skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has been A LOT of talk in my network about taking products in the tech space and bringing them abroad... I'm curious what your thoughts are.
Anyone know what their chat status is while chat is hidden?
Chad is right when he said that "it's scarier to tackle the big stuff."

The urge to work is the answer. Another thing is freeing your self into focusing for another software.

One cool post. I have learned a lot from it.
Doh. Thanks. Like I always say: I should not be trusted to implement crypto.
http://www.virtualbox.org/

FTFY
The difference between RAM & disk space continues to elude some, never mind megabytes versus gigabytes & now terabytes.
Slicehost has an excellent assortment of articles for Ubuntu (as well as plenty of other topics). It looks like they don't have any for Karmic yet though.

http://articles.slicehost.com/
I like how you picked two other examples of "bad crypto"...

I picked those just for you. :-)

the other of which is a personal crusade of yours and, in fact, an example of really good crypto

Treating anything as a silver bullet is a dumb thing to do. I only mentioned SSL because, well, it's something which is commonly used that way.

(I was originally going to use PGP as an example, but figured that you'd appreciate me using SSL instead.)
Agreed. I think there are some strange syntax quirks ("go to", versus "enter" would be hard to parse into separate tokens because whitespace isn't a token delimiter).

However, the syntax for "variables" is obvious, and the nesting of parenthesis is a really interesting way to create a context for specific variables.

I happen to have a short temper with applescript, because there are some cases where the natural language component seems to "Get in the way." However, at least for the purpose of this example, pegasus_f strikes me as a really interesting thing to consider.
That's probably why there is the comment at the end: "No fly was harmed. The banners were attached with wax and detached themselves after a couple of hours.". It's up to you, whether you want to believe this... :-)
Featuring HN's markbao
It supports ARM; and a bunch of ARM-based netbooks are due out soon. They are cheaper and much more power efficient than intel's Atom etc. And Windows doesn't run on them (yet).

I'm not a big linux vs. windows or ARM vs. intel fanatic, but I'm excited at what seems to be a disruptive inflection point coming up in the next year or so...
Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about
Ask HN: How to sell a startup?
A friend of mine (not me, I swear) has a profitable company that does about 3 million a year in gross revenue. He’s at a point where the company is still growing and has a decision to face -- sell it or expand it in a way that moves him into a CEO position with a staff reporting to him. Right now he has a just 3 or so employees, all working from home. He doesn’t like the idea of setting up an office -- he really is a startup guy and wants to move on to another project. So now he’s thinking of selling, and knows little about how to approach that.

So the main question is: How does one sell a startup?

I know a thing or two now about approaching angels and VCs, but little about approaching buyers. Do VCs buy companies or know people who do? Does one just directly contact competitors like I’ve heard? Any tips on how to go about this are appreciated. The guy who founded this site bootstrapped it and has no "connections" to speak of. It’s a great feat and an inspiration to those going it alone. However, it really does leave him in the dark now that he wants an exit and I'm pretty sure this company is too big to use digitalpoint, eBay, etc. for a sale.

Another question: How does one value a company?

I know enough to know that this is an art as much as a science, especially with startups. I’ve heard three to five times gross revenue, especially if the business is growing. That gives a target range of 9 to 15 million.

I guess I hear about companies going up for sale and don’t really know if there is a process that they use to announce it or if they just put out a press release or what.

Notes: I’ve searched YC and found a few posts in a similar vein. Forgive me if there is overlap, but I didn’t get all the answers I felt I needed for this particular situation (such as using digitalpoint or eBay for sales). Also, I’m posting this under a new account while I research a sale and valuation until the owner is sure he wants to proceed with a sale.
"Press menu twice" and "draw your pattern" are the only ones I know of. But yes, you can write your own lock application, and there are a few on the market. ("Slide to unlock" is one, although it was very broken when I tried it.)
3 types of social networks embedded in UGC sites
Classification of the 3 types of social networks that are embedded in, and drive, user-gen content sites.<p>Also a deep dive on Wikipedia and how it had game mechanics built in many years ago.
iPhone advocates seem to forget all the features that the iPhone is missing. What if I want to be on IM and at the same time browse the web? Unless there is an external IM server sending me Apple-approved push messages, it can't be done.

On Android, this is trivial.
This is a harmless mistake, for two reasons:

1. It doesn't actually weaken the MAC.

2. You'd never manage to ship that bug anyway, since all of your test cases would fail.

I'm not saying that you should be trusted to implement crypto, but I don't think this particular error is a good reason for such a lack of trust. :-)
Well yeah, there's no Apple logo. How could anyone use software without Steve Job's seal of approval?
I couldn't agree more. The last time I ran Ubuntu as my primary OS its desktop experience was a long ways from Windows or OSX. Compviz was full of bugs that in my opinion significantly detracted from the the overall desktop experience. I'd constantly run into problems where windows wouldn't be placed correctly on the screen or would have artifacts drawn in them. Some of the compviz effects would fail to run altogether - with almost no indication of why. On top of that I found the general desktop performance to be much slower than Windows and OSX. Specific examples of this would include: hiding/restoring/maximizing windows, scrolling through text and graphics, and moving windows. Add to that performance issues in firefox (which have been well documented), incomplete drivers (sleeping, graphics drivers, etc), and the obvious compatibility problems with running linux. Ubuntu is still more frustration than it's worth for a desktop OS imho.
This might be a stupid question, but why not hash a message then encrypt the hash with a symmetric cypher instead of trying to mix the key material into the pre-hash value? Is that just much slower?
why only the two options? is there something intrinsic about this business that precludes him from having his cake and eating it too?
Lean and Scrum - Chicken and Egg
I went the the conference, it was actually pretty good. The main theme being to fail often and realize that you are failing so that you can learn from your mistakes and do better on your next venture.
COme up with a way to attach banner ads that is GUARANTEED to kill the fly, and I'm with you.
Ditto for 2.0.0.3 --- installed fine without complaint, but didn't seem to have any effect on viewing.
What if you're just resting?
Definitely. A name does not make you, it might just be the "dot on the i" but your actual quality decides about your success.
there are some cases where the natural language component seems to "Get in the way"

I guess this is kind of like the uncanny valley [1] of language - if it's too much like natural language, but a little off, it seems much weirder than being an completely unnatural language.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
this was discussed 413,442 posts back

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=496946
Startup School Highlights (video)
The great part about being dead is that you probably won't care too much about any of this. It won't be your problem, anyway.
Wow, thanks for the summary.. I wish that all security experts had your skill at explaining things in layman's terms.
From the vagueness of your statement, it sounds like these forums fall into the second category of being up to no good in the first place.
I meant the general value their company - the value of the specialized GPS widget hardware, the relationships with manufacturers, etc. all goes to 0 once a general purpose device which can provide a better experience comes out.
You mean like cashing out some to an investor and continuing to grow? That is a possibility, but he seems to want to be rich or be king, but not a combination of the two. :-)
What's missing from most entrepreneur pitches
why not hash a message then encrypt the hash with a symmetric cypher

Provided that you're using a cipher with a block size equal to the hash length, this can work. This approach is usually avoided for two reasons:

1. It requires two building blocks (hash + cipher) instead of just one (hash).

2. Under the "standard model" of cryptography, you can prove things about HMAC(k, m) which you can't prove about Encrypt_k(Hash(m)) -- for practical purposes these are utterly irrelevant, but cryptographers are academics and like to have cute theoretical results.
I probably should write up the (very similar, but with a few significant differences) my design for the never-executed Delicious backend datastore.
That's a great point, Stuart.
I'd guess that it can, if that number is being used to protect a copyrighted work. That sounds like exactly a situation that the DMCA was designed to make illegal.
They tend to be pretty trollish about it. They'll probably complain about the flies being "tortured" by having to fly with a weight attached to them.
No Relation: The Mixed Blessings of Non-Relational Databases
Why? Getting a used replacement that's just a bit better than your old worthless car should be more or less free.
Junk Robots
I don't understand it, either, but I'll make a guess. It appears that, from a "C"-programmer point of view, π is something like a type-aware preprocessor. So, for example, the integer_potentiation snippet is using π to construct a "C" program.

OTOH, I may be completely wrong. (Actually, this isn't too surprising, considering the references to "OOPSLA" and "patterns" all over the place on that page. In my experience, people who hang out at OOPSLA often come up with some interesting stuff, but don't do so well at explaining it to outsiders, this page being yet another example of this phenomenon. <grumble, grumble>.)
Slicehost don't officially support Karmic yet, they need to roll a special kernel for it. See:
http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2009/10/28/ubuntu-karmic-k...
The Vatican does this with latin too. It became a dead language nonetheless.

English always absorbed lots of words from many different languages. I suspect that this is a better recipe for language vitality than the "National bureau of new words" approach.
I think your analogy is very poor - indeed I'd say if an analogy can be wrong, this is.

The proximity of the location of a dwelling to the city is analogous the the beneficial qualities of a domain name. Memorability, zeitgeist, aptness, etc.. The unity of each name is responsible for the cost of obtaining it (second hand) as much as the proximity of location to an economic centre is responsible for real-estate costs. Both are scarce.

Your analogy is good for one thing, both situations are impossible: you can't allow everyone the same domain name and you can't enable everyone to occupy the same physical space.
MIT, Volkswagen's In-Car Personal Robot Thinks You're Driving Like a Maniac
What is Problem Solving?
Chaitin gave a not very formal but very nice and informative talk about omega at CMU in 200. Here is part 1 (the other parts should be easy to find).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLPO-RTFU2o

Someone above asked if this is just a restatement of Kolmogorov complexity. I'm not good enough at the technical details to say precisely yes or no but, basically: "yes" - they are regarded as simultaneous and independent discoveries. Kolmogorov complexity is also sometimes called Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity.

-t
There is a setting for PayPal Subscriptions. The most basic way of setting it up is to create a subscription button (PayPal->Merchant Services->Create Button->Subscribe). You choose the setup payment, and monthly, and a few other options, and when someone clicks to subscribe, PayPal will bill them accordingly.

Once you are bringing in money regularly, you will want to enable Auto Sweep. Call PayPal support and tell them to activate "Auto Sweep". Then go to Profile->Auto Sweep and enable it and choose a checking account. Then, every night, PayPal will transfer your PayPal balance (if any) directly to your checking account.
Blackboard defends against open source (Moodle)
A mathematician's take on the importance of the H1N1 vaccine
Twitter Lists:Organize information in a better way
Companies have chosen to be associated with things that are a lot stranger. All depends on the company and the demographic they want to hit.
Out of curiosity ... why do you use the 64bit version?
Do you have more than 4GB of ram?
The TI-83/84 is still used in a lot of textbooks, and teachers are loathe (sometimes) to learn something new. It's entrenched.

2008-09 list of approved calculators:

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/calculus_ab/c...
Even if they used something simple, such as rot13? That would be funny...
H(m || k) was a construction that was used in the early 1990's. No protocol standards specified it after HMAC appeared in 1996. SHA256 appeared in 2002.

If you're using a 2002 heavyweight hash function with an early 1990's MAC construction, you are an idiot. I can use such strong words because no one does this. There are no standards anywhere that specified this exact construction because HMAC was invented long before SHA2. If anyone does this in some private toolkit, it's the perfect example why unreviewed, proprietary crypto designs are horrible.

However, the much more likely scenario if you use H(m || k) is that you're using MD5 (or possibly, but less likely, SHA-1). You have a legacy application that inherited an early 1990's design. This construction was specified for SNMP in 1991, for example.

So while you have a technical point, your argument is detrimental to real, deployed systems. I'm extremely concerned that your straw man argument based on SHA256-SecretSuffix, which is extremely unlikely to exist anywhere, would be taken as supporting MD5- or SHA1-SecretSuffix which I know exist in various toolkits. I've seen it when talking to some clients.

Can you make it clear that both MD5- and SHA1-SecretSuffix are not only cryptographically broken, but have feasible attacks with today's hardware?
That would be very interesting to read.

We're looking at implementing a tagging system for navigating through a large proprietary datastore of oil and gas well data.

The problem we're running into is scaling conjunction queries without blowing-out our hardware budget -- 100's of tags per item with tens of millions of items, updated daily.
You should submit this on it's own to HN. That was a great read.
My high school physics teacher did #1. The math was pretty simple if you knew the concept and the first week he showed us stuff like finding a square root on paper.
It certainly is an innovative idea.

As with the lady on the mobile, at first it would freak me out watching it fly into my vision if I wasn't aware of "fly by advertisement".

With the wax detaching from the fly, could we then have the ad company or the advertiser fined for littering?
Less Everything - Taking Risks
Also, keep in mind that it's not just a result about programming / halting problem. It has implications for the foundations of mathematics. For example, if you formalize math such that you can measure the bit-length of theorems about numbers, you'll find that in the limit, to have a theory of all true theorems up to length N-bits, you'll need O(N) bits of axioms. (I'm probably not saying that in the best possible way: again, I'm no technician in these matters.)
Who knew!

Perhaps you should go on to say it's hexadecimal RGB shorthand and that when concatenated it should be interpreted as the long hand which gives rgb(00h,0Fh,FFh) which is blue with a little green.

Shorthand hex notation is commonly used in HTML styles, eg p { color:#000; } gives paragraphs black text.
I would argue that "dating" means that we go on dates together (present tense being important here). But a lot of people are "dating" before they have a specific conversation about exclusitivity.
Upgrading agile development at uSwitch.com
At the agile testing user group meeting yesterday in London, Hemal Kuntawala talked about development strategies and process improvements at uSwitch.com over the last year or so. The start of his experience report reminded me very much of several teams I’ve seen over the last few years, with a process that is seemingly agile with lots of good ideas but also a ton of problems. Judging by the reactions from the audience the situation is very common in development shops today, so his success story is sure to be very encouraging to lots of people out there.
> Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large agribusiness entities than the family farm.

Same in Europe. Large agribusinesses can afford lawyers.
aka: "if you aren't doing anything wrong, what've you got to hide"
Nice article. Emphasizes that the only way to know what's going on is to test and inspect the assembly.

I tried it, and without any flags gcc used 'sqrtsd' (the sse version) for me. -msse was enabled by default.. So I'm not sure that what he says about needing an obscure gcc flag, but i guess it depends on your distro.

I didn't know about the rsqrtss*x trick.. that's pretty cool.
No cryptography was broken. Given a number, he found a number that divided it. It's a property of the universe, and you can't copyright properties of the universe. (That gravity is mine!!!)

I think that breaking cryptography should not be, as long as you inform the owner a six months before going public, and do not use the result for any personal gain.

It worries me that anyone would say something like this. I notice that 2 * 2 is 4, and I have to wait 6 months before telling anyone? Or what? What would TI do with this information? Why does TI have a right to tell me what I can do with chunks of plastic with TI's logo on it? (Remember, he's not copying their software; he wants to delete their software and use his own.) What legal framework would this fit into? Factoring numbers has nothing to do with copyright law, and a new law suppressing the publication of scientific research is a clear violation of the Constitution. Even if it is illegal, people can't be stopped; you can't police the entire Internet, and you can't stop people from installing software on their calculator. There is no way a government or corporation could monitor this.

So you basically want to make a law that is a violation of hundereds of years of American principles, that is completely impossible to enforce, and that will drastically slow down scientific and mathematical progress. All so a piece of plastic that says "TI" on it can only run TI's buggy code?

Wow. I ... just don't know what to say.

You also use the word "owner". Who owns a number? Does TI own the number because they used it to sign some software? Can I "own" the number 4 because I say I do? If you are in a situation where you have four pieces of candy, and want to split them between you and your friend, should you have to inform me of your intentions and wait 6 months before giving yourself two pieces of candy and your friend the other two pieces? Why not? I'm the owner of the number 4, and anything you do with it needs my approval.

The thing about "personal gain" is also insane. Everyone uses facts for personal gain. Big investment banks analyze market trends to make themselves billions of dollars. TI assumes you can't factor a number, and they use that to prevent you from cheating on math tests. All "personal gain" of the same variety. Should all enterprise be made illegal?

Now that I think about it, I guess your post is sarcasm... but you had me worried there for a minute.
Please, I'd find that very interesting.
Also looks like that for me in Safari. Very odd.
Very simple, short explanation.
Reminds me that shorter is usually better.
But do people fear big numbers? Certainly they do.

Apathy !== fear.

comforting smallness of mysticism?

In what way is mysticism small? It is bigger by most definitions than anything we're capable of being consciously aware of.

On topic, excellent; but the off-the-cuff remarks could have used a little more thought IMO.
Google Music Search Officially Launched
Guaranteed Password Recovery for MS Access 2007 Databases
LastBit Corp. launches a password recovery service to unlock password-protected databases in Microsoft Access 2007 format. No matter how long and complex a password is, guaranteed recovery is possible in 48 hours or less.
no, i mean more like, why can't he start to structure the company so that he doesn't have to be directly involved so much? gradually change business processes and such so that he only has to throw in an hour or two a day, freeing up time for other things.

it'll cost him, will mean he has to spend more money on other things (another employee perhaps), but he'll still be making $, have direct influence on the company, and the freedom/power to jump back into it full time if he wants.
Thank you for the comment.

By the "exit strategy", you mean creating the startup with a short list of acquirers in mind, I guess.

I can re-phrase my view on the difference so:

"A startup is designed to multiply its appeal to acquirers and be then sold whereas traditional company is formed solely to reap the opportunities in the market using an efficient system"
They are tied, but it is being restated by one of the independent discoverers of the concept. Furthermore the theorem he is talking about is original to him.

There is no "just" to it.
For me the fonts are better in Linux. The clear-type technology they introduced in Vista doesn't play well with existing monitors.

I have a 19 inch LCD display that's very decent, but I purchased it before Vista's release. The fonts on Vista have a red hallow that are unbearable, and I'm not the only one with this problem (and trust me, I played with the clear-type settings, although they don't make that easy).

On a big monitor with a typical DPI, clear-type just adds visual noise.

In Gnome the standard font anti-aliasing that doesn't use clear-type is great.
It is a good effort, but i doubt it will work. This is the professor who is notorious in the academic/funding circles for faking demos, getting fined and so on.
JavaScript Basics Quiz
Why should I worry about "a clear violation of the [US American] Constitution"? I never signed it, and do not even live under its jurisdiction. Why should I care about care about "hundereds of years of American principles"? Do you care about the Abstraction principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_principle_%28law%29)? Neither do I.

If you ask me in private, I think that copyright is no longer enforceable, and thus should be done away with. And philosophical, so called intellectual property restricts what I can do with my physical property.

My grandparent post expressed a more guarded opinion. And telling somebody that you broke his cryptosystems (or his key) before going public with it, is at least good manners.
Being Windows-proof is, definitely, a feature for me ;-)
Tilera working on 100 core processor
IPhone game devs can now build a passionate fan following
The Secret History of Silicon Valley 12: The Rise of "Risk Capital" Part 2
Edit:

I originally asked what's wrong with SSL, until I realized it's been replaced by TLS, so I guess there was something wrong with it.

But when you talked about the perils of relying on "SSL", did you mean precisely that, or is there a problem with TLS too?
Ask boutique investment banks
Out of curiosity, what sort of hardware is typically used for this?