skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A related anecdote: I saw mathematician Andrew Dilnot [1] at a Mathematica users conference a couple years ago, and he asked the audience how many times the size of the world economy had doubled since 1900, given that it had grown at about 5% per year. The audience guesses were in the 2-4 range, but he pointed out that the rule of 72 gives 110/(72/5) ~= 7.6. "Don't feel bad," he said, "last week I gave this talk to the council of European finance ministers, and they did no better!" (I may not have remembered the numbers exactly, but they were something like that.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Dilnot
"A system which relies on DNS, but in which anyone can setup a node seems better than a system that relies on DNS but only has one centralized node (Twitter), no?"

The concern here is that whoever is currently leasing the domain name has authority over users' identities. A better system would let users own their identities outright.

"In a truly decentralized system, you're not going to be able to have readable unique names without collisions. Why? [....]"

This is a well explored topic. A good place to start might be to look up "Zooko's Triangle" and then go forward from there towards various ways people have figured out to deal with such problems. (Zooko's wasn't the last word.)
I believe he meant that the machine was usually used as a gateway to his home network, but he repurposed it for the competition.
This exact system was just on the front page last week.

Just use BrowserID.
Yes, I remember that.

Ugly solution that didn't expose a UI for sites that didn't support it and still had plain username/password forms. So it's completely impossible to bootstrap this by making some of the features useful to browser users before it was widespread.

Needed a js library because it worked at the wrong level of abstraction and put browserid.org in the middle of the transaction for no sensible reason (well no sensible technical reason but a perfectly sensible political one).

This was not developed by someone thinking "how can we solve a problem our users have" but by someone thinking "it would be advantageous to be in the middle of login transactions and there is a user problem we could bolt that functionality on to".
I'm dreaming of a curriculum where students start to program their own computer algebra system in 9th grade (or earlier), say, using Python or Clojure. Starting by teaching it to solve simple equations for x, then proceed over the next 4 years by extending it to know about binomial formulas, solving quadratic euations, perform gaussian elimination, symbolic differentiation and integration, etc. I guess the world isn't ready for that idea, yet ;)
Indeed, Flash on OS X (at least, in Mountain Lion anyway) does not respect proxy settings. Additionally, the Flash BBC iPlayer will not work if it connects from the United States, despite what SG- has said below.
This is patently untrue, at least with the latest Flash in Mountain Lion. If you read the top paragraph of my post, you'd know this.
This is a bit of a curious post. I'm not sure the antidote to people being proud of ignorance in science/math (which is a problem) is to be proud of ignorance in the humanities (which is also a problem). I mean, if you'd rather go boozing than read Bertrand Russell, that's a choice you're free to make, but I wouldn't be proud of it. I guess I don't know much about the history of classical music myself, but mostly because one can't study everything, and it isn't currently near the top of my reading list (though the fact that both Douglas Hofstadter and David Cope constantly mention J.S. Bach makes it somewhat relevant to my AI interests).

I also don't generally think as scientists we can afford to be ignorant of the humanities in general, though many people can afford to ignore parts. There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of. And there's a lot of work in artificial intelligence that makes more sense with a humanities background.

Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher. Some is unavoidable due to increasing specialization, but if anything that would seem to call for more humility, not extra arrogance that we know how to solve the philosophical problems that we don't time to study in as much depth as Einstein/Planck/Bohr/etc. did...

I'd trace some of it (on both sides) to a general academic tendency to want to rationalize why the fields you didn't specialize in and don't know about aren't that important to know about. There's an only half-joke that academics always want to reduce every field to their own: to an economist everything is analyzable with economic tools, to a sociologist everything is culture, to a physicist everything is physics and its minor epiphenomena, to a philosopher everything is philosophy plus implementation details, to a dynamical systems theorist everything is just instantiations of dynamical systems, etc.
Enceladus: home of alien lifeforms?
Google already does this with Chrome and Google websites.

I don't have to enter my second factor with credential or even my password when using Gmail from my phone, tablet, laptop or desktop.
I don't mind the innumeracy of so many liberal arts intellectuals... as long as they stick to liberal arts. Alas, they do not.

A short time ago, I was involved in debate over instituting a new affirmative action program at my university. "We're failing this group terribly! We must do something about this!" came the rallying cry.

I responded with university admissions statistics, high school graduation statistics, and census statistics, showing that the largest reason behind our apparent lack of members of that group was that we were an urban institution which drew students mostly from the local area, and members of that group lived mostly in rural areas where the population as a whole tended to attend more rural institutions. (Canada has far more of a trend towards attending "nearby" post-secondary institutions than the US does.)

I was accused of trying to confuse the issue "by introducing numbers and percentages", and the admissions policy was adopted.
The main other difference I can see is that one button actually functions as "login via gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, or any other countless email providers", and no work needs to happen on the email provider's end to make it work. Lots of people don't want to sign up for FB or Twitter, but basically everyone has an email account.
Surely nobody with malicious intentions would ever try to trick you.
Actually, the Flash BBC iPlayer will _not_ work if it connects from the United States. Additionally, I discovered that the BBC is using Akamai for streaming their live content, and Akamai's United States servers do not have the content. So even if you convince the BBC that you're in England, but talk to Akamai servers in the US, the content does not stream.

Interestingly, BBC is using Limelight for pre-recorded content, and that content is apparently cached globally.
I think what the OP is saying is that there's no right, stated or implied, to wrap Craigslist data in your own UI. If you want to write your own front end for classified ads, you're going to have to bring your own ads to the table as well.
Hyperlinks could work as they currently do, pointing to the (hidden, non-human-readable) real URL - but the UI would never show the URL. Or we could just accept that they change - in normal conversation you don't give out unambiguous pointers to specific things, you say words and trust they'll mean the same thing to listeners (at least within your community). If someone's telling me about a concept or a news story, I probably don't want a link to a specific web page.
And I have a macbook, and no plans to switch from my android phone. Still have a windows partition though.
Some people despise Facebook, but nearly everyone online has an email account.

Personally I would implement Facebook connect and have this email login system as an alternative.
Here at GraphMuse (invite engine for Facebook apps), we hadn't heard of a "Growth Engineer" until we really looked into some of the people interested in our product.

Turns out that Growth Engineers are actually respected "higher-ups." You said it yourself too. That said, I think few people are familiar with this job title outside of SV.

Was it Facebook who started this trend?

NOTE: I'd increase the line spacing on your blog, it's a bit tight.
Don't believe me? Try it:

Node.js: https://gist.github.com/3200829

Clojure: https://gist.github.com/3200862

Note that I picked the really small messages here--integers, to give node the best possible serialization advantage.

$ time node cluster.js
Finished with 10000000

real 3m30.652s
user 3m17.180s
sys	1m16.113s

Note the high sys time: that's IPC. Node also uses only 75% of each core. Why?

$ pidstat -w | grep node
11:47:47 AM 25258 48.22 2.11 node
11:47:47 AM 25260 48.34 1.99 node

96 context switches per second.

Compare that to a multithreaded Clojure program which uses a LinkedTransferQueue--which eats 97% of each core easily. Note that the times here include ~3 seconds of compilation and jvm startup.

$ time lein2 run queue
10000000
"Elapsed time: 55696.274802 msecs"

real 0m58.540s
user 1m16.733s
sys	0m6.436s

Why is this version over 3 times faster? Partly because it requires only 4 context switches per second.

$ pidstat -tw -p 26537
Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (azimuth)	07/29/2012	_x86_64_	(2 CPU)

11:52:03 AM TGID TID cswch/s nvcswch/s Command
11:52:03 AM 26537 - 0.00 0.00 java
11:52:03 AM - 26540 0.01 0.00 |__java
11:52:03 AM - 26541 0.01 0.00 |__java
11:52:03 AM - 26544 0.01 0.00 |__java
11:52:03 AM - 26549 0.01 0.00 |__java
11:52:03 AM - 26551 0.01 0.00 |__java
11:52:03 AM - 26552 2.16 4.26 |__java
11:52:03 AM - 26553 2.10 4.33 |__java

And queues are WAY slower than compare-and-set, which involves basically no context switching:

$ time lein2 run atom
10000000
"Elapsed time: 969.599545 msecs"

real 0m3.925s
user 0m5.944s
sys	0m0.252s

$ pidstat -tw -p 26717
Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (azimuth)	07/29/2012	_x86_64_	(2 CPU)

11:54:49 AM TGID TID cswch/s nvcswch/s Command
11:54:49 AM 26717 - 0.00 0.00 java
11:54:49 AM - 26720 0.00 0.01 |__java
11:54:49 AM - 26728 0.01 0.00 |__java
11:54:49 AM - 26731 0.00 0.02 |__java
11:54:49 AM - 26732 0.00 0.01 |__java

TL;DR: node.js IPC is not a replacement for a real parallel VM. It allows you to solve a particular class of parallel problems (namely, those which require relatively infrequent communication) on multiple cores, but shared state is basically impossible and message passing is slow. It's a suitable tool for problems which are largely independent and where you can defer the problem of shared state to some other component, e.g. a database. Node is great for stateless web heads, but is in no way a high-performance parallel environment.
Not really saying Facebook, but using Facebook as an example. They keep the session alive until you either delete the cookie, or the session from your control panel. Why deal with this email method when you can just keep the session alive forever unless they logout or delete cookies, after they have typed their password in?
Experimental research papers in medicine, and decision making in business, are in a shambles, due to people learning and then misapplying the trappings of statistics, slamming Gaussians everywhere in plug-and-chug SAS sessions, without understanding the mathematical justifications for model selection.
Really? Nothing in any screenshots suggest it can be set up this way.

Instead it looks like there's a list of synopses on the left which you must click to view a full story on the right?
As I stated at the top of my gist (did you read it?) and in other comments here, this simply does not work using the latest Flash in Mountain Lion. In this situation, Flash ignores proxy settings, and streaming does not work.
This effect seems to happen commonly among news aggregating site communities.

Digg used to be pretty cool when it was used largely by people excited about the start-up/tech enthusiasts. As it became more popular, the user-base seemed to devolve as the content started to cater to the LCD.

Reddit has done a good job combating this, with their implementation of subreddits that focus on specific core user demographics. But most of their largest subreddits have a dubious quality of users.

Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.
I don't think even Bilton is arguing that CL is not within their legal rights. He is just pointing out that it seems contradictory to their claimed culture of being community-driven, anti-SOPA, wanting to be a public good, and all that jazz.
Fresco Community Market finds success in hiring on skid row
Great site! Sadly I got an error trying to log in with Google.
Brett Terpstra has a great post on how to do this in Mountain Lion: http://brettterpstra.com/fixing-virtual-hosts-and-web-sharin...
Are you sure it's for this reason? I always thought it was a bit dodgy - basically some European broadcasters effectively pirate the unencrypted broadcasts. This was only ever speculation, but in some countries channels occasionally disappear for a while and later come back.
After first reading about the benefits of procrastination a year or two ago, I made a conscious effort to delay decisions and actions that previously seemed to need immediate resolution. I found that I rarely encountered a situation that I delayed action on, even when it felt like I needed to act immediately, that ended up being a mistake to delay.

Since then, I have noticed countless examples where delaying action benefited me. I have wanted to implement features in my software that I knew would take a long time and much concentration, but wanted, only to stumble upon an open source library or tutorial or new standard in the browser that made it easily. These include jsPlumb, jsdiff, encryption algorithms, and more.

There are also other countless times that I have acted too quickly. Writing code to generate images to create rounded borders that are now handled natively via CSS's border-radius. Lots of jQuery functionality, ajax and more.

The point is, it really does help to procrastinate. It's not just lip service. I have extrapolated this to really move away from deadlines. All deadlines have either already passed or do not need to be met. I create no deadlines for myself. I leave to the universe more deadlines -- working on other people's schedules or those set by the weather.

I have found myself much more at peace. I live a better life now and am a lot happier since I stopped rushing through everything. As I look back on my life, I tried to move deadlines forward, get out of classes, pass milestones quicker and so many times I remember whatever task it was I wanted to hurry through taking longer than had I just gone at the regular pace.

Procrastinate. It's good for life.
Agree with huckleberries21.

The story would not have been as sympathetic to Mr. DeMenthon if he was hosting a site called, WhereToSetUpMethLabs.com.
>for every viewer I know, it's about national competition between incredible athletes

That's like asking people in China about how the government treats dissidents,
because hey, they watch TV. Surely that will be on TV, yes?

And yes, the comparison with China is apt. The IOC is a bunch of corrupt,
corporate prostitutes who will do anything for their corporate overlords. London
is in a state of military lockdown for the duration of the games - heard about
the missile pods on civilian houses, for example?

Besides, about those "incredible athletes" - the olympic games were never about
that, either. It's supposed to be a friendly competition between amateurs.
Professional atheletes have their world championships/cups/leagues/whatever, and
should have never been admitted to the games. They have absolutely no
business being there.

My point still stands: the very absolutely and definitely last thing the
olympic games are about is sports. It's about mind-numbing commercialisation,
corporate greed and senseless destruction of local economies, all neatly hidden
behind entertainment for the masses - panem et circenses!

>All of your reasons are why it sucks for the host city.

Yes, and that's more than enough reason to boycott the games, and loudly
demand their abolition, instead of hiding behind "it doesn't concern me" and
mindless patriotism. It concerns millions of people. Show some compassion. We'll
lose nothing by abolishing the games that hasn't already disappeared long ago.
The proxy method does not work using the latest Flash in Mountain Lion, as it ignores proxy settings.
This Is Your Brain On Boarding: How To Turn Visitors Into Users
Perhaps the sciences are just harder to pretend to care about. I don’t mean that derisively—it’s just that the arts are very approachable because you don’t need to understand everything in order to appreciate it.

I’m a designer at heart, but my work is firmly in the hard sciences. I’m excited about what I do, and it shows. That’s what gets people interested—ferocity, passion.

You have to be able to describe your work in accessible terms, so that other people can appreciate it without having to understand it in depth. Not all people want to understand everything—it’s hard work. Work that we hackers can take for granted because, by our nature, we enjoy it.
"Potemkin Village" isn't about original communities leaving. A Potemkin Village is a fake facade erected to hide the real thing and fool visitors.
Thanks so much cablemap.info site.
Quite funny but I feel for the guy. I lost my voice an hour before a meeting with upper management a few years ago. Thankfully they were all quite understanding and accepted the written report and me answering any questions they had with written responses.
First thing I thought too. The email validation step, in my opinion, is the most annoying part of signing up for any site. I often log in places on devices where I don't have access to my email, so this requirement would completely keep me off your site.
I really like the idea of having many different metrics that you automatically track for every test you run. I've been telling people to do that for years, and saying that the fact that standard A/B test frameworks don't is good enough reason to roll your own.

However suppose that you have 20 metrics you are following, and you run 20 tests. The odds are that by chance 4 times you'll have tests showing 99% confidence on random metrics for random results. This is just a side-effect of having many tests and many metrics.

Therefore if you find yourself in that situation, you should be very predisposed to assume that random results you were not expecting on random metrics that seem unconnected to your test really are due to random chance. Because the odds of weird chance results are higher than you would have guessed.
This is only mildly amusing because I know Bertrand Russel more from his work in mathematics than from his work in the humanities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_paradox
Size + required landing precision

It certainly looks like overly complex. The simplest system, that is, airbags, are unusable because of the size (it's almost like the difference between a big toy car and a regular car)

You probably can't brake it only with retrorockets, and as this mission is aiming to be the most precise landing on Mars ever (and I'm not even sorry for the pun) they need a way to get the lander to an exact location (by deploying it from the crane)
It's ironic that the post claims Craigslist cultivates an exaggerated image of doing public good, but then repeats without question Padmapper's claim that it's all about doing more good and saving people time.

I strongly suspect both sites are pretty equal in their overstated desire to "just do good".
The problem I see with this is that humans are really bad at estimating how long tasks are to complete. So while perhaps procrastination isn't inherently bad, in the world of poor estimation it means things don't get done on time.
Is there a good reason to think this is not either a curious outlier or strawman? Is that situation alone actually good reason to demand people "stick to the liberal arts"? Or is there something else here among your reasoning?

For the record, I have a degree in CS and Philosophy, so its awfully tough to "stick to the liberal arts".
I kind of feel bad for Craigslist. Everyone is attacking them for wanting to hold onto their data. I don't think that they should be obligated to let just anyone scrape it
I really love that idea. I think a lot of students which are bored by school (and/or feel left behind) would regain their natural curiosity in such an environment. I think the technical possibilities we have now make much more individual approaches to learning possible and computers can help with this cross-subject approach.

Based on your example they could then go on to construct some instrument (say, a flute) by writing a little program and print the instrument with a 3d printer or have a rough version cut by a laser cutter. The question is: how to integrate ideas like that in the current school system? ...
Meanwhile, Bing still doesn't do rate calculations that have worked at Google for years, like:

1GB / 1 hour
500km / 1.5 hours in mph
You set it up. I spiked it.

For what it is worth I like this comment more than your previous because it gets to an actual problem. The problem isn't YouTube's editorial choices since there are good competitors; but rathe that there is a limited market of large scale identity providers that many other sites are becoming dependent on.

However I still disagree it is a big problem. It's the same privacy problem of credit cards versus cash. As long as cash is legal and privacy laws are strong enough I think it will be ok. People will make efficient choices depending on the context. Most people don't want anonymity most of the time as it turns out, and those who do can still get it.
Samsung’s upgradable TV: DOA, unless the company reinvents itself
"Quit sending so many emails!" means he was sending too many emails to people who didn't want them. If every message had value to everyone receiving them, nobody would complain. An unattainable standard. without erring on the side of not sending useful stuff, but you have a decent margin where people will ignore your noise because your signal is valuable. Nobody complains about spam for things they end up buying.

CC'ing a group "just to keep everyone in the loop" is overcommunication. Pulling out the details that are useful for the whole group, if any, and then sending followups with additional details to a subset of people is the effective way to do it. It's a lot of work and it's why so many people who effortlessly handle in-person communication have trouble with written/broadcast patterns, they just aren't used to putting the extra work in.
The “Psycho” designer who tried to save AT&T in the ’60s
Actually the Pentium & Celeron brands aren't really whole lot different than their higher end counterparts like Core i3/i5/i7. The main difference still is core count, cache and clock. Minor things also apply now such as hardware threads & TurboBoost, but the underlying architecture is quite similar.

The Celeron 430 used in the tests is based off the Conroe core which is what Core/Core2 products used. Just with less cache and slower front side bus.

I think the point was that a CPU which retailed for $50 5 years ago, beat out a bunch of exotic and more costly setups.