skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that by splitting the community into these micro sites they are making the whole stack-exchange universe less valuable and interesting.

First, the idea that questions can be easily classified into discrete categories is bullshit. Why have they set it up so that multiple tags can be assigned to individual questions? Because most, if not all questions span genres. Not only is it possible for a submitter not to know what category a question goes in, but it is also possible for the same question to legitimately belong in multiple categories.

Most importantly, however, the populations asking and answering these questions (or that you want asking and answering these questions) are not different. Do you really think that people answering questions under "programmers" and under "cstheory" wouldn't also be suitably answering questions under "cs"? Would a question posted under "cstheory" not be useful to people posting under "cs"? At what point in one's academic path does one transition from asking questions in "cs" to doing so in "cstheory"? After your second year of college, after graduating, or after being accepted to a phd program?

Think about it mathematically. Take 1,000 people posting in stackoverflow, divide that population in half and distribute one half of them equally between programmers, cs, and cstheory. The total possible connections and interactions between people in communities of size 500, 167, 167 and 166 is far fewer than the total possible connections and interactions within a single community of size 1000.

I had actually not heard of there being different stackexchange sites for "programmers", "cs" and "cstheory" before reading your comment. What a ridiculous thing to do, to split up these sites. And then to shut down popular questions inside stackoverflow in order to push people into these marginal sites? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
You can write apps in C or C++ on iOS if you like, but the framework (Cocoa) is everything.
Back in 1993, an interesting documentary titled "Money Man" was made about currency artist J.S.G. Boggs. I don't know if it's still available.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104909/

Here is a short YouTube clip from the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q

Searching images for "jsg boggs art" returns some of his work.
I see that friends are showed twice when they are in a relationship with another friend of you.

So if I have two friends: A and B, they're listed twice like:

A is in a relationship with B
B is in a relationship with A

Bit redundant imo.
Actually this topic has moved beyond philosophy. There is a beautiful and simple mathematical argument and formulation of Occams Razor in terms of the universal prior of Solomonoff induction.

For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference and http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability.

This is another but similar concept of an incomputable strategy with optimal predictive power http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~ted/203S10/References/peculiar.p... predicated on picking the simplest explanation.

In a practical setting complex theories or models with lots of explanatory variables tend to overfit the data. In machine learning, regularization or picking a proper prior and things like Minimum Description length in forming networks are instances of penalizing complexity for better predictive power. In decision trees, pruning is another example. In genetic programming picking the smaller and or faster of two similarly performing programs substantially reduces its tendency to overfit.
> Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-
> existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption
> are more likely to give rise to communist regimes

Seems more likely that whenever someone wants to rise to power as a despot, it's a lot easier when you are claiming to be communist/a workers' paradise/a government for the people, even if that description is in name only. E.g.:

Why do you want to over-throw $despot? You must be
an enemy of 'the people.'
Google's Algorithms for Talent
There were studies done that showed that he gains some advantages from springs in long, straight sections, but also has disadvantages in starting and turning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius#Dispute_over_pr...
You can credit the search and price, but for the content and community, the question is why did those come there in the first place? And perhaps search and price are the answer, but perhaps also word of mouth leading a critical mass of users also helped. And then the question is why did word get around in the first place. Marketing? Nice site design? Back to search and price? I can't tell because I started using it after it got big (or at least it feels that way). The upvote system, as always, also contributed a little I'm sure, as an encouragement to produce quality content. That kind of system seems a prerquisite at the very least, if not the reason for a site's success.
Okay, I'll give it a shot!
"To me, this outage is the most worrisome of all AWS service disruptions that I know about. In a nutshell:

AWS effectively lost its control plane for entire region as a result of a failure within a single AZ.
This was not supposed to be possible."

I find it funny how we have this assumption that if we don't architect across multiple AZs or regions we shouldn't be surprised when our service goes down because of an AWS failure, but that if we do, we're "pretty safe" -- and then Amazon itself experiences failure spanning AZs from a single-AZ failure.
>implying this was an engineering team decision
Smaller-screened, non-retina “iPad mini” expected before end of 2012
Speeding up OmniFocus with Launch Center Pro
Oh, er, I don't have a link, but I believe it was from a talk they did at //build about Metro. It shouldn't be too hard to find.
They're not really comparable. Skipfish is a fast crawler with some checks for DOM corruption, SQL metacharacters, and hygiene. sqlmap is a tool for exploiting SQL injection.

I like the code for Skipfish a lot, but neither tool is particularly important in the profession; if you're working with a contract application security firm and they give you findings that came from sqlmap or Skipfish, you should be irritated.
would love to hear spatel @ iorad .com
HP's see-through screen proposals secure US patent
OK, unfortunately I'm not in the UK.

I guess it's not possible to pre-order in the US/UK and then ship it elsewhere in Europe?
Arsonists attack Microsoft HQ in Greece (video)
Functions are curried by default in Haskell.
Well, you're right, but:

"provides a really broad range of useful and detailed content"

...which it gets from users. Who are motivated to contribute using game mechanics.

No, you can't just slap a points mechanism at any site and magically make it great. But "get credit for your work" is a motivation that is basic to human nature.

I say this as a longtime user with more than 10k points. I like helping others, but I must admit that having points to show for it is also a motivation.
Phisher Faces Up To 50 Years For Role In $1.5 Million Scam
Does Chrome use a custom-located/built-in Flash version?
When I visit http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about using Google Chrome (Version 20.0.1132.47) on Mac the Flash version is reported as 11,3,300,257. However, if I visit the same page using Safari or Firefox then Flash version is reported as 11,2,202,235. So is Chrome using Flash installed in some other custom location?<p>Also, it's interesting that even if Chrome is using a custom Flash version, the system Flash installer still wants to stop/kill Chrome application to perform the update.
Dark matter connects galaxy clusters
Added these to my feature list of Hacker Tools => http://github.com/killswitch/hackertools if you want to contribute or use.
It keeps crashing Mobile Safari (5.1.1) for me.
Awesome product, this is really fantastic. Creating basic tutorials/screencasts has always been such a time-consuming task, this will help immensely and is much easier for users to consume.

Here's a few usability items I uncovered while playing around with it...

- Support undo. I accidentally deleted a slide, but it was gone forever :)

- Same with on-slide elements...

- I used it to create a tutorial on modifying PDF document properties in Acrobat, but the dialog box was cutoff top and bottom and I was unable to scroll to close the dialog.

- The above issue resulted in me creating 42 slides instead of 12, because I kept clicking and scrolling to try to get to the 'OK' button on the dialog. The tutorial would have been usable, but there is no way to easily delete 30 slides at once, and clicking 'delete... confirm delete' on 30 slides is tedious.

Overall, very nice work, and best of luck!
Not really. I want the ability to make it into a multi-media in the truest sense of the term. I'd want it as an option, but not a requirement.

Maybe I'm just asking for a youtube-boxed sized version of hypercard. :D
The 7" size sounds great. I basically want something that I can use almost exactly like how I use my smartphone around the house (ie browsing the internet while lounging in bed or on the couch) but with a supersized screen. The 10" form factor fails that test for me, getting fairly awkward if I'm reclined at all. The fact that Google have gone out of their way to make it a usable GPS as well (with downloadable maps and functional voice commands even without an internet connection) is a nice bonus.
Using Basecamp to build the Basecamp calendar
That's a bit of a straw man. I could expect some kind of evidence for you being a king, whereas a goal behind the universe or evolution is a metaphysical matter. But yeah, we rule it out provisionally.
Few know?

That's part of every grammar school boys education. Or was, in my day. Newton sending a couple of dozen men off to Tyburn to be hanged, drawn and quartered was quite memorable.
First case of malware in the Apple App Store.
Certainly it can be done for some inventions. The RSA cryptosystem patent comes to mind as something that even experts wouldn't have seen. Likewise much of the original work on image compression, etc... You don't have to look that far to find brilliance -- we're swimming in it. So again, that just sounds like a platitude to me. Rather than try to defend the nonsense, you're hiding behind the fact that you can't be proven wrong.

Or conversely: the world you apparently want to live in is one where "protectable innovation" is cheap and worthless. Every simple improvement on an existing system becomes someone's property. Do you really want that? I don't think you do -- I think, frankly, that you want every simple improvement made by Apple Computer to be protectable. Prove me wrong. I don't think you can. :)
Picture of A Single Atom's Shadow
How the hell did you get get somebody to give you money. I have a product but no money, want to trade places?
I find karma an effective motivator, but badges are worthless.
We wanted to make spontaneous meetups happen. However, our real world is not made for spontaneous meetups. You have to spam about 70 people to find some people to meet spontaneously. And if you only have 10 friends near you, chances are not good that a spontaneous meetup will happen.
>> it is one that almost all online communities face

I'd strike "almost" and "online" from this sentence.

Being part of community always means compromise. Only hermits win all their arguments. But most of us have decided that the benefits of community outweigh the cost.
A lot of these Git tutorials seem to walk you through a series of commands as if knowing the commands is knowing Git.

I think they should focus on scenarios instead. Short stories like: "Bob's code is working well but he wants to try something that might be completely misguided. He knows better than to mess with his working code....." Then at the end of the story a command is introduced. Also, some kind of indication of what Git is actually doing when you issue that command. When you tell Git to branch, what actually happens to the file system? When you say git status, what is it actually looking at?

And please, don't start a tutorial on Git without introducing the three area paradigm (working, staging/index, commit)

Here's a talk by Scott Chacon of GitHub.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDR433b0HJY

It's over an hour long and very detailed.
Really? Collaborative porn viewing sounds creepy!
More detail in the full article: http://www.nbcolympics.com/news-blogs/track-and-field/pistor...
Although I admire the guy, it doesn't make much sense to include him in the Olympics. If he were actually good enough to compete for medals, then everything would boil down to the results of the studies gauging the size of his advantage/disadvantage (as linked by stupandaus below).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius#Dispute_over_pr...

Track runners compete on tenths or even hundredths of a second, and it's silly to think you could have a reasonable, objective decision on the type of equipment he was allowed to use based off of the nebulous concept of an "advantage".
Api Design: Fail Fast
This sounds very fishy. Imaging and scaning software, along with printer drivers have built in currency detectors to prevent this.
PR exercise, maybe. "paid-for" is an accusation you can't back up and shouldn't make.
University of Calgary's Fat Thumb trick allows one-handed phone use
Printed Record Turns Drawings Into Music
>> even the vaguely-advanced questions I asked met with tumbleweed and whistling wind

Links?
yes this is already there...quick guide, interactive video all in one shot...
Out of curiosity, why was a parody posted on the blog?

Also this is hackernews so I'm not sure the readers here would find coding and networking "dry".

:)
>But this is Wired

You make it seem like these long-form narrative articles are a totally foreign concept to Wired, like this is a one-off piece that somehow slipped past the Wired editors who want brief pieces for the internet generation. Not true at all.

This article is nothing compared to a piece Neal Stephenson wrote about a trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable. It's hilariously long and pretty epic. I guess in your case I wouldn't recommend it, though.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

I don't know, man. I'm all for AP-length news stories about current events (I don't want to read artistic prose about every little news event), but sometimes it's fun and interesting to transcend the typical format. I'm one year younger than you, by the way, just so you don't think this is a generational issue.
Unless the analysis in http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/12/science-of-sport-awa... is quite wrong, I can't see how he should be allowed to compete. The story here is being cast as a win against bureaucracy, but ignores the fact that he has significant mechanical and metabolic advantages against able-bodied athletes.

Final paragraphs:

> The end result of this is that Pistorius was "cleared", based not on science, but on a legal process that was manipulated by science and the huge drive to permit Pistorius to run. And make no mistake, there is inspiration in the story.

> In fact, it got to the point where despite the science, I can appreciate the viewpoint of those who say "Sure, there is an advantage, but there's only one such athlete, and he's not running away with the gold medals, and so the good outweighs the bad, so let him compete despite that advantage".

> I disagree with that, but I can respect the opinion of those who believe it. What cannot be accepted, however, is the assertion that there is no advantage. Everything about the science points to the advantage, from the pacing strategy he uses, to the German-testing that found mechanical and metabolic differences, to the Texas testing which provided evidence of an athletic advantage.

> The science was clear, from the point of hypothesis, to the theory behind it, to the evidence. The deceit in the case, fueled by a willfully ignorant media who would rather portray as villains anyone who dares suggest what the science really says, is equally clear, to me at least.
US currency isn't printed on paper.
Actually, I don't have a smart phone.

Until recently, I did. It got broken. When I went to replace it, I realized that my iPad has displaced my smart phone in almost every way.

So I bought a flip phone.

I charge the battery every week whether it needs it or not.
"Ignored tags" just greys out posts with the tags I'm not interested in.

I have to explicitly limit myself to specific tags I'm interested in, and even then, I can't mute the idiot posts. I'll check if downvoting a question does this. But that's not always appropriate -- there are fair questions that just don't pique my interest.
Framework sauce...maybe some MVC-balls?
I am surprised by the negativity in here. I was really impressed by the article because I know what it's like to feel dumb just after you've said something to a stranger.

Rather than contrived, it seemed to me that the author pushed himself to find something that he genuinely liked. Sure he gave compliments that he wouldn't have given before, and that's artificial. On the other hand, his natural tendency to compliment certainly increased over the course of the venture, so I think that artificiality served a fine purpose.

I think the effort the author put in probably took him from hour 5 to hour 15 on his road to 10,000 compliment-hours and mastery. Fear of failure is the surest way to stifle success.

It's rare for me to feel challenged by such a light fluffy piece. I'm not sure I could do what he did.
Laser beam guides lightning bolts to a ground target
Apple, Samsung Scale Back Infringement Claims Ahead of Trial
There's no included camera app, but I've tried Google Talk with video on it and it's not terrible.
1. Can you link example questions?
2. Do you personally try to answer such questions?
3. If you get no answer, and subsequently figure something out, do you answer your own question as a help to the next person?

If you answered "no" to both 2 and 3, I would like to gently suggest that the community is only as good as its members make it.
"God Particle" was so yesterday. Today "Finger of God"
Ah I getcha now. I think my point is still valid though - and in fact full stack engineers are more likely to write a spaghetti code mess from the back to the front because they control the entire feature and may see the code in its entirety as one "feature" and thus one code base.
There are interesting facets to it, I think. What would they be using if Linux didn't exist? How much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? Or Windows?

How many of those millions of man-hours contributed to this discovery? How many other major breakthroughs have they enabled? How much amazing potential is locked up in proprietary software, utterly useless?

A major discovery like this is a perfect chance to blow the horn for publicly-funded research, and open source software is a huge part of that.
This should answer your question:

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/flash-player-google-c...
Hey, yes the logic is all clientside, in fact there's no server side code here at all.
I will look into the crashing issue asap. Thanx (on my 356 friends it works ok on ipad 2)
About the Time Bubba the Love Sponge Pointed a Gun at Me
That's a great idea! Home and office phones are just begging to be pulled out of the 1980's and into the modern world. I'd love to have a stationary desk phone that runs Android, integrates with my Google contacts, etc.

Unfortunately, the 2.4Ghz spectrum is overcrowded in my area, the Nexus only supports 2.4Ghz wi-fi, and packet loss is especially annoying for voice calls. (Although the word on the street is that the Nexus 7 supports USB ethernet. Hmm...)
Next holiday, use these Four Pre-Vacation Display Priorities
While that contributed to the fall of RIM, what really did them in was that they didn't have a real operating system that could be leveraged to properly compete with Apple and Android.
The concept of an inverted pyramid isn't quite what you're looking for here, is it? The inverted pyramid is the idea that a newspaper article leads with the most important facts first, followed by lesser and lesser details, so that one will always have read the most important facts for a given amount of reading no matter how long that amount of reading is.

But that's not really the problem with the Wired article. It's not in a newspaper, so it's legitimate to write it assuming the reader will read the whole thing. It's perfectly fine for the author to tell the story in chronological order (or whatever order is appropriate for communicating the important ideas).

Instead, I think the problem you and I have with it are the unnecessary artistic flourishes and the non-standard chronology designed to "pull" the reader into the article. Does anyone know what this aspect is called?

Edit: On second thought, maybe I'm just projecting. Do you really think that this article would have been better as a reverse pyramid?
Oracle decision could radically alter the IP playing field
Right. It's a technical term used incorrectly. If a journalist called a few teens selling weed a "drug cartel" they'd be likewise expected to correct it. These are (apparently) just rogue apps.
I also think we need less stories that linux played a major/significant role in X, but for different reasons. I think we need fewer "tool y played a major role in my success" stories. The tool fetish is distracting.

The scientist in the linked story comes out and says that he is not sure about the differences between BSD and linux and that windows could have filled the gap in principle.

Tools are tools. Whether its a hammer or a Scientific Linux Cluster the significant factor is the user, the carpenter or the physicist. The search for the theory of everything is not a logistics/supply-chain-management problem it is a question of physics.
The real irony is that the Meta question was deleted instead of being answered.

It just seems like there are so many people with vote-to-close permissions that it's statistically likely that some 4 of them will have a nit to pick with any question you ask.
Most people are uncomfortable with their voices. My boss, who has a great deep speaking voice and is a very confident extrovert has been recording the same 3 minute screencast over and over this week (I assume it is because the sound of hearing his own voice has made him very self conscious).

Record a screencast even if you have an accent. Silent screencasts with just clicking (or even worse - music) seem pointless.
It's a good idea. Nice job.

I have some issues with the usability of the presentations, specifically around the prominence of the next action. The green highlighting isn't visible enough, and the annotations look like buttons themselves.
TTFB is terrible data for anyone trying to optimize a website's page load. There are a dozen other easily quantifiable metrics one can easily gather

- page render time server side
- time until the user sees something meaningful (you ought to be able to measure this with a headless browser if you have some idea what the first thing you want the user sees) This will get you what people might think they're getting out of the TTFB metric.
- full page load latency
- data transfer latency

TTFB might be useful if you have some data that suggests your web server is a significant bottleneck, but I wouldn't gather it as a matter of course in trying to optimize page load times.
What Is The Difference Between A Worm, Trojan and a virus?
will torrent even without pirate bay

Or they'll just use any free proxy/VPN. TPB nowadays just serves magnet hashes, even the slowest, more restricted link is enough. The rest goes through DHT.
Measuring An Employee's Worth? Consider Influence
Great news everyone computers were used to do that thing that everyone's talking about! Aren't we so cool that something we talk about everyday is used in other things? I just get so excited when I think that the little machine that I've got on my lap now could be used for amazing scientific discoveries. Nobel Prize here I come!