Hacker News Reader

timsallyon ARM Goes 64-bit

You want to read Agner Fog's article, How good is hyperthreading?, http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=6. As an aside, Agner is one of those rare people who only writes when he has extremely valuable things to say. His entire website is worth a read.

timsallyon NSA Careers for DEF CON Attendees

One of this really interesting things I've discovered over the last year is that the government is really heterogeneous; extraordinary competence exists in many places. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. There are talented hackers working on the kernel instead of Wall Street for ideological reasons. It not that great of a leap to imagine that there are also talented hackers (and people who are talented at recruiting) who ideology causes them to work in government.

timsallyon All Rockstars Went to Julliard

The subtext here is that those without elite credentials are at some disadvantage because they don't have a convenient signaling mechanism of quality to prospective employers. Stipulated. But if you have the talent to compete, this disadvantage is merely a speedbump. In 2012 you're just a git pull away from interacting with the decision makers at your next job. It's never been easier for programmers with top talent to convey their qualities to employers. One community that has always worked this way is the community surrounding the Linux kernel. Credentials are not even mentioned. It's all about the code and people routinely get hired on that basis alone.

timsallyon 'Unprecedented' discovery could propel quantum computers to reality

Michael Nielsen has a series of Khan Academy style videos called Quantum computing for the determined: http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-det.... Nielsen co-wrote the textbook on quantum computing and has made significant contributions to the field.

timsallyon Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

The top rated comment on this question asserts that the reason why programmers have lower salaries is because they are logical, intelligent individuals who refuse to play the politics game and thus are hated by executives. Not only it this incorrect (have you seen the politics in certain open source software projects ?) but it plays into a narrative that programmers want to believe: business people are corrupt and programmers are superior to them morally if not in compensation. You're doing yourself a disservice if you follow this line of thinking.

On the other hand, the top rated answer has a pretty elaborate and abstract theory about widgets and film makers. I make no assertion about the accuracy of this abstract theory, but I can summarize reality in a much simpler way: many programmers work in businesses where software is a cost center. If you want to make money as a programmer, you need to work at a company where software is a generator of profit and negotiate compensation aggressively after demonstrating your value.

The following is required reading if you'd like an algorithm for doing the above:

Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

timsallyon Why The US Can Beat China: The Facts About SpaceX Costs

That's because a corporation does not have to commit to a certain level of production. On the other hand, the government does so all the time at the request of the people. And when you guarantee output X for whatever good/service, the notion of full employment makes sense. As a representative example, it takes about 5,000 police officers to keep the peace for 1,000,000 people in an urban environment (rough estimate, just an example).

Of course, what goods/services should be guaranteed and what the value of X should be for each one is and will remain an open problem.

timsallyon Why it's OK to leave a tech job at 5 p.m.

For an orthogonal perspective, see grellas (writing on another article):

Work-life balance is very important as well, a point the author emphasizes. He seems to have made that choice later in life (as did I) and I commend him for it. But, while I can exhort others too to strive for such balance, I will not begrudge them the choice to work exceedingly hard (especially as they are first developing in their careers) to achieve other "unbalanced" goals. People do accomplish insanely great things by working insanely hard. If they choose to do this in their work as employees, that is their privilege and, as long as they are highly-skilled and highly compensated, I say more power to them if they do it without the benefit of protective labor laws.

Complete comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642433.

timsallyon Police Are Using Phone Tracking As A Routine Tool

If you're talking about United States v. Antoine Jones, the result the Court reached is not what you describe. The Court ruled that a warrant is required to install a GPS device on a car because the act of installing the device is a seizure (however brief). Unfortunately Kennedy hid behind this narrow ruling; no finding was made on the broader issues of the 4th Amendment and electronic surveillance.

timsallyon Police Are Using Phone Tracking As A Routine Tool

Thankfully the Justices are aware that this is an issue. The beginnings of the oral argument in US v. Jones are relevant. The Chief Justice in particular is quite conscious about the issue you describe.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcri...

timsallyon An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide

Haha yeah that paper is how I got started reversing VM based schemes. A short paper that does use symbolic execution and theorem proving is BinHunt, although it's a blatant ripoff of Halvar published 4 years later. Their only claimed contributions are (1) symbolic execution and theorem proving for basic block equivalence and (2) backtracking for their maximum common subgraph isomorphism algorithm (in contrast to Halvar who I believe used direction instruction comparison for basic block equivalence and a greedy subgraph algorithm). These could be meaningful contributions but they provide no data to prove that that the posited accuracy increase of symbolic execution and backtracking is worth the large performance hit.

timsallyon An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide

It is true the techniques in the article are nothing new. However, this comment is a knee jerk reaction and largely misleading. The notion that something being crackable is a failure is incorrect. The time a protection scheme needs to hold up varies depending on the industry, but the economics of DRM to not require it to last forever. For video games it's a month or two (Starcraft 2 sold 75% of total copies told to date within the first month). Also, there are several DRM schemes deployed in production today that are acknowledged by those in the field as quite effective, namely BD+ and DirecTV's scheme. Indeed, as far as I know there hasn't been a break in DirecTV for over half a decade.

As far as malware goes, virtualization obfuscators are the current state of the art. They are a fundemental advancement in packing. Up until virtualization obfuscators, all other packers had the weakness where at some point the unprotected program would end up in memory. This weakness is easily exploitable (ala VxClass, see Recon 2010 for an easily digestible talk). Virtualization obfuscators are still beatable with manual reverse engineering (see Rolles WOOT 2009) and some effort has been made to automate the process (see Wenke Lee's group at Oakland 2009). But when a packing scheme forces you to hire reverse engineers who know what symbolic execution is, you know that you've substantially raised the bar.

timsallyon Your vote counts (Cryptographic Voting System)

What happens if someone covertly breaks the seal on a box with the intention of simply invalidating the ballots inside? In some areas, votes tend to go one way or the other depending on the time of day. You might be able to exploit this fact and attempt to invalidate boxes that favor a particular party.

timsallyon TSA Pressures Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story

Indeed. It's actually quite amazing how impressive our federal judiciary is (two notable examples in Chicago: Posner [1] and Easterbrook). Unfortunately, the judiciary has faced a fairly serious crisis in funding over the last two decades [2]. The Chief Justice spoke about this in his year end report in 2010 [3]. It's one of the largest unsung problem in the U.S. today and it makes me worry about the calibre of judges we will end up with a few decades down the road. The math is depressingly straightforward: judges get paid a lot less, law school costs a lot more, and an entire branch of government is at risk for decay.

[1] http://www.projectposner.org/

[2] http://www.uscourts.gov/JudgesAndJudgeships/JudicialCompensa...

[3] http://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2010year-end...

timsallyon Mens’ Wardrobe Essentials

Your comment is subsumed by Hamming's point. Dressing properly does not always mean dressing "up".

timsallyon Mens’ Wardrobe Essentials

You get at an importent point. However, it is important to add Richard Hamming's orthogonal idea: "I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service."

Contexts in which dress matters may disproportionally be contexts to avoid, but there are contexts that are worthwhile in which dress is very important.

timsallyon Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button

Facebook faced this exact problem with its newsfeed. The solution? Do what Facebook did. Allow people to watch projects and then subscribe to various levels of activity.

timsallyon Obama Administration Unveils Blueprint for a “Privacy Bill of Rights”

The issue is more nuanced than the picture you present. In 1967, the Fourth Amendment was extended to areas in which a person had the "reasonable expectation of privacy" (Katz v. United States). This is well established precedent which, in the worlds of Justice Scalia, "[Katz] has been around for so long, we're not going to overrule that". In a recent case, United States v. Antoine Jones, both a right leaning justice (Alito) and a left leaning justice (Sotomayor) expressed strong concerns in favor privacy.

The above illustrates that the problem is not with privacy, as you seem to think. Thinkers across the ideological spectrum generally believe people have the right to keep things private in many areas of their lives. The question is to what should this right apply and to what extent. Privacy is not doomed just because it is linked to Roe. It has well founded support in a range of cases.

timsallyon Why Every Professional Should Consider Blogging

HNers including Patrick (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=by%3Apatio1...) and Matt Might (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=by%3Amattmi...) have been talking about this for years now. There's a lot of benefit to be had by carefully grepping through the comment archives of HN.

timsallyon Curebit (YC W11) Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System

We'll take it down if DHH insists!

It is personally my fault for not including a credit to Highrise for the design

Lesson to us: add credits

Crediting someone for their property doesn't make stealing it ok. By default, stealing is wrong. Waiting for an objection and/or linking to the owner doesn't change that. This seems like a problematic worldview for a young company.

timsallyon The Secret Number

Strage Horizons is a fantastic speculative fiction publication. They're considered a professional market and pay their authors at professional rates. The archives are worth checking out. Clarkesworld is another similar publication and has won the Hugo award for best semi-pro zine two years in a row (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/). If you enjoy this type of writing, support these places! They're run by small communities and often do quite a bit of independent publishing.

timsallyon Man with multiple degrees fails standardized test for children

Your analysis is simplistic. When you break up TIMSS by ethnic groups, the US performs comparably to other counties across the board (Asians, Europeans, etc). [1] There's something to be said about the differences between attempting to educate a racially diverse population versus a largely homogenous one.

I've done more analysis on a similar test called PISA, but I think it's worth bringing up in the context of this debate. In standardized testing there are often significant underlying factors that have nothing to do with the schools themselves. From the executive summary of PISA: "[In the United States], after accounting for socio-economic background, the performance difference between students from single-parent families and those from other types of families stands at 23 score points.... Parents’ engagement with their children’s reading life has a positive impact on their children’s reading performance." Consider that the divorce rate in the US is one of the highest in the world, 5 times that of China. This problem along with any others is one that needs to be considered in the context of education.

Also, PISA was not done on China, but rather on two specific cities: Shanghai and Hong Kong (similarly, TIMSS was done in Hong Kong). Along with Beijing, these are the most advantaged areas in China in terms of both money and education. The US administers PISA to a wide range of schools across the country. I imagine we would see much different results if PISA only tested Boston and some other advantaged city. The PISA study itself even notes that scores were much higher in urban schools. Other countries are either testing exclusively urban schools or urban schools at a higher rate than the US.

There are serious, serious problems with education in the US. But it's important to look at these studies with a critical eye and avoid the temptation to go off on a rant on how the US is bad at math. Data doesn't lie, but analysis is often wrong and/or exaggerated. In sum, problems with education in the US are deeply rooted in racial, social, and geographic issues. Better management practices and policy reform, while good, doesn't change the fact that the US isn't Singapore.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001_suptables.pdf

timsallyon Code sober, get things done drunk

People are surprisingly easy to offend over email. I know that I've offended some when sober. Sometimes it's because I'm too terse. Sometimes it's because they're reading something between the lines that I didn't mean to say. Sometimes I phrased things poorly. Sometimes I wrote it the email in anger.

It sounds like beer is accentuating (not causing) a problem with email etiquette. Your point and Thomas's point are orthogonal: (1) two beers can make you terrible at things you are already bad at and (2) two beers wont make you terrible at things you aren't bad at. Because the bottom line is that people aren't easy to offend over email. I've written 1 email that has offended someone in the last 5 years and that was mostly intentional.

timsallyon Tuning out: How brains benefit from meditation

Can anyone find a copy of the paper? I haven't been able to dig one up.

timsallyon Think twice about that F-bomb in your next talk

> Whether you like to admit it or not, swearing is and will be taken as a sign of disrespect or superiority.

This is a simplistic analysis. Swearing is a device of language that can be used well or misused. Most of the time we can do better, yes, but swearing does have a place that is neither disrespectful or superior [1]. What would John McClane, one of the greatest movie characters of all time [2], be without that classic line?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ7z5CUsrbk

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McClane#Reception

timsallyon If you're using Ruby trunk, regenerate your keys

RVM, which is a standard tool to manage Ruby versions, does expose trunk:

  mil:~ poet$ rvm list known_strings | grep ^ruby
  ruby-head
  ruby-1.9.3-rc1
  ruby-1.9.3-preview1
  ruby-1.9.3-head
  ruby-1.9.2-p290
  ruby-1.9.2-p180
  ruby-1.9.2-head
  ruby-1.9.1-p431
  ruby-1.9.1-p378
  ruby-1.9.1-head
  ruby-1.8.7-p352
  ruby-1.8.7-head
  ruby-1.8.6-p420
  ruby-1.8.6-head

However, in my anecdotal experience most people run patch releases.

timsallyon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (November 2011)

MA. Cambridge and the greater Boston area. Full time.

I work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (http://www.ll.mit.edu), a research and development center run by MIT that does work for the government. My group has about 20 people in it and does application security, reverse engineering, and other low level systems stuff. Knowledge of things like assembly, operating systems, and systems are pluses but not required. It's great if you have some experience in those things, but if you can code I want to talk to you. The pluses:

* Extremely difficult and rewarding problems. In the past few weeks my work has had me hacking on a compiler, scaling up databases, reversing malware, etc. We're a really agile and tight knit group.

* Awesome workplace culture. We're a 9-5 shop, you pick your laptop, and you can order any books that you need.

* We reimburse tuition for classes at MIT. Last semester my office mate took operating systems with Robert Morris. We send you to conferences, including Blackhat and Defcon.

* We sponsor relocation and have multiple positions we want to fill.

You do need to be a US citizen and you will have to get a security clearance. I'm happy to talk to you about how the clearance process works and answer any questions you have. If you're local I'll buy you a cup of coffee while we talk it over. You really can't waste my time. The first step is to get in touch with me and I can explain to you how our hiring process works.

Email: tsally@mit.edu

timsallyon Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston

I would imagine you're being downvoted by people who don't know what winter in Chicago is like. ^^

timsallyon For HN: Open access to scientific papers, a summary of the state of play

I like Matt Might's take on that particular issue: http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

An open source license for academics has additional needs: (1) it should require that source and modifications used to validate scientific claims be released with those claims; and (2) more importantly, it should absolve authors of shame, embarrassment and ridicule for ugly code.

timsallyon What are some inspiring videos I can watch to renew my passion for startups?

Inspiration can be highly personal. This is the video that did it for me. "When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breath, then you'll be successful."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fsm-QbN9r8&t=20

timsallyon HN please help me pick a logo for my next startup-related project

The branding you describe is orthogonal to what acangiano is trying to do here. When launching a minimum viable product, it's best to go with a logo from 99designs and a Wordpress/WooThemes/whatever template. Essentially a minimum level of professionalism while focusing on building the core product. Lest you think I'm alone in this recommendation, Patrick wrote a bit about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697558. Attempting to brand like Time magazine right out of the gate for a small project like this is absolutely the wrong choice.