skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“What other tools for creativity and learning do you arbitrarily limit? Do you have a hard rule on “paper time”?”¹

① http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/quantification

Edit: Related blog posts:

http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/quantification

http://penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/30/screen-time
One of the biggest peaceful protests on this issue is happening today, across the nation, but you wouldn't know it from the Hacker News frontpage.

It's been troubling seeing any links about the Ferguson and Eric Garner protests wiped from Hacker News before they attract very many upvotes. The issues being debated encompass government action, fundamental technology and privacy rights, as well as race, but they're being ignored here for the most part and I don't understand exactly why.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/us/thousands-march-in-wash...

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2014/dec/13/police-k...
I think this is a great idea.

We as citizens of the world should also be allowed on the same terms to keep government communications on record as well.

As soon as government emails (eg like sony emails this week) start appearing in public and torrented in a "never to be private again" format then I think politicians may choose at such time to vote that perhaps keeping emails/phone calls/meta data on record indefinitely....isn't a good idea.
Cosmology and Biology (2008) [pdf]
Ah, way too young to worry then :) . I wouldn't take what that girl told you seriously.

As you might have seen from the replies, most programmers and nerds in general end up with girlfriends or wives if that's what they want (most do). You'll find your girl eventually :)
Depends where you're from, living in the UK, growing up in Republic of Ireland I can say that over here there is not the rampant free market ideology that exists in the States.

I can also say that when things become less regulated or get taken over by the private sector they are far FAR better than when under government thumb.

Case in point being privatization of Telecom Éireann and the liberalisation of fixed line phones and internet. Prior to this you'd wait 4-6 months to get a new line(now it's days/weeks). Ryanair is another one, because of them air travel in Europe (in particular Ireland) became affordable.

I personally have experienced the difference when things moved from the public to the private sector and the improvements as a result.

The latest that comes to mind is Royal Mail, since it's been privatised I get post and packages on a Sunday!
You could always say they are competing with themselves. The lower the price, the more customers they can get, which means more launches, which lowers the cost further.
The Dozy Watchdogs
It's good to see FreeBSD moving up. Maybe it's time to give ArchBSD a try?
As the other two replies said, there's Prezi:

https://prezi.com/

It can be used to do much cooler things than PowerPoint, but it takes time.

There are some cool sample presentations that show what you can do:

http://prezi.com/explore/staff-picks/

http://prezi.com/explore/popular/
So the generation that grew up with free love and drugs did everything to prevent their children from experiencing the same, and the generation that grew up with free tech does the same with tech. The cycle continues.
> More diversity

If I were to ask, "what can a man of good will do to combat tornado calamities", would you respond with a "more air temperature homogeneity would certainly help"?

We can't reasonably engineer or create "neighborhood diversity". There are some policies that have tried to accomplish this, and they fail miserably. The "diversity" ends up artificial and hollow, and does nothing for prejudice. In some cases it seems to amplify it.

> the transition from "us" and "them" to a unified "us."

There can never be an "us" when we're talking about the 300 million people in the United States. There can't even be an "us" if you're talking about the 8 million in New York City, or the 500,000 in Atlanta.

Human beings are limited in their ability to form an "us", and it's in the low hundreds.
Those are the tough questions? What about: "What are the current plans to improve warehouse working conditions?", "Fast food workers have gone on strike and been on demonstrations in favor of a $15 an hour minimum wage; what is needed to get Amazon to unilaterally set a minimum $15/hour wage for all of its employees, associates, and other hourly positions?", and "If Amazon were to have and abuse monopoly powers, what would it look like?"
With 3D Printing, Medical Devices Are Cool Again
What if a key has a space?
/\O
/\/
/\
/ \
LOL LOL
Yes, what weaksauce said. The bad guys are so good at being bad now it's amazing. Even the smallest, lowest traffic, lowest value little tiny nothing seemingly useless WordPress site will be found and used.
Taking easy cases could easily be accounted for by tracking the cases the surgeon chose not to take as well.
thanks a lot, books look nice!
I'll definitely start reaching out to people more. As I mentioned earlier, leaving university and not seeing your good friends regularly has made me realise I should reach out to people.
In terms of privacy, I don't like the idea of installing a proxy on my phone that can monitor everything I do. At least for Firefox that add-on has to go through their review process, which is pretty strict.

With Firefox on my Android I'm also using HTTPS Everywhere and Ghostery. Both are a really good idea on mobile phones - HTTPS Everywhere is useful because you tend to connect to a lot of public networks and Ghostery is very useful because a lot of websites are not optimized for mobile traffic and tend to load all kinds of crap, like social buttons, which I don't miss because Firefox on Android makes sharing easy.
thank you! looks usefull!
This. Plenty of citations backing it up here: http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=reading-to-young-chil...
Wow. I had expected a series of youtube videos showing short sequences of machinery, but I was positively surprised. The explanations are really well written and quite detailed.
Thanks for the link!
Good influence won't simply be support for/against, but deflecting each viewpoint into a framework that upholds the status quo (making it impotent) and causing infighting between people who would otherwise find common ground.

The NSA doesn't influence standards by sockpuppeting "no crypto". They concern troll to add endless complexity, making implementations buggier and rarer.

In the HN NSA threads, the easiest example is encouraging argument between people who are in violent agreement that the NSA must be curtailed, but differ in approach. But instead of coding or grassroots activism, they're goaded into engaging each other on a message board!

Listen critically to "conservative" talk radio for a good general example - every segment starts off talking about problems that have grassroots concern (and that the "other side" would even sympathize with, just with lower priority). After the warm up to get listeners on board, the narrative switches to pigeonholing that anger away from systematic issues, and towards individual politicians and the "other side" that supports them.
The problem is that TV and computers can be used for far more than 'creativity and learning' and, in my experience with kids, the majority of use is mindless. Kids get hooked on games.
Looking for Dev Partner for CRM and Tracking SaaS
Not a developer myself. Need a lead developer to partner who has the same forward thinking.

This would be starting with nothing but a domain.
http://www.uclassify.com/browse

You can run MBTI albeit as 4 separate API calls.
The thing is, many of us have been around the block on more than one occasion with poorly thought out metrics which lead to unintended and down right bad consequences. A few years ago I was rallying against a system used to rate and rank relative risk of software systems based on a score. Many times I was told: "at least it's better than nothing." Ultimately it was discovered that there was nearly an inverse relationship to the scoring. Those bits of software which ranked as the most secure ended up being the least, with the least secure being the most. This happened because developers unaware of security concepts assumed security was happening elsewhere rather than taking the initiative to practice secure coding. Interestingly enough this entirely invalidated the argument that doing something was better than nothing as the system drove misplaced focus and overall reduced the security of the overall environment as the number of bad bits of software out numbered the good, thus leading to poor hiring practices. Management saw the score and figured everything was getting better and the environment needed fewer security resources rather than the reality which was that many more were needed.

Complex systems are challenging & one study isn't going to provide the miracle solution. Surgery is not a refrigerator and to think every problem can immediately be solved by a trivial metric can be a dangerous game, especially when it comes to lives. When it comes to health care I tend to look at the macro, rather than the micro. Which hospitals have higher ratings, lower insurance claims and rates, etc., however, I understand that information can be gamed as well and take it with a grain of salt. At the end of the day I hedge my bets in this space by eating well, working out daily, and otherwise trying to avoid the medical industry at all costs.
Interesting. There is a book along these lines (more how things work vs how they are made) and of course there is something like 10 seasons of 'How its Made' which the discovery channel runs.
My daughter is 5. She had zero screen time till she was 2. After that, it was a case by case basis. 5 minutes a day when she was 3 - which is one peppa pig episode. The only computer time she was allowed were for drawing using paint or Photoshop.
At 4, on special occasions, she got to ask for a few YouTube videos - usually Dora, peppa pig, or something educational. She was also allowed to ask to watch the news, which she did sometimes. Her allowed TV time went up to 20 minutes a day, but she didn't know that- for her, it was either 2 peppa pig episodes or one yo gabba gabba. However, we did not make a big deal of increasing her screen time. We made a big deal about the fact that because she is 4, she now gets two bedtime stories.
At 5, her screen time has not increased. But, if she is a really good girl, she can ask for 3 bedtime b stories.
How's it working?
Well, she isn't bothered about TV that much, she loves books and she knows ads are really about getting you to spend money. So I think she's on the right track.

I try my best to answer all her questions and encourage her to ask more. When I don't know the answer, she and I do the research together.

I think the approach is working really well and we're going to do the same with our one year old too.
Focus! Focus! Focus!
love this.

"A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions"

just wow. This gives me alot to reflect on and goes much deeper than racial prejudices. This can be applied to alot of areas in my life. I was one of the top in my high school class for math, and skated through college pretty easily. Came out being kind of cocky then learned pretty quickly how little I actually knew. The past few years have really really given me perspective. Speaking for myself, I seem to grow much faster when I humble myself and acknowledge my areas that need improvement.
>>http://i.imgur.com/iQdEwX7.png

I can tell by your insults that this discussion is impossible.
Probably not. You only need a few seconds of propellant for landing: a mostly-empty stage weighs much less than a full one, and even one engine is enough to slow it down real fast. I've done some really rough guess-numbers before, landing on 5-10% of a full propellant load needed for landing.

It's probably not even as bad as that, since they certainly fly with some performance reserve already, at least several percent, and most payloads are probably not max-weight. The landing propellant in many cases may be entirely free, mass-budget-wise. They do add some additional mass for the legs and fins, in addition to any extra propellant they need, so it's not free, but the first stage is not as performance-sensitive as higher stages (see: rocket equation), so they can get away with it. I don't see 'em getting second stages back any time soon, though, and I think they've given up on that, at least for F9.

WRT engines, the efficiency based on air density is mostly a function of the nozzle, and the upper-stage Merlins have a nozzle extension to deal with this. Higher-efficiency fuels (i.e LH2) are historically preferred for upper stages, since they are more performance-sensitive, so SpaceX is losing some performance there. But LH2 is super-cryogenic and a beast to work with, and an entirely different engine. SpaceX's thing is that they are willing to sacrifice maximum efficiency for reasonable cost, so they decided to make that tradeoff. It seems like a good plan so far.
How many pixels of resolution and what latency of screen refresh does your imagination offer? That's what stories offer - a personalized virtual reality with higher resolution than all current tech. Books are a delivery mechanism for stories. Poems offer even more - the brain fills in the blanks.
Limiting what post rate? If it's coming from a farm it could have the same distribution as real people. If you read the article, you'll see that it's not about spam. It's about astroturf, and not even the kind where you just get a people to repeat your talking points. There are more subtle ways of diverting attention toward a legitimate message you find favorable, or away from a message you'd rather have people forget. That's all much harder for an automated system to detect, and the karma-whoring part harder still.

Look at some of the other comments on this very thread. Not the top vote-getters, but the ones that must have gotten two or three upvotes apiece. Several of those could easily have been generated by an AI designed to rephrase an already-popular view, perhaps with a pop culture reference or two thrown in to make it seem more authentic. Voila, instant karma, which can then be used in the ways the original presentation suggested to influence who reads what.

It only seems easy until you spend five minutes thinking about it.
No limits so far; my eldest is 5. My parents didn't limit my TV watching or computer use as a kid. It never did me any harm, although my kids, like me, seem not to get addicted to things and naturally shift between different activity types often (indeed, to my wife's annoyance, it is more difficult to get them - or me! - to pay attention to an entire movie without opportunities to multitask ;-))

But would I get strict if my kids did want to watch TV or an iPad for hours to the detriment of their health or wanting to do other stuff? Yes.
Recently I had a major shoulder operation. I was shocked at how little information I had about who was a good surgeon. If I didn't have a family member who worked in the complaints department of the local big hospital, I would have had no way of knowing who was considered good or bad.

My surgeon told me that I had a 90% percent chance of success, and a 1% chance of nasty complications like nerve damage. The literature on the procedure said that typical success rates were 75% and the complications rate more like 5%. Was my surgeon particular good? Did I have a better shot because I was young and healthy? Or was my surgeon suffering from the Lake Wobegon affect and overconfidence? There was no way for me to know as a patient.

That said, naive score keeping could go very awry, for very obvious reasons that others in thread have mentioned.

Here is the system I would like to see. Tell me how this could get gamed:

Surgeons should be required to give official, written, probabilities to all potential patients. So for instance, a surgeon might say that there is a 90% chance that I can play football again, a 1% chance that my arm will end up worse than before the surgery, and a .01% chance of death.

Then surgeons should simply be measured against their own predictions. When I go to a surgeon, I should have access to that data. The surgeon has no incentive to be overly conservative with the probabilities - because then I will go to a surgeon who is more skilled, can predict better outcomes, and the track record to prove it. Nor does the surgeon have an incentive to be overly optimistic, because then they will get dinged for not scoring according to their own predictions. Nor does the surgeon have an incentive to turn away high-risk patients, they just need to state the risks accurately.

The patient wins because the patient can finally have the most accurate as possible information about the risks and benefits of a surgery, and can get multiple opinions, compare them, and have good data about which surgeons are reliable in their predictions.
Although, this sort of integration was encouraged and took place in Brazil and the mixed-race Brazilian offspring of today still seemingly and disproportionately prefer to be categorized as 'white' based on year-to-year census results.
Yes, that is absolutely correct. And I find it sad that such thoughtless mechanisms are exactly what powered the worst forms of racism in the history.

Edit: would just like to point out that I was flagkilled before any response came, so currently my post is invisible in this thread.
Incase you find this useful:

Just lying in hospital bed here about 36 hours after 2nd revision on a THR first done in 1987. In the absence of clear public metrics I used the following approach to choose my most recent surgeon:

1. Age/experience. I was looking for someone about 2/3 of their way thru career. Assuming experience and survival bias were positive indicators.

2. I got a series of second opinions asking surgeons the direct question of whom they would get to operate on themselves if they needed the procedure done.

3. I consulted a series of family doctors on their recommendations.

4. I went with someone with a strong track record designing prostheses but also a large history of performing the particular procedure I was having.

There are always trade offs. My surgeon works long shifts and so I got them 12 hours into a shift on a friday, which had me a little nervous (fatigue wise).

So my main advice is don't be shy in getting a lot of opinions and advice. I will probably need another 2-3 revisions in my life time on this hip alone. So I thought it worth my while taking a thorough approach.

Still at the end of the day bad luck can always happen. Expect the best but be mentally prepared for the worst.
The Unhappy Reality of Twitter Advertising
As the Beach Boys used to sing: Wouldn't it be nice?

I know this guy who collects old computers, who also has a NeXT workstation at home. I was always so envious of him. Now, I might be able to have my own. Sort of. At least, with emulation you don't need to worry about fragile 20-year-old hardware breaking.
Well, at least the original joke was better than my own!
Yes, former. It may be useful to translate these into other systems[0] so that you see what each end of the spectrum means.

[0] http://similarminds.com/global5/g5-jung.html
PHP already has a package manager though (Composer.)

Granted, the amount of friction involved depends on personal preference, and whatever environment you're working in, but why require a package manager in another language (and, potentially, the language itself) when one exists for the language you're actually deploying in?
The drone war in Pakistan
i think the kind of doctors that would "game the system" are probably already shitty doctors, so i think the risk of surgeons only taking trivial cases is even less of a big deal.
I think his comment also may have sailed right over your head. That or you're playing dumb. Either way, it's not working.
The Strength of a Transparent Startup
The weight of the empty stage definitely is something I overlooked. Thanks for the answer!
It's great for kids, too (might need some filtering, though).
> Then we don't live even in the same world. By taking into account how much people has the economical means to just "make music for the sake of it", I'd believe that a very small proportion of all artists actually don't seek profit for their work.

A few things. First, seeking profit doesn't mean its the motivator. Second, my meaning was that profit as the primary motivator seems to have a degrading effect on the quality of the art. By "best" I meant "best art" not "greatest quantity of art."

You can argue DRM all you want, I'm saying it's not relevant to everyone who cares about music.
The whole point of the article is that surgeon ability can be reliably determined from looking at short videos, and this ability is correlated with how well the patient does.

For another interesting article on this, see http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/a-vital-measure-you...
That's really cool. For some reason, the ranking changes every time I click on the same category. Edit: I just realised it's probably because the position of users who have the same score is randomised.

Also, why is Libertatea (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Libertatea) ranking so high in many categories and yet he only has 5 posts?
Or, as Sen. Bulworth says in the movie of the same name,
"Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color."
Dan Martell – Raising Capital Like a Pro
Dan Martell has raised millions for his startups from big named investors including Mark Cuban.

Watch the video here: http://youtu.be/7dew9hhWBB4

There is limited time availability on this. The link expires in two weeks. Dan is putting this out there only until 12-26-14 when he's removing the video.
I should not here: I was not using that term to be derisive, though many others have used it in that sense when targeting Patreon in particular. I actually have seriously considered a Patreon project myself, and I've crowdfunded multiple books, so I've no mean view of it personally, only of a society that has made such things necessary.

And indeed, Patreon is a good example of the same principle: KS and Patreon creators get no end of shit on, often worst of all from their own fans and even paid supporters. You are demonized for asking for money, and then demonized for not offering more than you can afford for that money, demonized for not being transparent enough, picked apart and demonized for what figures you do release, and then further demonized for failing to live up to that expectation on release.
Einsten did not 'contribute to the design and construction of nuclear bombs.' As he wrote himself:

> "My participation in the production of the atom bomb consisted in a single act: I signed a letter to President Roosevelt. this letter stressed the necessity of large scale experimentation to ascertain the possibility of producing an atom bomb." - http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/EinsteinResponse...
When I was in college, my department had a computer lab that was nothing but row upon row of shiny NeXT cubes.

Unfortunately, for some reason it belonged to the university's communications department, not their computer science department, so nobody who had access to those machines had the foggiest idea what to do with them. Throwing a bunch of early '90s communications majors onto a real UNIX workstation desktop turned out to not be the smartest idea. Who'da thunk?

Kinda the story of NeXT in a nutshell, I guess -- all that potential, more or less completely wasted until it was injected into the near-dead body of Apple...