skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BTW, though I don't agree with many of your points, I appreciate that you're taking the time to post here. Thank you!
also ssl everywhere without authentication by default. ie slower, encrypted, but not actually safe.
What are you guys running that site on, out of curiosity?
Interestingly, this sort of tracking can come up with false negatives. Imagine a situation in which multiple students are studying together in a group, and they decide to watch the videos together, on one computer. Only the student that is logged in will be tracked, and the other students might appear as though they haven't watched any videos at all.
How do you tell if a Kindle book has DRM or not? I searched all over the product pages and couldn't find it anywhere.
There is probably some artist whose life's work is being The Tree Guy. Art direction called for a Japanese maple to be in the background of that shot and, by God, TTG made it so. Can't render scenes in a forest? Call in TTG -- he can take a clipper to the topiary and knock off 80% of the polys off a stockart tree without taking away 1% of it's tree-ness. When the companies which make automated tree-production software (n.b. this is A Thing [+] and it costs several thousand dollars a license IIRC) needed recommended parameters for aesthetically pleasing trees, who do they call? TTG, that's right. Give him 30 minutes and a high-end PC to do simulated annealing and he'll come up with a new species of tree, unknown to nature, which nonetheless would fool botanists because it looks like it should exist, somewhere, maybe in wet regions of Laos.

I really feel for video game artists. In some ways, they're like the medieval painters of our age -- the ones who would paint gorgeous frescoes in parts of cathedrals which were planned to be occluded in further construction, because if that part of the wall was unpainted God would see it. I walked into a room in a Final Fantasy game once, blew through it in 7 seconds, then went back and thought "Wait, somebody -- heck, probably a team of someones -- spent most of a year of their life getting this room ready for those seven seconds."

It's inspiring, in a way, and also makes me triply glad that I am not in the game industry.

[+] Edit: Representative example: http://www.speedtree.com/
Hypothetically, a company like Hyperspin could create a chart of webservers that were offline (most likely to break) in the past X days. I think the results would be interesting. Example: Out of 1,234 servers that were offline for > 1 hour in the last month, 40% Microsoft, 30% Apache, 20% NginX, etc.
I see now; I didn't notice the distinction in the subject header here.
I think outrage at this is a little unjustified. Monitoring user interaction is how you get data to effectively improve your platform. In the case of schools, they should be monitoring student interaction in order to gain insights in how to improve their system, just as any website does. How are we supposed to improve the education system if getting quantitative data is outrageous?

If you're outraged at this software are you also outraged at all of the awesome new developments in ed tech to create self-paced curriculums? Those involve plenty of monitoring as well.

When I went through the education system, I was seen as a genius in elementary school. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the standardized tests, and participated in the advanced math tracks two years early. I was on track to be very successful. Then middle school came along.

First half of sixth grade, I continued my performance from elementary school, doing extremely well. Then I started with the destructive questions I'm sure a lot of HNers are familiar with: "Why do I need to learn this?", "Am I ever going to use this in real life?". This is when the grades started tanking, and I basically didn't participate in my education. I didn't recover from this terrible attitude until I entered college.

I never really established any study habits, and it's something that still weighs me down now, graduated from college and in the workforce. To relate to the story, I wish these sorts of programs were available when I was a student. I wish I was graded on my study habits even in elementary school.

I don't really understand the defense of cramming. The goal of school is not to pass all of the tests with high scores, the goal of school is to establish strong habits that will optimize your education and your effectiveness in your future profession.

I think the best way to help our kids develop these skills is going to be through lots of monitoring. It's certainly good to question the effectiveness of monitoring, and what it's encouraging, so I respect that sentiment of the other posters, but really? Outrage?

Lets encourage our school system to try new things, measure the effectiveness, and readjust based on data. I would really love to steer this debate away from whining about being free to choose less effective study techniques and monitoring. Monitoring is essential to providing adjustments on a per-student basis, allowing highly customizable content for the most efficient education.

Edit: I guess I should have known better than to make a dissenting comment on this type of article.
On the other hand, there are firewall administrators who do extensive filtering on ports 80 and 443 and allow other outgoing traffic by default. We get pretty ticked off when some thermostat, credit card machine, or postage meter decides to send its bizarre and undocumented data stream over port 80 or 443 in the name of firewall compatibility and therefore becomes incompatible with our firewall. (Yes, we can put in exceptions for those machines' IP addresses, but if they didn't try to use HTTP ports, they would Just Work.)
Riot Games: The Science Behind Shaping Player Behavior in Online Games
(hand up) Was there. It was actually less sucky at the time, because Netscape 4 was an unbelievably unstable piece of shit. Microsoft pulled every shitty monopoly trick going, but Netscape did also in fact drop the ball, good and hard.
Restoring a 2014 website about restoring a 14-year-old website. :)
Fair enough, but I know how to type most of the common diacritics on my Mac keyboard, which is probably more than most people could say. I'm not sure how it's even possible to type the "o" in that word without an alternate keyboard layout, though.
Why Online Games Turn Players Into Psychopaths
My father wrote and had published a couple of books (obscure historical topics). He spent years writing them. He didn't care about making money off of them, he wrote them to establish his professional reputation. He's happy that people read them and cite them.
If we're going to pull on evolutionary biology metaphors, I think the "Red Queen Hypothesis" is the more apt one for this situation...
I found the article pretty rewarding, here's my attempt at a summary:

The article is about the OSSI (Open Source Seed Initiative).

Since 1985 it's possible to get "utility patents" for plants. This allows you to claim that something like "easily harvestable broccoli" (say a breed with a specific shaped head) is your unique invention. Plant breeders are worried about the same chilling effects we see in software patents. Breeding something like "really red carrots" could get you sued. This is not an academic concern as thousands of patents are being filed.

Big companies are (naturally) treating the patent-ability of plant breeds and traits as a "land rush", an opportunity to lock away whatever profitable ideas they can. This is viewed as an encroachment on the commons by old-school plant breeders, who note that many of the specific things being patented have been worked on for decades (or maybe, thousands of years if you look at the big picture) in basically an open-source manner. They value seed freedom in the same way as a hacker might view freedom of code and ideas.

Plant breeding experts and enthusiasts have been working for years to oppose this trend, or at least carve out some reasonable exceptions, but things just seem to be getting worse.

Major "industrial" crops like corn and soybeans are pretty much locked down, covered by 500 and 250 patents respectively in 1999 (more today). Today, it would be hard to grow those in a commercially viable way without using someone's IP.

Now there is more interest in vegetables by multinationals. This seems much worse to OSSI because it covers a wider variety of "things people eat" and encroaches on non-industrial breeders and growers more.

Tired of lobbying and "slow change", the group in the article wanted to create a movement like the free software movement, but for seeds. However, there's no legal basis for copyleft in this area because patents are different from copyright. Copyright is automatic, allowing easy "copylefting". To apply this scheme to patents, they would have to apply for patents for each of their breeds or traits before they can dictate licensing terms, which would be onerous, expensive and still legally dubious.

The group couldn't find a way to construct a copyleft system for seeds, but they're still intent on creating and popularizing a movement. They're putting non-enforceable "shrink wrap" honesty licenses on their seed packets. Another avenue to preserve seed freedom is to focus on breeding "open pollinated" varieties (e.g. sexually reproduced), since these preserve genetic diversity and are harder to lock down with IP laws.
You are because you want to.

Also, the grandpatent post that eats the marketing BS of the nexus devices... You still don't have access to ALL the hardware. You can only use alternative versions of Android that Google provided you with because you have to reuse driver binary blobs and such. So stop spreading that falsehood.
I remember reading Stallman's "The Right To Read" in 1997 (see the parent for the link).

It describes the time where a student Dan can't even lend his own electronic books to another student, Lissa:

"He had to help her -- but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong -- something that only pirates would do."

We're getting closer every day to this dystopia.
Well well, Pikkety's book has been published internationally in April 2014 (French is not mastered well enough by most people, including European politicians, to take in). It takes a little while longer for something to affect public opinion or policy. Many years, probably.

For what it's worth, it is known that Dutch politicians are reading it and have commented about it already.
Amazon gets a small cut from every batch of HITs. Requesters pay for a bunch of small tasks for the workers to complete (which typically earns them a couple cents each), and Amazon takes a small piece of that.
Unicode tools (at least should) have ways to determine visually similar letters. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about Unicode than me can pull out the term for it (maybe "homograph"?). For example: 'ö' and 'o' should 'match' using this method. It also allows you to do things like make sure that μ (mu) and µ (micro sign) match.

So in response to:

> I'm not sure if interchangeable is the right word. 'phởne' and 'phone' yield different result lists.

The results are different because it's matching somethings that are an exact character match, and others that are just visually similar (homographs?).
It's funny that you mention XHTML 2, because I think it demonstrates the opposite of what you are arguing.

XHTML 2 is a lot more like what PHK is proposing: an attempt to "rethink" HTML, come up with something simpler, revolutionary rather than evolutionary, "The Right Thing." It was an attempt to reinvent the space from first principles, and had lots of ideas that were theoretically good but unproven at large scale.

When that went nowhere, the world settled on HTML5: evolutionary, incremental, and based on standardizing existing practice. Much less sexy, but more useful in practice.

There is a time and a place for bold new ideas, but a standards body designing v2 of a protocol isn't it. Standards are for codifying proven ideas. When standards bodies try to innovate you end up with XHTML, VRML, P3P, SPARQL, etc.
I just want to point out that Academia.edu is not much different from the two examples brought by the OP
Auroracoin: One of the Biggest Pump and Dumps in Cryptocurrency History
Asking Google:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=why+are+there+not+always+8...

Here's some reading:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7552104/is-a-day-always-8...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12516059/php-timestamp-in...

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

http://justinsomnia.org/2007/03/yesterday-was-only-82800-sec...
So now we're going to call grading "policing"?

I'm not sure what line I crossed to get so many downvotes, but I really don't understand why this is outrageous.

Can someone please explain for me why we're fighting a school for measuring user interaction and adjusting based on that data?
Not true. He made a predictive hypothesis of how the brain activity in a schizophrenic person behaves that was later borne out by imaging technology.

Now, to be fair, that particular hypothesis is pretty far removed from the rest of this theory. I would certainly not say that the meat of his theory is in any way supported by this evidence. It's basically an aside to the rest of his theories.

But, that was a really damn specific hypothesis, and he totally nailed it. He said that people with schizophrenia undergoing a command hallucination would have heightened activity in the right-hemisphere areas that correspond to the speech centers in the left hemisphere, which they do. That's kind of... not the sort of prediction that you just happen to get right by chance. It also revolutionized the study of schizophrenia.

But yes, his statements about the non-schizophrenic brain are basically philosophy and not science at this point. And his historical hypotheses may never reach the state of falsifiability.
Definitely figure out your tax/insurance situation early on.
I see no problems at all with fixed top bars. They take what? 20pixels? 50 pixels at most. It's really not a huge loss. I'm more annoyed by lateral bars since I already use the horizontal space with tree style tab.
I hope Haxe succeeds even more than it already has. Congrats guys.

What's a good and up-to-date Haxe tutorial for making mobile apps, targeted at Mac developers?
Wrong what?
Effort grades marginalize gifted students with learning disabilities.
You can actually use ^V to insert control characters in vim, for example: `:h ^V^W^V^W` will search for CTRL-W CTRL-W.

Now I just wish `:h ^V` would actually tell you about this feature.
40-50 pixels is generally what you want (for decently sized touch targets)
We stipulate up front that wealth is a solved problem. There are incredible sources of energy driving incredible machines that do everything for us. The marginal product of anyone's labor is effectively zero. The people in Star Fleet aren't doing "labor" per se - food is by machine, I presume nobody has to do their own laundry, we've completely "enslaved" machines to do literally everything we don't want to.

Just IMO, but power is a narrative artifact because stories want protagonists and antagonists. Social science uses the word "status", which is better.
If it's any consolation, I laughed harder at this than I did at the original joke.
Still down. How many concurrent connections are you getting via HN right now?
The main criticism there is that the concept of return on capital is meaningless. I think that is fringe view and I don't find it compelling.
I feel we're sleepwalking into a future where all our online or digital behaviour is tracked in some way. And we're not stopping to think about the implications.

Our online behaviour is already tracked and recorded to a large degree. Analytics software is everywhere and growing. The tracking is often not anonymous either; it's far more valuable to companies and organisations when tracking can be tied to an account or email address.

More and more companies are encouraging schools and students to use their digital products and online services. This trend is likely to grow (Google's presence looms particularly large). Tracking data anonymously and aggregating it can have benefits. But to evaluate a service properly, we need to know what is being tracked, how it is aggregated, who has access to that data and how long that data is kept. These are things that companies simply do not reveal. And something that a lot of individuals never ask about in the first place.
His lack of a clearly stated theory. Ask yourself this question: in a few equations, what is his fundamental claim? What specific data (irrespective of technical details about collecting it) would prove or disprove his theory?

The closest he comes to having a clearly stated theory is that "r > g => growth of inequality". That specific claim is completely wrong.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/piketty_and_inequalit...
Ironically, you could buy a computer without a Microsoft license from Amazon with one click! (And I have.) (And you still can.)
If you merged the transports (for example, everything was over HTTPS), we could just have "GET example.com/some/path HTTP/2.0\r\n"
Earth's continents 250 million years from now
It's not the form factor, it's the pricing structure. Most phones are "free" with contract or very near to it. It's difficult to complain about something you're getting for "free".

Now look at off-contract phones. I have a Dev Edition Moto X. I unlocked and rooted my phone with official tools provided by Motorola. I paid for the phone in full. I wouldn't have bought it unless I got a device that I completely owned.

If you want hardware that you can completely own and control, you can buy it. Most people simply choose not to.
(I didn't downvote you)

Children are being ised as experiments for privacy violating new technology.

Some of this is less acceptable than others.

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

http://www.wired.com/2011/06/webcam-scandal-resurfaces/
Good read. I just wrote a WordPress plugin skeleton, using static methods. This takes it one step further. I see some refactoring in my future!
SQL is the worst form of database querying, except for all the other forms
You can sell your books through your own web site and set your own prices.

The internet is the great democratizer of commerce.
I buy from http://www.trustico.co.uk, they are a reseller and have used them couple of times.
Has the average web page actually gotten smaller?
One reason I find the delete, or edit useful is, sometimes I'll type up a comment come back a while later, read it, hit post without really thinking, and then go back and see the context, and realize I'm an idiot[0] and quickly edit or delete the comment before anyone else finds out.

[0] http://xkcd.com/481/
The upward trends in the hiring graph do not show that "there is growth in computer science". If I am hired by a university in 2002, another in 2007 and another in 2012, I will only show up in the graph for 2012 because they are getting hiring dates from current professor data. So that graph does not say much about growth.
The first is "Neal Stephenson," no "v." I enjoy both but much prefer Sterling's earlier work (Islands in the Net, Schismatrix, Heavy Weather).
The Basis story: an accidental sync service in Clojure for iOS devices
According to https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8#1-5_Who_d... if you choose the 35% royalty option, you get paid 35% of list price no matter the actual retail price.
What about self-monitoring?

Imagine a reader with reading analytics stored in localStorage, generating a "your progress" view?

There could be an opt-in "share my anonymized stats" option, with the anonymization being done on the client. As an author, I can say that such "reading stats" would be very useful for content-dev purposes, but it should be up to the reader to choose whether they want to share them with the author.
Another privacy threat: DNS logging and how to avoid it
If they open source and cease to support, I doubt anyone in the Microsoft ecosystem would pick it up.
i recently needed to deal with a ~4G xml file.. i tried a parser but after waiting thirty minutes for it to load i decided to parse out the bits i needed manually with a bash script

knowing my needs i could easily account for all possible muck ups and avoid the instances where ambiguity could play a part

i was then able to use the bits i pulled out of the ~4G file, now 16M, in the parser with all of its assurances

sure, edge cases justify using a tried and true library for generics, but there are also edge cases that justify mocking up your own naive implementation.. if only, like in my case, to make the dada usable in such a library
Can recommend guake[1] for linux users, it looks decent and works like a charm. Modified the code a bit to color the active tab so it's easier to spot[2]. I think it's also included in the most recent version, i.e. if your distro has it or if you build it from source.

[1] = https://github.com/Guake/guake/
[2] = http://i.imgur.com/njoTQXe.png
OK, but most of the time you're not really going to care about those exceptions, are you? Like in the example of setting a cookie for 'a day'.
Currently python 3 packages ported are at about 10.9% according to pypi. This isn't including separate source downloads, so I guess the number would be higher by a few percentage points.

There was a post by Alex Gaynor in January [0] about downloads for python 3 being at 2.4%. But that was before python 3.4 came out, and before some major libraries were finally ported like Twisted. Twisted not being ported was one of the main blockers for python 3 in the last Ubuntu release [1]. Once more distros improve their python 3 support, things will get exponentially better for python 3. Continuous integration servers inflate numbers because they re-download things, and there is the CDN which makes all these numbers highly inaccurate.

Lots of things have been ported since January, like pycurl, pyOpenSSL, bugzilla [2], etc. Because of the big pushes by Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mozilla, and Gnome [3] communities amongst many others. Things have improved greatly in a few months.

Distros, and apps like Sublime Text 3 moving to python 3, along with some of the major missing pieces will help uptake significantly. Almost all packages in Fedora come with python 3 packages now. But the key to increasing python 3 adoption is Apple, and python 3 on OS X. Many of the python packages that come with OS X are now ported to python 3 (Twisted, cups, pyobjc, etc) ... but who knows what they have planned? I guess we'll see June-ish.

[0] http://alexgaynor.net/2014/jan/03/pypi-download-statistics/
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python/FoundationsTPythonVersions
[2] https://fedorahosted.org/python-bugzilla/
[3] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show//Initiatives/GnomeGoals/P...
> I don't see how being paid quite well is extremely onerous.

That's not how I read it. I read it as he gets paid extremely well if he accepts the onerous terms. What are the onerous terms? I wish he'd elaborated, but you can imagine it might have something to do with ownership once you've published with Amazon. I really do wish he'd elaborated though so we know for sure.
What falsehood did grandparent wrote? All s/he claimed is that you can unlock the bootloader and run CyanogenMod, nobody said anything about having "access to ALL the hardware".
If your credit is good enough for a phone contract it's probably also good enough for a credit card that could buy the phone outright.
You mean 1555200 seconds ago?