skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am convinced that when computing comes in force to the third world, it will not be through donated/subsidized laptops, but through phones. I bet that in 100 years, the famous hacker that rose to great power from the slums will have cut his teeth on a mobile device that was purely the result of the free market. This is not a value judgement. Just a prediction.
I think Hacker News is as close to a "non-social" discussion forum as you're going to find, while maintaining high engagement.

The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and care about the discussion, but it also means that people will go off-topic, get into heated arguments, or bring up memes and social topics.

If it were possible to strictly enforce rules against off-topic or non-technical discussions, I suspect engagement would drop very quickly. Learning is a strong motivator, but I doubt it provides the same semi-addictive feedback loop that the social aspects of a site do.

(I don't have any evidence beyond my own gut feelings based on web forums over the years --- happy to be proved wrong! A high-engagement non-social discussion forum would be an interesting place.)
Holding a large program in your head is like holding a city in your head. You can't entirely do it. What you can do is to know broad outlines and principles, so you can navigate to the relevant points and negotiate difficult parts. When you see the details at the relevant places, then you can deal with them. It's like being a cab driver. You don't memorize every cobblestone and pothole, but you know how to get where you need to go you can deal with them as you're driving.
Don't know how unique I am, but clicking the test button there causes (old, 3.x) Firefox to crash.
I couldn't cope with all the "LOL WOODSCREWS!!!1!" type trolling. There's a lot of partisan stuff, and meme-spewing. And while there are plenty of people who really know what they're talking about (to the level the OP wants and above) there are also arrogant but ignorant 14 year olds ranting stuff.

The text /prog/ board has some interesting discussion, but there's a lot of "Have you read your SICP today?".

And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content.

Some of the other chans are better, but still risky and with a lot less traffic.

There is a great bit of copypasta about installing Linux though.
Trojan Disguised as Trend Micro Component Drops BitCoin Miner App
Sleep-deprived writer raising money for charity with websockets (tech demo now)
f :: IPAddress -> [Maybe EmailAddress]

I am guessing that in order to get this function to work, the ad company would have a contract with a company such as LinkedIn or Twitter, who can perform this mapping, based on their server logs.
Your response has a higher content density than the original!

Working in scientific groups & having studied philosophy, I find that I'm constantly reminding my coworkers to ask if their clever question is in fact the right one, to question (and answer) what they'll accept as an explanation before searching for one. This sort of thinking doesn't come automatically from purely technical or scientific studies.
Reposting the paper referenced in the G+ thread:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

From the paper:

"By observing returning visitors, we estimate how rapidly browser fingerprints might change over time. In our sample, fingerprints changed quite rapidly, but even a simple heuristic was usually able to guess when a fingerprint was an 'upgraded' version of a previously observed browser's fingerprint, with 99.1% of guesses correct and a false positive rate of only 0.86%"
I read that he wanted someone to take the bet with. As in he wanted someone who disagreed so they could stake money on the outcome.
I really like that HN still has such an old, simple interface. It's one of the reasons I haven't left yet.
On Android you could play it (and Icewind Dale, etc) with the FOSS https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforg...
It's a double-edged sword: global labour arbitrage has resulted in massive increases in quality of life for the average Chinese, but people look at the QOL in China and think, "I'm facilitating slavery by buying foreign goods". What these people really want, in an ideal world, is for there to be no inequality between various national markets. This is happening slowly, but like any inequality, it will gradually even out over time.

Businesses look at both halves of that problem and see

a) we have to pay more to manufacture things in China, and the cost is going up

b) people don't want to buy things made in China, even though the price is going up, because they still sense inequality

and so they tentatively start bringing some production back. This trend will likely speed up ( especially, as this article says, for large goods that are more expensive to ship and easier to assemble ) as Chinese wages rise.
Ask HN: Etiquette of Applying for Internships at Startups
I'll be contacting various startups in the next coming months after developing a portfolio and personal website, but I do have one question.

Should I use the companies' jobs@ emails, or contact a developer directly?

In my experience, sending to jobs@ has been unfulfilling, and I've found success (small sample size) contacting developers directly. Is this rude? Do companies have the jobs@ email for a reason? In the case of a college student looking for an internship, is it appropriate?

Thanks HN.
You're right. But if you're learning science then you don't learn ethics. However we're not learning science here, we're learning philosophy.

Secondly, just because it's "invented by humans" doesn't mean it's not real. After all, language is invented by humans, but you can still do science on language.
I find it interesting to read this again after a few years only to realize that Paul is in direct contradiction of those who would have us take a break every 25 minutes with his second point. It's kinda refreshing to hear this point of view again. I worked 5 solid hours last night, starting that particular stretch around 7pm and got around 3-4 normal work days worth of work done.
> It's actually an indictment of our programming tools that they require one to hold so much of the design context in one's head.

Reminds me of a misconception a vocal student I met had about math. She thought she could understand the attraction of math because the symbols and equations could look pretty. I had to explain that the beauty was not in the symbols, but in the pictures and concepts they could evoke in your mind, much as the beauty of music wasn't in notes on a page, but the sounds they represent.

Feynman once said something about how equations evoked animations in his mind.

This is the value of things like Lisp, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Light Table -- by interacting with systems in a tight feedback loop, you can start to form pictures and understandings in your mind. It also shows where those environments and other current tools are lacking. Instead of having to reconstruct relationships in our minds, we should have a way of navigating an explicit diagram of them. Even IDEs like Eclipse, for all their complexity, still require you to read then form relationships in your mind. (It's like we're all still doing word processing with non WYSIWYG word processors.)

http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp
C++ continuation-passing style
> Generally, I think philosophy is like mathematics ...

There are no two subjects farther apart than philosophy and mathematics. They represent extrema on a spectrum that lies between absolute intellectual rigor and absolute intellectual onanism:

http://xkcd.com/435/

A mathematical idea is interesting to the degree that it addresses other mathematical ideas, perhaps proves a theorem of interest to other mathematicians.

A philosophical idea is interesting to the degree that it avoids addressing anything that might resolve an open question or (God forbid) cause the cessation of the endless chatter that identifies the true philosopher.

> ... that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost every level of "practical" research.

You're still describing philosophy, yes? There's no research in philosophy, practical or otherwise -- research is by definition an effort to correlate an idea with reality, and reality-testing is not philosophy's domain.
Also anything to do with the continental side of philosophy, which leans towards the political and away from the scientific.

In fact, this guy's syllabus is basically an intro to philosophy of science, and that's it. Philosophy does much, much more than that.
The encryption algo:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?pid=explorer&srcid=0Bz16_...
There's a cultural divide between those attitudes - comfortable is the enemy of startups? Well, then call it something else. It isn't a bad thing - in fact in the end all you can live is your one life, whether in a corporation, startup or consulting. If you've built a cocoon around yourself in the form of a consulting business, its as good a cocoon as one in any other place. Better than some; it doesn't depend upon the whim of VCs or a board.
US FTC bars advertising firm from sniffing browser histories
An invite would be appreciated if you, or anyone else seeing this, can offer one.

http://scr.im/2pty
Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund (Harvard)
> That's because all morality is relative, one of the few things philosophy got right.

As far as I know, there is no consensus in the philosophical community that relativism is right. In fact, my impression is that there's a stigma against relativism, as it's hard to come up with a satisfactory relativistic theory. For example, if relativism is true, it might be the case that we can't judge other societies or other times, but certainly slavery and female genital mutilation are wrong, and objectively so. I'm also not sure what to make of "nature not caring." Nature also doesn't "care" about math or science, because nature isn't a thinking thing that can care.
We're currently trying to load test the web app.
Feel free to come and check what's going on in David's mind as you see him typing in real time, so that we can get an idea of how much traffic we can sustain.
If it's for a good cause, also.
Most of your potential market may have never heard of HN, much less have established karma here. Not defending my lowly position and certainly understand what you're getting at, but I do not think you're doing your idea justice by taking 'Ask HN' as a solid interest gauge.

If I were trying to validate this idea, I would probably look to local meetups for co-founders and non-tech founders, LinkedIn groups for tech-business people, and tech-business students. They're your market, so ask them.

How long do you think it would take?
Are there any substantial costs involved?
You can visit the neighborhoods often enough that they are quickly familiar when you happen upon them again. That's called a domain expert.

In fact, London cab drivers DO hold the city in their head. They are required to, before they get their license.
Pokemon Yellow hack recodes the game from within
I'm not sure I understand where the kicker comes from.

"The big data market has been suffering from a general lack of qualified analysts and developers, say vendors. Companies have sought to help bridge the gap by extending training efforts and partnerships with universities."
Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source
40+ Friday freebies
Every once in a while we all run out of ideas. It’s a stressful and frustrating experience. And it’s no coincidence that it often comes at the end of a long working week. However, Friday is a great day to finish up projects, draw in new inspiration and let those ideas percolate over the weekend in time for a productive start to the following week.So to help you finish up this week’s work and prepare for next week’s, we’ve put together a list of great freebies. Most are aimed at designers and developers, but there’s plenty here for bloggers too. So dip in, get reinspired, and let’s get the week finished off in style.
Yes, I was thinking about what I read about London cabbies. However, they don't necessarily have recall of every pothole and cobblestone. They remember enough of a map so they can get to where they need to be, and deal with what's there on the way.
India's cyber monday - Great Online Shopping Festival
Scientists warn of sperm count crisis
I can't see them paying a $320 million penalty to GloFo in order to move their manufacturing to TSMC.
Now he is am early employee of a highly successful startup.
>[Philosophy's real purpose] is to constantly search for deeper underlying truth.

What "truth" has philosophy itself produced from that search which is well-defined, non-trivial, and correct?
I do it. I build mockups in my mind, run through clicks and interactions and finally the code flows.
I dunno. I see 'Made in Europe' becoming more prevalent in products mfgd in Europe. I don't feel off-put by that. So, I think it's more your personal reaction.

Mfgs mfg where they do because it's advantageous, one way or another. They very rarely do it for political reasons; overwhelmingly it's due to economic/strategic reasons, AFAIK.

W/re Kickstarter, I wonder if there's any bleeding effect from the 'consume local' food movement to the durable goods sphere. Maybe it's just coincidence, altho there seem be some parallels.
New Rule: Every Desktop Design Has To Go Finger-Friendly
Umm, no, it isn't. He's talking about Judea Pearl, the developer of Bayesian networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl
>> mobile application (either web based or native app)
The defect rate is not 4 times as high, it is actually higher than that. If there is some probability x that a single pixel is not defective, the defect-free probability for a display is x^(width * height).

If we choose x to be 99.99999% that a single pixel is not defective, the probability of generating a defect-free 1080p (19201080) display is 81.27%, and the probability of generating a defect-free 4k (38402160) display is only 43.63%. This means that in order to produce one defect-free 1080p display, on average 1.23 displays need to be produced, and on average to produce one defect-free 4k display 2.29 displays must be produced. In pixels, this translates to 2.55e6 and 1.90e7 respectively.

The difference between the two is the number of pixels comprising 7.9377 1080p displays, about 6.4 of which would be expected to be defect free. This should indicate that the raw cost of a defect-free 4k display should be at least 6.4 times the raw cost of a defect-free 1080p display, assuming that a full display is manufactured all-at-once, and there is no interim testing to discard bad panels early, and that the cost-per-pixel of manufacture is a constant. In reality, I would expect the defect-tolerance and the pre-defect cost per pixel of the 4k display to be higher than a 1080p display. There probably is a small early-adopter penalty, but the cost isn't very out of line.
Actually, (1) is the result of vote fuzzing by reddit. They intentionally manipulate upvote and downvote numbers to obscure from potential voting rings whether their votes are effective.

There are also some small safeguards in place against (2). If you literally go to someone's user page, and start downvoting every post, reddit will start ignoring your votes towards that user in actual score calculations.
Veilig auto rijden op een glad en besneeuwd wegdek
Google doesn't run JS on its machines much. Google users run JS.
So, we all agree that "Retina" displays are better? The problem is that it won't become popular until a company, which tends to be Apple, comes along with the right marketing so the average consumer feels the need to spend the extra money on the technology. Personally, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft joined in and promoted HiDPI, for example, with Windows 8.

Apple introduced USB in the later 90's. It took forever before the PC industry adopted it. I don't think anyone has to pay licensing fees for Thunderbolt connectors. How long do we have to wait before every PC ships with a port?
this is worse than that ayn rand post a while back
We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon for hackers to consume news.

This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results.

You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...
So the author argues for some kind of long in the tooth peculiar positivism? Had he studied just some 20th century philosophy and its problems (from positivism to analytic philosophy to post-analytic), he wouldn't make such tiresome arguments.
Japanese scientist unveils thinking humanoid robot
I would imagine that the article about how atheists experience and connect with religion-inspired works would be relevant to someone trying to design a marketing strategy for a movie based on the Christian musical Les Miserables.
Yes, that's a good start. And if you want to take it a step further, you could use a tool like intigi.com (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders) which allows you to not only aggregate feeds, but also run Lucene queries on them to filter out the noise.
The latest developer challenge at my job: touch-screen autocorrect.
> I’m surprised that LinkedIn doesn’t use labels correctly.

I'm really not. My experience with LinkedIn in terms of production quality code has been quite bad - not being able to unsubscribe from emails because of bugs that crash the website among the most annoying one.
I think this is correct, but for all positions rather than just executives. If you want to be a Principal Engineer or a similar position in the technical track, this would also work.

Even with my company being so large, there's a few key names I always hear dropped. Those are the "A" players, and always busy. For new projects, they're always the first people managers try to draft on to their projects. This relates to both #4 & #5, where high priority people get high priority projects which leads to further high priority things.

What I'd like to know for my own career is (in a large and bureaucratic system) if there is a repeatable way to find the high priority projects. The "A" players get tagged first, and work seems to be silo'd so you don't hear about the cool/high priority projects until after it's underway and they've already staffed out the team through people they know.

My current strategy is to work with one of those "A" people in hopes of getting projects passed on that he's too busy for. We're in similar roles, and I work well with him. I recently got a fairly high priority project because of that, but I didn't know if anyone else had any strategies.
Title: "Can websites personally identify visitors?"

Links to: plus.google.com

That's hilarious.
The dusty corners of Google where Python is relegated must add up to far more expansive use tha all of DropBox.

This isn't a Python move. It is a Guido move and a company environment move and a product move.
Compare Googles recentbJS publications with their recent Dart publications.
Many philosophers have questioned the scientific definition of "correctness". For example Heidegger who argued that scientific truth is an approximation and measurement of things that we already presume to exist. These discoveries may be correct, and they may be true. But what about the more primordial truth (i.e. being) which we take for granted before we even begin a scientific inquiry? This is what he investigates, so pretty much all scientific definitions of correctness don't apply here. But it is very hard to convince followers of scientism that this investigation has any meaning, because they've already closed their minds to this form of thinking.
Not to mention Facebook tracking you across the web with their Like buttons.

I try to do most of my browsing in a different browser from the one I log into FB/Google with.
The best way to learn something is to come up with it yourself.

That's been bugging me, and it's been bugging me because it's not entirely right. It's not entirely wrong either, though.

Given an undirected graph, in which you need to calculate the shortest path between two vertices, would you slog it out or would you just find a shortest path algorithm?

Now move that up a level, from feature implementation to feature design -

If you had to federate identities between two directories, would you hack something together, or would you have a look to see if someone else has done that before? Assuming the latter, you'd probably discover OpenId, OAuth, WS-Federation, and SAML. Would you then use one of these or try to roll something that models their behaviour?

Take that up all the way until you reach the age-old build vs. buy debate, and the connected enterprise and so on. Building something just to understand it is not making much sense to me.
>For example, shouldn't you then be looking to provide internet/bandwidth in the first place? This is a lucrative problem that you (entrepreneurs) can solve. Customers are always going to be there, no matter how you see it.

Yes, of course. I agree with both statements in the sense that internet infrastructure and more basic needs are a big market in India, and that customers in general will always be there.

What I disagreed with is that Customers for some specific market or level of service will always be there.
CheckIO guys, the very first task (ATM) is annoyingly unclear. One shouldn't need to try to understand what you meant. You might want to look at the way problems and objectives are laid out in Rice's excellent interactive python class on Coursera : https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython

Also, from a pure "story" game design standpoint : there's no initial hook, and the story is fairly bland (I came in curious and 2 lines were enough to bore me). I believe you shouldn't try to do a backstory for the sake of it. Either think it through and do something good, or keep it very very very short.

Hope this helps, I know this kind of playtest feedback is always hard to listen to, but if you're gonna do something great, you need to pay attention... Plus I'm a business/product cofounder type of guy, currently learning Python, so I imagine I'm pretty damn close to your target audience.

Anyway, this is interesting and I'll be back to try it more and see if it gets better. Good luck and lots of courage on this!
It is important to note that the author is from Canada and spent a significant portion of his life there, before trying to do something in India. So, his views are fairly biased about India - like trying to compare a Developed vs a Developing country.
>because nature isn't a thinking thing that can care.

This isn't commonly accepted even now. Many people think that good things happen to good people because nature/god cares.
One cool thing: looking thru the README it looks like they ended up fixing a part of Banjo Tooie that had always broken before due to the challenge/response being encoded wrong in one case.
The modern mis-use of the term philosopher is annoying.

A philosopher isn't a philosophy professor. A philosopher is someone who lives by and espouses there own belief system.