skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How will Apple be able to make use of their experience in electronics when they move to a completely new industry?"

Completely new industry?
Who is the biggest user of lithium batteries in the world? Hint: It is a company with a fruit as a name.

They started talks for collaboration with Tesla because if Tesla creates a Megafactory they HAVE TO use it or their battery prices will be higher than Tesla's. If they can't use it, they will create their own Megafactory.

The electric motors in a electric car are incredible simple compared with internal combustion engines.

The batteries are the most expensive item in a car by far.

"What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve?"

They know abut batteries, they know about recharging batteries. More free capital than any other company in the world, access to the best electronic components and battery manufacturers, very important for power electronics.

"What will the car have?"
A good price. It will be expensive, like anything Apple does, but a very good price because of mass production that only Apple could afford(because they can invest billions on factories).

Think on aluminum Apple computers, they sell at $1000, other companies compete with aluminum computers with a similar price. Apple earns 30% margins or more but competition could barely survive, because Apple was the first to sell those and sell in the millions and competition in the thousands.
You cant have a remote cutoff option due to lawsuits. What if a zipcar got turned off on the highway and caused an accident, they would be sued
>> The switch to electric motors levels the playing field, giving newcomers an edge if they can move fast.

It doesn't exactly level it. Any new player in the auto industry will have an enormous learning curve and spend billions just to bring their first car to market (I hear Ford spends a billion to bring a brand new model to market and they're established) and get production going. The shift to electric cars may be significant enough to consider it a new industry (replacing the old) where a new entrant could become a dominant player and hold that position even as everyone else slowly migrates. I guess in that sense it is a level playing field.

I originally wondered why Apple would want to do a car until I thought about the above opportunity. That, along with the enormous amount of cash they have, go together. They need to aim really big to have a meaningful impact on the company. They could have bought Facebook, Twitter, or other startups all day long and it wouldn't have the same impact on their bottom line as becoming a dominant auto company. In fact Apple and Google DO buy small tech companies and I have yet to see one have the impact they could get from going big in electric cars (assuming those become a thing, which is not an unreasonable gamble IMHO).

>> What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve?

At this point they don't need any. Make an affordable electric car and they win. If the price is right, people will buy every iCar they can produce. What apple brings to the table is money. IMHO all the other ones (except Tesla so far) have failed because they didn't have deep enough pockets to go all the way.

That said, if it is a car, why the hell do it from CA instead of MI? That's the part I don't fully understand. I have some ideas, but I've never heard an official explanation. Of course they never actually said they're making car either have they?
Show HN: Word game I made up in High School
I made up a word game in high school that became popular with my friends - tell me what you think. Basically, you solve for one word. The clues are words that have at least one letter from the word, in order, that have something to do with the word.
As an example, this:

---

storm

weather

drip

falling

---

would be "rain".

This one is considerably harder:

---

fur

hibernate

claws

latin

brown

omnivores

---
This is a small thing - but how do you pronounce the name? Looking at it, I want to call it "ssh sync", but it looks more like it should sound like "shync" (which sounds sort of like Garth from "Wayne's World" saying "schwing!") Just curious because it's hard to discuss a tool verbally if I don't know how to pronounce it.
Lets not be silly here -- of course not everything ends up with a correlation of exactly 1 during crashes. It is an exaggeration demonstrating a general trend.

In 2008, bonds AND stocks fell because of all-out panic where individuals dumped everything and tried to go into cash. The only thing not falling were US Treasuries since that is where all the capital ended up.

In 2015, we have a different issue -- a lot of the market is controlled by algos which, upon seeing instability, sell and go to cash. This causes a valley for all asset classes except the safe harbours (US Treasuries...maybe gold.)
Reminds me of the best optimization advice I ever got, "If you want to go faster, do less."
The scrolljacking on https://www.21.co/ is so bad. Just let me scroll through your nice looking site!
WordPress Malware – Active VisitorTracker Campaign
I think there will always be a place for individual car ownership, mainly because of morons.
I am a member of a car coop which has 400 or so cars in its pool. When it was a lot smaller it was great. Most people were the kind who do things differently. The cars were left clean with seats returned to normal positions. Now that the coop has grown, I find partly emptied soda cups in the cup holders, seats left in cargo configurations, dirt tracked in with no effort to clean up, dogs in allergen free cars, etc.
Masses ruin special things - they are not part of the initial culture. Also costs have risen to the point where I am dusting off my almost 20 year old car (which incidentally feels just as current as the newer coop cars, except for the electric ones which feel like I am driving in the future).
I don't think the question is well-posed. Why would the market rate for electricity affect the price at all if stolen computing time were a reasonable component of the current hash power?

If bitcoin mining were competing for the market for stolen computing time, then the "pwner" of each zombie would make an economic decision as to whether to use the machine for other tasks (spamming, password cracking, etc.) based on the relative value of those tasks in bitcoin vs. the amount of bitcoin produced by the machine. As the price/hashrate ratio increases, more zombies would switch to mining; as it decreased, the flow would go in the other direction. The price of electricity is irrelevant to the "pwner" of the machine as regards this decision; for them electricity is free.

In terms of how this were to affect price, that's a more complex relationship, even in theory. As the difficulty increases, it gets more expensive to attack the network (and thus artificially expand supply), so the price will presumably face upward pressure to keep the relationship of difficulty to inverse price constant (assuming price/hashrate as the function is disingenuous, but is probably reasonable for local price and difficulty changes).

That said, it is unlikely that the antecedent holds -- it is extremely doubtful that stolen computing time (or even total CPU + GPU mining) is a reasonable component of the current hash power.
Note that the FCC still hasn't stopped manufacturers from using RP-SMA connectors on their routers, despite ruling that they are "commonly available" in 2000.
One fun implication of this is that most of our phylogenies derived from genetics assume little to no lateral gene transfer. In this case we have been able to trace a subset of genes back to a virus that mediates the transfer. However this suggests that LGT may be more common than our models suggest.
Really nice summary! If you really want to make your life with ports easier, I highly recommend Poudriere (https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere). Poudriere can build your ports collection for one or more machines running any version of FreeBSD that's <= of the Poudriere hosts. After you configure your ports, you can easily archive all of the options you've set (e.g. should want/need to move your Poudriere setup elsewhere).

I run Poudriere on my home server, and then I point pkg to a local Nginx server. Every night, it builds the latest versions of all of the ports I use, and I can simply type "pkg upgrade" any time I want. For work, I run a Poudriere server on an EC2 instance to build packages for a variety of configurations. Depending on your needs, you could pretty easily have an EC2 instance that remains shutdown most of the time, and then on some sort of schedule you spin it up, build the latest, publish your packages, and shut down again.
Why Wearables Are Outperforming Tablets and Laptops Outdoors
Nice resource!

Sidenote: not everyone has Monaco installed:
https://i.gyazo.com/15a01b39b1919f6587245bdad76aeef8.png

This looks a lot better when I change it to "Monaco, Consolas, monospace" ;)
I don't think anyone is necessarily saying what she has done isn't amazing, profound and admirable.

My comment was to the fact that she pretty much gave up everything to accomplish that. Was it necessary? Could she still have achieved what she did if she had friends or took even one day off a week? Maybe, maybe not.

My point was that it shouldn't be all or nothing to create a successful company. Many entrepreneurs, myself included have given up all of these things (at least temporarily) in the single minded pursuit of business success. I still work way more than I probably need to but also make time for other things.

Just because she is doing something lifesaving doesn't mean I shouldn't want her to also enjoy her own life. I would have said the same comment if she made the next WhatsApp instead. Good on her that she's saving lives. Also good on her if she wasn't and just accomplished something big.

To clarify (at least my own point), if you love what you do and don't need friends etc then that's great and I wish you all the best. Whatever makes you happy. If instead you like having friends, dating, a day off etc then don't feel you absolutely need to remove all of that to make a successful business.
I'd imagine killing the engine could have potential liability issues if they cut it off at a dangerous time whereas GPS tracking lets them hand off that responsibility to the police.
Yeah, and I'm kind of angry that I updated my iPad. It looks like they let the latest crop of interns redesign their apps again and I can't !@#$%^ find anything... like how to _turn off_ audio playback in the Podcast app.
Did you consider you're putting the horse before the cart? I mean to say....did you consider she has these connections because she comes from money? Sometimes they come hand in hand.
It's quite popular in Fiji too, brought by the Girmityas. I love me some nice jackfruit curry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girmityas
The reading of free market theory with which most people, including its founder, would agree, is one where the goal is to maximize utility, not wealth. This is a vitally important distinction, and one that the layperson often overlooks.

I would argue that human life is not limitless in utility and the free market establishes a price range on it.

Like it or not, there is a price tag on the utility of a human life. If you need to spend 100k per year on drugs to live and you cannot make 100k per year, then the free market has decided that your life is not worth the cost because you are not creating 100k worth of value to trade 100k worth of drugs you are taking out of the market.

I don't think it is reasonable to say that a market in which you arbitrarily decide that a human life has unlimited utlity is a "free" market at all. We can all agree that jacking up the price of a life-saving drug to save more money is despicable, but we would be lying to ourselves if we pretended this wasn't part of the free market.
I thought to myself: "This looks like a good time to stock up on SDR equipment, in case this ever goes through."

And then I realized this is exactly the same thing gun enthusiasts thought when they though Obama would limit their guns/bullets, and stocked up on them, and I thought it was silly. I guess we're a lot more similar than I would have thought, made me think a little bit more about it. I'm reminded a bit of that "first they came for me" poem/story.
If I was starving and the only thing holding me back from eating was a few ants and plucking bulbs, I'd be eating jackfruits ever day!
Agreed, 100%. Any shared space takes care of so many challenges that come with remote work: socializing, a unique non-relaxation oriented place to "be on", as well as the expectation to be seen.
Depending on your personality, it can be super easy to disappear and fall into work avoidance rather than proactiveness when there's no face time/expectation.
That does make some sense but I'm not sure if the assumptions totally work, primarily the "no extra miles" and "only 1 extra hour for 9 more stops".
Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.

Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
Good Idea, Bad Startup
Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems (1988) [pdf]
Yes but #TAXI never showed up.
Yes, you can make a profit - if you agree to kill someone with the 21 Bitcoin Computer as the murder weapon.
While I'm not intending to be heavy-handed and reductionist, I think the (macro) trend(s) we've seen in (domestic) startup investment since 2008-2009 can satisfactorily explain this behavior.

Disinflation & deflation, capital flows and political friction preventing effective (any?) fiscal policy have produced an environment where private capital set on a given rate of return on investment is chasing increasingly risky organizations [1][2].

Large firms have been sitting on enormous sums of cash; e.g., why is it that the most capitalized company on earth isn't investing aggressively. In lieu of investment, many of these firms have been focused on engineering stock buybacks.

So, the thesis: why are so many firms pouring money into startups with increasingly questionable fundamentals? Because hands previously gripping bundles of capital have (nominally) more capital than they did with decreasing options for productive investment and downward pressure on returns.

1. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/puzzles

2. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/?s=low+inflation+return+inv...

P.S. I recognize that I'm probably a bit left field for this group as I'm not a libertarian, I support strong regulation and I question the marginal value of lots of Valley products.
This is a TERRIBLE idea in my opinion. Apart from the blatant marketing LIES (this will NOT get you free money, you will lose money on the electricity, even the promotional material admits this in the fine print) this only claims to do things that EVERY OTHER computer already does.

You can already use APIs in half a dozen programming languages to do every one of the things they mention in this blog post, and you can do them for less than 5 cents per hour on EC2 (which is $400/year [compared to $400 upfront + electricity], but if you're running it for a year straight you can get it cheaper at places other than EC2).

If this didn't have the magic buzzword of "Bitcoin" in the name and a smorgasbord of people cross-promoting it for reasons I don't pretend to understand, everyone would see that it's just an overpriced, under-powered computer.
Try Chrome or firefox, works in those.
The basic problem is that, many years ago, we somehow decided as a country that your SSN was a valid GUID for a person, and one that could be used to secure lines of credit and all sorts of other things. At the same time, we decided that there was no reason to make it properly secured or obscure, or to make it easy to make a new one, or anything else.

So, it's this kind of quasi-bad thing that is mostly just good for getting your identity stolen.
As it's related I'll post some links.

I've recently discovered:
http://fosslawyers.org/the-copyfair-iniciative/

And I have an idea how to organize open source project to be both free, and sustainable (make income to fund it's development):

https://github.com/CopyFairCorp/copyfair
I'm excited to see more work being done to empower small engineering teams to take advantage of certificates. Lemur looks great, though many smaller organizations may find tools like "xca" to be adequate. xca is a simple GUI for certificate management: http://xca.sourceforge.net/
> It is valid ISO C, if it isn't running in a hosted environment

It is valid ISO C syntax in any environment, which has no meaning according to ISO C.

To have meaning in a hosted environment, the implementation must supply one by accepting "void main" as a startup function in addition to the required forms.

In a freestanding environment, for the program to have meaning, the freestanding implementation must ... supply one by accepting "void main" as a startup function as one of its implementation-defined startup function forms.

It's the same thing: the program is not defined by ISO C, but implementations can give it a local definition of meaning.

If both kinds of implementations support "void main(void)" as an extension, they have to documented it, because an implementation must document all extensions. I'm looking at C99, section 4:

An implementation shall be accompanied by a document that defines all implementationdefined and locale-specific characteristics and all extensions.

So, if "void main(void)" is officially accepted by a freestanding implementation, that means it is one of the implementation-defined startup function forms, and must be documented.

If "void main(void)" is officially accepted by a hosted implementation, it constitutes an extension and must be documented.

Basically, the status of void main appears identical, whether hosted or not, with regard to the definedness of behavior (as far as ISO C is concerned), and the requirement for documentation if it is supported.
Here's what a tested growth strategy looks like
but it's not currently illegal, so you're point of view is irrelevant.
How about disabling the car once the crooks park it?
Well, yes and no and yes and no.

HIPAA doesn't actually protect you as much as you'd think--for example everyone who is signed on as a business partner (and similarly HIPAA qualified) can, if memory serves, view records.
Ignorance that's enabled by the whole place having a single name. Europe gets different treatment because all the countries have their own names, governments, etc.

The regions of the US are surprisingly different in many ways, but may not even line up with the various state boundaries so most of the time it's just "America" too. Probably not as diverse as India (I've never been, so it's just a guess) but still nowhere near as homogeneous as some European countries are.
the FAQ says "as an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second."

this mining calculator https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator does claim $0.19/day at today's exchange rate and difficulty.
Car interiors are full of plasticky knobs that remind me of cell phone keys from 1995-2006. I think that Apple will have a lot of fun creating a new interfaces for everything inside the car, and I think they're wise enough not to try to replace all physical controls with a gigantic touch screen, unlike Tesla.

I'm hoping that many functions won't need a UI any more, such as adjusting the mirrors: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=118796...
As I recall, they got around this by not being FCC licensed - in other words, HackRF is classified as a kit/developer component, and is not legal to operate unless you hold an independent license from FCC (e.g.: if you're a Ham you can use it on Ham frequencies you are licensed for). Read the disclaimer at bottom

> HackRF One is test equipment for RF systems. It has not been tested for compliance with regulations governing transmission of radio signals. You are responsible for using your HackRF One legally.

Realistically you're not going to probably get in trouble, but I _will_ caution you - if you use this kind of equipment illegally, the FCC does have radio direction finding equipment and will send someone out to find you if you piss them off - they've done this for people that were on Ham frequencies without authorization, people doing nasty things on government frequencies, and anything disturbing people who paid for a license.

Re: GNURadio The software itself has no requirement - there is no "if you run radio software, it has to do X" and there still is no requirement under proposed rules for that as far as I can tell - it's just if you build hardware, your hardware must enforce that only certain software can be installed :).
> Should they be able to charge whatever they want when they have no competition? Isn't that against the whole free market ethos?
of course not.
It seems like it would be better to just use SRP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protoco...). SRP defends against replay attacks, and could potentially use a modified bcrypt or scrypt for H() to limit brute force attempts.
"Can I get my money back for the 21 Bitcoin Computer after realizing what a mistake I've made? Yes, you can indeed get your money back with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. However, you would do so not by directly returning the machine, but by selling digital goods for bitcoin."
What are you talking about? Where are these cheap illicit bitcoins for sale?
This sounds like an opening for some sort of noir-absurdist series with some of the flavor of 100 Bullets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Bullets
I found it meaningful insofar as the the poster was locating the subject far out on the tail of a normal distribution, and I've had enough contact with the hedge fund world to have a sense of the distribution in question (and how people express themselves in that social context). I do see your point but I guess we have different communication styles as I found the use of language more informative than inflammatory. De gustibus, non est disputandem.
Don't do that, that's a cop-out. Please answer the question directly. And, it's really not clear if everyone "knows better than that". Clearly state what is the "better" explanation (seriously, I'd love to hear the explanation), don't suggest he needs coffee or whatever -- that adds absolutely nothing of value to the conversation.
Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?

Or maybe which ones got online back when SEO was trivial. (I once ranked #2 in my country for "make money" with a 5-minute site almost completely devoid of useful info.) Or when keyphrase domains dominated.

For many industries, AdWords is just another layer in the arms race completely detached from the actual product/service.
Me too. 21*220$=4620$, which is quite a bit for a PC- it would have been a good article, especially if he bought everything with bitcoin.
Yep.

"A service launching this week will tell you that Machine Zone is currently spending somewhere around $12 per user with AdColony, InMobi, and Unity Ads, up to $20 per user with Vungle, and between $2 and $30 per user with Chartboost."

http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/12/this-service-tells-you-wha...

GoW has very low retention. Users who stick around in GoW are the kind of people who like to spend a lot of money to feel empowered. But, finding and keeping those people is very expensive because it involves churning through a whole lot of users who aren't like that.