skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most profound statistic I learned from pick-up artists
It's not a new word, it's been around for decades
How to build the Secret Service’s “sarcasm detector”
Psychologists call it "social proof".

It's why brands say "we're #1 in X", "we're the most popular Y", "more people buy our product than any other".

It's why sitcoms have laugh tracks.

And I am not confident on "disrupting" human nature. Most "disruptions" follow the grooves laid out millions of years ago; what changes is the environment, not the subjects.
Temporal Consciousness
It's very, very poor. Extensive discussions already here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864644

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864521

There are more submissions, more sources for the story, search for them to find more.
I'd prefer a discretely input-able password; alongside who ever is stupid enough to attempt to brute force it.
It's very, very poor. Extensive discussions already here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864644

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864521

There are other submissions without discussion, for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864332
You're referring to "jank" when additional content is added to the page, which to my understanding isn't what this library remedies.
A period is a good point.
Tech Founder vs. CEO
Agreed. I was at about 800 following and decided to trim down to 25-30 people. Unfollowing takes so long on Twitter I had to use 3rd party apps to speed up the process.
I don't read it all, but when i do open the twitter app, i like that it's all new content for as long as i can be bothered to scroll. And there are lots of interesting people out there.

edit: and 2000 users over 7 years is less than one new per day.
Fake Friends with Real Benefits in the early 20th century: $20,000 for club membership. Early 21st century: $5 for 4000 fake followers.
I feel like this comment might give a mistaken impression, so I'd like to clarify.

Simply rolling out iBeacons does not replicate the copious data that one can currently get by monitoring WiFi probe requests. iBeacons, as designed, broadcast packets at a set rate using Bluetooth LE, and devices scan for those broadcasts. There is no two-way communication, and no probe requests from client devices.

In order for a company to use information from an iBeacon installation, they must have software running on the client scanning for unique iBeacon UUIDs, optionally filtered by "major" and "minor" uint16s to represent separate locations and nodes. Apple limits iOS apps to scanning for 20 UUIDs at any given time.

If the user does not have software that in some way scans for and does something with data from a particular iBeacon UUID, then the implementer gets no information. Thus, iBeacons move control over location and identity data from third parties to users. If a user installs, say, a Target iOS app, it can now scan for an iBeacon UUID that Target generates and can roll out across the country. Only once the user has made that affirmative choice can Target acquire information about that user or device.
Why not go the other way and just have the one single closure reason:

"Closed by some pompous twat, because exercising dictatorial power on an internet forum briefly helps him forget his own almost complete lack of real-world importance. Fortunately, however, you may scroll past this arsehole's non-contribution and find some useful info, left by other, less contemptible individuals"

From what I've seen of SO, that would fit nicely with about 99% of the site's topic threads.
Cree Introduces Sleek New Outdoor LED Luminaire
You clearly missed that fact that no judge, anywhere, would hold up names as why something was copyrightable. Instead, as my sibling comments say, what was found copyrightable was the "structure, sequence and organization" of their API. The court said that Google copied the whole package structure of Java, including a whole tree of names.
This is really nice to have footnotes just next to the line there are called from[0].

I rarely stumble upon a web page that actually improves on the paper format but this one does.

[0] There must be a better way to phrase this.
Whoever gave the Globe and Mail journalist the information about TD's password restrictions didn't differentiate between TD Bank USA ("TDB") and TD CanadaTrust ("TDCT"). TDCT is the Canadian corporate entity (and parent corporation). TDB is TDCT's US banking operation.

TDB has password restrictions listed in the article (8-32 characters with some special characters). TDCT restricts one to the 8 character restriction (!), as you pointed out. EasyWeb is the name of the TDCT (Canadian) online banking site. There is no corresponding brandname for the TDB (US) online banking site.

The highly restrictive TDCT password is why I have to keep changing my TDCT password rather often compared to other online banking accounts.
Great tip. I felt tempted to try AirBNB many times but I just didn't feel comfortable with that. I guess geeky social awkwardness was taking over :)
Yep, basically. Would you use it?
That's interesting. Unfortunately the UI is all about "follow @user" buttons, lists not so much. I'm guessing browsing list feeds aren't as prominent in the mobile apps either, but I haven't tried yet.

Anyway the user hostile error messages I got when I tried to add following user #2001 - instead of a suggestion like yours, perhaps - made me lose interest in the whole thing.
Wow....thank you for posting. I must agree - even independently I see the same "CGI" like effect as described in the NN video. I just had a major "wow" moment....
Fine I didn't think my comment was THAT bad.
Doubtful, I think the reporter was either lied to or was given an answer for a different system.
Very good points. To summarize:

1. Signal who belongs and who doesn’t
2. Charge users a fee to join
3. Reward ideal behaviour
4. Don’t try to gamify great content
5. Treat your biggest contributors
6. Tirelessly close poor discussions

"Culture is like a plant. It’s not something you can design or control. Instead it is something you cultivate."
That excerpt reads to me like writing, not conversation. Someone spent some time polishing it. I know people who can talk like that extemporaneously, but I'd wager 99% of native English speakers wouldn't pass if that's the bar.
"ought" does not imply "can be".
There's a great app for rooted Android devices called Pry-fi that generates random MAC addresses while you're not connected to a network.

edit: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.p...
Depends on the industry; there are plenty of places where trade secrets aren't viable (e.g. medicinal chemistry, where it's trivial to reverse engineer a drug).
Engineering the Extinction of 40 Species of Mosquitoes
Wait, could you explain how a program that is capable of being mistaken for a human more than 50% of the time is more human than human?

I'm pretty sure you're human, with a high degree of confidence, much higher than 50%.

So to are you more human than human?
Show HN: MailRipper – Inbound email ripping for developers with email pain
Hi HN - This is our MVP.

https://www.mailripper.com

Questions for you:

Is this something your company might pay to use?

Do you have any feedback, thoughts or comments for us? - we'd love to hear what you think.

thanks
Clickable: https://www.mailripper.com
Thanks for sharing, that was a wonderful essay, highly recommended!
Can you give more context/information?

I understand that he was fired for dropping the C bomb but couldn't find more from his twitter profile.
I don't like summary condemnations of people "to set the example". The guy has been uncouth and rude but it was just a (drunken? Tourette-like?) outburst.

As a women in tech I am more worried that, if we don't use with other people the same open-mindedness and fair play we ask for, we'll end up being dreaded or hated more than (maybe begrudgingly) accepted. I see nothing wrong in firing someone who promotes discrimination but hey, this was just a guy being a troll. One could as well have used magnanimity in dealing with it. Just my 2 cents.
The UX makes it pretty easy to add users to lists. You click on the gear next to the follow button then click Add/Remove from lists. And I'm pretty sure it's present in the mobile app as well.
ACT-R is silly; please see Douglas Hofstadter's criticisms of the architecture (published in Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies).
That's true. I want to talk to Eugine. Your suggestion seems to be the very minimum.
Probably not. While any additional factor makes authentication more secure, a voice line allows anyone nearby (or farther away with a unidirectional mic) to compromise that factor. Further, the false negative rate would concern me. What is wrong with TOTP 2-factor?
How am I going to login if I catch a cold?
No. iBeacons broadcast their own presence only and cannot be used for surreptitious user tracking.

The only way an iBeacon could be used to track is in concert with an app running on the user's phone that communicates back to the business, letting them know you're near the beacon. In other words the user has to opt in to tracking, which is how it should be.
Eugene Transcripts (2008) [pdf]
People have been putting their feet in their mouths publicly long before the Internet.
But developers are stumbling on a new kind of obstacle
as they burrow deeper still: abandoned diggers from the
last round of improvements.

I say we dust off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Completely agree. I first saw this on the Grantland.com site. I loved it the moment I first came across it there.
Inspiring stuff.
>to give each judge a conversation with one human and one computer, and for them to say which one they believe is the human.

I always assumed this was exactly what the Turing test was about. Guess I was wrong.
MAC address ranges are assigned to device manufacturers, I wonder if they'll only randomize inside the Apple device range or if they'll go outside of it. Analytics companies might start seeing people carrying their sparcstations into the grocery store.
Not at all. If you've been following this, the age of the test has been getting older and older for the past 15 or so years. They're not resting on their laurels at 13-year-old, next year maybe they'll make 14, and the year after that...

It's a way of having a better metric than pass/fail. This is the real problem with AI. Everyone expects that AI research should go: you put a bunch of programmers in a room, and they work for a few years and build an AI.

The best intelligence production we have is human child-rearing. This process has always taken 15-20 years, and is backed by millennia of research. Assume you have a digital computer capable of human-like thought. Without an example of a computer capable of learning faster, it stands to reason that raising the computer into an AI capable of conversation should take 15-20 years.

Of course, one thinks there would be a way to do it faster, but on the first go?
Little Pork Chop: Auto turns longer thoughts into series of 140 char tweets
StackOverflow ranks answers based on how many upvotes it gets. In other words, it establishes a user's credibility based on his answers' popularity...
Topical because of this [1] maybe.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/08/metal-spikes-...
Has Dennet never seen Facebook or Youtube?
Out of curiosity, if someone does hack a Swedish bank and steals money, who takes the hit? The bank or the customer?
It's a bank.

If a hacker gets into a bank's systems, they're not going to bother to steal passwords. Passwords have little value (except to blackmail the owner) and hacking into a bank is a very serious crime.
It really was causing a bad trend on HN. People starting doing XYZ Thursday and such.

If you're really looking for the HN Idea Sunday thread, try firespotting: http://firespotting.com/
Also as a woman in tech (trans as well!) I'm uncomfortable with bringing people's employers into internet pissing matches. Its a nuclear option that seems like overkill, not unlike the whole Adria Richards fiasco. Seriously, people get bitchy at each other on the internet all the time. Calling someone a cunt is not the same as death threats or rape threats.
There is, and I think it has been around longer than the trending HN threads

http://firespotting.com/
> the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe

But that isn't what the MIT fusion reactor is doing. We already know how fusion works; we already know what conditions we need to create to make a fusion reactor self-sustaining. What we don't yet know is how to create them here on Earth.

So the question isn't about fundamental knowledge; it's about engineering and economics. We've been trying to make tokamak fusion work for decades. The Alcator C-Mod experiment that's mentioned in these articles was put into place while I was at MIT in the mid-1980's, and people back then were saying we would have ignition, a self-sustaining controlled fusion reaction, sometime within the next decade. It's now been three decades and we still don't have ignition. Certainly the experiment has been upgraded and refined and has continued to yield useful data, but that's not the crucial question; the crucial question is, is it worth the taxpayer money that's been put into it? That money wasn't supposed to buy useful data, it was supposed to buy ignition.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that the funds for MIT's experiment should be redirected to ITER or to the other US sites mentioned in the article. The same reasoning that I just applied to the MIT experiment, could be applied to all of the fusion research that's been done since we started doing fusion research. We simply did not realize the magnitude of the engineering problem involved in achieving a controlled, self-sustaining fusion reaction without a Sun's mass worth of gravity to confine it.
Well obviously humans are more slovenly than that. Though talking was never a requirement, and indeed the Turing test could be run through a succession of emails. Or perhaps a forum like HN. So it's not unreasonable.

Though your right, and if a computer were to try to imitate a human, a better strategy would be about as slovenly as my post is.
> Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions

Really? It seems difficult to know without some sort of proof, otherwise there is no telling if you are marking false positives.

I don't think this is the same as spam. Spam is low quality and my guess why is to target those that will fall for whatever scam they are selling.

My guess is that any actual state sponsored propaganda on website comments would be pretty damn good.
Looks like it's there in the main mobile app. But what about embeddable widgets on websites? And now i need multiple taps to add a follower. And will it show "added to your list" status like it shows "following"?

Too much effort. Plus, it seems twitter thinks I'm using their service in the wrong way. If the way I like to use it is wrong, I guess it's better to just stay away, makes everyone happier.
Looks nice.

I had the problem of modularizing GLSL code myself and ended up writing a Require.js plugin which supported #include statements. Take a look at the shaders in here if interested: https://github.com/felixpalmer/lod-terrain/tree/master/js/sh... and https://github.com/felixpalmer/amd-three.js/blob/master/js/l...

While glsify has a bunch of nice features that my plugin lacks, one thing mine can do which (as far as I know) glsify cannot, is provide support for redefining #define statements from JavaScript. I find this quite useful if I need to have several similar shaders and want to tweak their behavior from JavaScript. Something like (see https://github.com/felixpalmer/amd-three.js/blob/master/js/a...):

define( ["shader!simple.vert"], function ( simpleVert ) {
simpleFrag.define( "faceColor", "vec3(1.0, 0, 0)" );
var vertexShader = simpleVert.value;
} );

Do you have any thoughts on this feature, or even plans to support something like this in the future?
I agree the reactor is useful and shouldn't simply be shut down; but the capital cost could just as easily be recovered for the taxpayers by selling the reactor to a private company that could focus on using the thing productively instead of seeking government grants.
Tangential, but anyone ever been to Paradise the bar or Flour the cafe right across the street from the nuclear power plant? Cool places to go but I've always been afraid there because of the radiation exposure if there's a meltdown.
Analyzing Flightradar24’s internal API structure.
Very much agree. Much more natural way to get additional information. I really like how Livefyre is doing something similar with Sidenotes: http://web.livefyre.com/streamhub/#liveSidenotes
Its great to know that Shanley doesn't think name calling is appropriate or productive. I shudder to think about what she'd think of something like this: https://medium.com/about-work/finding-out-youre-a-sexist-mis...

edit: more name calling that she would certainly condemn: https://twitter.com/ryan/status/474791621100199936
Yes, and I'm not sure that's a fair description. As far as I can tell, MIT's reactor has been producing as much useful data as the other ones; and I don't think the other US projects, or ITER, have a significantly better chance than MIT's of achieving ignition, which is supposed to be the goal that makes all this worth the taxpayer's money. See my response to nitrogen 51 upthread.
Thanks for sharing this. It's interesting that you can improve your performance so much by, essentially, getting rid of the automatic class-loader. On the other hand, the autoloader is one of the most important improvements to PHP in the last couple of years. It looks like PHP's recent improvements -- easier testing using dependency injection, ORMs, class loaders -- all have a pretty big cost in terms of performance.
The UK is far stricter that other countries with "fair dealing".

Also, while what you did was possibly illegal you're not a criminal. People could sue you for loss of earnings, but the police (and fines and criminal records) only get involved if you are selling what you're copying.
Yes but contrived sentences are bad examples. If you have to carefully parse a sentence's punctuation to come to the correct meaning, the sentence should be rewritten. (Analogous to forcing code maintainers to remember obscure precedence rules to understand your code.)
Yep, to the point of /hw/ being considered comical by many speakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_wh#Wine...

Edit: I just want to point out that despite what the map in the linked article says, the merger is complete in most of the urban areas in the Southeast as well. You'll usually only hear /hw/ in rural areas.
And a reply from an ex homeless outreach worker: http://imsorrythatimlikethis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/the-sp...
That's the whole reason to do it. Do Not Track for the physical world.
pity it's closed.
in perl in would be:
unlink $0
I found this in the source of the page.

<!--
So this guy we just interviewed at my
current job wrote this little script
to see if a product update for some
company had come out. Every 10 seconds
the script urllib'ed the page, checked
the length of the html - literally
len(html) - against the length it was
last time it checked. He wrote a blog
post about this script. A freaking
blog post. He also described himself
as "something of a child prodigy"
despite, in another post, saying he
couldn't calculate the area of a slice
of pizza because "area of a triangle
with a curved edge is beyond my
Google-less math skills." Seriously
dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20
years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty
freaking obvious.

The script also called a ruby script
to send him a tweet which another
script was probably monitoring to text
his phone so he could screenshot the
text and post to facebook via
instagram.

I think the "millenials" - who should
be referred to as generation byte - get
undeserved flak, as all generations do,
for being younger and prettier and
living in a different world.

But this kid calling himself a prodigy
is a clear indication of way too many
gold stars handed out for adequacy, so
to ensure that no such abominable
script ever does anything besides
bomb somebody's twitter account, this
comment shows up exactly 50% of the
time, and I encourage others to do
the same.
-->

Found my new favorite blogger; s'cept for PG.
it depends what you believe; the UK media stories about bureaucratic incompetence and bungling or the colossal number of state employees and technologies deployed to monitor everything (GCHQ, MI5/6 buildings across river from seat of democracy etc).

If you wanted to build a vast surveillance state you'd cover your tracks by seeding the news media with stories of ineffectual incompetence and other fakery...
Punctuation abuse in Apple ad copy, actually the worst ever.
You can only get that kind of information (e.g. IMEI) if you use IOKit, and you can't submit to the App Store if your app uses IOKit if you're not a part of the MFi (Made for iOS) program, i.e. a hardware manufacturer.

Edit: I'm really getting confused with downvoting on HN. How exactly is this comment poor?
What is the link between futuristic biological terrorism and NSA surveillance? You seem to be assuming that NSA surveillance might stop it, but how?

It does seem like a potential problem and I also don't know how to solve it, but I would personally say that either technology will present us with the solution, or there will not be a solution.

We have plenty of technology right now which, if transplanted back in time a century or so, could cause complete havoc. Imagine, for example, the crime-enabling aspects of cars and highways. A small group of criminals could literally ransack an entire city by using an automobile to drive from one heist to the next, keeping ahead of the police by virtue of their machine's great speed, and finally fleeing the local jurisdiction altogether to someplace safe. What this ignores is that police will have cars too, negating the speed advantage of the criminals, and radios and telephones to alert neighboring jurisdictions, and cameras to identify the culprits, etc.

Or consider the airplane. A small group could acquire a decent sized cargo aircraft, load it up with bombs, and then fly over Buckingham Palace with it and essentially hold the entire country hostage. Firearms don't have nearly the range to reach an airplane at altitude, so there would be no way to stop them. With the great range of the aircraft, there would be no hope whatsoever of tracking it back to its origins and thus apprehending the culprits.

But of course the technology that enables this scenario also prevents it: fighter aircraft, radar, and surface-to-air missiles mean that this attack is laughable rather than terrifying.

Presumably, the technological advances that enable biological terrorism will also enable biological counter-terrorism. If it doesn't, then we are doomed. Either way, massive surveillance systems are an unrelated thing.
Getting Started with Writefully (Use GitHub Repo as a CMS)
I don't get it, defeating that kind of tracking sounds...awesome? Isn't that the point?

EDIT: sorry, I've had too little coffee today for proper reading comprehension. Clearly you think it'd be nice too and are not empathizing with the snoops and marketers.
A slight disruption, or perhaps just coat tail riding. A Russian detergent company took advantage of Proctor and Gamble advertising. You know the type of ad: "when compared to an ordinary soap." So the company named their soap Ordinary and made it look like the soap in the advertisement. Free advertising thanks to PG.

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/09/news/mn-54309