skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Bonds/Notes/Bills issued by the Treasury have fixed rates - so yes, the interest rates will stay that low until the money is paid off.

TIPS aren't fixed rate, but I don't know what fraction of new US debt is TIPS.

More to the point, you're assuming that we won't have to roll-over that debt, which only happens if we're not running a deficit. Since we are for the forseeable future....
This is so silly.

It's clear that Google is not playing the same game as Facebook.

What is more likely than Google+ displacing Facebook is that it will prevent Facebook from making Google irrelevant (social search is a relatively uncharted frontier).
What people saw back then is that Jobs was selling a phone. When in reality Steve was selling a post-pc device that could also make phone calls.
That's why the usual fashion cycle didn't apply.
I don't think there's one right way to code a website. So I wouldn't look down my nose at someone who uses a perfectly good architecture that's merely different from the one I would have chosen.

That being said, there is such a thing as a wrong architecture. (And for non-trivial projects, the absence of architecture is clearly wrong as well.) The choice between several good designs is partly subjective, but some designs are objectively bad. So I think criticism (not condescension) is warranted at times. Wordpress being a good example.
It's certainly a "very long random string" without context but as people have pointed out above, it's actually not a very good password if people adopted this pattern widely (and you said the attacker knows this).

2000^4 = 16000000000000 possible passwords = 1.6E13 = ([A-Z] + [a-z] + [0-9] + [!@#$%^&()])^7.1ish. So, your four words from the 2000 word list are equal to a 7ish character password that looks like "Av#12GH". I'm not sure if you meant that seven characters was "very long" but I wouldn't say it is. Still a very strong password but maybe not as random as it appears to be when the pattern is known.
Zynga Raised $1 Billion Credit Line In July
If you have an iPhone or don't want to use keepassx, you can use an online password manager like Passpack or Lastpass.

The downside is that you need to really trust the password manager, as they have all of your usernames and password.
Right, maybe if you use the first letter of the words in a sentence, like "Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song, and make it better." -> "HJ,dmib,tass,amib." Then you can add in some characters that make it different for each site without it being obvious which characters you added. I wrote a blog post on how to create different passwords for sites that are easy to remember: http://craigquiter.com/post/8668237043/creating-and-remember...
Test of hypersonic aircraft fails
Getting my team to apply now! Thanks for the heads up!
Edit: Im in LA and if I qet the invite, Ill be driving up but I can fit 2 more people in the car for the ride if any locals want to carpool. I have room to host 2 people at my place here in LA also if anyone is flying in to LAX for any reason lol.
You probably could have written that in a much more constructive manner.
You are trolling. Your comment uses a pedantic point to purposefully arouse a negative reaction in readers. Bad form.
This is the same method Apple officially recommended in their help for choosing a secure password—the example they gave was “Tnf,tfws95” (“That’s not flying, that’s falling with style”) followed by the year of Toy Story’s release (where the quote is from). I agree that it’s an excellent combo of passphrase and obfuscation.
Unfortunately, their documentation now[1] gives the same kind of example that XKCD points out will be exceedingly difficult to remember correctly.

[1] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506
No it wouldn't. Don't even go there. Totally wrong.
He's wrong, but eerily prophetic too -- all the reasons he says that the ipod was successful are the reasons that the iphone was successful (I do disagree with how important advertising was, though).

He just didn't realize, living in the moment, that all the existing smartphones were crap. Just as people pre-ipod did not realize that all the existing MP3 players were crap.

It's not until you see how much better something can be that the blinders can come off.
My favorite thing about A Song of Ice and Fire is that the author could literally do anything. In Harry Potter, you know the main three won't die. Forget about what GRRM does in books 2-5...
Unmanned USA military aircraft travels from NYC to LA in 12 minutes.
I didn't see anything much to do with Javascript here. Unless you're meant to use some of these libraries (such as Drools) through something like RingoJS.
I don't think that really solves the problem. People are different, and societies have different collective values. That diversity is IMHO valuable, and in case, it's probably unavoidable. Trying to force everyone into the same template seems to me a Very Bad Idea.

I think we do much better with our current model, where each jurisdiction has its own legal and ethical norms, jurisdictions may reach multilateral agreements on areas of common interest, and anyone wanting to operate across jurisdictions needs to do so in a way that is compatible with everywhere they operate and any common agreements between those places. In this case, economic incentives for major multinationals to be able to operate across borders is, or at least should be, a compelling reason for national governments to accept their limitations and not try to exert influence beyond their borders in unsustainable ways.
Here's a video of the plane's arrival in Ireland and its landing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KEIq76JE7o
How iPod got its name
Google+ Wastes No Time: Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Zynga On Board
Apple Finally Acknowledges Sub-Standard iPad 2 Displays
It's a cool paper and almost none of it depends on knowing much about low-level crypto vulnerabilities.

Police tactical radios are an interesting case where denial of service and traffic analysis are genuinely threatening scenarios. Most modern crypto protocols aren't built to be secure from either. So right off the bat, you have a paper saying they can shut police tactical radios off for entire metro areas.

I'm not sure how true that is of digital domain RF in general, though.

The confidentiality flaws here seem to boil down to usability; the configuration and metadata used by this system is so brittle that trivial real-world setbacks preclude encryption; these happen so often that police teams don't even notice when encryption isn't enabled.
My bad, i thought your comment was in his thread for some reason.
No, the rules specify "unmarked straightedge". And marking the straightedge is not allowed.

If you were allowed to mark the straightedge then you could put 2 random marks on it. With 2 random marks, you can trisect any angle. The location of the marks doesn't matter, just their existence.
Anyone road tripping this from back East?
> >We tried that

> When? ARRA was sold as that, but it became more about tax cuts and propping up state governments that a public works program.

And your new program won't be that because ....?

We can also look at currrent infrastructure spending. It's basically all jobs program, starting with the Davis-Bacon requirement.

> We're going to have to do it some point: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

> May as well do it now while people are out of work and interest rates are low.

Um, the facts that we need to do it and now would be a good time to do it do not imply that we'd actually do it.

We're doing a lot of infrastructure spending now. How about fixing it before embarking on an expansion? That way, we won't have wasted a lot of money that could be used when we're actually going to fix infrastructure.

Yes, interest rates are low now, but lenders want their principle back as well, so wasting money now can affect our ability to borrow and spend when we're serious.
"The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough."

John Dvorak was right about the trends, he was wrong about the company. Apple can play "the fashion game" better than any other consumer electronics firm. With the iPhone, they've played fast for a sustained period.
Google rolls out games for G+
Making the Most of Your Time at a Start-Up Incubator
Quick research tells me that there ar about 45,000 cases of leukemia in the US per year. Equally quick research tells me traditional treatment easily comes to $400k, and comes with terrible side effects.

So, if you had a fairly reliable (at achieving remission) injection, and especially one without the terrible side effects, you should be able to charge at least $400k.

Please inform me which pharmaceutical company would not like an $18 billion/year revenue stream.
I saw the HBO series before reading the books (miway into book 3).

Knowing the ending of book 1 definitely changed the way I read it and what I got out of it. Knowing the character was so innocent/hopeless made me feel sorry for him rather than associate with him being the hero.

If I hadn't known what was coming I probably would have been disappointed, confused and annoyed with the book. I also wold have been paying attention to the wrong details.

And even now I'm avoiding spoiling the story.
I'm willing to bet Heello is TwitPic's backup plan. What I mean by that is, when you base your entire product on another platform, and that platform ceases to exist (or in this case, doesn't want to play nice with you anymore) you can do one of two things:

1. Shutdown

2. Rebuild the other service yourself and integrate your tool

If you invested real money into a product, which would you choose? Especially when the "other service" is basically a badly scaled, maxlen'd, asynchronous messaging service.
The categories are still quite confusing, because Apple's products stubbornly fail to fit cleanly in any of the old ones.

Is the iPod Touch a phone? No. Is it more-or-less like an iPhone? More, rather than less. Is the iPad a PC? No. Does it replace a PC? Yes and no. Does it replace an iPhone? No and yes.

It's reminiscent of the elder days when "microcomputers" were new, and one could have an extensive debate over whether a microcomputer was a real computer or just a toy. In the long run, of course, the very word microcomputer died out.
Just the UI wrapped around app development is a nightmare. Even if the API were perfect, deploying apps would suck.
Yep. It's the story of the teacher who divided his class into two groups: One would be graded on how many pots they crafted and the other on the quality of a single pot over the course. The students from the first group also had the finest pots.
Music Beat Analysis on the GPU with Jacket
I'm not surprised. After serving as a maintainer of both the main perl client side api (http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Facebook-API) and one production application I have to say the Facebook platform sucked[1] for its instability, lack of regression testing, lack of roadmap for new feature or fixes for major bugs and lack of a testing framework for client apis.

Now, this was 2 and 3 years ago they may have cleaned up the mess since but I don't think so after poking my head in a time of two over the last few months.

[1] It sucked to worked with but was an undeniable success for them and those that we able to dedicate the resources to keep up to the constant churn and downtime
The ideas that Nilay puts forth as good examples of patents are held up here to be bad examples.

Why is that?

Because Nilay doesn't understand why these patents are obvious.

Which is the whole fucking problem with the patent system Nilay:

People like you saying "Well, these patents look reasonable to me, so why are you people who do this for a living complaining?"
At the risk of infecting someone else?
Would there be any basis to suing the USPTO? If it could be shown that their incompetence/negligence led to an organization suffering loss due to an patently invalid patent? (pun not intended but acknowledged).
The numbers for 1 litre of fuel don't really add up, either. They said the flight took ~38 hours, but when it landed it had ~ 2 ounces of fuel left, which would have "[left] it less than an hour left before it would have crashed".

~34 ounces per liter, ~2(+) ounces per hour, implies >2 liters for the flight.

The speeds are about right, though: 1800 miles/55mph=33 hours, /42 = 43 hours.
Because there are interesting ideas. Not everything has to be news.
I don't think his piece was intended to be a rebuttal to serious informed analysts so much as an attempt to discredit the naive abolitionists who frequently know little or nothing about patent law and who fix on edge cases and abuse as if they are the norm and declare 'off with his head.'

If you are irritated by such standard arguments, which I respect, bear in mind that there are those of us who are frustrated by endless statements about how 'obvious' software patents are and how the edge cases demonstrate the whole system is broken and hence must be abandoned which is as coherent a position as proposing to do away with criminal law because of high profile miscarriages of justice. The law is an ass. Duh.
The Google+ Platform Blog
I agree that this is an obvious invention. I think using the unqualified term "linked list" is misleading, though. As I pointed out elsewhere, references typically do not include the "multiply-linked list" when defining the linked list. They'll mention single, doubly, circularly, and possibly sorted linked lists. I don't see any mention of multiply-linked lists (or equivalent) in Intro to Algos or TaoCP. *

* It's possible that TaoCP covers them somewhere, but I don't see them in the early discussion of linked lists.
Documentation is my main gripe with it, too.

What really frustrates me is that there are some places in which options exist but simply aren't documented, and in other cases the various call options are listed but with no explanation, so you have no clue what each option actually does for you.
The best part is definitely "let's all go secure: it's the O without the line through it".

(secure is actually ∅ and clear is O; the police team got it backwards)
I think I support the current system, though maybe there are ways of tweaking it. If there's no preference for internal decision-making on HN by people actually reading the /newest page, HN will tend to only consist of things that had traffic driven to them from something like twitter, a popular blog, or reddit (it's already pretty hard for anything on /newest to get noticed).

That seems like it'd lead to an HN that consisted mainly of discussion of things that're already being discussed elsewhere. To avoid that, some decoupling of communities so that what's at the top of HN is primarily driven internally is good, imo. But, perhaps there's a better way than devaluing externally driven votes.
I wonder if there are any John Gruber posts predicting Android to be a complete failure...
He just didn't realize...

Watch that Youtube video posted here by arn. He wrote it to get hits, not to represent his actual world view.
"I think there's a non-trivial possibility that the gov't would take that drug for its own uses."

Is there precedent for such a thing?
Look more closely. The publishing date is April 1st.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=26aJAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...

Clearly this isn't serious.
Mark Cuban's favorite books on business, innovation and selling
Yes, software patents are evil (and what to do about it)
Wow, that's amazing. I hope the results hold up.

My father died of type 2 non hodkins lymphoma in 1997 when I was 17; he was sick for 4 years from two rounds of lymphoma, plus a marrow transplant. Every time I read about advances like this I feel bad about wasting my life building better advertising instead of doing biomed. I just wish biomed paid better wages -- I much more than doubled my income by leaving a wetlab and doing advertising instead. It's a lesson in what our society really values. And now I feel like Steve Yegge.
Hypersonic Glider Loses Contact with US Military as Speed Test Takes Place
Greater Manchester Police Names & Shames Rioters on Twitter
A variant on this contributes to the problem. The mechanism is that person 'a' 'invents' X while working on something doesn't think its all that special, person 'b' also 'invents' feature X but they work at a place that has incentivized filing patents so they file a patent on it.

Now some time later person 'c' also invents X and gets sued by person 'b's company. (or the holding company that bought out person 'b's company's IP portfolio).

Engineers have been told to literally "file a patent on everything you do, regardless of how novel or patentable you think it is, let the lawyers figure that out." further, to protect themselves they pay 'bonuses' for filing. Its a strategy and it pays dividends in the current climate.

So I understand Marco's and others frustration here, I would be interested in clearly bogus patents that have been filed post 2005 (my thesis is that starting in 1995 the PTO was hit by a zillion new patents and it wasn't until 2005 that the examiners had become trained enough to recognize the obvious ones and discard them) I've done some expert witness work and found that the prosecution histories of patents show a significant improvement in the examiner's responses as you move from 1995 to 2005.
> Bush owned the first > 1 trillion dollar deficit, that budget was passed while he was still president.

Yup, and Obama has gone deeper.

I'm not claiming that Bush was good - I've said that he's bad. I'm pointing out that Obama and the Dems have been worse.

> If we're doing stupid technicalities.

One "stupid technicality" is that the Obama and the Dems haven't been all that interested in passing budgets.

That's why I talk about spending.

> but if we cherry pick from the peak of the housing bubble, my side looks great! Just don't look at the following year".

You've repeatedly claimed that there will be a huge difference in spending after this year because the stimulus will be over. That makes a comparision with pre-recession reasonable.
You can add a variety of two factor authentication options to lastpass (phys OTP, yubikey).

You can also allow/disallow "offline" access to your lastpass account when using these two factor options (force second factor at all times or allow single factor if offline).
I really hope they do a good job of this, and find a way to draw from the Chrome Web Store too.
UK riots  Rioting leads to Cameron call for social media clampdown
It's pretty amazing that there's only one iPhone and iPad at a time. Sure, there's updated versions, but there's only one size and form that Apple promotes at any time. They don't do this with their desktops and laptops or even iPods. I can't think of any other leading device with such a "take it or leave it" mentality that a large share of people conform to.
Well, Superuser, not Stack Overflow.

Go to about:config and set browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.resume_from_c...
And why couldn't this just be done in OpenVPN??? All that would be needed is the steno part...
I agree that the Loop can be convenient at times. But I still contend it's bad architecture--just as many seemingly convenient programming practices are.

The loop functions operate on (global) variables that are not explicitly passed into them. Therefore, without consulting their source, one cannot know what data they're touching. It's not obvious how and when these global variables get set and modified (which is one of the classic reasons global variables are considered Evil). Presumably, the variable are are set by the_loop(), but the opacity here is bad style.

On top of that, the fact that you must have these globals set to use the Loop's formatting functions makes it much less practical to use them in novel ways--i.e. in contexts other than the Loop. Sure, if you want that same data somewhere other than the Loop, there are other functions you can use. This is the typical reply I've heard in defense of the Loop. But that's a fairly poor defense: It's admitting that the API is so wonky, the WP devs had to create a bevy of functions that all do roughly the same thing to patch over each other's weaknesses. Why should there be a different way to get some post data in the main content area versus anywhere else?

BTW, I'm not just nit-picking Wordpress about the Loop. I'm talking about it because it's a well-known and very illustrative example of what I perceive to be a broader pattern of poor architecture throughout Wordpress.
I love how Google has really taken time to address the problem number 1 with Facebook games : they are spam machines! Games in Google+ will feel more like real games (pc, mobile or console games) as in if I feel like playing a game and I see my friend also plays that game, then we can share scores and stuff. But when I'm not feeling for games, then games don't invade my news feed. What would be the point anyway in knowing my friend had a high score in a game I wouldn't play? It's only spam.

Clicking on that "Game" tab on Google+ will be just like opening Steam and seeing all your friends' activity and going "Cool, which game do I play now? Is there anyone online right now?" and I love that!
Re-Vinyl CEO raps to investors at Dreamit Ventures' Demo Day
Erm, that last is this very item - so when you wrote that it had one comment, and now has at least two.
Hmm, why aren't they joining forces with identi.ca and pushing an already existing service (with a small but existing user base)? There would have been so much room for improvement, instead, they create YATC (yet another twitter clone) from scratch, without any backup from an existing community …

I really don't think that they can compete with twitter this way. Let's see how this will evolve.
Even better: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
Would people like a co-founders meetup that evening? I'm sure everyone's creative juices will be in full swing by the evening.
Addressing the Latest Facebook Privacy Issue
Interesting. I'd hate to lose that file/db. I guess I could keep it in my dropbox...
Not only that, you're not slumming it in Haifa-- it's a beautiful city with a great beach, restaurants, and culture of its own. I met my wife in Haifa; one night we walked around Mt. Carmel and Baha'i Gardens (one of the most beautiful gardens I've visited). Wonderful place to live.
Facebook's Rapid Update Cycle
Compressing Transparent PNGs for the Web
When To Use SproutCore, and When Not To
WordPress timthumb.php vulnerability being used in the wild
Careful! This is only using `Math.random` and does not attempt to use `window.crypto.random` (though most browsers do not support it yet: http://jsfiddle.net/alanhogan/trUYu/) or anything that would attempt to bring real entropy into the process.

I don’t mean to fault the creator of this page, but at the same time, I would not trust this generator for important passwords, simply because you cannot know if others are getting the same 'random' results as you are.

More info on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5651789/is-math-random-cr...

PDF on the topic: http://www.trusteer.com/sites/default/files/Temporary_User_T...

> In the Javascript engines of IE (Trident), Firefox (Gecko), Safari (WebKit) and
Chrome (V8), the output of Math.random() can be used to reconstruct the
random seed, and thus provide both this seed and the current “JS mileage” (i.e.
the number of times Math.random() was invoked).
In 9 years, we'll look back on today with 2020 hindsight.
My Second App Pixel Speed(Game)
Last night I uploaded my new app called Pixel Speed. Pixel Speed is a simple game in which you control a space ship and pick up objects that give you points and the better score you get the faster the ship will get.
Can anyone explain why they might need "additional cushion"? I thought Zynga was wildly profitable.
FCC Plan Would Allow 911 to Accept Texts, Photographs, Videos
Along with JWasm -- http://www.japheth.de/JWasm.html -- and DOSBox, this can make for a lot of fun.