skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they are pushing the iMac to replace most of the high end use cases the Mac Pro had with the 27inch display, 16GB max memory, and Quad Core CPU options.

Some people here are saying the reason to buy a Mac Pro is that it is expandable - I think for that reason Apple would rather you kept buying new iMacs rather than upgrading your Mac Pro.
Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook
This oddly relates to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909449 where we are concerned about increasing concentration in "centers" where in the other article the "center" is the cities, and here the "center" is dominant languages. And in both cases, there is the desire on the part of some to stop this increasing coalescing.
Yes. Otherwise I could publish something like

[Source of MS Windows in binary] + 1 = [Source of MS Windows in binary + 1]

However, I while I feel that breaking into systems should be punishable, 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.
He makes a solid argument which really comes down to the problem facing any component of an ecology... either keep expanding until you can't... and then die back "involuntarily" (pretty much the universal pattern) or get your act together and make a better plan!

And that's an option only available to "rational" components of an ecology...

So he's really making just a rational argument for the need to either recognize limits or expand the frontier.

Regarding his thoughts on the role of complexity and a society's need to simplify... there's some truth in it but to achieve that solution without the chaos of collapse may actually require an "increase in complexity.
One other difference: the Mac Pros use ECC memory, the iMacs do not. This makes sense, given the users that each product line targets.
Best Startup´s advices EVER
I'm confused about why you're even trying to make this argument, Colin. Name a real system that uses H(m||k) that you trust. H(x||y) MAC schemes are a hallmark of DIY crypto, and DIY crypto systems are the ones that get broken first.
The Secret History of Haskell
A lot of forums and blogs would prefer that some sites not know that they are talking about them. I've come across it several times and doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
What I'm saying is that the quality-effect would take time to become prominent.

First they have to profit off all the low-hanging fruit simply because there is no competition.

Then, once competition starts to build up, there is no more low-hanging fruit left and they are forced to compete on quality.

Over time, a democratic effect takes place and quality rises.

There is a difference between saying, "Cat pics are more popular than articles" and saying, "This eHow video is higher quality than this other site's HowTo video"

Cat pics don't compete with articles except on reddit and digg which love to compare apples and oranges. In a google search though, they are totally separate. So yeah maybe eHow will make 10 times more cat pics than informed videos but the point is that the cat pics will be automatically filtered out unless you search for "cat pics".
Kind of same here -- I think I first read about him on the Argentinian magazine "Humor y Juegos" (Humor and Games) some time in the late 70s/ early 80s. I guess most people with any interest in recreational mathematics/ puzzles will know of Ramanujan.
A detailed look at iPhone photography
Jared Diamond has some good stuff too. Check out 'Collapse'.
pegasus_f from the "Who?" section seems even more interesting:

action bring (several folders)
from (an office) to (an archive)
{
go to (the office);
enter (it), take (the folders) and leave;
go to (the archive);
search (the right place for (the folders))
and leave (them) (there);
go back;
}
I use a few packages from http://www.getdeb.net/ and have several PPAs https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas installed as well so there's some secondary lag there as those developers release new packages for 9.10. Which shouldn't be too long, really.

My main concern with this release is the ongoing, phantom ext4 (and sometimes 3?) corruption problem. Depending on which reports you read, it affects 64-bit installations specifically, which is what I use.

As much as the software, I want to ensure that there's plenty of community documentation and collective experience compiled before I switch. My System76 laptop here is my bread and butter; I don't want to find myself pathfinding on a new problem when I need to get things done, I want someone to have already charted a solution.
The Byzantine Doctrine
This really helped out!
Thanks guys.
A young man “can work at excessive speed with no ill effect but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.”. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Going deep into the shed, SNOBOL was an early homoiconic language where the primary idiom was pattern-matching over strings. A little like regular expressions with control over backtracking, side effects during pattern matching, and many other features. SNOBOL provided a very unique paradigm in its day, and I can attest that "Thinking in SNOBOL" required letting go of almost everything FORTRAN taught you about programming :-)

The first implementation actually compiled SNOBOL programs into FORTRAN programs. My mind boggles at the thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL
This is what happened to TomTom and Garmin stock prices when Google announced Maps Navigation.

To be honest, that's why the stock market should scare companies not google. The stock price is an arbitrary number derived by people who do nothing but sit around deriving stock prices.

Both TomTom and Garmin (hell they make avionics suites FFS)_ address different market needs from google, and I highly doubt either will see a dramatic immediate effect on their revenues. Long term, my guess is that TomTom will feel something, but Garmin is pretty secure on the high end.
There's lots of good reasons to not use H(m || k) -- I'm not going to argue with you there.

I just don't want people to say "oh my god, Nate says that what I'm doing is insecure, I'd better fix it ASAP" -- and possibly introduce far worse problems in their panic -- if what they're doing is dumb but not necessarily insecure... hence my pointing out that the insecurity of H(m || k) depends on whether the hash function is broken.
font rendering has always been a huge + on ubuntu for me

http://junk.arandomurl.com/type.jpg
The answer to "would you pay?" for any dedicated, single-purpose consumer electronic:

Yes. If the device did enough for me. I have a Kindle, which can only read documents. I still have and use an old iPod that can only play music (no games or fart apps?! That thing must be useless). I have a television which can only output video (what do you mean, it can't record what its displaying?!), etc.

All these devices - that can ultimately only do one thing - serve me just fine. That isn't to say that every single-purpose device will have a widespread market; the ebook reader market is very much a niche - and so is this market, Twitter anywhere without a cell phone contract.

And there's nothing wrong with serving a niche.
I thought the explanation they used at the dev garage yesterday was a bit surprising. They said something very specific that, to me, narrows the scope of a super cool project.
What are people's favorite guides for setting up Ubuntu? http://www.funnestra.org/ubuntu is really good but they don't have a 9.10 update yet.
Decoder ring:

H(k || m) --> SHA1("secret-key" + "name=bob,withdraw=$200")

H(m || k) --> SHA1("name=bob,withdraw=$200" + "secret-key")

HMAC(k, m) -->
SHA1(
("secret-key" XOR ("\x5c" * 10)) +
SHA1(
("secret-key" XOR ("\x36" * 10)) + "name=bob,withdraw=$200"))

All three functions have the same purpose. If you and the bank share "secret-key", and nobody else can guess it, then only you and the bank can compute the function. So when you send the message "name=bob,withdraw=$200", you tack the result of the function to the end, and the bank can prove the message came from you.

The first two functions are what a normal, reasonable developer could be expected to come up with given SHA1 as a tool. Combine the key with the message and hash them; you can't work back from the hash to the message, so the hash doesn't reveal the key, and the hash will be wildly different if even a single bit of the key is different.

The first example is totally, fatally broken. SHA1 (and MD5 and many other hashes) are machines that share a common design called Merkle-Damgaard, which means that they process messages in block-length chunks, and use those blocks to permute an internal state. The output SHA1 is the "final" contents of that state. But there's nothing that actually "finalizes" the SHA1 state; if you see the SHA1 value on the wire, you can keep cranking the Merkle-Damgaard machine with additional data. That means you can mint new messages with arbitrary data tacked to the end that will appear to be authentic. This attack is incredibly easy to carry out; it takes ~20 lines of Ruby code.

The second example is also broken, and it's the subject of this blog post. If you tack the key on after the message, you can't keep driving the hash with data, because a secret you can't guess goes on the end of it. Colin and Nate are arguing about that downthread.

The final example is HMAC. People talk a lot about HMAC without really knowing what it is, but there you have it. What makes HMAC so much more secure than the other two "normal programmer" examples is that the key and the message are being hashed in separate steps, each made mathematically distinct from each other with the opad (0x5c) and ipad (0x36).

Now you know, and knowing is 1/10000th of the battle.
Well, they call it the dark ages for a reason...

Statistics might show improvement because wealth is redistributed, but the total wealth is also a lot less, which isn't always a good thing.
Mmmm. I wasn't referring to the hardware. I meant that they had made it cheaper to gather, process, store, and use location information. A guess, but considering how good they are at some aspects of efficiency, a reasonable one.

And while a Android handset costs more than a GPS unit, by combining it with other functions, you open up the potential for synergy, (Ugh. Why did the MBAs have to go an ruin so many good words), between applications.
Ask HN: PayPal Auto Payments
I'm just starting to get my first web design jobs. Where should i look to learn how to set it up so my clients pay me on a reoccurring basis through something like PayPal? I have payed for reoccurring subscriptions like this but i don't know how to do it on the other end so I'm the one getting paid on a monthly basis.
Every college looks at SATs and GPA, which are nothing more than measures of current ability. SATs measure current ability† in math and language. GPA measures current ability in all the subjects. Oftentimes an applicant can get special consideration by proving their interest in the subject and having some experience - for instance at science fairs. Or you can go talk to the professors of your particular subject and if the professors are impressed by your interest in the field they give special consideration. The best predictor of future interest is past interest. And anyone interested in computer science will have experience with it outside of the classroom.

†I know, theoretically they measure potential - but c'mon we all know that's bullshit. It's so easy to either raise or lower your SAT scores through study and experience.
After a cursory glance this just looks like a restatement of Kolmogorov Complexity: "...the complexity is the length of the string's shortest description in some fixed universal description language."

Traditionally a Turing Machine is used as the fixed universal description language. This paper just substituted scheme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
Just a guess. The average New Yorker may not have a car.
Good point.

That probably adds quite a bit to the cost of the machine.

I realized after the fact that I implied that the creative industry was the ONLY other one that would be interested in a MacPro rather than in an iMac, rather than just an example. Oops.
Preserving a language requires a very proactive approach. In Iceland (Icelandic is spoken by not much more than 350,000 people) there is a committee tasked with ensuring that new words are formed for new items, ideas or concepts.

In Iceland, rather than letting the English word 'computer' catch on, a linguist combined an old word for a witch (völva) with the word for number (tala) to come up with 'tölva' which is now the word for computer. Today, engineers often come up with clever new words for technical concepts.

With a proactive approach even declining languages can be revived (eg. Basque or Gaelic in Ireland).

Small tribes unfortunately lack the impetus or resources to proactively maintain their languages in this way.
Gruppi d'acquisto per impianti fotovoltaici
Wordpress ate my infopornstars
Almost no one. Total desktop sales have been drifting down for 2 years: http://images.macworld.com/images/news/graphics/143380-mac-u... Of the 800K desktops, over 600K were iMacs (no citation; sorry), and the average selling price was ~$1,250, meaning that Apple sold well under 100K Mac Pros. I would guess it's a ~250K unit/year business, shrinking slowly. They can probably keep swapping new processors into the existing design for years w/o significant R&D costs. My guess is high-end video-editing will keep it alive for some time.
Swine flu (ah1n1): Do we need to be scared?
As we heard from news and tabloids, Swine flu is deadly than we thought it would. Lots and lots of people are scared to death to catch some of these deadly disease, we are very much afraid even though we don't know what it is...What is Swine flue? What are the symptoms and how can we avoid it and how can we cure it?

Swine flue or Ah1n1 is an acute viral infection from pigs and some small mammals which is cause by type A influenza virus. Take note that Swine flu and type A influenza virus is different from each other. This is highly contagious specially to people who has a direct exposure to pigs like people who have their own pig farms. As early as 1950's this disease has been know to infect human,so beware.

How do we know if we have one?

There are several symptoms if you have been infected by this disease. Fever, respiratory symptoms like difficulty in breathing and sometimes diarrhea. There can be also severe complication that can also occur not only to weak bodied individual but to also healthy humans as i have read in some sites.

Can other humans infect other people?

Yes, But the percentage of transfer from one human to another is very low thus making human to human infection very rare.

From food?

No. Once a pork is cooked the disease is gone. But there is a certain temperature to cook a pork just to make sure you have removed the disease completely.
Mostly very good points. Maybe want someone else to proofread before posting that, though. To != too. Where != were.
I have given up on waiting for VMWare Tools to catch up and switched to VirtualBox from Sun. http://www.virtualbox.com

Unless there is some strange functionality you need from VMWare that isn't supported in VirtualBox, I suggest giving it a try.
I'm confused about why you're even trying to make this argument, Colin.

Because I'm an academic who believes in education and getting details right. And also because I don't want to have people panic unnecessarily.

Name a real system that uses H(m||k) that you trust. H(x||y) MAC schemes are a hallmark of DIY crypto, and DIY crypto systems are the ones that get broken first.

I wouldn't say that it's a hallmark of DIY crypto so much as it is a hallmark of not understanding crypto -- like advertising the use of AES-256 without mentioning the block cipher mode, or treating SSL as a silver bullet.

You're right that I wouldn't trust a system which used SHA256(m || k) as a MAC; but if I was hired to fix such a system, that would be the last thing I'd fix. I'd start by looking for the security flaws.
> In every country, in every culture, rural residents are leaving for the city.

I don't know if it's as universal as you say. Some highly developed countries, like Switzerland, seem quite stable in this regard.
`sudo do-release-upgrade` :)

In all seriousness, "guides" for setting up Ubuntu are most likely unnecessary or superfluous; they'll just go into some random area of "customization" that 95% of users probably don't need or care about.

If you already have an older version of Ubuntu, just run the command I mentioned, or go to System->Update Manager to handle the upgrade, and get on with your day. If you don't have Ubuntu, just boot the live disc and install it, and go from there.
In Arch the AUR directory has packages called fontconfig-ubuntu, cairo-ubuntu, and libxft-ubuntu , i found when i compiled those my font rendering was the same as ubuntus. Maybe Gentoo has the same packages, or you could grab the sources from AUR and compile them manually?
What exactly are they opening up?
Another compelling reason to prefer a Mac Pro over an iMac would be virtualization. Since I began using it a year ago, VMWare fusion has completely changed how I work.

I have 6 VMs set up on my Macbook Pro that I use regularly - they contain different versions of Windows along with Oracle, SQL Server, and various service packs. I don't think I will ever go back to setting up a bunch of dedicated machines for the testing and development that I do. If I wanted a desktop server, I'd definitely buy a Mac Pro for this.

The way I would use it, 1 Mac Pro == 8 or more PCs :)
Having earlier lived in the largest city in the US and now in rural Minnesota, I think I may have some insight, but bear in mind that this is only the way I see life, not how I think others should.

This is where I should be at this point in my life. When I lived in cities, that's where I wanted to be. When I stopped wanting to be there I moved, it's that simple. Don't stay where you don't enjoy it.

I enjoy the peace, the solitude, looking up at the Milky Way at night, waking up to my rooster crowing and pheasants squawking. I like sitting out on the grass in the dark of a warm summer night with my wife listening to the horses ripping up mouthfuls of grass. I find a wholesomeness in trudging through knee-deep snow when it's -10F with a 15 knot wind, carrying two 50-lb bales of hay on my shoulders to the horses. Doing that, then jumping in my truck to drive off to a climate-controlled office building and writing software the rest of the day causes a certain dissonance that's strangely pleasing.

I can do things here that would be impossible in the city. I make wine from the wild grapes on my own property, I have enough land that I could grow anything I want to (and do!). I like being able to be considerably more self-sufficient than I could be anywhere else. I could raise/grow all my own food if I were so inclined.

Honestly, about the only thing I miss about the city or suburbs is the easy access to decent restaurants.
PETA will be all over this.
A Tale to Tell: The story of my grandfather
Does this line of argument really make any sense? Isn't "prior art" just as easy to defend against in a lawsuit?

I'm not sure I really feel good about a big brother corporation creating bogus patents with the promise of doing it for the good of mankind. Even if there are good intentions, it just adds more burden to an overtaxed patent system and makes the bogus patent problem worse.

I love Apple products but I also think as a company, they seem very closed and litigious so I'm a bit skeptical.
What new syntax was invented here?

I can't tell if you're sarcastically lambasting HTML 5 or if you're mocking its detractors. Could you elaborate?
Even with msttcorefonts installed?
This is what I use when I need to setup a new server for a Rails app:

http://github.com/jnstq/rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu
Essential Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter
So "zero" are the number of systems you trust that use hand-hacked H(m||k) MACs, and like Nate you agree that using a hand-hacked H(m||k) MAC is evidence of not understanding how MACs work.

I like how you picked two other examples of "bad crypto", one which is clearly an example of bad crypto (using AES and not knowing how to actually apply the function to real data), and the other of which is a personal crusade of yours and, in fact, an example of really good crypto. But you're an academic, and you're all about getting the details right. Right. ;)
do you really want your product to be associated to stuff stuck to a fly?
I have a 4 core Mac Pro. It replaced a gaming PC and a Mac Cube. The reason I went with the Mac Pro was that I need the power for gaming and wanted to use my old 22 inch screen, which is a leftover from the Cube, but still going strong. I want to try to upgrade the graphics card now, but that is about it.

My screens generally has lasted two computers, so over time I guessed that the Mac Pro would be better value for money, as I don't have to chuck away screens as often. But the price for screens have gone way down so I am not sure what the next computer will be.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/737
I'd have to say the absurdity of the whole thing is that calculators are allowed on math tests at all, thus fueling an entire market of crippleware calculators.

(1) If you're trying to teach mathematical _concepts_ then make your problems come out to whole numbers that are easily done with pencil and paper.

(2) If (1) was true then maybe we'd see some real innovation in the calculator space, especially if the single-purpose electronic device costing $100 from TI had to compete with iphone apps costing $1. Or Google Calculator. Or Wolfram Alpha.

(3) I've anecdotally heard from my math-tutoring friends that there is a growing pandemic of high school kids in America that can't multiply single-digit numbers anymore. O_o
Decoder ring

Thanks for this -- after so long in the field I forget how much we're speaking in our own language until someone points it out. :-)

One small correction:

HMAC(k, m) -->
SHA1(
("secret-key" XOR ("\x5c" * 10)) +
SHA1(
("secret-key" XOR ("\x36" * 10)) + "name=bob,withdraw=$200"))

The opad and ipad are block-length, and the key is 0-padded; so this should be

HMAC(k, m) -->
SHA1(
(("secret-key" + "\x00" * 54) XOR ("\x5c" * 64)) +
SHA1(
(("secret-key" + "\x00" * 54) XOR ("\x36" * 64)) + "name=bob,withdraw=$200"))
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Ask HN:  What do you know about Africa?
So basically you're saying that if they're using SHA-256 H(m||k), they shouldn't worry, and you want to make that clear.

I'll tell you what: I bet you $50 that we can find 5 examples of H(m || k) MACs on Google code search, and that none of them will use an "acceptably" secure hash function.

I'd really like to bet that you simply will - not - be - able - to - find an H(m || k) MAC that uses a hash function that is survivable in that configuration, but proving that would take too long. I think I can win that other bet inside of an hour.

If there are no real-world systems that could possibly be secure in the H(m || k) configuration, I'm left wondering why you're sticking up for it, other than to be pedantic. Being pedantic about security on Hacker News is my job, Colin, not yours.

I know you feel like you're just being academically precise in this conversation, but what you're really doing is creating a subtext that SHA1 is survivable in H(m || k) configurations, and that this is really just an example of "how broken MD5 is".
I've always used the latest WebKit nightlies to get the latest Inspector updates.

I've moved over to Chrome for OSX last week and haven't looked back. Whats nice about updates to the Inspector is that they'll be in Chrome as well.

IMO, Chrome now has the best of both worlds: Faster/better browsing (I like the tabs on top) experience and superb inspector.
At the end it claims that no flies were hurt and that the ads were attached with wax, which came off on its own after a few hours...