skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The kind of aggressive court interference talked about in the article, will (or at least should) be the catalyst to make that happen.

Anonymous comments really ought to be hosted anonymously and in a distributed fashion, preventing them from being taken down or "used against you." The "fire in a crowded theater" supposed exception, is simply not relevant wrt internet comments.
I don't think anyone knows what the world will look like in a million years. Will we be around as a species? Given the tendency toward exponential progress in all things we do, I tend to think that within 10,000 years, we'll either be off the planet or extinct. (That's not to say that we're destined to make the Earth uninhabitable, although that could happen. I just think we're "up or out" as a species. We'll either end economic scarcity or kill ourselves off within 500 years, I'd say, and the former means we're mining asteroids and, over the millennia, moving to other planets.)

If we get off the planet, it's unclear what we'll "look like" in many ways. We could be cyborgs. We could have enormous lifespans (millions of years). Unless we achieve such an immortality, we will continue to evolve (physically and culturally) and after a million years on different planets, we'll probably see all sorts of variation in terms of number of digits, representation of knowledge, and language.

So, looking a million years out, the answer is probably "no". Our system may still be alive, but if we're alive in a million years, I'd bet that we're off the planet and human culture will have forked, making the question of what is "final" unclear.

For the next 500 years (even 2500) I don't think we'll see another numeral system. Arabic Base-10 works, and there isn't much ti be gained in changing it . The glyphs themselves may evolve (our "Arabic" numbers look nothing like the original Arabic digits) but the concept will be the same.
Design that doesn't put the user first is egotistical by nature.

There's nothing to get used to; design isn't new on Apple's platforms. If anything, Apple has driven software design more than any other platform or company.

Apple's customers value -- and paid for -- a consistent ecosystem, on which Apple defines design guidelines and HIG requirements. Apple developers and designers work together to maintain a consistent ecosystem and the resulting mutual benefit.

Get used to it.
By the way, I would be interested to see a graph of the average rating of the players by year, as well as what the other graphs look like when controlled for rating. I wouldn't be surprised if the explosion of the data set in recent times is partially due to many more games between lesser players being recorded, and this could certainly have an impact on the stats.
I wouldn't say we use base-60 for time or angles. We still use just 10 digits to write them down, so it's still in base-10.
Some of us have realized that the puritan heritage has not always been the most beneficial in the modern world.
Good idea to mention the scientific notation. As it really is different from the positional notation. You can express some numbers in a shorter way then in the positional notation. Thats pretty nice. A variable length encoding with compression.

As for different bases: I consider these very similar to base 10. Maybe we will use base X in a million years, but that wouldnt be a big surprise. I was more thinking about a revolution like from "............." to "13".
If you're ignorant to the degree that you don't understand how exceptions are part of the function's return type, it has nothing to do with my imagination.
Yep. The more general lesson I see to be learned from this story is: never take inherently dangerous activities or situations lightly, even if you've done it a few times before and nothing seemed to go wrong.
What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues.

If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?
I wonder why they haven't put the encryption method out in public, they necessarily don't need to tell how they broke it.
It won't be used anymore on American side, nor Iran would use it now that it is broken, so why not for educational purpose put it in public domain?
I think everyone is misinterpreting the question. This isn't about the fact that we're using base-10. This is about the fact that we're using the Arabic "symbol-valued cardinal exponential" notation:

ABC = (val[A] × base^2) + (val[B] × base^1) + (val[C] × base^0).

Examples of other systems, as the OP said, are tally-marks (uniform-valued ordinal additive) and Roman numerals (symbol-valued ordinal additive). The question is, is arabic notation optimal for doing simple math quickly? It might not be, given that e.g. mathematical savants seem to be doing something involving geometric/visual computation.
I find it suspicious that these Gmail -> Fastmail submissions appear relatively regularly, and then see an abnormally high number of supportive commentary, out of proportion with other posts at the same time of day.
I just don't want advertising companies or the NSA sniffing around my personal communications. It has to be private as private should be.
can't throw exceptions that the caller can catch. If an exception falls in the forest, and there's no one there to catch it…
Depends entirely on why and how it was encrypted. If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must(edit,not necessarily) have the keys to boot clearly.

If we are talking about recorded data, it's less clear. The imagery data may be encrypted to provide access control after the drives are removed from the plane and handed somewhere else. In which case, there's little reason the drone wouldn't have the decrypt keys.

You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it. I'd suspect the way the military planed to handle that eventuality, however, would use on an exothermic random number generator (a.k.a. a self destruct mechanism/ explosive charge) rather than encryption. There's a lot of way more sensitive thing on the aircraft than just what it took pictures of that you need to destroy.
when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever)

You can configure Gmail to use your university's SMTP server and then Gmail is simply an e-mail client. They steer you away from that option but it's available.
Is there any good reason why they haven't done this already? It seems to me privacy is a major selling point, especially after the Snowden revelations.
Base 5, base 6, base whatever are not in way fundamentally different from base 10 (as a piece of curio: every base is "base 10" when you refer to it from within itself). They're all the same straightforward positional system and you just change how high you'll count before rolling over.
I think the tabs are great. With little or no training they're right 99% of the time and are a very effective way of separating "real email" - friends, colleagues, family - from the automated stuff that's not spam but which I also don't care about as much.
> human culture will have forked

We have that situation already. The Pirahã have only 2 numers in their languge. Roughly translatable as "few" and "many".

And scientists use different bases and scientific notation.
CSVjs: Basic CSV parsing and encoding in JavaScript
There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great:

"Getting my data back under control

In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data."

If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1].

It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2].

[1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic.

[2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.
There's a nice example from Shriram Krishnamurthi of implementing automata using functions, where the functions represent states and state transitions are just function calls. It's an elegant way of creating automata IMHO, but the efficiency of the approach depends on TCO:

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-aut...
> Note: In all of the following plots, the white line is the mean and the shaded blue area is the 95% confidence interval [for the mean of moves-per-game]

Is confidence interval the right statistical concept to use when characterizing this data set? It seems like it would be more meaningful to examine how various percentiles of "moves per game" change over time rather than plotting a confidence interval around the mean.

In particular, the mean moves-per-game that he displayed is (I assume) the actual mean of his data set. It's not an estimate of the mean of some larger population of games, if I'm understanding the article correctly. So what does it mean to display a confidence interval for a parameter that's known rather than been estimated?

It seems more interesting to treat the data set as the population and analyze how it changes over time. For example, I'd be interested to see a graph of 5th, 50th, and 95th percentile of match length. I notice that the confidence interval is shrinking around his mean -- is that really reflecting that percentiles are converging on the mean because of changes in play style? Or have I misunderstood and the data set is being treated as a random sample of some larger population of chess games? (In that case, since there are more games in his data set in later years, it is unsurprising for the confidence interval to shrink. Whereas if the percentiles of match length are converging on the mean, then I think that's pretty interesting.)
HEET turnstiles?
Especially for something as crucial as email. I am probably still sticking with gmail for a while, but I can't imagine the horror of suddenly being locked out and not being able to get on the phone with anyone.
Beside the non-standard way of managing folders (duplicate emails caused by labels) I find it slow compared to others.
First anything I've contributed to the community.

As a 16 year-old just getting into software development, it'd be amazing to get feedback from hn.
OK, I getcha, thanks.

Heads Up specifically means that there are match-ups between 2 players. This doesn't mean it's necessarily a 2 player tournament, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Heads-Up_Poker_Champi...

I already checked this case and you are right, indeed.
Chinese:

零一二三四五六七八九

Africans are a diverse group so I expect that they have many different systems.
The best way to find weaknesses in a system is to analyze, and then to see if you can replicate it. This has been done just about forever with weapons systems. Piloting a drone will teach you about the blind spots of a drone, that's golden knowledge if you need to take them down.
Having faith that you're not susceptible to having faith still counts as having faith.
I've also done the same recently-- though I always liked Gmail, FastMail has just been much better in terms of usability with the web client (e.g. no ads, it's fast, etc.)
Fare dodging of 3% isn't that much, and shouldn't be characterised as "winning". You could spend a lot of money to reduce it to 2% or maybe 1%, but is it really worth it economically? Reducing it by 1% will net you $12M, but to get that you need to train up existing employees, hire new ones, and build more infrastructure.

The fare-dodging organisation is an interesting one, but it's worth mentioning that it's net monetary gain each month is enough for a single employee equivalent (on an average wage), with no overheads or other costs. It is interesting that it's profitable, but it's not like the money is pouring in.

Edit: For comparison, fare evasion here in Melbourne hit a 5-year low point at 9% back in January.
Should developers still be skeptical of Windows Phone? [12/2013]
There's two types of "data under your control" at play here.

The first (and for most users, more important) is about not giving away your data to marketing companies. Switching to Fastmail accomplishes that (probably?).

The second is about securing your data from governments/state actors. That battle seems kind of futile to me. Even if I were running everything on my own server in my own basement, with my own ISP, I'm almost certainly not qualified to sysadmin a machine that needs to be secure against the NSA.
I read once about gamma ray bursts [0] which happen pretty frequently out there; we detect them every day in other galaxies. If any such event occurred near us (by near I mean anywhere in the vicinity of our galaxy) and the Earth was in the path of the beam, it could do anything from destroying the ozone layer to burning away every trace of life from the surface.

The scary thing is that, like with starquakes, we can't dodge it. The effect moves with the speed of light; when we detect it, it's already too late for us.

So between GRBs and starquakes, what else is there that can snuff us out without warning?

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
Suspicious, how so? I've been using Fastmail for a few months and highly recommend it. My initial thought RE: the number of comments would be that many of the people who've switched to Fastmail are vocal in their support because they had specific reasons to switch.
I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to.

Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day.

The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused.

Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless.

Choose the Business email option - https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html - if you want them to keep an automatic archive of the emails you download via POP. When I signed up under the Personal Email option I found they didn't have this archive option, but they switched me over to the business account on request.

It's so worth the measly $15/year, considering the importance a good email/webmail experience, and how much it affects your every-day life.

I've helped a few friends switch over, and they've all been thrilled with it.
It was the difference between 'metric' and numbered gages that had this effect. They took the next standard size up but still ended up with a plane that weighed almost the same as the B-29. Makes you wonder how much weight the B-29 could have still saved.
"reasoning that scofflaws might graduate to more serious crimes if left alone." Really, is there any evidence of that? Or do they think that people will get bored with it, and start on harder crimes?
I was disappointed that the article didn't really discuss WHY they are doing it, other than as some sort of “collective fare strike,” and the system should be free. But if it is free, then who will pay for it? It isn't like the fares are that outrageous.
If I were the Stockholm public transit company, I'd get my employees to join Planka, get fined every day, and send the bill to Planka. Let's see how they like being on the receiving end of fraud for a change.
> It has to be private as private should be.

But you also don't want to pay any money for it?
I'm not related to Fastmail in any way, you can verify that easily. I'm just a simple but happy customer who likes to share when he think that it might be of interest to others.
ZohoMail does everything Gmail does, including using you own domain. http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html

Ditched Gmail when it started getting slow, ditched Outlook when it disabled its domain feature. It has a REAL free tier of 5GB + 10 users. (unlike Fastmail's 250MB). Plus their webmail interface is nice and clean.
I wouldn't advise beginners to study today's elite's game, because the opening preparation is incredibly deep and what you see is only the pit of the iceberg, meaning that it's impossible to really understand what's going on without deeply studying the opening theory, which is not what you'd want a beginner to do.
Clearly the fines are too low. Tripling the fines would defeat the economics of the freeloaders little group:

Last year, the group took in more than twice as much money — more than $7,500 per month — as it paid out in fines, organizers said.

Triple their fine costs, and the group is suddenly no longer economical. No investment in infrastructure needed.
Isn't holding bitcoin already gambling?
the article didn't really discuss WHY they are doing it, other than as some sort of “collective fare strike,” and the system should be free. But if it is free, then who will pay for it?

From the article, "The transit system should be financed through taxes, they said, ensuring that a greater share comes from affluent residents and drivers."
A somewhat off-topic but honest question: why is it that the NYT gets a free pass when it comes to linking pay-walled sites?

Others would get ignored, not upvoted, flagged or at least come with a clear warning label in the title.

Linking to pay-walled content without warning is generally considered bad form on open discussion platforms.
If the metric of the relevance is the % of numbers represented or the amount of calculations done with it, base 10 has effectively been dead for many years. It's only used to occasionally communicate numbers over extremely narrow bandwidth channels to or between organics.
If that's true, would love to see some documentation for it.
> The government can't shut it down. It's owned by the people.

So noble. A societal ill that's owned by people.
Being able to pay the fare really is an issue for poor people. Every time I've seen MUNI or VTA (Santa Clara County) agents checking for fare evasion, the perpetrators are invariably poor, homeless, look like they are mentally ill, etc. Good luck collecting those fines.
I agree. Synthetic diamonds are available and generally run about 25% less per carat than an equivalent quality natural stone. This pricing is high in view of the relatively low production costs.

Gemesis and other companies were successful in driving down the cost of capital equipment for making diamonds by the older high pressure, high temperature process. Chemical vapor deposition of high quality diamonds is well established and doesn't cost much at all.

Market pricing for aesthetic applications of diamonds continues to be only loosely related to cost of production. I think this will continue until the Maker movement decides it would be cool to have diamond doorknobs, at which point the price will drop to something more closely related to the cost of arranging sp3 bonds between carbon atoms under metastable conditions - i.e., not much.

edited for a typo
The best option I found, to match my own preferences, was Runbox:

https://runbox.com/why-runbox/email-privacy/

Edited to apologise: The cheapest option seems to be $20pa, sorry. I find it excellent value.
It's only the imaginary me in your head that doesn't understand that.
I revised the wording in the post to reflect your wording suggestions. Thanks! The visualizations are a pain to replace, but I'll get the terminology right on those in future posts.

To me, it doesn't make sense to assign a draw as 1/2 to Black and White. Technically, neither side won, so why not just throw that game out when looking at which side wins more often? That's what I do in this analysis, although I show the full breakdown in the final area plot.
I can vaguely imagine a more advanced numeral system based on geometric visualizations in 2 or 3 dimensions (rather than the existing 1-dimensional digit string), that is also more suited to probabilistic representations than fractions or decimals.

Relational reasoning is a key use case to be considered for any popular numeral system (How many do I have? How do I signal that amount to others? Do I have more or less?). For small, whole quantities (<100), alternate numeral systems could likely reach a similar learning curve as Arabic numerals. Very large and complex quantities, and things of a number theoretic nature are probably areas where a future numeral system will be differentiated.
The author needs to come to terms with one fact; not even your professors are going to read these walls of text.

Most people you want to convey your opinions to will check the amount of text before deciding on whether to invest the time or not.

Fact of life. Work around it.
Triple the fines, and the poorer people who may have paid up before won't be able to anymore. It's a delicate balance; otherwise it would be too easy ("just make the fines $10 000")
I was a fare evader the first time I road the MUNI. I couldn't figure out how to pay for the damn thing:)
I wrote a Firefox extension on 2007 that allowed you to use different accounts at the same time in different tabs (no windows!). The video showing it continues to be available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBkB-Yp-zM

Sadly it was very difficult to maintain.
What base are numbers represented inside a computer? Are there really little "things" holding 0s and 1s in DRAM for example? Or is it technically a different base?
From the very page you linked:

most GRBs are billions of light years away from Earth, implying that the explosions are...extremely rare.

There are things to worry about, and things not to worry about. GRBs seem to be fairly squarely in the 2nd camp.
>In particular, the mean moves-per-game that he displayed it is simply the actual mean of the data set. It's not an estimate of that mean, if I'm understanding the article correctly. So what does it mean to display a confidence interval for a parameter that's known rather than been estimated?

Technically, I don't have the "true" mean because this data set isn't a set of all games ever. As such, I'm treating the games I have as a sample of all games ever, and providing an estimate of how confident I am in the mean I'm reporting.

>I notice that the confidence interval is shrinking around his mean -- is that because there are more recorded games

Exactly! Law of large numbers.
> Earth will go on for billions of years after we are gone.

I used to use this phrase too, but now I think there is a lot of overestimation in such understatements. It basically says that you are thinking in time scales much bigger than centuries: You think in billions of years.

Besides that I'm not sure anymore if this is really true from a factual point.

I mean - where are we after we burned all fossil and nuclear resources? This would be a very new situation for humanity but also for the rest of the living system on this planet. What happens with all the CO2, what happens with all the plutinium?

In a relatively short timespan of 2-3 years almost half the bees in my country died. Nobody saw that coming, nobody want/cant do something about it. Thinking that further, what would happen to our biosphere if pollination would stop working withing a short period of time? All living life is reciprocally developed in a long running evolutionary process.

So, I think this phrase is used a little too careless, we simply don't no how Earth react on fundamental changes that are happen quickly.