skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We'd consider private if we could afford it, but it's fuggin expensive, and with two kids it's out of the question.

Interestingly, as home schoolers we're allowed to purchase tickets to local educational events (plays etc.) at the same price as local schools. So if there's a special showing of a play at noon for school kids, we can buy the discounted tickets and go to it. For sports etc., I believe that technically our local schools are obligated to allow our children to join their extracurricular groups, such as sports. As for field trips, that would be nice to be able to go with the private school, but frankly that's the least of my worries. If there's one thing homeschooling (at least how we do it) does better than any other model, it's field trips! :)
Depending on the personal information, you may be liable if someone breaks into your house and steals it. Patient records that should never have been taken home come to mind. Secret / confidential information left in a car. Etc.

That doesn't absolve the thief of any guilt, but it DOES mean you are responsible for how well you secure certain types of information.
yeah, wanted to write exactly that. US citizen cry about gasoline prices while most europeans already pay around $8 per gallon.
Different driving habits ? Different studies show thats not true (posted in the comments here as well)

Still i dont see electric cars becoming mainstream in the near future
Forgot to do?

a. Beg for my job back
b. Find customers & build company
c. then quit

Not being glib, I just subscribe to being careful while reaching for the gold ring! Good luck!
"you're mistaking the insurance with risk swap contracts, options"

No I'm not. btw i trade options & risk swaps for a living, so I had a good laugh reading your mini tutorial on "this is called option, that is called CDS" :)
Anyways, there's lots of holes in your explanation. For one, you say it is illegal to double-insure. Not true. It is illegal to double-dip, not double-insure. So you can get health insurance for yourself from your employer & simultaneously be covered by your spouse's employer - this is quite routine and legal, though frowned upon. What is illegal is to bill both the providers for your expenses. Another eg. you double-insure expensive realty, so if one insurance provider goes out of business, you don't have CP risk. But if there's damages to your house, you can recover losses from only one provider, not both.

As an aside, much of this is enforceable because insurance is such a heavily regulated industry, so you have centralized databases & its easy to check if you are double-insured, double-dipping & other edge cases. With HTBRAI, assuming such a thing ever comes into existence, you'd need a framework for all that regulation to fit in, which is what I'm skeptical about. airbnb is a fine service and they have a sound business model & a solid future - these insurance wrinkles will hopefully be ironed out in due course.
This is ridiculous. How were they even approved a patent for something so broad and general? Is it a matter of the judges not understanding the technology?

There are a lot of recent law school grads out there that are having a hard time finding jobs. I tell a few of my friends in such a situation all the time that they should get into the IT area because there is so much going on. What's the climate like for challenging patents like this in court?
I wouldn't use the present tense when some of those guys are dead.
Doesn't work for non-software patents that need infrastructure.

Say I have an idea that will improve digital cameras.
I need to sell the idea to Canon/Nikon etc, there is no chance of me building the invention myself. Patents are the only way I can discuss it with them without them just being able to copy the idea.
The recommendations seem to be sound but this piece is unreadable!

Between the tiny font, wide single column text and having to scroll before seeing a hint of content I can't say that I'm impressed with Brolik's design.

Sorry for the uninformed rant but if you're going to write on good web design first get your ducks in a row.
Somebody wants a piece of that pie.
https://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/30_Meaningful_Use.a...
Show HN: Netflix Queue management w/ iPhone barcode scanning, free promo codes
I'm excited to show off my new iPhone app--Q Scan for Netflix! Despite some setbacks with the development process and changes in the Netflix API, I finally have the app live.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/q-scan-for-netflix/id414603457?mt=8

With Q Scan for Netflix, you can easily scan a retail DVD or Blu-ray barcode to add the title to your Netflix Queue (instant or disc/DVD). Q Scan can come in handy when you're walking through a retail store and notice a new release you've been meaning to watch--now you can quickly check to see if it's already on Netflix!

I'd really appreciate any feedback and am glad to share this with the HN community. And, what you've been waiting for, a few promo codes:

RJTA64TL46YT
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Thanks, John @qscanapp http://qscanapp.com
I completely agree. I think what we really need is some rethinking and innovating ideas on public transportation. I know that is a vague concept to a lot of American's that live in cities other than NYC and maybe Chicago and a few others, but it is a solution that works in other areas of the world. We have some obstacles to get it to work here for sure, but good old American ingenuity can surely solve those can't they?
South Korean Social Networking site hacked.
I would be interested to see responses from the companies tested.
How to Tell if Someone is Being Sarcastic?
I've always thought age segregation is a small evil (not a big one, but still...). We're not supposed to be locked into our current state, but to mature and grow - older people have experience, and younger people have energy... a good combo.
Cal Tech, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine etc...there should be plenty of talent...
I once remember taking over maintenance of a previous project and being handed 20-25 pages of minute details(mostly meaningless to anyone but a newbie to the s/w). But no mention of what happens overall. I spent a day to come up with a workflow diagram (in a page) that made quick sense.

P.S: for those who like to blame outsourcing to India, this one was from a U.S contractor
First point is that MS Points or any "points" is something from a company. The company sold you those points and thus are liable for business ethics and so on if brought up.

BitCoins are not sold. They are traded and generated. There is nothing physical backing them up. There are companies facilitating trades, but those companies neither issue nor value the currency. They only facilitate exchange of hands. The BitCoin network is what issues coinage, yet the network is an agreement between all clients, and thus nobody "owns" it and thus nobody is responsible for the issuing of it.

MS Points/Points sold by companies are backed by a physical entity. MS is liable for each individual coin.
BitCoins are not owned or backed by anyone, only the changing of hands. Nobody is legally liable for each individual coin.
Let me take a stab at an explanation. Suppose we know the positions of all the transmitters and receivers, and we know which receivers are supposed to get which signals. Then we determine the signals (waves) to be emitted by the transmitters such that at each receiver, all the other signals cancel out (interfere destructively), leaving nothing but the signal you want at that receiver.

(Oh, and don't forget to account for reflection, refraction, dispersion, etc. as the waves propagate around.)

If this is what they're doing, then wow, that's pretty cool. It's amazing the problem can be solved fast enough.

The way they get around Shannon is by taking advantage of the spatial separation of the various receivers. In effect, Shannon assumed all receivers are at the same position.

Is this an accurate understanding?
I think it depends on the time frame you look at. I started in Java back w/ some of the pre 1.0 releases. Between then and now, it's come a really long way.

Maybe I'm biased due to other new(er) languages becoming mainstream. But it feels like Java (as a language) has fallen behind as other Languages adopt new features that cater to different/modern techniques.

Java won't ever be cutting edge (and given the types of applications that are built with it, some stability/maturity makes a lot of sense), but look at the advances that C# has made since 1.5/1.6 has been out.

It wasn't like C++ pre C+11 -it didn't take a decade or soto catch up with the rest of the programming world, but you can see the its size slowing its advancement down.

I want to like programming in Java again (I'm not saying it's bad, or it's a mistake) - for a long time it was my go-to language for when I play with ideas. But for now it's just a way to pay the bills while I try to figure out what I want to do/make/build.
When I was in London recently, I used the London Transport iPhone app for getting around:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/london-transport/id393119892?...

It was a little quirky (the bus arrival times seemed to be off a bit), but overall quite nice. It includes all forms of transport (bus, tube, DLR, ferry, and even Boris's bikes), lets your limit your travel options to just certain types (e.g., "I only want to see bus routes right now"), and has nice heuristics like whether you prefer to walk, how fast a walker you are, etc.
Wow, that front page badge is a blatant copy.
Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public.

That's not a simple thought experiment, it's a massive data-collecting exercise.

I'm not sure if there are any countries with wholly-private education systems, are there? Still, there are many countries (the UK and Australia spring to mind) where private schools play a larger role than they do in the US. And your fears appear to be unfounded, as the private schools in these countries range from "truly excellent" to "quite reasonably okay". Parents and students choosing a school aren't nearly as misled by glossy brochures as you might think -- the newspapers are filled with detailed comparisons of average marks in statewide tests, success in getting into universities, and so forth.

Now I didn't go to a private school, I went to an academically selective public school in Australia, but there was always the sense that we were in competition with the private schools... their mere presence drives the public schools to try to do better as well. The main criticism that I could make of the private schools where I was (apart from snobbery and often-silly uniforms) is that they had a tendency to spoon-feed education to their students in the interests of maximizing their university entrance marks... the result being that students often floundered somewhat when they actually got to university and were expected to learn in a more self-directed way. But faced with a choice between that and a chaotic American public school where the primary goal appears to be stopping the students from shooting each other, I'll take the spoon feeding and straw hats any day.
Download OS X Lion Skin Pack 6.0 for Windows 7 
We have previously uploaded Mac OSX Leopard which was our one of the best pack in Desktop Enhancement. Recently Apple has released OSX Lion for MAC and we have uploaded its theme pack for Windows 7. Lion Skin Pack is an application that gives a new look to your windows with just one click.
> Correctness should be verified by tests not 'looking at the code'.

Tests can prove the presence of bugs, but they are (in general) hopelessly inadequate to prove their absence; and once a test finds a bug, you still have to be able to understand what the code is doing in order to fix the bug.

In practice, code inspections and tests find quite distinct sets of bugs with some overlap, so it's valuable to do both of them. That's why all decent programming processes require both.

(This is probably one of the few cases where you could in fact verify that the code is correct by exhaustive testing — but only by comparing it against a known-correct implementation.)
A related view of language evolution: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/90g80/history_o...
That rule is easily circumvented. Just write a 10 line python script that references the patent. Release it as MyPatentApp version 1.0 and we're back to litigation square 1.

I believe that in such a quickly changing engineering landscape as software, best way to fix patent troll problem is to make software patents expire in 2-3 years.
Unfortunately most institutions choose to simply automate their bad processes. The studies that were originally done to justify this incentive were based on hospitals such as Mayo that are simply better hospitals. Their use of electronic systems is not the reason why they are better.
I mean, that's how you sell SaaS, right? Why reinvent the wheel? Good artists copy, great artists steal, etc.

If you're selling SaaS, you've probably got more pressing concerns than coming up with a unique way to present your pricing tiers.

Agree that the corner badge is a bit much, though.
One question that I haven't seen answered yet is what happens if the receiving antenna is not stationary. It seems to me that if it is moving at the time that the test signal was sent out there is no guarantee that the signals will sum together properly for the receiver now that is in a different location. Most devices that are wireless are wireless because they spend most of the time moving around.

But perhaps this system of analyzing the test signals and figuring out how to create the waveforms that will sum up for the receiver happens so fast that it is not a problem to recalibrate constantly to take in account cell phones in moving cars, etc.
Wow...troll much?
Insurance industry steps up to help airBnB renters
"my guess is that the vast majority would opt for a cost-effective, fairly standardized large education provider"

Maybe, but we can observe:
1) intense competition for admission to the highest tier colleges
2) intense efforts by many inner city residents to place their kids in charter / special focus schools
3) strong correlations between perceived school quality and housing values

All of which suggests that many parents are actually quite focused on educational quality. That focus is often forestalled from becoming "effective demand" by the high opportunity cost on private education imposed by our public school system.

I don't know how real choice would emerge or how it would play out. I do know that more freedom would enable far more parents to translate their intense interest into much more effective action. It would also deny parents the excuse of poor schools, as they would choose the school, and schools the excuse of poor parenting, as they would be better able to choose the parents. Accountability would shift from procedural compliance to behaviors more likely to be conducive to learning.

Further, it would provide space for innovation. And when some innovation demonstrated better preparation for college, or graduation rates, or post-grad employment, there would be effective market pressure to emulate that innovation, and in an effective rather than formal manner.

It is likely the case that most schools would evolve to forms with great similarities to one another -- and why not, the majority of kids they're teaching are likely pretty similar on the important dimensions. The similarities would emerge after a process of _finding_ that most effective form, and weeding out the institutions that are providing suboptimal service. The freedom to migrate to new forms would constantly discipline those schools to avoid various distractions, or shift accountability. And it would provide greater flexibility to handle edge cases more effectively.

And in a more flexible system, educators would never ask to "slow a kid down" because of the problems the kid's speed poses to _their_ model. They would have to ask how to adjust that model to the kid's speed, lest they lose that kid's revenue to some model that can make the adjustment.
Really, I'm quite fond of Opera. It's pretty good about standards compliance and I really enjoy the Opera Portal where I can keep up on all my favorite blogs from my start page. I think where Opera falls short for me is the Dragonfly plugin. Whenever I want to modify CSS live, Dragonfly makes it such a clumsy process. I find firebug to be far more intuitive.
The white paper is non-technical, but I think this is the gist:

Currently, if you have multiple users and 1 access point (AP), the users split the bandwidth. Multiple APs and multiple users on the same channel results in split bandwidth as well, since the APs operate independently and interfere with each other.

This proposal uses N APs for N users on the same channel, allowing for full bidirectional use of the channel bandwidth by each user. To send data to N users simultaneously, a central server receives the data, and calculates the signal to send to each AP such that the user receives only the clean signal meant for him post interference. This requires precise localization of the user in AP space, presumably done by having the user transmit a certain pattern at the particular frequency, and measuring the result at each of the channels.

For the N users to transmit simultaneously to the N APs, the data center can take each of the incoming signals from the N APs along with the localization of the users in AP space, and apply linear algebra to unmix the signals into a signal from each user.

I imagine this adds some overhead to each channel in order to maintain precise localizations of each user in AP space.
YUMI does this apperently. I had never heard of Yumi before, but I read the comments (and the article) so now I know about it.

So given our new knowledge what does this do that yumi does not?
Yes. I don't have a Python version of Processing, so I thought about how the Processing API would best be exposed in Python — and it would probably be by calling functions exported by a module named "processing", rather than by inheriting your class from processing.App. So you're right about both languages.
Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2011
I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion.

The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem.

"Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth, anyway?"
Show HN: DealBurner - Your Reason to Checkin
Samsung and HTC aren't eating Apple's lunch, they're eating Nokia's lunch. The author notes that makers of Android phones are gaining market share faster than Apple, and assumes that this will eventually mean taking market share from Apple, but that's far from given.
> Or perhaps they do want to get into computer science and there are a number of obstacles stopping them. Most people would agree with this.

> If you're going come up a controversial answer, you better have some solid evidence backing you up.

I find these 2 statements, back to back, presented in a serious context about the most amusing thing I've seen in a long, long time.
One relevant study:

http://www.ajmc.com/publications/supplement/2010/AJMC_10dec_...
Has any of you seen "Collapse"?

Its a Documentary, and in it this guy states that there is no realistic substitution for oil, and once we run out of it society will collapse.

Pretty scary.
That style substantially pre-dates Shopify. It's a fairly inevitable consequence of the tools available and A/B testing. Everyone is working from the same basic starting point and testing everything for conversion. Convergent evolution is remarkably powerful when you can iterate quickly. Whether people work it out for themselves or just copy it wholesale, that layout is used for a reason - because it drives conversion.
What is the mobile market share in the United States? 
Statistics on mobile market share. I also answer the question of What smartphone dominate the market? Is it iphone, Droid, blackberry? read more..
"the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO"

Sorry, but you dismiss Cato because of its "free-market spin" and then call its main thesis "questionable", when 10 Nobel Laureates, who probably know far more than us on economic issues, are associated with Cato. I'd also note that Paul Krugman, Delong, and Sachs -- all very prominent Democratic supporters -- are very pro free market as indicated on the links you'll find on their Wikipedia pages.
In this case the patent is related to PacketVideo's business.
> junior level courses your freshmen year

Not if the upper-level courses have prerequisites, which is typically the case in STEM programs. In my EE program the courses were scheduled so that it was impossible to graduate in less than four years. Most courses beyond freshman year had only one or two sections, taught during a specific semester.

Liberal arts may be different.
MongoDB UK Conference
One of the problems is that this companies don't have anything to loose by bringing these lawsuits. They just have to fill some papers electronically, pay a few hundred dollars and the other party have to loose thousands of dollars to protect itself.
All points touched in the article are valid. However, calculating sine of 100M numbers is simple but not very representative case for GPGPU programs. Leaving data in GPU memory as long as possible between kernel invocations and avoiding transfers is one of the first optimizations that must be considered.
Energy/volume is irrelevant (at these levels). What really matters is the usable energy coming out the engine compared to the engine coming in. Because of its higher octane, ethanol could in principle be run in ICUs with much higher compression ratios than engines designed for gasoline use have, giving higher efficiency (like diesel engines have higher efficiencies). The problem is that no engines actually are tuned for maximum ethanol efficiency, since that makes them unusable with gasoline. (Turbocharging somewhat offsets this, which is why I assume the grandparent specified this, but only partially.)
The testing would have caught anyone who didn't know the material. Yes, they learned as a group and corrected each others homework, but they also put in lots of individual hours.
Clearly students need to be placed into classes based on their ability. There is no goddamn reason why student A and student B should be in the same class, or even at the same school.
Good luck with that wish.
I don't think it makes sense to term this prediction in price of gas. Even as they say in the study, one of the most weighted factors in a purchasing decision is the number of charging stations available. It's the cart and the horse, even if gas is $5/gallon, consumers won't be super motivated to buy cars b/c of a lack of charging stations, and charging stations won't be built due to a lack of existing demand.

These things need to happen together to make the change, not just the gas price hike. Like others have alluded to, there needs to be more of a cultural shift or incentives from the government.

I think it makes sense to do this study with more focus on number of charging stations or public/private investment in the space rather than gas price.
Another:

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/170/17/1578
That's fine, but the concept of intermediate storage (index) is not very easy to explain to an artist. Some of them still don't grasp all of P4, and P4 is very simple and easy - with changelists.