skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If that were true, then the figure for scientific consensus being true would be much lower than 90%."

I think if you actually look at research about the historical validity of science, you'll in fact find that the 90% figure is a wild overestimate. There are dozens of disciplines where virtually every single scientific consensus in the entire field has been overturned.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damne...
Certainly doable in medicine:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract
Using OpenID makes the rest of the techniques moot (except for OpenID providers), right?
I would liken software creation to something more like plumbing, cobbled together and constantly requiring maintenance.
I think you'd be surprised how advanced and expensive some people's home entertainment systems are compared with some other parts of their lifestyle.
In my mind, that's the primary design flaw with traditional password managers. Why should end users store passwords? It introduces so many issues. Must have proper encryption. Must deal with synchronization. Must have master password. The list could go on and on. Passwords should be generated (locally on your device) when needed, and never stored in any way.

Edit: Some more negatives to password storage. Must protect stored password file. May be required to log access to stored password file for compliance reasons. Stored password files may become corrupt and stop working.
Sounds to me like they missed an opportunity to also host, in addition to being a prototyping site.

The correct answer for that client was "If you want to host that site with us, the URL will be X and it will cost you Y per month."

Chances are they just wanted free hosting, but if they didn't, you've got more income and an additional revenue model. Without much work.
Just tap the very top of the screen. That takes you back to the top.

This of course shows the problem with gesture based UI in general: lack of discoverability.
Stop Lying……They are too smart now [video]
1000x times yes about the newsletter checkbox. Nothing turns me off to a service more than being tricked into receiving a newsletter. I consider those to be spam and mark them as such.
Admittedly I hadn't heard of using a client-side JS input box as an alternative to a Captcha. Does that sort of thing actually work, or can spammers get around it? Is there any anecdotal data to suggest that that's a better method? (not snarking; actually curious)
Paper-thin computer set to redefine industry
Unless it's something they care about (and not everyone cares about voting reform!), being told "Don't worry about it, it's too hard to explain" is often met with "Oh, okay."

The trick is to get people to care about it so they become curious and reject the assertions of "it's too hard". The Yes campaign attempted this initially but did a poor job, in this case it turns out much easier to explain the thing than to pose half-truth arguments why people should care!
I'm done with these analogies. I find it a lot easier to make good decisions by asking direct questions about the situation I'm in and the outcomes I want.

edit: snark removal
But imagine your cell phone has a wi-fi chip, and most of them have it anyway, it creates a local network. Imagine that network is an ad hoc network and can immediately connect with other networks. So all the cell phones we have create their own small networks and become interconnected with each other.

Ta-da -- http://penumbra.warmcat.com
I would have expected that to be a tooltip that describes what a password is, not a reset link.
The other problem with the desirability standard is that iOS and Android in the survey are pretty much even (30% and 31%).

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-smartp...

If you look at their other graphs, however, they show that "recent acquirers" have favoured Android (50% bought an Android versus 25% who bought an iPhone).

I particularly like how they handwave the discrepancy between desirability and reported purchases by saying "Those dynamics are already translating into sales."

If one assumes their numbers are accurate, they point to other factors besides "desirability" behind the purchase of a smartphone.
Sure, but the point is that if there's something wrong with your model of the noise, the result could be completely invalid.

Look at the history of Milliken's oil-drop experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.27...

He got the wrong answer, but subsequent researchers who got different results kind of smoothed their own results to match the "correct" (actually wrong) expected result.

I'm not saying that happened here, but it's always a possibility.

Essentially, how do you know when you've modelled the noise accurately enough? When you get the expected right answer? Why not continue to refine the noise model, or consider other ones?
"science does change because flaws in research do eventually get pointed out."

No argument there, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't wrong to begin with.

"I don't think it's laziness to allow people who have devoted their entire lives to work out fantastically complicated problems to do their work without polluting the debate with my generally uninformed opinion."

Of course you shouldn't express your opinion if you're uninformed. But you also shouldn't put science on a pedestal. Writing your own literature review might not be feasible for most people, but deciding which of two factions (if not both) is full of shit doesn't take a whole lot of talent.
Wow. This looks amazing! Have contacted them and said I'd like to buy some, and I wouldn't mind writing or porting some educational open-source games on them. Great, great idea.
Papers 2: your new best OS X research management app?
If you look at the actual site (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) it mentions Composite and HDMI video output under the tech specs.
How Fog Creek learned to do sales part 3
Right, he could donate it to a cause that he feels strongly about. Perhaps an organization that would use the money to advance the state of mathematics. Morally, this seems like what he should have done: he should have taken the money, paid taxes on it, and then given it back to the AMA.
Robert Peston is generally a waste of space.

UK GDP is around 1.5 trillion. Therefore we spent the equivalent of ONE WHOLE YEAR OF OUTPUT FOR THE WHOLE COUNTRY on bailing out the banks. You do not solve a debt crisis with more debt. You do not solve a financial crisis by supporting the financial institutions that caused it in the first place. Northern Rock has no assets other than a bunch of shit 125% mortgages and repo'd Barrats buy to let flats worth cents on the dollar. The idea this could turn a profit is absurd.
I know Gary is preaching to the choir here but I love his energy and his message I wish more companies were honest. I think that is changing a bit but it hasn't completely caught on.
US Firms Shifting Hiring Abroad, But Is A Change Near?
Some spam bots use WebDriver and can get around this.
Piracy Politics Fuel Internet Censorship
Thanks for pointing that out. I think this is a great project and hope it takes off. I would definitely buy one myself to play around with.
Whether they're interested in meeting you or not, if you turn up and start talking to them they won't have much of a choice in the matter.
Ah. This makes more sense. In this comment you seem to be arguing that some mistrust of science is caused by poor reporting. Which I wouldn't disagree with.

From your first comment, I thought you were saying that there was no mistrust of science, just of reporters, from this line "The perceived distrust of scientists by the public could well be a distrust of media reporting of most issues in general, not necessarily a lack of belief in the scientific method."

Apologies if I had misunderstood.
Penumbra: Broadcast-based Wireless network
Unless you're talking about Facebook. Then he'd be correct. ;)
Maybe you could get major players like Cineplex or Famous Players to help you out? Or better yet, buy you out?
Hookers and blow are worse than miniatures?
As a developer I often have to recursively grep large source trees. With an HDD that was painful, no matter how much RAM I added to my laptop -- the whole source tree was rarely cached. With an SSD, I can grep a few hundred megs of sources in a couple of seconds.

Now I'm someone who hates having to wait unnecessarily, and considers even 1 or 2 seconds of application startup time to be unacceptably slow (hence Chromium instead of Firefox). For me the expensive Intel SSD was worth the money.
Most peopele are stupid. If you subtract the microenviroment of the valley and the university system.
I guess the problem is that it stops working when you start being big enough to attract the spammers' attention and get bots tailored to your registration system. In the meantime, I guess this is just to avoid problems with general stupid bots which just fill out all the forms they can't find without trying anything fancy.
I don't think I understand this - if the password isn't stored, do you expect the user to memorize all the various passwords?
I think "effectively" is really dependent on the end user. If the goal is to provide an easy and cheap system for school children to work with, much like the OLPC, then internet may not be something that is available or required for the target demographic. In the case of your standard hacker, it would obviously be awesome to have all the additional items on-board, but with the ease of adding a USB hub and all required additions to it you can expand on it as much as you want in what ever cost range you can afford.
It's the same justification given for not letting minors vote.

If it's acceptable to de-juris disenfranchise the under-18s on the spurious grounds that they are incapable of voting effectively, surely we can de-facto disenfranchise any adults incapable of operating an AV ballot paper. (which only requires the ability to count up to 1)
"It's undemocratic", the rallying cry of anti-progressives in these sorts of situations. The Conservative Party of Canada was calling coalitions undemocratic. (But suspending parliament when coalitions against them are being discussed... apparently not undemocratic.) Conservative supporters were calling voting strategically (voting for whoever had the likeliest chance of lowering the odds of a Conservative majority) "undemocratic".
I didn't know Wal-Mart sold the same brands as Armani Exchange. Seems like a good deal to me...
I think OpenID has proven to be uneffective, some (HN popular) sites have removed it again (37signals? not sure).

I have problems with OpenID, too, because I tend to be unable to remember which OpenID login I used for a site.
Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M
To tie in something bluekeybox mentioned, while this is strictly true, people are often exposed to underdeveloped scientific arguments. High energy physics at CERN is the same as Climatology is the same as people who interpreted those reverse-causality ESP results as something other than a statistical anomaly.

Of course, some skepticism can be used to separate these three classes even for the layperson. The wiser layperson looks for articles on journal websites that they don't want to buy, looks for credentials from known universities, looks for something that sounds sciencey instead of new agey. These policies definitely can improve your capacity to learn from digested scientific material.

But if you interpret this power as roughly knowing how to interpret and trust scientists, which is probably a fair description of the actors in a lot of lay science argumentation (or politics in general), then you can quickly get out of your depth without others or even yourself noticing.

---

I think the article does a good job conveying the idea of scientific doubt. I also love the idea of stressing science history in an effort to both demonstrate the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and the sheer volume of work that's gone behind a lot of it.

The real message, I believe, should be one of reverence toward the problem. When scientific knowledge is passed on to an increasingly lay audience, it should be known that this is the best guess a room full of really smart, dedicated people could get at. This guess may be good or bad, but unless you're willing to tackle the question they were asking at a similar level of rigor (like your "could you get a paper accepted" criterion) then you are pretty unlikely to understand and appreciate the less good options.
Don't know about IBs, but consultancies offer the chance to work across a real range of clients and industries, and in a variety of roles. The ability to do something fresh on a fairly regular basis but without changing employers is appealing to certain minds.
Hacking Work Manifesto
Or USB->WiFi.

The mini-USB bluetooth adaptor that they currently have stock of in my local pound shop (for, not surprisingly, £1) (they look very like http://cgi.ebay.co.uk//300388440707 so may be the same thing) work perfectly will under Ubuntu (at least on 10.04 and 11.04). So as long as the bluetooth stack doesn't eat too much of that small chunk of RAM and network speed is not a big issue you could use the PAN or DUN profiles for networking on the cheap, tethering to a phone or a desktop/laptop with bt and PAN/DUN support.

The official site doesn't say anything about power but as the image only shows USB and screen connections I assume it runs off the power a USB connection can provide, so it could probably run nicely off a pair of AA or AAA batteries. I can think of a number of play projects for monitoring (attach a cam, mic, temperature probe, and so on via USB) or display (attach a small LCD screen and/or a beeper and you've got a portable status monitor for some other project).

Something like this could be great fun for a nerd like me to spend a bit of time playing with. A bit like an Arduino for a software-only person. If they do hit the market at the £15 estimated or there abouts I'd certainly buy a couple, as I'm sure would a couple of my friends.
I'd be very careful when considering and implementing most of these ideas. While the sentiment is correct (make users' experience easier), many of these approaches have pitfalls or require fallbacks.

Your signup and login pages MUST be bulletproof.

Autofilling city/state from zip, for example, requires an updated database of postal codes, but users will often consider your autofill city as "wrong", since they use a different district/locale name. Make sure users can override your guesses.
good point. Unfortunately, I have ended up working on big apps that were written early 2000's during the big Java migration which means Jsp/Struts 1/EJB 1&2. The apps tended to be developed under a short timeline by a lot of developers so the lack of clear direction really shows.

Sorry I'd like to meet up but in sunny South Carolina (go gamecocks !)
Software is a lot more unreliable than bridges and buildings because it can be. People pay a lot of money to have reliable physical constructions. Some also pay for reliable virtual constructions (think 30-year-old space probes). There's no sensible business need for Facebook, say, to have three 9's reliability.
Agreed. So much of making things easy for the user is sticking to convention and giving them what they expect to see.

I think most places use the "Forgot Password" link now so I think most people come to expect it. I know I would.
New flexible paper computer to be unveiled soon
You need to take a break and let your brain recoup to be more productive.

Watch a movie and hog down huge bags of popcorn and a 10kg bar of chocolate.

I know people will say running/swimming, but that is good for when you are stressed. Not when you are almost burnt out. You are mentally fatigued and you need to do something that doesn't involve too much brain power while still being interesting enough - movie with indulging in movie food would work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reframing It's not that clever.
Is the local funding for schools a uniquely US thing? In a piece that's all about questioning assumptions that stuck out to me (as a non-US native) as a being a weird thing to take for granted.
How do you define high end? Because to me, and people in general out there, Apple is (always) high end in the sense that they're about as high quality as you can get as far as these kind of devices go. They don't charge "high-end" prices for some of their devices, but price isn't the metric you judge something to be high end or not.

Of course, if high end for you means diamond studded or gold plated, then we have a different case here.
I couldn't do it but I bet it's possible..
It doesn't. The parent worker was talking about moving to the UK.
Unfortunately, the prevailing sentiment right now seems to be that OpenID is not a good idea.
End users don't need to memorize any passwords. They don't know them and they do not care what the passwords are (nor should they). They only need to know how to generate them when needed. Read about SHA1_Pass and try it out. I use it (and wrote it) to deal with hundreds of passwords that change frequently.

I tried to make traditional password managers work for a number of years, before realizing that the traditional approach (password storage, master password) is fundamentally flawed and introduces more problems than it solves.
Your comment makes little sense; if my piss poor attitude makes HN a better place than why the downvote and snide remark? What is so clever about yours?
You are implying that there are no moderate (or 'swing') voters, which is foolish when the big parties actively reach out for these people.

Instead, issues get polarised. Both parties and candidates have several different issues, so voters' actual preferences depend on which issues are important to them.

You also get tribal voters ("My family has always voted conservative") who are unlikely to care about the issues in any election, but these cancel each other out somewhat in a plurality or AV/IRV vote.

Nevertheless, I hope we can agree that accurately modelling voting habits is complicated, not simple.
A PR system maintaining one representative per constituency is already in use in the United Kingdom - in both Scotland and Wales.
Having said this though, it sure seems that software is alot more unreliable than most bridges and buildings, so the question is, "Why?"

I'd say it is that way because for many use-cases, the point where software becomes useful is much lower than it is for bridges. If my MP3 software has a bug, worst case is I have to use a different one and import my library. If my stereo has a problem, it could electrocute me.
Craigslist is dead? News to me. I was using it just the other night...
While you're right that all CAPTCHAs are annoying, the CAPTCHA ads are a whole different level of annoying. I think you'd lose more goodwill than you'd gain in money from doing this.
Am I misunderstanding how to program or does this line look wrong? It appears to be missing the open curly brace.

> if (m == 0) return n + 1;}
Has Facebook Become The Master Key To Unlocking The Web?
Obviously there is no correlation between false results and a profit connection between the research and the researcher.

Or is there.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-p...
Intense...
I can see this being really cool. I'm interested to see where it goes.
Apparently this is how New Zealand selected their voting method (with a qualifying question beforehand, "Do you want to change the system? Y/N").

Very reasonable. So we'll never see it here. ;)
In the example given, "a" seems the least favorite, unless you ignore all preferences except the "first choice" preference. However, voting systems that take into account second and third choices (or more) cannot be perfect, since groups do not really have preferences in the same way that individuals do: a group can legitimately prefer every candidate to every other candidate, as Condorcet voting shows.
I use the scroll bar all the time when I don't have my mouse.
In Mac OS X Lion, you can reveal the scrollbar by mousing over to the right gutter area, and you can drag it as you would a normal scrollbar. There is also the option to have them always appear. But by Fitt's law that's an exponentially less efficient way to navigate through a document. How many people actually use scrollbars that way?
depends, I believe it will depend on what the user has to type.
The submitter obviously did not even read the article. The title is false:

"Asked whether it knew who had carried out the attacks, Sony responded with a single word: No."
Mathematicians want you to distrust everything. Scientists want you to believe whatever the data says.

If you know someone is a highly accurate person and they say something, then you should trust what they said to be correct. If someone is widely regarded as being highly accurate, it's likely that they are. If someone is scientifically decorated, it's likely they are widely regarded as being highly accurate.

In other words while there are a lot of links in the chain you can attack, if you want to succeed at being accurate yourself, you should consider the words of scientists as pretty strong evidence.

Now there are much stronger, more direct links that you can follow to achieve strong belief in something. You can study its actual behaviors and how they fit into well-regarded patterns of reality (which you can derive yourself from observing it, if you like) and then extrapolate these to a tentative conclusion about the world. You can also then go and publish your conclusion and begin to collect scientific accolade.

---

In short, science in no way suggests that you shouldn't trust something until you can take it all the way apart. Nobody does that (except mathematicians, sort of). It has been shown however that you can trace scientific accolade back to being highly accurate back to actually following and discovering all of those steps. It's also been shown that nearly the only way to become highly accurate yourself is to pare down to them.

This is closer to the actual promise of rational study.
"ad hominem (accusing the scientists of being motivated by something other pursuit of truth...)"

Is it your assertion that scientists are not motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth? Seems you are saying those who might think that are engaging in name-calling rather than simple observation of known facts. If this is your assertion (it is, but I'm giving you a chance to back down), please justify with evidence your claim that scientists are not motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth.