interactions with computers as we have today.

Not sure if locale specific URLs will take off or not, especially pointing toward the other HN article.
Disk space requirements aren't obscure technical information. Providing it wouldn't confuse anyone, especially not anyone adept enough to install an operating system. It should be provided.
Does this happen in a vacuum?
Linkbait. This guy is noticing admittedly interesting characteristics of "grain dynamics," but it's not a new state of matter at all.
Only mine, http://wingolog.org/. The blog server is Scheme with a git backend, documented at http://wingolog.org/software/tekuti/. The static bits of the site are generated from SXML.
Some googling shows that the VMWare Tools are not yet compatible with 9.10. Does anyone know how quickly VMWare usually gets around to updating tools after an Ubuntu update?
Note that the single-quad Mac Pro has only 4 RAM slots and goes up to 16GB, same as the iMac.
I don't think anyone got what I meant (which means I should express myself more clearly). If a person who deifies nature is putting forward a theory on how our 'mistreating nature' may lead to the collapse of our civilisation, then I get suspicious, merely because 'he would say that, wouldn't he?'.
Maybe a computer-specific language would have been created, composed of whistles, beeps and chirps ;)
Finally! I'm sick of my roommate hogging the airport sound system!
According to their research, women started out with much less confidence but by the junior year it has started to level out when the classes become more difficult for both genders. See section "Gap Between Perceived and Actual Ability" and "Confidence Gap Narrows"

Also see "Geek Mythology: Lore about Being in CS" specifically "It is important to note that most of the CS students (both male and female) we interviewed feel they do not match the stereotype: their interests are varied (including sports, theater, poetry) and not isolated to computer science. "

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/si....

This paper expounds more on the view that a student must be absorbed in computers 24/7 and that women's perception is that they must be this way to succeed: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/an... men who are not like that still feel like they can be successful in computer science under "The Non-Hacker Male" from that paper.

Based on this information, I believe the stereotypes are self perpetuating and breaking the feedback loop will help a lot. I ask that you personally help by keeping an open mind.
Agreed, same experience on my ThinkPad R500.
I'm not sure if I buy this theory, since the collapse of the Roman empire was presaged by the collapse of the taxation system by several generations, especially in Hispania. Regardless, the nutrition and health of Rome in particular was ravaged by the Justinian invasion of Italy and the subsequent Lombard war, which reset the agricultural production of Italy to a significantly lower level for the next 800 years or so until the 1400s and the rise of the Italian city-states.
From http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/desktop/features :

System requirements

Ubuntu is available for PC, 64-Bit and Mac architectures. The Alternate installation CDs require at least 256 MB of RAM (the standard installation CD requires 384MB of RAM). Install requires at least 3 GB of disk space.
Canastilla bebé para bordar en punto de cruz, 3 meses
Alpine is UW's successor to Pine:

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/
Good link, but you should know he mentions that aspect and disputes its sufficiency: something more is needed because recent research shows that other nations had respect for property rights, good government and so on.
Is Redis stable enough to replace using a database as persistent storage. There seems to be some indication that it is, but then there are paragraphs in the documentation that makes it seem like it's not. Particularly if your database size exceeds the machine's memory then you could lose data.

Is one of the goals of the project to replace the need to use a database? Or will it always be more suitable cache or worker queue replacement?
I recently started using Leo for a combination of outlining, literate programming, and general project management.

I don't go as far as Knuth and try to formulate a complete narrative of my program, but Leo's outlining features let me clone and regroup blocks of code on a task-by-task basis and document: "In these blocks, I'm implementing feature x," or "fixing bug y." It's very useful for getting the big picture and making sense of problems in the codebase. When using only a code editor, you waste a lot of time jumping through the project and searching through files, and I don't have that problem anymore.
> Providing it wouldn't confuse anyone

You fail at UI. Any and all information always adds some cognitive load and confuses the user. Every time you think you should show the user something, you must figure out a very convincing reason why you should not just leave it out. There clearly isn't one for majority of users who are going to install ubuntu, and for the rest, googling for two easy words isn't going to be too much of trouble.
It's right there on the features page. That takes fewer clicks than finding the requirements for Windows 7.
A fun reminder that where most programmers (I suspect) are of the iterative sort -- especially where the language is concise and testable -- Knuth is an inveterate planner. If you've trained yourself to strategize mathematically and execute long streams of pseudocode in your head, a word processor is your friend. :)

That said, I've long wanted more expressive commentary in the trickier parts of the codebase. i.e. some kind of comment xml that IDEs make into a rich text area, for the diagrams and maths and whatnot.
Thanks for the recommend. I'll reciprocate with a rec of Arnold Toynbee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee), who wrote about the cyclical nature of civilizations and societies with a blend of perspectives from various fields, rather than the basic 'flow of history.'
Why Haskell is great for multicore programming
Ah, in that case, it's not a fallacious argument. I would suggest reading it; while I've only gone through parts of it thus far, it's proving to be quite riveting. Also, he's not the only one who argues that the collapse of civilizations is a function of ecological sustainability practices. Jared Diamond immediately comes to mind (and he's much easier to digest because he doesn't have a theoretical ulterior motive.)
I disagree: it is insecure even if you use a perfect hash function. This is because the construction itself is vulnerable to collisions, whereas HMAC requires 2nd-preimage attacks (as far as we know today, modulo any advances in the multicollision work of Joux and Kelsey for long messages, YMMV).

In other words, if you use a secure 128-bit hash algorithm (not MD5!) with HMAC, you get approximately 128-bit security. If you use the same hash with "secret suffix", you get 64-bit security. Quite a loss of security for no gain.

Additionally, hashes often fall to collision attacks long before 2nd-preimage attacks. So you've maximally exposed yourself to the leading edge of attacks. Not a good plan.

In summary, today the following MAC approaches for short messages (say, cookies) have approximately this level of security:

SHA256-HMAC: 2^256
SHA256-SecretSuffix: 2^128

SHA1-HMAC: 2^160
SHA1-SecretSuffix: 2^53 (versus 2^80 originally)

MD5-HMAC: 2^128
MD5-SecretSuffix: 30 seconds on a laptop
Top 30 online resume services
Key advice missing from this is to be dilligent about Trademarks. I've seen a friend's company burn through $250K in trademark law suits. They are transitioning from the startup to small business stage so it can be absorbed, but would kill an earlier stage venture.
Agile Windows Programming: Big, Simple, Stupid
Integrated Development Environments For Qt And Not Only
5 tech match ups
Any references on how to read/interpret this results?
Branch policies with Git
Works fine for me under Fusion 3.
Finding or Keeping a Tech Job
I got about halfway through this before I decided that I just wanted to see the final result. Perusing the source of the final link, I saw a bunch of unclosed tags - is this something that he mentions is allowed in HTML5? I don't think I could bring myself to place unclosed <p> or <td> elements in my page.

As a side note I submitted this post while not logged in, was redirected to the login page, came back to my post and instead of showing "<p>" the input field had rendered a newline. Vulnerability of some sort?
Guitar Hero as a Form of Scaffolding
Tips on How to Exercise Your Way Out of Diabetes
I wrote: If you use a non-broken hash ... then the attacks Nate describes are harmless.

You wrote: the construction itself is vulnerable to collisions.

These two statements do not contradict each other. A hash function for which it is feasible to find collisions is considered by the cryptographic community to be broken.

hashes often fall to collision attacks long before 2nd-preimage attacks. So you've maximally exposed yourself to the leading edge of attacks

As I said -- H(m || k) is insecure with a broken hash function, while HMAC(k, m) remains secure unless the underlying hash fails catastrophically. Someone who uses SHA256(m || k) as a MAC is taking an unnecessary risk, but it's not an immediate security flaw.
i done been on beta, it actually works pretty well and the graphic card compatibility is improved greatly.
Great post. Thanks for doing the work to get the word out.
Digital Graffiti Wall
You sound a lot like me. I've realised lately that I just don't like being an employee (for many of the reasons you have mentioned above) and I'm trying to find a way to transition into working on my startup full-time and hopefully never go back.

Perhaps you are going about this the wrong way. You are looking for "The job where I'm happy to stay late, work on the project at home, and have pride in telling people what my company does."

That sounds more like running your own company instead of being an employee.
Hello, the documentation should be updated indeed. Now Redis supports the maxmemory directive that will start to reply with an error on write commands when the database is using more than the specified bytes of RAM.
I have an early 2008 8-core Mac Pro with 8 gigs of RAM. I just don't like laptops much, since I'm always at my desk (and I have a Macbook anyway).
Artist draws manhattan skyline from memory
Looking forward to upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 ...in 3 to 6 months when all the bugs are shaken out and everything is compatible with the new version. =^)
We can handle the humor, we're just waiting for it to show up.
Very nice application. I have been looking for something like this for quite a while now.
One of my coworkers used to talk about Ramanujan. He remarked Ramanujan called every prime number a close personal friend. He sort of had this deep relationship with numbers.

Then I saw a documentary on people who could do complex math without the aide of a calculator (e.g. given any large number and tell if it was prime in their head). I thought there might be a parallel between people like this and Ramanujan. The documentary focused on a couple of people who were not savants, but by all accounts normal people. They followed a young British kid. He described how he saw and felt about numbers, and each number had a distinct personality. I found it remarkably similar to the description about how Ramanujan felt about numbers.
Unclosed tags have been valid in all versions of HTML except for XHTML1 and XHTML2. It's the SGML ancestry showing through.
This is Why Google Scares the Sh*t Out of Companies
Wow. I mean really, WOW! One announcement of a Web based product that is currently inferior to your product that only runs on a very limited number of devices and your company looses Billions of dollars. Wow.
About Water Aerobics Shoes
Environment. When I'm putting more effort into tuning out a noisy, distracting environment than I am into the work product, burnout is on the horizon.

Beware of people who claim to like such environments: Some function well in them, but in my anecdotal observation, many crank out substandard work. This accumulates over time into big problems.
My highschool math teacher spent two classes proving Goedel's incompleteness theorem to us, so this was really cool to see in programming form.

Besides that though, I finally understand what LISP is all about. I've never worked with LISP before, and his explanation of LISP as manipulating sets blew my mind!

Does anyone have any LISP tutorials they recommend? I did a quick search and came up with loads, but it's hard to tell if they're good right off the bat.
In Rails we just have a page that prints out CACHE.stats.
http://code.sixapart.com/svn/memcached/trunk/server/doc/prot...
To be clear, we are using the cryptographic definition of "broken": a cipher or construction with known attacks faster than the best theoretical strength

We both agree that the highest theoretical strength for collision resistance in a hash function is the birthday paradox, which takes sqrt(2^n) work. So if a collision attack is found that is faster, the hash algorithm is considered "broken".

But the H(m || k) construction is broken compared to HMAC by the same definition, no matter how secure the underlying hash function. Out of the gate with a perfect hash, you're reducing the strength from 2^n to 2^(n/2).

If a 2nd-preimage attack was discovered for SHA256 that reduced the effort from 2^256 to 2^128, we would both agree that it is broken for use with HMAC (among other things). This, of course, says nothing about the practicality of a 2^128 search, but cryptographically, SHA256-HMAC would be broken.

So why would you call a construction that always has the same effect as such a momentous discovery not "broken"?
I should have titled this "User Interfaces: Big, Simple, Stupid"

For those of you skimming, key quote: One of the few indicators that you're working at the maximum level of simplicity is that you will view your UI as the most ridiculously stupid thing ever. If your User Interface is easy enough for one-eyed, one-fingered, one-armed, lobotomized, drunken monkeys? You might be close.
Could someone explain this to me? If, as they say, "There is only one language construct in π: the pattern", why is there flow control, blocks, etc.? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that a pattern is a specialized function, and the only type of function in π?
How my friend negotiated an $8,000 salary increase (video)
I helped a friend negotiate an $8,000 salary increase and 50% boost in equity, and we decided to put together a video showing how. Thought you guys might find it interesting for future job interviews.
Since I installed Ubuntu on my mom's computer, she hasn't called me for really any support. The computer boots up faster and isn't slowed down by virus software.
It's a neat example, but surely you know you can't rearrange terms of an infinite sum unless it is absolutely convergent. That's not the case here.
You can major in facebook here!

Seriously?
Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly.

The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?
Ok, I found that Alt+26 on Windows gives you the single arrow (→). But how do you type the ⇒ hollow arrow? (Without charmap or copy&paste)

Edit: I haven't really been able to get it to run on my Windows machine at work. I'll have to try at home later.
So why would you call a construction that always has the same effect as such a momentous discovery not "broken"?

I didn't say that H(m || k) wasn't broken. I said that it wasn't necessarily insecure. :-)
Other Causes of Death vs. H1N1 since Jan. 1 2009
Firefox experience in Ubuntu is inferior to Firefox experience in Vista (at least on my Thinkpad).

It's noticeably slower and fonts are uglier (even after installing exactly the same TrueType fonts as on Windows).
I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.)

Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configure X and fonts/local.conf.
Tiny banner ads attached to flies generate buzz at conference [video]
How much patience?
Technologically, not. Remember that a luxury car is more like a status symbol.
Windows 7 is running on my 1.6ghz Sempron w/ 1GB of ram. I turned off the major eye candy (aero) and it still looks great and runs fine.

That PC is the 'family' computer - so basically all it's used for is Surfing, streaming music through iTunes and instant messaging.

It used to run ubuntu but everyone complained about how ugly it is - and I wasn't going back to XP. At least with Win7 I'm in the clear anti-virus wise, no need for that.. yet.
Assuming that it's priced reasonably, I'd definitely buy it. I'm sure a lot of people would. But it's something that Apple's not going to do as it won't work out of the box.
Outstanding introduction to this sort of thing, thanks for sharing.
The "tape changes for 4 state busy beaver" image is the Burj Dubai! :)
Why Do We Persist?
You're neglecting the importance of context.
What do you use that isn't compatible?
Vaporware....
MIT's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming is in LISP (Scheme to be exact) All the lectures and course materials are under Creative Commons.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
Apple to patent CSS transformations and animations
Has anyone seen this same work applied to Google Reader? There's quite a large header that takes up a lot of space on my netbook screen. I didn't see anything on the zenhabits.com site after a quick search either.

Maybe I just need to start tinkering...
From the comments (it's might not be what it appear to be)

"Let me explain this again. Apple promises not to use these patents against MS, Mozilla, Opera, et.al. because that would ba against W3C rules. But by having the patents they make it impossible for someone else to claim 'ownership' of the technologies and patent troll anyone!"
Interview with Aucadia.com, where Fans Get Involved in the Bands They Love
I'd like to see e-paper used in places other than ebooks. Static, powerless displays could be really useful in so many areas: cell phone/computer notifications, wall calendars, daily reminders, or anything that changes less than 30 times a second.
Ok, I think we agree on that: "broken" doesn't necessarily mean it is feasible to attack.

Another example I thought of is truncated HMAC. This is where the output of an HMAC is truncated to meet some space constraint. For example, you might have an embedded device that is now using SHA256-HMAC but you have a legacy need to store the result in 160 bits (due to a hard-coded packet size designed originally for SHA-1). Let's compare this to SHA256-SecretSuffix with no truncation.

Comparison of space used in packet versus the work required to attack each approach:

SHA256-HMAC-Truncated160: 160 bits, 2^160
SHA256-SecretSuffix: 256 bits, 2^128

Thus even though it uses less space, a truncated SHA256-HMAC is more secure than a full size SHA256-SecretSuffix authenticator. I think this also illustrates that SHA256-SecretSuffix as a construction is broken.
I wonder how well Google Wave would work as a real-time collaborative literate programming tool.
The menus and title bars look great.

But open Firefox and and go to Gmail or something and compare it to OS X.
I can't believe I didn't think of OpenCourseWare. Thanks!
We weren't allowed calculators on most tests. (And when we were, most of the time I forgot to bring one. I've never been so fast with mental and written arithmetic since.)
Notes from Startup School
There is no inherent virtue in just about any living arrangement: it all depends on your perspective. Yours appears to be focused on environmental impact, I prefer to live in the near silence out in the country. When I visit family in NYC, I can't believe that I used to live there: the noise and crowds drive me nuts!

I don't live in an incorporated town: I live in a rural "township" with a population of roughly 2,000 over 36 square miles. IIRC, that's about the size of Manhattan. Yet I know my neighbors better than I did when I lived in Brooklyn, NY some 20 years ago. The mother Nature you relegate to weekend trips is the same mother Nature I enjoy dealing with every day.

Like I said: it's all about perspective.
If you've already got Arch set up how you like it, there's not much reason to switch back over to Ubuntu, at least in my opinion.
Let me just say that I love the concept. I know many people have tried similar ideas before.