skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an Android user (and promoter to my friends/family), I'm starting to get worried about Google's approach to the product. Not because of "fragmentation" (which to me is an argument that essentially says "Android isn't going to ever be successful because its too successful now"), but because of the lack of attention it seems to be getting from Google.

It isn't just the OS itself-- several of Google's own apps are getting buggier and buggier. Voice worked fine when I first got my Droid a year or so ago, but has had a lot of bugs-- including dialing random numbers instead of the one I wanted. (Just yesterday, I tried to send a text message to XXX-XXXX and it truncated the last digit of the first group and complained that it couldn't send a text to XX-XXXX. Nothing I did could stop it from doing this except using the web-based version). Google Listen has stopped refreshing for huge numbers of people, and my wife's new Galaxy S won't even accept subscriptions. Not a word from Google on either issue, even though both show up in searches for the problem.

I had to install Launcher Pro to get any kind of performance out of my Droid, and even then it occasionally locks up on the home screen. Sometimes calls come in and the touch interface freezes, which means that I can't answer the phone. The Droid also will occasionally decide that there is no data connection when it has full 3G service according to the indicators.

I don't use it, but the stock SMS app has apparently has its own problems too-- at least Google has acknowledged those and is working on a fix, but as a whole, Android has gone from less technologically interesting (no wi-fi hotspots, etc) and stable to exciting and really buggy. Combine that with this kind of politicking, and I'm getting less and less enthusiastic about Android every day.
Tarsnap had a CTR nonce collision. It's a bad bug that's fairly common and easy to explain.

CTR mode turns AES into a stream cipher, meaning it can encrypt a byte at a time instead of 16 bytes at a time. It does this by using the block cipher core to encrypt counters, which produces a "keystream" that you can XOR against plaintext to use as a stream cipher.

For this to be secure, as with any stream cipher, it is crucial that the keystream never repeat. If you encrypt two plaintexts under the same keystream, you can XOR them together to cryptanalyze them; even easier, if you know the contents of one of the plaintexts, you can XOR the known plaintext against the ciphertext to recover the keystream!

To avoid repeating keystreams, CTR mode uses a nonce, which is a long cryptographically secure random number concatented to the counter before encrypting.

To avoid that catastrophic security bug, CTR mode users have to make sure the nonce never repeats (and also that the counter never repeats, e.g. by wrapping). We have found both bugs multiple times in shipping products, and now Colin found it in his product.

And so I come to the moral of my story: Colin is clearly a gifted crypto dev. He can talk lucidly and at length about the best ways to design crypto-secured protocols. He has found crypto flaws in major systems before. He is as expert as you could expect anyone to be on any product.

And Colin didn't get it right; what's more, the manner in which he got it wrong was devastating (in cryptographic terms).

Colin handled this well, largely due to the fact that he's an expert and knows how to handle it.

How likely is it that anyone less capable than Colin could have handled it so well? Moreover, if Colin can make a devastating mistake with his crypto code, how many worse mistakes would a non-expert make?

You should avoid writing crypto code if at all possible. Nate Lawson is fond of saying, "you should budget 10 times as much to verification as you do for construction of cryptosystems"; I would amend that only to add a price floor to it, because you cannot get real validation of a cryptosystem for less than many tens of thousands of dollars --- if your system is simple.
You've failed to address the core question, and instead are following a red herring:

What are the chances of my child's teacher (of any gender) being a molester?

The answer to that, as always is: vanishingly low.

So sure, I'm willing to go along with the notion that, in the absurdly improbable case that your child's teacher is a molester, it's probably a man and not a woman.

So? Your child is orders of magnitude more likely to be abused by a known family member than by a stranger or known authority figure. You're proposing that we exclude an entire gender from a legitimate profession because of this? If you're that concerned about this tiny, astronomically improbable occurrence, I suggest you also ban your uncles, aunts, and neighbors from visiting - statistically they pose a far graver threat to your child than any teacher.

This strikes me as a similar attitude to people refusing to be seated at the front of a plane since, in the case of a crash, people in the back are statistically more likely to survive. This paranoia is fueled with the complete ignorance of the fact that the odds of a commercial airliner crashing is ridiculously low.

At least the airline seat paranoid folk aren't harming anyone with their paranoia. Yours however, does.
I learned about Varnish a few weeks ago and it looks promising. I am setting it up now on one of my sites to test properly.
It seems that you switched before you tried. I don't know much about unity, but I was following the beginnings of gnome shell and I can't wait to get it in my hands. Activities / creating desktops as you need them is exactly what I wanted. But there are other cool things included too.
What kind of control do you presently have over your computer, that would be taken away?

Current CPUs come with hypervisors; running native code need not lead to any loss of control. Sanely designed CPUs would give the user yet more control.
The Companies Who Support Censoring The Internet
NodeFu – Free Hosting of Your Node.JS Apps In The Cloud
I'd like to point out that the images are marked as being of an alpha version. These complaints are fair, but they can be forgiven for not having all the details under control at this point. I personally am reserving judgement until I have an actual, finished product to test out.
The Only Book Search Tool You’ll Ever Need
Why pick on the open source community? Even people working for commercial entities can write bad code.

In the open source world at least others get to look at the code and find (and perhaps fix) problems.
You may be correct in most cases. For me, the tutoring and piano are both at the house. I generally sit 10 feet away writing code. Not for any particular reason, but its generally where I code at when home.
Dad banned from kids over excessive homework approach | Herald Sun
6" Spicy Italian is $2.99, the meal which includes two cookies and a medium drink is $5.00. However, if you buy the drink separately at $.99 and the two cookies at $.99, I save $.02.

I often worry about their financial solvency when I do this.
My main goal is to make it useful for people, and I know that it can be useful and convenient. But it is hard to explain to people that it can be useful.
"The most often cited research o this matter was conducted by Gene Glass and Mary Lee Smith. [...] Several features of the resulting curve stand out. First, for class sizes in the range of twenty to forty students, the effects are minimal. Second, significant improvement in student achievement does not occur until class sizes are in the range of fifteen students or below.[1]

[...]

The immense costs make classes smaller than 15 utterly out of the question. In 1986, for example, a reduction of the national average for regularly convened classes from 24 to 23 pupils would have required almost 73,000 more teachers and 5 billion additional dollars, not counting the expenses of building more classrooms. Reducing the average class to 20 students would require over 335,000 more teachers at an added $22.8 billion. At 15 students, 1 million extra classroom teachers would be needed and added costs close to $69 billion."

[1] Riordan notes that there were some problems with this study, but that despite these problems later research has validated the original curve.

source: Equality And Achievement by Cornelius Riordan, p. 164
The TIGER data set may have what you're looking for. It's essentially government data collected during the Census. In it's technical documentation, it has special MTFCC codes for Universities as well as Schools/Academys that you could query on (WHERE MTFCC IN ('K2540', 'K2543')). See section 6-155 here:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/TGRSHP10AF.pd...

Take this with a grain of salt, but I believe you'd want to pull the data out of the following shape files:

ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/POINTLM/

These files are brand spanking new, and in fact not all the data has been added yet (5 states are missing). The entire dataset for 2010 will probably be up by the end of the month.

You can see the layout of the shape file here (see Landmark (Point) Shape File Layout in section 6-104):

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/TGRSHP10AA.pd...

For what it's worth, it looks like the TIGER dataset also has school district info, which could allow you to lookup a person's school(s) based on their address (reverse geolocate their address and use the coordinates to query districts where the point exists).

If that doesn't work out (or it's missing some data) you could try looking at these websites:

http://gos2.geodata.gov/wps/portal/gos

http://www.data.gov/catalog/geodata

http://nationalatlas.gov/

http://simplegeo.com/

http://market.weogeo.com/

http://data.geocomm.com/

http://geocommons.com/
I regularly see a movie I would be interested in seeing in the theaters and it to my netflix que. Just a few months later it appears at my door (or removed from my que when reviews turn out it was bad). At least for me they overestimate the value of seeing most everything 'right now'. While I could go see the hot new movie, I just got in the mail the movie that came out 3-6 months ago to keep me busy this evening.

As for piracy, just like iTunes between always having a plenty of items from my que for streaming and getting a new disk every few days it is easier for me to use netflix than pirate. That is when I knew they had a model that was going to be very successful.
Node.js Coming Of Age
This is about awareness and education...with a twist.
I agree with you, although I wonder to what extent "cutting the fat" helps corporations during recessions, when layoffs can easily be blamed on a down economy.
AAPL Q1 earnings call (starts at 2PM US/Pacific)
Quite a contrast with the "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" article from WSJ.com.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870411150457605...
Are you saying women are, on average more empathethic/ have better communication skills, or women are innately 'guaranteed' to be better in these areas?

Any man with the skills needed to perform well in childcare(especially) and teaching jobs are discouraged from taking those jobs, as any woman would 'naturally' be better in such roles (not to mention the significant 'pedo scare' barrier). This is the sort of latent discrimination that forces people away from the jobs they are best suited to.
I would absolutely love to see titanium support and great javascript integration in aptana studio.

I love both these companies products, I just hope they don't nerf pydev or radrails in the process :/
Tarsnap 1.0.28 is completely compatible with earlier versions (except for key file format changes in 1.0.22). The only nontrivial change was to make new uploaded data get encrypted correctly.
I was pretty mean to Colin in that post. In the intervening year I've come to respect Colin's practical experience a lot more than I did before, when I thought he was hopelessly academic. I'd like to make it clear that Colin doesn't look incompetant (actually, he seems to be earning accolades from the Twitterverse for how he wrote it up).

But yeah, I hope it's obvious that I see this as a very strong vindication for my argument that generalist devs shouldn't build crypto. At all, ever. Use TLS for data in motion; use PGP for data at rest. Systems much bigger and heavier than yours have gotten away with this.
All the french people in the audience will remember the Outreau trial ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outreau_trial ) where several innocent people spent years in prison and one commited suicide, all that based on the lies of two persons and bogus psychiatric expertise of the children. The media also took a big part in this debacle. I think it really made people realize something here, I don't think this could happen again anytime soon. I hope you won't have to live something like that in the US to make things change.

People should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty, not the other way around. The modern western society would have us think otherwise (and not only for child molesting, see CCTV, airport screenings, ...).
Chris Anderson's The Long Tail describes the very thing you enjoy about Netflix. In fact, company data given to Anderson revealed that an entire 25% of the company's sales are generated from non-blockbuster titles -- the "back catalog".
Just like syndicated cartoonists - it is interesting though that a major print newspaper isn't as good as a blog once you have your own book out.
Because in Soviet Florida, computer programs you.

Sorry. I could not resist.

Now, on a more serious tone, if this is a cost-cutting measure, why not embrace the XO as a learning aid? It certainly cost very little and can be packed with mountains of learning material, much more than it would be cost-effective to print and ship to schools. Plus, contrarily to the Dells pictured in the text, students can carry them everywhere and the energy cost of operating them must be smaller than the cost of operating those CRTs alone.
>(not that I know anything about crypto)

Me either, and while I chuckled, I think cperciva is one of the better qualified people to be implementing crypto.
Getting paypal to be behind marketing your app to their users is a non-starter, they would never ever do that unless you were a very big name already.
I don't know if right here is the best place to ask, but is anyone else confused about why "Pushing Daisies" could be critically acclaimed? After watching what I could stand of the first 2 episodes, the premise is awesome, the narration is okay, the writing is abysmal, and the characters are as hollow as a PVC pipe. I mean, does it get better later or something?
I'm assuming it was flagged because it looked like blatant blog spam: A repost of a post you wrote and submitted a year ago with a linkbait title.
Though you're certainly entitled to do whatever you wish re: your child's education and care, I do find your attitude highly disturbing.

You are condoning the ostracism and discrimination of an entire gender from an entire field of occupation, and the best comment you can come up with regarding it is hey, maybe people can get some sweet deals from all the male caretakers who will now be working at slave wages just to find work.

Imagine if we replaced "male" with "black". Would it seem like such a reasonable position then? Would we be okay with condoning the economic exploitation of blacks by encouraging an uneven employment playing field?

So why are we ok with doing this to all men?
The biggest downside I see is that it will shackle Google's ability to move the platform forward. For example 2.3 is reported to include some major improvements for low latency audio. As a game developer how do you handle this? Just ignore this 2.3-only feature and target 2.1? Or do you build a 2.1 and 2.3 version? 2.2? 3.0? 3.1? Unfortunately we're talking about these phones being around for another 2-3 years at minimum so realistically you might be asking a developer to support 2.1 3 years from now? That's going to be a really tough sell. The other issue is security. Leaving all those old versions out there with little or no post-release updating is just begging for trouble. (and let's not forget about bug fixes -- no one wants to suffer 2 years working around an annoying bug. They simply won't buy another Android phone after a bad experience like that)
Is it me or the adds next to the article purporting "earn masters degree at home" too ironic?
Indeed, this bug was found because the Tarsnap source code is open -- someone was looking through out of curiosity when he saw the problem.
It would be great if this shortened the wait for a Titanium JS debugger...
New NodeFu blog post (Node.js Coming of Age) spotted at http://www.voiceingov.org/blog/?p=2228
This doesn't bode well for my Galaxy Tab running Froyo, hoping for Gingerbread and Honeycomb one day.
I am not so sure about the better for content producer part. How much money would a content producer get per viewing of a movie or how much does Netflix pay for the rights? Is it economical if DVD / non-streaming channels dry up?
http://freethingsnetwork.com
Yes, showing up looking for specific titles is a recipe for disappointment, given how Netflix has to purchase content. But if you like movies, hie thee to instantwatcher.com, and you're going to do OK.
For one Joyents no.de platform runs on their "accelerators" which are basically Solaris containers and there is a different package management system to deal with than you may be used to (they use pkgsrc) but it's pretty easy to figure out. Mostly you will just be using node package manager (npm) for node packages.
There's no space!

Actually, I tried to make this an exercise in minimal, button-poor, intuitive UI design. I'm quite pleased with how simple the thing is, but I guess it's not intuitive to everybody.
From the perspective a potential founder interviewing with a company, beware of any partner who insists on maintaining their majority position -- particularly if you will be the third or greater partner. It good indication you will not be a partner, but an employee. A second bad smell are companies without revenue and no audited valuation that require a significant buy-in. This behavior indicates a lack of the critical business acumen required to succeed.
Oh, come on - he gave it a full eight minutes before complaining that some girl got more attention in a thread on her post.
True to a point, but they don't have the luxury of assuming that you'll buy from them. Not upgrading their devices works against a repeat consumer, really, so you're just as, if not more, likely to help the bottom line of one of their competitors if they leave you in the cold.

And of course there's the march of progress, and the nexus one of one year ago is now outmatched by almost all devices with better screens, dual cameras, coming dual core processors and much better GPUs, etc.
Are we ever going to get to a place where crypto engineering is something the open source community can take on?

I'm not sure I understand the question - are you suggesting that authors of open source security code are less qualified or more bug prone than those who work on closed source software?

One of the promises of open source code is fewer bugs through exposure to many eyes. That seems to be exactly how this security bug was found, according to the blog post. How long do you suppose this bug would have stayed hidden if the source were not available? Personally, I'd guess a lot longer.
Help me understand closures
I created this little tutorial to help others (and myself) understand the very, very basics of closures. Am I missing anything obvious that is going to trip me up going forward?
What's funny, is you're the guy with the dog; I have no pets. You should have been the one convincing me that your dog understands. Anyway, and up-vote for you.
I think that second sentence is somewhat wrongheaded. Crypto bugs aren't like normal bugs. Thousands of eyes aren't likely to surface them. Open source does not have a particularly excellent track record with exposing crypto flaws.

Simultaneously, we routinely find crypto flaws on black-box reviews of commercial products, sometimes even in firmware and hardware settings.

To my eyes, it's not the availability of source code that smokes out flaws like this, it's simply the incentive structure. Colin's project gets the attention of someone like Taylor Campbell, but Colin has made a name for himself and for Tarsnap. Even if your project becomes popular, if you aren't shouting from the mountaintops about your use of cryptography, you may be unlikely to garner the specific kind of attention you need.
"Tarsnap compresses its chunks of data before encrypting them. While the compresion is not perfect (there are, for instance, some predictable header bits), I do not believe that enough information is leaked to make such a ciphertext-only attack feasible."

That part is very important. Compress then encrypt. Here you see competent crypto applications playing safe covering for unexpected problems. I say well done Colin! Full disclosure and best practices.
There's a REALLY cool chapter in the first edition, Chapter 12 ("Compiler Derivation") about using continuation-passing style to incrementally convert an interpreter to a (bytecode) compiler. I had never seen that approach before, and it completely blew my mind. Steele's _RABBIT_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AITR...), Krantz's _ORBIT_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf), and Appel's _Compiling with Continuations_ develop the approach further.

It was cut from later editions, for some reason. Too advanced? Too tangential to the rest of the book? Too bad.

The first edition is also really cheap. FWIW.
Does the US produce too many science PhDs? Do we suffer from degree inflation? Is US science funding broken?
According to http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/html5_va... the logo was designed by "Honolulu, HI-based Ocupop." (http://ocupop.com)
It seems the logo is an image (http://www.w3.org/html/logo/img/html5-topper.png). How long until someone can draw it using purely HTML5?
Skenazy was also featured in an episode (608) of Penn & Teller's Bullshit about the topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullsh...
I created this little tutorial to help others (and myself) understand the very, very basics of closures. Am I missing anything obvious that is going to trip me up going forward?
Where does the code come from and how is its use specified? To be able to change code, my edit must affect all copies. If I'm receiving code dependencies over the network from the same source as my data, I need some sort of override rule that will use my edited copy instead. The package also needs a global name such that the datasource cannot change the name and put me back to the old code. And how do we reconcile changes to the code bundle from the datasource with my local changes?

We can mitigate most of these issues with cryptographic identities and trust systems, but with that amount of surrounding infrastructure, why does the datasource even need to specify which code to run for well-known datatypes if those packages already have to be on my trusted sources?
You assume that economists know anything about making money. They usually don't (although they love to pretend they do).
$26.7 Billion Revenue; 7 Million iPads, 16 Million iPhones Sold
I would need to put the term in quotes if I'm planning on using the term in an unusual manner.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quotation_mar...

I put the term in single quotes due to the fact that 'attractive' can be an ambiguous and subjective term.

I'm aware that 'Attractiveness is a real thing'.
Even if the carriers wanted to update users to the latest Android OS many devices come with a preinstalled custom UI and existing apps. You don’t want to mess with the users’ experience by changing their UI or what apps they expect to see.

It would actually require a great deal of work to get new OS updates into the many varieties of Android phones in the way users are accustomed to their phones’ experience.