khandekars

Thanks. OT: How do we protect from such snooping? I thought that recording the keys was harder for the cameras since the keyboard would be masked by user's height or a partially closed tray. E.g. in a cyber cafe, the keyboard normally is below the tabletop in tray. This is also true of many companies in India, where they use desktops.

Dodgy keyboard is a good point; makes for a compelling case in favour of bullets.

Disagree. Even bullets shouldn't be displayed while the user types the password. Why should a security camera in an office know that the user's password length is ten, twelve or twenty nine characters?

True. At the same time, we keep expecting more from our machines, fuelling feature growth and consequential demand for faster processing mechanisms.

"Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston. Full of good stories.

"My years with General Motors" by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. How he built the organization is quite an interesting read.

I will like to believe that the Desktop software will move towards parallelism, may not be to the same extent as of HPC, but in a similar direction in the sense that it will certainly go away from strictly single core approach. It won't be easy, e.g. none of the web browsers today fully exploits all cores of a box. But, it will be fun to watch.

Off topic: I'm in your fan club, :) due to your "Hack the planet" blog http://wmf.editthispage.com since Dec. 1999.

Processor: 32-bit PowerPC 450 at 850 MHz. The supercomputer has 294,912 processor cores. Instead of running it at a higher speed, they are quite correctly exploiting the parallelism. It's a net win for performance and energy efficiency. I guess that the desktops of the future will tend to follow a similar trend.

Thanks. Having actually used Mono on Linux, he shared some interesting observations. Clojure surely looks promising, but Python or Scala can be equally fine choices as of the moment.

This poses some pretty interesting questions.

1. Is it mandatory to install such filter software on Linux boxes also? 2. How do they handle the case where the filter software is chroot'ed in a jail, so that the individual is complying with the letter of the law by installing and running the software, but managing to avoid the ill-effects?

I'm not speaking about censorship etc., just plain curious.

In case you decide to compile MzScheme 372 from sources on a Fedora 10 box that has SELinux in enforcing mode, you need to take a few (simple) additional steps:

http://aadnyavali.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/making-arc-3-play...

I'm still downloading Fedora 11, but suspect that the same exercise will be needed for that as well.

There was a formatting problem with my previous comment. The statement "Nowhere near the power offered by LISP, but huge leap of convenience while writing in C++" was a footnote for "lambda expressions and closures." The asterisk got eaten when I posted the comment, :(

C++0x standard is in "real soon now" mode for quite some time. I'm definitely excited by the possibilities, but somewhat unhappy over the current state of compilers, see e.g., http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C++0xCompilerSupport and http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html

In such as scenario, writing code that runs with different OS-compiler combinations while leveraging the cool features such as concepts, lambda expressions and closures, variadic templates and unicode is going to be difficult in the short term. Of course, if a project sticks to a single compiler, then it won't be much of an issue.

Nowhere near the power offered by LISP, but huge leap of convenience while writing in C++

Looks like github+topcoder for ideas.

Thanks, it's good.

In examples/README, it mentions of exmaples/zenon -- certification of Tom's output using zenon and Coq. Apparently, the "zvtov" tool required for that is part of FoCaLize. Given that Coq was used to create a surveyable proof of 4-color problem, it sounds impressive.

Links:

FoCaLize -- http://focalize.inria.fr/

Coq -- http://coq.inria.fr/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq#Four_color_theorem_and_ssre...

Correct. At the same time, even trying to break a protocol is an interesting activity and improves the fertility of mind. That would help in the areas like identifying security holes in a system.

Many times I wish the below mentioned, but perhaps it will take quite a few decades to achieve it.

If we could have a global infrastructure, wherein we tell the car the place we wish to visit, which causes the car to automatically figure out: the optimal route based on constantly changing traffic and weather conditions, refilling, obeying all rules such as one-way / speed limitations and so on, it will be truly amazing achievement.

The technology is there, fragmented in thousands of pieces; it needs to be weaved as a cohesive whole in a reliable and safe manner.

In a nutshell, save the time for driving the vehicles for an entire civilization, :)

Congratulations. I also read your article about document control, and immediately liked your approach. For example, restricting folders to just one level and not folders-within-folders, seems to have helped you in eliminating gratuitous complexity.

Side question out of sheer curiosity: Do you have AutoLISP/ObjectARX plugins that interact with your site?

Congratulations Paul. It will be nice to have a prominent page on ycombinator.com that links to all launched startups. Edit: Found the link -- http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Google {News, Reader}, FriendFeed.

:-) Somewhat related: Bruce Schneier's "Self-Study Course in Block Cipher Cryptanalysis," http://www.schneier.com/paper-self-study.html

Aha, thanks for the recollection about Google Sets. Your guess looks plausible.

I agree with vidarh's point about spam potential, re: reusing previous samples.

I'm not sure, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

Fascinating read. Employing Cell GPUs to implement the technique in the paper could have interesting ramifications.

Nice. I searched for four scenarios. Apparently, one can train the engine, as discovered in the 4th scenario. In that, it said that it couldn't automatically build a square about the topic and asked me to enter up to 5 examples. I entered Alan Turing, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, Donald E. Knuth, C.A.R. Hoare. I was delighted to see that Google Squared built the square and added names of Norbert Weiner and Claude Shanon to it.

This is a good application of machine learning.

  Scenario 1: "renaissance artists" florence
    Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=%22renaissance+artists%22+florence
    Web Search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22renaissance+artists%22+florence&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=%22renaissance+artists%22+florence&aqi=&fp=1mZ_-PL2Zjc

  Scenario 2: "open source" "cryptographically strong" "random number generators"
    Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22
    Web search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22&aqi=&fp=1mZ_-PL2Zjc

  Scenario 3: "string theory" problems
    Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=%22string+theory%22+problems
    Web search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22string+theory%22+problems&aq=&oq=&aqi=&fp=1mZ_-PL2Zjc

  Scenario 4: "mathematicians" "computer scientists"
    Squared: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=mathematicians+%22computer+scientists%22
    Web Search: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=mathematicians+%22computer+scientists%22&aq=f&oq=%22open+source%22+%22cryptographically+strong%22+%22random+number+generators%22&

Neat. This reminds of the attack on the SSL stack in an early version of Netscape.

Very cool! Thanks for the link.

I downloaded and built 2.2.5 sources in Fedora 10. After installation and a bit of lazy fiddling, created the 'yc' elvi.

    cd ~/foo/lib/surfraw
    diff yubnub yc

    -------------------------<snip>------------------------
    2,3c2,3
    < # elvis: yubnub		-- Use the social command-line for the web (yubnub.org)
    < # initial implementation by Iain D Broadfoot, ripped from the freshmeat elvi
    ---
    > # elvis: yc		-- Search ycombinator (news.ycombinator.com)
    > # initial implementation by Shailesh S. Khandekar, by simply patching the yubnub script by Iain D Broadfoot
    10c10
    <     Run a yubnub command
    ---
    >     Run a yc command
    16,17c16,17
    < # disable requoting, yubnub commands often need protecting from
    < # the shell with quotes but without those quotes passed on to yubnub
    ---
    > # disable requoting, yc commands often need protecting from
    > # the shell with quotes but without those quotes passed on to yc
    22c22
    <     w3_browse_url "http://www.yubnub.org/"
    ---
    >     w3_browse_url "http://searchyc.com/"
    25c25
    <     w3_browse_url "http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=${escaped_args}"
    ---
    >     w3_browse_url "http://searchyc.com/${escaped_args}"
    ------------------------</snip>-------------------------------------------------

Dissect the argument with surgical precision, if need be, but never with a canon? Sounds good to me.

IMO, it immediately strikes as a metaphor for generational garbage collector, each region depicting the generation of objects: red => new, blue => long-lived, black => garbage collected, whiteness => (??) the programmer doesn't have to worry about those details. While the rectangular shapes denote perfect building blocks, it would have been better to mix them with curves, as an expression of finesse, and/or surgical precision.

Later, pg's comment at arclanguage.org says that it's "a." May be the lack of curves is intentional, to caution that abstractions are often somewhat approximate? :)

Beautiful! Rocks on FireFox 3.0.10 on Fedora 10. I expected it to be slow, but was pleasantly surprised to see the overall speed after initial loading was over. The '5 seconds remaining' idea is elegant.

For a litmus test, to help isolate the problem, you might prefer to write the test in Selenium, and do a traffic analysis to compare the pattern of flow with Curl.