skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps these hard-to-predict movies simply have pointy bits sticking out. A rose is great until you get poked, then you irrationally throw it away. Napoleon Dynamite has lots of parts that make people uncomfortable - different parts for different people. Never mind its a great movie - it will get irrationally rated by a great many folks.
So come up with a Beta for a movie, or cluster the folks that like it anyway, or try to detect what kind of phobias a person has - these movies could be great litmus tests for homophobia or whatever!
Best Infant Snowsuit
No mention of Helvetimail (http://www.josefrichter.com/helvetimail/) yet?
Google's free sat-nav system shaking up the sat-nav market.
If you use a 512-bit RSA modulus then you are asking for it to be factored. I am in the process of factorizing the 512-bit RSA modulus of a very famous company and will disclose it (responsibly) once it is done. Factorizing keys of that size is doable on high-end consumer hardware with a little patience.
Now recognize people! Or cars, or engine problems, or birds...Rats! I missed the yc deadline by 1 day!
Who's buying the Mac Pro?
If California is a bellwether, we should be the first out of this too.

Besides, seems like the financial health of the state should be irrelevant if the employer is solid. Just do us all a favor and rid of your car before you come here. All major California cities have a halfway decent public transit system if you plan your life (live near transit) around using it.
The original forum thread was entertaining to read after the fact (parts have since been redacted).

"Oh my good lord...

You need to explain how you did this. Now. To somebody.

EDIT: I just confirmed this is what I think it is. This needs to go to ticalc.org. Are you being intentionally cryptic about this and want to stay unknown?"

http://www.unitedti.org/index.php?showtopic=8888

(via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771736)
I just installed it and the largest problem I'm having is with access to search. Hitting '/' no longer focuses the search box and hitting the arrow is cumbersome. Anyone have a workaround aside from enabling the clunky header?
Where are you located, geographically?
Thats an interesting idea. I'd still be surprised though if that didn't correlate with some movies. If someone hates Napoleon Dynamite due to feature X, then they should dislike movies that have X as well. Or, at the least, avoid watching movies with X.

So, if your theory is correct then I see two possibilities:

1) The pointy bits are themselves strange and don't appear i other movies. This goes back to "the movie is strange" again though...

2) People who dislike these traits avoid movies that have them and the algorithms don't take into account what movies people haven't seen (or that taking it into account is very tough since most people haven't seen most movies).

Not sure which is more likely.
Phishers rejoice on the new variants of ebay.com and paypal.com they can now create!
The Internet is 40 years old today (by 'first message sent').
As someone pointed out when this just appeared on Slashdot, if you go to http://ubuntu.com you'll see in big letters "Coming Soon!"

EDIT: Nevermind, the website just changed.
Repost of the original message that started it all -- spread it far and wide:

Gentlemen,
A mathematical morsel for your entertainment and edification.

The number
6,857,599,914,349,403,977,654,744,967,
172,758,179,904,114,264,612,947,326,
127,169,976,133,296,980,951,450,542,
789,808,884,504,301,075,550,786,464,
802,304,019,795,402,754,670,660,318,
614,966,266,413,770,127

is the product of
5,174,413,344,875,007,990,519,123,187,
618,500,139,954,995,264,909,695,897,
020,209,972,309,881,454,541

and
1,325,290,319,363,741,258,636,842,042,
448,323,483,211,759,628,292,406,959,
481,461,131,759,210,884,908,747.
The current low end Mac Pro does kinda suck compared to the iMac. Indeed, I think it sucks compared to the previous Mac Pro, which I own.

I bought the "entry level" (the default entry level - you could do a downgrade to 4 cores for a small saving) Mac Pro almost two years ago - it's an eight core 2.8GHz Xeon. It benches better than the mere quad 2.66GHz Nehalem and was cheaper in 2008 than the current entry level machine! I think I got a bargain ;-)

I can only believe that Apple's in a limbo with the Mac Pro and getting ready to unveil something massive in the next several months. The Mac Pro has pretty much sucked since the latest Nehalem revision compared to what it was.
Worth pointing out that busy beavers have the potential to be alot more than just 'interesting'. If you knew what the busy beaver numbers were for a given number of states, it could be used to solve various unsolved mathematical problems.

For example, Goldbach's conjecture states that every integer greater than 2 is the sum of 2 primes. So far it has been resistant to being proved. But if you could convert it to a computer program with say, 500 states, and you knew the busy beaver number for 500, you could check it by running the program that number of cycles. If you did and the program didn't halt, then it would NEVER halt, and Goldbach's conjecture would be proven true.

Of course, BB(500) would certainly be an unfathomably huge number, so there would be practical problems running a computer program that number of cycles. But if you had sufficient computing power, knowing the busy beaver numbers would be an amazing mathematical tool.
This guy was huge, and he is very well known.
It's fine for working with someone else's doc files. Sometimes you have to bend.
For producing my own work, I'll take LaTeX over Office any day.
As long as my browser still renders them in punycode by default, I suppose I'm okay with that.
Innovation: Ultimate jukebox is next step in net music
Then just set up a UK Limited company. It's perfectly legal. you'll just pay your annual fee to Companies House in the UK, and you'll pay taxes locally. All this through the wonder of European economical integration...
They used to be reasonably legal, too.

Half the stuff from my old chemistry kit in the 80's would be illegal to sell to mass consumers now. Even legal home chemistry labs can result in getting one's door kicked down by people with guns and being charged with making drug manufacture or terrorism.
Amazon PayPhrase
Facebook is really taking over everything. Social media is going to be a HUGE part of the future. It seems already facebook and tweet and part of the majority's vocabulary. Now its crossed generations. My grandma now has a facebook. What is the world coming to? My University http://www.drury.edu/ recently adopted a social media major. You can major in facebook here! crazy. As social media continues to expand like this, its going to become more and more a part of our daily lives.
What could TI's motivation possibly be? How could they lose any business by hackers modifying firmware? Instead, it seems it would be more likely to increase hardware sales.
It looks like the guts of what Matt Constantine put into the Firefox add-on is covered by the userscripts mentioned here:

http://zenhabits.net/2009/09/minimalist-gmail-how-to-get-rid...

I'd guess that the Zen Habits article came first and then the Firefox extension was made for an easy one-click installation.

Edit: I'm having trouble getting those userscripts to run in my Gmail Fluid app. Maybe there's some Greasemonkey-specific stuff going on in there...
"Crushing on"? Never heard that expression before.
"Have a crush on" is more usual.
Example: I offer to meet you at a computer store to help you pick out a good monitor. You, having a crush on me, consider this a 'date', I, not having any romantic feelings for you whatsoever, consider it an act of friendship.

And yes, there are people that think such things constitute a 'date', they usually turn out to be a scary creepy stalker types once you tell them you're not interested.
Yeah, but it's coming out today, and it's going to get like a gazillion upvotes... so somebody wanted to earn the points by being the first to post.

I've been using the beta for a while now, it is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.
It's competing with OSX now (having surpassed Windows long long ago)
It seems the website is in transition. While still coming soon on the homepage, the download page now lists 9.10 as newest version.

http://twitpic.com/ndx0v
One word, expandability. The top-end iMac is pretty much maxed out, whereas the low-end MacPro has plenty of room for expansion and performance upgrades.
If I was in the market for a new high-end development platform, I'd be all over the low-end MacPro and then upgrade it myself. It's definitely cheaper to get memory and HD's from Newegg than Apple. Although I do have to say the 27" iMac is pretty sweet but I doubt I'd have enough desk space for it.
My regex's are cringing already.
Inflationary Depression, not Reflationary Depression, according to the article.

And isn't that what Stagflation is meant to refer to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation

"Stagflation is an economic situation in which inflation and economic stagnation occur simultaneously and remain unchecked for a significant period of time."
Do you consider Los Angeles a major california city?
I was confused at first by the first paragraph since it didn't say the beavers _must_ stop. Once I figured that out the rest made sense.
It highlights the absurdity of the whole thing, really. It seems hard for TI to argue that it's illegal to post a mathematical fact, doesn't it? Especially one that's so concise and straightforward.
Hmm, looks interesting.

A litle bit of legal complexity, but worth investigating.

Thank you.
Tom Cross, a security technology researcher in Atlanta, received a cease-and-desist letter from TI after merely posting about the hackers on his blog, ... [and] took down his link.

Excuse me, taking down a link to a discussion of the key? Does the DMCA really extend that far? If it does, it really sounds like it could be challenged on First Amendment grounds. Otherwise, either this guy has no backbone, or there is more to the story.
> You're twisting an out of context quote to provide a stupid strawman worthy of attacking with your worldview.

I quoted your whole paragraph. The only context that I left out was what you were responding to, which people can easily see above. If there's some context "missing" that changes what you wrote into something that withstands scrutiny, that's because you never wrote it.

However, feel free to provide that missing context now.

Or, maybe you can point out how I'm wrong. You know, provide some evidence supporting "stupid". I'll help. If you're "stupid" as "you're mean, I don't like you, and I'm not going to respond to your arguments", I'll agree.
The system tries to say that 'I'm catering to the needs of _everybody_ by imparting them common knowledge'. But the other way to look at it would be that, the system is trying to produce huge number of people with common skills which isn't anything to be happy about. If the extension of goodwill should not be exclusive to "geniuses", then at least the system should wait till everyone has recognized 'what they want' and let them proceed in the direction of their passion. The industry focussed education system however poses a roadblock in this process. Just as Sir Ken Robinson said - "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" - http://is.gd/4Hby5 I think they do kill creativity and forming geniuses in India.
I'm not sure about the details, but perhaps they're afraid that if the ROM key is broken, people can more easily read out the ROM code, and use it in a cheap clone of the hardware?

There might be a larger monetary value associated with the actual OS code, than with the hardware design itself.

As I said though, I'm not sure about the details here; you'd of course expect the CPU on the calculator to be able to access the ROM code in order to run it, but perhaps it's somehow obfuscated when that happens.
The more fundamental question here: can the DMCA really be used to prevent a person from factoring a number and disclosing the results? This is insanity.
I just asked him and will put reply in this post, but I'm assuming that the difference is that stagnation seems to be zero growth, and depression remains negative.

[update]Here's what he sent me:

Pretty much the same thing.

However, in the 1970's stagflation, there really was a more supply and demand driven component to inflation with extra pressure from wage growth.

In our current situation, I see a huge component of deflation coming from credit and housing, and the inflationary component comes/will come via the currency. Compared to the 1970's this is less messy, in a way. it's very clean. Classid deflation from a burst credit bubble, and then classic currency-based inflation via lost purchasing power.
There's two questions here:

1. Does it work (i.e. trigger standards mode) in all browsers

2. Does it specifically identify content as HTML5 (as opposed to 6) i.e. versioning

For 1, html5 puts versions of Firefox into quirks mode so it's no go. For 2, versioning HTML5, I'm going to take a handy shortcut and assume that if Microsoft supports something it's probably bad for the internet.

There's a comment from Hixie here that touches on both issues:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/07/html5-doctype#comment-4391
Anyone else think that picture resembles a headline from The Onion?
Collection of Research Papers on Twitter and Microblogging
NoSQL Berlin Videos Posted
Smoothest dist upgrade yet ... didn't break any laptop functionality (ThinkPad T500) AFAICT.

Use a mirror! ;)
So what's your point? I don't see how GFW slows the Internet down in any way. Except RST packets bandwidth which is too tiny.
> Cap-and-trade is probably the last chance to fix the economy of the valley, and frankly it's not looking good right now.

One way to distinguish folks who actually care about carbon from folks pushing some other agenda is to bring up nuclear. If nuclear is their top short term priority, they're serious about carbon. If it isn't, they're using carbon to push another agenda.

And no, it doesn't take a long time to get nuclear on-line. What takes a long time is people-imposed constraints that add nothing to safety, efficiency, etc If those constraints are more important than carbon....
is it really a big jump from 9.04? the last few releases havent changed a whole lot in terms of ui polish, which I always thought was really nice until I used osx.

and to be fair to the original poster, the link is available now, the site was in the middle of updating
My understanding (which is incomplete) is that this is only a signing key.

Even if they are somehow relying on this key to prevent cloning, are they seriously under the impression that a 512-bit key is sufficient to keep a bunch of guys in Shenzhen from making a firmware-compatible device? Any effort to clone has long since come to fruition, and it's extremely likely they know this.

My guess: lawyers justifying their existence by picking fights with people they expect can't fight back. I'm glad the EFF has stepped in.
I'm in Houston right now, but am willing to relocate.
Actually, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard out Ubuntu feels even further away from becoming mainstream. I want to like Linux on the desktop but looking at it objectively Win 7 and Snow Leopard are better.
I generally don't consider it as "we're dating" until at least the 3rd or 4th date. The first few dates are tryouts for "dating".
Daniel, thanks so much for the feedback :)
This is purely a signing key. It's not used for any sort of copy protection but solely to prevent unauthorized code from running.
NOTE: Apple has said they aren't releasing anything new for the remainder of the year.

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/27/phil-schiller-claims-no-...
Front page is updated now as well..

My download via torrent is cruising right along..
> no shortage of not-very-useful production (see also: Cougartown).

Ah yes, the proles and their bad taste. They're so dumb that they pay for their stuff and are embarrassed to ask for subsidies.

Everyone knows that the best people rely on thugs to get resources.

Speaking of thugs, where's the omlet?
The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English
Usability and the Ubuntu desktop
it used to have the best public transit... then who framed roger rabbit happened =/
I genuinely believe (ignoring vendor support) that ubuntu is by far the easiest to use operating system, ahead of windows and osx for the basic operations of installing and using new applications, I would rather use gnome over leapords window manager any day.

but the polish has always been lacking
Are they trying to get away with selling cheap low-features versions that aren't different except in software?
The problem is that the above implies that you had some basis for your position.

I suppose that it is okay if you don't, but is it really too much trouble to acknowledge that up front?
cough I told you so =)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905436
"[The author] is active in the contemporary nature spirituality movement"

While the concept seems interesting, this line made me seriously doubt the credibility of the author. I will wait for a few more comments before attempting to read again.
whats the url to the torrents? not listed on the download page yet here
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.is...

substitute whatever particular image you need, it's all named accordingly.
i don't think Win7 is better. to me, it is a slight improvement over vista but still annoying and ugly.
osx is the clear winner among UIs and ubuntu is nice enough for most people.
"Audio Preview" Is A Bad User Experience
In the last version, they broke my Intel graphics driver, rendering my machine almost unusable except for the console. I spent many hours trying to fix it, and ended up switching to Arch out of frustration. I don't think I'm going back, but does anyone know if they've fixed it?
Crowdsourcing Your Product Name
Happy 40th Birthday, Internet
But we must find that thin difference b/w when to stop teaching general sciences and let students focus on what they love. As for my computer science course, I'm pretty much frustrated with the enforced chemistry and physics in 1st 5 semesters of 8 semester course. That doesn't make sense. Plus it eats out a lot of time I could've spent over learning new things if I had 4 subjects instead of 6.

The courses in India also happen to be outdated. At my college we do VC++ 6 under HCI --> wtf?!

And computer science grads go through a combined 1 semester course of 'signals and systems' and 'digital signal processing', which again doesn't make any sense to me. No wonder students get below 20/50.

My point is, the time lost due to over-engagement promoted in these colleges could have been spent in 'finding out what one loves to do'.

Since students don't find that time, there is an evident herd mentality when it comes to furthering their careers after a bachelors degree in Computer Science. People end up disrespecting it by trying to do MBA, etc.

Nothing wrong, their personal choice, but I think humanity in this region of world could've given out more inventions and geniuses if students (most of us) didn't have this pattern as the only way of starting our lives.

If only we could too just roam around on road, pick a paper and scribble some maths onto it like Ramanujan used to... if only we all could be unique with the knowledge of what we love...
Didn't this hacker make a replacement OS better than TI's? I don't think TI will face serious competition from clones, except possibly in Asia and third-world countries. This hack doesn't even help in making clones, except maybe by giving engineers a chance to practice programming calculator OS's.
I almost wish Apple would sell a bare-bones MacPro so I could pick decent parts without Apple markup and not have to pay for the shitty parts they stick in the entry level model.

No hard drive, no video card, no ram. Just the CPU, mobo, case, and a copy of Snow Leopard (and pretty kb+mouse).
The costs have dropped to zero for many of the smaller low traffic sites because they don't currently need more resources than those provided by Herkou's basic free service. We can boost the resources almost instantly as and when they need it.
if you plan your life (live near transit) around using it

He probably did. LA has light rail, heavy commuter rail, express busways and regular buses. While big parts of the metro aren't covered by useful transit, there's definitely enough areas that are.
US military shares open source code
Long url: http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&client=firefox-a...
It's easy to posture how you'd fight The Man when it's not you who's threatened with financial ruin and the time equivalent to a second job.
Mandelson and Three Strikes: Not So Much Dark Lord...
I keep seeing people saying "I'll support it when IE10 does" or similar.

Is there a single good reason why anyone producing a website in HTML4 or XHTML couldn't move to HTML5 today?

If you avoid the new stuff (which you couldn't use with those formats anyway) then as far as I can tell you'd actually be using something better supported by IE6,7&8 than HTML4 and especially XHTML since a lot of HTML5 involved reverse-engineering and minutely specifying the real-word behaviors of those browsers so that other, more active, browser developers could more accurately copy and interoperate.

Maybe someone needs to have a validator target called "HTML5, the IE-supported subset".
Fewer Murders, More Suicide?
Fixed for sure. I had the same problem but instead of switching to arch I installed the latest X.org drivers.
Live light, save, save, save, live in Oakland or Dublin and use the BART time to read or something; consider riding a bicycle and ditching a car. Just live like you're poor and save as much as you can.
π: A Pattern Language
It's not even keeping anyone from cloning, because a Chinese manufacturer could just copy the ROM wholesale, signing key and all. Or patch out the signing key checks, or replace the key with one of their own... quite literally, the only thing this key is doing is keeping device owners from installing unauthorized applications and replacement OSes.
Very Unusual Lamps. Part 2
would it be possible to take this same engine and use it for a live sentence by sentence translation of spoken voice conversations on the android, since there the platform is more open? that's a scarily awesome proposition.
I'm thinking it goes something like this. The TI calculators have something called "press-to-test", where a teacher can hit a combination of keys to disable functionality on the calculator. When in this mode, a LED flashes on the calculator so a teacher can tell at a glance that the student isn't "cheating".

Now imagine a homebrew OS where you hit the "press-to-test" keys, and the light blinks, but all the calculator's functionality is still there. If this became prevalent, then schools could outright ban the calculators on tests, so students would be less likely to buy them. Lost sales from this would dwarf any pickup from home hobbyists.
Lo and Behold: The 40th anniversary of the internet
On the 40th anniversary of the first internet connection, a look back on how a flash of insight and a 20-minute meeting got it all started.
I think it is. Pulseaudio, for example, has become sane and actually better than any other sound system I've used. It even streams to apple airports and other computers.
I think this is down to the educational market. For many exams you can only used an approved make/model calculator.

If you can hack the OS you can use it to store answers, notes or similar aids in cheating for an exam. If the platform isn't locked down they'll lose their exam board approval which would have a big impact on that models sales.
What’s in a name – Tips for naming your startup
Isaac Newton was an alchemist.

Any more examples?