skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried running a Chromium session with no extensions for the stuff I want to be more secure (email/banking/etc.), while using Chrome for everything else, and this does work in a way. But I find that I tend to forget to switch to the other browser sometimes. A solution which said "don't run extensions on mail.google.com and online.my_bank.com" would be a lot more convenient.

The separate browser solution does protect from tracking, but with the security threats of today, like these malicious extensions with access to all your data, I've become desensitized to mere tracking.
A century-old pro-Twitter argument
Exactly, if a smartphone can replace a DSLR then you did't really need one in the first place. Hence, the idea that DSLRs are not going to be sold to the general public anymore and will return to be a niche product for enthusiasts/pros.
+1 as well. just downgraded to free one or two weeks back and use dropbox only as shared storage for some iOS apps now. For actual sharing/backups i use AeroFS which works fine with off site storage (limited only by my ability to add cheap redundant disks) and is much quicker & cheaper.
> But that's what you get when you vote in folks that demand that government be the center of attention of everybody's lives.

It's useful to separate what they say ("Big government!" "Small government!") from what they actually do: more resources to any agency in their portfolio.

The bigger your agency(ies), the bigger your dick, and the more likely your re-election.
ThinkSpace Pioneers.
I think this video does matter, but I think it's in a good way. What follows is a gross over-simplification, and it's more of a rant than a real explanation. I may not even agree with it tomorrow. Hell, I don't fully agree with it now. But here's a flavour of how I see it.

Broadly speaking there are four main groups:

A: Those who won't see it or don't care;

B: Those who will use this as an opportunity to diss and dismiss math, to ridicule and deride those who do math;

C: Those who start asking why and how this can be "true," and why and how it can be useful;

D: Those who understand that it's really just math geeks having fun.

We can ignore group A, they won't be affected.

We can ignore group B, they will never be converted, and will actively look for reasons to excuse their disinterest and disengagement. They are the ones who already seize on things like the usual proofs that 1=2, and so on. No harm will be done here. In fact, we can use this to identify them, and work with them to hone the skills they will need. Doing arithmetic and getting hold of a sense of number will be the best way to help them.

We can ignore group D, they already get it.

But in group C there is an opportunity. These are the ones who we can start to get engaged in real math, and not the crappy drivel they get exposed to in school. For them we now have an opportunity to share why math can be fun and exciting, as well as useful.

The people in group B who rant about how this is overt, obvious nonsense, and all math is pointless, they are lost already. Sadly some will go on to be politicians, and we must continue to defend against them, yes. But this sort of fun video gives us the chance to talk about what real math is like, and what real math involves, and to capture those who possess the raw skills we need in the more difficult, technical, abstract, fundamental subjects.
I didn't see any fn key in the OP's photo. Maybe they just moved that too? Or are you talking about the older model?
Obligitory link to c2: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...

and the seminal Peter Norvig essay: http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
If a startup wants to reach a similar customer base as a startup in the US it will always have to deal with 50 different markets with 50 different legal systems, 50 different marketing channels, and 50 different social networks. Starting a complete web-based company like Spotify or Soundcloud may still be possible because itunes has paved the way to organize media rights efficiently, but as soon as you touch the bricks and mortar world it becomes a different story. The startups I know were first of all focused on their home country and became international only much later, after building local representations in the different countries, and then they had to deal with the local competitors and became successful in only a subset of these countries.
Inane response to well cited content.
Just started using btsync and pretty impressed with the ease of use so far.. Couldn't get dropbox going on Linux..
Who in the right mind would schedule a critical infrastructure upgrade during the day?
I can +1 that. C#/.NET isn't very trendy, but it's my main language right now. I get at least one or two inquiries from recruiters a month with about 10-20 minutes spent on a Linkedin profile.
I'm not sure whether Egor Homakov received a reward for reporting this to Mt.Gox which he clearly deserves. However we have contacted to Mt.Gox to understand if they would be launching a vulnerability reward program and the response we got is that they would launch one during Q1 2014. Read more at our blog about it. https://blog.crowdcurity.com/how-to-measure-the-security-of-...
Interesting theory. So, in effect, your comments are downvoted because the majority of people here are either too ignorant or too stupid to understand them. Well, that's one way to avoid ever having to question your own beliefs/knowledge.
Can you put units on everything? For example, I'm assuming USD, but since I see Sydney on there...
I think I have read too much Taleb to be able to agree.
Better to begin to divide up Hacker News, so that there is not a single front news page. Can 10,000 community forums be wrong?

At present there are already several front HN pages: "new", "ask" "jobs", "comments" and "news".

It is past time to divide up the "news" page to reduce the focus on the front news page.

HN is actually many communities of interest, and it is desirable to reflect that in HN.
It's not just "you've got enough space" - it's only relevant if both operands are in registers already. If they're both in memory, then the xors are entirely redundant (first things you'd have to do is read values into two registers, at which point you can just write it back the other way).

I wouldn't object to seeing it in a critical section in high performance code with substantial register pressure, but ideally it could be inserted by the compiler!
Help Yale students fight for open data access
The Beginner's Guide to Scrappy Growth Hacks
> Actually Borland C++.

Actually, Borland C++Builder.
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

Something like 1 in 10 people is employed by the government (state, federal, or local) directly, countless more indirectly.

The .gov actually is large, in the strictest sense of the word.
I love the interface and structure.The loading went really really slowly though.
I would suggest you to add some keyboard shortcuts (like [J] and [K] for switching articles back and forth) and let the users participate!
Maybe if you were a touch less condescending and arrogant, and refrained from making baseless judgments, you would get more up-votes.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that the "average user here is neither an expert in practically anything, nor likely a productive member of society"? I disagree with many users, but have no reason to indict them.
It is entirely possible to use a database without understanding its internals. Look, I'm not encouraging incompetence--not by a long shot--I'm just challenging the assertion that everyone who "writes code" (the words 'potatolicious used, which started this sub-thread) needs to have the same knowledge base.

I've worked with a lot of academics who write code for math and stats without any real computer science knowledge (including no more than a rudimentary understanding of the most basic data structures). I have a business mentor who makes millions of dollars with a piece of legacy web software he wrote himself--I'm certain he could tell you that certain fields are indexed in the DB because the SQL performs better that way, but I doubt he would use the word hashmap/hashtable at all and that doesn't undermine his credibility in my eyes one bit. I have friends who write embedded code all day but couldn't write an SQL query to save their life; that is obviously fine for what they do, and it doesn't make them any worse of a programmer.

My example in the parent comment was obviously relating to web programmers, where the necessity of being able to write a usable SQL query is of far greater importance than the ability to explain how the database is actually executing that query. All I'm saying is that if we are able to deflate our own self-importance just a little bit (and accept the idea that the role of an employer might also be to act as a mentor), suddenly the pool of qualified applicants becomes bigger.
> Second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine.

This claim was originally by an expert doctor.

> Which is why articles and books are subjected to “peer review” and not to “everyone review,”

Peer review struggles to correct inaccuracies and by failing to share the underlying data behind the assertions made, and especially in Tom Nichols' area of expertise (public policy) the data is the only way of invalidating claims (as opposed to abstract mathematical concepts, like machine learning). Further more, most peer review journals are behind paywalls of some kind.

Contrast this to the accuracy of Wikipedia (where, yes peers review the knowledge, but so can the general public) or the increasing support behind open peer review (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review) and the open research movement in general (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research) it is at least questionable to argue that closed peer review implies a standard of truth.

> but don’t tell that to someone hectoring you about the how things really work in Moscow or Beijing or Washington.

It is funny he brings this up because Beijing is rife with academic dishonesty to the point where if the exact steps / data to reproduce aren't explicitly mentioned in the paper, I don't even read it.

> [A large, large amount of opinionated elitism ending with a call for the return of the days of gatekeepers]

Gatekeepers impede scientific inquiry. It wasn't until 1957 that we seriously started examining human sexual response. This is 100% due to gatekeepers. By advancing the case for open data, open methods, and open journals we may suffer more fools' opinion's on global warming, but it is far more worth it.

The reason I suspect that this author is especially angry is that public policy is politics in declarative form. "We will use one school of 500 kids vs five schools of 100 kids" has far reaching consequences that spill into the political sphere. The reason public policy is hard to take a seriously as a scientific endeavour is that it isn't often provable, although with open data would certainly improve it.
I agree that it is an interesting idea, but it is not particularly original.
I'd say that most DSLRs never left Auto mode or anything other than the kits lens they shipped with attached to them.

I was never an SLR guy, film or digital ... always though they were bigger and less convenient than rangefinders. Heck, for OM-D I only own two lenses ... a 24mm and a 50mm equivalent, which all I ever needed really. Next step is probably a FF compact with a 35/2.0 or faster, doesn't even need to interchangeable.
"Promoting unseen content" won't be solved by increasing the size of the front page because the amount of traffic and attention a post receives is directly proportional to the absolute ranking (anedotally, posts from my blog which hit the Top 5 got 3-5x the concurrent traffic than posts at the bottom of the front page).

Adding more entries to the front page won't help at all.
For Apple, there's quite a lot if you're willing to grovel through commits, but at the moment nothing is bigger than Clang/LLVM -- a large chunk of the core team is directly employed by Apple, and with FreeBSD 10 Clang is directly incorporated into the core system. Apple has, at various times, employed other FreeBSD core committers directly. They very quietly have done a lot to support the project.

Sony, IIRC, employed some Japanese committers who were working on ACPI at one point.
Can 10,000 community forums be wrong?

Yes, because quantity != quality. And even worse, it causes fragmentation.

Reddit is a start, but requires a lot of manual effort to make Reddit an effective community tool.
It wasn't adjusted to exclude traditional non-working categories of any kind at all. That's what made is such an obviously useless figure, right there in the first sentence.
And it is exactly the same argument that was used against extending the franchise to non property owning men , women .... and so on.
All it needs to do is move the flag you click on to the first free square starting at the upper-left. The cheat helped me see this in action, but I've forgotten how to activate it now. I'll have to look that up again to see if it's implemented in this version.
Yeah, maybe, but that's also a much bigger change.

I guess it depends if HN is still growing much bigger or if it's somehow bounded. If it's bounded, then just increasing the size of pages might be good enough because you won't have to keep doing it to keep up.
Taleb's writings do not contradict this article, as the experts are often right; (my take on) Taleb's criticism of experts is that being right most of the time is not good enough when there are long-tailed distributions.
The arena of thought is typically shrunk when people fear negative judgment. Using more positive terms like this would promote healthy discourse.

It would also open up a cleaner way to discuss paranoia, specifically. Some ideas could be singled out as paranoid, while acknowledging the value in others.
What made me hate upstart was that it still is willing to get the default runlevel from /etc/inittab, but it doesn't bother to emit warnings to the user that the rest of /etc/inittab is completely ignored, at least on the version of CentOS I was using. I think it's particularly user-hostile design for any program to accept configuration that does nothing (excepting whatever comment syntax a particular config file uses.)

I would vastly prefer if it either made lots of complaints about the ignored lines in inittab, or even if it it failed hard -- because then I would have to fix the problem immediately.

I have used systemd, but never actually poked around at its configuration (having just run Debian with it as a desktop user), so I can't properly judge it yet.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the article. I've used tensors a little bit, but I remain uncomfortable with them. Perhaps I'm exactly the audience you were targeting. :)
Round Rock was full of Dellionaires.
That's a very tough call to make. Making changes at off-peak times makes some sense, especially if you think there's a likelihood of disruption. But if you're planning for the unexpected, it can be best to make changes when people are their most alert and when plenty of help is around and available. Also, in a fast moving quickly growing business, there's really only so often you can come in at very anti-social hours before burning out.
Because they aren't products, they are explorations. I don't think they are meant for the average consumer. Not everything has to be consumed.
No rewards
It wasn't meant as a criticism; I'm genuinely interested in which quote you're speaking of (FDR or misattributed to FDR).
Could you please post a citation for this? I do not know if you are right or wrong, and it is not something I have considered before, but I would appreciate the opportunity to learn what arguments were made at the time.
This is the argument that resonates with me the most. Unless you're already intimately familiar with the codebase and build system (with all their attendant quirks), it could consume a huge amount of time and effort to tease apart the stuff you need from the vast chromium codebase.

For the record, I'm working on a new C++ project where I ended up picking up small (very small) pieces of chromium codebase with the rest being in conservatively written C++ (but not as conservative as described in google code-style guide). In general, I'd say /base and /threading libraries are useful sources to raid at the beginning of your project. These are high quality implementations of basic things most programs would need and somewhat easier to disentangle from the rest of the code.
Actually, my problem with conspiracy theorists is that a whole lot of them do believe in Jewish Bolshevism/Zionist Occupied Government nonsense. And I'm Jewish: the result is that every time some nutter shoots up a community center, the real reason is because he never got the mental-health care he needed, but the proximate reason is that "not loons" conspiracy theorists told him we were holding Evil League of Evil meetings there.
The claim that "expertise" is going by the wayside is absurd. What's gone by the wayside is the automatic acceptance of anything a self-proclaimed expert says as fact.

Yes, wide access to Google and Wikipedia have aided this trend, and raised the layperson's knowledge level. These things have also raised the burden of proof of expertise. I've never even heard of Tom Nichols; I'm not apt to take what he says as fact just because his blog says he's an expert in public policy.

I will, however, trust the opinion of e.g. Bruce Schneier because he has consistently demonstrated that he knows what he's talking about. If Tom Nichols aka Random McBlogger wants to be viewed as an expert, it's up to him to prove his expertise to his audience.

The first thing I did after reading this article was to google "Tom Nichols". The first few results were a horribly-amateurish blog, presumably by the same Tom Nichols (though no picture, so who knows?) and some wikipedia articles about a music producer and soccer player of the same name. As far as I can tell from a cursory google search, Tom Nichols is a nobody.
The censoring of the email address looks terrible. It looks like someone has just drawn a line over each email in paint. I would not be surprised if the original email could be recovered just by putting the different "erased" copies together.
How the movie Her depicts the future of mobile
I think what the author misses is the large institutional structure that restricts the supply of experts and (as a result) enhances their prestige. These days, with the growing availability of technical information, existing systems of licensure, credentialing, and professionalization are breeding resentment on both sides of the lectern.

The author's focus in the article is on the layman's resentment for the expert. While most people would agree that experts are better qualified to talk about something than Joe Blogger, I think the urge to disagree with the expert is engendered by the larger power structure of expertise that has grown up over the past 100 years.

To take a trivial example, I wear contact lenses. While I agree that an optometrist knows a lot more about vision correction than I do, I resent the fact that I have to pay a lot of money to sit in a chair in a dark room and wait for The Expert to deliver his Opinion about whether I need the -4.5's or -5's.

The author of the article feels like he is the victim of resentment at the hands of his students (references to "intellectual valet" and so forth). I don't think students are necessarily in the wrong -- most are probably in college to get a job, and they're right to resent the stranglehold that universities have on social prestige and career respectability. They end up taking it out on the professors, because, well, they're stuck in class listening to The Expert for hours a day because of this or that degree requirement.

The experts then start to resent the laymen for failing to pay what they feel is a proper amount of respect for the superior state of their knowledge. They conclude that the solution is to come up with ways to enhance their prestige even more, for example by writing articles like this one that talks about how great experts are. I'm afraid this will only poison relations between laymen and experts even more.

What I love about computer programming is that basically all you need to be an expert on something is time, persistence, and an Internet connection. Contrary to the author's claims, the alternative to institutionalized expertise is not that "Everyone is an expert". It's that "You don't have to go to a prestigious university to become an expert". Sure, there are a lot of charlatans running around in the programming world, but the free exchange of knowledge and the absence of licensure has led to both a flowering of human creativity as well as (outside of San Francisco) non-resentful relationships between experts and laypeople.
What Happens to New Users? (Meta stack overflow)
I can't tell you how much I am enjoying this narrative about the US Chamber of Commerce being the secret controllers of the levers of power. Keep going with this! It's gold.
Not OP, but actually looking for something in the 20-25 hours a week range. Plenty of PHP experience, do you have some more details and a contact address? (my email is in my profile).
The World Is Now an Airport
There’s also that immutable problem known as “human nature.” It has a name now: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which says, in sum, that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.

The usual - social science gets disrespected, blogs that world is ending...

He'd have more credibility if he didn't quote Dunning-Kruger as if it was a law rather a debatable, sometimes observed effect. With blanket appeals to "human nature", you'll need more than some degrees to present your claims as fact. We can see where this is going. Indeed, I'm hopeful that this blog will shoot a few holes in his apparently rather thin credibility.
I found their introduction to tensors to be the most helpful I had ever read. Realizing that tensors are (or can be considered) functions that map vectors onto vectors was a big conceptual shift for me.
"They may not be wealthy, "but they are wealthy in spirit."
Fun fact: DOSBox runs Windows 3.1, and (on my MacBook Pro) it starts as fast as this website.
Also, for anyone interested, one of my favourite talks is about a study of political forecasters and their accurancy over the years, seen from this perspective: (the video is paywalled, but the audio is free):

http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bette...