skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I paste from http://del.icio.us/kragen/jpg. I'm as happy to see these guys fail as I am to see Bernie Madoff.

2007-06-03

http://www.flickr.com/groups/jpgmag/discuss/7215760022357183...

Clarifications in The Unofficial JPG Magazine Group on Flickr, thread started by Paul Cloutier 2007-05-17

730 words from Paul Cloutier about what happened with the JPG blowup. Still doesn't explain why the first 6 issues are still missing from the issues page, why the official 8020 blog is still full of lies, etc.

tagged: paul-cloutier fraud jpg

2007-05-19

http://www.flickr.com/groups/jpgmag/discuss/7215760022221027...

"context is everything", a discussion thread in The Unofficial JPG Magazine Group, started 2007-05-16

1200 words from Alana, the wife of Paul Cloutier, adding no new information to the scandal over Paul deleting the old JPG issues and rewriting history, but calling Derek Powazek a liar. Derek responds in 650 more words.

tagged fraud paul-cloutier 8020 jpg

2007-05-18

http://www.8020publishing.com/blog/2007/05/dereks_departur.h...

Derek's Departure, from Paul Cloutier, via 8020 Publishing Blog

200 words subtly announcing his decision to back off on rewriting JPG Magazine's history, without acknowledging that it was his dishonesty that led to Derek's departure or providing an alternate explanation.

tagged decentralization-stories 8020 fraud paul-cloutier jpg

http://powazek.com/posts/534

The Real Story of JPG Magazine, from Derek Powazek, 2007-05-14

1500 words on JPG Magazine/8020/Paul Cloutier's new campaign of lying and rewriting history. "People are too smart and well-connected to believe a lie anymore." JPG published nice photos from Flickr etc. on paper.

tagged decentralization-stories communication 8020 fraud paul-cloutier jpg
Does this apply with the cell phone handset market? A market that has been trained, from the beginning, based on differentiation of both crappy hardware and crappy software options AND on the lack of true portability of data and apps? It becomes easier to test out new hardware without having to test out new software and lose all your data (contacts, content, apps) at the same time. People seem to instantly get "If someone doesn't like the address book on an Android phone, there's at least the capability to replace it with something else that someone else wrote" (I think people see the value in this because the address book functionality on handsets is, in general, REALLY crappy) -- this feature has not existed, short of potentially second class Java apps that are difficult to acquire and install, on any other handset previously.

The variations and options of Android will appeal to people who did not previously consider themselves to be members of the smart phone demographic. Android has the potential to put a smart phone in the hands of these people. And this market is, ultimately, larger than the potential iPhone market, what with more hardware and service vendors.
If I told someone that in real life and they replied by asking, "Is at least one a boy?", I would probably back away very, very slowly.

The main point is that given the way Atwood asked the question the correct answer is 50% which wasn't the answer he intended to discuss and indicates he himself didn't fully understand the subject he was writing about. It wouldn't be the first time either.
you'll die of infectious disease. I'm almost 100% sure of this.
rp, in theory, that makes sense. But I think there's a category error possibly at work. Hung out with many average (read: normal) college kids lately? :)
Not a download service. Downloading pirates will continue to pirate. Uhgh.

Though its streaming service is definitely a way to win over pirates who only want to stream.
knowing some modern first aid would probably be your most valuable asset. you might be able to position yourself as doctor to some powerful noble.
read Lest Darkness Fall for a MUCH more interesting account.
Serv O' Beer
How Detroit works.
I am starting a project that is pinned to present information that is based on the opposite philosophy: The goal isn't to properly summarize data to appeal to students, but to offer as much details as possible and let the 'consumer' of information to choose how they navigate it.

There are some questions that are representative of a science that can be presented in such a fashion and properly presenting details can be the closing of the gap between "getting it" and "not getting it."

This is both content and content presentation and I'm still chewing over the details. This is mostly based on how some people I've spoken to and myself learn and is inspired by writings/philosophy of data presentation from Tufte.

If anyone is interested in joining the effort or hearing me out, contact me. I feel fairly strongly on the topic.
What the Kids Are Collecting These Days - NYT
With any sane storage subsystem you can un-mirror and re-silver hot. Lots of people used to back up Oracle like this (using a 3 way mirror), so you'd only be in hotbackup mode for a minute. This was before RMAN.
If you regularly refresh your dev/qa enviroment from production backups, you get the verification "for free".
It's not so much a matter of password exposure for people who share passwords with other sites (that is their own fault), it's having to trust all these sites you put your password into to keep it secure (you may claim you're not storing it, but how can I verify that). The risk of your twitter password getting out is impersonation and taking control of your twitter account, with no way to recover it. Remote keys have problems too, but the idea behind remote keys is that you enable third party access to the core functionality but the authentication and control of the account itself is out of reach of the third party.
Are these the 20% we lost with Python 3?
Stanford owns the patent for PageRank. Seems to have worked out well for Larry and Sergey.
Cars behave exactly the same. Gears all work the same, steering wheel, open the engine and you'll know what were belongs pretty easily.

If you can drive one car, you can go into another and you just need to locate things and then you can drive it. Without reading a manual. Don't confuse looks with usage.

If you cannot recognize that basic usability fact, then I don't think I'll be able to convince you of any of the other things I'm saying.
There is nothing that they do so bad. The issue is that there's nothing that they do that's so compelling.

Today, you can get a VPS from Slicehost, Linode, Amazon, or a number of other providers. A few years ago, Slicehost was just starting up and there was a waiting list of months sometimes, Amazon's EC2 had no persistent storage, Linode was using User Mode Linux which is terribly slow. . . Joyent was fast, had lots of bandwidth, SAN storage, offered 16 and 32GB RAM servers, were the host of next big thing Twitter, and were the official host of Ruby on Rails.

Today, Slicehost is a division of Rackspace and SAN storage will probably be available soon. There is no waiting list or prepayment for Slicehost anymore and you can grab a 15.5GB server. Slicehost is under half the price of Joyent except for transfer costs (Joyent includes 10TB with each plan - whether that's like Dreamhost's "unlimited" bandwidth is yet to be seen). Today, EC2 is no longer beta, comes in various sizes (medium, large, XL) and has persistent storage. And all three (Linode, Slicehost and EC2) all offer instant activation. With Joyent, it's a human-run system.

That probably one of Joyent's biggest failings. While Slicehost automates all of its build process so that you can be up in a couple minutes, Joyent requires a tech person. More than that, they tied themselves to OpenSolaris and Sun and there hasn't been as much activity there. Plus, they're telling everyone to use Solaris' Blastware packaging system which is just bad and most people would rather have their own Linux flavor (as their competitors allow).

Now for Joyent's advantages:

-Zones offer fast disk access compared to Xen. This probably makes it more suitable than Slicehost or Linode for a really high-end database server, but it probably wouldn't beat EC2's EBS which is just really fast.

-SAN storage. Joyent can offer you (virtually) as much storage as you need. EC2 can as well, but Slicehost and Linode can't.

Joyent used to be where it was at. Linode, Slicehost, and EC2 have caught up and in some ways surpassed it. Combined with a lack of polish on the Joyent backend (surprising since they spend a ton on their frontend polish) and it just doesn't look great. Don't worry too much. It's not as if it's terrible or anything. It will serve you, but you probably could have gotten something cheaper somewhere else. Joyent needs to rework some of its infrastructure to remain competitive with a Rackspace owned Slicehost, a non-beta EC2, and a Xen-powered Linode that is constantly increasing CPU, bandwidth, RAM, and disk to its users.

Bottom line: Joyent offered a scalable storage, CPU, and RAM architecture back when Slicehost, EC2, and Linode didn't. So, if you thought you were going to be the next big thing and need a few 8GB servers, Joyent was the only game in town. They aren't any longer and don't seem to be taking steps to ensure they aren't history as others improve.
The Reference Frame: Myths about thermodynamics and gravity
Mini, Micro Funds for App Developers
summary: some blog/site hosting shut down on short notice (one month) and a lot of users (especially not tech savvy) got hosed because they did't understand or couldn't react in time. "Digital eviction" should have rules in place to balance interests of "landlords" and "tenants".
The author apparently doesn't understand where the confusion in the original question (or variations) comes from.

One way of phrasing it is asking,

"If you have an unrelated man and woman and they both have two children (one of which is a boy), where the oldest son of the man is a boy - what are the odds that they both have two boys?"

(There are any number of variations on this - what are the odds of the man having two boys? what are the odds of the woman having two boys what are the odds of the man but not the woman having two boys .. all the same problem, but stated differently).

This 'loads' the question by implying (superficially incorrect) that there might be a difference between the chances of a man and a woman having two boys.

Next up is a bit of probability theory. In the case of the woman, no order is stated, so the chances of her two children have no connection - the events are unrelated. The man, however, has as a first child a boy (which eliminates the possibility of this being a girl).

This is another variation on the Monty Hall problem,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem

Read up on some historical background on this here,
http://www.marilynvossavant.com/articles/gameshow.html

And as for the overall birthrate of men vs women or the possibilities of having twins/triplets/etc (and their male/female ratio) ... well, that's really out of the scope of a fairly trivial question statement such as this.

[edit for non-trivial detail]
Not the "same" 20%, no: the same optimization could be applied to Python 2.x, presumably yielding a comparable relative speedup.
Papers submitted to W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking
In a year I think I installed just two desktop applications:
Spotify and DropBox. So I guess desktop is not dead yet :)

I am using Spotify for 3 months now and think it is great service and fast one. I don't remember any buffering issues and I consider myself a heavy user: using it both at work and at home (now).

Some of the artists are not available though. And at least 20% of my selected tracks disappeared after 2 weeks usage, think some licensing issues got involved.

Waiting for Windows Mobile or Symbian client and I am into the buying a new phone market :)
Avoiding Silos: “link” as a first-class object
Twitter and the Password Anti-Pattern
And one thing I hate about your blog is I couldn't view the beautiful rocket launchpad bground in one page - so I had to command(minus) multiple times to achieve almost 90% success :-)
Subversion Hooks Best Practices - Post Commit
Colleges and universities obtained fewer than 250 patents a year before 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research.

I'm torn about when this should be considered a good thing.
Next step: get an awesome accountant and start using that money to purchase anything and everything you could possibly write off. All that excess revenue will get raped by taxes.
I saw this technique, namely using gcc's labels-as-values extension to efficiently implement threaded code, in gForth. The developers of gForth originally chose gcc back in 1992 because it had such a neat feature that allowed to implement threaded code efficiently. Unfortunately for gForth, somewhere along the way gcc developers changed something and gForth took massive perfomance hit (2 or 3 times slowdown) gForth developers tried to negotiate with gcc team, but they didn't seem to be interested to do additional work seemingly needed only for one application (gForth). The gForth developers couldn't afford to fork gcc either (gcc is too big; too much work)

I guess the moral of the story should be: beware of such speedups that come from nonstandard technology you cannot control.

The whole story is from my memory, as I cannot find the source right now.
The iPhone craze right now reminds me a lot of the rush in summer 2007 onto the facebook platform. After the initial success of the FB apps, didn't a lot of VCs also start up funds for facebook apps.

Of course, there are differences since for iphone apps, an app sold is a few dollars for the dev.

Look at where facebook apps are at now today. Do you think that the deluge of apps for the iphone will cause apple to implement similar system as facebook to control the quality of apps that goes into the store?
I would pay $9.99 just to use this instead of iTunes. The interface is brilliantly well thought out and amazingly fast! Now if only I could take this to my car...

Edit: Looking at their jobs section, it appears that a Symbian version is in the works.
yf, I'd glad you're interested. I skipped a few details in my OP thinking no one would be interested, yet here you are.

The state standardized tests are pretty long, but not long enough to make all your tests from. Teachers have to give tests every few weeks (partly because students will forget things after too long, but also because the administration demands assessments, assessments, and more assessments). So what happens is, some chapter tests are standardized. The students do ok on these, since they've been prepped over and over for them. However, teachers need to make their own tests too, of course, and these were the ones I was originally referring to (where, if you require critical thinking, too many students fail).

> Perhaps the current standardized tests are a poor measure of performance.

They are a good measure of how well students perform on standardized tests.

> I can't see any reason why standardized tests would be worse than non-standardized ones.

Good teachers know how to ask good questions. Sometimes those questions change depending upon the students, any extra/different material covered in class, and so on. Regardless, good teachers can ask students to perform critical thinking and can tell if the student can really do it or not -- but it takes time. Administrators want lots of assessments. So many that good teachers will drown under all the grading if they are making students do real critical thinking and providing detailed assessments of it all.

> Additionally, teachers do not have the ability to "race to the bottom".

The forces in place now are resulting in bad patterns. Patterns like good teachers leaving, and the only ones staying are the ones willing to play the game and do all the assessments. "Race to the bottom" means teachers becoming robots who

* cover the required material ("electricity is movement of electrons!"),

* assign homework on it ("what is electricity?"),

* quiz on it ("is electricity, a. movement of protons, b. movement of neutrons, c..."),

* review it ("does everyone remember what electricity is?")

* test on it ("what is electricity? a. movement of electrons b. ..."),

then move on to the next topic. That's what standardized testing gets you and why it's a race to the bottom: find teachers who can shovel the most of that to the most students in the shortest amount of time and get the highest scores.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/question-is-wrong.h...
Yes! Here is more agreement:

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/question-is-wrong.h...

(and also my own comment from earlier:)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416576
Interesting post, I wish you'd elaborate a little bit more about what your iphone app does. From your current description, it sounds like a glorified color-picker.

And yes, I've been working on some interesting stuff which (coincidentally) also deals with image processing. I will show once I'm done with it.
Android on netbooks is big money for Google
"The second feature of the Danish system is that mortgage-holders can also buy the bonds in the market and use them to redeem their mortgages. This is useful if a rise in interest rates (or a fall in house prices) causes mortgage-backed bonds to trade at a discount. Redeeming their bonds allows homeowners to reduce the amount they owe. In America, for instance, mortgage-backed securities have fallen far below their fundamental value in thinly traded markets, partly because the people who would benefit most from buying them have no mechanism to do so."

Cool. A way for the mortgage-holder to hedge a bit.
Yes, the question must be very carefully worded (which is kind of my point, if I have one).

In order to get the "unintuitive" outcome, there must be some element of selection (much like the Monty Hall problem has). In your formulation of the question, the GG possibility has already been eliminated because the mathematician answers "yes".
Now for My Next Trick, I'll Turn Brand into Cash
The death of Lively and some lessons about complexity
Gerald - A Python Schema Comparison Tool
I am not surprised. In fact the availability of offline version is the main reason my clients are considering balsamiq. Anything online is inevitably slow on corporate Internet and unavailable in some meeting rooms, airports or anywhere on the go. Online apps are fine for time wasting, but when you have work to do and a paycheck to earn, most people prefer to have their tools available 24/7.
In which new paradigms are explored, clojure is reached, and impressions are still cursory
This is such a cool story to watch unfold.

One concern I have is there might be too many* SKU's: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/pricesheet

While offering a variety of prices is great, I'm curious if some users don't become overwhelmed.
If Jeff Atwood argument would be right, couldn't it than be applied to roulette as well?

If you play two games for example, there are 4 different orders of black/red possible (neglecting 0/00):

b,b

b,r

r,b

r,r

Each has the same possibility of 1/4. If you place 1$ in the first round on black, your chance to win is 1/2. If it is black (or red), only 3 of the original 4 option are left and two will lead to red...
Oh, I think the complaint was that normally middle-click opens things in a new tab (which it does, and has since Mosaic 1.0, except that before we had tabs they were windows) but that doesn't work with Picasa or whatever, because they're JavaScript links.
It's true, as a commenter on this article mentioned, that successive children are (more-or-less) independent events, but that doesn't mean what that commenter (or our author) apparently thinks. If you specify that the older child is a girl, then the chances of the younger child being a girl are 1/2. If you don't specify which child is a girl, only that one is, then it's 1/3. This and the Monty Hall problem are just examples of the same limited-information situation.
No, you've reintroduced ordering.
Isn't the probability still 2/3 even in the proposed alternative? The fact that we "arbitrarily announce the gender of one of the children" provides new information for calculating the probability, which is ignored if you assume that the original 50/50 distribution is unchanged by the announcement.

In an extreme example, consider this algorithm, analogous to the one in the article:

1. Choose a random parent that has exactly two children

2. Announce the gender of _both_ children

3. Ask about the odds that the parent has both a boy and a girl

In this situation, it would be ridiculous to say that the odds calculated at step 3 are still 50/50. Because of step 2, it is either certainly true (100%) or not true (0%) that the parent had both a boy and a girl. Granted, on average with repeated trials, half the time the step-3 value will be 100% and the other half 0%. But still, the step 2 information changes the value at step 3.
Water-lensed eyeglasses offer promise of sight for millions
That's just a link to the blurb; here's the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver
With plenty of added effing and jeffing for no apparent reason.
Step back into the time machine and poke the Back to the Future button until your finger bleeds.
That's just a link to a blurb; here's the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable...
Hi Jasber, the link on my post was actually the first time I shared the pricesheet page with the public. I never show it to potential customers, but had to make it for partners and resellers (they really like to make sure they buy the right SKU for their clients). In other words, people get to the version they need via the site, which is hopefully clear enough to navigate (I'm not super-happy with it, but it works ok).
If the FIRST round is black, only two of the four possibilities are left, one of which leads to red.

Similarly, if Atwood's problem stated that the FIRST child is a girl then the probability that the second is a boy is 1/2.

The problem, however, states that one of the children is a girl -- it could be the first or the second. In this case the probability that the other child is a boy is 2/3.
Warning: Someone is phishing on Twitter
You are right about the question ("Announcing the gender of one child does not magically alter the gender of the other child"), but wrong about the statistics, even in your second formulation the probability is 2/3, not 1/2. This problem, the way Jeff has formulated it, has nothing to do with the Monty Hall problem. But still, the end probability is the same : 2/3 (that's the only common point). Tell me if there is a mistake :

The question is : What are the odds that the person has a boy and a girl, if we already know that one of the child is a girl ? (If we agree on the question, then we must agree on the following probabilities).

Possibilities are :

1/ boy / boy

2/ boy / girl

3/ girl / boy

4/ girl / girl

Since one of them is a girl, we must remove possibility number 1. That leaves us with 3 possiblities, and 2 of them have a boy. Probability : 2/3

(edited for correction, we search the probability of having a boy, not a girl :p)
I really appreciate the trouble they went through to make sure even Linux users could benefit but not only posting instructions for wine, but also how to get URI recognition just like you would on Windows or OS X.
Did "hometown" pages end up in the internet archive's "way back machine"? Presumably everyones not completely out of luck if this is the case.