skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is surprisingly inexpensive advertising and will likely generate the value of its price in press coverage alone.
Is the whole privacy on search thing really a big issue?

I, for one, want Google to be all Orwellian on me because it will mean better search results. I had a scenario like this a few days ago when I googled for "fabric" -- Being a Python developer I was looking for http://fabfile.org and it shows up as the second result while logged in. If I'm not, it won't show up.

This may be the outlier state of mind on HN, but I think in general, as-in billboard advertising, it's not an issue. Am I wrong?
To be concrete, an average nicely formatted P=NP proof claim is correct with probability less than 10^(-5) (IMO).
That's disingenuous. DDG has legitimate claim to "Google tracks you" beyond just referrer URLs.

When you search for "athlete's foot" on DDG you won't see an add for foot cream the next time you're watching a video on YouTube. That's the sort of tracking Google undeniably does do that users may find troubling (I know I do).

Most users don't know about this level of tracking. Moreover, while referral URLs containing search terms has been the norm for a long time (and IMHO, is not an evil move, just legacy from a privacy perspective), there is no real reason why things must stay this way.
Not knowing which keywords referred visitors would be terribly annoying to webmasters. Unless you're using dodgy 3rd party advertisers, I don't see what's so bad about aggregating referrer data.

I have a feeling Google might be keen to hold onto their duck.com domain a little longer :)
Indeed I am from the US. I guess I would be surprised to hear people get that one wrong, but I'd be truly shocked to see someone get the classification of -2 wrong.

(A disclaimer: The only people with whom I've had occasion to have this conversation have been students in (my) college mathematics classes, so I guess I should clarify that these are the people of whom I'm really thinking.)
Silly move. As noted it's not a big deal because you can easily get the app directly (unless you were foolish enough to buy an Android phone from AT&T), but if Google is going to pull this one I wish they'd also do something about the thousands of spam apps on the Market.
Guys, guys – it's fine. Let us not forget: Android is open. So clearly there's nothing to be looked askance at here. We're not looking at it from the right perspective or something.

Snark aside, I'd be happy if Google used their muscle to make things better for the end user, then found ways to profit from that superior experience. This is how they got their start. These days they're like a corporate zombie: relentless, surprisingly strong and seemingly bereft of any guiding ideals or purpose.
Seems like a nice idea, but it wouldn't work well with

1) Traffic lights

2) Roundabouts

3) Yield/stop signs
Microsoft Windows VP Brad Brooks Heads To Juniper
Women Filling Up Coding Workshops
great idea. But I can't help to think that as soon as this gets implemented, some guy will get on the road train and then jump into the back seat and take a nap.
Well that's great. There goes MIT.
I imagine they are only intended be used on limited-access highways, where you don't have any of those things.
I am inspired that one man is pulling off DuckDuckGo
What happens when the truck driver guns it on a yellow and has 6 cars behind it? I'm guessing 2 or 3 T-bones and about 4 hours clearing up an intersection.

For this system to work, all traffic lights will need to be reliably broadcasting their status and how long they're going to be remaining in it so that either the fleet can stop, or so that some of the cars can drop out to avoid running a red.

It would also need to communicate with other vehicles. I can turn right (or left in some occasions here in Canada) on a red if I've got the room, but how do I tell if my fleet has the room? If the truck driver becomes liable for risking my vehicle then he's only ever going to move on his light and when he knows he has the time, which will only cripple intersections with congestion.

It's a great idea and I can't wait for the day, but our road system is overly complex as it is and these systems will need to be equally as complex to guarantee safety.

Edit: Also the driver of the fleet vehicles would need to know the destination and what exit the lead is taking. If I'm going to Montreal, I don't want to end up in downtown Toronto and spend forever trying to get back on the highway. Similarly, it will be especially dangerous if I'm just 'dropped' from the fleet due to a communication problem or if my vehicle doesn't follow because the lead is exiting before my destination is set to.

IMO this system would do best as an advancement of an auto-driver system that can read lights and signals, etc. itself without endangering the driver.
Mixpanel - Javascript hackers
> Parity is a property of numbers and sets only.

Why? Seriously, though: what do you mean by parity (EDIT: I mean even-ness) of a set? Almost assuredly, something like “it can be partitioned into two disjoint subsets that can be put into bijection”; but then you've just defined even-ness of cardinals (which are sets after all), and all infinite cardinals are even (in fact, satisfy 2κ = κ; EDIT: and odd; they also satisfy 2κ + 1 = κ).
I was under the impression you can opt-out of all that, is that not the case?
If you're attempting a 'startup' and not a 'project', I believe that it is important to plan a revenue model from the inception. It can be difficult to force-feed a revenue model on your product after it has gained significant momentum. You don't have to implement it from the beginning, but it may help to steer your development to meet with your revenue model.

If you're attempting a 'project' and not a 'startup', still think about what kind of revenue models would work for the project. If the plan isn't to make money (ie. make something cool), don't kill yourself thinking of how to make money from your idea.
Here's the link to the conversation about the original blog post. http://namesake.com/conversation/92e76ace-2338-11e0-9439-123...
From the same document:

Products: Software, content and digital materials created for Devices in accordance with the Android SDK and distributed via the Market.

No idea what "In accordance with the Android SDK" means, and that doesn't seem to apply to anything not otherwise available on the "Market".
From the link:

> The next day, our flight profile was duplicated on the SR-71 flight simulator at Beale AFB, Calif. The outcome was identical.

This seems to belie your argument.
This is an important point and worth providing a link to a full explanation of easements. Wikipedia seems to have a pretty comprehensive (and accurate from knowledge) review of the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement
Without meaning to be unduly cynical, I suspect that's attributing to the average person altogether too much mathematical inquisitiveness and willingness to conjecture; but I'd love it if your explanation, especially the last, were the correct one.

EDIT: Incidentally, this reminds me of one of my favourite pedagogical techniques, which I was heartbroken to discover recently is not original to me. After discussing even and odd numbers, as a very basic introduction to modular arithmetic, I like to introduce and discuss ‘threeven’ and ‘throdd’ numbers, and discover that they don't behave quite as nicely—what to do, what to do ….
The Neuroscience Of Music
sorry guys. this site is not worth taking seriously anymore
Third Parties Increasingly Targeted in Infringement Cases
Then that is their ONLY claim against Google (yet not Google alone). Everything else on that donttrack.us page is applicable to any and every search engine or Website. I believe DDG is being disingenuous by making it sound like this a Google-only thing. Even if Google is the big guy they want to go after, they should be up front that this is not something that makes Google evil or is specific to Google.
From what I could tell, the links you posted are no evidence to the contrary.

First, child abuse is beyond what most would call "parenting"; that term is mostly applied to things like strictness with respect to school homework, video games, pressure to choose certain careers, etc. My argument was that those of us that care about giving their children the best should not sweat too much over where precisely to draw the lines, because the effect of these decisions on the child's personality and life outcome is minimal.

Second, it is very possible that the same genes that increase the chance of a person being a child abuser also increase the chance of their child being, say, an alcoholic or criminal.
I know this comes up every now and again...but I find the length of the domain name a barrier to entry. I think building a brand around "DuckDuckGo" is an upward battle.
It would be interesting to see how these numbers compare with apps that were not as prominently featured or not as well-known as Evernote. Clearly the numbers would not be as high, but I'm wondering if some of the percentages would be consistent.
I have five daughters in competitive Gymnastics - they've all been in Gymnastics since around 2-3 years of age(oldest is now 15). I see their 'peers' in the neighborhood and there's no comparing physical fitness between them. It's been great for all of them - there have been injuries, but nothing that bad, so far.

Injuries happen - either get over it and go on, or curl up in a ball and put a cocoon around yourself. This guy had great intestinal fortitude coming back to the sport after those injuries - I commend him.
> He doesn't mention this (I guess it goes without saying among mathematicians), but part of the problem is that in mathematics one fact doesn't generally seem to cause another: certainly there's no adequate causality that can trivially be verified by intuition or common sense.

However, there is a sense (albeit informal) in which mathematicians recognise causality, and he alludes to that when he says that probably no one would say that the Riemann hypothesis implies Fermat's last theorem. I think that all mathematicians (or at least those who learned from Herstein!) would agree that Sylow's theorem on the existence of p-subgroups of all possible orders is equivalent to the weaker statement about the existence of p-Sylow subgroups; but no mathematician would mean by that merely that both are true.
Although it's always dangerous to say to a mathematician something like “But there's no sense in which that's true!”, still I would be reluctant to refer to elements of the Riemann sphere as numbers; the sphere seems fundamentally a geometric rather than algebraic object (of course, until you start thinking of it as the complex projective ‘line’, at which point it becomes both :-) ).

With that said, as I have argued elsethread, I certainly do think that there are occasions when infinity can be considered a number; the surreal numbers are an elegant example.
There is also a slightly different case - google passing on your search terms to the website that you click through to.

You may trust google with knowing that you searched for "naked bieber pics", but you may not want other websites also knowing your search habits.
Haha, this was the subject of my first blog post. It's pretty ridiculous.

Here's a link actually, should be doing this more.

http://guscost.com/2010/12/23/science-where-are-the-aliens/
Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents?
Anyone else disturbed/amused to see a Windows screensaver in the bottom right on the dash computer of the guy in a "following" vehicle who's reading the paper?
You read my mind for "parity of a set". So Q.E.D.: parity is only applicable to reason about numbers (and infinity is not a number). See also surreal numbers.
Great book! I really love this approach to teaching this kind of subject. Seeing the whole stack, top to bottom, really helps tie together so many different threads that are generally left untied during a CS education.
I love it when WIRED quotes someone on Hacker News :-)
Lobbying is almost entirely a question of who has the most money. In this case, it's a .com startup vs. Sony. To follow the analogy, we want to build up an immunity to the disease.
donttrack.us also rips on third-party ad networks that are non-Google for extending the tracking even further. This also seems to be the core reason why DDG rails against search terms in referral URLs, since it's a major enabler for third-party network tracking.

So yes, DDG is targeting the 800# gorilla in its marketing, but it's not unjustified, nor has DDG claimed on the donttrack.us page that Google is the sole culprit in the destruction of user privacy.

There's a certain amount of opportunism in this billboard/privacy ad campaign here, that much is obvious. But, as a search engine it does not seem unreasonable to call out the failings of your main competitor.
This could be ok if he was doing an experiment about HN. These tricks of asking your buddies to upvote and retweet seems against the spirit of HN.
I would be interested to see what the other HNers think.
How the Fed Creates Money
Show HN: New Punchd website (like foursquare for the masses)
Factoring is in NP. Proving that P=NP would, by definition, imply that large numbers can be factored in polynomial time.

The issue of whether it's a feasible amount of work is exactly what I was addressing.
That's being a bit pedantic, he's just using it as a colorful way of saying that he doesn't mind them keeping track of what he's done, and he backs it up with a really good reason.
For people not aware of that site that want to see the content, just scroll up to the top in the list of what looks like comments.

After 4 visits, and clicking in some places i finally got it... I must be dumb or something.
This is one of the biggest reasons I don't use DuckDuckGo yet. Seems trivial, but for me it's certainly a barrier to entry. I'd say the second biggest reason is the annoying user interface (gaudy effects like large lime green backgrounds when you roll over search results, etc.)
> Or someone selling you an operating system and telling you you can only install it on hardware purchased from them.

How ridiculous!

Sent from my Macbook Pro
It's OK while it is sensible (after all, you will inform your friends you have published a new blog post or whatever) and not some heavy "please upvote" campaign.
Ace demo: http://ajaxorg.github.com/ace/editor-build.html
I'm going to side with Google on this one (though I might change my mind in the future). Two reasons:

1. Kongregate can distribute it's app outside the app store, though I hear you guys about AT&T blocking apps outside the store. I might take this off my list if Google starts doing more evil down the road.

2. The main reason: Kongregate is free to bundle each of those games as a separate app and put them on the store. The lawyers can argue all they want about whether the Kongregate app violates the TOS by being an app store, but certainly it violates the agreement in spirit.

Has anyone here dealt with the WildTangent client? It does roughly what the Kongregate app is designed to do, but on Windows. It lives in memory and tries to download new games at regular intervals. Frankly, it gets annoying.

Honestly, this smells like Kongregate is trying to push shovelware along with their legitimate games. If Google lets them put their games up but not their magic Kongregate App, that seems legitimate--especially if Kongregate is allowed to make their Bonzi Buddy^H^H client app available outside the market.

Anyone care to explain why I'm wrong?
Ask HN: Any hackernews entrepreneurs in Ft. Worth, Texas?
I was wondering if there were any hackers in ft worth that might be interested in starting a coworking space-- nothing big. I'm thinking maybe we can use a room at a library or find an area that would be suitable to bring laptops etc.

I know there's one in dallas, but thought it would be nice to set one up around ft. worth/nrh area.
> Is zero positive or negative? OK, now is zero even or odd? I can imagine some just see zero with weird properties.

I think that's the best explanation I've heard. Thanks! (Also you can't divide by it (although (http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2006/12/06/d...) …), so who knows what trickery it's up to?)
Are they passing on search terms for previous searches or just the current search?

In your (frankly terrifying) example, would the site have had to have ranked for "naked bieber pics", showing up in the results and then you click it to pull the search terms? Because that would seem to be pretty innocuous.
My only problem is that it gives people some senses of rigorousness, without actually providing it. I could say the chance of extraterrestrial life is .4% pulling that number out of the air, and you can use the Drake equation and get .99% but you know what -- both are made up #s and yours is in no way more accurate than mine, but because of the use of an equation people will think it has scientific merit and is more rigorous.
> It's the same as a couple of cavemen sitting on a hill talking about thunder as being large rocks falling from a cliff in a faraway valley.

Those cavemen are doing rudimentary science. They've come up with a testable theory that explains an observed phenomenon of the natural world. If they were to conduct surveys of the cliffs within hearing distance before and after thunderstorms, they'd eventually falsify the theory.
One time pads are not useful in many cases, but they have been used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad#Historical_uses
Joystiq has more info here: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/19/kongregate-ceo-jim-greer-o...
Ask HN: Selling the rights to browser extensions?
I've developed a number of browser extensions over the years that have each accumulated between 50,000 and 100,000 active users. I don't have the time to keep them all updated anymore, so I'd like to sell them off.

Does anyone have experience with selling the rights to browser extensions? I've sold a few before, but those were both to companies that approached me first, so I don't have any experience in being the instigator in this kind of situation.
But yet again, how is this the customers fault Comcast oversold their bandwidth? Comcast set the limits, the max speed, and takes care of the infrastructure. And fyi, electrical grids are designed for peak usage, same with water systems, and same with sewer pipes. Look at stadiums for an example where they engineered the system to handle every crapper to be flushed at the same time.

Comcast has been reaping the benefits of over selling for years and now its time to pay the piper back. They sold it this way and they didn't complain or sink every dollar of profit back into the infrastructure that they made from over selling. In my eyes they are using their customer base to slow down a competitor, and in all rights its probably against some federal law. Some sort of anti competitive law.
The problem is that we don't know what the confidence should be, and as of right now we don't have anyway to tell. In the future hopefully we'll know enough to use the equation but right now we just don't know.
Snail Mail Push Alerts to Your Mobile Phone
> I'd say the second biggest reason is the annoying user interface
DuckDuckGo is the first website that made me want to install a browser plugin to change the way the page looks. (As for other websites that had a look I didn't like, I simply stopped visiting them.)
The problem with installing plugins, though, is that I use several browsers on several computers, and to get a consistent look, I'd have to customize all of them (if possible).
Everything in this app is/was free.
The Drake Equation has so many fuzzy unknowns that you cant get meaningful information out of it, if rephrased right we could get some meaning variables to play with. If we want to know if there are possible communication partners right now, we can figure out some of the unknowns. First the definition of an earth like planet. It has liquid water and dry land. Liquid water, because the only kind of life we know of developed in liquid water. Dry land because developing a communicating technology requires an abiulity to isolate your experiments. I believe there are so many impediments under water that a technological civilization would never develop. So a technological civilization requires 4B years to develop from the birth of a star. The habitable zone of a star is where water is liquid roughly. An earth-like planet must have inhabited a continuously habitable zone for 4B years. A flare star may not have a continuously habitable zone. An M star's habitable zone may be so close to the start that the planet is in a tidal lock with the star. An enterprising astrophysist can probably estimate the probability of a sufficently large stable habital zone for a given class of stars. We dont have enough
data for estimating the probability of a water/dry land world being there.

Given life and enough time, what is the probability of a technological civilization arising. 1.0 or so small that we are alone. We are probably at the age and interconnectedness that we will survive a very long time. I
dont wory about nuclear war, but I do worry about bio-terror and nut cases.

I think the big constraint is patience. I dont think any civilization is ready to invest the time and energy to wait 1000 years for a reply. I think the potential partners will be limited to a volume of 100 light years.
Maybe 5000 stars, not all that many.
Absolutely nothing.

We interpret sound via air waves colliding with our eardrums causing tiny hairs to vibrate in our inner ears causing electrical signals in our head. What does this imply about what a piano looks like? Or a stereo system? Or a flashbang?

It even only extremely slightly implies how sound-creating things function, given that they could inject themselves at any point in that process. They could vibrate air. They could vibrate our jawbones. They could cause electrical impulses directly. And this discounts future creations - maybe we discover a way to induce momentum, vibrating our eardrums without doing so by vibrating the air. And it entirely ignores synaesthesia, whereby we could create sound by looking at a light or smelling a cookie.

Or lets take the programmer approach: the spec is an interface. What does that imply about what goes on behind the interface?
Nice tip! While not quite as easy as the marketplace, it's still painfully easy to download and install. (I think I was up and running in...30 seconds or so?)

Performance of all the games seem pretty good. This is a great idea IMHO.

Sad I won't be able to enjoy either of these two things (download arbitrary apps and installing them, playing flash games) on my iPhone.
Node.js production environment #63
This was brilliant.

If Kongregate had just blogged "Hey, look at our new Android app", they would have gotten a little press and a few downloads.

Release in the Market and GET KICKED OUT OF THE MARKET ... BOOM - tons of great press and now people are eager to see what's so great that Google had to kick them out!

Pure marketing awesomeness (hopefully).

Seriously. It's not like it was a secret that this type of app wasn't allowed in the Android Market. It's right there in the distribution agreement, plain as day.

I really think, intentional or not, this was a great move that got way more attention than had they just made an announcement on their blog.
I think your analysis of Knockout.js is incomplete. You can customize any of the interactions and bindings, and it supports an entire reactive programming model (automatic re-execution of functions) that Backbone does not. Especially with the newer Knockout extensions that turn fromJSON into a full-fledged updateable model, Knockout competes well feature-wise with Backbone, it just has a very different flow-of-control paradigm.
The Play Framework is not in the list. May be it's too new. It's interesting to see deployment frequency and duration in the survey. Play sort of renders those questions obsolete.