skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I advocate a switch to direct hardware execution of exclusively high-level (human readable!) code. Does it get more user-modifiable than that?

What sort of code the hardware executes is irrelevant to whether that code is Free. JavaScript is high-level and mostly human-readable, but it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible. And JavaScript is a relatively limited language; a LISP-like language executed directly by the hardware could be even more difficult to modify.
Why Server Virtualization Can Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
Tarsnap critical security bug
I think a lot of it is subconsciously consumed. Also if you were lucky to have a good male role model at home - father/older siblings, then perhaps male teachers weren't important to you.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that boys learn best when taught by men, and girls learn best when taught by women. Male and female brains are very different, and we think differently about problems.

So if your school has 80% women teachers, then the girls are going to do better on average than the boys in that school, which is concerning.
Context, plus some other works:

http://markwatson.com/opencontent/
All of your statistics are pointing at society in general, which does not support your statement regarding the subset of male teachers versus female teachers (particularly if you take into account the gender ratios of teachers).

These statistics are also in relation to the total number of molesters in the US population, which if my memory serves me (at work, no desire to look up the specifics on my work connection) is less than .01% of the US population.

That's a pretty small chance of a random male of being an offender, much less so a male teacher.
Amazon Leaked True Grit For Kindle Last Week
I agree that the phenomenon is undeniable. Commercial after commercial shows a bumbling, silly, or wrongheaded male creating a problem that an eye-rolling female armed with the advertised product is able to solve.

I used to find this mildly annoying. I thought that surely our society is sufficiently advanced that we might accept roughly equal occurrences of each gender as the goats in these commercials without it seeming disparaging to women.

But thinking this made me realize: having men as the goats is not disparaging to men, either. Now I choose to attribute the phenomenon to the conventional wisdom that men are generally less self-conscious than women. I believe there is some anecdotal evidence for this but have no idea whether it is actually true. What I do believe is that marketers perceive this to be the case and making commercials that make men look stupid will alienate fewer people in the audience, since humiliating somebody that a male viewer identifies with is, theoretically, less disquieting.

The same applies to sitcoms and movies.
Awesome Review of SICP
Two Men Charged With Hacking About 120,000 Apple iPads Via AT&T Servers
DRM = functionally indistinguishable from broken
I found this story and perspective very interesting but everyone discussing this subject with Hilbert is severely mistaken if they think they'll dissuade him from his unpopular beliefs with anecdote and musings.

Sadly, your story is not one that is going to be heard often in HN (wrong demographic entirely), but it still falls under the scope of anecdote.

I think what you're pushing is a more deterministically oriented perspective in terms of where women find themselves in their lives.

I don't think that's necessarily going to be much more popular than Hilbert's biologically deterministic tendencies -> choice flip.

You'll need to take a different approach in advancing this argument, although the lack of misandry is certainly appreciated.

A gentle note: countries that have state funded childcare and that otherwise compensate for the burden of child-rearing have even higher part-time and pink collar employment rates for women than countries that do less to provide for women and children.

Your point, I'm afraid, doesn't have fact on its side.
The user you are replying to is the author.
Right, I think the article misses one of the purposes of advertising. Coke doesn't target ads at people googling "soft drink". Facebook seems like as good a place as any for the kinds of subliminal advertising that Coke does.
Most abuse is by family members/friends.

So rather than trusting your husband to drop your kids off in the SUV and worrying about the gym teacher - you would be safer letting them walk with strangers.
I've been planning to give up my iPhone for a 4G VZW Android, but it's easy to take a direct update channel for granted.

So, iOS 4 has 90 percent share amongst iOS device owners. What about Android 2.3? 0.4 percent, as of a couple weeks ago. Yes, that’s zero point four percent.

But for the sake of this being slightly more fair, let’s compare iOS 4 to Android 2.2 — an OS which came out well before iOS 4. The adoption rate there? 51.8 percent. That’s still pretty pathetic.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/
Thanks for the compliment. Really appreciate it.
Is this the new Facebook photos?
An interesting side effect is that copying a dvd is relatively trivial. Saving a streamed movie is harder and you have no motivation to do it.
Video is a few years behind music. I see no reason to expect it won't follow the same path, though.
Please do not recontextualize/editorialize news stories like this on HN.
I've seen RSS-extracted URLs like that here. But this was not one of them. The headline came up on a news site and I simply clicked through. I never expected extraneous stuff in the URL because that's never happened before using the news site. I usually get clean URLs.
And I bet you just have all the answers don't you? I'll even bet that you think everyone else is stupid for not seeing the OBVIOUS solutions that you're presenting!

Damn those corporate conspiracies to keep programmers down!
Ubuntu's decision to move to Unity made me go back to Debian for GNOME/Clearlooks for the first time in a while, but what am I going to do now with the way GNOME 3 looks?
What? Mr Confidence Admits Setbacks? – with Timothy Sykes
This is what I mean by hysteria. Actual odds of a child being molested by a male teacher/caregiver? Female teacher/caregiver? Family member or family friend of either gender?

Regardless of numbers or justification, you're also accepting a form of discrimination that would be much less acceptable for any other situation. Hell, even "I would never get a gay babysitter" would likely provoke more outrage.

The worst part is that I completely understand your argument. When it comes to our children, all bets are off - forget statistics and numbers, if your kid gets hurt and you feel you could have prevented it, no matter how unlikely the event, you'll never forgive yourself for it. That's normal, it's natural - it's also likely to lead to completely irrational behavior, which can easily grow into hysteria. That's what bothers me the most - that in a way it's normal.
Here's one about daycare workers:
http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/4/481.full.pdf

Here's a quote based on their data, "In summary this study found that a sexual interest in children is relatively common among male public sector child care workers".

Here's another study about educators:
http://www.taasa.org/library/pdfs/TAASALibrary142.pdf

Choice quote, "The vast majority (96%) of the abusers in our study were males".

But lets be clear, I'm not saying to ban male daycare teachers at all. I'm just saying I won't send my children to one. And I think the numbers make this very clear as to why one might make this decision. Now clearly you don't think those numbers prove anything and that's fine. Like I said in another post, it's a great arbitrage opportunity for you.
I didn't follow your links, but I do want to point out that the statistics you mention strike me as the wrong ones. You're discussing how many pedophiles are men, but I want to know how many men are pedophiles.

It's like saying that one should always walk on the sidewalk because land mines are always planted in soil. Whether or not that's good advise depends very much on how much I expect to encounter land mines on my travels.
Fake Steve Jobs says- leave the real one alone, quits
Unsecured IP cameras accessible to everyone
It's surely more pointing out the absurdity of adults being so petrified of terrorists/pedophiles/etc Basically everything the media tries to make us scared of.
Maybe you won't put it on any main page but I suggest you do on your "about" page or what have you.

I can't be the only user in the world who has seen an interesting "tech" thing and subsequently learned more from a website.

It can't hurt!
I suppose I'm in the "problem" audience here as I usually go to Netflix with a particular title in mind. The title is almost always not available for instant watching, and I've come to the point where I just assume it isn't on Netflix.

Netflix may have a ton of streamable content, but if you have to approach it from a non-specific point-of-view, it's questionable how valuable a service it is for people like me.
Dealing with challenging behaviour in IT groups
Very nice. I spend so much of my time designing reporting like this or doing it manually in excel. I especially like the cohort reporting. Im launching a new product now and will seriously look at a this. Any details on the pricing?
Since version 4.2.5 MzScheme can use many cores with future and touch (http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html#(part._ef... ) But they apparently they are tricky to use.

For example the manual says that to run the computations in parallel, you should no use operations that mix exact ans inexact numbers. It is possible to do this by hand writing the scheme code, but I think that it is more difficult to make the arc->scheme compiler do this automatically.
Downvote the heretic!

Unpopular opinions will not be tolerated!

Oh, HN, you never fail to disappoint.
Law

The server is down so I couldn't review the article but I am very interested in your idea, I have been thinking about something similar for sometime as well but on a local level which should be easy in SF. I'd like to discuss this further with you.
When even someone like Colin introduces a crypto bug like this, it makes you wonder. Are we ever going to get to a place where crypto engineering is something the open source community can take on? How long did it take to push people to stop writing C programs with trivial vulnerabilities? And that's something you can write a static analyzer for. No so with crypto.
That's fast. I got the email two minutes earlier :)

I meant to say this in an email, but big props to Colin for being transparent about this and responding to the issue the way he did. I'm sure it wasn't an easy weekend.
Go to McDonalds; buy a $1 side salad with Southwestern dressing and a $1 Hot 'n' Spicy chicken sandwich. Cube the chicken meat (offer the bun to your kids if they're still hungry) and add it to the salad and dressing... instant Southwestern Chicken Salad for $2
Twitter: Fast becoming a legitimate conversation platform
I see this as a benefit too, especially for TV shows.

If you are the type of person that enjoys "critically acclaimed" but "unpopular" shows (Arrested Development, Pushing Daises, Better Off Ted, etc.), the signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically lower than regular Cable TV.
Netflix-style distribution is better for content producers, and far better for consumers.

The only parties it's not better for are the existing content distributors. I, for one, will not weep at their inevitable death. The only reason they aren't dead already is that they're deeply in bed with the content producers (if not the same entities). But in the long term, they can't compete.
> it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible.

This is a moral, rather than technological problem. Anyone writing any kind of code can choose to make life less-pleasant for those who will read it.

Under current architectures, you do not even have the option of making life pleasant for those who wish to read the code that is presently running on their machine, at the time it runs. In fact, the very idea sounds like schizophrenic soapbox heresy to most people. Which is a crying shame.
And the IE folks on Twitter are using it as their picture:

http://twitter.com/#!/IE/status/27397420665016320

I think we can expect full compliance.
A lot of effort has gone into this; it's a shame to see so many disparaging posts here. I think the developers should be applauded for their work.

Between this and Ubuntu's plans to adopt Wayland in place of X, there are some interesting times ahead for Linux on the desktop. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.
DOJ Fail.

The biggest problem with this merger is that it messes with what should be a separation of control between content and distribution. One of the core purposes and intentions of Net Neutrality was to enforce a clear line between the two.

A distributor of content shouldn't go around applying favoritism to certain content or blocking certain content. 10K commercials for anti-depressants or the latest Millionaire Matchmaker, but the news doesn't report what's happening in the real world.

Oh well. Thank goodness for PBS.
It was an arbitrary figure to make a point. Although I have been offered part-time sweat equity consulting gigs which amount to about that.
This is an excellent example of why you shouldn't write your own crypto code - Colin is awesome at it and even he makes mistakes.

Edit: To be clear, this isn't aimed at Colin but meant to point out that if he still occasionally gets it wrong there's a pretty good chance that your fancy custom encryption method does too.
> Time Warner is so agitated by Netflix’s streaming that Kent has spoken of “freezing those rights” to maximize a show’s value on traditional TV.

I find it funny that there are still companies / people out there who are afraid of the Internet. Maximize a show's value on traditional TV all you want, but in the long term you will lose big.
There was a campaign like that in the UK - the kids were given dolls with somewhat impressive external genitals. If the kids touched the genitals that was evidence that they were being abused.

Apart from the fact that dolls of adults with penises are rather unusual and likely to produce an odd reaction - the same logic suggests my nieces are being abused by the lion from Lion king.
The article’s interesting but it didn’t really answer the question I wanted answered which is “who is actually making more money?”

Netflix is at the forefront of on-demand visual media and we all know how that story is going to end. I don’t know of anyone who thinks people 30 years from now are going to be catching reruns on TNT instead of requesting what show they want to watch when they want to watch it.

But to me the big question is whether it’s better for media companies to drag their feet or to be an early adopter. To use the HBO example they’re adamantly refusing to license their content for streaming while Showtime has almost all its shows available on Netflix. So from a business perspective the interesting question is whether people will turn to HBO because of its scarcity or choose Showtime shows instead.
I've had success using HTDP with students, and can recommend it - especially for the type of student that has interest/potential but that might otherwise struggle with a more standardized teaching approach.

I've also used Picturing Programs (http://picturingprograms.com/philosophy.html) and "How to Design Worlds" (http://world.cs.brown.edu/) with a few students that had a great deal of math anxiety and wanted a more graphics-intensive approach. I myself had/have a great deal of math anxiety, so I appreciate all of their efforts on this front. All of these materials help student's get their feet wet before they get too scared of the waves.

BTW, Does anyone know if someone has worked out the kinks so that you can use SICP examples directly in DrScheme/Racket to make the transition from HTDP to SICP easier for students? The last time I tried it, there were too many little gotchas and I gave up due to (volunteer work) time constraints.
I'm totally with you on this one. XFCE is an excellent option to avoid this design madness.
Could just be that the other story actually related to the software industry - it's Hacker news after all. Why the persecution complex?
I'm not saying always, but certainly at the schools I went to, the female teachers were by and large softer, and would let you get away with more.

I think naturally, when faced with bad behavior women will try to empathize and reason, whereas men will tend to punish/kick into line.
People like to beat up on MS a lot, but the differences between the Windows 7 GUI (or iOS GUI) and Gnome 3 really highlight the disadvantage that a bunch of spare-time developers who say to themselves, "well, I think our users will like text truncation, let's throw it in tomorrow!" are at versus a big company with millions to spend on thoughtful UI design, graphics, research, and focus groups.

Windows 7 has its problems too, but it's clear to me that the changes Gnome 3 is bringing are nothing more than what some out-of-touch developers think is what users want, without having actually asked users. Maybe I'm wrong on that assertion but that sure is the feeling I'm getting from this project.

Gnome 3 would have benefited greatly from a series of focus groups before development started or from snagging a high-profile UI expert to rap them on the knuckles whenever they had a bright idea like using 12 different font colors, sizes, and styles on the already-overwhelming dashboard screen.
Yes, I can explain: We can already clone any almost extinct species. We're not sure whether we can clone an already extinct one.

And if you consider yourself a (nerd|geek), you can't turn away from the possibility of someday riding a Mammoth obtained from SCIENCE.
Which we all do, when we invest in a stock and then sell when we believe its reached its peak.
"if you roll your own crypto, and it breaks, you will look incompetent." - tptacek to cperciva, 313 days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183757

(not that I know anything about crypto)
Demo Basico Player Move Networks
I think one of the wonderful qualities of SICP is that a determined 14 year old and an experienced programmer can both get a lot out of it. I also think the difficulty of the text is generally overstated.
That's why we had to get rid of our German professor.

Statistically there was a 7.5% risk he would gas the students (6 million Jews/80 Million Germans)
You're missing the point. Currently, I do not have to run proprietary software to use the Web. Under your design, I would have to surrender control of my computer to arbitrary third parties to use even the most basic features.
Yep, just grandstanding. Point being that the equity offered should be commensurate with the value of the co-founder. If you're only offering 10% to someone who is worth 20%, don't expect to get full value. That guy will have a side project going while working for you.
Colin, one question: let's say I'm not paranoid about my backups' security. So I don't want to re-encrypt anything (even though it's only about 1GB). How does upgrade to 1.0.28 affect existing and new backups (and deduplication among those)?
The ads and sitcoms aren't targetting men. That's why they don't care if you're annoyed.

The commercials say a lot more about women than they do about men.

Watching the commercials, it's hard to deny that a lot of women must like feeling superior to men, and that feeling will eventually cause them to buy a product.

Why this patronizing and sexist tactic works on anyone but a 13-year-old girl is a mystery to me, but it does. I guess it's the female equivalent of the dumb college buddy movie and beer commerical.
They're really writing sociology for the most part.
Cryptography is hard, but someone has to do it.
I'm working on a site that is, in part, attempting to help match entrepreneurs with one another based on mutually beneficial skills. We're still in alpha, so there is a long way to go yet. I think not having a real life connection makes these relationships take longer to cultivate online, if it is even possible at all. I'm hoping that having a material goal, a startup idea in our case, will energize people to start the bonding process though.
My Goal has always been to provide software as a service. I started working on one such product named it care to share. The product always you to share your purchases on facebook and make affiliate earnings from any purchases made by your friends. Project didn't sit well with big companies as they were not willing to change their marketing campaigns, although it was obvious that their sales would go up. As I didn't get sign ups from any big businesses I had to leave the working prototype in sandbox and start on my new app. This time I partnered up with PayPal to allow users to create wishes and share with their Social circle. Contributions can be made through PayPal. Very interactive and useful app. Tried to get PayPal to market the app to its users as users were hesitating creating a new PayPal account. PayPal ignored my 3 of my email requests. So I guess this project will go down as a failure as well.
That last comment made me think of this sentence from a student's recent petition to reverse a school's "No hugging" policy:

"Interpersonal touch is not inherently sexual, and to treat it as such is to make it so."

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/17/kids-petition-agains.ht...
I haven't many answers; only questions. And someone appears to think they are interesting, as I do not submit my articles to this site, and have tried to discourage others from doing so:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91

And to explain the present status quo, we need no conspiracies. Only people who laugh off the very idea of re-thinking foundations.

No one is asking you to throw out your PC. I only ask that you think.
Look, I don't claim to be an expert. I was just asking you to cite some of the voluminous research you claimed existed, and pointing out that the case seems far from clear. I just cited the first two on-point google results, one of which was about grade 1. Also, no one is claiming reduced class sizes have a detrimental effect. The claim is that their effect is small and probably not cost effective.

Now, on to your citations. Your first paper (Konstantantopoulos and Chun) agrees with me. It shows an achievement gain is 0.04-0.1 standard deviations, decreasing with time (they don't even bother to look past grade 8). The increase in cost is 66% (reducing class size from 25 to 15).

Graduation probabilities are also increased by 3% (for students not receiving a free lunch) to 18% (for students receiving a free lunch), after 4 years of small class size (according to the Finn paper). So far, the only effect that seems significant is the graduation probability for students receiving a free lunch (assuming this particular effect is real, rather than just data mining).

(Note: several of your other studies don't even try to address the claim that lower class sizes improve student achievement. Your paper by Woolf and Muennig is just an advocacy piece, assuming that education is the cause of all good things and arguing that we need more of it. )