skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But to claim that some history books are better than others is just wrong.

How can you even write that? That statement is just so ridiculous as to befuddle belief. There are history books in existence written with deliberate lies mean to indoctrinate people in certain ways. Are you saying that these books are no different from other books that have no lies inserted? Are you saying that books that don't incorporate newly discovered evidence about the past aren't more complete than books which don't?

Yes, it's true that we have to account for the unreliable narrator, but to then say that we must abandon all attempt at objectivity with regard to history is absurd! There is so much one can do to mitigate the problems of an unreliable narrator and when we can't mitigate it entirely (most of the time,) we can always express our margin of error. True, there will always be some degree of uncertainty but the purpose of studying history is to decrease that degree of uncertainty.
The industrial food system is efficient use of land and keeps those smells city folks don't like far away. There are other advantages that people have looked at other than food to decide where to put a city.
Richard Dreyfus Reads the iTunes EULA
The Atlantic has a post somewhat on this, slowing how transit-centric behavior can lead to more disposable income:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/the-fina...
Samsung courts modder community with free phones
Ask HN: What is the safest online bank?
Most of what I hear about banks implementing two-factor authentication includes something like "they wanted the least amount of inconvenience for their customers." I don't care about that. I want a bank that is as safe as possible for online banking regardless of the difficulty.

What banks should I look at?
Should we teach different things to different children, then, in order to promote educational diversity?
How is Call of Duty different than a soldiers account of how a battlefield looked like?

Between a WWII veteran's personal account of the battles and playing CoD, which one would you pick? If you pick the veteran's account, you know that Call of Duty trivializes war. There is a difference.
Carl Sagan - A Life in the Cosmos
It's the bank's fault simply because this system has been broken for at least a decade, they know damn well it is broken, but they don't make as much profit if they invest in fixing it.

This won't change until it becomes more expensive for them to leave it unfixed - either by market forces, or by regulation.
The way I've heard it argued is that as more and more things happen in the client, you want some level of data validation there. But as we all know, it's not enough to just validate the data in the client - you need to do it on the server too. So hence code duplication.
Evernote Peek, The First iPad Smart Cover App
Well actually, history does consist of value-neutral facts, but the sum total of all those facts is far too complicated for any one mind to comprehend. This atom moved there, that atom moved here, and so forth. Even if you scale up to the actions of individual people rather than atoms, we're still far beyond what we could comprehend... and in any case, most of it isn't recorded.

Having acknowledged the limitations of the historian's knowledge, though, the question is what do you do next? A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases.
Benchmarking is illegal says Microsoft
"The normalize.css file is not intended to be a mysterious "black box" that is included in a project and then ignored."

Is there anything that is? I think I'd prefer to use that, if it existed.
Torrent here, when done:
http://burnbit.com/torrent/170493/twitter_sql_bz2
I rarely use the "for" or "while" keywords. I use the algorithms instead.

The containers have been designed with this is mind.

If you don't use the algorithms, indeed, the STL can be cumbersome to use.
yeah, this happens all the time everyday with cash. life goes on...
Expecting people who know nothing about security to make an informed decision is unreasonable. It's much like expecting people to choose a building that won't fall over in an earthquake when they aren't architects - the responsibility lies with the architect for claiming that the security is good enough, not with the customer for trusting the expert.
This is the linux model. First, discussion then front-line coders create a patch, then lieutenants review the patch and submit to their superiors who review the patch and ultimately, all patches go through Linus before being committed to kernel. This way, the style and potential issues are enforced by the most senior people that are the stewards for the code base.

Linus has deputized a few people to commit without his review, I believe.. but this is after years of working with them.
That's it, I'm moving all my savings over to EVE timecards. They'll never go after that, CCP has an economist on staff.
Canadian Conservative Party's website hacked
Clark Howard (the consumer radio personality) recommends that businesses use a separate computer for all bank related transactions. And that computer isn't used for email or other web access.

You should also contact your bank and request double or dual authentication on any wires. If your bank doesn't offer this, then get a different bank.

http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clarkhoward/business-entrepr...
A true visionary.
Writing a Twitter scraper is pretty trivial and you can find several good examples on Github. I'd put mine online, but the commands I was using in 2009/2010 are changed/deprecated largely and my code wouldn't run.

In either case, as Sethish said, distributing dumps like this is against the new ToS.
Thanks for your suggestions. Screen readers is something I've thought about (it would be Orca as it's free and available for Linux), as is including more debugging software like Weinre by default. Neither IE8 or 9 can currently not be run in Linux, afaik.

For testing IE8 and greater you need a separate Windows virtual machine, one that can't be distributed legally.
No, it is a run on paragraph. The equivalent of a run on sentence is a method that is way too long.

Also, we practice code review at our work. That is definitely a way of fulfilling the role of being editors.
Greeble
Finally: Japanese scientists create touchable holograms
> Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.

On a cost basis, public transportation is more expensive and less versatile than roadways.

// no bus stop within 90 miles of where I am and the flooding is seriously problematic for rail
He seems to think you're on the verge of becoming the only educator on the planet, which is nonsense. He also doesn't discern between what you teach, and how you teach. YouTube accounts are free; He can get one.

Thanks for doing what you do. I think you're exploring what will become a incredibly valuable piece of the puzzle, especially for those without the advantages of a western public school system.
That smells like a rhetorical question. But my answer would be yes.
Example: You are building an editable list. The client insert and delete items from the list, which is then synchronized with the database. Now you need the HTML generating code on both the client and the server.

Another example: validation. You want to validate on the client for responsiveness, but on the server for integrity.
hmm so how will they outlaw bartering?

But than again the derivative traders, they are allowed to make free money and steal without any change..
Additionally, this data probably isn't as useful as many might think. We found that collecting random tweets probably isn't that useful for most research overall, partially because using any of the streaming APIs omit tweets. Even 'full' firehose seems to omit some tweets, so it can't be considered a complete set, nor verified as a completely random set.
Potential XSS Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails Applications
I'm just curious and not out to cast aspersions on him because I liked that profile very much, but is $20/day more than most Chinese workers make? I have no idea, so am just asking.
This is a very clever idea. This 'tactic' could be used with a lot of different apps too, maybe even a notification bar?
Are You Fighting To Be Average? Seven Steps to Break the Bonds of Mediocrity
Go ahead and don't care about IPv6 day
> In contrast, our research indicates that Android developers must create six versions of their apps on average.

That part makes no sense to me. I've never seen a single app in the Android Market that has 6 different versions. And it would probably be obvious. The Market will hide apps that aren't compatible with your device, but each app still has to have a separate, unique name.

The most versions of a single app I've been able to find is TouchDown, which has 3 versions: 1 for Android 1.x devices, 1 for Android 2.x devices, and 1 for MobileIron customers. The third version arguably would still exist even if there were only a single Android handset. http://www.appbrain.com/browse/dev/NitroDesk%2C+Inc.

Anyone have a concrete example of an Android app with 6 versions in the Market?
HNSearch temporarily down (until 1:25pm EST)
The Smart Fortwo wasn't designed for efficiency or cheapness; it was intended to be a tiny car for dense European cities where the ability to park in very tight spaces would allow you to find a space quickly. Parking on curbs and in odd spaces may be relatively common in Europe, but it's generally a good way to get ticketed or towed in the US, so the main selling point for the car is moot.
The problem is that you think someone who watches this video would then "know there was a Russian Revolution." No, they wouldn't--at least not in any strong sense of the term "know". All they would have is some phonetic sequence that they could repeat.

At that point, it's just a game of 'guess the password'. http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/
You don’t profit in a monopoly, you work harder: A lesson from Apple
Well, they have to use something while the servers are being built, and something that's not local to their campus to give a good feel for how much speed & lag they need to deal with. I'm sure AWS is a fine contender for a test environment while the hardware is being installed.
Personally, I believe he is a spiteful fool afraid of a revolution in education

Please refrain from name-calling.

On one hand, you're rightly pointing out that one fifteen-minute video by one guy can never be an all-encompassing summary of thirty years of world history. And you're right.

But then you're talking about the Khan Academy as being some kind of "revolution" in education, even though the Khan academy still consists of fifteen-minute videos by one guy. This is the article's point -- there's some pretty serious limits to what we can expect out of a Khan-Academy sort of model. He's done a great job with introductory mathematics, but there's a crapload of work that would need to be done to make it an adequate source for other subjects.
Yeah, he says something like:

"You should buy stock... it is what I have done"
Thanks for commenting, I clicked through to the third page eventually and saw that reasoning.

Sucks that you guys are the ones getting punished, here, the "nexus" mechanics are stupid. I'm not a California resident but I do think that if they have a sales tax, it should be across the board and include things purchased on the internet by CA residents.
Exactly this, I think most would agree that Apple attempts to either do it right or not at all.
Dutch want net neutrality
it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.

Yes, that's what I was thinking. The stuff the author quotes sounds bad, but probably better than you'd get from some teachers I had.

Plus on the Internet kids can watch these videos at any age. His simplified version of history could be way better than what e.g. an 8 year old might otherwise have access to.
My understanding is that it's tied to your Apple ID and the whole thing is free (up to certain limits). So if a user has your app, they have an Apple ID and they have some iCloud storage.

However, it is likely that, as a user, you have to allow an app to use it or not.

What I meant, basically, is that you can prompt the user to authorize iCloud, but the user will not have to be taught what it is or to create an account for it. They should have it.
How does this invade somebody's privacy? I don't get it - because it makes detecting a friend's face possible?
Sorry shareme, but this is pretty much a perfect example of a bad HN comment.

hmm so how will they outlaw bartering?

Unjustified logical leap.

But than again the derivative traders

Misspelling.

they are allowed to make free money and steal

Nonsensical accusation against a group of people engaged in an activity which I'm not sure you fully understand.

without any change..

Incomprehensible.

Please think before you type.
The great part about bit coins is there is no FTC oversight, making pump-and-dump schemes very easy.
The first point applies as well, to when his counterexample has happened.

Who has not seen a piece of code that is so bad they don't even understand how it can compile, coming out of a newbie?

Doing strange undefined things in C comes to mind as a usual case where this happens.
>he is testing one aspect in isolation of others. This is a good thing, and is generally the way in which scientific tests advance knowledge.

Yes, maintaining constants and only altering one variable. But this test has an 2nd variable, that is altered into a special state for all of the experimentation, and then we make the leap into assuming that these results are anything other than pretty to look at when the 2nd variable is in any other position.

This is a good test for seeing which server runs best with a load testing client competing for resources on the box and using the loopback network. Thats it.

The problem is you can't test without a network stack at all, you can only test with a different network stack. Whats to say the particulars of the loopback network aren't causing more issues to be introduced to the validity of the results than the full TCP/IP stack you're trying to avoid influencing the results? Nothing, that's what.
This barrier is quickly going away as well.

Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) is virtualizable. I'm sure someone will build a rack and offer cloud-based Lion accounts for developers that can be remoted into 24/7 so long as you have internet access.
Adobe Acrobat 8.1 Professional Portable : photoshop download
I actually did read that book (I bought it on sale, natch).

But the whole thing is seriously flawed, because all his statistics are based only on the small fraction of millionaires whom he actually interviewed, who are surely not a random sampling of all millionaires.
Education’s upcoming technology eruption
> you could very well have $300k "stolen" out of your bank account if the FDIC shuts your bank down one Friday

I thought that was the whole point of the FDIC? That we don't lose our bank account contents if our bank dies.
Hell, this reminds me of another thing I want to say. The word that leaps out here is "smalltalk". The short-method school of OO came from the Smalltalk world. It has since been extrapolated to other languages. I am skeptical of this extrapolation. It's fashionable to say language choice doesn't matter that much, but I think language choice has a powerful effect in conditioning how one thinks about one's program. Different languages give rise to different ideas, and ultimately very different programs. It wouldn't surprise me if the short-method style makes good sense in Smalltalk environments for reasons that don't naively extrapolate to other languages. But that's just a guess.

By the way, the reason the above language effect doesn't get discussed is that when we compare languages we're almost always talking about already-existing code (look at how you can write X in Haskell or whatever). This leaves out the most important factor, which is how the language affects the creation of X in the first place.
This was Sun Microsystems' vision of computing in 1982, 15 years earlier.
I don't think he gets that Khan isn't the big idea. The market can select for history teachers that are better than Khan. The big idea is that many won't need universities moving forward.
I think this was in referrence to adding "reset.css"[1] as your first css file. It is very "black box," as it is something that you add but never modify.

[1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
All hail the Great Cause of Communism!
I don't think anyone's denying that a closed community is trading money back and forth speculatively among themselves for some commodity, and at any given time some are making money while some are losing money.

You could say the same about baseball cards.
Brilliant. However, I'd argue that SEO, project management, and development are fairly abstract to many.

Thinking about it more, I think UX has a lot in common with project management. They're both positions that are about overseeing components. I mean, it's easy to theoretically overlook why you even need managers period. It seems like you wouldn't NEED them because all of the component pieces could do the job, until you realize you do. I just think we've learned over time that project management is needed. We haven't yet decided if UX (as in, someone overseeing and synthesizing IA, graphic design, dev) is needed in the chain of command.
Glass Company
Evo Glass is an Australian company that specialises in flat glass production and has been extensively marketing their products all over Australia and into international markets. The company also provides recommendations for glass selection that would best fit clients' needs.More information, visit www.evoglass.com.au
Current Mac Mini's solder the cable to the drive and it's not swappable. (It's like the new iMac's drives -- which have apple specific firmware and thermal systems, but worse.)
That sounds a LOT like what Walt Disney wanted EPCOT to be originally.

I often wish someone had taken his real dream (a closely knit city of work, living, and play areas that always worked towards the future rather than a lame [by comparison to what it should have been] theme park) and run with it.
>The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.

Are there no libraries? I believe that if you are truly self motivated enough to learn US history on your own (which is what the Khan academy is supposed to do), you'd be better off actually looking up a syllabus online and reading about the topics yourself.

A 15 minute summary of US history between World War II and Vietnam can only create the illusion of understanding, which I would argue is indeed worse than zero history (a factoid I find highly debatable).
This was a bank robbery, and the customer is just out the loss for money taken from the bank? That's a novel legal argument.
A coworker of mine worked with Eric Schmidt when he was at Novell. He was talking about the cloud back then. Now his vision is coming alive with Chrome OS.
-- I disagree.

- You can cluster users based on tweet data, links relationships &/or even user-to-user relationships

- Understand how retweets work and how fast they propagate.

- Sentiment analysis based on a specific keyword.

- Trend analysis.

There are N number of ways this dataset can be helpful.
You have 200MM tweets. Enough for a quick experiment using real data.

* Its true that is "random" data. Just unrandom it!
The most valuable thing you do is provide a basis for intuition in the topics you teach. Getting people to understand the "big picture" early on actually increases the appetite for curiosity, makes topics less intimidating and easier to learn.

I don't need all the facts, but I do need an understanding of why certain historical events (or any other topic) are important. Having that latticework in my mind allows me to kickstart learning the details, and synthesizing all that information.

Criticism of various learning models will always be around. Its important to listen to it, but at the same time, these ideas are coming straight out of people's heads - about what they "think" is a better approach. On the other hand, Khan Academy's success is a direct function of its wide-spread adoption. If it didn't work as well as, if not better than, what people learn in a classroom, people simply wouldn't watch. Not only that, I'm sure feedback (positive and negative) from actual users is much more useful than from someone ingrained in the old model (and most likely views himself as teacher only, and not a learner).

I'm an avid user of the site and I see this all the time:
Sal- "In the last video, I seemed to have confused people about so and so.. let me clarify that now." The videos and site are developing iteratively, and they have data to understand what people need/having trouble with.

Please continue to teach in this manner. Anyone who grew into, and succeeded in an academic environment (as virtually all professors have) will not see how transformative KA is for people who do not learn that way.
Ask HN:  Should I join my friends business?
A friend of mine has offered me a 30% share in his business to come in as the technical partner and develop and improve the product. He's been running the business solely for the last 4 years though only the last 2 has he focussed 100% on it.
The business itself only has 20 or so customers but due to it's nature (booking systems) that brings in a decent amount each month.

I personally think the idea and product are sound, the issue lies with my friend. When all is said and done, I'm just not sure he's the right person to take this business on to the next level. He's easily distracted and completely disorganised. He's also had years to take this business places himself but hasn't managed it and I wonder why?

On the flip side, we obviously get on really well having been friends for years, communicate effectively and he is very personable and outgoing making for a decent salesman.

I guess it comes down to if I can assert my skills & influence onto this business and my friend enough to make it successful. And, knowing how difficult that will be, do I really even want to try?

Any thoughts/advice would be much appreciated!
Since I compile all my CoffeeScripts into JavaScripts at node program start, code sharing is a breeze. For each file, I make a client version and a server version and use simple preprocessor lines:

#if client

#if server

#endif

for the pieces that only apply to the client side or the server side, with shared pieces staying outside these "tags". I won't go back. This is especially cool as I have a templating system that can run on the server or on the client. So for JS-enabled browsers, all HTML template rendering is done on the client by building all HTML tags out of very small simple JSON structs. For non-JS clients (spiders, bots, paranoid non-JS enterprise legacy browsers) the "pages" get fully rendered old-school by the server-side -- both sharing the same rather simple custom-made JSON-driven templating functions and producing essentially almost the same HTML output. Of course there are some added complexities going on with things like scripted onclicks, but you get the general idea. (This is mostly done for indexing spiders and human non-JS clients just simply have to put up with a limited, degraded, basic experience.)
so why be a janitor, of all things? certainly it wasn't for the job?
from what i remember, that add-on just tries to resolve hostnames that it sees, it doesn't actually show you whether you connected to that specific ipv4 or ipv6 address.