skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. A user requesting http://example.com is that user requesting everything that the webmaster of example.com wanted example.com to include. This includes ads.

The webmaster has decided that the content hosted on http://example.com includes some HTML, some off-site resources (maybe images hosted on a CDN, maybe some ads, maybe some Javascript hosted elsewhere).

Are you going to charge CDN owners too given the user doesn't 'know' that websites often use a CDN to host their content? What about jquery.com for hosting the version of jquery the site uses (if they don't host it themselves)?

Why are ads special? Simply because the webmaster is being paid by the ad network? In the CDN case, money flows in the opposite direction -- the webmaster pays the CDN. Why shouldn't the ISP take a cut of that transaction too?

If a website has ads the implied contract is that you get access to this content in exchange for having these ads on the screen. Why does an ISP get to take a cut out of that agreement between the webmaster, the ad network, and the user? They are already compensated by the user to deliver all the bytes the user's computer requested to them.

If an ISP is unhappy with how many bytes the user is requesting, and how many of those bytes come from a particular source (e.g. Google) then they need to renegotiate their contract with the user.
I meant design within software is always going to feel dated eventually, because we don't have finalized hardware products like Ive's and Rams's products.

There isn't really an idea of software design that's extricable from the viewport, and that what I mean is going to make it look dated eventually.
La Red Social de los Networkers
It's a bit of an odd article, but my guess is that it's a gloss of a press release, and that kind of writing is par for the course for AI/ML press releases.

Gunnar Carlsson, the researcher mentioned, seems to work mainly on an approach related to manifold learning (roughly, finding lower-dimensional structure in high-dimensional data) that's based on algebraic topology. He co-ran a workshop on that last year at NIPS, one of the main machine-learning conferences: https://sites.google.com/site/nips2012topology/ . He's written some highly cited papers on the subject, though it'd be a bit of a stretch to claim he invented the area, since there have been workshops at least back to 2007, that one organized by a set of French researchers: http://topolearnnips2007.insa-rouen.fr/description.html

I would guess the part about removing the human element from data mining is putting an optimistic PR spin on the basic idea of automatically extracting lower-dimensional structure, which, if it works, should allow for less feature engineering. The emphasis on visualization makes sense in that light, if they're planning to sell it as a no-expertise-necessary system: feed it data and get interpretable-by-non-experts viz as output, with any complexity that would normally require "data scientists" being handled automatically.
1.5 million, close to 2 years and a "small band" of programmers to deliver a specialized product working on-site with the end users. Call me naive, but this sounds completely reasonable to me.
Hello, PushBullet - push anything to your Android phone from your browser
The piece was removed for some reason?
This sounds like a run of the mill peering negotiation[1]. The unusual thing here is a company getting press coverage for it.

I have no idea how Google's peering arrangements are set up but I doubt that this is the only transit arrangement Google has ever ended up in.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering
And that "Regalsystem" is from 1960. Claude Garamond's typeface from ~1550 [1] still is the high standard for book typefaces. This is excellent design.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Original-CG.gif
In automated exploitation (e.g. scanning for common classes of web vulnerabilities) /dev/shm is better because it doesn't touch the disk filesystem. It's also not an obvious place people use on a regular basis (as opposed to /tmp) so (some) people are less likely to look for things in there.

/tmp sometimes uses tmpfs which is also memory based, but not always and you won't know until you're in /tmp.
Other resources have titles. For a tweet, the title is the contents.
With due respect to pg, HN's UI is not something to aspire to, though it has subtle things that make the difference between "meh, but usable" and "omgwtf".

The problem I've found with Windows 8 is that there is no visual difference between clickable text/icons and nonclickable text icons. The whole experience comes one of trial and error where you tap on random things like an idiot to see what elicits a response and what doesn't.

The web's way of solving this problem is by underlining text that can be clicked. HN violates this in many places, but at the very least text links underline when moused over - not ideal, but works, and is something that doesn't exist in touch-land.

Ditto, we've been using rollover effects for years to demarcate clickable icons from the unclickable. This entire strategy is now kaput thanks to touch.

We don't necessarily have to have drop shadows, but what we do need is a consistent and unambiguous language that clues the user into how the UI operates. Windows 8 currently lacks this in a really, really bad way. We can do this without skeumorphs, but we still need to do it.

And therein lies the greatest problem with this flat design trend - many designers are going flat without remembering that skeumorphs carry a lot of user hinting that you have to replicate.
Wiki-api, a simple Wikipedia python library
Thanks, it worked.

The traffic was yesterday so huge that I wasn't even able to trigger that "wrong password" prompt again. I guess today, everything went back to normal.
His forté is in hardware, and he's been hired to work in the Xbox division, so I hope his touch will affect the look of the next Xbox console/controller and other peripheral products.

I really dislike what Microsoft did with the Xbox design in general, and a combination of Kim and the Metro aesthetic seems like the perfect antidote to that.

EDIT: Kim also shares my views on the Xbox design, it looks like: http://static.squarespace.com/static/50271a61c4aab6c54f9af5e....
On Android & the Nexus 7: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I've been using rlwrap for years with Oracle's sqlplus command line client on Linux.

Because it uses readline, it can benefit from settings in ~/.inputrc, along with all of your other readline-based applications for a more uniform experience.

For example, I'm a vi(m) user, so I put this in my .inputrc:

set editing-mode vi

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

These days, I tend to use the dbext vim extension for Oracle queries, allowing me to develop and save them in one file per project. But when I need to fire off something quick on the command line, it's nice to have rlwrap available.
I started meditating consistently a few months ago, and it has led to some huge breakthroughs for myself. I can't recommend meditation enough as a way to take a step back from the hurried need to do something, and to really think deeply on every aspect of your approach.

Shameless self promotion:

I was measuring my meditation with an Arduino for the first 3 months and built a meditation app to help people get started meditating. If you have a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor, the app also tracks your heart rate variance to let you know when you've entered a meditative state.

buddhamindapp.com
Burn, My Little Universe (procedural WebGL textures)
500 year old mummy
There's something I keep wondering about whenever I see people draw any conclusions whatsoever from IQ alone: How can it not matter whether a particular score was achieved by being equally good at all tasks or by being very good at some and very bad at other tasks?

I would expect a totally different outcome to many IQ related studies if that were taken into account. Or maybe it is actually taken into account but never reported, I'm not sure.
Got 19 out of 20. I missed the Panasonic one.

What I like most about Helvetica is the top of the t is flat rather than sharp and there is less stylizing overall. Arial, for me, breaks the philosophy of stylizing for stylizing sake. Helvetica, IMHO, was already perfect.

This makes me remember the Essay by Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime (1929) (http://technical-english.wikidot.com/text-1-2). Albeit bordering on racist propaganda contains very valid points on ornamentation being wasteful which I believe was a hallmark of Dieter Rams philosophy, "Good design is as little design as possible" which highly influences Apple's industrial designer Jonathan Ive.
well in that case why all the fuss and fines over Janet Jacksons wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl.
Yeah, it's like communism for interfaces: all tiles are equally important and get the same amount of real estate. :)

It makes it impossible to create a taxonomy, because the only thing you can do to organize them is put them in groups.

In Microsoft's defence, Apple haven't done anything to fix the problem of people with several screens of apps, which is basically impossible to navigate enjoyable. I almost always use Spotlight to open apps that aren't in the first two screens nowadays.
We have something like this for years in Poland and it works very well:
http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos
This is the most absurd tax I've ever heard of.

Google is not responsible for this traffic, it is the user requesting it. I consume YouTube, search, etc. content because I request it, not because Google tells me to.

I just hope the EU slaps French politicians for this one.
Does any binary message format (proto buffer , message pack , blink etc)support data streaming ? I as know none.
The article seems to be pulling in two directions on MEGA:

1. It's identical to Dropbox (or spideroak, or tarsnap, etc.)

2. Its only viable use case is piracy.

These two claims seem at odds...

If nothing else, it's Dropbox where I get 50 GB of free space. If Dropbox can be legitimate and viable, I don't see why this can't (once they work through some kinks and get a good client).
I find Android to be a good middle ground. Enough cues to make actions obvious, but not totally over the top like iOS. It also has widgets, which are similar in functionality to live tiles.
Honor Aaron Swartz's life, not his death
At the risk of yet another post on this matter...

(And forgive me if a similar post has occurred, because I have not seen it)...

I think that many people are (unintentionally) sending out a very bad message with all of the attention surrounding Aaron's death.

That message is: suicide is empowering.

Seemingly (if headlines were any indication), few people really cared about Aaron's prosecution before his death.

If you want to attack the prosecutor and the ideals of the prosecution, by all means do so, but do not do it in Aaron's name. Do it because you have something against such policies.

I do not say this to try and sound heartless, but rather to protect people. Whether it is commonly acknowledged or not, suicide has a profoundly negative effect on more than just the person committing it (my family has been affected on multiple occasions by suicide). As soon as you turn somebody into a martyr (for lack of a better word), you inspire others who are contemplating suicide that their death might bring them the attention they seek (whether or not this was Aaron's intention, I have no idea).

That said, Aaron had an amazing life (even if short-lived); let's remember the good things.
Source: https://plus.google.com/117976049902652636484/posts/WTh75wjA...
Airport screening was introduced in the US in 1973. In the 5 years prior to this there was 12 major aircraft hijackings originating from the US. In the 5 years after this, there were 2.

Airport screening effectively ended the very rapidly increasing number of aircraft hijackings which occurred in the early '70s. There were of course other factors in play, but the sharp drop (1972 saw 6 major hijackings) after the introduction of airport screening is certainly a good indicator of the effectiveness of airport screening.

Airport screening isn't completely effective, but it's fairly demonstrable that having a layer of security when boarding an aircraft does act as a deterrent to aircraft hijackings. It doesn't completely stop them, but it does make a difference.

I'm not going to defend the TSA as an organisation, but to say that airport screening as a whole serves no purpose is not really based in fact. It's almost certainly possible to bring banned items onto aircraft, and it's fairly reasonable to assume that if someone is dedicated enough they will find a way to cause death, but what airport screening does do is act as enough of a deterrent that aircraft hijacking isn't seen as an easy crime. The rapid drop in numbers post-screening shows that.
If it were just about building and doing things in a social vacuum, and you can accept the risks of what you're doing without becoming paralyzed, there should be no real downside to having a completely realistic feeling for your own limits.

Here is the problem. In our business culture, if you are pitching to sell products, get funding or get hired, then you can't export the products of your realistic introspection. This is not effective. No one wants to hear it. And you will be despised: if you say tepid things about yourself, people will imagine even worse about you, and your competitors will easily make use of this. So whether you are delusional about yourself or not, you have to export a delusionally rosy picture of who you are and what you are doing.

If we want to stop incentivizing this, we can. But we don't.
It seems like Unity and Ubuntu will continue to become more and more social. Social in simple words mean sending private data to Canonical and third party servers. It's going to get very hard to keep Ubuntu box secure.
I still email myself things, or text myself something, which sucks. This seems like a serious replacement for that. Wish it was on iOS!
OK this trend is NOT "progress".

It would be progress if the library based approach were a 1-to-1 replacement for the code a DIY programmer would have written, but that's never the case.

The new library solves maybe 95% of the problem, but then you find that the 5% they don't solve is critical to your project. So then you have to rip it out and start again, or bolt your own solution on top, or add yet another library etc etc etc.

Worse that the needed things the libraries don't do are the unneeded things they do. For example, you often find security problems from using third party components which are bigger than needed and so have a relatively huge attack surface.

Finally, you end up in dependency hell, especially if one of the libraries depends on another which depends on another... and especially if there are incompatibilities between different versions of the library. You can end up with multiple versions of a library, and heaven help you if you connect to the wrong one.

In conclusion, if you are a developer on one of these "Lego"
projects, you end up responsible for very many features, but with understanding and control of very few. This is a very unfair working environment and means that you will spend the rest of your life debugging rather than developing.
Using scroll for zoom in web maps is a horrific UI choice. Nice enough icons, although I'm not a designer.
Database: A Primer by C. J. Date, if you can find it

http://www.amazon.com/Database-Primer-Micro-computer-books/d...
What's about Wuala (http://wuala.com/)? It has been available for years and is owned by Lacie today …
It gets worse. The contacts app on an iPad doesn't use all vertical space in order to keep the aspect ratio of the booklet it imitates believable.

Very amateurish indeed, I'm baffled people praise Apple for UIs.
thanks Andrew! The upside is when we were getting ready to leave, all we had to do was roll up that 1 banner, and that was it. All the other fancy booths had to begin the long process of disassembling their schtuff.
Awesome travel diary. I took Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Beijing with my friends in 2002 and it was quite a trip. I can just imagine how did the OP feel when they crossed North Korean border. Based on the photos he took, country-side dwellings in North Korea are of better quality than my impression was.
It's just a number. Like everything in life its best to be objective about these subjective numbers.
Really? That's what Google Maps and Bing Maps does...
Why do you get so butthurt every time someone says something remotely negative about your hero?
How to cut megabanks down to size
Freemium for sure. While it's not possible with every product, I like the idea of getting free and full access for any build-out and beta period, but then only having to pay if my product is a success. Seems more stable and indicative of future income for you as well, since people are only starting to pay you when they've achieved some degree of success and validation :)
> Of course, as we know now, his miscalculation was that JSTOR's archives were not (not all of them, anyway) in the same public status as the PACER documents.

Is there any evidence that was a miscalculation?
This has great value for all of us, I would think.

I also imagine a number of commerce disciplines are going to like this contribution that can be used to enforce copyright...

And authority groups could also benefit.

I definitely would NOT recommend stopping the research, but I would be concerned about it suddenly disappearing from public oversight.
But saying we as a group don't understand the internals of what we use ... is a bunch of bull

Just out of curiosity, can you tell me what the mnemonic LDAC means without looking it up?
1/2 OT:

50 GB of free space?

According to https://www.dropbox.com/pricing, the default is still 2 GB of free space and up to 18 GB with referrals.
Wuala is a desktop app - this is a website that works everywhere on most modern browsers, including Chrome for Android. Securesha.re wouldn't have even been possible a year ago; it relies on some very new File API calls that were recently added by the W3C. (http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/)
thanks so much! very excited to use this in a project we're working on.
One of the big obstacles I see with this kind of model is the need to get security rock-solid. Any system that deals with student information is subject to federal privacy laws, and the consequences of a data leak would be pretty significant.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this? I am wondering if os projects like the one you describe could partner with an experienced mentor, but I still wonder what kind of structure you'd want to use to address liability issues.
Technology Entrepreneurship Demo Decks
It sure did. Some people have a misconception that it's old-school (real-life face-to-face events?) and don't work. Definitely not true, so I'm glad we're able to share at least 1 data point as a counter-argument.
"Write as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick... average students had much more diverse answers than students with high I.Q.’s. "

Asking a question like list things you can do with a brick is meaningless, since there's no metric to measure the ideas by. Anyone can list an unlimited number of completely ridiculous (and diverse) ideas if they want to, just many would find that pointless. And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either, what's needed in life is good ideas.

A more useful test would be to see what useful ideas people could come up with to solve a problem, though that would be harder to measure.
Has anyone had any experience where adding or removing client-side validation has affected conversion?

Other comments talked about client-side validation being mainly for UX and user convenience. But I'm wondering if it has a noticeable effect on whether or not people actually submit the form all the way to completion (i.e. no errors).

I made a tool that I have server-side form validation. I found that saving the invalid input so that I could examine it later was extremely valuable in understanding what people were entering, so that I could make the tool smarter. A good example is like with Parsley's demo where it requires http:// for the website URL. After seeing that people tried to enter URLs without http://, I knew I could change my code to automatically infer it. http:// is obvious, but a lot of times, people will surprise you. I don't have stats, but presumably this kind of change increases conversion. I realize this anecdote is a different effect than what I'm asking about client-side validation.
It's pretty much the modern equivalent of the argument for always underlining links to communicate that it can be clicked.

Dustin Curtis's flat approach to buttons and links is to use rounded borders: http://svbtle.com. This will probably be how buttons will - and should - work in a flat design.
Maybe it is more elegant, but if you don't want cross browser, cross platform rendering issues you'll stick with Arial.
He is saying that Mega = DropBox with 50GB of free space, not that DropBox gives you that space.
I'm just pointing out how Tufte could reasonably have empathy for Aaron [..]

Agreed, I was more responding to jacquesm than to Tufte.
So I quickly ran the icon set through http://icomoon.io/app and the icon font it produced seemed pretty good http://dl.dropbox.com/u/138393/maki.zip
Sure, but they are usually on a page with almost no other content (maps.google.com and whatever the Bing URL is). This page has content that I might want to scroll down to and the scroll zoom in the map makes that more difficult.
My father bought me a used Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ from someone who couldn't figure what to do with it, when I was 11. The succinctly written manual that came with it had I all need to master BASIC, followed by learning to program in machine code straight (no assembler!) by age 14.

It would be hard to say what would have been if this had not happened. This machine had me figure several things well ahead of my age, including coordinate geometry, computer graphics and animation, compilers and interpreters, computer architecture and basic logic design, et al. One thing I could not figure from the manual was the meaning of functions "sin" and "cos"! The latter was pretty much the only area where school helped. :-)

I still have the machine, and sometimes miss that 16 kB of ROM'ed machine code that could do so much for its size.
Hn is also aimed at an audience who's HTML heuristics are perfectly honed to detect a link, whatever it may look like.
I actually think Mega was third, and Securesha.re second, as Blindvault.com has been up for around half a year. It's not free though, but it compares in that files are encrypted user-side and if you don't have the key you can't tell if there are files, what the content is, etc.
It's worth noting that for most of the twentieth century AT&T was a driving force for scientific and engineering innovation in the US, greater than most universities (though perhaps not MIT). Researchers there won seven Nobel prizes, and two Turing awards. On a more mundane note, Unix was invented there, as well as C and C++, and the photovoltaic cell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...

None of these accomplishments would have been possible if AT&T didn't know how to coddle geniuses.
Leiningen version 2.0.0 released
You don't happen to have any studies about work-sample tests used alongside IQ tests to predict an applicant's performance in a given job role, do you?
Source? ubuntu-server has nothing to do with Unity.
"...has developed data visualization software it says uses big data to answer the questions you never thought to ask..."

Replace "questions" with "hypotheses" and "thought" to "cared".

I'm all for having a tool that can highlight a ton of interesting things in my data... I'd make a business case to buy that any day. But finding all the connections is so noisy compared to finding the right connections. That's the cynic in me.

The optimist in me is looking forward to when these kinds of techniques are just another R package I can load and turn loose on my data. :)