skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All deaths in the 1927 Kehoe Massacre were attributed to dynamite. Charles Whitman would have killed more in 1966 if he weren't hampered by return fire from armed civilians as well as police. I'm sure we're seeing some sample bias toward more recent events here as well.

Firearm possession in elementary and secondary schools by anyone other than LEOs is prohibited by federal law.

It's also true that violent crime in the USA has been falling for decades.
I love the idea behind this company. I wish her every success. We need more entrepreneurs with this type of vision.
Am I the only one who finds the 'maker movement' slightly embarrassing. There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movement crap.

This isn't a flame - I'm just surprised that the application of spin managed to produce such a ton of noise.
Very true, but doesn't that mean she belongs on the 30 under 30 list a few years ago, not 2012?
Patch IE, tell mozilla and google about the problem too. Activity that is local to a machine should never be impaired by security patches aimed at the network.
Yes. There are so many companies with wasted productivity in repetitive business process waiting for someone to automate them or "DRY them out." One of the worst examples I saw was a woman whose entire job, as far as I could tell, consisted of downloading a list of system-generated pickup numbers every day and e-mailing it to people. This person was probably being paid between $40-50k per year to do a job that could be completely automated by a few lines of scripting code.

Not that I think automation should be used to lay people off. But if the job she was doing were automated, they could have her on the phone talking to customers and helping out the overworked customer service staff with the call queue instead, with no net expense to the company.
Mostly kids of rich fucks... go figure.
Ask HN: Useful Frameworks/Approaches for Simple Number-Tracking Webapp?
I need to a build a webapp that allows any number of web-based clients (on smartphones) to increment/decrement a number. Each client's current number should be stored on a server so another app can read the list of current numbers and visualize the results in real time.

I haven't done much in the webapp space so am looking for tech suggestions on ways to about this.

I figure I could certainly do PHP/MySQL, but I want an ajax feel to the app (no page reloads). I've noticed options like Firebase/Meteor/Derby and am wondering if that might be a good way to go---avoid the DB all together. Are there other options I should be looking at?

Thanks for any help.
OMG... I logged 1000+ hours with the Amiga 500 on this back in the day.
I really love Mixpanel, it is the "best in breed" when it comes to event analytics. I don't think many people would argue with that, it's awesome. In fact, we use it at Zapier for pretty much everything (basic funnels, A/B testing, retention, engagement, etc...) and we haven't even reached our full potential with it yet. But I still have some pretty fundamental beefs with the state of analytics software in general.

About the article, the problem stems from the fact that proper analytics is hard and is (arguably) getting harder with more advanced packages.Shouldn't it be going in the opposite direction?

It is a lot easier to track discrete downloads or pageviews than some other, more insightful metric, so people will naturally gravitate to the cheaper metrics. Until this is reversed, bullshit metrics will reign.

Anyways, my beefs:

First: how do you decide what data to send into the package?

The more data you send, the better (sure), but at a certain point you are just duplicating your internal datastore, so that is too much, right? But not enough and you'll miss a chance to understand a phenomena that you didn't predict seeing (isn't that the point?). After you decide, then you write a crapton of code to send it all (what about backfilling data when you want to track something new?).

Second: once you are collecting the data, how do you know what metrics to actively track?

This is definitely existential, but it's back to the core problem: doing analytics properly is hard. Why couldn't the software let me define some properties about the type of app I am running and suggest some strategies (you have a subscription SaaS app? Try tracking paid plan retention, signup funnels, etc...). Maybe it could go even further with reverse funnels, as in: what events are the most important and work backwards. I could see some automation and discovery possibilities there.

Third: do I really have to dig around trying to find something useful?

All the data is there, the software should tell me what is useful or interesting. It's definitely a hard problem, but I would throw money at software that could send me this email: "Looks like users who experienced event "ABC" also performed your highest priority event "Signup" at a 13% higher rate. This observation is 99% confident." Of course, you'd need to investigate a littler deeper to see if that isn't just a fluke or something stupidly obvious (like: people who view a page signup at a higher rate than those who don't), but at least I might learn something.

I know this is certainly a pipe dream as of today, but I vow to shower someone with money if they can do this.

In my opinion, the next generation of analytics software won't just have more bells and whistles, it will fundamentally shorten the time to some sort of real "AHA!" insight.
I'm not looking forward to the coming months. It's going to be a political circus, with each side clamoring to push or protect their already strongly held beliefs and positions.

I really wish we would have a meaningful debate over the best tools and strategies for protecting people in large groups in public places. Because of the delay of so-called first responders, it is really left to the people who are there to take action.

Outside of banning and confiscating all guns, gun control isn't going to solve the problem. People with criminal intent will always find a way to carry out their plans (c.f. the recent spate of knife attacks in China).

We need defensive and offensive measures to minimize harm. I believe the lockdown plan put into action at the school probably saved more lives than any other one thing, until the police arrived. So giving schools more tools for effective plans like this would probably help.

On the offensive side, teachers and staff were left to fight guns with their hands. If they had had a weapon of their own (tasers or guns with rubber bullets, for example), they would have stood a better chance of minimizing harm. We allow pilots to carry weapons if they so choose and it is probably at least somewhat effective as a random deterrent, in addition to providing some actual protection.

Sadly, I don't think this line of thinking will come up. This thing is going to be played out largely in Washington, where entrenched groups will be mostly pushing existing agendae, not thinking in new ways to actually minimize the problem.
100%.

The lambda calculus forms the backbone of most theories of programming languages. Functional programmers use enriched forms of it directly, but all others, at least the useful ones, do make use of lambda-calculus techniques.

The LC demarcates the border between high and low-level languages. High-level programming languages have reducible expressions, low-level ones are flat. HLPLs have notion of heirarchical variable scope, within which some variables are "bound" while others are "free" and escape to a parent environment; while LLPLs often have a flat dictionary of variables, if at all.

The lambda-calculus can also be higher-level than mainstream languages. Most PLs treat functions with identical bodies as different, due to name/pointer inequality. In the LC, two forms are equal if they reduce to the same basic form, and names of bound variables are insignificant.
5 Reasons to Avoid Bundler.require
That's what this app does, it uses LD_PRELOAD to perform keylogging on both non-suid and suid apps.
Although to be fair, you have to pay to get the SEO/Ranking data now. I'm cool with that if it keeps the service open but it should be pointed out.

On a related note www.procog.com has a totally open algorithm.
But surely your time was worth something. Isn't that the first lesson of running a business -- pay yourself first?
If you insert a big image into the DOM, MobileSafari locks up for quite a few frames (whether or not it's preloaded.) Sencha's implementation just swaps pictures when you're not doing anything else! But most native apps can update photos while you're actually scrolling around.
>Perhaps they need the chip in there for patent licensing reasons.

Actually, maybe someone can answer this. Does anyone know exactly what the cost is(both in licensing and materials) for a 4G LTE chip vs the antenna?
It depends on what you're willing to be public about. I think your OKM is people buying something and looking at all the metrics around that.

Great metrics for e-commerce are churn, lifetime value, repetition of purchases, average revenue per user. On the marketing side, I think it's useful to understand what kinds of marketing produce certain kinds of repeat revenue.

Publicly, I think understanding how many customers purchased something in the past 30 days is useful. Potentially, the number of customers that purchased something above $X.
Yipes, I missed an entire category: Congratulations Suhail, John, Apoorva, Matt, Mazy, Ben, and Emmett too!
What do you mean by "same stuff"?

Were you selling kits and tools to people who might not have previously thought of themselves as makers, making it super easy to jump in and get started? This is what I think she's got the attention for.
you can't help but feel tremendous sympathy and respect for him.
Introducing Mechanic Miner
Shame on me for voting for a retroactive tax in Prop 30
$10 per unit becomes a bigger deal when you sell millions of units.
I'll keep this in mind. I'll be staying on the east end, but would be happy to put back a beer on Bardstown Road. :)
Read "Confessions of an economic hit man" by John Perkins to understand this trend.
It's not relevant to the conversation. We're talking about individuals. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili... seems to have a lot more action than the part of your page since the late 18th century, so I think you're wrong either way.
Watch ICANN's Raffle for new gTLDs
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one of my favorite hangouts on the net for the last decade. Enjoy it.
Votes for BBC SPOTY 2012 modelled as a Zipf distribution
Are there any plans to make this work with Twitter & email?
Google Releases YouTube Capture for iPhone
Max here from Cards Against Humanity. We talked about donating to the Wayback Machine, but ultimately decided that a contribution Wikipedia would help more people with a more fundamental need.
Now if I find something which is ugly or non-intuitive, I really do take a step back and think about why things were shown to public like that.

Indeed, the bar is raised. When confronted with multiple choices, I'll pick the nicely designed and engineered (that's a bit hard to assess from the beginning)

The bar now is getting too high that start-ups are becoming expensive again.
"People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility."

It's not just smart phones; it's anything that uses tantalum capacitors. If, as an engineer, you can avoid using tantalum capacitors in your designs, please do.
Thoughts on Competition for Early Stage Startups
What matters is what is likely, and what is likely is largely what is observed. People don't blow up schools with tanker trucks. They could, and if they had the intent to kill they should, but they don't.

But that's not my point. My point is that the best source for wise decisions is hands-on experience. Many countries have a better handle on the gun situation than the U.S. What's wrong with learning from their experience?
Yep, hope to add login for both of those in the future. Just needed to get this out soon.
> We don't allow people on the roads without a licence

I'm not convinced by this argument. Firearms are not used in public spaces, but in private land, or on club-owned property.
Daniel Burka joins Google Ventures as a Design Partner
> That's the only way we'll actually deplete resources.

Like we could recycle everything. Or like energy was currently free and non-polluting. Whoever the guy is, he actually gave good arguments in this article.
Software AG Director of Business Sean Riley Discusses 2012 Supply Chain Trends
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention.

No, he is not. He is saying, anything that is statistically small, and the elimination thereof would substantially restrain the rights and freedom of others, should be questioned.

No matter how you are going to argue, there is at least "some" purpose for guns - for self protection, etc. If the discussion were really about saving lifes, it makes no sense why not putting a ban on smoking, something that clearly has no purpose at all.
Anonymous - Message To The Westboro Baptist Church [video]
About Us Downloader 4 Free
I hate comments
Absolutely, it is inadequate for modeling language, but then everything is! (My assertion is that so much contextual information is required to converse with humans that one needs to build a proper AI in order to have unrestricted conversation. That or you have to reliably constrain conversation to a domain)

The importance of systems like Montague Semantics are to kind of scope out what sort of thing we need to be able to model language in the abstract.

Statistical NLP is definitely way better for building engineering systems that are deployed to accomplish particular tasks.
Wikipedia moving from MySQL to MariaDB
With HTML-native-apps you get free cross-platform support, and you get to work within a very-well supported, constantly improving and performant framework. Furthermore, if you're building a SASS-type app (e.g. where your content is primarily hosted online) then using a WebView-type component will let you instantly "upgrade" your clients and you never have to worry about old versions of your app in the wild. You better have a damn good reason to give that up.
Another frontpage hn article today was asking for donations to the internet archive, which helps make sure those humble beginnings are forever remembered:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931472
Yea, it takes time for things to change!
U.S. Creates System To Look For 'Future Crimes'
There are actually 40 names in just the tech category. Talk about completely unwilling to stick to the format.
The first most important metric: When it goes up and to the right, it means your company doesn't die.

Death can be alluded in many different ways, depending on the nature of your business, but it usually means making money, hitting a milestone that allows you to raise money, acquiring users, and so forth.

Once your company evolves, and has beaten death for the foreseeable future, a new set of metrics come into play and are now the most important. These may be similar to the death-evading set above, or they may be something new like increasing revenue, retaining users, increasing engagement, optimizing CLV, and so forth.

The point? If a metric means your company is not dying, or your company is growing, it matters. If it doesn't fit into those buckets? Probably doesn't matter.
> That's the only way we'll actually deplete resources.

Well, at humanity timescale a lot of thing can deplete without shooting them outside the solar system. Environment for one.
What about the nexus 10 shortage ?
Thanks for the link, I'll have a look at it.
What I meant by rationale was the reasoning behind the policy, it's actual effectiveness would, I guess, only become apparent in practice.
Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap.

Everyone sold the tools, kits and parts already. All that had been achieved is the application of hype and turning a bunch of prepackaged modules into a way of excusing the user from having to know what the hell they are doing.

It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.
Is there a way to buy it without using Amazon?
Putting weapons in the hands of teachers and other school officials makes intuitive sense, however the case where it will need to be used is very rare, yet to be useful the weapons will need to be readily available at all times. As a result, it's plausible that the total magnitude of injury would be higher due to accident, misuse, etc.
>And If I need to handle selection, edition, caching, cells with different layouts

I'm not going to touch the rest of your comments but mutability of presentation is really not the place to wage your battle against HTML/CSS/JS from. Dynamic presentation is really web tech's strong point.
Just to get some other opinions out there.. It would be nice if it responded more for large screens instead of only handling the small ones, but I love the look of the site.
I met her around the same time when we were both hanging around MIT in the summer; I think I was 15 or 16. It was clear then too.
The choice of Apache 2.0 for the license is interesting. It makes the library incompatible with GPLv2 software[1], but compatible with being integrated into the Python standard library[2].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2

[2] http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseF...
11 Uses For The Humble Presents Queue, Er, Message Queue
Unfortunately I think this may be what we can expect from Coursera. If you're ready for it then it's great. (I've put Boneh's Crypto 1 in the top ten of courses I ever took.) But if you're not familiar with modular arithmetic then you're definitely not familiar with abstract algebra, in which case yeah you need to study that first.
YouTube Video Capture App Brings; Direct Shooting & Sharing On iPhone And iPod
Since it is hard to compare one country to another since there is a long history of the attitudes and mentality of each's citizens that makes them different. One statistic that is rarely seen is "# of guns per 100 gun owners" to go along with that. Having 2x the number of guns per 100 citizens is a little less significant if the average US gun owner has 2 guns. Meaning, the number of people that are armed is the same.

Let's say you are in a room with 100 people and you know that 88 guns are in there. Would you feel better if you knew that 88 different people each had 1 gun or that 44 people each had 2 guns?
Here’s “something” we all can do (even if you hate guns)
Firearms are never used in public? Ever?
JQuery plugins that handle touch events
> tasers

A melee weapon versus a deadly ranged weapon is going to be a poor matchup.

> guns with rubber bullets

If you're the good guy who's doing the most damage, but it's non-lethal, non-debilitating damage, you'd better be prepared to draw aggro.

My guess is that only a teacher with a gun would have had a decent chance of ending the massacre early.

My understanding of tactics is largely based on video games. Anyone with any training/experience in real-life tactics is welcome to comment on my comment.
I'm not sure it will be more foolproof since images don't really need to have long horizontal or vertical lines, but it is indeed another great attack path.
I concur. This is one of those cases where gut reaction proves to be a really bad idea after just a couple minutes of introspection.
I've been hesitant about contacting agencies because of said margins, but if the projects are that much better perhaps it is worthwhile.
True, but a common argument from gun owners is that if you're feeling homicidal, you'll find a way to commit murder with or without a gun.

Looking at all homicides vs gun ownership seems to bear that out. In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation with gun ownership: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership

(Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're going to argue that more guns = more murders, at the very least you're going to have to concede that other factors are much, much more important.)
Who has ordered his own replica journal?
Where are you getting your "quadrupled" number? It makes sense to claim writing two native apps two cover two platforms is roughly twice the work of covering one platform, but in now way does the claim that writing an HTML5 app requires 4 times the time and effort it takes to write a native app. If that were true we wouldn't even be debating this topic today.
Too many first-time entrepreneurs spend all of their time on ideation without realizing that ideation is a qualifier. It's execution that breeds real winners.
Something gun control advocates seem to forget is that gun ownership is a Constitutional right for Americans. You cannot compare it to driving a car, or buying a television, or buying something from Amazon. If you're going to compare to something else for the purposes of limiting and regulating it, you need to compare to voting, assembling, practicing your faith or some other Constitutional right.

When you are required to get a license to cast your ballot or attend your church, then you can make the argument for getting a license to purchase a firearm.
Doing The Math On Guns
Yeah but it's nowhere near as nice to edit with. The textarea's are short, the content frame is short... I think this is a case where simplicity wins out.

SASS would be a cool feature though.. (as long as it came with Compass)
Hey quick question: how many people died in those knife attacks?
Biggest Comeback of 2012: Yahoo
There are 20+ curious kids around; the teacher can't always watch everyone all the time.

The classroom presents special challenges not present in other situations when it comes to arming civilians.
We deal with this every day at Mixpanel. Education is a tough problem to solve. Here's how we think about it with respect to your questions:

"First: how do you decide what data to send into the package?"

My recommendation is you think about this gradually. Don't instrument everything. Start by picking 5 metrics you really, really care about. One of them should be your One Key Metric (OKM) - a metric that you would be the company on if you could only pick one thing to measure. I think the pressure of picking 5 helps you decide what to measure.

"Second: once you are collecting the data, how do you know what metrics to actively track?"

When you start gradually, there isn't much to pay attention to. Stay focused only on a set of metrics. Add more metrics when you want to understand those specific metrics more deeply. Add more data to split those metrics into groups to dig even deeper. Keep driving your OKM up as much as possible--sometimes you have to do it with something that correlates to it.

"Third: do I really have to dig around trying to find something useful?"

Today, the answer is yes. Businesses are fundamentally very different. Analytics is a lot like science experiments in high school: You start with a hypothesis, you test to see if you were right, and if you were then you came up with a conclusion or answer to your experiment. It's hard work to build a good business. I think the first step is for companies like us to help you understand your data. The next step that I think is more important than simply pulling "insights" out automatically is to help you take action on it so you grow.
Sad, I came to the store hoping that there'd finally be a dependable US distributor of the devices themselves.
History buff says he's cracked WWII pigeon code
False dichotomy: why do we have to choose between fixing mass shooting or fixing tobacco deaths? Why not fix both? There is likely some amount of finite resources to be given, per nation, to solving ills, but I doubt the US has tapped out on that...
bourbon... that's all i need to know ...
Original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821517