skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure about that. Certainly the need to learn math will remain reasonably constant, but I think you underestimate the ability of technology. Once we get high quality explanations that remove most bugs before they form, and practice questions that expose problems quickly (it wouldn't be too difficult to design a program to choose which problems each student should be given), and some sort of weak siri-level AI that can watch the student working to discover what they understand ... when all that happens, the demand for maths teachers/tutors will be very low. I suspect that a single qualified teacher could service 400 students.

EDIT to add: the problem with human tutors is that they are inconvenient. It takes time to schedule a tutor, and you can only get help at certain times (that is, during the tutoring session). Human tutors have many advantages, but a program that is merely passable will nevertheless be immensely popular simply because it is convenient.
I'm quite certain that David is talking about viewing somebody's comments within an individual thread.

The page that you're talking about will display all of the threads they've commented in at the same time.

They're close, but not quite the same thing.
Sadly, in a world where the gaming industry has become more profitable than the film and music industry combined, this has become the nature of things. I'm going to a gamification seminar tonight that I'm expecting to be the same. Phooey.
Porn is to the Internet as selling drugs is to Bitcoin.
Exploiting SAP.com's Intrusion Detection System for fun
If weather is chaotic, how will sampling initial conditions help?
Idea guys are great when they bring lots of money.
The actual court case will drag on forever I'm sure. But their ability to force a settlement seems pretty badly hurt. It's much easier for a corporate legal department to take a wait-and-see approach, waiting for a resolution here. The perceived risk is lower.
On living other people's lives.
If you click on "Other accounts" at the top then you can point it at an mbox folder, if that's what you mean by "local offline".
I would think that, as a Science Fiction writer, separating yourself from current technology as a whole would allow you to be more creative in how you perceive the world(s) you are creating.
But this usage of hidden php can sometimes be detected. If expose_php is not Off, you can see the X-Powered-by HTTP header and the PHP version, if the requested page was a PHP ressource.

You can also try to get the PHP eastereggs displayed with something like this, on a PHP generated page:

http://example.com/?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42

Trying to provoke errors or weird PHP specific behaviour, maybe with PHP error messages displayed, is another way to gather some informations about the script language used by a site. But this is already more aggressive than simply looking for an X-Powered-By: header.

Just rewriting the file extension does not make a site any safer. Omitting file extensions is generally an interesting alternative, because in case you change from .php to .aspx or whatever, all URLs stay the same. Cool URIs don't change.
Google for some reason will not let me add mutliple GMail accounts

Are you sure? Because I have 2, and it handles them beautifully. I can switch accounts in Gmail with one tap, and - mirabile dictu - appointments from both calendars are perfectly collated into one agenda. for things like YouTube or other sign-in services, I get to choose which account I want to use. So on YT I use my personal account, in Reader I use my work/study one.
Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
It works just fine on a PC. (Chrome here.)
After doing nearly all the exercises through 1.3 I did approximately 1/4 (randomly selected) through 1.5. I agree that the exercises generate good insights not in the text, but 1/4 might still be a good amount for me to do, given time constraints.

I just noticed that odd exercises helpfully have solutions in the back. So moving forward, I'm planning to do all exercises marked recommended/important, all numbered 1 mod 4, and a few others that seem helpful.

For the exercises which don't have solutions, it would be nice to have a place where we can compare answers yet not post them to the public internet. Would anyone else find that useful?
Interesting observation. I almost never post now. I never used to fight, intensively or otherwise. Nor do I now. I spend far less time on HN now than I did when there was a mechanism to easily determine the quality of the debate.
I'm curious, what has happened to the average time spent on comment-pages since removing the points?

I personally don't care about fights, they're usually confined to a single nested thread which is easy to skip right over. What I can't stand is not being able to judge consensus on topics in which I'm inexperienced. In that regard Hacker News has gone from being my main resource for diving into new topics, to being near the bottom of my list of resources.

Removing points hasn't merely reduced HN's usefulness for me, it's put it in an entirely different category. This used to be a place for me to skim and read an entire thread, top-to-bottom, and provide insight where appropriate. Now, if anything, I read the first couple comments and move on, because I just don't have the time.
One of these things will happen: (1) A successful attack on Tor, (2) A successful attack on Bitcoin, (3) The Silk Road's (or similar site's) share of the black market will continue to grow rapidly.
Compression in the Node.js Memcached Library
Please, can someone ship a copy of The Matrix to those scientists?
It usually get's to my nerve when people jump in the "PHP is inferior language because I decided so" bandwagon, but this kind of security strategy ind of gives some base for such criticism.

Disable external execution functions, eval, disable disable, disable. It appears to me that this is following the approach of disabling everything and nothing, then start coding without any security concerns, because you 'secured your PHP'.

I'm not a security obsessed person, but after hearing so much fuss about PHP lack of security I headed up to milw0rm a few years ago to see what it was all about. To my surprise (not so much) all the exploits were based on non sanitized user data.

Why would you use user data without sanitizing it? Why would you protect yourself against a file the hacker uploaded? (they should not have uploaded it in the first place)
Why would you feed exec, eval, etc with potentially dangerous content?

If a programmer is stupid enough to do so, disabling such functions won't prevent him/her from screwing up big time some other way.

My advice: write proper applications with proper standard security in mind. It's not that hard.
I'm somewhat sad that the ML course project isn't an option available to the online students. I know there's no way something like that could scale, but I'd still like to have more validation that I know what I'm talking about than 'yes, you can answer ?'s and do programming assignments.'

When he found out I'm taking this course (he's a Stanford alum from the 90's), the CEO of ThisOrThat, the startup I work for, was really excited. He said I could use production data for a project if necessary, and gave me some ideas for possible ML applications that would be really helpful to have on the site (fraud detection, a reputation system, etc). I'm looking forward to this more than anything I did in college or grad school, and I actually feel like I'm on the young side of 25 again.

Even so, I'd really like having someone who groks ML giving me pointers after the fact. 3 months just doesn't seem like enough time to do a thorough dive into the material for me to say with confidence "I understand the background and problems in the field of ML".
One college student running an app ("69 Positions") already caved.

Unfortunately, it sounds like Lodsys still has most of what it needs to lean on the indie developers - the fact that the devs simply can't afford to pay for defense.
Godfather of SV shares angel insights
seems pretty nice, let's play with it! :).
This seems like SIFT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...) in a nutshell.

Here’s how image recognition works in a nutshell. It starts with identifying points of interest in an image — the points, lines, and patterns that provide sharp contrasts or really stick out from a bland, featureless background. It’s similar in some ways to how the human eye picks out edges and points by keying off the places where there’s sharp contrast.

Then it looks at how these points are related to each other — the geometry of the whole set of points. You could picture it as looking like a constellation of stars, even though really it’s a more sophisticated mathematical model of these points of interest and how they relate.

Now it compares that model to all the other models in a huge database. Those other models come from images it has already analyzed from around the web. It looks for a matching model, but it doesn’t have to be a perfect match. In fact, it’s important that it be a bit flexible, so it doesn’t matter if it’s turned around, or shrunken, or twisted a bit. The Taj Mahal still has the basic geometry of the Taj Mahal even if you photograph it from a little bit of a different angle or photograph it lower in the frame. When Google recognizes that it matches that model best, it guesses it’s probably the Taj Mahal.
App Engine HTTP GET 3x slower than in 2009
At the moment Apple have cornered a market based on their (Steve's) company policies. Eventually "Apple Fever" will wear off and another company will produce something so amazingly worth spending $600 on.

This however, is the same as any company's stock history. My argument is that the future of AAPL isn't in mobile devices (exactly) but in producing parts for it. It may be comparable to Intel sometime soon.
MongoDB Ruby Driver 1.4.1 has been released
yeah, I've been thinking about it. thank you for suggestion! I'm going to contact a lawyer as soon as it becomes reasonable
To further clarify.
Imagine, for the sake of a nice example, that MS owned the patent to pinch-to-zoom.

Google incorporate pinch-to-zoom in android but don't actually sell any product featuring pinch-to-zoom so aren't actually infringing on the patent.

Some other company produces an android device and thus creates a product that uses pinch-to-zoom and thus infringes on MS' patent.
All it's done is freeze the status quo. Nobody votes any more, so those users who had lots of points at the cut off get to exercise their extra powers, and the rest of us just have learn to be good little serfs. I for one have come here less because the voting has become so pointless.
From the polls that happened in the past, I saw more votes in favor of showing scores.
>Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.

That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads.

A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.
I would prevent uploads of arbitrary PHP files. If they are not parsed by the PHP interpreter, they might be delivered as PHP source code, like an ordinary text file. This could be used to be included into another vulnerable website. So your website is part of an attack, the malicious code is on your server, but remotely included and executed on another machine.

Also, if nearly arbitrary PHP files can be uploaded, the chances might be good that it's possible to upload other files as well, like some additional .htaccess files for subdirectories.
1. Is the problem with the phone or Android? I'm still using a Nexus One and rely heavily on the navigation features because I hate asking people for directions. I usually get a fix within 1-2 seconds of turning the phone on.
There's a huge difference between an opinion held by one person and one held by 100 people.
Why not? Don't you think the language design discussion would be improved by your knowledge?
People you don't like Radiohead

... are idioteque

... woke up sucking a lemon
Old pages are valuable since the quality of discussion is very high here. I, for example, did a search on "NYC" and read all the discussions (pros and cons) of doing a startup in NYC vs SF and, just in general, life for a hacker in NYC vs SF. And I do searches on tools like VIM and see what everyone is recommending to do and all the good tutorials people submit. For certain topics, I prefer to search here than Google. A number of discussions on here are timeless.

I'm not arguing to show points. It's fine without the points. Just saying that old pages are valuable to me.
Twosides.co still the most promising startup idea to you
Show HN: Feedback on my resume website written in Nodejs
Here was Jason Calacanis's take on May 15: "Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen" -- "We are 100% certain that governments will start banning bitcoins in the next 12 to 18 months. Additionally, we’re certain bitcoins will soar in value and a crush of folks will flood the system and start using them." http://www.launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most...
I agree with you about the podcast. I listened to a few episodes and stopped listening to any of 5by5 podcasts.

In general, I have not listened to many different podcasts, but so far I felt that they were very repetitive and there was very little to gain from them. It kind of felt like I was reading a forum with debates about text editors. It is addictive, but not productive.

Aside: If anyone has a good podcast to recommend, please do.
You can follow the progress or add an issue on the repo:

https://github.com/milesmatthias/hiremiles.com

I appreciate any advice/feedback! Thanks!
$ gsettings list-recursively | wc
1037 3367 56466

$ gsettings list-recursively | gzip -9c | wc -c
11700

Here. What is the issue you are trying to understand?

$ gsettings list-schemas | wc -l
211

I guess we can assume a schema == a config file
Out of curiosity, did you measure that quantitatively or is it just a qualitative observation? If quantitatively, what did you use to measure it? (Totally just randomly curious...)
>And, notably, Microsoft has never sued Google over those products.

Apple has never sued Google either. And no one has ever sued kernel developers. It doesn't make any sense at all suing someone that isn't directly making gobs of money from selling the software/hardware. Also, big tech giants don't usually sue each other over patents, since the other side can retaliate in kind and then the end result is cross-licensing minus wasted lawyer money and PR cred.\

It's Samsung, HTC, Motorola etc. making the real money from Android.

> ..when there is simply no evidence that those products infringe on any Microsoft patents.

Follow the lawsuits against Motorola and Nook for this. If they lose, the other licensees may think twice about continuing to pay. Also, Apple is trying to get in on the action.
George Orwell: Why I write
Why mbox instead of, say, Maildir? The irreversible mangling mbox requires makes me reluctant to use it as an archive format.
Here are two of the polls created by pg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
186 days ago

prefer points: 2355
prefer no-points: 1763

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
141 days ago

prefer points: 2717
prefer no-points: 1703

So, 57.2% and 61.5%, respectively, were in favor of bringing points back.

EDIT: succinctness and formatting

EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.
Could we perhaps have powers of 2 shown?? ie where points are 1,2,4,8... 1,2,3,4.. are shown.

This would still allow some way to see the relative opinion of other HN users, but hopefully with less problems than you saw with the direct points system. (personally i was ok with how it used to be).

Whilst here could i request a minimize thread button (like reddits); without it allows anyone to hijack the top comment's popularity (and overly/improperly focuses discussion around it), at the cost of the guy who properly started a new thread.
URDU SEX STORIES: Shadi Mamu Ki, Suhagraat Meri
iOS is lovely. All the apps are represented by finger-sized icons.

In Ubuntu, neither Unity nor GNOME 3 have any desktop icons by default. Unity at least has a dock on the left, but GNOME 3 requires you to click "Activities" before you can do anything else.

In both, the only way to have desktop icons is by changing an obscure setting in an application that isn't installed by default.

Unity's dash is also far from a "grid of icons". You need to open the dash, click the "more apps" button, and finally click a relatively small target at the top of the list before you can see all of your installed apps in a grid.
Sean Parker Is Back With A New Startup And He Wants To Poach Facebook Employees
Sean Parker: Yes, My New Startup Is Called Airtime
If I recall correctly, right after the switch there was a significant majority that wanted the points back.

A month later, it was a 50/50 split.

I'm incline to believe now that the trend would suggest more people are happy without the points.
Show HN: My casual project - a pastebin for poetry
Because VoiceOver (Apple’s screenreader) uses a female voice. At least if you pick US English as your language. You will get a male voice if you pick British English or French. (Siri uses the same voice as the screenreader. There is only one per language, unlike on the Mac where you can pick from different voices.)

What’s the underlying reason for Apple picking a female US English voice for VoiceOver? They probably bought the voice that whoever worked on it liked best and that also worked with the limited resources on the iOS devices.

The default voice for VoiceOver on the Mac is “Alex”, a male voice. It sounds much better than the iPhone’s voice, probably because a Mac can throw much more resources at voice synthesis. I bet the iPhone would use “Alex” as its US English voice if it had the chops to do so.

All the rest is the author’s silly imagination. Go ahead and ask Siri what sex it is.
Ask HN: What tools/resources do you have/use for competitive research? 
Aside from Alexa and CrunchBase, what do you use to a) assess the landscape as a whole and b) look into individual competitors?
Show HN: A simple Ruby script to delete duplicate photos
How about just showing them in the best or bestcomments list page or creating a new list page that shows them?
I'm of the belief that William Gibson pretty much hates computers which is why he wrote so much about them. He doesn't write SF, he writes anti-SF. An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. Gibson's novels about cyberspace and that relied extensively on handwaving, magical thinking, and "unseen, unknown threat" to develop their narratives.

This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows more about computers than you. Hint: Rather than look at technical details, he has always thought about computers from the most critical perspective: at the points where they interact with people.
In proof of your point I was searching for comments by PG and instead found your request.
A tangential question for PG: whatever happened to perhaps showing logarithmic point values?

If I remember correctly, you were seriously considering this.

Personally, I like it better without the points now. But I do still wish there was an indicator of high-quality comments (I think you said you were considering an orange dot?).
How to Update Twitter and Facebook with Siri on Your iPhone 4S
So crippling utility in favour of civility is a fair trade?

Like others, I found it very helpful to be able to gauge the general consensus on a topic by the number of points each comment had. If the price for that is having to skip over a fight or two, I'm pretty okay with that, personally.
Yes. Just simple tools and the writing. Canny, and aware of the demands of the industry (word: 'talks to publishers'). The page is small (word-count/ego) and to the point as well.
So does Digg. I wonder how they are going to pivot after all that drama.
Who gives a shit what some famous spammer says about crypto-currency?

Plus, how do you ban something like this?
I watched Bezos unveil the Fire, and I wasn't really impressed with his presentation skills. Not nearly as good a story teller as Jobs.
TechZing - http://techzinglive.com/
Back To Work - http://5by5.tv/b2w

~3 hrs of content that is consistently released weekly
It's a commendable project but it's very naive to think that more and better data is what's keeping people from from engaging in better debates or politics. I've seen similar platforms and what happens is that people continue preaching to the choir.
Anyway, points on comments doesn't say if a comment is good or bad; it says if people agree or not with it.
> Python is a general purpose language, and scientific computing is a single domain.

I think this is shortsighted to the point of ignorance. "Scientific computing" here really means "performance-critical numerical computation on regular arrays". Basically all of the new things that people are doing with computers in the last five years and the next five years — machine learning and other statistics, software-defined radio, audio synthesis, real-time video processing, cool visual effects, speech recognition, machine vision, and 3-D rendering, and arguably Bitcoin — consist largely of performance-critical numerical computation on regular arrays. It's what GPUs are for. Five years ago, Numeric or NumPy was probably the best way to do that for a wide range of things, although a lot of people still use Matlab instead, and R deserves at least a mention. Today it's not clear. Five years from now there will be something much better than current NumPy, and it could be a better version of NumPy or it could be R or Matlab or Octave or something.

In short, "scientific computing" is not a single domain, but a set of capabilities increasingly important in many different domains.
With points I might have to read the odd 'popular cheap shot' when finding gems.

Without, I have to read everything, including these 'popular cheap shots'. And as many have stated (but i can't really quantify-- because i can't see how many people are voting them up!) there isn't the time or the inclination to read everyone's posts.
Company Culture, as Explained by Jasonfried
Most of what Facebook and Google do is thanks to advertising revenue, with variations on the theme.

If something comes along to take that away, a start-up with a new business model, then data becomes the thing that has value for them. Here, privacy issues get racked up so both Google and Facebook would start to look shaky if that happened too, and there are signs.

That's where Amazon and Apple are both superior. They've never been based solely based on an advertising business model, if they get revenue with iAds it's a bonus. It's the fact that they control their market places which is important. And they have what people want to buy.
Gorgeous! Nice work - really shows off how much detail on textures the new camera captures.
Perhaps also see my comment nearby about how "scientific computing" isn't really a narrow domain any more. It could add ammunition to your argument.
It seems pretty inevitable in the longer term. If current technologies break up, new technologies will be popping up. I guess law enforcement has already lost this battle (in the long term), similarly as RIAA/MPAA has lost to piracy.

It should also be noted that criminal use doesn't raise the price of bitcoins, since criminals don't necessarily hold their bitcoins. For them bitcoin is just an another money laundering system.