skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great, the ol' "Argument from Market Share", an essentially un-falsifiable hypothesis. I mean, it would take Saruman, Gandalf and Dumbldore to reverse the proportions of machines with Windows vs Macs, vs machines running Linux. That argument basically excuses Windows and the surrounding culture from examination.

Perhaps Windows is the "Dragon King" of malware, and the Linux or Mac experience is more typical. After all, undocumented systems calls, using part of the file name (".exe") as execute permission, magic file names like "AUX", "LP" and "CON", and not documenting the entire list of file types that can execute might really contribute.

Untrue analogies like "The biggest beast in the jungle has the most parasites" don't help either, they're just more of the same excuse for Windows. Does the biggest beast have the most parasites? Maybe the most visible parasites, but I doubt the most. I personally would expect the most ancient clades of animals to have the most parasites: long-lasting clades of animals would have the most time for parasites to evolve. Some recent paleontological work suggests that some disease we see in birds today may have originally evolved as diseases of the bird's theropod dinosaur ancestors. Since Windows preserves at least a measure of backwards compatibility to MS-DOS, maybe it has the most parasites as the most unchanged clade of operating system.
Almost Every Android Device is Malware Infected
How long before Apple, Google and Facebook are disrupted
Any plan for SSL? And Apache Solr as a Service?
All I can finish today is a rather unhelpful rant. I'm very opinionated and angry about this stuff:

http://guscost.com/2012/07/29/mathemantics/

But I'll be sure to put together a follow-up instructional blog that skips the vitriol, as nobody should actually have to just believe me. I do think that the very general attitude toward each problem is the only constant feature, and each topic has to be treated as a brand-new exploration, so I'll need to coagulate a topic to start off with. I'm leaning towards degrees of freedom, coordinate systems and the magic of Euler's formula. Sound good?

And if not, I'm serious about the last sentence. What topic gave you the most trouble when you tried to learn it?
Still a pretty big inconsistency.

500 + 1% typed right in calculator displays "500 + 1% = 500.01" in the calculator.

500 + 1% typed in the search box displays "500 + 1% = 505" in the calculator too.

It's probably due to the search result being returned by some server at Google while the other one is computed locally through some client-side JS logic. I think they'll notice and unify the behavior at some point.
If by "school mathematics" you mean algebra, then I completely disagree with you. Algebra is essential for almost every other mathematical concept, not to mention everyday tasks. Just because a computer can do it easily, doesn't mean that people should rely on them to do simple calculations when they could have easily learned how to do it on their own. That is terribly inconvenient and a waste of resources.
I might have found this interesting if it used Markdown as its base syntax, since I prefer my content to be somewhat portable from one system to another. I like to avoid being locked into a particular piece of software, and Vimwiki's custom syntax would seem to make that kind of portability more challenging than if it used Markdown, Textile, or some other somewhat-standard syntax as its base syntax.
Why accounts should have anything to do with email or email address. It's bad policy and I hate it. We all know that email isn't secure. For many sites I would like to disable password recovery due these inherit security issues related to email. If you ever login to Gmail, after that you have always clear all cookies and cache data and possible super cookies. After that you would need to login (again) to email to uh oh, access other sites. Afaik this is super bad idea. Naturally you could save the link as bookmark, which would work. But security would still suck.
Domains operate in a manner to real estate. We've been through the "wild west" land grab of domains at this point and now we're working toward the next stage, whatever that ends up being. Remember that domain names are transferable so the reality is that, of all of the millions of registered domains, only those which are profiting their creators are truly taken without much chance of being reclaimed (probably 1% or fewer).

This is a problem that will sort itself out, there's no cause for concern.
Same reaction here. It also does not generalize to (x+1)(x+2)(x+3). It especially does not generalize to (x+y)^n, let alone (x+y+z)^n, which I think is more important. I think these kinds of specialized tricks are to be avoided at all cost. Math is about abstraction after all.
In other words if you dont' have something nice to say, be passive aggressive about it.
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I don't want people knowing what services I signed up for even if mainstream. Anytime you leak any user info you potentially weaken security.
I find it amusing that 90% of 4chan's comments are misunderstanding the term "hacker" as it is applied to HN & the Startup scene.
And I hate arm-chair complainers that come up with ridiculous complaints about protestors. How do you reasonably any of these things to happen? So: where is the irony?
Foursquare is not useful though. I don't know anyone who really uses it actively.
ShowHN: unofficial Olympics json feed demo in knockoutjs
These KPIs are on a monthly basis, but do you have anything more fine-grained to track KPIs weekly? Perhaps I'm getting too focused..
Ryan - from what I've seen (we've recently started doing KPIs at our startup) - the more business-y people like them, and the more tech-y people hate them. To Sherman's point, their naming offends tech people - "KPI" sounds like it's meant to intentionally obfuscate, whereas "key metric" is the same number of syllables. Pretentious isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

I don't mean to say that they're not good - looking at yours, they seem very reasonable. We're introducing a Product team right now, over/with a dev team that's been otherwise self-reliant for the last two years, and there are growing pains with that process. As silly as it is, speaking everyone's language (not talking about KPI's or sending power points to devs, not sending Legal to GitHub to checkout your terms of service, etc) is important for buy-in.

That being said, yours is the first tech person's blog post about KPIs. I'll be sure to check back on it as we get our dashboard off the ground - thanks Ryan.
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The bbc is almost entirely funded by the licence fee. There is a small grant to cover world service (mainly for political reasons eg providing news in Arabic) and BBC worldwide makes some money, but the vast majority is from the tv license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Finances

I also don't think it's true to suggest ISPs are throttling iPlayer specifically. The bbc has said it will name and shame any ISP that does.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/362950/bbc-will-alert-...
My dream educational system destroys the concept of "subjects" - no more siloing knowledge within artificial boundaries. Students think things like "Algebra is Math and I hate Math so I hate Algebra" or "Math is my worst subject." It is an easy label to associate their failures with.

An example of learning without boundaries:

One day, I decide I want to play the guitar. I get my hands on one and fiddle around. Perhaps a brief history on the instrument will give me some better context as to why the instrument is shaped as it is, and what all the features are. An exposure to famous guitarists and their music improves my appreciation of music and gives me context to work with. As I continue to struggle with notes and basic music theory, it may be a good time to take a brief detour into the realm of physics - a lesson in simple harmonics. If interested, I can dive further into the required algebra relevant to harmonic equations. Hmm... maybe learning to use a computer program can help me figure out how messing with these waves changes the sound...

And so it goes. A familiar story to most hackers, but sadly an approach that most educational systems do not encourage.

Is this exploratory form of learning superior? My theory is that the associations formed between nodes of knowledge are necessary for any sort of actual deep learning to occur. By sandboxing subjects, the standard school curriculum limits the possible associations that students think are allowed, thus limiting the probability of successful links between nodes. Even an above average student can graduate from college, and be left with nothing but a bunch of barely reachable random islands of knowledge, floating further out to sea every day.

In other words: school sucks, learning rules.
NNTP? for TV? Is this legal?
>someone posts a PHP/Apple/Olympics rant and then half the top links are swallowed by thinly veiled 'responses'.

Love it or hate it, it's the new self-promotion/branding via blogging. If a controversial article makes it to the top of a popular or niche internet forum like HN, and you have something of substance to say about it, it's infinitely better to post your thoughts on your own blog instead of in the comments of the social news submission.

The niche forum sees it, and you can claim credit in the comments, associating your handle with your blog. But more people may see it - potential clients, employees, funders, cofounders, employees, etc - and it's good way of beating writer's block and adding content to your professional blog.
'...people brag all the time about not knowing how to do math'. This is true, I think, mostly of Anglo-Saxon countries. It is quite a disgusting attitude. In what way is someone's life-chances or overall happiness degraded by a better understanding or skill in the use of numbers and higher mathematical concepts? I consider this anti-maths meme one of the most pernicious aspects of our culture.
There was a recent discussion on reddit following some Khan Academy controversy, where some education people mentioned some research about the concept of slope.

It turns out that a significant number of people don't understand speed as a rate. They think of it as an intensity, as in volume of sound or brightness. (Those are flux, which are related to rate, though that's not how we perceive them.)

People like that are alien to me. I think it also explains why freeway drivers in Houston often have about 0.3 seconds of separation between cars.
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In this particular instance, the IOC.
They can protest however they want, they will not change the basic facts: that a country with Japan's population density needs dense power---a lot of power from as little land as possible.

Keeping existing nuclear plants for as long as possible, while the next generation of nuclear plants is being actively developed, is a sane choice for any country, but especially for Japan.

Of course, I can see the incredulous voices "How can you say that, when in Fukushima etc.". However, please see (again) the facts: radiation death toll is still zero. Compare that to the death toll from pollution, if Japan had built coal plants instead of nuclear plants all those decades. For numbers, google "deaths per terawatthour".
> Math is the best way that I know of to do this.

But is it the best way educators know of to do this? Because at the end of the day, whether math is a good basic skill that pays dividends in logical thinking and symbolic manipulation (dividends beyond what other methods could deliver) is an empirical question. What you say sounds plausible, but theories can be plausible and dead wrong.
Fun way to make fake headlines on nytimes.com, just had my wife fooled for a second :)
مسلسل فرقة ناجي عطا الله الحلقة 12 
مسلسل فرقة ناجي عطا الله الحلقة 12

فرقة ,ناجي, عطا, الله , الحلقة 12

http://tube.sbayaa.com/1322
This sounds like the argument google etc. are using for making everything "social". You don't type in a domain name for "ham's fish and chips", you just search for it, and google knows which community you're part of and directs you to the correct one.

Obviously everyone here will hate that idea, but "normal" users may welcome it.
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Olympics: Will you still medal in the morning?
So you aspire to be a Renaissance Man?
Why should "anti-nuke protesters" boycott the power grid? It's necessary no matter what energy source is used (though its topology can look very different).
It's hard to affect most KPIs in 7 days. However, it really depends on what you're measuring. For instance, you could switch a lot of the User Growth KPIs to weekly instead of monthly.
Exactly. As a developer I get back the email address of the user that has authenticated with the BrowserID server. That way it is easy to build a list of authorized users.

I suspect they will make a browser specific login workflow in which case you would not even need to be presented with a form asking you to auth as a user. Your browser would know your credentials already (which I guess is similar to login details autocomplete).
What struck me about the reporters was their insistence on measurability. The reporter framed the idea as a East/West coast philosophical difference, but I believe it goes deeper than that. W. Edwards Deming (who brought modern management to Japanese factories after WWII) listed running a company on only visible figures as one of his "Seven Deadly Diseases," and he repeatedly mentioned that the most important factors in running a business are unknown, unknowable, and unmeasurable.
Interesting... I thought they did affect all prior comments. My mistake. He has indeed been hellbanned.
"KPI" is a common term that most people are aware of, so it's mostly about avoiding confusion.
> Mental blind spot? You're making stuff up, it's called strawman -- and then you accuse me of having a blind spot for your strawman? And that's not snarky? Irony duly noted and appreciated.

Note I did say "(willful?)" Thanks for clearing that question up.

Also, the irony of the functional similarity of your post and its parent is left as an exercise. (Though you're probably feeling too righteous to get it and would be furious if you did.)
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People would just hit both down arrows.
On OpenRent [1] we're using the Google Identity Toolkit [2]. We're finding that in our current configuration it works extremely well, even for non technical users.

It offers password-less log-in, and also remembers your username/email client-side. The only issue is lack of support for facebook/twitter log in out of the box - but that is apparently in development.

It doesn't seem to be widely adopted, and that is possibly due to the reliance on Google servers it adds to your service. Whether that comes back to haunt us or not I don't know - but I have a backup system in place in case GITKit does stop working!

[1] - http://www.openrent.co.uk

[2] - https://developers.google.com/identity-toolkit/
Who understands "KPI" that wouldn't understand "metrics"?
This is a perfect example of how Betteridge's Law can fail. Yes, algebra is necessary. Very much so. It's basically the first time students are required to operate on a formal system, which requires strictness and analytical thinking. As another poster has pointed out, algebra is a gym for your brain. Also, algebra has tons and tons of applications. Anybody claiming they "never needed to solve for x" has completely missed the point of symbols. They have certainly solved for x but haven't realized it yet.

The article lists arguments which can be applied to about everything else you learn in secondary education. How comes nobody ever complains about learning literature, arts, music or whatever, but people seem to insist that they'll never need math in their jobs, when in fact, math has made their lives possible as they know it.

</rant>
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And as your comments show, the opacity of the rules and automated moderation is a problem with the way HN is run.
I bought a TV License (updated the article) and here's the proof: https://img.skitch.com/20120729-8nkr9edjmm4966yt8qm1sfyg5t.p...

So, really now it should just be a question of the rights holder allowing me in the US to watch something broadcast in the UK that I paid for.
Go read "How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians?" for a mathematician's take on the topic.

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematic...
indicating there might be some significant overlap between the two userbases

I am more than willing to out myself. The discussion is exactly proving the point why 4chan is such a fascinating place. Sure it has lots of "distortion" but in the end it is one of the few places that does not sugar coat reality and the absence of any "punishments" produce raw insights. That is why the only "communities" I am somewhat active on are hn and 4chan. One because it provides a more supportive environment, the other because it isn't afraid to go there where it hurts. I never could find a reason to join those in-betweeners ala Reddit.
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No, I find it about right. Everything is hacking and everyone is an engineer around here. Wake up at 5am now? Hacking your sleep pattern. Move a button to the right, Layout hacking. Learn what the html tag means, web engineer. Discovered vi, system engineer. Edit (find?) your .bash_profile on OS X, OS X hacking system engineer.

I see this all as nothing but the continued dilution of the terms to nothingness.
Perhaps a more elegant personal wiki solution is Github's own gollum[1]. It supports markdown as well as a number of other formats.

[1] https://github.com/github/gollum/
Isn't this what the new TLD domains rollout addressing?
The thing about 4chan (all boards) is that, even when an anonymoust poster makes a good point, it's usually wrapped in hyperbole and meanness. It's not a requirement of being anonymous, but it's a part of the culture of imageboards: you're expected to be brash about anything you don't like. If you don't, you come off as a newbie.

This is why I think anything that happens in 4chan should stay there: because the very culture of 4chan only makes sense there. When you take it to a site like HN, where anonymity is less common, you make the discussion unilateral. A HN user is probably not going to say everything they think about /g/ under an username that's associated with their real name elsewhere. So we have /g/ telling everything that's wrong with HN (with the usual hyperbole) but not HN telling everything that/s wrong with /g/, either for fear of reprisal or fear of a ban.

I don't really frequent /g/, but I suppose that we could point out their flaws and stereotypes too, like they do to us (that HN is too supportive of Apple, that we're entrepreneur wannabes, that we take ourselves too seriously, that we're "design hipsters" (?)) but since we don't have the absolute anonymity and brazen attitude of 4chan, we'll never make this discussion truly honest.

As for their complaint about our pretentiousness: when you're writing under your name, or for your company, there's no way of not being a little pretentious and taking yourself too seriously.
Kind of off-topic, I'm slightly reminded of this:
http://xkcd.com/1007/
Well, not just technical excellence. I want to celebrate and encourage "the hacker spirit", which embodies playfulness as well. It takes a certain mind to look at Brainfuck and ask "do we really need all those instructions?" [1], even if it's not particularly hard, once you've asked the question, to see that you don't. (Mind you, I never looked for ways to minimise them myself, so it might be a harder problem than I'm giving credit for.)

I don't feel like the Olympics demonstrate the hacker spirit, although it's likely that some of the athletes have it.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/BF_instruction_minimalization
People do find the Olympics entertaining, but not in proportion to the budget.

For all the millions of people who get joy in the Olympics there are even more who get joy, more consistently, by following the Yankees or Sachin Tendulkar.
I worked for Veridae (veridae.com) doing some really interesting EDA software and we used both very heavily. They got acquired by Tektronix last year.
Perhaps we need a way to navigate to websites without requiring the use of a unique identifier such as domain names.

No. I don't care if the identifier is an English word or a SHA512 hash; you need identifier for linking. Linking is what makes the Web what it is, not the fact that you can write a company's name and append .com to go to its website.

On the other hand, ipv6 (and being a number based system, future versions are possible) will allow us to carry on without domain names, so if you don’t mind users needing to use an ip address then there is no problem.

I'm sorry no, that doesn't really work. What happens when you move from EC2 to your own dedicated server, or vice-versa? You lose all your links?
Hi James. I now own a TV Licence. I'm in the US. Is it still pirating if I watch the BBC feed through a VPN?

There's no higher cost of transmission for the BBC - they're sending it to a UK based IP and then I pay a monthly fee for that transmission to the US.

https://img.skitch.com/20120729-8nkr9edjmm4966yt8qm1sfyg5t.p...
Haven't made any commits in a while. Waiting for more features from meteor.
gTLDs were invented to create jobs for lawyers, marketers and others
Very good point.

This could still perhaps be solved technically, although it would take a lot of effort and is probably not worth it.

You can detect cheaters. People who give up/downvotes on the "value add" dimension that are not well correlated with the community's opinion of value add would be detected as cheaters, or at least detected as users who do not share the same values as the community.

Much harder to do, but possible, is to detect cheating in agreement by analyzing trends. Users who agreed with story A, B, and C may have a 90% chance of agreeing with story D. A user who bucks these trends enough can be detected as cheating or randomly voting.
In moments like that I really wish there was a comment from a throwaway account of someone working in Foursquare telling how it looks from the side of the employees.
What is it we are longing for?
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Sopcast has been around for many years..
Or use multiple browsers.
I think you're looking for a problem where there is none. The only case for a "problem in the distribution of domains" would be your "local shops that can't grab their names".

The DNS is a very well thought system, I think it's one of my favorite protocols. ICANN (or any sub-agancy of it) can just decide to take some domains to make the names more "granular". A first approach I thought of in just a few seconds is, with the US as an example, taking over "state code".(com|org|net|...) and only delegate those to small business operating within one state. You get a lot of "domains" for free.
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iPad also doesn't ship with stopwatch/timer/alarm like the iPhone does. The lack of these Apple apps is always sad to me.
There is no stupid "hey I've an idea!" comment in this thread, so I'll offer one.

An alternative (probably already proposed?) could be the following, if you have a large set of human tagged images or videos you could show this images to users and, like, eight set of tags, and ask: what set of tags better apply to the image above (of course only one set is really about the image, other sets are random)? This are three bits per image, do this a few times and the probability of a computer random guessing is very low.

Every time you show an image you may crop + rotate it a bit and apply a filter, so that manually building a table is hard, but if you have a big set of images like google could have maybe this is not needed.