skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did some digging around to figure out what's actually going on here; my background as a chemist includes some time working in biofuels.

This technology is micron-sized beads of ammonia borane encapsulated in various plastics. So far, they've figured out how to store hydrogen and release it at least modestly safely. They're working on varying the plastics so that they can recharge the beads with hydrogen; so far nothing they can demonstrate.

Problems: they can't recharge it, yet, it would be hella toxic if it caught on fire, and you'd have to handle it using powders-handling equipment. They gloss over this, saying it's "like a liquid", but it isn't; in particular powders are vulnerable to static charge, which in the case of metal hydrides wrapped in jellied gasoline is a Bad Thing.

That, and it's a hydrogen delivery mechanism, making it a chemical battery, not a fuel per se. One still needs to make the hydrogen.

This research, IMHO, is more likely to lead to better batteries than to a replacement internal combustion fuel for gasoline engines.
As an employer, the question I'm always asking is this: What value do you bring to my company?

When I get a generic CV I'm getting told what qualifications the person has, but rarely am I told what they might do for me to justify their wage. What skills do you have? Why are they useful to my business? Why will employing you make my company more valuable?

If I take funding for my company, the level of funding indicates a valuation of the company. If I take on an employee I'm saying that the value of the company rises by about 5 times their salary.

It's the same with a startup. How do they know you can do things that they will need done? Answer that question, directly, without hesitation, and with convincing examples, and there's a good chance they'll take you.
But if you have less to win, why should you take risks anyway?
Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web
Is the US really much better? As we saw earlier in the week from Netflix, slower average bandwidth than Canada... hardly any competition and so on.

If you want decent internet connectivity, move to Europe or Japan or something. They're rolling out 100mbps broadband in the UK.
Would be interesting to see if companies like Google, who have a significant stake in a "free and open internet", could establish operations in Canada. Google wants users online as much as possible so they can continue to serve ads. It's too bad all that dark fiber they own doesn't extend into Canada.
At the risk of adding to the intrigue here, I think it's best if this community knows that there might be someone unsaviory amongst us. It is jiganti's perogative whether or not to out the person responsible for this. However, nothing stops a bit of detective work.

Whois on both wikizu.com and crushtease.com reveal:

Registrant:
Sink Float
P.O. Box 820
Beijing, Beijing 100837
China

Administrative Contact:
Float, Sink sinkyfloaty@gmail.com
P.O. Box 820
Beijing, Beijing 100837
China
+20.13352074153 Fax --

A few tests of user profile pages shows us there is a user here named 'sinkfloat'. Strange, but not conclusive by any means. Another search using searchyc.com using 'sink float' reveals another user, 'pinksoda' making some outrageous claims about sites he/she has built [1] [2]. Also, a link to a new business they started, www.sinkfloat.com [3]. Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Whois on sinkfloat.com reveals the same contact information as wikizu.com and crushtease.com.

Knowing that jiganti mentioned this user has at least two handles here, a lot of evidence points that pinksoda and sinkfloat are one in the same and likely the person jiganti partnered with on this venture.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1299723

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1299094

[3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1269276

Conclusive? Maybe not. Certainly enough, IMO, to make anyone thinking of doing business with pinksoda or sinkfloat think twice. Unsavory business practices, scammers, etc are not welcome here, as far as I'm concerned. I welcome pinksoda and/or sinkfloat to chime in here if this analysis is wrong. If so, I apologize.
A real solution to the debt ceiling
China Steps Up Web Censorship
The English arm of Al Jazeera is based in Washington DC
I thought some legislation passed under Carter made breeder reactors illegal in the USA.
> The tower-devices will be broadcasting their presence and location

To a certain extent, yes. You could use highly directional 802.11 antennas (yagi or shotgun) and disguise them. If they have minimal side lobe bleed, they may be indistinguishable from the normal AP background levels. You should be able to get 1-5 miles out of such a link. A few dozen such links could criss-cross a city such as Cairo.
Of course you're right, they're not identical, but I don't think there's any practical difference between them here - they both initiate the view; but using the window namespace seems more readable, and is an established idiom. Maybe it is intentional, but I don't think so?
I have a startup idea that I think that has a viable chance to compete. I've been mulling it over for a couple years now and it's startup idea #3 on my list of future projects.
So much for 'the cloud' and ubiquitous broadband. Next time I see someone mention that such and such iPhone app can be made as a web app I'll point them here. Web apps are at the mercy of so many third parties...
The principle might be sound, but I'm skeptical about the yield. Lots of chemical processes work at small scales but fail when they're implemented at full refinery/chemical plant scale. This is doubly true for nanotechnology.

They've demonstrated that the process works at small scales. Whether it'll scale sufficiently to work in a refinery is anyone's guess.
Probably not. Github is on a path to become the market leader, has a critical mass of customers, and has a business model that harnesses those customers to benefit from network effects. This idea is akin to building a business offering private white-label Stack Overflow clones. Key point: the actual software is not what makes Stack Overflow and Github valuable.

Simpler reaction: Github:FI is already priced at a rounding error for the kinds of companies from which most of the revenue in this space will originate.
It gets your foot in the door for your 1st and, maybe, 2nd job. If your first job is Google or Apple or Facebook, then you have an advantage going into your 2nd job or startup. This advantage compounds over your career. I went to a giant mid-western school with no recruiters from hot SV companies. Instead only large corporations came to hire drones. This is a significant disadvantage. It's not insurmountable, but it does suck.

There is an assumption that a degree from Fancy School means you're smart. Also, I've noticed that many people from Fancy School have more self-confidence that allows them to take bigger risks. I was awed by MIT until I worked with someone with straight A's in CS there. He wasn't any smarter than me, but he did work 10X harder than me. I'm lazy.
Anatomy of a $20K per month Flippa Seller
They do, it's been bugging the shit out of me the last week because every time I go to copy/paste a result link it's a mess.
I suspect it is. I've heard the term used and nobody's batted an eye. Could be because we're on the west coast, though.
In my experience carpooling is becoming more and more viable and popular in Europe, in the past few years I traveled almost exclusively in this way. Between major cities in western Europe you can almost always find rides on websites (being slightly flexible on the time). In eastern Europe you can still safely hitchhike on the roadside (if weather is good). I like both modalities and when I happen to drive a car I always take passengers as well.
Is the intended user a Lisp programmer forced to work on a php code base...or a Lisp programmer looking to take advantage of some of php's native server scripting features?
This is EXACTLY what regulatory capture is all about. Bell knows the game and played it masterfully.

Ask for the moon - ask for really ridiculous things, but expect to only get half of those things. The CRTC, wanting to seem "reasonable" and "balanced", meets Bell halfway. Unfortunately, halfway towards Bell's ridiculous agenda is still absolutely terrible for consumers, a perspective that the CRTC has utterly failed to consider.

This is a classic problem, one that recently contributed to the Gulf oil spill as well (and resulted in the disbanding of the regulator, just as the CRTC should be disbanded or, at the very least, stripped of its ability to regulate the internet).
It's not easy to overcome that inertia without the passion for programming itself. I have two suggestions:

1. Start small

Don't start with Java. Find something simple as hell, like QBASIC[1], or easy as hell (to begin with) like Ruby or Python. Play. I repeat: Play. Play. Play. Play with the language. Let it be fun. Let yourself be childlike about it. Focus on messing around and seeing what you can do. At some point, you'll realize that you're six layers of "I wonder if..." deep, and at this point, I officially declare you to be a Programmer.

2. Start big

Find a problem you want to solve. Here are some examples:

- "I can't believe there isn't an iPhone app for tracking what kind of burgers you eat."
- "I hate how I never know when a Hacker News post involving Tim Ferriss has been submitted."
- "Wouldn't it be great if I never had to e-mail myself a file again?"

Footnotes

[1] - Renowned computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra would opine that any programmer whose first language was in the BASIC family tree is forever warped in the most vital parts of their brain. I cannot confirm nor deny this, but my potentially-warped brain has served me quite well.

Many of these types of problems already have answers, like the third one (the answer is Dropbox). But the practice of researching them and finding existing answers is just as much a part of programming as is the writing of code.
> Twisted-pair sucks, actually

The reason we're having this debate is because twisted pair easily does 20MBit these days.

> and Bell's monopoly is on dead technology.

Not quite dead. Maybe not on par with fiber to the home, but not all that bad either.

ITU G.992.5 Annex M: 24 Mbit/s down, 3.3 Mbit/s up.

> Though I'm not even sure what your point is.

I think we can agree on that :)

ISPs on metered billing is going about 10 years back, I really can't see any justification for it.

> keep up with this ridiculous illusion that Bell has any ounce of a provider monopoly in Canada.

You've provided more examples of that than I have actually.
But I guess you can't have it both ways - if Black and black Hispanics should indeed be two distinct racial groups it would be a bit arbitrary to say marriages between them aren't interracial, no?
This actually doesn't suck. I was expecting something much much worse, but I was pleasantly surprised. If the author just focuses on a few primitives and how to make them as efficient as possible (i.e. closure efficiency, tail-calls, macros, efficient list representation, etc), if he just gets those right, others can always use it as a target and develop more comfortable lisp substrates on top of it.

Cheers!
Unless something has changed, you still cannot get a Kindle from amazon.ca. Instead, you've got to go through amazon.com, and there are restrictions on the books that you can buy, if you do it in Canada.
"Or the problem might be that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few who are vulnerable to groupthink and consequently triggering financial disasters with their incompetence. DISTRIBUTE MORE OF THE WEALTH."

"distribute more of the wealth" sounds so clean and nice. What you are really doing is taking this money away by force, which is anything but.

Here is a scenario: Let's say you are a senior developer for a company and you make $90,000/year. A new guy joins the company with almost no experience and your boss tells you that he needs to "distribute more of your wealth". You will make $60,000 so he can make $30,000 more. He is putting in much less effort than you. This is okay, right?

Everyone that wants wealth redistribution should be put into the same situation. I think we would have much less people out there interested in taxing the rich to death.

"consequently triggering financial disasters"

What about the people that took out loans they obviously couldn't afford? It's the same with credit card debt. People blame the credit card companies for giving them the loans in the first place, yet they keep putting themselves into more and more debt buying things they don't need. We need more personal responsibility.
8-Year-Old Girl Lectures Egypt’s Mubarak on YouTube [video]
I think that's a fascinating idea - logistical problems (not speaking the language etc) aside. I'm NOT a Keith Olbermann fan. I think in America we have an incredibly luxurious journalistic class. They can whine and berate the powers that be all day every day without risking anything. Put someone like KO in an oppressive country with real stakes and it just might make him more responsible, thoughtful, thorough.
Socialism FTW! My province's government run ISP faught against the CRTC and is not implementing UBB. Bravo MTS!
I'll bet genetic predispositions have a lot to do with these statistics. I'd like to see which groups are generating the most offspring.
That's an enlightening comment.

How can I stop being a "faker", as you call it? I, and probably some other HNers, are often pretty critical or take things people say more literally than they meant often, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt with a more liberal interpretation.

I realize this is usually not conducive to "profound and productive interactions", but it is almost second nature for me, something of a gut reaction and I'm not entirely sure how to go about fixing this problem. Behavior change is difficult, just seeking advice.
That is definitely one of many ways a person can self-destruct, and it is indeed related to being wealthy and perhaps famous. But there are other motives that could explain suicides that don't involve money. I'm not saying they suicidal tendencies and wealth orthogonal (disclosure: I had to look that up :), but they're not always, uh, parallel either. Say for example you have someone who's been heavily goal oriented their entire life, but when they achieve their goals--of wealth and fame, or maybe just to be a hell of an entrepreneur, or something that has a side-effect of wealth and fame--they are completely unprepared for the emptiness and lack of purpose they now face. It could be argued that they face a despair unrelated to their wealth and riches but rather to the way they structured and lived their lives. (There's some interesting passages in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest about this.)

I don't disagree with you w/r/t wealth being a possible contributor to the motivations for suicide, but I believe that there are as many reasons a person could kill themselves as we can imagine, only some of which might involve their richness and famousness. Suicide is a dark, multi-tentacled thing.
Absolutely agree. I think programming forces anyone at any age to think critically and logically about their decisions. It also is a great way to understand how logical decisions can adapt and build on each other. For example, instead of saying "I think X and Y makes Z" you say "My first guess is that X and Y makes Z, but let's script and test if it is true". It becomes a combination of what you learn in math and science class -- which rarely cross paths in grade school.
Here's another reason why this is bullshit... this is an excerpt from an article I'm working on:

The biggest problem with these caps is that they are, plain and simply, anticompetitive. Probably illegally so.

Let’s take Bell’s internet service as an example. Bell recently rolled out their “Fibe” offerings, both for internet and IPTV.

Their most accommodating plan, Fibe 25, has a ludicrously low cap of 75GB. It would be pretty easy to exceed that with HD content from iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Fibe TV, however, delivers TV over the same network. Bell even treats the IPTV traffic preferentially, as you can in this gushing review:
http://www.benlucier.ca/work/tech/bell-entertainment-service...

There’s only one minor difference: Fibe TV is not subject to the same usage caps. You can stream as many movies as you like over Fibe TV, watch as much TV as you like, and never get charged extra for the bandwidth.

Well now, that’s funny. Didn’t Bell’s regulatory spokesperson say something to the contrary just the other day? Oh yeah!

“A bit is a bit is a bit. If you’re a heavy user, regardless of what’s causing the heavy use, you will pay more. That’s the concept,” said Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada’s senior vice-president for regulatory affairs.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/net...

Yes, Mr. Bibic, it appears that all bits are equal – but some bits are more equal than others.

This is a textbook case of anticompetitive behaviour, one of a long litany of recent sleazy undertakings by major Canadian telecoms (e.g. Rogers’ suspiciously well-timed lowering of caps on their most popular plans when Netflix entered the Canadian market). It is also a textbook method for successfully stifling innovation, a problem Canadians are all-too-familiar with.

The Internet is now an essential service. While smart countries like South Korea, Australia, and Japan are making (or have made) large public investments in fast, ubiquitous, and unlimited Internet for all citizens, Canada continues to lurch backwards courtesy of myopic regulators, oligopolistic telecoms and a government that is unwilling to intervene for the good of all Canadians.
This is awesome.

If there's anything that I can do help with this via Hackety, let me know.
HAH!

I think, strictly, the former.

(I actually laughed out loud at this :_)
Comment thread of pg's "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704

and "Ask HN: Industries Ripe For Disruption?": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475736
As much as we wax lyrical on the Internet being without borders and transcending governments, it's sobering--and important--to see just how quickly and easily a government can enforce its will.

Any networked system has a large number of vulnerabilities:

1. Physical hardware. You combat this in three possible ways:

a) Make the hardware as cheap as possible;

b) Make the hardware dual-purpose. For example, behind the Iron Curtain, they would modify radios beyond what the state allowed them to listen to; and

c) Use hardware that the state can not do without. For example, use of the telephone network by spies in occupied Europe during WW2.

2. Wired networks are inflexible and easily interrupted. It wouldn't take too many acts of sabotage to almost completely disable the Internet in the US. Wireless networks are subject to state tracking. You combat this in a number of ways:

a) Use a medium the state can't do without (eg power lines, although in extreme circumstances the state can and will cut the power);

b) Hide your communication channel (eg steganography);

c) Use a wireless medium where the transmitters are small, cheap and portable.

Note: in this context, carrying messages using people constitutes a wireless packet-switched network with high bandwidth and high latency, which solves the problems of cost and partially solves the problem of tracing as the state can still use armed forces to limit movement.

It's worth discussing encryption in particular. It is not a sufficient protection but it can help. For one thing, an intercepted encrypted message will be taken as a sign of guilt in extreme circumstances regardless of its content.

Also, the distribution of encryption keys is an age old problem.

Lastly, encryption has a human element. You don't really know who is receiving your message and what they're doing with it. They could be a government agent, a turncoat or simply surrender their secrets under duress.

So I'm not sure this is a problem that can be solved but it can be easier.
While learning is important on college. The networking and social aspects are just as important.
He(Pres Obama) said that it doesn't make any sense that people who have accountants and attorneys can get away with not paying taxes, while the rest of the ppl get stuck with the bill. This translates to, “bye bye middle class.” The Pres was put in offc by the richest men in the world, he is not going 2 make them pay more taxes, hell, they benefit from taxes, especially the biggest of all(inflation). The way to level the playing field is not by stopping tax cuts to the top 2% in income, the way to level the playing field would be to extend tax cuts to the bottom 98% in terms of income. Bigger government won't solve anything. If you look at world history, you will notice that any government that tries to do too much, does not do anything well enough..
Twitter Declares, 'The Tweets Must Flow'
Entrepreneur Of The Decade: An Interview With Steve Jobs (1989)
Both really, since interop with PHP is pretty easy so you can use those native features in a lispy way.
Just as a humorous aside, my wife and I both chuckled when I read the headline aloud stating that the FBI had violated intelligence...
That's very interesting - I assumed it was widely available. I'm in South Africa and have been watching it as much as BBC World News or CNN, more so over the last few months. What I do like about it is that there's a fair amount of actual 'world news' - stuff from countries that are hardly on my radar.
A much better article explaining the same issue:

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91228/crtc-ruling-could-mean-da... (2010 Nov 3)

Sounds like the regulator really dropped the ball on this one, giving small ISP's only 90 days to investigate possible alternatives, plan for them, and implement. 90 days?! That's insanely short. 9-12 months would have been reasonable. 90days? I'm stunned.
The article ignores the impact of changes in the workplace. With the shift towards a service economy fewer people work the sort of regular hours associated with manufacturing and shift work. The decline in organized labor also means that additional hours are more easily and cheaply added to the workday of many people. When using D.C. as an example, the article also glosses over the increased availability of public transportation as the DC metro system has expanded since the 1970's.
This was posted 9 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2124799

I do congratulate you on linking to the mobile site to bypass the url conflict, that is pretty smart.
Compared to Egypt it actually is, in fact, compared to most countries it actually is.

The problems that the United States have are special interests and businesses having too much power over politicians, a form of corruption. Campaign financing the way it's done in the United States would be illegal in most of the other democracies, and other problems related to that but it's not an 'oppressive regime' by any stretch of (my?) the imagination.
Fair enough. I've never programmed in lisp. I just assumed that lisp didn't have native server abstractions like $_REQUEST - and that Pharen may expose those.
I wonder how this will affect companies like Mobilicity who offer unlimited cell phone data usage for an additional $10/month. I have no idea how Mobilicity operates and whether they're dependent on Bell's infrastructure or not, and whether the infrastructure is the same for cell phones as it is for internet.

A systematic breakdown on how this affects all ISPs and phone providers across all of Canada would really clarify the issue!
I'd be more than happy to pay a per GB rate so long as the market was completely opened up. Do you know how attractive a market $2 / GB is? That's an insane mark-up! About as insane as the wireless text messaging markup Bell / Rogers forced us to eat.

Heck, open it up, and McDonald's might get out of selling soft drinks and start up a telco instead.