skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It was a boring life story of a flawless character who becomes a master in anything he partakes in, from acting to thievery to magic, and all before his teenage years... Totally ridiculous, in my opinion.

The point is made many times that he is an unreliable narrator, and that this is a self-mythologising, which is part of why I like it.
Inventation for Auctioneers interested in new technoligy
Free Auction Software Startup - only available for real auctioneers. I'm trying to get a user base for this software that will be cheap and easy :-) Any suggestions? New Startup www.bidcutter.com
Tribute Video to John Lennon Shot in Abbey Road Studios
HI,

I have an important (doesn't everyone think they are important) new video out that is a tribute to John Lennon and the passing of my brother Tony to ALS.

In a nutshell the song was born out of a the last conversation I had with my brother before he passed as he was telling me not to be scared of death because he was going up to heaven to play with John Lennon. The video was shot in Abbey Road Studios, the room made famous by The Beatles.

Take a look and if you like it (I hope you do) please help spread the word.

http://youtu.be/Pj5DV54A6cc

Thank you for your time.

All the best!

Alex
Let's pull back the veil on tech salary secrecy
FlexSense: A Transparent Self-Sensing Deformable Surface
One would hope we'll get over this, although it's been around as long as online communication has. USENet was the prototype for the modern Web, and it had all the problems we see today, at least in places. Trolls, harassment, the Two-Minutes Hate... they all spread around the world via NNTP.

RA Lafferty wrote a story about how communication between humans in fact involved telepathy. Speech was just an epiphenomenon. No one believed the researchers, and so they developed a device that would suppress telepathic communication between people, and the result was chaos because even though people were still speaking the words, no one was understanding what was said. It's a fun little piece, and I recommend it if you can find it. I remember sometime in the early '90's thinking, "That's whats' going on with newsgroups!"

People see the words and think they're communicating, but they aren't. If you've ever tried to reproduce an experiment based on a description in a scientific paper you'll realize how little information the words contain. Or learn how to do something from a manual. There was a George O Smith story about an ancient Martian device that was found with a manual the engineers were able to translate, but they found the manual contained just enough information to get them into trouble. Without the context of the engineering culture where the device was used it didn't contain nearly enough information. Smith was an electrical engineer, and knew what of he spoke.

These two factors: poverty of information and cultural context make communication hard, even face to face. It is likely we'll get better at it over time, and that will come mostly from appreciating each other's differences and not assuming ignorance and idiocy every time anyone disagrees with us (an attitude I struggle with still...)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=166634...

These guy tested the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide across a range of microwave frequencies.

Since hydrogen peroxide decomposes when heated, I'm guessing it's just due to the microwaves heating the mixture.
> * Most people couldn't care less about the 10 second thing.*

Really? That's Snapchat's unique selling proposition!
That does not necessarily follow. If you offer free mass transit, the people who take advantage of it may not be the same people who would otherwise be clogging up the roads in their personal cars.
They probably chose the biometric data option over ID cards to prevent buddy punching.
Well, given that the people here seem to have extreme hatred for Quora, they should not be visiting the site or do it on the terms set by Quora. I find it extremely hypocritical that they would want to read extremely interesting content which is often available there. Given that the original link was there in Quora, I don't see any reason why it should be changed - if people find it bad, they should not click the link or flag it so that it disappears.

Apologies for the abusive word used.
I myself am a computer scientist with only a fuzzy knowledge of the precise meaning of "data science". "Quantitative Analysis" is probably more the right idea.
I live in a country where lanes are that narrow. Driving is fucking terrifying. You're just inches away from the traffic in the next lane. Traffic is always congested. For me to get to work, the fastest way is bicycle or scooter, then public transport, then car, then walking. A third of the population doesn't drive it at all. It's simply too dangerous, too frustrating and too slow. I'd argue for expanding the lanes to 15ft rather than narrowing them.
Is it significant though? I can’t really see why bash of all software should be critical. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, other operating systems do not rely on bash being installed.
Iran. Which is why they have their own embargo.
The reasoning goes on. Colleges make people endure boredom & obedience in preparation for future jobs.

People should at least be allowed to decide whether some school should waste years of their lives for these (depressing) benefits. Failing that, this reasoning should be made crystal clear.
It's there now, I believe.
The technical forums are gardens compared to the religious forums.
Then I guess I'll own it, and vote accordingly.
I agree with your first paragraph. It's not only possible to see multiple sides to this, it's sane. But you may have missed my point, which is that comments in the thread tended to take one side or the other.

Your second paragraph, I think, goes way too far. I don't believe you have nearly enough information to make that judgment. In fact, you can't have it, because it mostly depends on what the author learns (or doesn't learn) from his mistakes, which means it depends on the future.
Seconded. If FreeBSD can replace GPL software, so can Apple.
Indeed. I love to show off tetris-mode to unknowing OS X users :)
The previous leaks did not definitely show anything like that. In fact its not clear they showed anything beyond an informational briefing on issues with intercepting Google related data.

There's a Chinese whispers effect to all this where vague assertions are repeated over and over until they become considered definite facts.
In the Gleick's book about complex system the author proposes a theory of why Bourbaki (the collective behind the plague called «mathématiques fondamentales») was structured: it is mainly a question of ego.

Poincaré was said to not acknowleged the «french school of mathematics» as the origin of his discoveries. And the institution especially the elite called «ENS» (forming the best teacher for university) is said to have been quite disliking his attitude.

Since Poincaré was heavily relying on geometry, it is said that since they found it unacademic they decided to change the content of math learning to avoid new «casses burnes» mathematicians.

It is very funny at this title to look at the discrepancy between the story of Mandelbrot experience whether it is written in french or english.

French biography states mandelbrot LOVED polytechnic school (another super ivy league) and english said the opposite stating that mandelbrot reproved the lack of use of geometry.

To be honest, I don't know if this is true.
>> For me to get to work, the fastest way is bicycle or scooter, then public transport, then car, then walking.

>> I'd argue for expanding the lanes to 15ft rather than narrowing them.

I can't even comprehend people like you. Encouraging biking and public transport is a good thing, environmentally and socially.
Can you give 2 or 3 examples of story elements that bothered you the most?

Do you have a similar opinion about Fire Upon the Deep? Is there any soft sci-fi, particularly far-future, that you like?
PS Feynman biography makes the same statement about the irruption of this fashion of teaching «mathématiques fondamentales» in the US system.

It seems have been part of the fuel about the cargo cult science essay (What is science?)
At some point, people forget what the roads are for in the first place. You can also decrease crashes by enforcing a 5 MPH speed limit, right?
Not working for me either.

Says "Error loading stream: Could not connect to server"
m3u8 link for vlc doesn't work for me either :(
Everything Dies, Right? But Does Everything Have to Die?
> the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond

> [from the article] “[Ballmer's] view was that anyone in the company who used the iPhone was a traitor,” says this person. “His dad worked for Ford, and that meant you had Ford in your garage.”

This attitude drives me nuts. The best thing Ford and GM could have done in 1985 would have been to buy Civics and Corollas for 10% of their employees so they could see for themselves what was so good about them. But no, instead they had this adolescent "be true to your school" thing going on.

The same clearly applies to Microsoft. I hope Nadella gets that business is not a repeat of high school.
That there are no rogue couples.
> our companies

Who is the "our" in our companies? I never owned a company in Cuba.
I'm in two minds about reading Rand: on the one hand, I've heard nothing but contempt for the quality of her writing from commentators I respect - i.e. prose, structure, etc. On the other, as I'm assuming I would disagree with her theses I would like to do so from an informed perspective. Should I bother?
What makes it so difficult to provide evidence for your own argument? I don't understand why you think that making a contrary point and then saying it "isn't worth your time" to corroborate the claim would persuade anybody.
Aah. PerrBlock was affecting connection. For some reason Lime Light Networks, Inc is blocked in PeerBlock and it's used somehow by the stream.

Just in case someone else is using PB.
This really looks interesting, I'd love to _read_ more about it.

I have two major concerns after watching the video through.

First is the spreadsheet ui. Much of the drama and nonsense with bad spreadsheet programming is related to not having the _table_ as the primary data organizational tool. Data should be in labeled and typed columns not laid out in cells on the main sheet and then postfacto treated as coherent data.

I was more genuinely more confused by what you were trying to explain in the early part of the video because of the awkwardness of your spreadsheet ui metaphor. Ie as you were explaining the columns and rows, reordering etc around 4:30+ .

The spreadsheet should be just a layout medium for expression of A view of data tables.

Apple tried to fix this with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_%28spreadsheet%29 but ymmv on how successfully.

Suggestion - experiment with using a graph (or just cards) with tables as nodes. Figure out how to use the edges to express the program coherently.

Your asteroids demo was nicely done but I would be very unhappy reading a medium size program with your current ui.

Suggestion - have tables only built as they are defined. Don't try to be too much like existing spreadsheets (though obviously some of your audience would like to see a very traditional spreadsheet ui).

My second major concern is that I think spreadsheets and spreadsheet programming would benefit from stronger typing. You seem to not be addressing that? As as an example from your video are people's children not people too?

How can we keep a money column from being used as someone's age etc (without a function in between)?
Will Catalonia Hold a Referendum on Whether to Break Away from Spain?
Sadly the author of ping, Mike Muss, died in a car accident in 2000. [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Muuss
Show HN: Spark Java – A Java 8 micro web framework
I would be a lot happier if this applied equally to the elected officials as much as the bureaucracy. What makes it difficult is what is the "office" for elected officials. One can argue that they are making more of a difference on the "field" rather than the parliament, but usually the reality is that they are mostly twiddling thumbs somewhere else entirely and that would be the better case scenario, the more common case would be that they are too busy counting the money.
However, there are additional legally questionable terms of distribution which the GPL3 imposes which remain open legal questions. For example, how inclusive is the patent grant? A lot of companies don't want to go anywhere near that minefield, even with using GPL3 software internally, which suggests that it's a much bigger problem than the FSF doesn't want to discuss.
Addendum: we help fund partners programs.

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (pg 124)
Please stop routinely posting political stories to Hacker News. Only the ones that offer some special intellectual interest are on-topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Even then, the bar is high.
Maybe send a private message instead of posting publicly before notifying the owners?
There's also Zigbee[1] which was specifically designed as a radio protocol for home automation, in which each device has a relatively short radio range but works on the assumption that if you're automating your home there's likely to be devices all over the place which can mesh together. I've not used it myself, but it looks to be pretty popular amongst manufacturers.

[1] http://www.zigbee.org/
For those looking for some additional recommendations that are "literary" (by which I mean, densely allusive and layered with meaning, yet not painfully self-conscious or lacking in any sense of awe and wonder, let alone enjoyment), look into Gene Wolfe. He is not exclusively a science fiction author, but The Book of the Sun (a tetralogy) and the rest of the Solar Cycle books definitely are, and they remain among my favorites. The entire series will keep you busy for a while. For a shorter introduction, consider The Fifth Head of Cerberus, consisting of three related novellas, is exquisite; also worth checking out.

See also, Borges; not usually considered a science fiction author, I suppose for reasons having to do with the connotations of being a genre author.
See the game security exploits posted upthread.
Ask HN: OS X App Ideas
Just activated Mac Developer Program for one app. Any ideas for some more applications? :)
> The world doesn't have time to explore your mind-palace...

But they have time to search social media sites?

If someone wants to twist an argument around to attain the goal they desire, you can take anything out of context and spin it in another direction. Informal language is informal because of this - it never conveys a true objectivity that can not be mutated with the slight of hand - and that includes things that have been invented and things that have not been yet.

There are no real rules to communication, only guidelines that are often informally adjusted via precedent. Politics is often a very tricky tightrope to walk.

> Frankly, I don't think the world loses much if, when it comes to complex nuanced issues, we put down the Twitter client and put our thoughts in a medium (no pun intended with Medium) intended for expansive discussion. Does it slow you down? Sure. And that's a good thing.

I do. I think it makes people visually aware of how a collective sentiment can build over small iterations of many dialogues. Maybe that would make people more empathetic to people who have such seemingly inflammatory opinions, and also not feel so alone in having fairly quirky ideas.
Found the reference to Israel/France, looking for Germany references.

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (pg 40/125)

Why the downvote here? The comment contributes to the conversation...
> For me to get to work, the fastest way is bicycle or scooter, then public transport, then car, then walking. A third of the population doesn't drive it at all.

That sounds pretty awesome. Driving a personal vehicle that takes up space, pollutes, and has the most capacity for causing harm should not be the default option like people treat it as.
I don't think of him as particularly early; he doesn't really show up on the scene until a decade after Asimov and Heinlein, if I recall correctly.

Really worth mentioning Bester's short stories, too. "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", "Fondly Fahrenheit", "5,271,009"...
I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars to achieve.

Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry.
I find it amazing that there still hasn't been a film or TV adaptation of Iain M Banks. Not that such a thing would be necessary or a validation of his writing; but I'd love to see it imagined and realized visually. It's a vision of perhaps the best possible case for the human future - if we don't fuck up.
Not sure if he meant P2P as peer-to-peer or point-to-point. The latter seems to make more sense. But P2P is most commonly used to mean "peer to peer". (also pay-to-play in the games space)
My solution to this has been to learn to write like a Bayesian, which is a useful project because it helps me think like a Bayesian.

The first step in this is to recognize the goal: it is not to prove some proposition true or false, but to show that some proposition is more plausible, given the evidence, than the alternatives. The alternatives should always number more than one, because single-alternative arguments are recipes for false dichotomies and oppositional dynamics, neither of which are useful.

Science--which is the discipline of publicly applying Bayesian reasoning to the results of systematic observation and controlled experiment--is not about proof or truth or falsity. It is about plausibility. This fundamentally changes the goal of any intellectual enterprise.

I liken philosopher's quest for "certainty" to alchemist's search for the secret of turning base metals into gold: despite the many interesting things they learned along the way, the goal itself was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge, which is evidence-based and therefore inherently uncertain. A certain proposition is one that is immune to any further evidence, conceivable or inconceivable (because what we can conceive has nothing to do with what is real). The name for such propositions is "faith", and to a Bayesian this is an epistemic error.

Once we've abandoned the impossible and wrong-headed goal of turning base metals into gold... err... of achieving certainty... we're in a position of acknowledging our priors (which are explicitly represented in Bayesian reasoning: you can't do it without them) and adducing our evidence. Differences of opinion may come down to differences in priors: "I find your evidence for Israel's war crimes unconvincing because I believe anti-Zionists dominate the international news media." Such revelations at least make it clear what we should be arguing with the person about. If we differ radically in our priors, arguing about the posterior plausibility of a particular proposition is probably useless.

If you do all this right (I'm still learning, always learning) it won't come across as hedging, but as reasoning. This is the joy of abandoning the alchemy of certainty.
We need hnify.com, a service to let a user give a title and brief summary for a website, and autocreate a web page with that title/info, for submission to HN.
I think this relates very directly to one of PG's essays¹:

At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted
most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try
to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive
way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way.
Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was
just trying to paint well; he couldn't help painting like
Michelangelo.

It's much easier to be distinctive than to be good, so if you're trying to optimize for the former you'll have a much harder time achieving the latter.

¹ http://paulgraham.com/taste.html
Which makes you wonder, could you bolt a language like Python onto an interface builder a la Xcode IB, Visual Studio Forms designer, etc?

I agree with you, I think the bigger picture here is how well the IDE, GUI, and code hang together as a complete unit; focusing on any in isolation (e.g. "VB sucks, use Python") misses the point.
What's PH?
Pro-Democracy Websites in Hong Kong Targeted with and Serving Malware
It does not need to be a 1:1 relationship for my statement to be true. If every 10 rides reduces 1 car trip it's still reducing congestion. The important thing to remember about congestion is at maximum capacity new trips simply increase wait times so a 30 min trip can add more than 30 minutes of wait time spread among all drivers. And removing a 30 minute trip can save people more than 30 minutes of wait time.

Granted as delays reduce people my decide to simply take more trips, but a combination of a car congestion tax, free public transit, and walk-able / bike-able city's are far more efficient say trying to stack highways.
Why not just encrypt it?
A Much Too Distant Mirror: Against Animal Histories
I can't recommend David Brin enough:

1. The Postman

2. Earth

3. Existence
Am I the only one that finds the MS Windows ping more useful for quick troubleshooting that the Linux/Unix variants? A few weeks ago I was dealing poor performance on my cable modem. When I pinged a valid IP, I was seeing the successful packets only. It didn't show time-out packets until the summary displayed on exit. This makes it useless for quick real-time monitoring. MS ping on the other hand will show time-outs along with the successful ones.

Why is Linux ping this way? Is this a fundamental design flaw?
There's a lot more info about Eve here: http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/111
Concrete repair
DIY concrete repair
This. Runners world mag is available everywhere around the world. Their website certainly is too. How about spendig 30seconds less on the animation and add a toggle for rest-of-world units instead of imperial?
Gedanken: A Simple Typeless Language (1970) [pdf]
There are a couple related issues at hand. I agree that hedging and weasel phrases are an issue. It's too easy to write content-free noise. The classic example in my mind is someone trying to sound "deep" who makes a statement like "Sometimes X..." without saying anything about how to identify such times out what to do about them. However, when this is a problem, it's one of not enough precision, not too much. The goal is to try to write a statement that fits all possible evidence, and so can't be proven wrong, ignoring that it's useless for the same reason.

Defensive writing, on the other hand, is generally a good thing. Precision and careful logic are essential in writing. We don't have the benefit of physical emotional cues. Common sense isn't common, and even if it was there are so many perspectives on the web that you at least need to be thinking about the potential for misunderstanding. You need to try to head off trivial or otherwise unproductive avenues of debate. These are all responsibilities of conscientious communicators. And if you find yourself using a lot of vague language, it's probably better not to say anything. Any other policy is willfully contributing to the proliferation of BS on the web.

Reality is messy so sometimes you have to use imprecise language to describe it. In that case, it may be helpful to try to precisely specify how imprecise you mean to be, or use some other more specific phrase than "sometimes X" or "sort of Y". If it needs to be said, you can usually find a way to add more information.