pseut

And, just to go back to patio11's article[1] "replace OpenSSL for free" is something that Tarsnap could afford to do as a company, and might make business sense, if it were substantially more profitable. </nag>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953https://news.yco...

I've seen people not know who "pg" is, so...

The one weak point of the landing page is that it didn't indicate who was not affected. I read to the bottom of the announcement and had to think a while on whether I had to update my laptop because, hey, this seems like a serious bug. Granted, I'm nontechnical... but that's kind of the point.

Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, but if it contains an error please add a comment pointing it out. If you just think it should be lower on the page, no worries.

Usually the algorithm is described in another document without several expressions & lines. "Readability" in some of these contexts means verifying that you've correctly typed in the expression.

You're right, thanks. But C-u doesn't seem to be necessary, unless I have a strange setup.

I love Vim's digraphs!

In emacs it's

    C-| tex

then

    \phi → φ

etc, which can be quite a bit more typing but can be easier to remember if you already know the TeX instructions for everything.

Now we just need to convince other editors to add something similar...

Konqueror on RHEL seems more likely than Lynx.

A reaction to the new moderation proposals, maybe?

FWIW, cryptocurrencies are far more fiat than dollars. You can pay taxes in dollars, for example, so they're not even a pure fiat currency.

It's used consistently in the core language and in well written packages but very inconsistently across the ecosystem. I certainly don't use it in packages I write for my own use and it's pretty unused in most of the packages I download.

Did you write qplot? (rhetorical question) A lot of these "quirks" of R are nice for end users when they're implemented well, but are unintuitive to program and, as a consequence, are inconsistently implemented across packages.

Hadley doesn't write everything, you know.

Yeah, I was just thinking that. About 90% of what I see on twitter I would consider spam if it were sent by email. :)

Not my area, but one starting place is http://www.andrewgelman.com

I more or less agree with your specific points, but in the larger scheme of things I'm more concerned that these hypothetical people don't understand the stats than that the tool won't scale or is badly implemented.

That said, it sure is a bitch of a language to try to develop for (since the consensus seems to be: write everything in C) and cran is a ghetto.

Nearlyfreespeech's homepage is infinitely more attractive and professional looking than tarsnap's.

And, no, the redesign in the article looks exactly like someone grabbed a $20 theme and didn't bother to swap in the image.

Things tarsnap would need to be anything like dropbox:

* Mobile support

* Windows support

* A web interface

* Any way of using it other than CLI

TFA left all that stuff in place. "tarsnap the software" does not change at all.

Unless I skimmed over part of the post, tarsnap is still run by crontab on a unix/linux box. So, still pretty geeky. And the idea that "affordable encrypted backup" can't be understood by "a suit" is silly.

From the first few graphs I've seen in the links, the shading is discrete and not continuous (e.g. p 40). Discrete shading does address my first point, and it can help somewhat with communication too. Personally, I prefer simulating from the implicit model and plotting, say, 1000 hypothetical sample paths; but I agree that discrete shading can be effective too.

1. If I want a confidence interval, I want to know the end points of the confidence interval. Trying to guess them from a plot like this is annoying and not helpful.

2. This doesn't work for bar graphs, lengths, etc. The uncertainty is often going to be symmetric around the point estimate, but your opacity forces an asymmetric representation of the uncertainty.

3. Box plots are great. If you want more detail than that, a thin vertical histogram or density is going to convey much more information than shading.

"Less elitist" may not appeal to someone who announces on HN that he or she got into these three colleges. Harvard it is!

I can't find the quote now, but I'm sure that I've read of someone saying (when told that a result had been found earlier but forgotten), "Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered!"

Probably not something you should care about, but this site doesn't load at all in Konqueror.

No, I'm thinking of frequencies higher than 1 day.

A priori, sure. After the fact, if you have detailed enough data it can be pretty easy to identify the timing of certain events.

It doesn't mean that the reaction is correct or that it won't be undone in the future. But there's a huge difference between "day to day fluctuations are unpredictable" and "day to day fluctuations are inexplicable."

I think they were more concerned with losing users (and future users) and being unable to raise more funding than with actually being sued.

Yeah, that's actually why I think it's important to point out who made the insight. Every time I've heard the anecdote, it's been presented as some sort of clever observation that we should all be expected to produce.

But, really, it's a clever observation that was made by a historically great statistician. And the anecdote leaves out the fact that he had probably been thinking about this problem before --- he was working as part of the war effort. So it was probably harder than it looks.

> "[A guy in charge]..."

That should read, "One of the most influential mathematical statisticians in history..."

He also invented the "Wald test".

Other people have probably seen this use before, but this is the first time I've seen rap genius embedded and used for something other than lyrics.

I'm blown away, it's fantastic.

Anticipation and timing.