skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like people are assuming that all products are commoditisable from a market point of view, and from an industry point of view, which isn't true.

E.g. Just because watches are commoditisable from an industry point of view, in the sense that they can be manufactured en-masse for next to nothing, the buying behaviour by consumers for watches indicates that they can not be commoditised, because brand equity is a factor in purchasing, features of the watch are a factor for purchasing, etc, and therefore product differentiation stops them being a commodity.

On the other side, just because consumers would accept commoditised, mass produced, cutting edge CPUs, does not mean that industry can provide this. The barriers to entry for this industry prevent them from being commoditised (R&D costs, human resources, capital costs and so on)

So to look at what technologies may soon become commoditised, you need to analyse current and future demand, and current and future supply. You'd also need to analyse both the markets for the product, and industry groupings within the supply chain for that product. Some simple analyses might give you an idea, e.g. a proper Porters Forces analysis, consumer indices, technology trends, etc.

An interesting current example for me are 3d printers. Because the barrier to entry for designing and creating and selling a rudimentary 3d printer is so small, it has the potential to be commoditised. But from a marketing point of view, it probably can't, because it's a new technology and so brand differentiation might affect buying behaviour. From a consumer perspective, not enough people want or care about 3d printers, so in turn, suppliers wont churn them out. From an industrial point of view, it would be hard to create barriers to entry for new entrants to the market because it's not complicated to create a rudimentary one, so it's probably not a profitable venture for incumbents, and so on.

Another example would be the resurgence of VR. That's an interesting one because you can witness companies doing their best to create barriers to entry for new competitors, to avoid it being a more commoditised product, despite also being easy to create a rudimentary version (emphasis on 'rudimentary'!)

From a marketing fundamentals point of view though, commoditised products tend to be ones that are cheap to make, are consumed in some manner, and which consumers don't have a brand preference for, therefore buying the cheapest product available. E.g. screws, staples, but not, say, certain breakfast cereals (because people exhibit preferences for different brands of cereal and don't just buy the cheapest possible). Most new technologies can't fall within these parameters.
Einstein's thought experiment on simultaneity illustrated with a train (simultaneous, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Traincar_Relativity1.svg), (not simultaneous, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Traincar_Relativity2.svg)
You're right, and that's my understanding too. But I would say that relativistic perception of time does not classify as "time travel", unless mere existence classifies as time travel. Yes, time slows down or speeds up depending on velocity, but not in a way that you have any control over. Time is not a choice, its not an axis upon which you can choose your direction of travel, it is only something you are subjected to and can observe.

Now, I guess this is a very subjective discussion, but saying you can "jump into other people's future" feels like a way to make it sound sexy while glossing over the boring detail that you have to sit through all the intervening time along the way, the "jump" isn't instantaneous, and once you "jump", there's no going back. In this sense, we're always jumping into the future each and every second, and it would be equally correct to state as fact that we can wait into other people's future.
It's not the size of the tentacle that matters...
Semantic Search and Visualization for the Quran
Are the max thrust ratings at some velocity > 0? It's not noted in the data sheet.
It's not the size of the tentacle beast that matters...
If Microsoft had been earlier, Google might (probably) have never existed.
I think the IPFS vision is fantastic.

The article misses the main advantage when it tries to say that IPFS would help corporations like Google/Youtube/Netflix.

Big players will always be able to expertly run powerful distributed CDN's, but newer smaller websites will always start with one server under the current model.

IPFS would help to level the playing field for distributed data services.
Cloud computing already works by decentralizing dynamic state with high resilience to failures. For instance, servers might be allowed to remain inconsistent for awhile (since there is no single point of failure to tell them what their state should be), synchronizing "eventually". Of course, then the system is forced to deal with the possibility of multiple versions and trying to figure out the actual order of operations when there's no common time server (since a clock would itself be a single point of failure) but there are algorithms for making that work as well.

Since we now have these technologies and other technologies like security protocols, I think we are at a point in history where decentralizing the web is plausible and maybe even a straightforward thing.
This is interesting! Especially the notion that some regions have predominantly helping "voices"!

This brings me to a crazy idea - can we think of any test that would allow us to decide whether indeed somebody else is using those brains? I.e. if we hypothetically assume we are living in a kind of simulation/virtual world/etc., there might be some number of agents outside directly interfering with the running of the world and a person suffering from schizophrenia could be the one directly affected by such an actor.

If we are indeed in something akin to a "virtual machine", allowing our world to be "interrupted" at any time, outside tampered with the intent of directing events towards a desired outcome, can we somehow detect this kind of tampering?

If we assume there is a VM we are in, can we computationally recognize that by constructing some problem that can reveal the nature of our universe? In other words, leaving the assumption the world is physical behind and instead operating under assumption the world is actually computational.

It's interesting that some mystics or philosophers hint at computational parts, like the nature of time by Augustine of Hippo from 4th century AD(!), or Emmerich mentioning a "Google"-like search performed inside Godhead etc. I am curious what the various cultures discovered regarding such computability and if we indeed can bring pieces of mosaic together and test it out? Is what we call "magic" basically invoking some undocumented services of the world's hypervisor?
IPFS Hands on Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73bd9b5pPA
more general, adaptive version: https://github.com/armon/libart
Yep sorry, it's in the issue tracker: https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues
>Of course in submitting your email address and phone number, you’re potentially providing the British government with information it doesn’t already have about you. But, as Privacy International points out in its FAQ about the tool, there’s no way around this.

"No way" around this. Hmm.

This is a disappointing level of incompetence on the mutual parts of Privacy International, GCHQ, and the Wired reporters, among whom there apparently is not enough security literacy for any of them to raise the possibility of using a hash scheme to prevent disclosure of the personal information in the request.
States with Tighter Gun Control Laws Have Fewer Gun Deaths
Apple Co-Founder’s Allies Take Aim at Hollywood Over ‘Steve Jobs’
> Sure enough, you have a frame that looks dead-on like it’s a Venge,” he recalls. “You could tell it was Chinese-direct. But I’d bought things from overseas on eBay, so I was comfortable with it.”

This guy straight up says he was "comfortable" buying a counterfeit frame (anything coming direct from China with a non-China trademark), so what exactly is the point of this article? He played around and lost.

China, being an entire country, has some great stuff and some absolute shite. If bike parts are anything like electronics, I'd recommend buying unbranded or Chinese-branded stuff. Inspect the quality thoroughly on receipt. And if you want the ability to return poor quality, pay a little overhead and buy from a US middleman who is incentivized to do the QA legwork for you.
(IPFS Dev) Yes yes yes yes! :)

This is very much what we're going for.

Glad you mention semantic web-- it tends to be a very tricky word with most hacker cultures, because everyone loves to hate on failed attempts :( :( -- but in fact SW (Linked Data!) is a super interesting model that has made Google and Facebook tons and tons of money (Knowledge Graph and Open Graph!). One interesting fallout of IPFS is that we can make Linked Data waaaaay more robust and faster, because you no longer need the _insane_ tons of little HTTP hits to query, retrieve content, retrieve other content + definitions, etc., on each request. With IPFS we can turn everything into a (merkle)dag and distribute it as a single bundle of objects. think Browserify/Webpack but for Linked Data. All with valid content addressing and signatures :)

And +1 to plan9 -- plan9 (in particular Fossil/Venti and 9p) have always been great inspirations for me, and their philosophy surfaces a lot in IPFS. From the fossil/venti (git) approach to content, to making everything mountable, to just using the path namespace for everything, etc. :)

(ps: woah, a message positive on BOTH Linked Data AND plan9! unexpected find!)
Satire does not typically switch between parody and self righteous condemnation, but maybe your just breaking new ground in the virgin fields of online humor.

Still no answer to my question either.
Nope. We'll just get ads as well. Companies tend to maximise their profits with whatever they can get away with. Once upon a time, pay TV argued "no ads" as a reason for purchasing. Then, once they had a base of users... along came the ads.
How Steve Jobs used Carly Fiorina's HP iPod deal to preinstall iTunes on millions of PCs and prevent HP from creating its own iPod competitor http://www.techmeme.com/151004/p7#a151004p7
I recall reading that Mirtich paper when I was doing my undergrad project. I still have a paper copy somewhere. You're definitely right in that there's really no excuse for not having proper inertia tensors. Given that paper is from '96, I would think that everybody who needs to know would know by now.

There's at least one contact model I'm fairly sure is unknown in the games industry and another I'm not sure about. A friend of mine (George Baciu) wrote a paper for an IEEE conference (Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, I think) on a method that solves the collisions using graph theory. One of the nice things about it is it handles multiple simultaneous collisions correctly. I'm annoyed because I can't find my copy of the paper or even the paper name at the moment. The other one is a volumetric contact model from Yves Gonthier's PhD thesis, "Contact Dynamics Modelling for Robotic Task Simulation" at the University of Waterloo. There's a thesis that uses it for a wheel-soil contact model and there's another thesis that validates it and presents a volumetric friction model.
Common Uses for CSPRNGs(Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generators)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3s-qZsjK8I
To some extent.

You can write a nice layer over the top but fundamentally underneath payment processors are controlled via Visa and Mastercard.

That's one of the reason payment processors are so damn careful to descend like the wrath of an angry god when someone does/sells something Visa or Mastercard wouldn't like.
> Women tend to care less about "looks" -- or, at least, care differently. I have seen studies that indicate that women are typically looking for "looks" that suggest career success more than hot bod.

From http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...:

> As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh.

> Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.

But there's also this:

> On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

Perhaps this speaks to your "differently" point, but it's still amusing (or disturbing depending on one's relationship status) that online daters appear to generally be so disconnected from reality.

This really isn't shocking though. The biggest problem with online dating is that it gives people the false impression they have unlimited options. The perfect person (handsome/gorgeous, educated, fun, wealthy, emotionally available, etc.) who will put your past dates to shame could always join tomorrow. This dynamic leads to people becoming incredibly picky[1], so the bar for what constitutes "attractive", "educated", "wealthy", etc. is for many always rising beyond what will ever realistically be available to them.

[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/PSPI-online_dating-p...
Thanks. You are right, the comparison is off probably on both sides.

As with critical civil/structural engineering projects, there are software development projects built with correctness in mind. I've worked on a few of those, mostly in aerospace and VLSI simulation in the late 70s til the early 90s, and the level of engineering was very high.

Fast forward two decades to the world of web development and corporate IT and, wow, the lack of rigour is simply abysmal. I can imagine the same been true in the housing/building sector.
I still find it amazing that we went from first flight 1903 and 65 years later landed on the moon.

My great aunt remembered the first motorcar to arrive at her village, and lived to fly across the Atlantic in a jetliner.
The notion that he always randomly opens a door without knowing what's behind it but the door is always a losing door is fairly bizarre and doesn't make much sense when you try to analyze probability in the context of repeated experiments. Something must make him always choose a losing door. Either he knows what's behind the doors, or there's some external force ("fate," "God," or whatever) that causes the door to always be a losing door.

Regardless, the problem as stated has Monty Hall open a losing door. Thus it's clear that you should switch after Monty Hall does so, and a very simple computer program can show that you tend to win by switching.

Another way to phrase the problem is that you choose one door, then Monty Hall (without revealing anything) gives you the option of taking the door you chose, or taking both the other doors. That's an equivalent problem (assuming the goat has zero utility), and it makes it very obvious that you should switch.
Utility-scale solar costs down by half in last five years
This whole article is a shill piece for specialized, and for the LBS racket as a whole. How is this contributing anything?
This is relevant:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/j6/why_is_the_future_so_absurd/

>When people look at historical changes and think "I could have predicted X" or "You could have predicted X if you looked at factors 1, 2, and 3"; then they forget that people did not, in fact, predict X, perhaps because they were distracted by factors 4 through 117. People read history books, see coherent narratives, and think that's how Time works. Underestimating the surprise of the present, they overestimate the predictability of the future.

>People seem to imagine futures that are minimally counterintuitive, with one or two interesting changes to make a good story...

...

>Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

>If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.

>In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres. Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together. If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.

>Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.
An even simpler version, which is equivalent: Monty Hall says that you can either choose 1 door, or 2 doors. It can't get more obvious than that.
>Most internet censorship eventually works on L3

Could you explain a little more about this?
Of course there's no IPv6 address. Compute Engine exists within a parallel universe where the IETF disbanded in 1997.
Why you should write buggy software with as few features as possible(2013 video)
Many products/techologies follow the S-curve. Slow start, exponential growth, plateau (mature product, 3-5% growth per year) - and then slow death. From my perspective, we have a broad set of capabilities. Let's take transportation. There are performance attributes like time, speed, work, power, mechanical efficiency, etc. The wheel was a technology that was surpassed by the horse and buggy and then eventually the automobile. The capability is needed but the technology or family of products eventually becomes obsolete.

Commodity products are on the plateau. The technology has been proven and there is broad market acceptance. The unit cost has been brought down substantially from the point of market entry. Tesla's electric vehicles are pushing in this direction but it will still take some time.
>our rapidly dwindling connectivity

...

Sorry to be extremely obtuse, but since when has our connectivity been rapidly dwindling? It seems to have only been growing since the network launched.
Yeah I realized that came across as sounding like bragging but I was more just stating it matter of factly. I mean it's true isn't it? That's why we're on HN.
just skimmed the beginning, saw a mention of the use of popcount. That looks interesting. It is an article like this that I really enjoy on HN. Thanks for writing it.
Yeah, there really isn't any way to implement that version of the Monty Hall problem in the real world. You could say that Monty Hall randomly picks a door, and if he picks the winning door, that round of the game is aborted and you (the contestant) are given a drug that makes you forget that round ever happened. The rounds continue until Monty Hall happens to reveal a losing door, and that's the only one you will ever remember.

This is so detached from normal events in life that the paradoxical nature is much less impactful, so it's nowhere near as enticing of a thought experiment. It is, however, similar (equivalent, methinks) to the "God's Coin Toss" problem, which is also popular and which also has gotten some attention on Hacker News: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec17.html
Exactly what I thought. I've seen some bizarre stuff come out of autocorrect, so I tend to give a little latitude in that department. But, if the message says something like "Heyyyy u r so hott," that's one that's getting deleted or ignored.
You Can Now Swipe Up on Tinder If You 'Super Like' Someone
The art historian mentioned by oppie is most likely Erwin Panofsky
Such articles should start by:
IPFS = Internet Protocol File system

Just because it makes stuff clearer. Heck the project page could use some of that too ;)
The site is returning an error "This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.", but here's a cached version and some other links:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kOJQO0i...

http://www.darpa.mil/program/systems-of-neuromorphic-adaptiv...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyNAPSE
Sweet visualizations!

Have you measured the performance of this form of tessellation vs. using GL_INVERT on the stencil buffer to implement the even-odd fill rule? I've always been curious about the relative performance of the two approaches when you have to tessellate at runtime.
"in the cloud" == "on the Internet"?
I wouldn't call the market for general aviation semi commoditized. Even the state of is working hard to create a decent competitor.
Police the violation - I agree. Should have been clearer perhaps.

i think we need to discuss why you should be able to write to your car. Or rather, there will become a OSL layer style to the car. Drive train, brakes, steering. These are things I question why you should be able to do more than verify the binary. If you want to, turn up the fuel mix or something (showing my clear understanding of cars), well, apply for a UEFI key and sign your own binary. If the GPS on the car shows you on a public highway with a unlicensed binary drive train, frankly they can pull out the tyre bursting chains.

I don't think there should be some untouchable chip at the bottom of the stack able to stop the car if the "right" people send the code. Too dangerous. But I also don't want half coded ideas driving next to me at 100kph.

Does this mean there won't be a Debian binary for Ford, undoing all the crap they throw in. No it should exist, but should also get on the highway approval eventually.

Yes, you should be free to modify your car, to the bare metal. No you should not be free to drive your modified car on the road next to the rest of us.

All our cars pass yearly tests assuring us they meet minimum engineering standards - why not the software in the car.

And no, not so stringent on the rest of the OSL layers - you can swap binaries on the CD player
15 Struggles of Online Shopping
The Wretched Table: How Dinner in America Became an Ordeal
Woman Prepares to Hike from Argentina to Alaska
Amazon Bans Sale of Apple and Google Streaming Devices
But is it clear this this law oppresses?
Are you suggesting that fiction cannot be logical? Sorry, i got his name conflated with J.R.R. Tolkien. This is me pokerfacing as you finger a cup of straws.

Your ignorance of military tactics renders this discussion pointless. Your statement, "Incidentally, having combat units stationed around the world doesn't do much to avoid global conflicts." when the entirety of the last half of the 20th century stands in direct opposition to your statement is what leads me to believe this.

I just sat through Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned professor, for two hours. Of all the drivel he spewed, his objection to military spending was the most aggravating. He says we spend to much money. When asked what would be a better amount, he says "(paraphrasing) I dont know less". when pushed to take a stance, he says something to the effect of "in the modern age there is no real need of a large military." He is working off of the relatively recent trend of remotely operated killing machines. If you asked him, separately, about the CIA drone program, i wonder if he would be supportive.

Regardless of our personal sentiments, time will tell. who knows, maybe your camp is right and the world will just be peaceful for the most part, and, when the increasingly rare occasion where a disagreement turns into a conflict they will fight honorably and under self imposed limits. Just like in Syria.
Wow. In the UK we see (from memory) around 4500 road deaths pa, and 4-40 gun deaths. It's not even close - you msg remember that America is the outlier for guns in almost all ways
SSH clients do not need installation. I keep a copy of PuTTY on my USB drive for this scenario.