skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obama vetoes ITC ban on older AT&T-compatible iPhones and iPads
Of course, the entire point of the blog is that they're actually cementing people's existing misunderstandings of math...
People in California, as everywhere, don't feel anything in particular about their representative.

The power of incumbency does not come from citizens believing their rep does a great job, it comes from money putting that rep in the public eye. People in general will vote for who is put in front of their face the most. "I've heard of this guy, never heard of that other guy so much, so this guy it is. Now home to the TV."
Brilliant is Leveling the Academic Playing Field for Students World-wide
It is easy enough in Gnus to hook it in automatically so it populated your signature line by default, not much of a distraction. The scriptability is the main point of email in Emacs.

I stopped it when I eventually realized that it was probably a little bit distracting & annoying to all my readers, not myself.
Have you been to the site and watched a lecture?

There are comments of other students who watched that video. These comments are questions and answers about what was discussed. There are also links to exercises covering the content. Each lecture is arranged in a logical order for each topic. There are capabilities to integrate the video lectures and exercise with real-world classes and ways for teachers to track their students progress and the areas where each student is struggling is highlighted.

It's phenomenal and worth closer inspection if any of this is news to you.
Pick one example where the content has a flaw and use it to claim that all of his content is therefore "useless". I don't know the author's motives.

You don't know the author's main point either. He did not assert this at any point--he instead commented on the necessity of expert/experienced input in developing these videos, using the decimals content as an example.
Yes, what is the argument?
Wow. I hear what you're saying, but I don't know why it's desirable to weed people out in such an unrelated, arbitrary fashion. I mean, that's not much different than saying we should line up would-be competitors and beat them with sticks. The last ten standing obviously want it bad enough, and so, get a chance to compete.

To your point, competition might indeed be greater, but that would be a good thing. Why would we want to stifle access and opportunity? Everyone would still have to bring their A-games and compete against others who are presumably now also able to focus on their passions. So, with focus and dedication, everyone's A-games just get better. Everyone benefits, including consumers, stakeholders, other beneficiaries, and society.

But, what you seem to be suggesting is that we continue to insist that only those who run the gauntlet and/or get by the gatekeepers get a shot. There could be some extraordinarily well-qualified individuals who could launch revolutionary businesses if only given access. To my mind, that's part of the promise of crowd-funding.

So, I have to say, it's kind of odd to me that someone in crowd-funding holds the position you're describing. Crowd-funding is supposed to democratize both investing and access to capital. So, "the people" decide what's of value to society vs. the same investor class. But, what you seem to be advocating sounds more like the gate-keeping and denial of access to opportunities that are the current norms. In my mind, it's hard to reconcile the spirit of crowd-funding with that position.
It's amazing to me the engineers who refuse to update their worldviews about normal people's mental models for "sending data" that still get amazed by this.

The size of the files or the number of them are totally irrelevant.
Also, for a link of Cheap VPS providers in the Netherlands http://www.lowendbox.com/tag/netherlands/
Then realize you shouldn't define your life based on some digital records.
>I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily.

How are we quantifying Khan Academy's "broad and important impact" on learning? If someone learns from the KA videos, what do they typically accomplish afterwards?
There's a really good book on the topic of career planning (among other things), written by Cal Newport -- "So Good They Can't Ignore You" (http://www.amazon.ca/books/dp/1455509124).

Most people give the advice of "Do what you love and get most excited about" and this is, to some extent, the advice I would have given as well. However, when I think back to the work I've done and that has made me most proud in life, a bit chunk of it is simply doing new things, and pushing myself further than ever before. Cal Newport's advice is more along the lines of "Do what you're really good at, rather than only what you love."

Of course, this assumes you don't hate what you're doing. Food for thought.
If you think there are network effects, the odds are that they are much smaller than you think at scale. As http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf explains, usually they are of strength n log(n). For small n you can address that with a degree of personal attention that larger companies can't handle. For larger n, you have to be better than your competition for your use case, but not massively better.

If you have true quadratic network effects - auctions would be a good example - you probably need to find a different startup idea.
I find all of these attempts to "troll" or "distract" the NSA quite naive. If they truly have direct access to the backbone cables of the internet, then they must be pretty good at filtering signal from noise. Just imagine the size of email/IM traffic compared to bittorrent.

If they can extract everyone's email messages from fiber-optic cables in real-time, then they surely are smart enough to create a filter that ignores just a list of words without any actual structure, like "Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center".
This is actually a very deep question.

To oversimplify, yes, the difference is that you've consented to the rules. Imagine you and your friends decide to order a pizza and agree to vote on the toppings. That's fine. But it's not fine for a friend to force you to pay for the pizza when you didn't agree to do so.
Meh. 2007 was way more ridiculous.

The Nobel Peace Prize has become so overloaded in recent years that either it's time to endow some new prizes (and let the Peace Prize actually be about, you know, PEACE again) or end the thing entirely. Frankly, I think there's some value in having an actual peace prize, so I would rather see the former happen.
This isn't in response to current issues. It's very old. I remember it from ten years ago.
So long as you have smart ways of targeting that narrow, underserved market at a reasonable price.
Australia is a free country, and voters can vote as they please, but on my part I have completely lost respect for Wikileaks. Decrying the mistakes of the most free, most voter-responsive countries while becoming a fellow traveler with a variety of dictatorships is not what I expected of Wikileaks four years ago or so when a friend suggested that I "like" Wikileaks on Facebook. An Australian commentator

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/some-secrets-b...

expresses in the commentator's choice of words the thoughts I have about why you and I and the world are not gaining freedom through the actions of Wikileaks and its supporters recently. I respect anyone's right to disagree with me (and would be happy to hear your reasons for your disagreement), but on my part I will be glad to see Wikileaks fizzle out as a movement and as an organization, despite my former support for Wikileaks.
That's what you get when you use lossy compression, and it's hardly a problem unique to Xerox scanners. Maybe important documents should be scanned to a higher resolution so you don't have problems like this.
You make great points, and much of what you say is absolutely true. But I have dealt with pupils who have severely broken concepts of decimal place, and whose potential for understanding basic arithmetic has been damaged beyond repair.[0]

I believe the KA is doing brilliant things, and opening up knowledge for all is fantastic. I would just like to be convinced that modern research about pedagogy is being integrated rather than ignored. The evidence suggests it isn't, and I very much look forward to the day when it is, so this resource becomes even better.

And lest you think that I am one of the ones feeling threatened, I'm not. I'm not a teacher, but I do go out and give presentations for the purpose of enrichment and enhancement. As such I am often asked to consult on questions of tutoring both the most able and the least able, and because of that I work closely with those active in pedagogy research.

[0] I can't, of course, say that the damage was irreparable, but despite many hours of effort, I and several colleagues found no way to dissuade the student that 0.35 was bigger than 0.4, no matter what we tried.
Live streaming ATSC tuner - Chromecast
This is not what I'm arguing. There are many different incentives for someone to do something: money, fame, respect from certain groups, the belief that you're doing something good, influence, following the wishes of your relatives/friends/mentors, economic stability or mobility, sense of entrepreneurship or ownership...

Now, everyone is entitled to their opinion and maybe I'm too sensitive to these things, but when someone abandons a lucrative career to start recording videos to help children and adults learn math and other subjects, and his enterprise gets popular because people got something from those videos, I believe this person deserves better than to be effectively fired from what he built.

Sal Khan isn't the best teacher. He's not a substitute for a great teacher. But he did something no teacher, parent or student had done before.

And now anyone can start a website like Khan started, record better videos and create better exercises. Maybe we'll see a Khan Academy-like CMS to help people do that.

It's not that nitpicks and criticism makes people not work on important problems, it's that if you can't even keep control of a project you started, even though it became popular and bigger than you, we're essentially left with money and recognition as the only rewards to do something.

Jane Doe starts a YouTube channel with math lessons, gets some praise and some flak. Jane Q. Public makes a cat photo app, gets some praise and some flak.

The photo app gets moderately successful, gets some VC money. If Jane Q. Public is ousted, at least she has the money, if that makes her happy.

The math lessons channel gets moderately successful and people want Jane Doe off, no money, no recognition, and she fades into obscurity.
Funny, I also happen to think that the idea you took away from my comment was the opposite of the idea that it communicated.

Okay, forgive me for getting even more meta here, but: You're operating under the assumption that I would doggedly stick to my misinterpretation (if it were the case), or maybe that I have some agenda to distort the messages in your comments? My comment history suggests otherwise: I'm more than happy to back off, apologize, and recant any misguided statements I make if it's pointed out rationally. Why doesn't the idea of calmly, non-abrasively trying to explain the breakdown in communication occur to you? Why are you so quick to elevate differences into an us-vs-them orientation on a personal level?
Navigational Cell Systems Located in Human Brains
You know what strikes me most about that video? The tunnels and supports are so clean! Very cool.
I tend to agree that the award should go to Snowden, mainly because he knew fully of the potential consequences to himself and yet still chose to reveal the information.
>> Also, search for tptacek's explanation. It's counter-intuitive but this is the best license at the moment, mostly for reasons Stallman didn't forsee.

I was referring to tptaceck's reasons in the previous sentence you missed to quote.
I think his point there is that a JIT compiler can handle dynamism more effectively than an AOT compiler. A corollary is that the more static the language is, the less advantage JIT compilation has over AOT compilation.
Cal Newport's advice is more along the lines of "Do what you're really good at, rather than only what you love."

That's interesting, as other career gurus argue the opposite view. For example Barbara Sher, author of "I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was" gives the example of herself as an unhappy stay-at-home mom. She is an expert at cooking, changing diapers, and other aspects of child rearing. If she pursued what she was really good at, she'd be limiting her options to work as a nanny, or perhaps open a day-care center.
Social Media Marketing In Under-2-Minutes: The Videos
That is a bit reductive-- Snowden wouldn't be so out of place on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates
As a user of Free software consumer cryptography utillities, such as GPG and OTR instant messengers, can I configure stuff any differently to account for these developments?

What can I do to protect myself? Do you forsee projects like these responding to the concerns in the presentation in a timely manner?
Is that some sort of lighting rig on a parallel track? Is there any more information about how this film was made? Seems like a pretty big achievement for the time.
Sociopaths rationalizing themselves as titans of some kind. Economic superheros who shouldn't be bound to basic tit-for-tat rules. Rules even the most primitive cultures follow.
Perhaps a HN-appropriate analogy is in order here. Imagine someone came along who claimed that they could break the expensive stranglehold programmers have on software development and improve on the often mediocre code they produce by teaching anyone to program. Now imagine that it was widely lauded in the press and there was political pressure within the company you worked at to incorporate this new technique - except that the code produced was a bunch of dreck which you had to waste far more time cleaning up than it would've taken to do it right in the first place.

Further, imagine that every time you complained about this a bunch of people with no technical clue jumped on you and claimed you were just out to get the new scheme because it'd "successfully challenged a rusty status quo" and your "job security was at risk" if you didn't.

Of course the teachers are pissed off!
Resonance - Human and Divine
Really nice walkthrough!

But, it's a little copy heavy. And you have to scroll a lot, there's too much info below the fold. Let's use a carousel.

I kid, I kid!

Really, excellent walkthrough, the step by step screenshots were super helpful.
Well the solution seems to be pretty simple then- if everyone worked as hard as you did, we wouldn't have to worry about poverty, unemployment, and so on! :)
Twitter's IPO Should Be More LinkedIn's And Less Like Facebook's
I don't think I understood. In the first paragraph you are saying that Marx's and Lenin's lifestyle choices are not going to affect their followers but in the second paragraph you are saying that following an ideology is going to make you like the ideology's leaders.

I don't think both of these can be true simultaneously so I guess I did not get what are you saying right.
According to Firefox's page info, this is from Fri 17 Oct 1997.

But yes, I remember when I studied there (2001), things like Echelon and Total Information Awareness were the current topics. It was clear to us few "paranoids" that we're (soon to be) completely "transparent".
I came up with a similar idea for a Chrome and Firefox plugin that, when you searched online, it would also search on everyone else's device that was running the plug in. Other people's searches would also be run on your device.

This way, it would be hard for them to track who did the original search and the amount of traffic going to the keyword would grow immensely, making it harder to find out if the search was real.
The piece was written in the middle of a presidential election campaign where there were a lot of idiots running around saying we should eliminate government for all kinds of reasons that didn't make any sense. If it attacks anything, that's what it attacks.
You see, this is why I had said it shouldn't be discussed on a forum like this. I believe an honest human response would be more empathic and simply take something like CP being important without requiring extensive rationalization.

Your response, nit-picking my words as a form of debate, is counter to an empathic response, and entirely what I had hoped to avoid. I'm not going to engage in that line of thought because, honestly, there are a multitude of reasons why child pornography should be a priority. I won't argue them, and I understand that might be unpopular, but will you really debate someone on this?
U.S. Adults Now Spending More Time on Digital Devices Than Watching TV
I know I know... needs also way more jQuery!

Joking :p Thank you
As with most libertarians when you point out fundamental flaws in their reasoning, they deflect the conversation and try to talk about an ideal as opposed to anything based in reality.
We should be clear that this isn't a vulnerability in the Tor software or network, but an (apparent) vulnerability in this unrelated "Freedom Hosting" company's site:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-eve...
I fail to see how Sal Khan is not getting everything exactly right.None of my math teachers ever presented math perfectly,but what they gave was enough to get me to graduate top of my college math class.Do not sweat the small stuff,man.
It's a very good start. The main things that are still really lacking I think are "References" and "Transclusions". Even the word "transclusions" needs to be expelled from the interface. Nobody knows what that means, guys. Just call it "templates".
You missed the more important part of my comment - that this shouldn't be up for discussion. That has nothing to do with whether or not I'm right.

I think I'm right in my view, and if you think I'm wrong that's okay. But let's not argue that kind of point here on Hacker News. That's not to say you can't question my view; I was answering a question. But I'm not going to engage in debate about it because I find it abhorrent to do so.
In the space of 18 months ending Feb of this year the site has gone from reaching 1 million to 6 million students per month.

I quantify the value of the product by the demand.
All of the typicsl straw man arguments about roads and healthcare are nonsense. Rand believed that any way society chose to organize itself to benefit its members was perfectly acceptable, as long as that organization was rooted in individual freedom of choice, and not extracted from individuals with violence - the tyranny of the majority.
"the US isn't likely to be too intimidated by the large blustering egos of amateur militias and their (largely) civilian firearms"

Why on earth has the US issued a global terror alert? Is there some global terror network that can really hit 21 diplomatic facilities or is the threat more local focused than that?

The US is a scared, self-defensive beast. It fears anyone with a lathe.
Nitpick: RSA isn't known to be backed by factoring. More precisely, there is no proof that if textbook-RSA encrypted messages could be decrypted quickly that integer factorization could also be done quickly. (Of course if you can factor integers you can decrypt RSA messages quickly).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_problem

There are encryption schemes where decyption of an encrypted message is provably equivalent to factoring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin_encryption
Computers might become panacea to hurt
At the Federal level, California Senators have to be the absolutely worst case, post-12th Amendment. Largest state by population, 3rd in area after Alaska and Texas, most expensive statewide media market, etc. etc.
A lot of people don't understand what the Nobel Peace Prize is for. It's not to recognize old guys who promoted peace during their life; it's to promote peace.

Imagine that you have made some millions and you are deciding between starting the next ycombinator and using the money to promote peace. How would you go about the latter? Pretty much like the former: risky investments with a big potential payoff, only in peace rather than shares.

Saying that giving the award to Obama or Kissinger was a mistake is like saying that YCombinator is stupid because most of their investments don't pay off. If they only gave money to companies which they knew were going to be successful, they wouldn't be having any effect on their success.

So, Is it worth giving Manning and/or Snowden the Peace Prize? It would certainly focus the media's attention on them, but they have it already to some extent. It might work against the narrative that the securicrats are promoting. In some sense, Manning is a better candidate than Snowden: Manning released information which showed injustices of the Iraq and Afghan wars, whereas Snowden's releases are thus far an issue of whether domestic security is out of control. The Nobel remit covers the former; I'm not sure it covers the latter.
It would be amazing to see a site that pairs experienced
developers (especially women developers) with less-
experienced women to sherpa them into contributing to
open source.

Is there really a need to give women special treatment or help when it comes to open source development? Wouldn't that reinforce the (unbased) idea that there's a disparity between genders in tech? Or is there?
I am a huge fan of Gerrit, other than its UI. I ran it along with Jenkins[0] at a previous company. Its review model is far, far, far superior to Github's. As you said, it keeps successive patch sets, and allows for diffs against previous patch sets, rather than only against the original parent. This allows for you to see only the most lastest changes, so you don't have to wonder if anything else was changed and review the entire patch.

> $ git review

I actually wrote a bash script with the same name and a few other shortcuts before my company started working on OpenStack. I was quite pleased with the workflow I provided the team I was on.

$ git start <new-branch> <branch-from>
$ <do work as normal>
$ git review
$ git finish # removes the branch

These three commands along with the git-flow branching model[1] (but not the tool itself), leads to clean, sensible history in my opinion.

I respect that Github tries to maintain a low-barrier of entry to increase use and ease, but I believe there's a way to maintain it while still having a great patch-review model.

0: http://jenkins-ci.org/
1: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
Europeans point of view:
Am I the only one who feels that the US is taking over the Internet and all of our privacy with it?
I type out the instructions on how to squash a pull request so often that I just posted it to my blog, so I don't need to type it over and over: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-11-08-how-to-squash-...

That said, I do like pull requests: you might lose the history locally, but the PR contains a 'see outdated diff' that shows what it used to look like.
Have you contacted Unbounce? From their jobs site at http://careers.unbounce.com/ it appears they are looking for your skills. And they are in Vancouver
Hold a rally in a city other than SF.

Seriously, the world outside of SF (including politicians/DC) view SF as a place of crazies, willing to protest any stupid old thing.

Sad, but true.
Now that's privacy.
That won't work as it is with `w.Write`, as it returns two values, but yes, the idea is perfectly valid.