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logicalmindon Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.

Hopefully, when we do move away from the internal combustion engine we will move to something lighter. Currently the batteries are the source of massive weight for electric cars but we're all hoping that improves. We will (hopefully) have cars that are much lighter, more efficient, and based on some energy source than oil derivatives.

It just seems that that path is more likely than everyone in the suburbs giving up their homes and communities and moving within biking distance of home and work. I support initiatives that allow people to safely ride bikes. What I don't particularly like is expecting multi-ton vehicles driving at high speeds to negotiate 1/10th ton people going much slower speeds. There has to be a better/safer solution.

logicalmindon Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.

I completely agree with you (which was why I didn't respond to what you said). Doing something like adding a extra bike lane next to the car lanes and things like that. I would love to see something like that and it would probably make me want to bike to places more frequently as well. It would be safer for everyone.

logicalmindon Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.

Clearly you're an idealist. I don't mean that as an insult. The problems you've brought up can be solved by other means while retaining the existing infrastructure. For example, you could have cars that are non-oil-based. You could increase the amount of telecommuting allowed by the workforce. I would think those things are more likely in the US than making everyone ride a bike.

Your vision of the future basically kills every suburb and urban area and would reduce humans to extremely high population densities in highly concentrated areas. Leading to problems of it's own. But we're really off-topic at this point.

Interestingly enough, you said above you are in chicago. The area I am talking about above is in the western suburbs of chicago.

logicalmindon Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.

Every aspect of the roads were built for multi-ton automobiles. From the lane widths, to the radii of the curves to the posted speeds. You don't drive a car on railroad tracks or bike paths. I honestly don't follow the logic. It's like me saying I can ride a horse to work on the roads.

If a bicyclist wants to be equivalent to an automobile on areas that are designated for travel by automobile, then that bicyclist should be able to safely travel with other automobiles. If they cannot do so, they should not travel on those roads. The same rational as to why you don't see bicyclists on highways.

I see your request as me deciding that I want to drive my car down the train tracks and then asking trains to work around what the limitations of my car are on the tracks.

logicalmindon BareMetal OS: A 64-bit Operating System in only 16KiB

Your dream idea will work for cpu-bound programs but it seems the majority of applications are bound by factors other than the cpu. The waste frequently comes from waiting for I/O to complete.

logicalmindon Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.

Ironically, there is a law against accelerating too fast. It's usually called illegal "display of acceleration".

BTW, I have a Subura WRX STI (2006).

logicalmindon Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.

No offense, I was a successful bmx racer for a number of years so I used to be a hardcore bicyclist, but I really have a problem with bicyclists riding on roads on which they have no ability to maintain the posted speed limit.

I experience this nearly every day on a road I drive to/from work. This is a four-lane highway with a posted speed limit of 45mph. It is a favorite of bicyclists for some reason so there are a lot of riders on the road, even during rush hour. There are a handful of stoplights on this road over about a 5 mile stretch.

I have yet to see an bicyclist able to maintain a speed of 45mph nor do I see them have the ability to accelerate away from a stoplight with the same ability as an automobile. This leads to many traffic issues and numerous dangerous situations. The issue is only barely related to the bicyclists. It is mostly related to their abilities relative to other motorists. A car/motorcycle that was driving on the same road with the same acceleration and speed capabilities would be a nearly equivalent danger.

While I would never endanger a cyclist, I have seen many drivers put in danger by the habits of cyclists. And in my personal opinion, there should be a law that states that a cyclist should only be able to ride on roads for which they can maintain the proper speed.

logicalmindon HDCP master key allegedly posted

They didn't actually invent their own crypto system. They used the scheme devised by Swedish cryptographer Rolf Blom, know as Blom's Scheme. Which is a form of "threshold secret sharing". It has been known for quite some time that the system falls apart once a particular number of keys are known.

logicalmindon Self-Control Matters Far More Than Raw Intelligence

What you experienced is completely normal in violent situations. If you want to read a very good book on reactions and consequences of violent situations you should read this:

http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Violence-Comparison-Martia...

Even if you've never been in a violent encounter, this book will help you understand how you will react. Keep in mind, you don't choose when you become part of a violent situation, violence chooses you.

logicalmindon Why C Is Not Assembly

It's interesting to compare the real difference here. In C, what you see at compile-time is what you get. As compared to an interpreted language where what you see at compile-time is probably going to be completely different from what happens at runtime. The difference is really where the optimizations occur. Runtime optimizations have certainly come a long way.

logicalmindon Giving up on Google

For regular search, their SSL search page https://www.google.com/ is very close to "2008 mode". No luck on the image search part though.

logicalmindon 'Padding Oracle' Crypto Attack Affects Millions of ASP.NET Apps

Yep, so apply the patch. Now what do you do about your millions of insecure clients running unpatched, out-dated OS/browsers? How do you solve that problem? Security folks don't want to talk about that because it's hard. The client-side is a much larger number of opportunities and much weaker link in the chain. Yes, you need to deal with both, but it's hard to find discussion on the latter, and a lot on the former.

logicalmindon 'Padding Oracle' Crypto Attack Affects Millions of ASP.NET Apps

I think we're talking about two different things here. You seem to be talking about attacks against the application itself like SQLI, etc. But I'm talking about attacks on the much larger numbers of users of the system.

Pick the random Fortune 100 bank app and wouldn't it be more fruitful to attack the pc's of the clients rather than the server? You've got probably millions of users of the application, most of which are barely secure in the first place. As you said, the web server side is going to be the toughest link in the chain. Not impervious, but certainly difficult. Seems much more likely the hacker/cracker will target the users. In such an attack, the crypto is not the thing attacked.

logicalmindon 'Padding Oracle' Crypto Attack Affects Millions of ASP.NET Apps

But this type of attack, like most crypto attacks, seems to be singular in nature. It's one thing to have access to the client-side state via (machine compromise or MITM) of a single person or single computer. But it certainly seems that attacks of this directed nature are not very common against web apps. It seems more likely that a huge net is thrown against a large number of computers and a few get compromised. Hardly a directed attack.

It seems that weaknesses like these, while problematic and fun to discuss, are not really the ways in which web applications are generally attacked.

logicalmindon 'Padding Oracle' Crypto Attack Affects Millions of ASP.NET Apps

Software security people simply don't read crypto papers.

Crypto researchers, at least until recently, don't break software.

Do you know of any statistics on how often attacks on web applications are cracks of the crypto involved as compared to many of the other weak links in the chain? Seems like hackers/crackers will find much easier ways to circumvent the system, even if the crypto has weaknesses as outlined the above article.

logicalmindon What parents worry about vs what they should worry about

Believe me, I hear what you're saying. But DCFS has no oversight. If you have guns in your house with kids they will take a very keen interest in you. There are DCFS rules for what you can/will/should do with guns in your home that may exceed what you would do. If the DCFS agent finds your gun not locked by an XYZ lock your kids will be taken from you. I am not joking either.

Every attempt you make to establish your rights will lead you further down the path of their goal. Take heed from the stories above and you will see how it works.

logicalmindon What parents worry about vs what they should worry about

As a parent, one of the things I fear most is DCFS. I live on a large area of land with many natural resources and my children are free to do many things. I inform them of dangers and protect them from realistic dangers. But not every other parent thinks that way or agrees with it. It only takes one fearful parent to place a call into DCFS about their opinion on your parenting style. Once DCFS is involved you are at their mercy with little or no oversight.

So beware implementing some of the ideas presented here as things you shouldn't fear. Because not everyone will agree with you, and those other people can make your life very difficult.

logicalmindon Scott Adams: Future Jobs (and Irreplaceable Skill Sets)

It's even worse than that. If you work in a large hierarchical company you can be right and be able to present your correctness in a very clear and useful way. But it is unlikely that your superior is going to allow you speak directly to his superior. That is how politics work. Which brings us back to the original article.

logicalmindon The default position of HN is skepticism

Something I noticed quite some time ago is that any sufficiently long comment thread on HN will converge on a semantic argument.

logicalmindon Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

I meant it as a tongue-in-cheek reference. The mentality of the character in the movie boiler room gets involved with stock trading because he equates it to the young white male version of "slangin' crack rocks". I found it interesting that stock traders/programmers are literally "slang-in'".

The mentality in the movie also leads one to question the value of what is being created in the world of stock trading. So, to me, the comment had multiple levels of irony and coincidence. But having to explain it makes it lose some of the luster.

logicalmindon Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretary's that any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this picture, of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. you see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV, and there's just more of it. The $87 Million lottery winner, that kid actor that just made 20 million o his last movie, that internet stock that shot through the roof, you could have made millions if you had just gotten in early, and that's exactly what I wanted to do: get in. I didn't want to be an innovator any more, i just wanted to make the quick and easy buck, i just wanted in. The Notorious BIG said it best: "Either you're slangin' crack-rock, or you've got a wicked jump-shot." Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slanging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.

- Seth Davis, Boiler Room

logicalmindon Rethinking 'Fuck You' money

One thing that worries me, and I'd love to hear other people's opinions, is that as baby boomers retire they will be removing their retirements from the stock market. Whether they move their money to other non-stock investments or whatever. But don't you think the transfer of money out of stock-related investments by such a large percentage of people is going to cause some problems for those of us who still have money in stocks in the market?

logicalmindon Western civilization runs on the mainframe

I can think of a lot of new products and services a bank could offer. You would have the opportunity to rethink the standard checking/savings account world and hybridize cd's and savings accounts. There has been so little innovation in banking (some would say that it's because of how banks are tied to legacy infrastructure) that a re-think of what exists and what customers want would be very refreshing.

I think the best part would be that because of the legacy technology in place at existing banks, they would have a very hard time making changes to adapt to anything new that would be offered. Just imagine adding a new account type that isn't checking or savings and has new rules. How long would it take for a bank to re-write their backend system to incorporate that change? A long time.

If a disruptor entered banking and did offer this kind of change, I think you'd have banks banging down your door to buy you out, if nothing else.

logicalmindon Western civilization runs on the mainframe

I was speaking more about the mentality that led to the business opportunity that google exploited. More so than the technology. The mentality at that time was that "nobody would build another search engine". Any time I hear someone say "nobody would..." I think about how that mentality allows you to exploit that opportunity.

In this case, I'm referring to banking. You've got an industry that is based almost entirely on legacy systems that has not evolved with the progress of technology. As correctly pointed out, you would not want to modify an existing legacy system to move it to a new technology, which is why nobody has done so. What I'm referring to is a new, from scratch, bank with new technology. One that would allow you to disconnect from the current banking model and allow you to offer services that nobody could provide with today's legacy systems.

This combined with the fact that if you ask any bank customer they will tell you how much they hate their bank and hate the service. Sounds like it's ripe for the pickings with the right investment, investors and people.

logicalmindon Western civilization runs on the mainframe

Well, nobody would have built another search engine either, but google did it. Part of the problem is the legacy mindset of the higher ups at financial institutions combined with their extremely conservative nature.

I currently work in a fairly large financial institution, giving them a web presence for various services and the backend system is no longer a mainframe but an AS/400. Though it still runs COBOL-based apps, so it's really no different than the standard mainframe.

logicalmindon Western civilization runs on the mainframe

You don't think that there is room for a new high-tech bank to step in and eat the lunch of the big banks? If you started a bank from scratch, built with modern technology, you could provide all kinds of valuable services and adapt to change much more quickly. Pretty much every service provided, particularly on the web, is some application that screenscrapes CICS screens or reads data from VSAM. These applications a tricky to build and take much more time than they should.

logicalmindon Inception isn't science fiction (spoilers)

Interesting, how did you determine that they only provided voices for the phone call?

logicalmindon Inception isn't science fiction (spoilers)

Actually, if you look at the cast you will see that there are different children (different ages) who play the children at the two different points in the movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/fullcredits#cast

logicalmindon Ask HN: What annoys you?

You can do this in visual studio if you hold down the alt key and do your selection.

logicalmindon Ask HN: What annoys you?

This is annoying but what is more annoying is when you're on a multiple lane highway and 2 or more people decide to drive at exactly the same speed right next to each other. It would be nice if there was a rule (a law would be nice, but I don't see how you'd enforce it) that you could not drive within two car lengths of the car next to you at speeds over 40mph.

The added bonus here would be that people would not be sitting in other people's blindspots all the time and should reduce accidents.