skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> American culture appears to approach diet most scientifically

I don't think this claim can be substantiated. The belief that "a calorie is a calorie" is an axiom in American culture. Despite having been shown by Feynman to be wrong some 30 years ago.

The American culture believes that cholesterol intake is harmful, despite lack of evidence for that (despite a lot of time searching). Similarly for blood pressure and salt (which correlate for 5%-20% of the population, but otherwise a "normal" range of salt intake does not cause hypertension, and too little sodium DOES cause problems)
Also the 1990s 'PCS' auction which created hundreds of teeny-tiny local cellular companies. It took a long time for the big providers to stitch a nationwide network together.
ummm MIT?
I wish the author did better job at explaining what it does.
The blog post zeros right in on the purpose of the pg essay.

It is investor driven.

But the part about businesses building value is what is a little fuzzy? What is value, anyway?

If some "growth hackers", using the incedible and low cost reach of the web, manage to get a million people to "sign up" for some "thing" - never mind that you or someone else may think this "thing" is all but worthless - then this is a "business" that can be exploited. And that's what internet VC do.

Consumers define "value". If they are willing to pay in money or even just attention for absolute garbage, it is still "value". This appears to be true, at least it is true for investors, whether we like it or not.
Gore Vidal said: "Here's a bit of advice for anyone who wants to get on in the world. It doesn't matter what they think of you; what matters is what you think of them."
I missed this the first time around, is there a paper in addition to the blog post? I am wondering if I misunderstand common implementations of PWA 2 enterprise. I was under the impression that mschapv2 was only used inside the server (or mutual) authenticated tls with schemes like peap. Does the chap response actually travel in the clear after tls is used to authenticate the AAA box?
> Your logic is flawed here. TPT is selling lesson plans and live teaching materials, not books.

I think the reverse is true here. An individual plan isn't that different from a compilation of plans. The rules of copyright still apply and the teaching exception does not apply as distribution (for sale no less, though there are free plans on TPT) is not exempted.

Including a reference to the source doesn't remove the liability of distributing/selling a copyrighted work which the distributor doesn't have a license for.

> Like I said, TPT could be saved via DMCA, and the teachers are the ones that could be sued. The teachers would then be protected by the teaching exception. My point was that the lawsuit is not an obvious winner.

I stated this elsewhere but the teaching exception doesn't cover copying or distributing a work to other teachers or for sale. It provides an exception for the purposes of teaching face to face or in the case of an online course, electronically to a registered student.
> Your logic is flawed here.

It might be, but we're talking law, not logic. Copyright law has no obligation to logic.

> TPT is selling lesson plans and live teaching materials, not books. (Or at least they could reasonably make this argument)

They can call them moon modules, and it wouldn't matter. Copyright law has no concept of "book" or "lesson plan". Copyright protects the work. It doesn't matter if you're redistributing prints of a photo, or selling a JPG over the internet. Copying and redistributing a copyrighted work (in any form) is the violation.

> Also, the packages typically include references.

As do many books, but it doesn't exempt them from copyright obligations.

> Teachers using these materials should be aware that they are potentially infringing on copyright, thus could be sued.

This is where you have it backwards. The teachers who use the materials (probably) aren't breaking any laws by using the materials. They're covered by the teaching exemption. TPT, however, has copied and distributed the works in exchange for money. That is a pretty clear violation of copyright expectation.

> Like I said, TPT could be saved via DMCA, and the teachers are the ones that could be sued. The teachers would then be protected by the teaching exception. My point was that the lawsuit is not an obvious winner.

TPT, being in the position of a facilitator, might be safe, but there are two types of teachers in this equation. There are teachers using the lesson plans, and teachers selling the lesson plans. Those selling the lesson plans are at risk, IMO.

Simply being in the teaching profession doesn't automatically exempt you from copyright law. Laws are largely concerned with acts and context. Copying and distribution are both acts. If the context is that of teaching (as in the act of teaching, not the employment), then there is an exemption. Specifically, a teacher may copy and distribute (by incorporating it and showing it to students) a copyrighted work without penalty, provided the teacher is in the act of teaching.

I agree that the lawsuit is not a slam dunk -- very few lawsuits are -- but I don't think this for the same reasons as you.
Have you done any interesting projects with wearables? With Raspberry Pi becoming more mainstream it seems there's a lot of potential for hobbyist wearables, from simple devices to augmented reality projects.
That's certainly one way to side-step the problem.

Although, doesn't F# interop with C# code? It still has to deal with nulls potentially crossing that barrier and could benefit from that not happening.
I can't help but feel that whilst there is a chance that this is a Nigerian scammer, he shouldn't instantly presume it is. He also directly warns to be wary of Nigerians, without providing any reasoning that this IS a Nigerian. Even if it was, it's not really very important to the story.
/dev/null is the most scalable system though, just fire up a node and it's there.
"I think that the evidence strongly supports the notion that the differences between large populations is generally miniscule when compared to the differences within those populations and that if you compare individuals across populations you can find people who are far more similar to each other than they are to the average of their respective populations."

This is called Lewontin's Fallacy. Take height, for example. You can find a man and a woman who are both 5'2", while the average height for women is somewhere around 5'7" and for men somewhere around 5'10". Indeed, the "difference between large populations"--in this case, three inches' difference in average height between men and women--pales in comparison to the "difference within those populations": the height of a healthy adult male can be anywhere from 5' to 7'.

In other words, there can be great variation within either or both of two large populations, and yet statistically significant inherent differences can exist between the averages of those populations.
If I could short FB I would do so immediately. The fallout from this is going to be immense and long-term

That makes me wonder if there is some malicious self-interest behind this. Here's the formula:

ubiquitous yet misunderstood personal technology + sensationalist media + power of suggestion + deliberate astroturfing campaign = sudden and immense drop in stock price.

Not that I actually think this is the case, but it wouldn't be outside the realm of the possible.
Maybe the address he shipped to was in Nigeria? He never states that though.

I wasn't sure if this was just my impression, or if the blog author has some rather strong feelings against Nigerians, but his follow up comment ( http://www.notla.com/archives/2010/07/nigerian-scammer-gets-... ) leaves little doubt.
Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds
The new Myspace
I just tried installing the Rails gem but it is telling me that it can't be found on rubygems.org... anyone else having a problem? Seems like this is too new to have on StackOverflow.
I agree with you, incidentally. I think it might be a better design decision to be slower (but more reliable) and to fail loudly by default (10gen has started down this path a few versions ago, by turning journaling on by default). It's messy, but messes get peoples' attention, at least.

That said, I think that people really do overblow the issue and make mountains out of that particular molehill, because all the tools are there to make it do what you want. Many times, it comes down to people expecting that MongoDB will magically conform to their assumptions at the expense of conforming to others' assumptions. Having explicit knowledge of the ground rules for any piece of technology in your stack should be the rule rather than the exception.
I think this is a great idea. I've been using Opera, which has a full-text search capability for history, but it's limited to the machine you're using it on.

I often find interesting articles on Hacker News while I'm at home that I want to find again when I'm at work. Being able to search by browser history across machines is fantastic for me.
Software Is Eating The World, And APIs Are The Fuel For That
I wouldn't put this on the users' lack of clarity as much as I would blame Facebook for changing the course of it's features so much so that this is now happening to people. People were using the site as it was once intended and we can't blame them for being infuriated when the logic behind that usage changes. To me it's no different than Quora deciding to make all of your posts public without the chance to opt-in, except because of Facebook's privacy settings mess, it isn't easily reversible without severely crippling the content you've posted over the entirety of your account's lifespan.
Using it right now, and I have to say this has drastically increased how much more I enjoy using the site.
Can you please make it work on news.ycombinator.org as well? I'm weird.
> The amount of fees and the costs I pay in America versus what I would pay in The Netherlands is absolutely mind-boggling.

Are you including health insurance? I'm pretty sure that I'm paying significantly less in taxes in the UK than I would be in the US with federal and state taxes plus health insurance.

Your employer might pay for health insurance, of course, but someone is paying.
It is sending a simple get request to the comments links, so it should load roughly as fast as reloading the full page. As per expired links, it takes the links that are on your page. Can you be more specific about that?
Ask HN: Why BaaS (for mobile development) using RDBMS datastores not around?
1. Is the question novice? Am I not aware of backend as a service for mobiles which do have RDBMS datastores?
2. If they don't exist, Why not and Would such a service(which does use RDBMS datastores) make sense for mobile development?
This "main point" is never mentioned in their philosophy page. And the introduction mentions "Optional streaming writes (no acknowledgements)" which sounds like the default is synchronous writes.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Philosophy

I admit that the default unsafe tuning of MongoDB becomes quite obvious when you read more of the manual, but I can hardly say 10gen is without blame for causing this confusion.
I'm excited about RoboHornet. A bunch of people from well-known web companies, browsers, and frameworks are involved (https://github.com/robohornet/robohornet/wiki/Committee-Memb...) and you can be too: https://github.com/robohornet/robohornet/wiki/Community-Part...
Keep in mind that facebook's engineering philosophy is to push new code out every single day. This means that there is little to no QA on code push. Every engineer takes responsibility for their own code push and because people are human they mess up from time to time. I don't think this means that the culture is broken... there are simply pros and cons to on the fly site builds.
http://www.google.com/webfonts

The website itself has hardly any frills.
Not true. This is the source of all the confusion. Originally you couldn't like or comment on wall posts. Conversations were individual posts on each other's walls. You could click the "wall-to-wall" link to view the whole conversation.

This system gave conversations a different feel, and is now causing people to confuse them with private messages.

Edit: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566956
Google Talk is also the protocol for chatting on Google+ (That is, it's the same chat as on Gmail). I've used it for a while to talk with friends around the globe; it's a great place to centralize quick chats/messages and video hangouts. I get Google Talk messages on my phone, and I can leave messages for them to see next time they log on to Google+ or Gmail. It's pretty sweet.
i went to check my fb timeline and indeed some messages between 2008-2009 DO look like they must've been private messages - people writing their home addresses and phone numbers and similar stuff.. i doubt these were public wall posts to begin with .. i can't find any old fb notification emails as i am deleting this things, unfortunatelly. but i does feel a bit scary :|
That would explain why rural areas are expensive, but that excuse doesn't really carry over to urban areas in the US (where it is also expensive).
I'm wondering if it's the age of the SIM card in use...

A few years ago, I upgraded to a new android phone. A day or two later, the SIM card couldn't be detected. Try as I might, it was as though the thing wasn't plugged in.

I took the phone to the nearest carrier store, and the clerk took a look at my SIM card and told me he knew the problem.

My SIM was an older model, and wasn't designed for the heavy amount of... I'll be honest, I don't remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it was the newer phone was activating and accessing the SIM card at a much higher frequency than my old phone did. It had burned the thing out in a manner of 24-48 hours.

They loaded up a new SIM card (which actually had a slightly different look to the connector pins) and everything worked just fine. I couldn't believe it, even though it technically seems plausible.

I'm wondering if this is a similar issue - the new phones are accessing the SIM more frequently, and thus burning them out?

Just a thought
Good stuff Steve. My last day at microsoft is october 19th and i'll being doing similar. Splitting my time between my existing projects that currently bring in some revenue, working part time as the software architect for greatnonprofits.org and spending the rest of the time consulting.
Ubuntu bakes Amazon search results into OS to raise cash
Fucking control fanatics.

We must stop playing just defense against ACTA and such crap. We need an offensive endless stream of Law suggestions for stronger protections of freedoms.
OOC, what is the legal remedy in such a situation for Alice and Bob? Is Alice ultimately the one who loses out there presumably?
I know that even though there was no bug here, this can be an alarming experience to see old posts surfaced like this. We're working on ways to make this interaction clearer so people aren't so surprised in the future.

You ought to be doing more than that, actually. Having been an early user of Facebook, I can assure you that people viewed wall-to-wall and other types of posts differently from how they view wall posts now. No one expected their data to be exposed this way, so for practical purposes, this is tantamount to a bug or data breach from the user perspective.

Disabling this immediately for old posts or allowing users to opt out would be the right thing to do.
Credit Card Processing with Balanced Payments
Well, it was never mentioned.

In addition, because there are a lot of scams that seem to originate from Nigeria (not all that say they're Nigerian are), the author wonders why people should not be suspicious of ALL Nigerians like they are of fake FBI notices.

Interestingly, that paragraph is the most hilighted of this thread and no one thinks that type of blatant sterotyping and discrimination is odd.

As a Nigerian, it makes me really sad and uncomfortable.
You can try airbnb.com or vrbo.com.

At your price range, it would be hard to find a 2br but, you can find a place with two beds no problem (although, they may be in the same room).
Living your life in fear of what people (crooks or not) may do is a sad existence.

Everything could go badly, it's waste of life to worry about the insignificant / unlikely things.
> It would be far smarter for the big educational publishers to buy this thing back for mega-bucks rather than launch a lawsuit they could lose.

The linked article points out that Scholastic bought the site from it's creator and then sold it back when it didn't become an overnight viral success.
To my mind this is a brilliant if unpopular analysis. I would really like to see the ability to import modules "from the past" but it seems extraordinarily difficult to implement that now that 2 and 3 have diverged so much. And one of our problems is exactly what you describe: a large, very-well-tested, 2.X library that we rely on is no longer maintained by anyone. So we'll have to port it ourselves, and surely introduce a bunch of stupid bugs. Grumble.

A saving grace is Python's historical emphasis on unit testing. That makes fore-porting things without horribly breaking them at least plausible. But still painful.
Nice post! I've been thinking about this a lot and glad you wrote about it. I appreciate you sharing your experiences.

I completely agree with breaking up your time into blocks. I try to keep my schedule to 4 hours in the morning of heads down coding (9a - 1p), 4 hours in the afternoon of heads down coding (130p - 530p) and 3 or so again at night (8-11/12).

The other time is for me to do tasks which are relevant to coding but not actually coding, significant other time, or whatever I need to get done so I can think straight during those coding sessions.

I don't answer email while coding, or give in to other distractions. The reason being that I have scheduled time for that and its coming up soon. Anyways, back 2 work ;)
"Chinese method"? I'm sorry to break it like this to you, but you have just described the West.
This is nice, but destroys the ability to open a load of tabs at once by middle clicking the comment links. So it actually slows my usage of the site down as I can't wait for stuff to load in the background.
We know nothing of why they're shipping once a week.

You might not, but someone who read the article would know:

"Shipping rapidly is important to us for so many reasons. For example, the more frequently we ship the less likely it is for large numbers of changes to build up between releases, and shipping a small release is almost always less risky than shipping a big one. Shipping frequently also requires that we make it downright simple to ship by automating it, so anyone can do it. This raises our bus factor, and also democratizes the process of shipping so there aren’t “gatekeepers” who must sign off before any software goes out the door. And by shipping updates so often, there is less anxiety about getting a particular feature ready for a particular release. If your pull request isn’t ready to be merged in time for today’s release, relax. There will be another one soon, so make that code shine!"
Clear, and a good idea. Thanks.
Conduit Preventing "Zynga Anxiety" With Launch of U Browser
Agreed. Maybe the author can do a quick 1-minute video demo highlighting it in action. I need to be more enticed before installing anything, even a plug-in.
I just tried this. I went to http://fiddle.jshell.net/wut6z/show/ (which is the HTML frame of a fiddle someone posted down this page), with my iPhone. It's just an HTML input tag with type=file and an "accept" attribute set to "image/*", and it shows up as a "Choose File" button in the browser.

When you tap it, a sheet slides up from the bottom of the screen with buttons for "Take Photo", "Choose Existing" and "Cancel". Tapping "Take Photo", opens the rear-facing camera, and I have to tap to take the picture.

"Choose Existing" opens the photo album. It works like a normal file chooser if your hardware doesn't support a camera.

So, on this page, I had control over taking the picture. But you raise good points, and I'm curious what you could do with JavaScript if you were trying to take pictures without the user's knowledge.

I'm also curious what metadata I just uploaded.
I don't think anything their doing is particularly novel, but I don't think it's par for the course, either. I may be wrong, but I don't think this is commonplace among Windows desktop apps. I can think of a few others, but the vast majority of examples don't have this kind of release automation.

Welcome to software 101

Maybe you didn't mean that as dismissive and rude, but it sure comes across that way. We can do better than this.
The retailer does no owe sales tax to the state, you do as a citizen of that state.

You, not the retailer, are legally obligated to report your purchases and pay the tax.
RoboHornet: a benchmark designed around issues real web developers care about
There will be no python 2.8. Ref: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/
The rise of enterprise marketing
Audio speedup either generates chipmunk voice or cuts phonemes.

I'm not a big fan of learning from video, but in the online classes I took this year, both on edX and on coursera, I found audio speedup perfectly functional.
Yeah, it makes no sense, does it? I think what they're trying to say is: this page is monetised solely by advertising, and we're not allowed to show adverts to people in the UK, so you can't see it.

Can anyone recommend BBC Worldwide a good copywriter?
On Chrome, go here: chrome://chrome/settings/content

Then on Plugins, select 'Click to play'.
This is mostly unrelated, but some might find it interesting. I went to a Wells Fargo ATM to make a transaction, but the machine was in a sort of debug mode. The bank was closed. I messed around with it for a minute or two because I was curious. Then I remembered the cameras and decided I ought to get the hell out of there.

Pics related: http://i.imgur.com/T77ni.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WdiZK.jpg
Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my criticism. It's of the original site not this improved version.

What I meant is the expiration of the "next" page link at the bottom of the main list. If someone could fix that to either send me to the write page in a paged set or simply send me back to the new links page with the fresh content I'd be indebted for life.

The other criticism of hacker news is how slowly it loads sometimes. I love the content don't get me wrong. And it's free so I feel like a jerk complaining. But it's painfully slow sometimes. I'd never have a site so slow. It would be unacceptable to me.
I've just left a company to do the same-ish thing in marketing strategy. These are some helpful learnings, thank you!
Actually, wasting the scammers' time (at a minimal cost to you) is actually one of the better ways to combat this scam.

The entire scheme is based on the scammers avoiding baiting people who will catch on to the scheme (hence the obvious signs of scammage -- they're a reverse intelligence task), while snaring people who are likely to fall prey.

http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/study--obvious-nigeri...

This reduces their time cost, which is fairly high, as each mark must be navigated through the scam.

The ideal solution would be to create an AI which is sufficiently good to imitate a stupid, scammable individual, tarbaiting the scammers into wasting their time.
Hey, nobody is perfect with their spur-of-the-moment statements, especially when angry. Kudos to you for owning up to it.