knowtheory

It is super cool that Nunuavut will end up with better internet access because of this.

Says Cunningham, “It is made possible by climate change.”

Would love for climate change deniers to attempt an alternative explanation. Gentlemen, start your contortions.

Your judgementalness is showing.

There are equally likely explanations for people sitting around drinking. Maybe they don't work first shift. Maybe they're on vacation. Maybe they're disabled for some reason.

The fact that you leap to "oh the government pays them to be unemployed" is on you, not the government or them.

(also note that it's increasingly difficult to get SNAP benefits in states due to budget cut backs)

Expectation is a fascinating thing.

Gaiman is essentially describing the dichotomy in expectation between products and consultancy.

This is particularly complicated in fandom, because creators often say (and legitimately mean) that a body of work exists because of (the encouragement of) their fans. That's true, but it doesn't mean that what they're creating isn't a product first, and not bespoke work on the authority of and responsible to fans.

Apple has fans too, but took basically no heed of complaints that the Mac Pro hadn't been updated in years.

1) i love how credulous this article is. Even people who have only ever played the Bioshock games, and have never thought about anything else can see beyond the 9th grade level ethics/civics necessary to see what the problems with sea-steading are.

2) Are we seriously citing the freedom ship of all things as an example of what the future of sea steading might be like? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2514936/The-i...

Cities are complicated. Cruise ships are complicated. (Anybody remember http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/11/travel/cruise-ship-fire/ ?) I would looooove to hear someone explain what the logistics and supply chain management necessary to run a city-sized cruise ship would have to look like (note, none of these sea-steading articles ever discuss this question). And, sorry just to harp on the Bioshock thing again, but seriously: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/11/28/article-2514936-19... and http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130412063520/bioshock/i...

3) If you have enough money to sea-stead, or get yourself onto a hypothetical freedom ship... is paying your taxes and following a country's laws really so onerous that you would abandon your family and social network in order to move out onto the ocean onto platforms with experimental levels of quality & sustainability? (I mean, maybe you're an engineering nerd and you think it'd be awesome to live out on the water. But in what way does that dove-tail with the political aspirations of sea-steading? Why not just get yourself a boat if you've got that much money?)

It should also be noted that cars have a number of safety devices which bicycles do not, airbags, seat belts, crumple zones, and so on.

Cars also travel under different conditions from bicycles as well (certainly not many highway bicyclists), and as such i would presume that motorists would be involved in many more high speed crashes (although data on that would be interesting to see).

So comparing injuries on bikes to injuries in cars definitely seems like an apples to oranges comparison at first blush.

Okay, how's this :P

Cars have other safety equipment that make them unlike bicycles. These include airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones and the like.

If you are a driving, you should employ those safety devices when you do so.

There's a PLOS One paper which reanalyzed Ian Walker's 2007 data and claims that the effect Walker demonstrates is illusory if you chose different classification criteria for how to group data points: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

I tweeted w/ Ian Walker a bit about it, and though he hasn't written up a reply he disputes their conclusions (just for full disclosure).

For fucks sake, no. This is a meme that will not die.

Howie's evidence (as nice a guy as he is) is based on a single study by a professor at the University of Bath. (And there's a PLOS One paper which disputes his conclusions too which is worth reading: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna... )

There is no compelling evidence to recommend that you shouldn't wear a bike helmet and PLENTY of very solid evidence why wearing helmets have very important and life altering effects on the outcome of serious head trauma.

If you are cycling, wear a bike helmet.

This isn't blackmailing or extortion. This is what monopoly on a group of users looks like. Apple also charges 30% for anyone allowing in-app purchase on their devices. Is that also blackmail or extortion? Sure made Amazon drop in app purchases in a hurry (and yank them from comixology after Amazon purchased them)

Yeah, i'm not even sure that specifying just one unit is even sufficient for me to understand what they mean.

Presumably plume size is determined by a variety of factors, not just fuel?

This is not a problem with "the media". This is a problem with humans. You can say the same thing about politicians, business people, teachers, anybody who expresses an opinion about policy in general.

It's not even necessarily a fair one to hang around the neck of "the media".

"The media" used to have considerably better expertise who have been shed through successive waves of buyouts and layoffs. Seriously, newsroom headcounts were cut by >1/3 in the past 10 years.

That's a structural problem with the economics of media in the age of the internet (one which the media dealt with particularly poorly).

I hate pieces like this.

"The Media" is not a monolith. The media is a complicated and dynamic world of individuals, companies from large to small, distribution mechanisms, educational systems, and cultural assumptions.

The media is comprised of a lot of different things including people who may be awful or mendacious or ignorant or naïve or inexperienced or any number of things.

Does the press/media have structural issues? Yes absolutely. Does this piece identify, elucidate or address any of them?

No. It doesn't.

(p.s. the entire subtext of this piece is that the "liberal" media is dumb. I'm sure that the "conservative" media would fare much better /eyeroll)

You do realize that people still find the "iPad" name awkward, right?

Just because the device sells doesn't mean the name isn't bad.

Well, this should go down in the annals of logos which should have gotten some wider impressions before launching.

Since nobody else on HN has mentioned it, all of twitter thinks the new logo looks like a vagina. It's hard to unsee.

No, but it's not hard to provide actual mechanisms to explain how money influences politics.

That's not saying every dollar is the same, and the money -> influence function is a straight line. But money buys reach and coverage at the very least.

If you genuinely couldn't by elections with money, there wouldn't be so much money flowing into politics.

Money alone isn't sufficient to guarantee an election outcome, you still have to execute.

Starting conversations with the assumption that the person on the other end of the conversation is acting in bad faith will gain you nothing. If they are going to act in bad faith anyway, what you say doesn't matter.

Beyond that, the art of politics is to make sure you look reasonable at all times, and can make your case both to the decision maker in question, but also to everybody else now watching said decision maker in light of the statements you have made.

This is a rallying cry, and a notification to the FCC chairman that the YC community cares, is paying attention, and has pointed feelings on the matter, both in terms of policy and outcome.

This is one of the reasons why having adequate legal recourse is so important. The incompetence and inadequacy of the criminal justice system injures us all.

In an ideal world we would simply say "where is the evidence, this should be sorted out in a trial". But given that the cops are so hostile to sexual assault victims, forensics which aren't processed for decades (http://www.npr.org/2014/01/25/266275211/tested-at-last-rape-... ) and a legal system which will try the credibility of victims, it's hard to blame any sexual assault victim who shies away from reporting.

In the end, unanswered questions persist.

The /r/linguistics thread on this subject does a pretty good job of pointing out the flaws in the way this data is presented: http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/288ed6/12_engli...

The test that they run is pretty cool, but this conclusion is super weak.

Oh, yes, you're right. Orthogonality isn't at issue here, the decomposition is just being used for sorting/ranking/re-weighting.

Thanks for pointing out the muddle i was in there.

Yep. My gut reaction to the phrase "eigenmorality" is to immediately turn around and ask "have you ever seen an eigenface?" (see: https://www.google.com/search?q=eigenface&tbm=isch )

They are a certainly a mathematically accurate way to represent a distribution of human faces, but no one would ever confuse it with an actual human face.

And this is one way i view political/policy compromises (which is ultimately where the rubber hits the road regarding morality/ethics). One example is middle ground positions on immigration reform: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/5803912/americans-either-want-u...

There are circumstances where opinions fall into a multimodal distribution, and in those situations, taking a policy position that is the global average not only will piss everyone off, but won't necessarily fix the policy problem at hand.

This is very long but worth reading.

The modeling exercise herein is basically attempting to use a game theoretic model to test out some really dumb/simplified models of cooperation and whether the behaviors observed approximate anything approaching what our intuitions might say is moral behavior, up to and including an 'eigenjesus' and 'eigenmoses' up against tit_for_tat bots and the like.

Yeah, if you read the innovation report there's a breakout box that specifically highlights a number of their development talent.

To name but a few: Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore, Coffeescript), Mike Bostock (D3), Amanda Cox (creator of a lot of the NYT's great data visualizations), Kevin Quealy (Amanda's partner in vis), Gregor Aisch (wrote much of DataWrapper), and until recently David Nolen (aka Swannodette of Clojure & Clojurescript fame) all work for the NYT.

I haven't done a detailed read-through of the innovation report, but Niemanlab's writeup comports with my sense of the state of digital journalism (and the Niemanlab folks are quite good): http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...

Key to many of the problems that orgs like the NYT have are not a lack of prestige or ability to attract top tier talent. The problem news orgs have are organizational and structural, which are partially a matter of leadership and priorities.

Anyway, irrespective of any of that, the NYT does innovative things with data and visualization before anybody else in journalism, or hell even visualization in general, does (not to say that they're the only ones pushing the state of the art).

As another postscript, i'd just like to note that there is a difference between internships and fellowships.

OpenNews fellows are paid 60k$ a year, get health benefits and get to work with news nerds at organizations like ProPublica, the New York Times, Texas Tribune, NPR and a bunch of others.

And in fact they just opened up applications for their 2015 class of fellows: http://opennews.org/fellowships/apply.html

Oh yes. It's all a huge conspiracy. Can't let the sheep get too uppity.

Baaaa. Baaaaaaa.

After all that's what open source is for, right?

No.

Mozilla is actually two legal entities. Mozilla the Corporation and Mozilla the Foundation (but the mantra is "One Mozilla").

The Open News team is part of Mozilla the Foundation, just the way that the Open Badges and Open Science teams are.

Mozilla the Corporation is responsible for Firefox and a variety of other projects.

But as ever, Open News and all of the efforts within the Foundation are very much part of Mozilla, and there is, obviously, no deception going on.

The Knight Foundation, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are not stupid enough to be bamboozled in the manner that you appear to be implying.

P.S. if the mods are reading this... OpenNews is developing the tools WITH the NYT and WaPo, not (just) FOR them as @dansinker notes here: https://twitter.com/dansinker/status/479645936168493057

From my position as a fellow Knight grantee (i run DocumentCloud, and interact with many of the folks involved in this upcoming project) i'm pretty excited.

The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are people who very clearly get both the web and the news.

And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a lot easier.

Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to login to DocumentCloud as well as the host site, we'd love to be able to have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users, especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like back to the host organization.

Coffeescript was not funded by the Knight Foundation and was not developed for DocumentCloud.

Jeremy started Coffeescript as a personal project in his off time while building out DocumentCloud/Backbone/Underscore.

Why exactly do you or OP assume that this project can't or won't iterate and test?

And why are you assuming anything about the existence of voting systems?

Dan Sinker even says in his piece "We don’t see this project as a single product, but instead as building blocks for engaging communities throughout the web."

Edit: OP was claiming that the choice of Dan Sinker to lead the project was some how an uncritical fad pick because Sinker had been on the Colbert Report (years ago) & has a popular twitter account. Which is about as unfounded a speculative ad hominem as you can get.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Dan Sinker ran an indie publication for years (Punk Planet), was a journalism professor at Columbia College in Chicago, and has been running the OpenNews project for 3 years during which time their fellows have launched projects like http://tabula.nerdpower.org/ . He also started projects like Tacofancy (https://github.com/sinker/tacofancy ).