skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have mixed feelings about a system like this one. On one hand, knowing more about the habits of a student (or of students in general!) is very helpful, but when it goes wrong, it can have very bad results, and I find it hard to weigh the benefits and the risks.

Even with monitoring happening transparently and open to scrutiny, the damage it does in such contexts is typically irreversible. GPAs usually don't get revised and, when they do, it's hard to revise them objectively, retracted disciplinary actions don't give students their time back, and most people usually get exactly one chance at going through a stage of the educational system (especially the early ones).

This is especially scary and open to misinterpretation because, like anything that gathers only a small, well-defined subset of data (for privacy concerns, ironically!), it's bound to paint an incomplete picture. High school me would have been fucked if cramming had been actively discouraged or penalized; but not because I was lazy! I actually had trouble sleeping (and still do). This would regularly kick my life into zombie mode starting Wednesday or so during busier weeks, so if I had a test on Monday, Sunday evening was literally the only time when I could study (after recovering all the lost sleep on Saturday). Working around cases like this would get complicated once the bureaucracy kicks in, and we'd have kids like I was having to produce medical papers that certify they have a condition which sometimes makes it acceptable for them to cram. This is ridiculous.
Hacking the "CEO game" and how to answer the dreaded "How are you doing?"
That's just baseless scaremongering. If people value Stross' work enough, they will pay. Amazon can not become a monopoly, there are always other ways (like printed books, buying directly from the author, whatever).

I don't think it would be in Amazon's interest to encourage alternate channels by driving quality authors away.

They probably also can not just sell any crap that calls itself a book, so they need good authors (assuming books are even significant revenue for them anyway).
Brilliant article. I would add that Tom Ricks's book The Generals is an excellent complement to this piece (I wrote more about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/the-generals-tom-ri... ). Since Korea we have developed the habit of lauding generals who lose wars, instead of finding other duties to them.

A general or Secretary of Defense who screws up gets sweet six-figure "retirement" and widespread respect. He is at little if any risk of personal harm. A private who screws up, or just gets screwed by the system, dies.

It is worth contemplating what that asymmetry means.
Until the late 90s it was about 35 per IIT for CS, so about 140 for the top 4 IITs. After that it was about 50 per IIT, so 200 in all. Double these numbers if you want to include EE as well.
This should really be tagged as 1996, especially as since this was written the world of lock-free algorithms has moved forwards a lot. At the very least Fober et al suggested an alternative that performs a tad better in 2002 (http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/L17_Fober.pdf).
Speculating Rodger's sister was attractive might be mildly inappropriate, but, it's also relevant to understanding the nature of his killings, particularly as they seem to be based around sexual frustration.

I think 'violently inappropriate' is being used by the internet echo chamber to draw attention to themselves.
talk to any soldier about this and they will acknowledge that america's security is not directly threatened in todays world, and believe that the military mostly acts as a "preventative force" to keep it that way.
App.js: Mobile webapps made easy
pg's essay about philosophy is simply embarrassing.

He should just stick to essays about startups and lisp instead of pontificating on something he clearly has very little understanding of.
Nook epubs and amazon .mobis are both easily decrypted. The key is your name and credit card for nook and your serial number for kindle. There is no lock in when you add calibre to the mix, it will convert anything to anything.
This seems like quite the overreaction. Why wouldn't an apology suffice?
> Name a health care provider that would cover them then?

Any of them would, it's required by law; there are no more pre-existing conditions.
This is why I read HN - fascinating article, knowledge of an industry I had never thought about before, and a heads up about a new source of information, Cabinet Magazine. Thanks, HN!
Every once in a while this subject comes up with female friends of mine, and every time I'm shocked by the stories.

And then I'm shocked even more by the fact that I am generally unaware of all this, and by the fact that they don't usually tell me these things because they're 'used' to it and they don't want people to think they're whining.
EBay hacked last week after a massive cyberattack
Well, this sounds nice. This amount of nodes is more than sufficient for my needs. The problem would probably be the reads. "give my everything that is tagged X, Y and Z", "give me everything that is tagged A, B, X and G" etc.

But I will look in neo4j, thanks :)
sorry, in that case I didnt mean to be pedantic
As someone who was on the forums when the decision was made, I can give you some of the background. Last February, News Genius transcribed and annotated the Dorner manifesto, and got a lot of positive press. You can see the page at http://news.rapgenius.com/Christopher-dorner-manifesto-annot... and the press from Forbes at http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/02/13/christoph...

The thought was very similar in this case, in that News Genius could help annotate and pull out important sections, things that could help people understand the text. In retrospect, I believe we didn't consider fully how hard it would be to annotate, or how much more of a minefield it would be with the additional dimensions of misogyny and mental illness to consider. (Well, personally, I voted against its inclusion. But that's neither here nor there.)

I'm not sure what the right response is in this case. But that's the context.
Five Statistics That Will Define the Future
Agreed. Seems they enjoy testing the limits of there's no such thing as bad publicity
> That's just baseless scaremongering.

I didn't say this will happen, nor did I say it would necessarily be a good thing if it happened. I just said it might happen. Stross himself appears to agree that it might; see below.

> If people value Stross' work enough, they will pay.

And if they don't, they won't. More precisely, the more it costs to get Stross' work, the fewer people are likely to pay. Will there be enough at a higher cost (such as buying printed books or buying direct from the author) for Stross to make a living at it? Stross himself didn't seem too hopeful in his article; if you think otherwise, perhaps you should tell him, not me.

> I don't think it would be in Amazon's interest to encourage alternate channels by driving quality authors away.

I don't think Amazon cares about quality authors as such; I think they care about selling what the public has shown, by its buying choices, that it wants to buy. If the public wants to buy the work of quality authors, Amazon will sell it--and try to undercut everyone else's price. If the public wants trash, Amazon will sell that--and try to undercut everyone else's price.

> They probably also can not just sell any crap that calls itself a book, so they need good authors

Maybe, maybe not. See above. It's not Amazon that's ultimately deciding this; it's us, the readers.

> (assuming books are even significant revenue for them anyway).

I don't know about revenue, but I think it's quite possible that books, or at least e-books, might be a significant portion of their profits. They have distribution costs down extremely low for anything digital, and the prices in the Kindle store indicate to me that there could be quite a bit of margin there.
Regarding your point that native mobile software is easy to install: this seems true in the absolute sense, but is it true in the relative sense? There is arguably less friction in running a web app on your phone then there is going to the appstore, inputting your apple id yet another time, and waiting for yet another app to take up valuable screen real estate.

In my opinion, the limiting reagent preventing the mobile web from overtaking native app development is clearly not ease of installation - it's performance, which davidhariri argues is changing rapidly.
> Why on earth would we think these government run hospitals would work?

It's a silly question, why do you assume they wouldn't? Government doesn't equal bad.
There's a large number of significant commercial applications that use Python as their scripting and plug-in language. Non of them that I am aware of are showing any interest in Python 3.
The co-founder of a company uses his own company's service to display his misogyny and mock a recent tragedy. He should be lucky the let him 'resign' and didn't very publicly fire him.
Or just the market responding?
> Why the heck is print a statement? Why do we have urllib and urllib2? Why are generators not that useful?

So what if it is. Why not just make prnt a function. Or println or something.

Have urllib and urllib2. Make urllib2 or just put requests in the stdlib.

Still don't see what was worth breaking backward compatibility over.

> You say that it's not worth breaking backwards compatibility for genuine warts in the language and seem

I say it is not worth doing it at the time they did. It just came too late. People how didn't pick python over other frameworks probably weren't put off by the print statement.

This should have happened 5-10 years ago not now. Not it was time for better performance, packaging, web frameworks, better concurrency constructs.

> ts by implementing huge changes like adding a JIT or removing the GIL (why you would think of bundling requests or flask with Python is beyond me).

Removing the GIL shouldn't break sane code. With GIL you still have race conditions and have to guard against them. You just can't run CPU bound code in parallel. That would be nice to fix.

And if it is beyond you read up on how JPython works because it doesn't have a GIL.

> why you would think of bundling requests or flask with Python is beyond me)

How does bundling a library like that break code?

> I gave Python 3.4 a try while porting a Twisted application to asyncio and I was very surprised.

I switched to using gevent from Twisted and saw speed improvement and code reduction by about 30-50%.
the diary is not particularly well-written

depends on your standards. He's not a professional author but I think he's probably better than your average college grad.

studded with evidence of psychopathy

genuinely interested. could you point to some of these. I've been skimming it and haven't really seen that.

in fact, this struck me as empathetic

James’s mother, Kim Ellis, had just passed away from breast cancer. I cried for a bit. Kim was a very kind-hearted person, and the mother of my best friend. She had been suffering from breast cancer for several years, but I never thought she would die from it. I immediately thought of how James must be feeling. He just lost his own mother!Annotate It made me think of how horrible I would feel if the same thing happened to my own mother, just the thought alone filled me with pain.
You should look at the rest of his annotations which Gawker[1] has.

[1] http://gawker.com/rap-genius-co-founders-creepy-comments-on-...
Digital disruption on the farm
I was curious too because all those incidents made it sound like she is from the poorest parts of India or Pakistan (no offence to people from those countries in general but it can be pretty brutal for women in some regions).

Then I checked out her website's "About" page and she was born in Austin, grew up in Seattle, and currently a freelance web developer based out of Brooklyn, New York.

So, yeah.
The SAC had plenty of nasty screw ups, including littering large areas of Spain and (iirc) Greenland with plutonium dust from nuclear weapons accidents. It's also pretty much dumb luck that we've never had an accidental detonation of an SAC-controlled nuclear weapon:

http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser-ebook/d...
Replying to myself: s/uninstallable/unremovable/. Though everyone seems to have got what I meant.
> You cannot linearly compare shoplifting against auto theft or battery

Why can't I? For theft, it's easy to determine the value of the stolen goods.

You seem not to care for the lives of the individual human beings committing the crimes. It's not ethical or moral to sacrifice the one for the benefit of the many.
This was just the latest of many incidents involving Mahbod. Google his name and you will see why he was fired/resigned.
You're right that traditionally Control4 has not been hardwired - but note they're moving into panelized lighting control now, and my assumption was that system would only be controllable from their frontends unless you reverse engineered the protocol.
Not sure on the etymology, but #YesAllWomen is a trending hashtag in the wake of the recent—apparently sexually-motivated—mass murder in California.
Arch switched from Python 2 to Python 3, keeping the /usr/bin/python binary as pointing to their newest version of Python before the convention of naming it /usr/bin/python3 was standardised.

It was specifically in response to the troubles caused by having /usr/bin/python be python3 in Arch that the guideline came about: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/
Isn't that what git reflog + reset are for?
I honestly loathe the "scroll up bar" feature in Chrome browser because it throws off my instincts about how to interact with the UI. If something auto-hides into the top of the screen, my instinct is to pull it down from the top if I want to see it again. That just brings up the Android notification system.
> most Linux distros are at least at Python 3.2.

I don't know how else to interpret that besides "the base version of python in those latest distros is at least 3.2"

Shipping it as an "alternative" just splits the library world into to. So that is not a distro being "at" a python version.

> It looks like CentOS makes Python 3.2 available,

It does. Do all the python-* libraries work with it. Or do I have to install those separately?
I remember when RapGenius had the Google penalty a lot of folks were ranting about one of the founders and his bad behavior. Is this the same guy?
P.sh – a friendly script launcher
It's true that it might get crowded. In that case we plan to add more streams, but keep the original global stream. So if you want to spread your message globally, there is a place to do it, and if you want to spread your message locally, you have your place too.
Also, new slots are opened every day, which gives you a new chance to get a slot.
Yeah, the alternatives to Rap Genius are great... sigh.
Absolutely agree. That's why people who disagree with this only have appeals to fear in response, rather than having the capability to make a substantive, reasoned argument.

The compliant and obedient understand fear.
Greenwald's Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance
The worst implementation I've seen was for a desktop only web application. The navigation bar was only expanded when the scrollbar was at the very top. For very long pages they implemented a button that scrolls the user back to the top of the page so the navigation bar expands and the user can navigate. In the meantime, the horizontal space went mainly unused. The boss saw the IBM page and wanted the menus like this.
The Sewing Machine Patent Wars (2009)
So a business can't act preemptively to keep users from boycotting? There are several comments in this thread that suggest people shy away from using Rap Genius because of perceived bad behavior on the part of the founders. It is quite possible that the investors behind the company (who have quite a bit of money on the line and, according to the article, were partly behind this firing) have decided that the bad publicity is taking a toll and want to minimize the impact.
Users use apps on phones. They don't want to open a browser and navigate to an 'app'.

They go to the app store to get apps. They don't open a browser and google for a web page and expect it to operate like an app. Also you need to have an internet connection to even use an app, who wants that.

Technology improves but the drag comes from user adoption. You'll need to change behaviour.
Forgive me if I'm not well enough informed to partake productively in this discussion. I just wanted to ask:

Can't anyone implementing a webclient and webservice on top of common web servers and browsers, choose to forgo cookies and keep the state server side? If this is so, then why do people choose to use cookies if they give more overhead?

Also you would need to keep some sort of unique identifier on the client, that the client can send the server, in order for the server to be able to look up the session state (a session id). Isn't this what cookies often are used for? I'm guessing this is probably what you meant "information-free session nonces" would solve above. This sounds interesting, could you explain this scheme to me or maybe point me in the direction of a good resource?
Your definition is so broad as to be utterly meaningless.
Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? (2007)
http://web.archive.org/web/20010601000000*/http://online-res...

Sadly it seems that even the older snapshot is not working, so either that wasn't your url, or the wayback machine got to it too late :(
Since you seem to be relatively new to HN (based off when your account was created), when commenting, it is common practice to give examples/links/proof, ie. in this case; why his essay is embarrassing. The reason, is that this could lead to an insightful discussion, and offer paths to improvement. If you give evidence then you will likely not get downvoted even for saying something controversial [1]. After looking through your comment history, this style of commenting seems to ring true, in that when you provide links and proof, you have an improved comment score.

[1] Although, you are talking about PG (who is the founder of this forum), so you might get downvoted just for the hell of it ;)
The same people who bankroll(ed) GitHub. This is my shocked face.
No, it does not say how people should behave? It analyzes strategic situations using various equilibrium concepts, such as the Nash equilibrium. If you are not sure that your opponent will play the Nash equilibrium strategy, Game theory doesn't tell you what you should do.
It's easy to do, but it's circumventing a copy protection measure thus illegal in many places.

Making format-shifting illegal is a hateful thing to do and there should be exceptions in law for this.
I've never heard of anyone being forced to wait for weeks for this kind of stuff in a normal hospital in the US. Government run health systems overseas have well documented wait lists.

Furthermore, privately run systems should be more efficient because consumers have a choice. Don't like your current doctor? Go get a new one. To be clear, I don't object to government funding these things, just running them. Monopolies are bad.
They do. But python3 is not the default python.

Download a python script run it and it will run on Python 2.7.6.

Yes that OP meant to say that because he clarified it later. But I don't see how his original comment of:

> most Linux distros are at least at Python 3.2

implies that. To me that says 3.2+ ships as the default version of Python.
Ironically, I think that links to Scribd content on HN follow the same [idiom].
The "Gangsta rap" subgenre was heavily misogynistic, but as you say, it has completely died out. Most rap these days is about how rich the rapper is (Jay Z) or about racism (Kanye).
Why is sudo hardcoded into so many commands? I'll run your program with privileges if it needs and earned them, thank you very much.
Will the programs or scripts I download know to to that?
What Ars writers pay our Internet providers–and what we think about them
I thought so too, but then I saw for example this [1]. They use Titan (multi-machine setup) to scale out to 64 billion vertices. Very impressive.

[1] http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/05/13/educating-the-planet-wit...
I understand the issue of complexity in header compression but the impression I get is you seem to object to the whole basis of HTTP/2 seemingly because it's not ambitious enough.

If it didn't have HPACK but still did multiplexing would you still say abandon it?
I think 3.0 was meant to be 3.x not 3.0 specifically.
First off, all these things are terrible and no woman deserves to be treated like this. But the last part of #5 really has me questioning the validity of the author.

"A coworker invites me to his home under the premise of getting a few people together. When I arrive, there is no one else there. We watch TV and I go to retrieve my things to leave which are in his bedroom. His 6'4" frame blocks the door. I tell him I don't think it's a good idea for us to date. He sits on his bed, pulls me onto his lap, and sloppily puts his tongue in my mouth. He follows me home every day for four months “to hang out”. He makes me responsible for his crippling insecurity. He tells me I need to tell others we are in a relationship. He tells our boss. I resign myself and tell my friends. We live together for four years."

After all this, you lived with the guy for four years?
There was a great slide show posted here a while back that explained the theory being rooting android, but for the life of me I cannot find it. Google "Android rooting theory" and you'll get a set of fairly rich results. For more depth I'd recommend looking into specific exploits, such as Zerg Rush
Write articles about how you're using D and post them.
Again, I'll reiterate - scrolling is frictionless.

> Secondly, even if I am changing tasks, that doesn't mean ruining the state I leave in it is an acceptable side effect. Your browser history isn't corrupted when you leave Firefox.

That's a stretch. Ruining? You can still scroll down. The affordances of these actions means, at most, you're going to have to touch the screen once more to "get back to where you were." If you're using an application that doesn't provide the menu after a short swipe, that's a fair enough issue to raise with the implementation of the pattern, not with the pattern itself. It doesn't surprise me that you encountered it on FF Mobile, because FF has a longstanding tradition of ripping things off from successful UIs and getting them wholly wrong in their implementations.

> I can hardly believe the question needs to be asked, but it would be more appropriate to say "what logical sense does it make to bind scrolling to menu actions?" (The answer is none, which is why we didn't have this feature until now, and won't have it for long.)

That's your opinion. Unfortunately for you in this case, it's wrong. Try it on iOS Chrome / Android Chrome or Safari and see how it's done properly before making a sweeping judgment on the interaction pattern itself.
songmeanings.net has been around since I was a pre-teen and it's served me quite well. It's full of ads now, but at least the quality is good.
Just for a start veterans have specific injuries (both mental and physical) that general hospital will be hard to have the expertise to deal with.

We are talking about people that freak out/enter combat mode when they see a garbage can or a box near the road. Why - because for them for 10 years it has been a real and present danger. And those are the very mild cases.
some evidence might go a long way.
PHP Fights HHVM and Zephir with PHPNG
And Y Combinator.
Oh, are the alternatives to Rap Genius attempting to profit, through pageviews and ad revenue, from re-posting the horrifically, murderously misogynist rantings of a spree killer? And then going beyond that, adding their own misogynistic thoughts to the text, as a cherry on top?

I mean, that's not a real high bar there.