skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the conference call highlights at macrumors.com:

"Music products: 19.45 million iPods. iPod touch sales grew 27% year-over-year. Now over 50% of iPod sales."

Over 50% of 19.45 million must be around 10 million.
Life Tenure for Federal Judges Raises Issues of Senility, Dementia
Totally. Non-phone iOS devices are the elephant in the room and drive an incredible number of app sales. For example, if you look at the top selling apps in the App Store, they are mostly games that are being downloaded on iPod Touches.
Let's start with this one:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/abs/nature04...
Watching the Apple share price graph over the course of 7 days starting with Steve's step down announcement yesterday through the earnings call today is going to be a really interesting exercise on timing bad news.
Was this a REAL response by them? If not, satire at it's best! I hope it wasn't, but wouldn't be surprised if it is.
Agreed, and isn't that the whole point of group buying in the first place? Groupon didn't invent the group buying model, they're just enabling / automating it. I see nothing wrong with that. If a business can't benefit enough from the higher volume guaranteed buys to cover the fees, then they probably shouldn't expect miracles from any group buying service.

Using it purely for advertising / marketing seems secondary and questionable to me.
Thanks! I think this is the first time they actually somewhat broke down the iPod numbers which makes sense because it allows them to emphasize the importance of iOS.
> I'm differentiating the open source community form the private sector because the incentives are different.

The incentive in the private sector is to maximize profit, which means minimizing costs.

> But if you have nation-state levels of funding, you certainly can buy a system that would take serious talent and funding to break.

You might be able to build such a system, or you can buy a system that just passes all acceptance tests, which is where the incentive is (since this minimizes costs). Given that testing a cryptosystem for correctness is just about impossible, what do you suppose happens?

The best assurance that I get is when I'm told which standard implementation a product uses. If a private entity without a reputation in cryptography told you that they rolled their own, would you trust them? How many crytographers would you trust? I know whom I would, and I don't even need a full hand to count them.
It's by Brian Fuller, who creates a very specific "style" of shows.

If you liked Dead Like Me or Wonderfalls, then you will probably enjoy Pushing Daisies, otherwise you probably won't.

Edit: grammar.
Ah, in this case I simply mean caring in the weak sense of "interested in", which I think is the most generous way to read Kurzweil's point. If you really get technical, no words have any particular meaning about any entity of this intelligence, but it would be at least reasonable to define some sense of "interested in" us as more than just an incidental detail of running a universe. From what I've seen Deists-but-not-Theists tend to mean an entity that literally does not care about us, may not even know we exist, would not care to know about the ignorance, and sometimes I even get a whiff of the self-loathing-human sense of "and if it did know we existed it wouldn't like it". Again, not necessarily always spelled out but I think it's pretty much as fair as your previous assessment of Theism, which is to say, a decent working definition of what is already out there.

Your side point I actually deliberately left addressed because it goes down a rabbit hole. A fun one, but not one I was trying to go down. :)

It is not a new idea in theology that we don't really know the mind of God and that the words and concepts we use are merely approximations. It does rapidly deteriorate into something unprovable. Unfortunately, where in science we can discard the unprovable and justifiably consider ourselves wise, I think the undisprovability and/or unprovability of all these questions is actually fundamental and unavoidable, inasmuch that observing that certain statements are unprovable doesn't affect their truth value.

You could define a concept of "human justice as the considered timespan approaches infinity", for instance, which may still be vague but is at least getting somewhere, sort of.
Another prediction if other players (Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft were mentioned in the original article) get into the market:

Tiered pricing. Much like basic cable (fairly inexpensive) + movie channels / premium channels / sports packages (increases your subscription cost).

And perhaps eventually the holy grail that the cable industry would never go for: a la carte pricing. Here's the price to add Discovery to your subscription. Here's the price to add Mythbusters to your subscription.

And here's where it gets interesting: I could literally get a subscription to Mythbusters, thereby providing Adam and Jamie with a source of funds that would provide capital for them to create the next batch of episodes. I could get a subscription to the Cohen Brothers, which would fund their next three movies.
very good strategic planning. Releases the report right after Steve Jobs steps down, I am pretty positive that Steve Jobs knew this report, thus knowing that it'll be safe to step down with this type of amazing results being reported to the public
I know! And the amazing thing is just to think about how relevant this is to Hacker News! Because when I think, gee, I wonder what technology Mega Corp is raking in the billions, this it the very first site that comes to mind!
You don't need to quit Facebook; you need better friends.
Are you really surprised that entertainment executives fail to understand the Long Tail, and are pretty much giving a huge advantage to Netflix?

I find the jabs incredibly amusing. Shows who exactly is in the know, and who isn't...
Let's presume you are right and that a disturbingly large, statistically significant proportion of society are in fact pedophiles.

How are you combating the largest source of sexual abuse: i.e., family and friends? And why is that not applicable to your child's education where their risk factors are far lower?

I don't know about you - but I'm not going to ban my neighbors from seeing my child, nor would I give Uncle Bob the stink eye every time he gets near my niece. The reasonable stance in this case seems to be one of vigilance and education - be mindful that it may happen, educate your child to report untoward things, and do your best to vet people close to you.

You do this for your babysitter too. So why not your educators?

Your concerns are valid, but IMHO your reaction is entirely disproportionate. If your stance is proportionate to risk, you wouldn't ever leave your child alone with a family friend, or your own siblings for that matter. It still seems unreasonable to ban an entire gender of educators from your child's life over this.

To be clear, I'm not trying to dismiss your concerns in their entirety (though I do question the weight of these concerns). What seems absurd is that most families fail to address the far larger, far scarier risk factor while devoting all of their attention to a relatively tiny slice of the child abuse pie. It also seems absurd that these same families are willing to throw male educators to the wolves while Sketchy Uncle Bob gets a free pass.

[edit] As an aside:

> "studies show that women commit 14% to 40% of offenses reported against boys"

That's a gapingly wide confidence interval there. What sort of data are we basing this on?
The app got into a state where new fsi.exe processes wouldn't start up properly - they'd raise an unhandled exception and hang. I started being more diligent about cleaning up old processes.
It's really hard to look at quarter to quarter numbers and say that it's good or bad when you have the holiday buying season involved. It's better to look Year on Year (except for the iPad)

There's also different bits of the product lifecycle to consider. Ipods were refreshed in September, (probably in anticipation of the holidays), but they're down year on year. Iphones are nearing the mid point of the yearly cycle, and I'd expect them to be relatively flatish until summertime. (except for that whole verizon thing). Ipads should be mostly flatish, since world + dog expects a refresh in April. The fact that the ios devices aren't flat is saying that there's a huge demand for these things that hasn't been filled yet.
Fair point. My extremely scientific analysis of (a) setting a 6-month interval on GFinance, and (b) dragging that 6-month interval forward from January 2009 revealed no lower than a 10% return on AAPL at any point in time.
That's how society gets rid of future kids (AKA "solving problem of overpopulation").

The more dangerous it is to deal with kids (because of potential legal consequences), the less people want to deal with kids.

End result: childcare (formal and informal) is getting more expensive, potential parents have less children or don't have children at all.
Web Browser Security User Interfaces
Make quick fixes quicker on Google Project Hosting - Google Open Source Blog
If 99% of abuse is committed by men but 90% is committed by family members - then worrying that a stranger is man is not logical.

The point of the article though is that an unofficial blanket ban on male teachers - in case they are abusers - makes as much sense as a ban on Muslim airline pilots, or on Germans in uniform.
> it's disingenuous and petty to try to punish him

Where does he try to "punish" him?!

Plus it's a real legal concern, sure in practice cperciva will not sue him, but still...
Hacking side projects: Napkin to $1000 per day
Why the hostility? You picked a different search term than I did, big whoop (I picked "class size student outcome"). I guess that makes me a bullshit artist.

Now, you may be right that a 0.04-0.12 standard deviation improvement is large within the field of educational interventions. All that proves is that the entire field of educational interventions has produced little/no gains.

This is how small 0.12 standard deviations is: http://imgur.com/BJDHc

You and the authors can attempt to spin that as something significant, but it doesn't contradict Patrick's original assertion. He claimed that smaller classes "do little, if anything, for education." You cited a source showing that they do little. You didn't contradict him.

Here is my citation, which shows that smaller classes "do little, if anything, for education": Spyros Konstantopoulos and Vicki Chun, What Are the Long-Term Effects of Small Classes on the Achievement Gap? Evidence from the Lasting Benefits Study, American Journal of Education 116, November 2009.
What Peers? (rant by a Prof)
That's definitely impressive, but it's not really a product less than a year old. When you're buying an Apple product (iPhone, iPad, mac) you're buying into the brand too, when they release a new product a substantial part of the product is the apple branding. If another unknown company would have released the iPad I don't think it would have got such traction. When you buy an apple product, you're buying the apple brand.

That's not anything against Apple in case I sound as if I'm suggesting that, Apple are a great company and "deserve" the success because they do build solid products, but the iPads success is down to Apple being successful as much as it is the iPad as an individual product. Does that make sense? Maybe not.

Apple product = hardware + brand
At all levels of government (i.e., federal, state and local), we spend $850B on education and $792B on the military, your guess of $1.2 trillion is not even close.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2009_US.html

Reducing class sizes from 25 to 15 would require 66% more teachers, lets guestimate that the cost of education would rise by 40% [1]. That's $340B for fairly small improvements in educational outcomes (0.04-0.12 standard deviations, according to stats posted elsewhere in this thread).

[1] Not all costs would scale upward with teacher salaries. We could sometimes repurpose 2 30 student classrooms into 4 15 student classrooms, and some administrative costs would scale with # of students.
Sort of but not really. Apart from the fact that Sony broke DSA (a wildly different crypto primitive than AES-CTR), the mistake Sony made was more fundamental to the design. I think you're right to notice that in both cases a nonce wasn't actually a nonce.
This one really bugged me: "Three airlines, British Airways, Qantas and Air New Zealand, have attracted criticism for controversial seating policies which discriminate against adult male passengers on the basis of their gender." Fortunately BA has changed its policy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_sex_discrimination_poli...
Understanding Hash Functions and Keeping Passwords Safe
This is one reason why I'm going to be providing bounties for more than just security bugs. Even if people don't expect to find security bugs, they might find a typo in a comment and earn themselves a $1 tarsnap account credit -- and as demonstrated here, simply looking at source code can result in finding bugs even if you weren't originally looking for them.
Hmm. IBM's revenue in 2009 was around $95Bn, near as I can tell.

Has Apple now overtaken IBM in revenue? If so, that's an astonishing turnaround from 20 years ago ...
Groupon's real "dirty secret" is that they've brilliantly navigated the seedy world of affiliate marketing. As far as I know, Groupon uses the same affiliate networks as Acai scam artists (as opposed to say, building their own a la Amazon) and is (was?) willing to pay several dollars for a single email address.

How they managed that is the real secret and I would be extremely interested in that story.
1) I'd give the suggestion box more real estate. That's the site's focus.

2) If your using an ELO style algorithm, why not provide a "Neither" option?

3)It doesn't seem very effective in ranking the style of the shirt...Will it differentiate between choices of color, style and content?
And for most of us, the reason we rip are: the unskippable content on DVDs and ease of use. So far, netflix watch instantly satisfies both of those, so I can see not needing to rip DVD at some point in the future, except for DVD's I buy (I'd watch the ripped copy, not the physical one).
HP/Palm's webOS Tablets -- Pictures, Plans and More
And nearly twice their per-unit Mac sales for the quarter.

Ten years of work on OSX barely shifts the needle; less than a year of iPad sales breaks the gauge. It's pretty clear which OS is more important to Apple now.
1.78 out of 600 million users is a pretty low mortality rate. (Edit: oh sure, go and fix the headline on me...)
If you read the entire article, he actually covers this point. In short, without SSL on the login page, you're susceptible to DNS poisoning attacks (think logging in to your airline's frequent flier program from an airport's free wifi). Secondly, he shows that most of the sites don't even submit to an SSL URL.
Even more thought provoking; a mistake that was not due to a crypto mistake, but the sort of programming error you or I make daily....
I use fabric http://fabfile.org for deployment and though I don't have multiple servers, it's really easy to add more servers to a fabfile (a python script). Deployment is easy and flexible, for example I use something like this:

fab release pull update touch

The above will work on release version, will pull in changes from repo (hg in my case), will update to tip (or any tag I want), remove any *.pyc files and recompile and finally touch wsgi file. All these (release, pull, update, touch) are custom written python functions using fabric library.

If I want to restart apache, I use this (could have combined it with previous example and it would work)

fab apache_restart

Fabric is joy to use, very easy to write powerful deployment scripts and has good documentation: highly recommended.
Sorry, just reread and saw the suggestions are random for now. Disregard #3
What is that supposed to show?

It's studying adults, so it can't and of course doesn't make any claims about genetics like you're trying to.

I can only find one place with any information about individuals (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/fig_tab/natu...), but according to that one graph the difference among all men is more than twice the difference between the average of all men and the average of all women. Even the cultural implication isn't valuable for making statements about individuals.

Doesn't really look like it answers either of my points.
The downvoting's annoying. I don't agree with you, but you're presenting your argument calmly, clearly, and with supporting links - I think that's always valuable.
It will be interesting to see just how much influence he's able to have. Even without being the leader of a major government, this could make a difference in how the party is perceived. Just having a Pirate Party member in government is pretty significant, IMO.
> Expert devs shouldn't build crypto without review.

I was surprised that Colin's solution is to personally re-review his code. Good writers know--don't rely on yourself for proofreading. Usually the mental lapse that caused the problem will manifest itself during your review as well.

Disclaimer: I am not a tarsnap user.
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While the terms SEO and startup don't usually coincide together, organic SEO traffic can be one of the cheapest and most effective ways for a budding startup to build up a core user-base. I have also noticed a recent influx of startup companies testing the waters of SEO in order to build up traction for their business.

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I know the book is not about math (in fact I'm a math major now so I think I know what math is about ;), it was just that the mathy things were the hardest for me. For example understanding the O(log n) algorithm for fibonacci, the square root algorithm, series, exponentiation algorithm, newton's method, etc (especially since I had no idea what a derivative or exponentiation was). I suspect programmers with little math training will have similar difficulties.
Colin Percival told you that he uses RSA-2048, AES-256 in CTR mode, and HMAC-SHA256. None of that information helps you with a one-line implementation error that incorrectly handles CTR nonces. That's 'poet's point.
I'm not criticizing truncation. You need to do it on long names. I'm saying it looks like the designers of the GNOME UI are using truncation as a quick fix for a flawed design.

Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter:

http://i.imgur.com/MN3Q2.png

Notice how the tracking (spacing between letters) in the first item gets tightened to make it fit? It looks a little squished, but it's much preferable to reading dots.

The last item had to be truncated, but it happens in the middle and keeps the useful end information visible.

I was being honest when I said I was amazed at the GNOME truncation. I think an operating system UI that can't handle the names of its killer apps (e.g., OpenOffic…) lost its way somewhere.
> 1) I'd give the suggestion box more real estate. That's the site's focus.

Agreed.

> 2) If your using an ELO style algorithm, why not provide a "Neither" option?

I've done some testing with a "neither" button and people tend to over-use it. It's definitely an oft-requested feature though, so it would be nice to find some way of providing a neither option while still discouraging overuse.

Also, it's not quite ELO-style. This is to provide personalized recommendations, not a global ranking.
> Samsung won't release their kernel modifications for
> Froyo which are needed by the CM team to get CM7 running
> on the Galaxy S devices

Isn't this a violation of the GPL?
My bank in India has multiple passwords for different kinds of access. I have one password to get web access, a pin number to get phone/ATM access (since most phones don't have full keyboards) and a third password to actually transfer money from my web account. A session timeout is 5 minutes of inactivity and if you use the back button, your session is invalidated. It's annoying.
> Oh well. Thank goodness for PBS.

For now, but the new Republican controlled House is already calling for an end to its funding.
> you don’t need anything more complex than something like X Windows

I'm not sure X would be my prime example of simplicity...
All of my Hackety problems on Windows? Ruby 1.9.1. Works great on Linux and Mac. Windows... not so much.

Working on the 1.9.2 port, but it's just not that simple...
BUT when you just throw it up on the wall, you have no idea if anyone read it. And chances are, most of them didn't (didn't check in regularly enough, or they did check in, but your post wasn't one of the top 10 that was put on their page, etc).

So did you really tell anyone?
[Groupon Employee Speaking]

Keep in mind that when that study was done (June 2009), Groupon was 9 months old. Since then, Groupon has expanded to dozens of countries and hundreds of cities, raised over $1B, hired thousands of employees, and refined its processes a zillion-fold.

It's no secret in the company that our long term success is based on a) customers having great experiences, and b) merchants getting a return on the cost of their discount and fees to us. Everything is viewed through those two values. Deals are scheduled so that customers are always delighted (e.g. so there aren't 4 steakhouses in one week), and sized so that merchants don't get raped by the economics (e.g. if a typical bill at a restaurant is $100, then the deal might be $60 for $30. Also, quantity is estimated based on the merchant's capacity as well so that merchants don't get overwhelmed and customers still get a good experience. In the video for the recent Japanese new year debacle (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111609), Andrew mentions that deal sizing and scaling is already done in some markets and in response to the Japan incident, will now be done in all markets to ensure the experience continues to be good for everyone. Short-term profit maximization isn't what builds lasting businesses, and the execs here know it.

With something growing as ridiculously fast as Groupon, data get stale fast. It's like if you found a study from 2006 where someone complained that they couldn't find anyone they knew on Facebook.

It's always wise to take a company's numbers with a grain of sale, but with a fast growing company, the numbers they selectively release are usually the best you're going to get.
When I was a kid of 9 and in school, going into my first class with a male teacher, I had the same theory. It turned out I was wrong, though. My least favorite classes from then on out were all taught by women. It was like women had to be extra bitchy to maintain distance or something.