skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TBH what I want to see is a politician whose platform is using technology to record and publish everything he does in office and use technology to more effectively interact with his constituents. All the tools built to run his/her office would be open sourced. It's honestly probably easiest to do something like this at the San Francisco city level first as a proof of concept. The scale is right for a first pilot and the number of potential contributors is high enough for it to be self-sustaining.

Setting a precedent by going into office and running that office with the intent of disrupting how a politician interacts with his/her constituents via technology would be a gamechanger.

Would YC or another VC consider funding a "token" political candidate and a group of smart engineers? Obviously a single individual would have to be the one elected into office, but he/she could establish early on that the decision process is going to be led by interactions gathered from constituents via technology that the engineering team would build.
As I listened to him speak today I realized that he may not understand the technology the NSA is using or how it could be surreptitiously abused. No man can be an expert in everything and his background as a law professor probably didn't include the necessary study. So he relies on the experts in his circle who are telling him what he is repeating to us; that no Americans are being spied on. Of course he believes all his people are honest and have the highest integrity so why shouldn't he believe them? It's not the first time and not the last the a President has been duped by his own people.
LOL! Its full of HN'ers!
What a harsh point of view. When does that cycle end?

Now they can't live in MV, next they won't be able to get on the list in East Palo Alto because it's too long already, soon they'll be living in South San Jose or Morgan Hill, but their job is still in MV, so now they're spending three hours a day commuting each way and can't spend time with their family/children at all.

And every time they move they're forced into lower and lower quality neighborhoods, exposing their children to more violence and illegal activity because at that level of living the risk/reward level for legitimate work starts tipping to make crime more attractive even if they dislike the idea.

There's a lot of major social issues that become very difficult/intractable when entire regions undergo gentrification.
Brainfuck, then :).

People don't use node for the Javascript. They use it for the modules, and node is the glue that coheres them (and does an admirable job at that).

When you're comparing writing a CLI app in node to writing it in something else, it's a world of difference, and that difference is npm. With good modules, writing a CLI app has little to do with Javascript -- you're more specifying config and flow by passing some options and streams around, and you're done.
I love the Ehh messages:

It's not working on my browser! A patch by Bill Gates is imminent. In the meantime, use telnet as your browser.
Yes, that's kinda the thing though. If you're going to lifehack your way out of it, that's an externality.
> For instance, leaking details of Chinese hacking does not help the American people. It hurts the NSA and makes the American government look bad, but it doesn't help the American people.

Assuming that this is true, the net effect of Snowden's leaks (including revealing the extent to which we live in a surveillance state) is way in the positive.

> Likewise with all the drama about asylum with regard to Russia. He put Obama in the position of being forced to cancel a summit with Putin to avoid looking politically weak at home.

Well, a) he can't just avoid seeking asylum because it is inconvenient for the figurehead of the state pursuing him (what?), and b) the "drama" is a product of the United State's sensationalist news.
This is actually really, really great news, and I'm really impressed that we're changing direction so quickly. This is a huge bureaucracy, and softening even this much in a few short months is an amazing thing. I see this as a very hopeful sign that we'll get back on track - just more slowly than anyone (including myself) would like it to go. But it's a nation of almost 400 million people and crazy complex body of law to deal with: nothing changes on a dime.
They're not exactly mirroring aynthing though. I'd go with "Awesome", but I'm not sure whether that describes the product properly.

PS: Random tough, how long will it take the Japanese to create VR Girlfriends on this thing?
This is awesome, and I really appreciate the effort toward privacy/transparency. Along those lines, supporting do not track is great, but why use GA at all? Just implementation ease? Is this something you plan to move away from?
> The difference between a euclidean domain and a principal ideal domain

A Euclidean domain is an integral domain where the Euclidean algorithm works. For the Euclidean algorithm to work, you need to be able to divide two elements and produce a remainder that's smaller than the divisor.

So an ED requires a notion of "smallness" (the Euclidean norm) which interacts with division in a way that makes the Euclidean algorithm work (remainder is always smaller than divisor).

A principal ideal domain is an integral domain where every ideal is principal (can be generated by one element). It can be useful for you to know that certain situations cannot happen, e.g. in a PID you can say, "Let I be an ideal of D, then I = <g>..." and do something with the generating element g. It lets you pass from an ideal to a single generating element in a proof, which may be a useful capability. The PID concept is also part of a taxonomy, since Euclidean domains ⊆ principal ideal domains.
So what you're saying is that only the United States is capable of building cloud infrastructure, until people go to other places to build it there, from the United States. And your face is still straight. You exemplify the very attitude that's killing the United States.
What's your company's name? Checked your HN profile but no luck.
Show HN: 3D Printer Crowdsourcing as a beta software invitation
This is exactly what I thought of when reading that post.
True, sure they could move to Idaho or Montana, but many people have roots and strong family ties, which bind them to a small geographic area, so to them leaving simply isn't an option to them anymore than going and living on the moon would be (and I mean that almost literally). I have an uncle that's never left the state and considers a "city" an hour away an exotic location.

For example 46% of midwesterners live in the same community their entire life (http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/Movers-and-Stayers....), even though many of them could probably move elsewhere when the finish school (HS, Tech, College, Uni, etc.) and get much better jobs than they could locally.
I don't really think it's as big of a deal as the author thinks it is. Computer systems are often extremely complicated and confusing. Yes you might not think so because you are familiar with them, but things that seem obvious to you through experience do not to everyone else.

Anything that makes them simpler, easier, or cuts through the confusion is a good thing. My analogy would be how most programmers don't work with machine code. Even if they are familiar with it they probably don't have any experience. And you get any more low level than that, like the cpu design.

Specialization is a good thing. It's how we built modern civilization and how we are able to build computers in the first place. For most people there isn't really any benefit of learning the details of their operating system, if they don't have to deal with it in the first place because it's well designed, isn't that a good thing?

>I have one question for these policy makers:

>Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web-browser and a search engine?

>If you can’t, then you have no right to be making decisions that affect my use of these technologies. Try it out. Do your friends know the difference? Do you?

Legislators also aren't familiar with the vast majority of other industries they regulate. Stupid regulations aren't unique to technology. You just happen to know enough to see problems with them.

>We should be teaching kids not to install malware, rather than locking down machines so that it’s physically impossible.

What's wrong with more secure systems? I mean I don't think we should lock out general purpose apps entirely, but it's great that people can generally trust random apps, and that it's much harder to create a virus.

And for what it's worth, computercraft for minecraft is a great way of introducing programming.
Thanks!

Well, GA is quite convenient - we get pretty graphs, realtime analytics and so on. It's not something we have considered moving away from, since it's trivial to disable it entirely. And it's not significantly worse than any other tracking tool.
You might be surprised to hear that many tens of thousands of clueless kids, teenagers, and adults pay for all-in-one kits that host Java drivebys (malicious self-signed Java applets, and Java exploits), redirect visitors of compromised sites to one's Java driveby, infect them, and manage such botnets through fancy Web 2.0 interfaces.

And they don't even need (and often do not have) a shred of basic IT knowledge to do any of this, let alone programming knowledge.
alternatively: maven managed to get dependency management right about 5 years ago.
The HTTP specification in no way restricts the verbs that you can use to those that are in common use. But at some point somebody, somewhere, decided that the only ones allowed were the ones that the specification explicitly mentioned. And so people just shoehorn their applications into frameworks built around what the HTTP specification defines, rather than allows.

Ain't nobody got time for defining semantics.
The only truly effective way is to use an addon like NoScript (Firefox) or NotScripts / ScriptNo (Chrome).

Other addons may prevent certain leakages, but definitely not all.
The only real difference between PUT and POST is that PUT creates a resource at a defined location. There's no difference with regard to the mapping-from-request-representation-to-preferred-server-representation between PUT and the common use case of POST to create a new member of a collection where the collection URI is the target of the POST, the only difference is that with put, the target URI is the location that the resulting resource will be placed rather than the location it will be subordinate to.

Since this problem isn't a barrier to using POST to create resources, it shouldn't be for PUT, either.
So that place in Utah is gathering only 1.6% of ... whatever it is gathering.

CNN and a government is a kool-aid for the masses.
In addition to what jdiez had to say about GA - we're trying to understand our audience a little better. MediaCrush uses tons of new web tech that won't work on outdated browsers, and GA helps us get an easy look at support for things like that. Also tells us what kind of media is most popular, and who's sending us traffic, which is just kind of nice to know.
I should install a bunch of fonts that say "f* you, don't track me." and the like.
Pretty sure he's talking about how Republicans are always getting shafted for talking about things be "un-American" or "un-patriotic" to the point of insanity, coming up with things like the Patriot Act. And here's Obama, supposedly the candidate in favor of "change" using the exact same rhetoric.
Yeah, I frequently find myself clicking back over to classic because I simply can't figure out how to do what I want in the new mode. When they take away my ability to do that, I'll groan and curse and increment my "reasons not to get excited about the Next Big Thing from Google" counter.
Is HEAD really used a lot? I don't know that I've ever used it except to try it once. Is it used in API call? If so, why? Thanks for any help on this.
I'd say it's substantially different from hosting your own Piwik, OWA, or even something like snowplow - where you could elect to avoid IP storage.

That said, those all entail a lot of work and/or additional cost. You're also absolutely right that allowing users to disable it (and ads) is an amazing feature.
Inside a though, zoomed out, in dark light - my telephoto lens is pretty much useless. People are just put off by the sheer physicality of the lens, not so much what it is doing.

Likewise, (getting back on topic) - the poor guy fired at the AOL event wasn't fired for what he was doing, so much as the fact that he was visibly doing it.
They police people pretty heavily with neighborhood watch associations called CDRs. But, from my experience, the hammer only came down when someone rose above a certain threshold of undesired activity.

You're right, I saw no Fidel images. Tons of Che.
Sydney Uni Incubator offers $40k to Uni Student Startups
You might want to consider self hosted analytics. I've heard a lot of talk about Piwik, though I've not done much with it myself.
I think its a lot to ask but would you consider making a sample application that replicates this same behaviour?
Same - I'm not super car-literate, but I was able to refill wiper fluid before I went on a long trip, and if it came down to it I could change the tire (I at least know where the jack is, and roughly where it goes under the car). But I don't change my own oil, because I can't really do it cheaper than the shop.
holy cow, this is so cool. yes a few problems but i LOVE it
Quick plug for something we're working on that's related: chronos, launched on Android this week http://bit.ly/chronos-android (iOS next week: http://www.getchronos.com)

We passively track how you spend your time – you don't have to do anything, and it lets you know where you’ve gone, with whom, and breaks your time into categories (work, sleep, exercise, home, social, etc.).

-charlie
I wasn't impressed with Chicago's Field Museum compared to HMNS, but I've only been there once, and IIRC there was renovation going on, so maybe I missed the good stuff. I'll give it another try next time I go to Chicago. Glad to hear someone is enjoying the MFA and Menil. The Menil was mostly the result of the Schlumbergers IIRC.

I lived in Clear Lake when I was young, and I was fortunate enough to get to hang out at JSC, and get really good access to the place. My Little League coach was an Astronaut. I can barely stand to go there anymore. It kills me.

Alligators? Yeah, and mosquitoes. I've seen enough of both.
phk is awesome, he also wrote the beerware license [1]. lassez-faire

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware
TL;DR: Got butthurt over a competitor getting free publicity, resorted to bashing them.
> Fourth Hack: Be focussed, if you're doing something - just do that one thing and do it well at any one time - monotask!

Monotask. I've never heard that before. I like it.

That's how my brain works.
Yeah, if that's where your URL ended. But what if your URLs kept going? Say you had

/user/123/followers

or

/user/123/followers/followers

or

/user/123/followers/followers/following

? When your URLs have a non-obvious terminus (as is typical of proper REST APIs) it becomes clear that the verb does not belong in the URL path.
Did some quick back of the napkin math.

Daily internet traffic (from the NSA white paper) is 1,826 Petabytes. 1.6% (* .016) is 29 Petabytes that the NSA "touches."

If the average email or chat is 75kb, then the NSA just admitted it touches 389 BILLION messages DAILY.

Also, the NSA says it only "reviews" .025% (* .00025) of the 1.6% it "touches." Small right? Well that means that the NSA "reviews...."

97 MILLION messages DAILY.

Assuming they probably don't check solicitations, I'm assuming they "touch" all emails, chats, etc. Right? And they "review" a non-trivial amount of them by quantity.

Math check? Please someone tell me I'm wrong.

Edited — I was off a decimal point, still a lot of messages daily.
Australia and the others can't match Silicon Valley - Scoble
Well sure, and I disagree with the President's statement, but I think him using the word patriot is mostly indicative of the fact that a reporter asked him if he thought Snowden was a patriot...
Wow, a 98.4% failure rate.

/sarcasm
I love this article, but: what can a practicing math teacher take away from it? How can you apply this stuff if you still have to teach a standard curriculum?

I'm really asking -- my friend is about to start as a high-school math teacher.

I guess the first recommendation would be: motivate every new technique by starting with one or more problems that the technique helps to solve. (Here "problems" is meant in the Lockhart sense -- real puzzles, not exercises.)

But how often are "techniques" actually taught in high school math, especially algebra and precalculus? A lot of high school math consists of digesting new definitions, or the generalization of old definitions. A fair amount of it consists of learning theorems that go unproven, or that are proven (by the teacher) too quickly for students to understand where they come from -- and in general it isn't satisfying to solve a puzzle with a theorem that one doesn't actually understand.

On top of that... students have to spend time with problems before they become genuinely interested in their solutions, so progress would be slower with this method. It's not clear that you could teach a whole year's curriculum in one year like this. (And if you fail to do that you'll eventually get fired.)

Any insight? I believe that it's possible to teach math, even standard high school curriculum, in such a way that students are at all times intrinsically interested in what's presented. But it would be awfully hard to do at scale, at the standard pace, as a high school teacher would have to. How might a teacher start in that direction?
Oh, thanks. I think this is a promising project but I'd like to point out a couple of things.

I tried to upload 3 different files. 2x PNG file (no more than 1MB in total) and a gif file (~5MB). I was only able to upload one of them (one of the PNG files). I tried the upload the same files on 2 different browsers (Chrome 29.0.1547.49 & Firefox 23) in both normal and private mode but the result was the same. Maybe you're dealing with heavy traffic right now or maybe the problem was on my side. I hope I don't sound like I'm criticizing you (not that there's anything wrong with that), but I'm merely pointing out my experience in the first 5 minutes. I'll keep using the service to see if everything works out, though. Because I'm currently looking for a service like yours.

Another point I want to make is the similar to the one I've already made. You need to provide more information about the service. Clearly since this is an anonymous service, users won't be able to sign up for an account to manage their files, but what happens when I upload my files? Are they going to be indexed by the search engines? How long are you going to keep my files online?
Implement some form of browser fingerprinting - Meta Stack Overflow
Their stylized logo looks like it says "METH".
Most people wouldn't want to look like a geek, typing on a handheld computer while out with friends. Yet here we are.
FRP?
Is the game powered by FireBase somehow?
It's probably not a good thing that your 404 page features _multiple other_ users that are also experiencing some sort of error at the exact same time
Look at the top 2 depended on modules modules in the entire of the server side node.js ecosystem and guess what they were written for - https://npmjs.org/

I wrote a database specifically for web browsers and someone case along and write a relatively small pull request and it now works in node / on the server / with a http api - http://pouchdb.com
The giant "POWERED BY FIREBASE" section on the game's page is your hint.
We really need to teach people _how_ to teach induction, which is only done right when you put quotes around your Boolean statements; the "implies" symbol gets jumbled up with everything else otherwise, and not using it at all is passing up on a great tool. One can do simple proofs-by-induction without a single English word, completely symbolically, and have it be understood easily, if one uses quotes and correct LaTeX formatting (or good handwriting)

Induction doesn't just involve numbers and equality signs, it involves _statements_ with variables inside of them, and non-programmers need to be made well-aware of this (and taught Boolean logic early, PLEASE)
I shall create one, and name her Molly (comedy answer, Y.T.).
> Assuming that this is true, the net effect of Snowden's leaks (including revealing the extent to which we live in a surveillance state) is way in the positive.

Perhaps, but only by the same logic under which supply-side and 'trickle-down' economics is expected to succeed.

> a) he can't just avoid seeking asylum because it is inconvenient for the figurehead of the state pursuing him (what?)

Sure he could. Many "patriots" did things at risk to their liberty because they believed it was the right thing for their country.

He chooses not to because asylum is better for him personally. That's certainly his choice to make, but it's not the 'patriotic' choice.

> b) the "drama" is a product of the United State's sensationalist news.

When did the Guardian become a U.S. news outlet?
It's very interesting to note that there are many hardware (The serious ones, remember!) startups in the latest YC portfolio. I think it'd be pretty amazing to be around such an innovative bunch and do your work, even if one is doing a just software. :-)
Can you link me to your failed images? I'll see what's up. Load isn't too terrible at the moment.

As for information, I'll make sure it's more clear on the site, but I'll answer you directly as a temporary measure: When you upload your files, they disappear into our servers and can only be accessed by that URL. If you lost it, just upload it again, we'll hash it on the client before you actually do the upload. As for indexing, view pages are not shown in search engines. Your files stay there forever.
HN readers aren't dumb. Your post is a thinly veiled attempt to market your site, not to thank anyone and you know it. Not that there's anything wrong with self-promotion, but at least be honest about it!
Yeah - I never want to get paid to do tech support - I generally find it either so trivial it's not worth charging for, or so hair-pullingly frustrating that no reasonable amount of money would be enough.
http://www.w2spconf.com/2012/papers/w2sp12-final4.pdf
That kind of rewriting would be stupid, but of course isn't what's actually happening. In reality there's no match for the geocoding search [34th and 6th ave ny,ny], so it is interpreted as a local search for [34th and] in the vicinity of [6th ave ny, ny].

Why isn't there a match for the geocoding search? It's not because somebody "destroyed Google Maps on iOS", but most likely just due to a switch to a newer geocoding index. These would be updated frequently with new data from all kinds of sources, just like web search won't use a static index but one that changes over time.

Why wouldn't this kind of change be noticed when changing to a new set of data? Because it'd be essentially impossible to find all possible changes to geocoding results from a data change, and even less feasible to verify which of the results are correct. So there's always going to be some kind of sampling going on when validating new data or code changes. And with a sensibly sized sample, you're not very likely to be checking a particular intersection in a very large country.

These kinds of regressions would have popped in and out during the whole lifetime of Google Maps. Just because you noticed such a change for the first time doesn't mean that they are currently failing when they weren't before.
See also: http://kickassapp.com/