skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's probably true for some parts of science, but I think the general public pays at least as much attention to science as to art, when something catches its attention. How many people who don't know the first thing about particle physics were tweeting about the Higgs Boson? Probably more than the number who tweet about Damien Hirst! Astronomers are good at getting public attention and cultivating a sense of "astronomy appreciation" among laypeople as well.
I really don't like coffee either, so I stick to tea and blended drinks. Pretty much every coffeeshop will have one or the other.
> Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.

50 to 100 thousand daily users ("users", not visitors) is not small by any means!
And on top of that, this is a single market, culturally linked, with only five family names making up the majority of the populace (54%). Real names policy probably isn't as much of a deterrent for John Smith. Just sayin'.
23 years. Its age is less of an issue than its size. It has 400+ units and just contracts out TV service to a local San Francisco outfit, Satel: http://www.yelp.com/biz/satel-san-francisco

Satel has a sattelite receiver on the roof that provides for the complex.

The only programming options are:

1. DirectTV (extremely expensive)

2. 'Basic' Cable, which gives only a subset of terrestrial broadcasts at only 480p. This service wouldn't qualify for nbcolympics regardless due to no cnbc, msnbc, etc.
Ouch - I don't seem to be able to reproduce it but we'll take a look. Do you mind emailing me on [redacted] to discuss?
Naked protest against the TSA upheld
Yes, sorry, I was talking about two things at once (as was the author).

There are social networks that are valuable but evaporate (see, e.g., Digg). There are "inorganic" social networks that appear valuable because they have lots of passer-bys.

Potemkim village is a good word for the latter. I'd put Google+ in that category, Robert Scoble's love affair with it notwithstanding.
I've seen something like that on BBC Horizon. The idea was to give this to a blind person to help with navigation.

BTW, I'd like to know if a single buzzer is enough for this purpose - vibrate stronger as the angle north gets smaller. I'm quite sure human would be able to quickly learn this. Or maybe a combination of two buzzers.

BTW', I don't need to mention that I had similar idea to Indoor Atlas http://www.indooratlas.com/technology.html
(but of course, ideas don't matter only execution)
That was the most blatant example, but I see members of the university Senate voting for what they "know" over what they have evidence for on a regular basis.

(And the philosophers aren't the problem... although that might be partly because our philosophy department is quite strong on logic.)
So I'm waiting for a large group of protestors to strip down completely, and to do this regularly.
I have a text document on my computer that lists all the websites/programs with username/password. I also use autocomplete (which IMO is basically the same as having a document with all passwords.) I can have unique passwords for every single website without relying on a third party cloud solution. And for the passwords I use often, I have them memorized anyway.

If something is compromised (which has happened) then I have a list of every single site where I have an account, and can change the passwords.

A side benefit to this is if someone needs to access something (most likely while traveling, or if I'm dead) all the information is there for them.
i'm a site reliability engineer at foursquare sf, and i think it's very accurate. dennis travels to our office frequently and takes the time to meet with each of us individually, even those of us who work very far away from feature-land. when we're meeting i feel super comfortable saying "this sucks and we ought to fix it." mostly we discuss organizational issues; i generally air technical issues in similar meetings with harry (our eng lead, posted above,) because making engineering work is harry's whole job.

i've worked at high-profile startups with founders who are very media-visible before and dennis is pretty special in my opinion. he seems to genuinely believe that all of us employees are important to making foursquare the best product it can be.
Beer & a robot
I think meetup had the post to Craigslist a long time a go. Not sure if the still do it.
Sure. But we’re not all Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, and we don’t all work in fields that make it to “pop science” status. My work is in compilers—not exactly well known outside academia and the programming community. It doesn’t come for free.
I think that's a dangerous line of reasoning. Why not learn to memorize ingredients on a can of soup? That is also exercise for your brain.

Algebra lets us describe relationships between unknown quantities. Nearly every physical law is expressed as an algebraic equation (or Calculus, which requires it). It's the lingua franca of describing the world. That's why we need it :).
I was lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time in college with a senior citizen who was aiming for a fine arts degree in painting. As in most colleges, this does not require algebra which she thought was a shame as she had been home schooled and had a thorough background in mathematics as was expected of a young lady of her class and social standing. That 'woke' me up to the decline in education standards in the second half of the 20th century. Not only in this country but around the world. If you think I'm wrong, just compare the textbooks available now with what was available in say 1910! Would you even be allowed to use a text book by Hilbert? I doubt it. I will grant you that she was exceptional and typically excelled in any endeavor she chose---she was I believe the first American woman to be allowed a role on stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as an example. Decline and Fall are us I guess...
This a cool idea, but as soon as I heard It's made possible by: Facebook and Zynga, I lost all interest and never want to hear about this ever again.
some background info: http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable
Not to derail the thread here, but I'm genuinely curious: what prompted you to pick up degrees in both CS and philosophy? I know pg is in a similar boat, however I didn't meet anyone in undergraduate or graduate school pursuing that path. Given how important reasoning is in both disciplines, I don't think it's an unnatural coupling; however, I'd be very interested to know if you felt they complemented each other.
The persona.org middleman is only used when your email provider doesn't support BrowserID. It is temporary.

It is useful to browser users today. You don't have to remember a new password for each site or become less secure by giving the same password out to multiple sites. I'm going to use it on the next site I build.
I'm guessing that he disagrees with the assertion that Craigslist is blocking innovation.

After all, they have done nothing to stop Pad Mapper from doing their thing, given Pad Mapper goes and uses their own data.
No, but there is clearly use cases for Craigslist having an API. Instead of suing everyone who wants to use their data to make beautiful products, they should be giving people legal ways of doing so.
I think Gamestop realizes that selling physical media is dying: they bought Impulse, a PC game distribution site, from Stardock a few years ago in order to have a digital distribution presence. I'm sure they're looking for more ways to extend their business past physical media.

However, it's not clear to me that Ouya is interesting to Gamestop yet. They aren't a publisher or a developer, so they can't make games appear on it. If the games show up, and people pay for them, they'll probably be interested in extended their digital distribution platform to Ouya.
IIRC Atom is a very different internal architecture.
While the Beeb does produce a lot of its own programming, there is also much of it that is done in partnership with other public broadcasters outside of the UK and with corporate bodies who have distribution rights (which are a part of copyright) outside of the UK, whether those rights are exercised or not. The BBC having distribution rights in the UK does not automatically grant them rights to distribute outside of the UK.
I believe a major point that is missed by the author is that unfettered capitalism, especially national or multi-national, is based on the assumption that there are limitless resources.

Until there are appropriate costs associated with ocean dumping, air pollution, etc. there is no incentive to be concerned with the environmental costs. Here in the US, our EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) seems to be a toothless sideshow, rather than an effective agency.
They do charge for api access. You have to pay for the firehose.
What if the thing that is compromised is the computer with the text file?
But does that mean its okay for them to sue anyone who does? If they make the information public, how could they think they have a right to keep their data private from applications they think could be a competitive threat? Should Walmart sue Target if target scrapes walmart prices to help make decisions about their own online pricing schemes?

In what way is it "their data" if they release it to the public? The law is pretty clear about this--facts can't be copyrighted. They don't own the facts. They don't own the bits that padmapper is referencing. All they own is the db records for the posts that originated the information.

Imagine if they had a CL user meetup in public somewhere, and then they charged users to use a megaphone to announce that they were selling something. Someone writes down the information and has their own meetup for people who couldn't make it to the free, public CL meetup. Whats the difference between that and what padmapper is doing, except that padmapper is getting the information second hand?

If CL thinks they have a right to their data, they should be suing google should they?
Yes it was Facebook who started the trend as early days of the Facebook platform trained many of the best growth hackers in the Valley.
'Dan Yue' at Playdom, 'Joe Greenstein' at Flixster, and 'David King' at (Lil) Green Patch were a few Facebook pioneers.
But, it was 'Sean Ellis' (Eventbrite, Dropbox, Xobni, Catchfree) who Originally coined the term.

That's true hardly a few people are familiar with this job title outside SV.
I myself being a startup addict from India came across this title one night and couldn't stop dreaming the very moment 'how to be a growth hacker*.
> think about what you lose by getting rid of user accounts entirely. It probably isn't much.

This gets to the heart of identity! It often doesn't matter. For example, one could clone HN using anonymous accounts. You'd give up only karma and connection between messages. It would be, essentially, something like usenet where you have a choice to "brand" every message you send with an identity - or not. Let's call this "Broadcast Identity".

Then there is something else which is your "Legal Identity" and it's the one most closely associated with all things money. It's the one that you need to deal with financial obligation, going in both directions. When you buy something, you want it to come to you, not to some one else.

Interestingly, I don't think that targeted ads really care about the connection between Broadcast and Legal identity. This implies that, no, you probably won't lose much by losing user accounts.

Actually, I take that back. The one thing that sites want and need is a way to proactively contact you. Aha! I think I just stumbled on the real reason we keep logins around - to get the email address, so we can send newsletters, reminders, etc. To prod the user into using our service more. To remind them that we exist, to be obtrusive, because our value isn't intrinsically strong enough to remind them.
How is your solution better than a third-party cloud solution?
How To Make Windows 7 Bootable Via USB Drive The Easiest Way
Here's a translated abstract on supersonic parachute testing for MSL. I was not able to find the full paper online.

http://www.aric.or.kr/treatise/journal/content.asp?idx=11774...
Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy

Philosophy's usefulness to Science died off in the early 20th century for a reason.

Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson commented upon this very issue in their Poetry of Science talk. Very insightful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RExQFZzHXQ&feature=playe...
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I can find several papers in IEEE Aerospace Conference proceedings, but they are not available in free form online. This is a shame, because the government owns the copyright.
But no, I don't think you can be a Potemkin Village unless you are (a) fake and (b) designed to fool a temporary visitor. A Potemkin Village is a fraud. Even the people who hate Google+ don't claim that it doesn't actually exist. (Or do they?!)

A Potemkin Village social network might be something like one with a bunch of sock puppet accounts that appeared to be active, but which in fact was set up to deceive, say, an investor into thinking there was a real community there. A tech term close to "Potemkin Village" might be "vaporware".

The story behind Potemkin Villages is so colorful and profound (so good, as they say, that it had to be invented) that the term can only apply to deceptions of that variety.

Veering off a bit, there's an interpretation of the story I've always liked, according to which Potemkin has facades of prosperous villages erected for Catherine as she passes by, and Catherine, shrewd as ever, expresses imperial approval even as she can see perfectly well that they are fakes. In other words, the whole thing was a charade (analogous to the old Soviet joke, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us") conducted for internal political purposes, and none of the players cared about the actual status of the villages.
This anti Craigslist crusade is just ridiculous. The most impressive thing to me is how some startups that a knowingly violating TOS and intentionally abusing another site are able to gain that much traction for their "cause". Impressive PR/Buzz work!
It might be a great read. I'm sure plenty of young people will find this useful.

Are there any similar books/notes/pdfs around?
"Potemkin Village" is what the Reddit guys started with by making thousands of accounts and sharing, commenting, etc. In that case, the fiction became reality which I (assume) is incredibly rare.
Zo koop je een veilige trampoline
Yes, and it's been entirely possible to maintain anonymity with a book or a letter to a newspaper for almost as long as writing has been popular among the masses. Maybe longer.

Being required to use your real name on a site where you would reach your readers (the same as a newspaper or mail except the conversation can move in both directions) removes your option of being anonymous.
Can Canistro be the new Craiglist?
A way to streamline this even further might be to pair it with a browser extension designed to poll your inbox for these specific messages. When received, the extension could handle the login step, eliminating the need for the user to jump to their inbox for the validation email. I'm not sure if that kind of extension could be created so that it didn't compromise the security of your inbox.
>Some people want to be able to have the same kinds of social interactions
they have in the real world, but with the convenience of the internet.

And that requires forced real names for everyone... why? The whole point of
anonymity is that you can opt-out of it if you want. Just partially, or fully.
It's all up to you.

Anonymity is a fundamental right every human should have. You're of course not
required to be anonymous at all times, but you should be able to be if and when
you chose to. Anonymity is hard to gain when you don't have it to start with.
Voluntarily giving it away is easy, though.
One of the reasons for the skycrane is that it minimizes the area of the Martian surface that will be disturbed by the landing rockets. The skycrane approach moves less surface soil around the landing site (decreasing travel distance to pristine subjects for geological study) and deposits less rocket exhaust (which complicates chemical and biological studies).

NASA has an excellent and free ebook, _When Biospheres Collide_ [1], which goes into great detail about the problems posed by biological contamination (both forward and back). The book dedicates a long chapter to the great lengths taken with the Viking landers to avoid contamination problems. Having read it, I'm not at all surprised NASA is giving alternatives a try.

[1]: http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/when_biospheres_collide_d...
This is a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Padmapper. Much like the arguments for pirating music, it all boils down to weak justifications for taking something that's not yours.

I get that you may need to bend rules to innovate and that they were pulling CL's data in a way that did not affect their bandwidth, but at the end of the day, it's Craigslist that has attracted the users, Craigslist that has engaged the user, and it's Craigslist that has acquired and recorded that data.

The fact that Padmapper's UI is better is totally irrelevant and is just a way to distract from the real issue – blatant disregard of CL's wishes to hold on to its data.

EDIT: Replies have made some good points, so this isn't so black-and-white to me anymore.
I've been hammering code on this all weekend. If anyone is interested in discussing, feel free to contact me. I'm mainly working on queries for county information regarding age, race, sex, occupation, and income.
"Anonymous most of the time" is the key difference between a village and a city, and cities are wellsprings of progress because this makes them safe havens for eccentrics and heretics of all stripes.
With canistro is possible to exchange products and services and be contacted about them. In Future version it will add LBS being able to find deals close to your location. Any suggestions?
If you're in the area, there's an event at Ames: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/events/2012/ames-curiosity....
Social networking services and APIs are not the utility. The Internet is the utility.
Why didn't Viking worry about disturbing the landing site?

Also
If it can drive why does it matter what happens to the landing site?
I introduced Frank to the codebase of a shipping commercial app. Just having the ability to write functional tests without having to deal with all the plumbing was a big win for the whole team, devs and QAs alike. Don't let the Cucumber stuff turn you off; Frank is a valuable tool.
New Adware Update: Boxore (Smart Display, Player Plus) - Info and Removal
Not to derail your question, but my brother got a BA in philosophy, decided that he was really more interested in music, got a BMus, decided he was interested in the application of technology to music teaching, got an MA in "interdisciplinary" (music and computing), then decided machine learning was cool and decided to teach a machine learning system to play violin, and is now getting a PhD in "electrical engineering" (which is really CS in this case).

So in at least some cases, people get odd combinations of degrees more by accident than design.
Is The Sharing Economy Safe for Women?
This could really work well paired with an phone app that gets notifications instead. I use a VPN system that works like that.
Amen to that. This is an issue we've been very aware of recently, and we're discussing various possibilities for mitigating.

The point about using historical graphs instead of single significance numbers reduces, but does not solve, the likelihood of making a mistake due to one of these chance results.
Gowers on a new type of mathematics for non-mathematicians.
The problem for Craigslist is that the one thing people want is a better interface. If CL provides an API people can use to build an alternative frontend, and users start to go to these frontends instead of CL itself, there's nothing to stop those new frontends from extending CL with their own listings, and eventually extinguishing it. That was PadLister's business model.
Why can't the IT industry deliver large projects quickly as in other industries?
"...they[Craigslist] charged users to use a megaphone to announce that they were selling something."

I don't get where you came up with that. It wasn't in the article at all.
What are the best books on business networking and relationship building?
What if someone forgets the password of email system? :)
They drive at mm/s speeds. Moving over a few meters because the soil is stirred up is a huge waste of energy and time, not to mention the risk of failure.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3861127
People seem to forget/not realize that the EDL (entry, descent and landing) of Spirit and Opportunity had pretty much all the elements that the Curiosity EDL does PLUS the airbags and the airbag cocoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij33yhdGn_g
I can believe that as regards science practice, and think a lot of epistemology of science and such isn't that relevant or useful to the practice of science (everyone seems to have kind of a half-worked-out theory of verificationism or falsificationism or something similar that they claim to subscribe to, but things mostly work pragmatically in practice).

I'm more thinking of physicists who, especially in their later career, decide to write what are essentially philosophy works, only they: 1) don't acknowledge them as such; and 2) they are therefore often not as good as they could be, and sometimes bad. For example, Roger Penrose's stuff about physics and consciousness is a bit strange, and it probably wouldn't hurt if he cared more about existing work in philosophy of mind. And Hawking's most recent book has good science, and an interesting philosophical proposal of "model-dependent realism", but strangely refuses to consider it to be a philosophy proposal or discuss relevant existing positions.

Physicists veering off towards "big-picture" philosophy-ish stuff later in their careers isn't new, but this sort of seat-of-your-pants approach seems newer. Looking at the philosophy-oriented works Max Planck wrote later in his career, for example, he's impressively well-read in both physics and philosophy.
That said, PadMapper's point about facts not being copyrightable seems to be correct, and Craigslist is suing over something it doesn't have any actual ownership of.

Back when PadMapper was scraping the data itself, sure, there was a whole TOS / cost argument to be made. At that point I did think Craigslist was in the right. But that appears to have been gotten around completely legally, and Craigslist has moved into the position of being the bully in this argument.