skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read just enough to decide it isn't really worth reading. I love the articles OK Cupid does with hard statistical data backing up their inferences about similar social stuff. This does not strike me as of that ilk.

I am disappointed. I was recently thinking about how people are judged based on looks (and blogged about it) so was hoping for/looking forward to something meatier.
Black Hole Caught in Act of Swallowing Star
Version Numbers: Still Mattering
This is a very similar resource but using Google Webfonts:

http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

One of my favorite typography sites:
http://fontsinuse.com/
They're presenting averages, which should always be accompanied by the standard deviations, otherwise they're close to meaningless. I actually think box plots would be better here.
The root problem is that we still don't know how to disagree when two sides look at the same set of data and believe two different things. We allow ourselves to descend into tribalism and assume the worst of each other.

If you look at the language Tom objects to the most, it's language Isaac uses that promotes this tribal attitude that the other side doesn't have your best interests at heart, and questions their motives.

We're just terrible at this, and I'm not sure any human society has ever really cracked it.
Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching
Jim Gaffigan | MR. UNIVERSE
Jim Gaffigan uses same model as Louis C.K.
Being able to speed up the lectures is a huge nice-to-have.
Awesome analysis, though I agree they results look like error bars.

I know you mention a random sample of 1000 images, but what were your overall metrics? Did you have a good data set across the board (ie as many Hispanic females as Caucasian males)? What kind of advertising did you do as well?

Reason I ask is I've been working on trying build a face-morpher based on different criteria (make you look 80, fat, African) and these are some of the questions I've got bouncing in my head about how to collect the data.
> Assuming that a competitive economy is a good thing, ofcourse.

Yes, indeed assuming that. Good day.
I'm the Guy Who Made Snack Bags So Impossible to Open
Thetabyte, we'd love to have you join our group of volunteers! Please email me either at username@ g mail.com or coderdojonyc@ g m ail.com
When you don't start your y-axis at 0, you skew the interpretation of your data. At best, this is a significant mistake, and at worst, this is intentionally misleading.

Take this graph:

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

It looks like women are rated as more than twice as smart as men. Huge difference.

Except until you run the numbers. Women are rated about 4.3% "smarter" than men. Not twice as smart, like the graph implies. Not 20% smarter. Not even 5%.

Please, pay attention to your graphs. They're great tools, but they can mislead as much as they can help elucidate.
Good reading, I agree with the theory that our mind power is limitless.
You should really consider adding a license to your code if it bothers you, not that it will stop someone from giving you attribution or anything, but it can't hurt.
Why You Must Use Online Video For Your Small Business Marketing
I don't understand. So, you type in your password, and this input is sent (securely?) to their server, where it is hashed, and this hash is checked against their stored hash. But they can also "capture" this password prior to it being hashed? But then Facebook could do a few string manipulation operations, and then securely delete the un-hashed password from memory. Am I understanding this correctly?
Thanks guys +1
It's definitely in :)

Grab a Canary build, start playing with it right now.
If it's like android, it might be much closer to upstream now (your article is from 2009).
>As far as Coursera, it didn't exist in Fall. It was created in response to Stanford lawyers and bureaucrats going apeshit and shutting the venture down once they saw what a threat it was since the classes were as good as what they were charging for.

This is confused. Coursera didn't announce it's presence until very recently. It's existed as a stealth-mode startup for a while.
Namecheap nears 3 million regs - runs contest
Open a $1,000,000 certificate of deposit, get a car in lieu of interest
funny, because i got to a page showing the diff, and i thought i linked to the rendered page.

anyway, my apologies, no disrespect, have a nice day.
Exactly - there is a LOT of TI money to renovate for projects such as these.
With a decent language that allows trailing commas (eg. everything other than JS or SQL), it would never have been a problem in the first place.
Given hash(password), how do they get hash(password-inverted)? That requires going from hash(password) -> password -> password-inverted -> hash(password-inverted), right?

I think that first step (un-hashing) is impossible for a cryptographically secure hashing algorithm.

Edit: archivator explained it me :)
I'd say half the possible combinations are gone, minus one. I don't think that's too bad.

And I agree it's a great UX enhancement. I've been frustrated many times entering usernames and passwords with my phone defaulting to capitalising the first letter.

Now if only they'd strip # from the end of posts again (on UK keyboards at least it's right next to the return key, so many posts end up looking like this#
"Shouldn't" and "doesn't" are different concepts though. Just as you can't reasonably "force" EA to continue operating a service forever, you can't go back in time to make them architect it properly either.

This is inevitable in the modern world. We want to allow for people to pay for software. We want software to engage with the broader world. Having those two things at once inevitably leads to a situation where software breaks because its "managers" don't want to maintain that engagement anymore.

So pick one of those two and throw it out: make all services pay-for-play instead of one-time-fee. Or disallow non-standalone apps. (Or I guess a third option would be to force the customer and app vendor to sign a contract with a service level agreement). None of those seem workable to me.
And worse than that, the y-axis range shifts. For example, the range on the Fat vs. Normal chart is much smaller than the surrounding charts, giving the illusion that the spread is much larger than it is. (site is down or I'd link).
Having a group scared of your app is the mark of disruption!

I hear what you're saying about avoiding complicated subject matter - that's an interesting effect I hadn't considered.

That being said: I was the victim of several "bad" profs in university. Thing is I don't think they were "bad" - I just don't think they knew that they weren't "good" and even if they had, wouldn't have had any idea how move from bad to good.

I see this app as one part of a larger equation around designing systems that produce quality education. A complete suite would include tools for professors, administration, and students.
What's harder, finding an extra trailing comma, or finding a missing semi-colon in a JavaScript file that contains no semi-colons?
Paul Miller's First Day Offline
Most insecure passwords don't use mixed case anyhow (dictionary lower-case words), so I fail to see how this is making them much less secure.

In fact in terms of relative impact, this has a much greater impact on "secure" passwords (in this case, I mean ones that are a random jumbled set of mixed case letters and numbers). That's only really because it significantly reduces the range of the first character.
Sell stuff on Pinterest.
This newest change won't affect me too much because I wrote a Google Chrome extension to keep my YouTube and regular Google accounts separate. However, as the author suggests, content creators will not be so lucky.

Please try my extension if you're interested -

http://kwerty.com/YouTube-User-Guard/
High school coder gets $3M for his gradebook software, 10 years later
Coral Cache to the rescue

http://judg.me.nyud.net/blog/judgment-day/
Confusion again, but hopefully for the better.

So we've gone from Hotmail, to MSN Hotmail, to Windows Live Mail, to Windows Live Hotmail. Where now? Windows Hotmail?
Rethinking Online Journalism or: Why Branch Matters
Seems like a good design would be to have seals that are extra-weak to shear forces while being strong for all the other kinds.
"thousands of photos have been uploaded and judged by users since."

Who are the users that are judging? What is the breakdown of those users (age,sex,location,education etc.)? What can possibly be inferred from this without knowing that info?
Some bonus thoughts in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921258

I like the idea of the code to authenticate students.
I guess you'd have to watch out for selection effects in all of this too... an interesting challenge!
Are you actually going to study for Finals?
Do a DMCA take down. http://www.dmca.com/Takedowns.aspx

It works like a charm.
At 4:10 in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqBbr7Ewsw you can see a VFFS machine in action.

(I find 'how its made' to be musak for nerds but that is a different post :-)
I am happy to hear about new fonts; this seems overdue. Now, I'd really like Google Docs to allow setting a document's language. Currently, if you want spell-check in a foreign language, you have to change the language in your account settings, which then changes the UI language too. I want english language UI, with foreign language support in the document.
I think that building sites and applications with tools along the lines of Weebly is going to become fairly mainstream even for people who call themselves software developers.

My question about Weebly: how do I create my own widgets? I saw something on a page at developers.weebly.com that said something about emailing someone, I think his name is Chris?

I am working on my own system based on Node.js/HTML5 which will be totally open and make it easy for developers to create and publish their own widgets/plugins right in the interface with their github accounts. I am extremely early on but I am hoping by the 7th I can have a very basic demo ready. The code such as it is is at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog .. on the remote chance that anyone has any thoughts related to my project.
I'll take a look at this, thanks for the link.
Evidently, Pinterest took them down in 5 hours. http://www.facebook.com/groups/pinterestapi/ - read thread near the top
Scalado: Capture the perfect group portrait
Who gets to play the role of expert? Presumably the "leaders in this language community" who "have given [everyone] lies and fear", according to Isaac's referenced blog post.

In the absence of a true quantitative engineering method, there is a middle ground other than personal choice: common anecdotes. Presumably, those shameful leaders have heard enough stories about the issue to make a reasonable recommendation, sort of like advising against shipping server software with an open default security strategy even though I don't have any peer-reviewed studies saying such is unwise.
Beauty tips for hackers
Ya, I'm trying to decide if it's bothering me or not to be honest. Kind of annoying they even have my good analytics code still in there o_O
Some advice for Google
The App Store app is also aggravatingly slow, just like every other heavily-webview'ed app (Facebook, and now LinkedIn I guess).

Note that desktop apps that try to do this fare little better - iTunes is widely hated by its own users for being bloated and slow, particularly the store component, which is entirely webviews.

In the mobile space right now, these webview'ed apps seem to be heavily sacrificing user experience for developer experience, which is something I cannot agree with.
Your graphs appear to be very misleading. There is little to be learned from the data. Learn some Data analysis and learn how to not provide bias via graphs.
You could go to the University of San Francisco - they have an Entrepreneurship program (essentially a BA with startup-related requirements). The great thing is that you'll be a short bus ride from a ton of startup stuff if you're willing to seek it out. That's why I chose here and don't regret it at all.
One type of seal I see has a nick in the side.

It's still sealed, but the nick gives you something to leverage, so you can tear the packet open. Perhaps this isn't as common in the US?
I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on message boards. That said:

These aren't really privacy law exemptions so much as they are clarifications. It is very unlikely that anyone would prevail in a suit against an ISP who shared their private information incident to an actual attack on their network under the current privacy laws in the US. The ECPA explicitly carves out exceptions for this kind of sharing already. CISPA does almost nothing but modernize the language.

In fact, because ECPA carves out exemptions to privacy for any action that can be reasonably construed as "protecting the service", CISPA may narrow the current exemptions. If your ISP tomorrow said "sign this contract that covenants that you won't use BitTorrent", the ECPA probably allows them to capture, inspect, and share your personal information incident to investigating you pirating software. CISPA explicitly does not allow that --- it literally contains language saying that consumer contract terms are out of the scope of CISPA.

Again, bracket this whole thing (as always, please) with an implied "from a plain reading, to a layperson". A lawyer or legislative professional might catch something sinister here that I've missed. I do not find EFF's "catches" here particularly convincing. Others clearly do.
The most interesting part here is that they seem to embrace XMPP for their MSN service!
0x0 is saying that when you receive the password you can do 3 checks. No need to invert the hash function there.

Also, inverting a hash function is impossible (the size of the range is less than the size of the domain). Finding a collision, on the other hand, is not.
As far as I know, it's an avoidance for a WebKit bug wherein elements' pixel positions and sizes are simply wrong at non-default zoom levels; see https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60318 and all related.
They phrased that poorly, but the graphs make it pretty clear. Every picture was rated for "looks intelligent" and "looks extroverted". The two are orthogonal in presentation to the voter and as presented in the graphs. The blue bars are for the "smartness" ratings and the red bars are for the "extroversion" ratings.
Dah faq? Well send em a nice email saying "if you're going to use my shit, don't use my analytics code".
SpaceX software hangup delays first private launch to space station
Is this on iOS? If so, how does one get to the transactions page?
As much as I liked Stokes's articles in Ars, I think programmers should probably skip Inside the Machine and go straight to Hennessy and Patterson. Inside the Machine is loaded with analogies that I find annoyingly distracting; I'd rather learn how a computer actually works than learn an analogy about how it works.
Apple can't "force" EA to architect it properly, but they can refund everyone who purchased the game and/or punish EA in any way they see fit.
It's entirely anonymous - I know nothing about the users who are uploading the photos (apart from the email addresses they use when uploading a photo), and nothing about users who judge the photos.

The entire premise of the site is for the user to be judged by strangers. Why would age/sex/location/education of the person doing the judging matter?
The biggest change occurred when Skype sold to a US corporation. That ship has sailed. P2P or not, Skype became a US company when it sold to MS. Even before that, you never had any guarantees about where/who your calls were routed to/through.

"So you should now assume that ALL your skype calls are being recorded and monitored and anything of interest to the US authorities is now available to them ?"

Unless the network is secured by you end-to-end (e.g., encrypted tunnel and you're the private key holder), you should assume that your call can be intercepted and recorded. In the context of Skype, that was never true, so nothing has changed.

So yes, there have been significant changes, but all the concerns you outlines are fringe issues at best. Skype was never any kind of secure communications system where you were safe from persecution by overreaching governments.
> The claim appears to be that they are intercepting queries to 3rd-party DNS servers, yes.

[my head explodes]
This is just begging to be hacked: bankofamerica can be mispelled a number of ways, and I doubt BoA has covered them all.
I think they drove too far into the details considering their sample size.

It is an interesting study so I hope they update the post once they have been in business longer.
This article says that businesses created in the past 5 years have been a decreasing percentage of the total number of businesses. The two you linked to say that absolute business creation rates are stable-ish and/or growing a bit.

Therefore, I suggest that one or both of the following are happening:

- The total number of businesses has been growing, while the number of new businesses remained stable.

- New businesses are failing (or being acquired?) more quickly, leading to fewer new businesses, despite roughly the same new-business creation rate.
I go home for lunch. So I wash my dishes at home because that's where I use them.
> a statement that implies in itself that it isn't the end-all-be-all definitive rule, gets turned into some sort of hard rule

I didn't say that. I just stated it was a shitty emotional story and it didn't find it intellectually interesting at all. Also stated as others it brought up the religious flame war. The comment doesn't say the story doesn't fit HN rules.

You are the one intentionally misinterpreting other people's comments. You are the one diverting the point of this thread to other cases to back your point.
> half the possible combinations are gone, minus one

So, slightly more than one bit of entropy lost?
So I've got a question for ya. At what point do you know your MVP is actually a MVP? Part of the issue with focus, as I see it, is what if you focus on the wrong thing. Do you have metrics in mind to know when to bail or pivot? A stop or limit (I forget which is which) point.

So I'm curious about what you are planning to watch for? What signs will tell you to focus on something else?
CloudFlare promotes their service as a highly redundant CDN but the truth is that this isn't the first outage and they fail at very simple things.

I was using them until one day, they had routing problems with their DNS servers to some parts of the world (about 20% IIRC). This shouldn't be a issue except because all the name servers they provide were routing to the same network, making all my services unavailable for more than one hour. Yes, they have anycast and all that cool things, but if they fail providing real redundancy for DNS, I can't be their customer anymore.
Actually JS does allow trailing commas. Read the spec.

It is an IE bug that causes it to break. One of the many ways they do not follow the spec.
Going public creates a liquid market in the company's shares, which allows the owners to convert equity to cash. This ability is especially prized by investors, but founders and employees-with-options also benefit. (It's hard to buy a house with stock.)
It is, though it doesn't always work, and it's easy to tear a sub-optimal opening.
I'm going through the Coursera machine learning class right now and I have to say that the professor glosses over several details and often makes comments like "if you're not familiar with calculus..." and "if you're not familiar with statistics..." which caught me off guard at first. I really doubt that actual Stanford students enrolled in a machine learning course would be lost on the incredibly basic operations (e.g., taking the partial derivative of a polynomial function) he is using.

Also, there has been no acknowledgement of how contrived the exercises are. For instance: exercise one gives a data set of a the profitability of a company's existing stores versus the population size of the city in which the store is located (in units of 10,000 dollars and people, respectively). The range of the data is 5-23 (population), with most of it concentrated below 10. We fit a straight line to the data using least squares, then use that line to predict the profitability of two new locations--in cities of populations 35 and 75. I understand that this is an intro course, but there is not a word about how ridiculous this is.

I don't mean to be overly negative. I am enjoying the course, but I am surprised a bit by how basic it is. Let me say that I do like the approach of the course to ML, which is to formulate a parameterized cost function and then minimize it by some general method, rather than the typical statistics course approach which is to solve ordinary least squares directly, which gives an "exact solution" (given the data) but does not generalize to more general models.

I know this is foundational material and overall, I am impressed by the approach of the course, but I would expect more comments on the weakness of the naïve methods we are employing at this early stage and how they will eventually be improved. I find it very helpful when professors at least reference more advanced methods or provide references for further reading by the interested student. Admittedly, that is more frequently a feature of graduate courses, but encouraging students to go beyond the material is an important aspect of good teaching. I have watched the videos for several other online courses and I do appreciate the fact that Coursera is allowing me to hand in assignments for grading, which vastly increases by engagement with the material. This, in fact, is the most valuable resource offered by the program. The lectures themselves are fine--if a bit dry--but a good book or a set of well-prepared notes (not slides) would probably suffice just as well if accompanied by the assignment grader.

All in all, this is great. The more people who know about machine learning (and have access to higher education in general), the better.
True, and I was having a tough time deciding which option to take (whether to start the y-axis at 0, or 5). As far as averages are concerned, the differences are in the tenths and hundredths - so starting the y-axis at 0 would have it more difficult to see any differences across the graphs.
In early 2005, before Microsoft announced the Windows Live brand, I was a Principal at Microsoft (and was told to keep the branding information a secret - not even my direct reports (senior dev leads) could be told about it)

At that time, it seemed like a big joke to me (because a lot of senior people seemed very excited about the changes - even though it just amounted to renaming MSN as Windows Live)

I suspect that a new crop of senior leaders at Microsoft are now talking abut how excited they at the latest change.
Facebook's servers get to see your plaintext password for a fraction of a second every time you log in. That's their opportunity.
I misrepresented your argument, and I apologize for it.
I hope I can buy their stock long before Wall Street starts to take them seriously.
Ouch. Of course, that's way better.