skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember being intrigued by Google's "Sesame" experiment (covered on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469692) where they logged you in via a QR code processed via your mobile.

Relying on something you have (mobile phone with a trusted app on a trusted network) instead of something you know (passwords) can be an interesting choice. Ideally you'd require both (something you know and something you have), but we want to avoid passwords.
The problem is that mathematics and the sciences are useful, while the humanities are largely about social signalling. One may be proud to be ignorant of mathematics precisely because it is useful; being ignorant of it indicates you have sufficient wealth in other areas that you don't need to get your hands dirty, as it were. And on the other hand, being ignorant of something like classical music is looked down upon precisely because it marks you out as not a member of the group.
I'm posting this in all three of the 'Olympics' threads showing up on the front page of HN:

I live in Berkeley, CA and I was able to get full access to videos, including streams and highlights, by selecting Xfinity as my service provider during my initial sign-up/activation on the NBC Olympics website.

Here at my apartment, we have no cable service and an internet provider called Zoom. So obviously, I wasn't being truthful - but instead was trying to circumvent this ridiculous corporate stranglehold during my first attempt to access Olympic footage.

I don't know if it will still work, but it worked for me on Friday and my credentials have held since - allowing my full access without login each time I access the website.
It's fine if you're just using it to simulate a computationally expensive operation, as he is here. In fact, in that case, it's slightly more realistic.
I gave up using the Apple supplied Apache a while back. It became difficult to accommodate the diverse collection of server configurations I have to support and Vagrant + Puppet handles that very nicely. For those who have more modest needs, MAMP will probably suffice.
Why is it useful? Isn't it simpler to just say "multiply everything with everything"? This is the way I was taught.
I do not feel worried that we will miss out on the next revolution because its manifesto can no longer be written in a YouTube comment.

As long as free expression is legal and there is a free market, there will be an outlet for free, anonymous expression. It just doesn't have to be every single one.

I do think it is reasonable to wonder if real names on YouTube is too restrictive. Yet in the same vein it is ludicrous to confuse the issue with the extreme worry that the US constitution could not be debated in YouTube videos--possibly arguing if LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem should be our bro-national bro-anthem.
I'm sorry - I mis-read the paragraph. You're right!
She has updated her comments with a link to the actual email from Apple:

http://hollylisle.com/apple-made-its-decision-my-turn/commen...

My reading of this is a complete miscommunication. Nowhere in Apple's email does it state they had a problem with content. I really have no idea how she jumped to that conclusion. The very simple and likely explanations are either (1) she did not remove all links or (2) the reviewer did not closely check to see if she removed all links.
Integrations: Simple Marketing for Developers
Where to hack if you don't like coffee? (in SF)
I love the idea of hacking in coffee shops (change of scenery, available snacks, meeting new people) while working on projects, but I don't like coffee!

What are your suggestions for "coffee-shop like" places in San Francisco I can work at?

The minimum criteria look something like this:

- No Cover

- WiFi (I'm willing to pay a small amount, perhaps 10$/day).

- Open until ~8pm (but later is better)

- Serves food and drink

- Geek friendly (some places have free WiFi, like some McDonalds, but if you sit there with a laptop for an hour, both the patrons and the staff get fairly irritated with you IME)
I guess Andrew Hacker's trolling isn't so obvious to some.
I don't get what you are trying to imply... You do not walk up to people in public and criticize their gender, sexuality, appearance, intelligence, and more just because you do not agree with their opinion. "Anti-normative" is pretty vague but I'm assuming it is covering that subset of things that may not be cursing but are still negative. It seems that you are making the term fit some assumed oppression on society when it's just trying to make people not be dicks.
I forgot to include the word "actually" in the title.

It is interesting how great of a feature this is an how it most likely went almost-unnoticed. Surely some of their patents on less-than-noticed features (such as this one) will result in a small payday during their eventual liquidation/sell-off.
3 things to do when you lose the business/customer
I dislike how the camera is not vertically centered inside of that black strip on the back.
Check out Mozilla Persona (used to be called BrowserID).

https://login.persona.org/about
Which was perfectly obvious to anyone watching from the events unfold on the street for more than a couple of hours, or even less than that. But it's good to see this stuff finally documented in a consistent way.
Ikiwiki is nice, here's the clickable link: http://ikiwiki.info
There's also graphical calculator, or is that not a new thing? I don't remember seeing it before. For example: http://goo.gl/uSSWW
Rumournal: Photos of Complete Next-Generation iPhone Enclosure Leaked
This was a problem before the Internet. Change your name and do not contact people from your past ever.
I had to scroll down awfully far in the comments before I found a sane comment.

There are reasonable complaints about the process of producing these new tlds right now, but anyone who thinks there is any solution to this problem other than new tlds has not actually thought about the problem or doesn't understand how the domain name system works.

> Perhaps we need a way to navigate to websites without requiring the use of a unique identifier such as domain names

Or we add a .suffix to make it unique, like how the domain name system already works FFS.
Videotracker.js: Video tracking with javascript.
I don't think a non-mentally-ill person could do what he did. Pretty much by definition, he's mentally ill.
I don't understand why they need the skycrane. Why did Viking land ok without this complexity? Why can't they reuse whatever they did for Viking?
For me, it's gotten to the point where NDAs just scream "junior! junior!" about the people asking me to sign them.
A slightly better article on the same topic from a few years ago: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

It's funny we couch it in such intellectual language. There's an everyday word for this: Potemkin village.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

Or, a thought experiment. What's more valuable? A social network with 10,000 people who are all at most two degrees of separation from everyone else in real life? Or a social network filled with 10,000 people from around the world, selected at random?

Could you even call the second thing a "social network?"
I lost my voice before speaking to 1,000 people at DEFCON
It's a problem from the point of view of a writer wishing to ensure that his writings will be read.

From the point of view of a reader, however, having information about what will likely get moderated be scattered rather than gathered in one place decreases a reader's exposure to text written by people who have not read a lot of comment sections.
Sadly not, as its "timer" is actually just setting an alarm for x minutes later. That also means that you lose precision of seconds. If it's 5:22:36 and you tell it to set a timer for 10 minutes, it'll set an alarm for 5:32:00, not 5:32:36.
Marc Goodman: A vision of crimes in the future
It's really exciting to consider how Twitter fundamentally changes how we can communicate in large groups. Essentially, through the use of hash tags, Twitter has created a new conversation/comment stream that any one in the world can be a part of. For example, while watching the Olympics, there are several hash tags that show up on screen and allow everyone from celebrities to random people talk about it. It creates a conversation that is not even possible using other mediums. They're not doing social networking better, they've created a new way to communicate. This changes mass media from being a one-way conversation to a place where anyone can participate in the conversation.

App.net simply can never do this as a result of it costing money. Since it can't build a large user base of "regular" people, the data on App.net simply won't be that interesting or very open. Sure it would be a cool service, and for many people, particularly geeks, it might be nice. It could even be a great medium to communicate with specific people, but it will never be as useful as Twitter in the sense that it will never be able to fill the same space as Twitter.

If there really is a problem with Twitter's business model that's causing cash problems all they need to do is charge for API access. Twitter's data feeds provide immensely valuable data about a large variety of issues.
After migrating a Java application that ran on EC2 to AppFog over the weekend, I wouldn't recommend running mission-critical apps on their infrastructure yet. A few things that I ran into

- After EC2 East was slow like molasses, I switched over to EC2 EU which was still speedy

- That caused their CLI tool to fall on its nose when trying to tunnel to the database (right now the bridge always gets installed in EC2 East). Fixed with a simple patch in the Ruby source

- Looks like the backend connector in nginx won't connect to your app if you have Basic-Auth on your root index

- Later MySQL became unavailable with "Host '10.0.47.186' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'". No connection limiter between different apps?

I think AppFog is offering a great value should they be able to iron out all the kinks. I'm crossing my fingers that this will happen quickly.
Atleast the archlinux.org forum has the geekiest "Captcha"-system I came across so far:

What is the output of "date -u +%W$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"?

(This is not to prevent bots, but to prevent human spammers)
I find it hard to believe they'll take a step back in the design with that metal/glass back. Although I guess it would be their way of admitting an all-glass back was a bad idea.
I'm still hoping they'll manage to fit the larger screen into the same overall size as the 4s (though still thinner). These longer bodies seem lazy.
Royal Carribean Los Angeles
Royal Carribean Los Angeles: We are providing the services of pick and drop to the Royal Caribbean cruise. Royal caribbean in Los Angeles.
BTW, it just so happens that one of the mathematicians who came up with the first solution to Smale's paradox was blind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Morin

Something to think about, next time we brood on our own supposed handicaps ("aww, I started my education too late / I'm too slow at reading books / YC rejected my startup / etc etc whine whine ...")
What did Romney make that improved the material lives of the human race? Capitalism had the slam dunk existence proof over medieval and socialist forms of organization because people's lives had actually improved. If you could make that argument then Romney wouldn't have an "image" problem.
That seems like an strangely authoritarian stance?

The Internet is a free market. There are two billion people on it in 190+ countries and who knows how many non-sovereign entities. It is incredibly diverse and it is designed to let diversity reign. Not everyone has to agree because you can just not hang out with each other.

Why would people who don't like anonymity have to leave the Internet? Can't they build a space that fits their ideals? If you don't like it you don't have to use it; in fact you can compete with your own space that is possibly
better.
Well. "Frape" is a term I had never heard before.
I've taken an introduction to statistics course with social science students and based on that experience, I can relate to what you are saying, 100%.

However, I think there is a broad group of students[1] for which a significantly earlier exposure to calculus would be beneficial and make learning statistics (and physics) a lot easier or at least faster.

When I took introduction to statistics as a math major, I found the subject extremely confusing because the discrete and continuous case where taught completely disconnected and useful anchors for understanding such as basic measure theory and Lebesgue integration where left out. That's certainly a good way to teach for many but for some it doesn't work.

A similar case was physics for me (classical mechanics in particular). From grade 5 to 10 (after which I avoided the subject) there was little insight gained (e.g. heavy things fall down, there may be some friction, memorize all those seemingly random formulas and if you use a long lever, make sure you pick a strong material). Then I was exposed to an introduction to physics course at university (for non-majors) and the revelation that all those random formulas have a strong grounding in just 3 general principles and can then be developed with some help from calculus was liberating. Just too late in my case. Maybe I would have loved physics and actually study it, had they told me in 7th grade that there is something tying all of it together, and the ultimate goal of the class was to reach that summit. Just trying to show the other side of the coin which should be integrated into the way math and science is taught in schools in my opinion :-)

[1] Say, the top 5-10% of middle school students.
HNPod #4 is out - Yahoo, Digg, Sparrow, Bubblewatch
I resent the digs at Orkut. It was a great community - if you were Brazilian or Indian. That Google chose not to run with it says more about their lack of long term social vision and parochialism than about the health of the community itself.
"But a calculator should work like a calculator."

Yes, and no physical calculator I have ever seen would give 500.01 for "500 + 1%".
All fixes to hellbans go through site administrators (eg pg), and therefore he is aware of the false positives. He has access to data on when and why it happens, and is therefore able to track those issues down.
I would think that services that provide organizational or team newsfeeds, like Yammer or Status.Net, provide very similar functionality (though perhaps without the synchronized weekly fomratting).
Japanese equestrian is the oldest competitor at Olympics
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons is its unprecedented size: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Mars_Scie...
Bullet passing through playing card at 20,000 frames per second
Precisely. Maybe the best way to make math "cool" is to reclaim for it that status of "completely useless but fun knowledge" that Hardy was so proud about in his Apology.
Great idea. We're going to try this.
Ask HN: Why did Mixpanel change its pricing?
This HN thread details their pricing in 2009~:

0...10,000 points: Free
10,000...100,000: $25
100,000...500,000: $100
500,000...2,000,000: $200
2,000,000...10,000,000: $700

Since then, they've gotten rid of the $25/mo plan, and increased the relative prices of the other plans.

1. Is this a sign that Mixpanel's sales team rather spend time closing the bigger deals than worry about the small ones?

2. Is Mixpanel adopting the same pricing model as Heroku? That is, encourage startups to use it for free, and then charge the ones that grow into big companies?

Is this a good pricing strategy for "infrastructure" companies (API's, cloud services, etc.)?

~http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=942053
Among the Western public this might be true. But among intellectuals the bigger prejudice is that numbers are "hard." I certainly find them to be so, and have felt like this since high school algebra.

At root it seems to be an epistemological problem, complicated in higher learning by over-specialization in all disciplines.
Ok, it seems to be an online journal, in this world where everyone likes to share everything... I think I'll give it a try...
Most awesome thing I've seen all week. And far more useful than what a lot of startups are working in.
"It would seem to me that having data on an individual's ability to solve Captcha's might provide some correlation with educational, economic, and social characteristics which is potentially useful to advertisers."

Like whether or not they're literate? This is just bizarre paranoid speculation.
Human body on a chip - pharmaceutical testing
I wouldn't call it spam, but it is worth noting that this is at least the third "how to watch the Olympics" article I've seen on HN in the past day which contains a referral link to some VPS provider.
secure against what attack? in general, a single (longer) username is less secure:

it's less secure against someone looking over your shoulder and seeing your username displayed on the screen.

it's less secure than someone watching you log in and reading the username displayed as plaintext in the login interface.

it's less secure if the username is stored unencrypted (if the password is encrypted) and someone gains access to the database.

however, it is more secure if all information is encrypted (and someone gains access to the database).

the last point may be unintuitive, since the "amount of information" is the same, but k^n + k^m < k^(n+m) (for reasonable values of k, n and m).

(if k is the number of bits per character, and n is the number of characters in a words, then k^n is proportional to the cost of guessing - it's easier to guess two halves of something than to guess the whole) (think of hangman - the game would be no fun at all if you had to guess whole words; being able to guess letters - word fragments - makes it much easier)
Direct quote from the email from apple:

> Book file contains links from competitors: Amazon, in the chapter Q&A 6, under “Question 9″

I'm sure books dedicated to Amazon will contain links to them, so I think this just adds a little bit more evidence to the stories of Apple's inconsistent review process.
Thanks for the suggestion. Will be adding it soon along with refresh interval.
Did you really think I was worried that the next constitution wouldn't be debated in youtube comments or was that just to set up your LMFAO joke (which I laughed at)?

I'll speak more plainly just in case it was the former:

Anonymous speech being widespread and common instead of just "available" is extremely important for a healthy society.

Anyone who thinks that removing anonymity is good because it cuts down on curse words is an idiot.

Anyone who doesn't own stock or work for the big players is acting against their own interests for supporting those trying to win the current fight to be the first online identity monopoly, especially since they are both trying to tie them to real names.

Youtube is a great example when using hyperbole because it has famously stupid comments that will not be improved by a reduction in curse words. The other paragraphs were not necessarily about youtube just because it was mentioned in a sarcastic opening comment.
This is similar to the COMET/AJAX push model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)

As HTTP is stateless it's hard to tell when a user has disconnected, you can make the count more accurate by starting a session for each user then incrementing a "last_connected" timestamp by N seconds for each hit (can you tie this to each COMET update? Perhaps with JS?), then expiring any sessions that haven't been updated for a while. This is how a few popular CMS' (Drupal, Joomla) implement the "Who's Online" count.
> Everybody needs to understand formal symbolic systems.

Everybody does not need to understand this and I dare (with fingers crossed) say a good percentage of those on HN don't either. There needs to be rationalization within the educational system for what is taught, with relevance to education for the sake of knowledge and for how material can be used for future employment prospects & general life skills. That may play to the lowest common denominator or the student mean, but that's largely and unfortunately what public education has become over the past fifty years.
"We've limited requests for old items. If you're running a crawler, you can get this data a lot more easily from http://hnsearch.com/api.

Google, Archive.org, and my best attempt at HNSearch API ( http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?id=2534649... ) didn't tell me what was in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2534649 either.
The only plugins I use are ctrlp and repmo.vim (lets you repeat j and k movements with ;). Unfortunately, repmo.vim breaks on vim 7.3, and I don't know vimscript.
How is this different from say, having text files as a journal? Except for data being in the cloud obviously.
Show HN: Set NASA APOD as Ubuntu Desktop Background
Ben, I like where you're going but I think we need to go just a little bit further to make it viable. In particular, it's email that's the weak link (so to speak). But it's entirely possible and desirable to replace email with something that has emails positive qualities without it's drawbacks. I'm thinking a secure, realtime channel to which only you have access, and a notification system that let's you see (on all your devices) what got posted there. Anyone (or anything) in the world can post to it, and they are guaranteed that you'll get first crack at the data. (In this case the data is a one time URL).

What sort of thing represents a secure, real-time channel to which only you have access? Note that, unlike email, we are not interested in queueing messages in this channel. My first thought runs to a public URL, a place where anyone can post anything, and it will appear on all your devices (possibly within the browser).

So basically as long as you maintain credentials to access that channel, sites have a good way to give you a one-use login URL.

In an ideal world, you're browser would have a password protected private key and knowledge of what your personal URL is. All sites requiring login would ask the browser for that URL, and the site would send a one-time login URL to the channel URL, and the browser would be smart enough to just follow the link.

Bam, login nirvana.
To be fair, the user can still compromise all their accounts by choosing a weak password for their email account. It does reduce the onus on them from coming up with dozens of (hopefully) unique, strong passwords to one, which is certainly an improvement.
Just a note: I plan on replying to every comment here. I'm on the tail end of my lunch break right now and don't have the time, but I'll do it first thing when I get home.
Outside of transfering money, I think you should structure your site so that logins are not necessary. For example, if I wasn't the only "drcube" on Hacker News, I wouldn't be upset. Names in meat space aren't unique, why should we expect them to be on the web?

Next time you think about starting a web service (that doesn't handle money!), think about what you lose by getting rid of user accounts entirely. It probably isn't much.
There's also social signaling occurring when he includes boozing in his list of reasons he has chosen to remain ignorant of arts and music.
You disagree with what? You don't think the lawsuits are real?
Did you see the NorthPaw? It's a band of 8 buzzers that goes around an ankle, and buzzed Magnetic North as you walk around.
How to be a growth hacker
I guess that is what it is... the data is in the cloud accessible from anywhere, and it looks like you can download all the data you enter at anytime as well.
Multiplication distributes over addition.