skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The superconductor proceeded to text its ex-girlfriend all night.

Couldn't help it. But I did try and find a more sober analysis of what was going on as it seemed that the only accurate words in the title were "scientists" and "superconductor." All I found was a press release from NIMS saying they would announce at ASC2010.

"The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS; President: Sukekatsu Ushioda) has discovered that alcoholic beverages, including red wine, beer, and others, are effective in inducing superconductivity in Fe(Te,S), which is an iron-based superconductivity related substance. This result was obtained in research by a team headed by Dr. Yoshihiko Takano, Group Leader of the Nano Frontier Materials Group of the NIMS Superconducting Materials Center (Managing Director: Hiroaki Kumakura)."

http://www.nims.go.jp/eng/news/press/2010/07/p201007270.html
What age are you, out of curiosity?
Nice article. Thanks for posting. I, especially, needed to read that for more perpective (going through some similar mindstuffs).
I'm a huge kurzweil critic as well, and, in fact, believe he is overly generous sometimes in his "Mostly Correct" versus "Correct" category.

But, seriously - you've got to give the guy credit for his "* Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages."

That's a pretty far-out prediction for when he made it, and, the new Droid Apps are doing precisely that.

The voice recognition stuff that Dragon does freaks me out so much that I actually don't use them - It weirds me out to see 5-10 minutes of me talking coming out with only one or two typos. It's an uncanny valley experience. I can only imagine what it's going to be like when _translation_ experiences the same increase in performance and accuracy.

BTW - the entire point of Kurzweil's writing, and "singularity" thesis is precisely that the last 500+ years of technological growth are all building on each other, and a 20% growth next year is incomparable to what 20% growth was 100 years ago, presuming we had year over year growth of 20% in terms of our information processing capability.

We can argue if it's 30%/year, 20% year, or 10% year - but the reality is that as long as it's 10% plus (which I think every resident of HN would agree is a conservative predictor for future technological growth for the next 20 years), the curve gets freaky very soon.

Kurzweil isn't interesting in terms of the precision and absolute accuracy of his predictions - which I'll agree with you, he is overly generous - but in terms of the "class" of advances he is predicting.

Basically, anything that can be translated (pardon the pun. :-) into a "Information Processing Domain" - is going to be radically transformed in terms of performance, personalization, and miniaturization.

He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now.

So, I find his prediction about things like "nanotechnological blood and organ analysis in 20 years" to be pretty darn interesting.
It's less ridiculous since, in Ontario, the government runs the only beer store in the province. Additionally, the franchise is not found outside of Ontario.

On another note, you didn't mention whether "The Beer Store" was a trademark, just that it existed.
Back in the floppy days, archive tools matter because it can cut down the number of disks.

Cannot believe I still remember my old favorite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARJ

Screw pkzip. It always asked me to insert the first disk, again, last.
I have a trade deficit with my grocery store. I'm pretty sure most inhabitants of the industrialized world do. Why isn't Time running a story on that?
Only a small fraction of the parts in an iPhone come from America -- the majority come from Taiwan, Japan, China and 3 other countries. So yes, China probably gets more of the entire manufacturing cost of the iPhone than the US does. But not by much. The US, of course, should be able to book that sweet sweet margin of profit that Apple enjoys. (Or should the Bermuda tax haven Apple presumably employs book the profit?)
Scanning Electron Microscope analysis of ground coffee
I get anywhere from 1%-3% clickthrough, depending on the app, with AdMob. Whether your ads blend in with your app and where you place your ads affects this rate. AdMob recommends that you place your ads at the end of a user action, as in, once they've played a few rounds of a game, present them with their score and an ad. I think that's exactly what Angry Birds does.
I'd be interested in being able to select adding it to my instant play queue or my regular queue.

Or even better would be setting my instant queue as the default, but if it's not available for streaming, adding it to my regular queue.
I have sympathy for this guy but look nobody promised you a job when you took on those loans. It is basic risk reward. You took on a lot of loans to get a law degree because lawyers get paid well. You took on risk and it did not work out. Happens. Often too entrepreneurs.
Try some beiber with bacon!

http://bieber.ly/2bcf
Winklevoss twins sue Facebook again. Now want Boat Race to be re-rowed?
It makes sense only in the abstract. Once you look at the details of how IPv4 was implemented, it is clear that such an idea makes no sense at all. All IPv4 devices and software are hard coded to use 32 bit addresses. No more and no less. No amount of "design" can make 128 bits fit into 32 short of having designed IPv4 with bigger (or variable length) addresses in the first place.

To have an "extended IPv4 space" you must change all hardware and all software to be aware of that extended space. Hardware/software/networks that haven't been changed yet won't be able to use or route "extended" IPv4 packets. Such a situation has all of the same problems as IPv6.

Given those fundamental limitations plenty has been done to make inter-operating between protocols work as well as possible.

The ::ffff:/96 space was set aside as the "IPv4 embedded in IPv6" space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses) so that IPv6 aware software can talk about IPv4 addresses. Though cannot talk to them because there is no way to encode the 128 bit return address in the 32 bit field.

IPv4 was extended with the protocol 41 header option to allow two IPv6 systems to exchange IPv6 packets over the existing IPv4 network (this is how 6to4 and teredo/6in4(tunnelbroker) systems work). This effectively means that anyone with a public IPv4 address (or in the case of teredo even some systems behind NAT4) can talk to IPv6 machines albeit through translation mechanisms that can hurt performance.
Hire HN: Full Time Node/MongoDB Dev For Existing Analytics Platform
We are small but highly experienced and successful marketing company that has a focus predominately in the mobile space. All of us have been dealing with the online marketing world in some capacity for over a decade.

We are looking to hire a knowledgable and insightful developer full time that can help us continue to build out our analytics platform that we have been developing for the past couple of months.

Just to provide some insight into the code base of our existing system, it's roughly around 1000 lines of code broken up between a couple of different apps so it should not be too difficult for one to get up to scratch with things as they currently are.

You need to be well versed in node.js/coffeescript, the express library, mongodb, and ideally you would also have some experience with analytics. Some marketing experience would also help but is not required.

You also need to be passionate about what you do and this stuff absolutely must interest you. It's important to me personally that anyone who I work with loves what they do. Who wouldn't want to get paid for doing what they love to do after all.

Not to be too vague, but your starting assignment would fall into the realm of adding some ancilary reporting features to our existing system and then soon after that to help us begin making our system 'smart' in a variety of ways.

We have a lot of cool things in it already and have many more things planned, so if this has piqued your interest let me know and we can chat.

No location requirements, telecommuting is fine by us. Salary is negotiable based on your experience.

If interested please send along your CV, a brief explanation of any applicable work you've done, expectations that you may have of us, and your salary requirements to stephan@govista.com or the email in my HN profile.

Thanks!
It will work wonders as an alternative as long as you remove the 90% water content.
Electronics assembly in china is also done in an "air conditioned" environment, FWIW. Has to be, or the products wouldn't work well. The iPhone is undoubtedly assembled in a room which is controlled for temperature, humidity, and dust at least as well as the offices in cupertino. Well-lit, too.
It's built on top of bigtable, so presumably users can request the state of an object at any point in time just by specifying a timestamp with their query.
No, it's not.

The components that China imports from elsewhere to assemble iPhones will be credited as China's import value. The same happens recursively for those countries that export the components to China until it eventually traces back to U.S. export.

If you just look at the difference between China and the U.S., then yes it will look bad. But the two thing will cancel out each other in the whole system.

The metric is fine. Just don't take it at face value. The sad part is that it is often abused for political reasons.
A minor technical point, but in your quote, Benjamin Franklin is not referring to a vaccine. He is talking about variolation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation

He refers to the year 1736.

Edward Jenner's first test of his vaccine occurred on On 14 May 1796, when Jenner inoculated James Phipps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
You'll be able to dig up thousands of ridiculous name-claims, I never really doubted that.

They'd definitely argue that their trademark isn't ridiculous.

Yes, so would Apple and Microsoft. The same logic/idea apply here as well.
ML derivative functional programming languages are frequently ideal for project Euler in general - Haskell, f#, ocaml etc.
Something along these lines: http://timetobleed.com/rewrite-your-ruby-vm-at-runtime-to-ho...
If you signed a contract under the old rates/limits, then those should still apply regardless of any new changes.

I would call T-Mobile and have a conversation with them; they cannot unilaterally change the terms of a written contract.
Doesn't the SEC still have a hand in regulating these Goldman-type transactions?
>But really, the most likely place for lasers as a viable weapon is space. Without air, the difficulties with plasma creation and turbulence are removed. The issue of power and optics remain, but I could plausibly see a satellite or space station with the stability and power to use a laser as a weapon.

The hard part of almost any space-based power consumption is the difficulty of later dissipating the wasted heat energy. Conduction and convection don't work when there's no surrounding medium. Without lots of clever technology, then, your space-based laser is a double-edged sword.
"# 10 [...] If Apple were to switch to WebM and drop H.264 tomorrow, would you then herald it as a great move?"

I bet it would help, but I don't see Apple doing that anytime soon.

Currently, Apple uses PowerVR and nVidia chips for hardware decoding in iDevices and Macs, and those companies have already shown interest in building chips that offer WebM support. But Apple would have to find some way to support WebM hardware decoding on current devices, something like a Rosetta layer for video playback.

If Apple were to only include full support on new devices, it would feel the wrath of the entire tech press, not to mention organizations like Consumer Reports and Greenpeace. Apple only risks that kind of bad press when it's about a technology they've authored themselves.
It seems that people who say no for a living—designers, directors, critics, even big-league VCs—all fare poorly on HN. I wonder why that is?
Secrets of BackType's (YC S08) Data Engineers
I believe you confused this site with Reddit.

Nothing against Reddit. I like it quite much. It's just another site with a different culture.

EDIT: I concede my up-tightness and leave the comment here for historical reference. Good night to all involved.
So what kind of code base do they have? Could they make it free/open source software?
> Like using a student whose programming skills are probably worth over $100K in the real world as an indentured servant, dependent on you for a degree (and perhaps even a visa to remain in the country).

Supply and demand. There are way more people who wish to pursue a PhD in CS than there are spots for them. If you really would rather be on the outside making six figures, your adviser would be happy to oblige--(s)he can fill your chair tomorrow with any one of a hundred people who are equally qualified.

It cuts the other way too--advisers who really treat their students like shit (as in, "pick up my dry cleaning") find that the supply of people who want to work with them dwindles. (Unless less they are so brilliant and well-connected that they can get away with it. It all evens out.)

There is a market for talent both inside and outside of the university.
Oh, you mean psychopathic thieves! You are right, they are passionate about their work.

As far as bankers go, they work from 10 to 4 M-Th and from 10 to 6 on Fridays.
Wireless and Mobile ventures attract 'limitless' capital because investors feel that it offers an attractive return/risk profile, often these are winner take all types of businesses and once a winner has been established money pours in.

If you feel it's unfair then start offering a more attractive risk/reward profile to investors. This FB IPO (initial private offering) doesn't screw other entrepreneurs it forces them to compete. Investors aren't under any obligation to fund your startup.

As my mom always said when I complained about things being unfair: life isn't fair.
With mobile being more important in the long run than desktops, and Android gaining ever more importance over the iPhone, we just need Google adopting their open codecs in both Android hardware and YouTube, and it's game over for h.264.
The correct URL For info on BSON is http://bsonspec.org
Using auto means 100% compatibility with existing C++ code. Using some other name would potentially require updates to existing code, which is bad.
I hate date dropdowns. I think an app like this can borrow a UI idea from teuxdeux.com and let users enter schedule tweets over a timesheet-ish grid.

btw, are you the guy from the famfamfam icons? You are like a legend man!
The "animation" is most likely a side effect of the integration process, it's hard to avoid considering the high running time of force directed layout algorithms, especially because in this case it is brute force O(n2) rather than using something like Barnes-Hut that makes it more like O(n log n).
I don't think that's an ability that's exposed to app engine users. I don't see any mention of it: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/
Companies have massive incentive to use every tax loophole they can find. Honestly, what did they expect to happen? Another option is for the government to fix all the loopholes and then watch these companies move out of the US.
None. And its likely that software decoding of WebM will behave on mobile devices the same way Flash behaves. Okay in newer devices, but laughable in previous generation devices.
A Revolution At the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California has undergone a $19M renovation - and the results are astounding! Here are some articles from the privileged "preview" crowd:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/a-revolution-at-the-computer-history-museum

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375610,00.asp

And from our local newspaper, the SJ Mercury News: http://www.siliconvalley.com/opinion/ci_17069405

I can't wait to go see it when it opens to the public!
My apologies gnufs! I shall never again desecrate the hacker culture by injecting bacon into a justin beiber thread again. My Bad.
> 2. Unions don't have to fit the rigid model you have in your head of the UAW.

Maybe not, but let's see some examples that have been significantly better for over 10 years. (And no, teachers unions aren't better.)

I agree that it isn't obvious that unions must necessarily be a disaster in the US, but that's a theory argument and you know what they say about theory and practice....
Actually, despite having all these points, it looks like one of the moderators hung a stone around its neck and kicked it off the plank. It's nowhere to be found on the front page.

It's easy to get points with emotional hot-button stories here, just like anywhere else. It's not a sign of 'worthiness'.
Your point is excellent.

The thing to remember is that when two systems each have patents, it's a false dichotomy to ask which set of patents trump the other. It's entirely possible that VP3 infringes on MPEG-LA patents _and_ H.264 infringes on On2/Google patents.

The chronology of the two is nearly irrelevant.
SproutCore Book Project Proposal
First, these aren't 10 questions for John Gruber; it's 5 questions, with one of them phrased slightly differently 5 times, and another phrased two different ways.

Second, virtually all of these questions take as an axiom that H.264 is IP-encumbered and WebM/VP8 isn't. Technical analyses (by people who have actually implemented H.264 and are familiar with the patents) suggests that that simply isn't the case. That the author of this article thinks that VP3's release prior to H.264 might invalidate any part of the H.264 patent pool suggests that he may not be at all familiar with the patents in play.

Similarly, support for a "known patent troll" isn't germane to the debate if that patent troll is in the mix one way or the other, which appears to be the case.

Third, the fact that the H.264 patent pool hasn't been brought to bear on On2 tells us nothing at all about how successful H.264 would be against WebM; it's not at all unlikely that MPEG-LA sees nothing worth suing in Xiph/On2, and if that's the case, it is surely a different situation once Google pushes adoption.

Fourth, an "open pledge of support" for WebM from chip manufacturers is worth exactly nothing to the people who have spent many many hundreds of millions of dollars on mobile devices with hardware-accelerated H.264. One can reasonably argue that those people don't matter, but they can't with a straight face suggest that a "pledge of support" in any way mitigates the problem.

There's nothing wrong with this post as a contribution to the WebM/H.264 Apple/Google debate. But one gets the sense that the author sees it as some sort of devastating argument. I'm not sure he realizes that handwaving around "known patent trolls" and "decades of threats by MPEG-LA" and "is it because said codec isn't promoted by Apple", he's actually making a fairly weak sounding argument. He sounds emotional.

I'm gonna go with the analysis of the guy who said his B-frame implementation gave x264 the project's single greatest encoding quality improvement over the guy who thinks the release date of VP3 determines which patents encumber VP8, thanks.
Mozilla Labs Game Gallery
I'm a big wine fan and always wanted to really like Corkd but it never really did what I wanted in a way that worked for me. I never found it a great place to find new wines, or store my library or find out if a wine was very good For example a lot of wines are scored, but a lot of times only by one user, I'd love to see a more robust scoring system.

Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance and perhaps its gotten better, but it always left me wanting more. I think there is still a gap here to be filled. This is a passionate community that I think is still underserved online.
One way to monetize it is for standardized test preparation. Companies like Kaplan charge an arm and a leg for sample tests.

Likewise you could align the questions with common curriculums and sell separate fortifying study packs for primary and secondary school subjects.

I'd probably sell a 12-month pass to each individual subject for $1 and have a set of achievements for each that will drag you through a variety of questions multiple times to unlock them all. Hopefully you get the person to buy another subject the next semester and so on.

All of this requires actually studying the standardized tests and curricula and may need customization per state.

Your competitor in this space: http://www.ixl.com/
You need at least Perl 5.10 (and 5.12.3 should be out shortly). If your OS vendor has an older version installed, see App::perlbrew to install your own updated version independent of the system Perl 5.
Wow, it's not but that's a great find. Thank you!
Sorry, I meant DIR-615/825 not 655/855. You are correct, the 655 does not support IPv6 at the moment. According to Dlink support forums in 2009 there were plans for the 655 to get upgraded but I haven't heard anything since.

Note: the way Dlink has done the IPv6 upgrades on the other models is by releasing a new hardware revision. So DIR-615 Rev C,D, and E supports IPv6, but Rev A and B don't. =\
I think every product shutdown should be accompanied with a video. Granted, Gary is a pro, but it feels very personal and comforting to have the founder explain why it was shut down.

Every time Google or Yahoo close down a product, they should have the team lead explain what happened in a video. It would soften the blow to the community and give a nice face to what often seems like a harsh move.
Exactly - Looking at one product or sector or country in isolation makes no sense at all.
I'm curious - where do you draw the line between a technological advance and a design advance?

Apple, for example, is usually held up as an example of awesome design. But behind Apple's design is some pretty impressive technology. Why is this different than Maps or GMail or Websearch? Is it solely due to reputation, because Apple hides many of the technical details of its products behind this cloud of secrecy, while Google is openly proud of having advanced technology?
He was just having fun with by combining this with another site which does a similar thing.
Fast Multipole Methods FTW! O(n)

Haha, completely unnecessary. Just wanted to show off.
I think the parent is just suggesting a quick annealing process—drag should increase exponentially over time, but reset to 0 when a new node is added.
True, but the fact alone that it can store lots and lots of information, has the ability to obtain new information wirelessly, is "flat, book shaped, with a large screen and lots of buttons underneath the screen", etc... is what sells me on the comparison.

Being able to store Wikipedia offline would definitely clinch the deal though, even if it just stored entries on geographical locations and places, ignoring everything else... or if it had a Wiki app that let you choose topics and "cache" them locally. That would be awesome.
I though that question was disingenuous. Gruber's big support was for Apple dropping Flash and supporting H.264. It's dangerous to argue about being "less" or "more" open, but I'm going out on a limb and saying that going from Flash to HTML5+H.264 is moving in the correct direction.

Moving from HTML5+H.264 to HTML5+WebM, or perhaps to supporting both, wouldn't be inconsistent with the switch from Flash to HTML5+H.264 they made with iOS.
You'd never get elected into the U.S Congress. Congratulations, I guess.