skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tutored in uni for extra beer money and I've tutored children, teenagers, fellow university students, grad students, and adults. What I learned from this was that there was no one single best way to teach someone things. The phrase sucks, but it really depends on the person. Some people you can teach better by not giving them the answer and trying to get them to think and that's great. On the other hand, some people actually do excel if they are simply given the answer (of course one doesn't just stop after giving the answer, you would then explain the answer, how we got there, etc, and then knowing this, solve another similar problem to see how much of it they understood). Figuring out your student's learning style is unfortunately the hard part, and it looks like this guy in the link has not figured out his sister's learning style. Even just reading that conversation he posted---he sounds extremely condescending.

Just picking something out, he wrote:

"The circumference of the glass divided by the diameter gave me pi, what does that mean?"

OK, first of all, he goes to say that she JUST now learned what a circumference and diameter is and still doesn't know what a "pi" is. Why in the world would you ask a question like this with unfamiliar words to someone who just learned these words? He was making it unnecessarily difficult to understand. Of course she said she didn't know and then he goes on and says "WELL what if I divide 10 by 2?" Which is like comparing apples to oranges.
Why you should blog, how to start, finding topics, and more blogging tips
I think long term he'll be remembered for his election winning process (using technology, data mining, etc), and for public healthcare. I think that the scandals that have popped up are typical of our time, and not necessarily like Obama as an individual was sitting there installing wiretaps himself or denying tax forms laughing maniacally. I think those will likely be written of more as government bullshit than to Obama.
Sometimes the brain just isn't ready to understand at the time.

I struggled with math early on because why the fuck do I care what the cicumference of a circle is? When things don't have some practical relevance, they are harder to learn.

To motivate someone, you must find a way to tie in the subject to something they are genuinely interested in.
You really think the NSA doesn't have overseas datacenters?
May just be a load balancing issue; as @beecr001 mentioned, if you reload the page continuously you can access the site and all chapters.
This looks really neat, thanks!
We expend enormous resources preventing traffic deaths. From driver education to advanced safety systems costing thousands of dollars (in every vehicle sold!). There are (approx.) 15 million cars sold in the U.S. each year. Each $1000 of safety equipment is $15 billion spent mitigating traffic injuries and reducing deaths.

Maybe $15 billion looks silly in comparison to hundreds of billions, but it at least starts to look pretty comparable.
You obviously have no children.
Colorado Launches A New Startup Every 72 Hours
Having grown up in public schools in the southern US, I don't understand why we focus so much on memorizing formulas but not the underlying concepts or how they apply to other things. The power of math is the ability to abstract other problems into math and then solve them with a standardized toolset. We spent the first decade of our schooling learning very basic mathematics (up to algebra), and I hadn't seen calculus until my second year of university.

It's no surprise to me that kids are having issues understanding the parts of a circle, why the formulas do what they do, or how to do the related math. I've been there. I think teaching basic physics and some of the more esoteric math earlier (number type sets, limits, boolean logic, simplified of course) would help with some of this. I always wondered how to do things infinitely or how to calculate things certain ways in algebra, and it always seemed like parts were missing. Calculus filled in so much of this for me, and I wish I had known it earlier. Physics and video games (wiremod) gave me reasons to learn some of the math.

Another thing I wish there had been more of is the history and practical implications of this stuff. I never cared about the quadratic formula before I learned about electric circuits or things falling in gravity. I didn't know at the time it went back to Babylon, India, and Greece.

Kids don't get taught how to think critically and use the tools at their disposal, and that's the largest problem with our education system. We learn how to ask someone for the proper tool to use and then do the work ourselves without thinking about it. It's probably an accurate representation of what work in much of America has come to nowadays, busy work, but it's a shame that we don't do something better for the next group coming along.
This article is of course right on the money, and a well-argued version of this argument. But I have to think that everyone in the US has heard this argument a dozen times since 2001, and it seems like it has likely convinced all the people it's going to convince.
The difference is that this program is public and the Swedish public can debate it.
> Watch any fantasy draft or craft and see how much math is going on.

Indeed. Check out my irb history from playing Hero Academy (there's way more above):

>> 200*2.55+200*0.8
=> 670.0
>> 200*2.55+200*0.8*2
=> 830.0
>> 300*2.55
=> 765.0
>> 300*2.55+399*0.8
=> 1084.2
>> 300*2.55+300*0.8
=> 1005.0
>> 0+300*2.55+300*0.8
=> 1005.0
>> 260*2.55+260*0.8
=> 871.0
>> 260*2.55+260*0.8*2
=> 1079.0
>> 260*2.55*1.5+260*0.8*2
=> 1410.5
>> 260*2.55*1.5
=> 994.5
>> 260*2.5+260*0.75*2
=> 1040.0
>> 130+180+230+280
=> 820
>> 820*0.8
=> 656.0
>> 1350*0.8
=> 1080.0
> Mozilla will certify your identity after you click a confirmation link sent to your email address.

Asking email address for sign-up is perhaps important, but I'm wondering why can't it be removed completely from the process? It is a piece of friction, and potentially identifying as OP puts it in his post?

Can't we be just done with the requirement of email address? Let early users, especially those who inspire the rest of the bell curve, remember their persona id with some personal questions that the user may so choose.

Get rid of anything that can be gotten rid of.
> Mozilla will certify your identity after you click a confirmation link sent to your email address.

Asking email address for sign-up is perhaps important, but I'm wondering why can't it be removed completely from the process? It is a piece of friction, and potentially identifying as OP puts it in his post?

Can't we be just done with the requirement of email? Let early users, those who inspire the bell curve, remember their persona id with some personal questions that the user may choose.

Get rid of anything that can be gotten rid of?
Consider that the legal definition of "legitimate" is what's changed.
And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic.

Righhhhhhhhhhhhht.. Let throw out thinking, ethics, and morality just for some "heart". No, this is not how humanity should conduct themselves. Emotion should be calibrated to logics and numbers, not the other way around.

If heart attacks and motor accidents isn't photogenic as terrorism, the response shouldn't be to cater to the terrorism fearing population, but making heart attacks and motor accidents photogenic.

Let do what we really want rather than we think we want. Know ourselves, and we will know that pursuing terrorists by losing our liberty should not be our future.
Cheapens not in a monetary sense, but in a moral one.

I think the experiences of Black South Africans were a lot worse than those experienced by Palestinians and Arabs within Israel. I think if people redefine "apartheid" downwards to cover any regime that people don't like then it becomes a meaningless term.
There is no absolutely liberty and absolutely privacy, isn't it? if the government didn't collection people's information, the hackers from other countries will do so. which one do you prefer?
Not sure if this will work, but you can try changing the User Agent to Safari in the Chrome Inspector preferences.
You can't really force someone to learn something they don't wish to learn. And it's not about whether or not a person is capable or incapable. The value of math needs to be communicated - try using examples that speak to the girl's worldview. Show her the wonders of math and what it can do for her to solve her puzzles in life.

I never got the hang of what I learnt in school until I began working and it gave me so much reason to what I'm studying.
Sorry -- I didn't mean to be unclear about that. The point I wanted to make is that, while he violated a UN embargo, it was just a chess match, and nevertheless he was relentlessly persecuted and had to seek asylum.
really? you cannot watch if you are not on iOS? Messed up.
But aren't TrueCrypt volumes completely changed when you add/remove something?

No, the crypto in TrueCrypt doesn't amplify the number of changed blocks. But it does disperse the changed blocks throughout the encrypted image, and this does result in higher bandwidth used during the sync (at least with DropBox). Here's an analysis I did a few years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546626
So basically the encryption key for the specific folder is in the shared url, and wuala servers decrypt the content to the user's browser.
If sharing is disabled then a new key is created and used locally to decrypt/encrypt directly from the client.
Thanks!
You seem to be ranting against a position I'm not taking.
This is a lot of fancy math and graphics that don't differ all that much from what a very simple analysis can give you. Only Revere belonged to five of the groups of interest. Of the three who belonged to four groups, two of them are in "top scorers" on centrality, and the third, with one of the two in centrality, is in the final table.
That works by searching the contents of files. So, it is just a grep -l -R . 'search terms', right?

Edit: Actually, now that I am revisiting this thread. The top post hit my misunderstanding on the head.
I have chronic life threatening illnesses. I've had equal numbers of good doctors and bad doctors. I'm deeply skeptical. It's wicked hard for me to figure out what's going on in my body. And self-reporting is notoriously unreliable.

Until science catches up, I think we should all "try and see", compare notes, and keeping searching until we find solutions. I've been patient advocate for many others; this is old advice.

---

About two years ago I tried the Four Hour Body strategy. My goal was to lose weight. I was astonished when my psoriasis started to clear up. The important part: I established cause and effort by stopping the nutrition (bad eating during business trips) and the psoriasis comes back with a vengeance. I have no idea why it works. Because I'm eating more veggies? Because I'm avoiding wheat? All I know is it works.

Since then, I've had steady improvement while sticking to the troglodiet (tm), resumed eating meat and lotsa more of veggies. More or less following Dr Terry Wahls "Minding your Mitochondria" strategy, with occasional treats (cheesecake!) so I don't go insane.

Most recently, my gf persuaded me to try her naturopath doctor. From prior experience, I think naturopaths are quacks at best. But I also think that the good bits of naturopathy will eventually just be called "nutrition".

I presented specific complaints to this ND, which my other doctors haven't been able to assist with. I'll give an non-embarrassing example. My muscles never relax. I'm now super tone without exercising. It's fantastic. But I also have zero energy. I've been taking magnesium. I've seen a neurologist. I've tried some other stuff.

So the ND says the magnesium isn't getting to my muscles because I'm not eating enough essential fatty acids. Tells me to eat more of such and such and take some pills. Sure, why not, can't hurt.

Similar story for the other conditions I have.

Well, I'm about a month into this new regiment. Huge improvement on one issue, modest improvement on two others, and no change with the fourth.

In a few more months, I'll stop the regiment, see if my conditions get worse. I don't want to be taking pills and such without benefit.

---

I agree with everything you've written, but we should continue to experiment and ask questions, until we find solutions.
Live from Apple's WWDC 2013 keynote
How Long Can Edward Snowden Stay in Hong Kong?
The purpose of the institution is to protect the institution. This has about as much to do with terror as it does with aliens from another planet. Nothing at all. It's about protecting the US government from all threats. And they feel threatened by US citizens so they react with the subtleness of a titan. I sometimes wonder if this is the natural evolution of all governments, to overreact and slide into a delusional world, thinking complete control can be attained.
I think you miss the point entirely. Of course the classic Revolutionary position was treasonous to the British Empire.

The function of dialogue like this is to push the metadata conversation into the mainstream. We want the People to understand that giving away our privacy in this data is /JUST/ like taking their guns, and for the same reasons.
Basically this, you can not force someone to learn. By this point you're just talking at them.
The direct HTTP link posted here was still playing the keynote of last year, which I didn't notice immediately. I have no doubt my comment will still apply when it actually starts.
Simon wrote in the comments section on his post:

> Next, if you’ve read carefully you know that I’ve saved my criticism not for this data dump, which I do indeed support, but for the all-enveloping secrecy that prevents proper civilian oversight of the FISA court.

This is called being disingenuous. The problem has two halves: (A) the data, and (B) controls over the data.

Simon is calling everyone foolish because he thinks the problem is B, not A. He completely fails to acknowledge that the problem is A+B, and if haven't won on B, we have to fight to defend A.

I don't mind an NSA with all data and no abuse/breaches. But that's not going to happen!

I don't care if the NSA is completely independent and covert, if they don't have any data to analyze!

And from what I know of human nature, I know where I want to plant my defenses. Just like the people who wrote the Constitution, I prefer to limit the power of the government officials, not give them unlimited trust.
I am the author of the blog post.

I went for a walk and when I came back I found this mess. Excuses to those that could have felt offended by the comments posted by some readers.

Nasty comments have been deleted. Insults and personal fights are not acceptable in the comments section.

Please, feel free to contribute new comments to keep a useful discussion going.

Cheers,
Julio
That man cost thousands of people their life savings. That's why he went to prison. Had nothing to do with NSA
Your evident bias notwithstanding, I believe what you're trying to emphasize is the danger of an over-strong, over-active federal government directed by ideologues of any flavor. When the government uses its power against its own citizens, dividing them to make them unequal, then it flies in the face of the founding documents and ideals of this country.

The IRS taking political sides is a recent egregious example, but since its inception, the tax code has been used as a political power tool to divide us, giving special treatment to some groups over others. This is why politicians hate the idea of meaningful, economically-sane tax reform.

You mention the citizenry bearing arms against its government and the full force of the military directed against the people. Why take it to that extreme? You must realize that with current technology, small arms are the great equalizer among Men (and women). Think 110 lb jogger with a .45 vs. thug rapist. Now large government types want to take guns away from the citizenry for ideological reasons, but those reasons make the assumption that the people must be taken care of and protected by the government.

And that is where the big vs. small government argument hinges. Should the government protect the personal well-being of each citizen? The Founders said that we are born with the right to the "pursuit of happiness" not to the happiness itself. Too many on the big-government bandwagon have been promising the happiness for too long. Too many judges have been siding with the government over the rights of the people.

An overactive surveillance state once again operates under the assumption that the people are unable to take care of themselves. We MUST monitor all traffic so we can catch even the smallest act of 'terror,' destroying the rights of the people in the process and giving the government huge power over them. And speaking of traffic, the CAFE standards for autos have killed[1] more Americans than the terrorists have.

Our national dialog needs to be framed in the "Freedom vs. Security" trade off, but I'm not so sure that many people even understand what freedom is / was supposed to be.

[1]: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/death_by_cafe_standar...
Edward Snowden could face extradition from Hong Kong
This shows how it creeps. A change of policy here, a re-interpretation of the rules there, then over the years more and more is hoovered.

Be careful when they say things like "the program only looks at calls in which one end of the communication is overseas" (see Bush, 2006 in OP) ... because they distinguish between having the data, and looking at it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845258). Hence they claim that its OK for them to posses much more data than they should posses, as long as they only look at the bits they are allowed to look at. Dangerous.
let's say in the future, Christianity is made illegal. Is the above scary now?
Law is different from legislation. While the latter is passed by the legislature, the former can grow and evolve without any democratic input, through regulation and court rulings.
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Nice experiment! I've come to a similar conclusion without having done it: Monday feels like such a fresh start!
If you've got the popular support you're eluding to you'd be fine with baseball bats and molotov cocktails. You'd also be fine to steal the guns and other weapons of military/police forces as you have victorious encounters. You wouldn't actually need the guns in the first place.
What planning are you living on where physical and psychological torture is a warranted response to breaking military law?
We aren't giving up liberty to obtain safety. Those in power are using terrorism as an excuse to do what they want to do anyhow, and it's successful enough to provide just enough cover that successful resistance never quite formed.

Educating people out of beliefs they mostly don't have is not going to solve the problem.
Just because you say something doesn't make it true :)
The Scrollympics
The irony is that this issue (the universality of human rights) was the starting point of the dissent in the colonies in the 1760s that eventually lead to revolt against British rule in 1775. The people in the British colonies supported Parliament during the long revolutionary/counter-revolutionary period that lead up to the passage of the English Bill Of Rights in 1689, which everyone, in 1689, assumed applied to everyone under the rule of the crown. It was only the 1760s that Parliament adopted the attitude that the Bill Of Rights were privileges that only belonged to those who lived in Britain proper -- and the colonists were outraged that the rights they had assumed they had won 80 years earlier were now being denied to them. In 1774, when the government of Virginia asked Thomas Jefferson, to draw up a list of the grievances that the colonies had with Parliament, Jefferson referenced the long history of events that started under the Stuart Kings.

When the Founding Fathers eventually drew up a Bill Of Rights for the new nation, most of them wrote things that explicitly suggest that they felt the rights being granted were universal -- in particular, Benjamin Franklin was vehement on the subject, arguing that the Bill Of Rights extended to everyone, including the blacks who were being held in slavery (and when Congress met for the first time in 1789, Franklin pushed a bill to abolish all slavery).
> The first question will be which American citizen was harmed, and what was the harm.

A violation of Fourth or Fifth amendment rights constitutes a real harm done to a person as far as the courts are concerned.

>In addition, merely accessing data at rest does not really do any harm. You'd really need a U.S. citizen who you can prove has been wrongfully arrested or harassed as a direct result of their data being accessed in this way.

As far as I'm aware, this isn't a requirement...If you can prove the programs were overly broad, did in fact collect information on citizens illegally (which, by all accounts has already been established as of 2011) you're good.

>Simply put, the far, far better option here is to petition Congress. They will respond directly if the public pressure gets high enough.

Well, yes...But OP is specifically about the courts
“It’s Only Metadata…” a response to the NSA and US Intelligence use of Data
Your an idiot, he cost thousands of people their life savings. That's why he went to prison. I hope he never gets out. Know you facts before you post this garbage.
It's also almost certain that they're including suicides in the gun number:

"The two major component causes of all firearm injury deaths in 2009 were suicide (59.8%) and homicide (36.7%)." (source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf)
Has anyone ever taken an integrated math course[1]? I grew up in Minnesota and enjoyed those math classes when I was in junior high.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_mathematics
And in fact, a few people have mentioned that the intelligence agencies had a bit of forewarning about Major Hasan (at Ft. Hood) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and somehow still missed the key point: The fact that the intelligence agencies were able to know anything at all means that what they're doing is working. In fact the only thing that had kept those agencies from taking early action was our civil liberties and the need to employ due process, and the fact that there are still too many false positives.

Can a system like PRISM reduce the false positive rate? (Probably not, for domestic terrorists-to-be). If so, is it worth it? The answer might be "No", but it might be "Yes", too.

Another point to consider: If the intelligence agencies were able to get intel on the worst case scenarios (essentially "lone worf" budding terrorists) then how effective have they been in situations that play more to their strengths (which is to say, identifying and disrupting "cells" before they can proceed with an attack).

Sen. Udall has said that PRISM is completely redundant in stopping these attacks, but that doesn't mesh well with PRISM's prominent usage in the President's Daily Briefings. If PRISM isn't actually redundant, how useful does it have to be before we think it would be worth using?
It's an exceedingly simple example used to illustrate the technique. The methods included in the python library are robust enough to work just as well on much larger and more complicated data-sets but that would be too difficult to follow for someone who isn't familiar with the subject.
I find the list of little help. Yes, these points might be 'deadly sins', but just pointing me to RabbitMQ or advise 'feature flags' is of little help. And why is 'optimizing and tweaking' queries necessary for scalability?