skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like a lot of the comments here blasting the technology are related to its ability to output at the hi-fidelity we are now used to on the web / mobile 3D experiences.

This level of immersiveness/naturalness/fidelity will obviously come in due course.

Michael Siebel is here talking about the opportunity (obviously) — which is IMMENSE.

This is basically the iPhone/App-Store bandwagon all over again. If you can jump on it, do so.
I'm not aware of any company doing that (I know backblaze does that but at the pod level, not at the datacenter level... because they only have one)

You may be interested in Tahoe-LAFS though (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs). It has many good things in it, one of them is that all files get erasure-encoded so that k nodes out of n are needed to restore the file. When you set a node to be a storage provider (such as S3, GCS, ...), then you effectively have erasure encoding over providers: If S3 is down, you can still retrieve your data from the rest of the providers.

Some people have actually tried to do it, as described in the first section in (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/TipsTricks).
An NSA-Proof Twitter (2014)
> How is this better than using dongles?

In every possible way, by not being a bunch of dongles?

It slips into most laptop carriers, it's instant to set up and tear down, it has a constant arrangement so I can get used to where a connection is, it keeps sensitive stuff like M.2 PCBs and 2.5" drives nicely enclosed, it keeps my desk organized and clear of clutter...
> Before palatable young white guys who say “bruh” with alarming frequency spun daily monologues into Sony HD cams for audiences of millions?

This is racist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb
Massachusetts did this in the program that Obamacare was modeled after, so clearly that's not (currently) illegal at the state level.

The fee structure is different (just a missed deduction on the state taxes, not a separate monthly charge), but it still works.
OpenBMC https://code.facebook.com/posts/1601610310055392/introducing...
Obama could not have introduced Single Payer. There is just no political will in the US to do that. None. The medical industry is in one form or another is 1/6th of the US economy, you can't change that overnight.
I'm a pretty active lurker on HN and I really had to think hard about what App.net was and why I might care. I think that is an indicator of why they might have had a hard time surviving. Even hardcore nerds didn't know about it so I really don't expect "normal" people to know about it. :(
Just going to plug one of my favorite blogs here: http://elevr.com/ They're experimenting with basic VR interaction design. How do you represent things in VR, how do you communicate with other people in the room when you're wearing a headset, how does physical context change your experience. Fascinating, basic stuff we're going to have to figure out before we can build meaningful experiences in VR. http://elevr.com/would-you-like-to-see-an-invisible-sculptur...
Thank you! It's been a very fun and rewarding shift in career from what I was doing before. Glad people are enjoying my work!

And please do! We'll get you on the path through the Well again...
Blogs and shitty news sites like Business Insider don't practice standard due diligence like newspapers used to. They just print whatever they want, it's ground zero for fake news. There should be more consequence for sites printing things like this, but there isn't, and that's why we are suffering with misinformation.
Yeah, I would assume some combination of eye-tracking and facial scanning might work.

There is research into translating real facial movements onto a digital model. If you are wearing a headset already, I am sure there is something that could be done to 'scan' facial movements.
I've been there a number of times, but not for extended periods. I'm not moving, but the idea of moving has crossed my mind. I have no kids or family and I currently live downtown Austin in a studio (no car and bike everywhere without problems). I have a job at a local start up right now, but things change.
Surely you mean factoring numbers into primes as primes cannot be factored.
Early next week I'm switching to a 2G feature phone with no camera. I'm sure I'll be visiting HN (and a handful of other sites) much less, I'm sure there will be some withdrawal, but I'm also sure that I won't miss anything and that I'll be much calmer and more focused. I've thought about this for a few years, really since i first got a smartphone, and I'm persuaded that they are a problem, not a solution.
> "Silence" is in the title

Silence as a noun and silence as a verb are very different things. I'm sitting silent right now, but it's not because I've been bound and gagged.
Surely today's HMDs could be both much better than earlier generations, and not nearly good enough yet?
My brother's work calls their $1500 deductible option the "high deductible" plan.

The limits are more sane than they used to be, but a lot of people that are getting subsidies aren't going to have an easy time coming up with $10,000 more in a given year. It's high enough.
Jason's report was excellent and the discussion contributed by azet and lvh was also very on-point.

In contrast, some of the Tox team's response makes me want to take up drinking. The "crypto secret club gimmick" remark in particular.
That could be the bio of any tech. iPhones were this when they came out, now everyone has an iPhone. The adoption rate is not as immediately obvious with VR though.
Right. I live in Oklahoma which has...a strong 2nd Amendment contingent. The OK state government is taking a lot of heat from the federal government for refusing to implement the Real ID requirements for state DLs.

I'm not a conservative, but I can see the reasoning behind it: they know very well that this is one important step towards building a national database of personal information (or more likely, augmenting one that already exists). Actually, I have found more on the right concerned about privacy, government surveillance, etc, than on the left because this concern naturally meshes with the right's "small federal government" stance.

Remember how Social Security numbers were "just for Social Security -- not any kind of personal identifier"?

But perhaps the left, which has just as much ability to be hypocritical as the right, will see the light starting...oh, say, 12pm on January 20.
What handheld has come anywhere closer than smelling the GameBoy family's farts?
Right :X
If you click details and click through to the provider summary:

https://content.carefirst.com/sbc/APHMMN5DRXCMMN5MN012017.pd...

The explanation is "it's a typo".

Medical and Prescription Drug combined:
$6,550 individual/$13,100 family for In-Network Providers;
$13,100 individual/$26,200 family for Out-of-Network Providers.
Those gaps are actually just material milled away so the product doesn't block the vents on either side of the bottom MBP.
I had this problem with U-Verse DSL when I lived in Tulsa.

I did not have this issue with AT&T Fiber in Austin. They do not appear to be throttling any services or websites like I experienced with AT&T U-Verse DSL in Tulsa.
> Technologies tend to reflect the values of their inventors.

Maybe for single-use or "constrained" technologies (to be honest I don't even believe that - how does a B-52 Stratofortress reflect the values of Orville and Wilbur Wright?). But isn't the whole point of generalized AI that it's not like other technologies? Even if "regular" technology reflects the values of its inventors, what reason is there to believe that an AI will? AI is a technology that can use itself.
In Social Media Age, Young Cops Get Trained for Real-Life Conversation
HTC Vive supports the OpenVR "standard" - and I believe the HMD from Razer (yep, they make one - yet you never hear a peep about it) is the same.

The Rift doesn't have Linux support (anymore - the original DK1 did), and probably never will. There are some 3rd party reverse-engineered drivers for it, but they are limited in only allowing for the display to turn on, and view the output, plus a couple of other minor things. Tracking isn't supported, from what I recall.

For what its worth, I'm not even sure whether the Vive or the Razer offering even fully supports Linux; oftentimes you see things like "support for openwidget" actually meaning "Windows and Mac version of openwidget only".

The best way to get Linux HMD/VR support is the old-school, homebrew PC VR way (you know, the way Palmer did it before Occulus) - hack it yourself.
I wish more companies could be this transparent
The core complaint here, as far as I can tell, seems to be that bare bones insurance plans were banned.

The reasoning is that, if you allow bare bone plans, then someone could offer plans that let you pay a nominal fee but cover nothing. That, of course, is pretty much nixing the mandate, and you run into the same issues with pre-existing condition protections destroying the insurance market.

Neither of us really know enough about your attorney friend's exact situation to know what went on, but that $450/month plan certainly covers a lot more than the $175/month one. Before, he was essentially self-insuring for the less costly situations, and now that insurance is required to be externalized.

Not perfect, and I'd like if Republicans came up with a solution to ease your friend's situation. But if it comes to a tradeoff between people dying and an attorney being forced to purchase a more comprehensive health insurance plan, it's really not a hard decision.
If only the headline reflected that.
What 2017 brings for a java developer?
"Other generics coming to market" is what I meant by "a couple more iterations of competition".
Face-hugger HMDs?
Interesting thanks. It's a shame that Asana doesn't allow one to estimate time for tasks. It would be useful for fixed-price projects, to both make initial project quotes, and later see how you're doing against your estimates.

I had a look at Paydirt which shows time spent vs estimated for tasks and projects, but it's not as nicely integrated with a task board like Asana. You can import Trello projects but it's a one-way import, not that integrated.

A well integrated app for project board / estimates / time tracking / invoicing would be fantastic.
Yeah, I think the current iteration of VR will be comparable to how the Ninentdo Wii and Kinect were received--initial enthusiasm giving way to the realization that movement is physically taxing and requires a bunch of dedicated space.

Right now, I also think the costs are still too prohibitive for most people whose Kinect sensor or Wii-motes have been long idle.

I think Microsoft's strategy of marketing VR/AR as a productivity tool is interesting.
Absolutely. Figuring out how the hell the interactions and UI work in VR is one of the hardest - and most interesting - parts to the entire process.

Even really simple stuff like "OK, I need a graphics options menu" becomes a significant UI design challenge.

Personally I'm figuring it out while building a big experience in VR, but hey - that's what Early Access is for!

Bookmarked - thanks.
With actual insurance, you aren't paying for other people. Your premiums are based on the expected value of your future claims.

The financial incentive helps preserve that property: If a company can identify the cheaper customers, then they can offer lower premiums than the companies that can't. The customers left behind are more expensive, forcing those premiums to rise in order to remain solvent.
I haven't done any workout in a VR headset yet but I have cried in one, and the lens got fogged up. Clearly some sort of passive or active ventilation will have to be part of VR headsets.
That was a fun read. Just until recently, I also worked on a code base that originated in Think C/68k, albeit in the order of several hundred thousand lines of code. It was quite the effort when I had to take it through Apple's transitions, porting it to OS X/Carbon/Codewarrior, then to Xcode/gcc/UTF-8, then to Intel, finally lifting the whole thing to Cocoa/64 bit/clang. We even had prototypes on iOS.

The Windows version remained largely unchanged despite being ported to Unicode and 64 bits. Microsoft is doing a crazy good job at keeping APIs alive.
I don't really know about that. Take a look at how mushed your hand gets just to type out a message with your thumbs on your phone.
In that situation you would have to somehow control for collusion amongst the poker pros against the machine. Entirely blind, constrained bet amounts, etc.
The cost is directly a reflection of the risk pool and coverage.

Now think about who is buying ACA plans off the marketplace. First, it's almost entirely people eligible for subsidies (86%) since the plans are cost prohibitive without them. Second, it's people who didn't previously have or couldn't get insurance, unemployed, or who aren't offered insurance through work.

You can see immediately the problem... ACA subscribers will overwhelmingly be high-cost subscribers. There aren't any healthy subscribers to ACA because healthy Americans are working and get their insurance through their employer and therefore aren't eligible for subsidies and have no reason to look at the high-cost exchanges.

The ACA is effectively cornering the market for super-high risk pool, and premiums on ACA markets will continue to rise to reflect it.

If the subsidies were available regardless of availability of a so-called "affordable" employer sponsored plan, and if they employer's contribution could be taken by an employee and applied to an ACA plan in addition to subsidies, it would fix this all in an instant. Suddenly healthy Americans would be shopping on the exchanges, fundamentally altering the risk pool and drive down premiums for everyone.
>I cannot have this workflow in any other tiling window manager!

I could easily replicate this in bspwm+sxhkd with a small script.
$26,200 is a typo? or correct? Awful close to my approximation of $30k.
So it sounds like the idea is, make Trump look so bad that no possible future blackmail material could possibly match what people already think about him.

We could take it further- grab your tinfoil hat! What if the reason Trump was allowed to win this subterfuge-drenched election was precisely that he's a character that can sustain this kind of reputational rock-bottom. What did the Kremlin have on Clinton or Romney? Probably nothing nearly as bad, but bad enough to mortify a regular human. Trump's superhuman tolerance for shame actually makes him the BEST candidate against foreign actors, closing off an entire avenue of attack against the country!
There is really nothing wrong with committing often. For me a unit of work can be fixing a typo. Of course if you share code with others or user CI/CD you might want to commit only working code.

You can always rebase before pushing upstream.
Presto Web rendering engine (Opera 12.15) on GitHub.com
Well if you use a generic DNS server you won't get DNS answers that are geoip based because you will hit the cache of that DNS server and since they don't query google servers with your ISP IP you will get a generic endpoint.
On point #3, this is exactly why I've been building Primrose (https://www.primrosevr.com). Primrose is meant to be a framework for web developers to be able to build applications that live inside of a virtual environment. Microsoft calls this "Holographic Applications" (I don't exactly like that term, but I suppose I will get over it). The point is to divorce the need to do 3D graphics and geometry from building the application, to have those as the baseline and provide on top of that a shared set of UI metaphors. There is a really easy analogy to draw with standard, 2D GUI systems: you shouldn't have to write an HTML rendering engine before making a Web application, you shouldn't have to work in a game framework to make VR-enabled applications.

Please check out Primrose. I know it has some rough edges here and there, but I've already used it to make some interesting things (a client of mine was recently featured on Bloomberg.com for http://rex.legend3d.com). I know people are wary about "single-contributor" projects, but I've already been building Primrose for 2 years now, it's not going anywhere, and I'm open to bringing collaborators on, just nobody has really stepped up (and I've been so focused on working on VR projects for clients that I've not really had the time to proselytize).

Somebody is going to bring up A-Frame: I think A-Frame is a really nice system, I just think its design goals don't really match what I think is important. A-Frame wants to be the entity-component system for WebVR. That's great. But I don't think that meshes well with "get web developers on board". I don't want developers to have to think about what sort of motion controller component to use in their system. I actually want the system to be more restricted, less open-ended than A-Frame. Also, Primrose came out long before A-Frame, so I'm still married to Primrose for as long as I can be productive in it.

There are some limitations where I haven't quite reached my goal of making VR accessible to web developers, but that is more an issue of limited number of man-months. You can build useful applications with Primrose today. But I have a very clear goal in mind and if it's something you agree with, I would appreciate the help.
This is one of the more ironic parts - obviously, few people choose death. They choose to massively delay going to the doctor, driving up total cost by skipping preventative care, and then bankruptcy when they finally do.

That bankruptcy is not a magic free moment - it simply means someone else pays. Depending on the case, this might be the state through medicare/medicaid, it might be the health care provider, or it might be third party creditors.

Eventually, though, those defaults are all factored into operating costs of hospitals, the government, banks and so on - meaning you and I pay for them.

So, in the old system, we were all forced to pay for health coverage, whether we liked it or not. In the new system, we're all forced to pay for health coverage, whether we like it or not. ACA is explicit and, with extreme certainty, cheaper, since it expands preventative care on a systemic level.

But, of course, since people didn't realize they were paying for it previously, they now throw fits because the cost is made explicit.
100k is still too low, but it is better than nothing.

A family of four in San Francisco with an income of 100k a year qualifies for housing assistance. Yes, I know, most families are two income now, but it doesn't speak well to this severe "shortage" that a critical worker with ultra valuable skills in short supply still needs direct welfare from the government to get by.

I'd say 200k for a minimum salary. I know that seems high to people, but remember, by and large we rely on labor markets to set salary levels. If you can't hire the experienced lawyer or financial analyst you want for 100k a year to work in a big, loud open office, we generally say that's the market's answer. Increase the offer and job conditions or accept that people have found higher value work to do.

Giving employers the right to control who is and is not allowed to come into the united states is a really, really big deal. It's a complete end-run around normal labor markets. If we're going to allow this, it needs to be a slam-dunk decision - yes, clearly this is a very essential and very well paid worker. To me, 100k doesn't come close, especially in the expensive areas around silicon valley (where many of the companies claiming a shortage and lobbying for visas are located).
I played with a Vive for a while and it's pretty mind-blowing that it's possible to do it, I also haven't bothered picking it up again. Aside from games I'm having a hard time thinking of any problem domain that would be served by VR. We've had screen-based VR going back to the 90s (VRML?) and the few applications that were attempted like virtual tours didn't really take off. I look at how little has been applied to using the Google Glass and Kinect as precedents. Even voice recognition has been going for 25 years and is barely past the novelty stage. I know the tech is still relatively new, but it's been a few years since we've had retail VR headsets and no one has come up with a killer app.
It's the arbitrary length that causes you to have more pigeons than pigeonholes.
I think smartphones were this when they came out. Apple succeeded because they figured out how to sell smartphones to the popular crowd. It will be interesting to see who can do this for VR.
Thanks! The app uses some disk cache (when transcoding or watching something using bittorrent) that is automatically cleared when the app closes. We follow each platform's standard so the app uses the default temporary folder for each OS.
Why Peter Thiel Fears “Star Trek”
I understand from the macsales page (http://blog.macsales.com/39345-owc-makes-macbooks-pro-again-...) that it has space for a couple 2.5" and M.2 drives. But that obviously doesn't take up all the volume. I don't know about a battery.

But rectangular prisms are nice. Why does everything need to get shallow around the edges or the middle? So they can run some marketing-speak and say that their device is 1.7mm thick[0]? I'd hope for a large battery, but even empty space would be fine.

An eGPU would be pretty neat, but hot, expensive, and complicated. I'd love one with an ordinary battery expansion and some I/O ports.

[0] (May be thicker in locations other than the far corner where it tapers down to a sharp edge)
> regularly skate with/against NHL bound Junior players,

I've skated with guys that didn't make the NHL cut and they were extremely fast to me. All most no effort it seemed like.

That's really shocking to me that you could get a workout from VR. Fog has to be an issue, no?
Civil and mundane criminal uses were the goal from the beginning. "Terrorism" was just the tool they used to sell the masses on the idea.
The problem with "room scale" is very few people have a (near empty) room in their households which they can dedicate to a single-user VR experience. Every user in the household would need their own room (hmm - will new homes be advertised with these as "upgrades"?)...
That's assuming it was a macro decision, and not a micro decision. The govt could have had specific intel on a particular activist, or cell that they knew were using Signal, and shut it down to deal with that situation at that time.
Extensive discussion of EFF's article on this news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13390511
Of course they got a ton of downloads. Apple promoted it in the App Store before it was even launched and also sent out an email blast when it launched.
Common sense says the same thing that caused the dust bowl in the USA (changes, as noted in the article, to the land use, abandoned agriculture, etc.) caused this dust storm.

Then a team of <insert previous liberal establishment group that calls for carbon taxes and globalization> comes along to set the record straight with their conspiracy theories about knowing everything, etc.

People come by to see what's all the fuss about... labeled as "deniers", a term used to associate people that disagree with anthropogenic climate change conspiracy theories in with holocaust deniers.

If you think there is another valid reason to use the word "deniers" when referring to people questioning climate change conspiracy theories, then you probably haven't heard of burden of proof.
Buckboard Bacon
Hololens tracking isn't nearly good enough, in my opinion, and isn't going to get there soon. Vision algorithms + and inertial tracker could be interesting though. Appropriate tech exists, but is currently expensive.

There has been good work on eye tracking in other spaces for many years now, so that seems a much cleaner implementation path to work well.

edit: I'm going to add a caveat, I mostly care about VR and AR in decidedly non-consumer applications, so my bar may be unreasonably high for many consumer applications.