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mmc

631 karma · joined December 10, 2008

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mmc··on Dear Linux Kernel CNA, what have you done?
> There are other ways to lessen the CVE workload.

> 1. Disable unused components with defconf or make menuconfig.

+1 for avoiding vulnerabilities, but were you saying this lessens the CVE evaluation workload? I'd love to hear about automation for evaluating CVEs based on a kernel config. I've done a fair amount of that manually and I'm not aware of any metadata in the CVE records (or in the CVE json in gregkh's new vulns repo) that includes config metadata.

mmc··on Making Hard Things Easy
I've been using a little set of bash funcs I called `hs` for this for a few years:

https://github.com/mikemccracken/hs

your snippets are stored in a git repo that you can sync around how you like.

mmc··on Remembrance Agent (1996)
In 2004 I tried integrating the RA into OS X via the Input Manager mechanism, a way to load external code into Cocoa apps that'd have access to the contents of any text field, so you could get the text that the user was currently looking at and send it to the RA for queries.

If I recall correctly, I never had enough time to make it very useful, and it wasn't clear how best to get its input sources - Mail.app stored email it could read, but other things like calendar and chats were inaccessible to it.

I did it as part of a generic project for making use of input managers: https://sourceforge.net/p/leverage/code/HEAD/tree/

(NOTE: the RA code isn't there, I think it was never even useful enough for me to share it)

My favorite use of that was the "ISIM", or emacs-style incremental search in text views. That was nice. But of course, loading arbitrary external code wasn't sustainable, and that mechanism went away, along with my ISIM.

I no longer track OS X development, so I'm not sure if there's a new equivalent way to do this stuff. It'd be neat to hear.

mmc··on BibTeX Tidy
https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/ for Macs uses .bib natively
mmc··on Hypertext Tools from the 80s
Always interesting to see some hypertext history. I have a personal connection to KMS, so it was interesting to see that although it wasn't mentioned in the article, it was included in the references - just like in the original WWW proposal. ( https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html , although maybe the reference was lost in the HTMLization )

KMS was a a multiuser networked read/write hypertext system, a commercial spinoff of a CMU project from the 70's called ZOG.

mmc··on Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and columns to custom apps
Excel also has named rows/columns and cells - one of the bunch of useful tips I learned from Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" presentation - here's the part where he covers that: https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=25m54s
mmc··on A Chronology of Microprocessors
If you like this, you may also enjoy the CPUDB: http://cpudb.stanford.edu/
mmc··on Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband
Here's my favorite story of said "Big Boy Engineering": http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

It's about fixing a short in a power transmission line. Sounds simple, right? It involves liquid nitrogen and hundreds of people with possibility of explosions or huge oil spills. That's right, the line is suspended in pressurized oil! It goes on…

I tried to find a good pull quote, and it's basically all mind-blowing pull quotes. But here:

"Every vault also has a nipple which allows sampling of the pipe oil. They said you withdraw the oil through a thick membrane with a syringe (?). This happens monthly on all feeders in the LA area. The samples are analyzed downtown by a staff of chemists who can relate the presence of things like acetylene, butane, and benzene in the oil to arcing, coronas, and so forth. Apparently the oil chemistry is a very good indicator of the health of the segments."

mmc··on Charlie Munger Donates $65M for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara
I went to UCSD about 10 years ago, and have lived in the area since.

If we're talking about new faculty, who probably want to buy a house and may want to live near campus, I'd agree that UCSD's location is problematic financially. They seem to be able to attract solid faculty at least in engineering (the people I know), so they must be figuring this out somehow. Certainly some professors are living in small condos who would be living in big houses in the midwest…

However, most grad students while I was there managed well enough. If you don't have kids, and are OK with roommates, you can find places near campus or a short drive away (e.g. Pacific Beach) that are plenty affordable.

I don't really believe that any grad students avoid UCSD because of the cost of living - in a place where you'll only spend a few years and then probably leave.

mmc··on How to Read a Research Paper [pdf]
Those terrible meaningless PDF names, along with wanting to automate grabbing BibTeX from online databases (mostly ACM and IEEE for me), were the main drivers for writing BibDesk, a Mac OS X reference manager: http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

I started it back in ~2002 or so, and it's been kept running by a small group of contributors ever since.

Not a multi-user or web-based solution, but it has accumulated quite a few features (including searching many databases) that can make keeping a personal BibTeX file up to date much less of a pain.

mmc··on Inbox — The next-generation email platform
This looks like a nice API on a quick glance. But, since this service proposes to store email data, I was hoping to find some information on the site about how they plan to make money, and what they'll do with my data when they go away or get acquired.
mmc··on Seattle, the New Center of a Tech Boom
Weatherspark has some great visualizations of historical weather by time of day, e.g.:

http://weatherspark.com/history/29735/2014/Seattle-Washingto...

Unfortunately they don't have a great way to compare cities, aside from just loading multiple pages and eyeballing.

mmc··on ARM server pioneer Calxeda plans restructuring after running out of cash
The allthingsd article submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6938138 has more info, including verification from company execs.
mmc··on The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution
From this article: http://www.sportvu.com/PDFs/ESPN_62011.pdf

"Three cameras on each side of the court..."

This reminds me of a talk I heard a long time ago from Takeo Kanade at CMU, who was working on reconstructing 3D scenes from multiple cameras shooting different angles of the same action. One example was basketball, and he had a demo showing a play reconstructed as if the camera was on the ball. Pretty cool stuff. It needed lots of cameras, though, and I remember asking him if they had explored how well you could do with a minimum # of cameras. I remember his reply being essentially that they were less interested in bad results with few cameras :)

Here's a link to some surprisingly old press about his work being used for Super Bowl 35 in 2001: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/events/sb35/tksuperbowl.html They used 30 cameras.

mmc··on The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution
$100k/year is certainly a lot :)

I can imagine facilities like hockey rinks buying the cameras and selling the service to the teams that play there, but not at that price. My impression of hockey rinks is that they're not terribly profitable. Most of the ones I've played in seem like borderline charities.

mmc··on The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution
The "ghost" players in these animated replays that show where the system thinks a player should have been are fascinating to see. I wonder how automatic it is - if games could be analyzed like that without much expert input, this would be a really cool thing to have for recreational teams who want to get better but can't afford expert coaching. I'm thinking my late-night adult league hockey team would probably benefit from some replays like this.
mmc··on Microryza (YC W13) Is A “Kickstarter” For Scientific Research
In a variety of government-funded computer science projects, I've seen everything on the spectrum from "here's some cash, tell us what you do with it" to extremely detailed, measurable deliverables with heavily negotiated deadlines. Some agencies appear to lean one way or the other, and it also seems to depend on the amount of funding. In my experience, more cash means more planning up front and more oversight. No big surprise there.
mmc··on Computer Science PhD trends
The source material is pretty accessible - mostly just tables of data: http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CRA_Taulb...

So 23.9% are in other parts of academic computer science, mostly Postdocs. another 3.6% go to positions (unspecified) in other academic departments.

His 47% is "North American, Non-Academic, Industry". It doesn't break down research vs. development jobs, which is probably smart.

Another interesting thing is that it's broken down (Table D4) by specialty - so for instance, two PhDs in HCI left the US from the 2010-2011 class, and the specialties with the highest percentage leaving the country after graduating were "Information Systems" and "Networks".

mmc··on Light Table - a new IDE concept
Then do it somewhere else and point here, please? Another comment mentioned version control, which is a very important thing to get right, and I don't know how I'd diff two Self workspaces, for example...

What other sticking points are there?

mmc··on Death to MS Word
Nothing - if everyone knows how to use it. Version control is not as commonly used in research & business writing as you might hope.
mmc··on Instagram is "worth" more than the New York Times
True - HN reader, if you build this, my dogs and I would probably use it.
mmc··on Today I wrote some code
I'd suggest making a pot of coffee and diving in to the wiki:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryTesting

mmc··on Facebook Shakes Hardware World With Own Storage Gear
Does anyone know any technical details behind this paragraph? Specifically, are they talking about a new kind of interconnect technology with low power over ~1m distance?

(Searching for "rackspace virtual I/O" was not so useful.)

"Rackspace is leading an effort to build a “virtual I/O” protocol, which would allow companies to physically separate various parts of today’s servers. You could have your CPUs in one enclosure, for instance, your memory in another, and your network cards in a third. This would let you, say, upgrade your CPUs without touching other parts of the traditional system. “DRAM doesn’t [change] as fast as CPUs,” Frankovsky says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually disaggregate the CPUs from the DRAM complex?”"

mmc··on The single most useful Emacs feature
Too hard to pick one, it depends on the task. Maybe I'd go with M-x Occur. Other candidates are regex i-search, registers, yasnippet, kill/copy/(insert)string-rectangle, etc etc.

Also, emacsclient.

mmc··on Ivo – a reimagined Unix terminal system
I think he agrees, except for the textual display.

From the article:

  Data structure. Windows PowerShell had a chance to 
  redesign the terminal from scratch, but defaulted to 
  the same old grid of ASCII. One innovative thing they did 
  do was add structure to their data, piping .NET objects 
  instead of raw text, allowing the user to select fields by 
  name instead of writing elaborate AWK scripts. The shell 
  for the research OS Famke does a similar thing for 
  higher-order functions
mmc··on China to cancel college majors that don't pay
I was curious too, so I dug around and found this report from the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit that studies this question (for US universities): http://deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/trendsissuehighlig...

That is just the summary, there is a more complete report available too. The high points for me was that employee compensation accounts for 60-70% of costs, with increases there being driven by benefits (I assume this means health insurance costs rising), and that only 30-40% of that 60-70 is spent on instructional staff.

mmc··on A email client that is both personal and has personality
I watched the demo video and went looking for a download link.

Really well done video, nice ideas, but no download and no mention of how/when we could try it? Does it exist?

mmc··on Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass
In computer science, you will sometimes get to choose which 20 hours of the day you want to spend in the lab. Luxury!
mmc··on Ask HN: Burned out. How can I make the most of a sabbatical leave?
Maybe failure at something really hard wouldn't be so bad. I saw a movie once about a bike race north-south along the continental divide. Most who started quit at some point, but they didn't seem like failures to me.

Anyway, good luck. I bet you won't know what you want to do with your time until you've had some time to decompress first, so maybe just start with no plan.

mmc··on Ask HN: What do you use to organize e-books and research papers?
I use BibDesk to search for and organize research papers and Skim to read them (both Mac OS).

I like to write company-confidential notes on the papers, so I don't sync them anywhere external, so as to comply with security guidelines.

That ends up meaning that 'sharing' papers means just emailing the PDFs around.

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