skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like there should be limits to how many waveforms you could combine without needing more spectrum.

Let's say I wanted to email N distinct 1MB attachments to N users. Before sending, every user generates a unique key and sends it to me. I then use my super math to encode/compress the N distinct 1MB attachments into a single a single combined 1MB attachment. I then send that resulting combined 1MB attachment to all N users. Each user then uses his unique key to decode/decompress the 1MB combined attachment and, viola, he gets the distinct 1MB attachment intended for him.

Now scale that up to very high values of N. Linearly. While the keys are changing constantly. And keeping the combined attachment fixed at 1MB.

Is my analogy way off? If not, I don't see how this would be possible.
I can see a few instances of automated tweeting generating value. I have a bot that tweets the latest headlines from the most popular blogs in a small niche. I'd say a large % of the active people in said niche follow the bot and it gets a lot of retweets and sharing.

Twitter is another way to consume information. RSS aggregators are popular which are automated, twitter can do the same thing over a medium people may be more comfortable with.

I also see value of these without you following them in your stream. I may not want to hear every weather update but when I want to know the weather, it could be nice to know where I can find it updating in real-time in a place I already am.

And to counter the inevitable 'but there is product/site/place X that already does Y': so what? If you look at user behavior just because something exists doesn't mean multiple competitors and ways to consume the same information won't be popular or useful.
It's fun, if you're on a trip and have a lot of time. But as a semi-regular thing:

- I have to drive to the car rental place unless I live close enough for a pickup, in which case I have to wait around to be picked up.

- I have to arrange my trip so that I both depart and return during the rental place's hours. If I come back late, I have to pay a penalty and either take time off from work the next morning or drive the rented car a whole extra day.

- Unless I rent from a 24-hour airport location, which is usually twice as expensive and does not do pick-ups, so I also have to pay to park my electric car at the airport.

etc. Essentially, it's just not good for routine use.
From Functions to Monads in Scala
GitHub itself provides quite a bit of information about their internals over at their blog: http://github.com/blog.

A few I found interesting:

* https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn

* https://github.com/blog/542-introducing-resque

You also might want to check out their public projects: http://github.com/github

Or those of the founders:

* https://github.com/mojombo

* https://github.com/defunkt

* https://github.com/pjhyett
Ask HN: Using Code after Patent Has Expired
I was recently doing some research into Genetic Programming and found a library (ftp://cs.ucl.ac.uk/genetic/ftp.io.com/code/koza-book-gp-implementation.lisp) through a blog post (http://bc.tech.coop/blog/040619.html) that looks to be useful. After looking over the code and license, I found that this was the first piece of code I had seen that was protected by a patent (http://www.ptodirect.com/Results/Patents?query=PN/4935877), issued on June 19, 1990. I read that patents last for 20 years, meaning that the patent that this code refers to is expired. Is there any way for me to be sure that using this code is safe from any patent troll attacks if I choose to use it? Would rewriting the code keep me from violating any other patents that the author might have regarding the use of such an algorithm? Does the code pass into the public domain after the patent expires?

Sorry about the inline URLs; I'm not sure how I put actual links in my posting.
People generally don't like outliers. If not-so-decent people see someone not like them (probably noticeably better), they would have a natural desire to make them harm. At least of envy.
Alibaba launches "Aliyun" - A Cloud-Based OS for mobile phones and tablets
Come on, let's get honest. The ecosystem matters. A lot. The community, and level of interest and delight in using the language matters.. Yes, even to you. It determines what third party tools are available, how easy it is to hire developers, and what machines the platform actually runs on. Your argument suggests you'd be just as happy and productive developing today in Pascal.

"You can now do closures or first class functions" or something equally useless.

Flamebait, but I'll take it. I think the dust-up over the possibility of this being added to Java really seemed to contribute to the decline and apparent disinterest of a lot of folks (I'd really be interested in Bob Lee's opinions here, since he was someone who's ideas I was particularly aligned with at the time and has since gone pretty quiet).. That said, lack of first class functions in Java isn't a trifle. It's why Java isn't all that much fun to program in compared to more expressive languages... and a bigger problem is that more than any other language I'm familiar with Java suffers from the problem of not being able to see enough ideas in a given amount of source code. I'm explaining that terribly, but I just mean that Java code is at least 60% scaffolding that isn't material to the author's intent.

Closures, or first class functions done nicely would be a big step in alleviating that issue, IMHO.
Exactly. The OP is basically "and these are the problems I have because this technology is early-adoption" rather than "and these are the problems I had because of fundamental issues with technology".

As to the whole speed of whipping out the credit card issue - c'mon, you probably had to queue to buy your groceries, you could anticipate the need for payment a whole 10 seconds ahead of time and have your phone out already.
Google Hotel Finder
Exactly the point I wanted to make, but pithier. Kudos.
SimplyTweet Punch Card
An empty string is "nothing".
This Forbes article: http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/28/the-supreme-co...

Makes a neat argument that software patent arguments are finally entering the mainstream.
I hadn't realized it was released so I'm glad it showed up here.
As a point of sale system developer (Ambur, an iOS app), the problem I'm seeing with all these solutions is that the good ones are end-to-end (i.e. the point of sale is manufactured by the payment service), and the bad ones rely on point of sale integration.

The current division between point of sale and payment is that way for a reason, namely it allows for each to focus on its core competency and run with it. Square is a terrible point of sale for a business (it's great for personal use!), because they're not willing or able to built out a whole point of sale system just to satisfy the needs of businesses. We've had an incredible number of people since we launched extremely excited to switch from Square over to our product for some very basic features, such as receipt printing, much less things like managing what your employees can do in the system, maintaining payroll and separate user accounts, and a thousand other fundamental features that point of sale systems need to do to be anything besides a trendy, cheap, alternative.

The other payment services have little to no traction, and I'd like to think that's because of just how well Square is designed. Unfortunately, until Square either decides to build a full point of sale system and work on selling it (unlikely), or open up to 3rd parties via some API (which I doubt will happen, I've tried to get in touch multiple times to request this and haven't received any meaningful response), I don't see it getting much traction beyond personal use.
"A small group of gentlemen working separately to achieve a common goal"
The alternative to pure electric isn't pure gas, it's hybrid electric vehicles. You can't beat the worst alternative to win, you've got to beat the best alternative. That alone makes me not trust the rest of the study.
No. Twitter makes boatloads of cash.
Certification isn't cheap though. It's a definite barrier to entry at the outset. CCHIT seems to be structured to favor monolithic companies with deep pockets, and startups with lots of funding. The certification process also dictates to a degree the functionality of the app, which to my way of thinking may inhibit innovation.
There's an excellent PBS Frontline episode about private colleges in the US who spend more money on advertising than education:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/
Even if the patent has expired, copyright is still in place. You can't use the code unless it was placed in the public domain by the author or you have been granted a license. You could however write your own code that expresses the same algorithm. Nothing about this protects you from violating any other patents.
Because the standards are minimum standards, and the private schools will endeavour to teach it better.

Let me explain how schools work where I come from. The final year of high school is spent largely doing a series of examinations standardized across the state, called the Higher School Certificate. (It's a bit more complicated than that, there's a school-based contribution to the exams which gets normalized with another set of exams, but let's just pretend it's one big set of exams now, which tests everything you learn in your last two years of school.) The marks are all tallied up, and every student in the state recieves a grade between 0 and 100 which ranks exactly how well they did in their exams (if you get 95.4 then you did better than 95.4% of the state, et cetera). These numbers (called Tertiary Entrance Rankings when I went through, though I think they've changed name several times since then) determine what courses and universities you can get into (none of this namby-pamby admissions essay slash extracurricular bullshit stuff like in the US)... or for those who don't go to university it will be a major line item on your CV when you start looking for work, so obviously all students are very keen on making sure they get a high TER. This provides an obvious point for competition between schools -- schools will compete between themselves to get the largest number of high TERs, and parents choosing schools for their children will look at this information when choosing schools.

It's heartless, and it's cut-throat, and it's incredibly stressful for the students, and it works great.
Wasn't the feature freeze before Oracle bought Sun?
Wait wait wait... I add someone to my list because I know them. They use a pseudonym. I suddenly don't trust them any more?

No, most of my friends have pseudonyms that they use online on every freaking website. Even most gmail addresses are pseudonyms. Why would it suddenly be a problem if my friend Joe goes by 'ThunderLizard' instead? Hint: It isn't.

I can't imagine why Google has decided to do such a stupid thing, but it's not about users trusting each other.

If I had to guess, they're trying to prevent celebrity impersonations. It's bound to fail even more spectacularly than it already has.
Skype Opens Its Walls A Bit? Lets You IM Facebook Users Just Like Skype Users
To be clear, my pronouncement of it not being HN worthy has nothing to with it being from Cato. But purely with the content of the article. Let me explain.

It opens with an unattributed quote. One that is somewhat surprising given what I've seen from the teachers and educators I know who have seen Khan Academy. While some complain about things like the rigor of the exercises, I've never heard the complaint about needing to slow down the education of students. Ben's statement, which Cato parrots needs to be attributed to someone. Cato should known better than to base a story on it.

Furthermore, the Cato story say, "This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly." Is it really? Where is the argument that substantiates such a claim?

Then they say, "In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so." Again, can they substantiate that claim? Supermarkets exist in a competitive marketplace, but things like geography make it far from a frictionless market. Again, I'd love to see the data that supports this claim.

Lastly, "But why should a monopolist bother doing that? It’s easier just to feed children through the system on a uniform conveyor belt based on when they were born." Again, this is a claim with no finding in fact. And ignores a LOT of things like the fact that schools typically have single classes by grade, but subclasses broken out by skill. In my experience a child who is three grade levels ahead in math often should't be placed for social interaction with children three years older.

So again, my point is that this Cato article is full of speculation and absolutely no data. Now your appeals to Cato's authority (Nobel prizes and such) is fine. They should put their skills that won them the Noble prize to work and actually write credible stories. This was a junk story simply meant to attack public schools. Plain and simple. It's political propaganda. No data. No logical arguments. Not worthy of HN.

But that's just my opinion.
That reminds me; the saison I've got going in the secondary needs to be bottled this weekend.

(Didn't read the article)
If you can learn the material you can pass classes by examination.
Anti-piracy agency HADOPI finds pirates are the best customers
An anonymous quote does not a compelling argument make.
From what you've written a lot of the services you think you would be good at are best suited for a face-to-face interaction rather than online. There are certain trust issues about accessing computers remotely; especially for average users that are going to want your services.

As far as 14 year old age eligibility, I have no idea on the laws in your country and what that might mean.

However, if I were to offer some advice, I'd say focus on the programming aspect, as that is the easiest skill to sell online of the ones you've listed I think. There are plenty of places to sell that skill (if elance et al are an age problem - try forums/communities).
I don't think that the article really portrays an accurate view of the HTML5 vs. Flash vs. native apps clearly, but saying that a site's article should not be posted because a company owned by the same conglomerate as the site performed phone hacking is ridiculous.
The cases that these patent trolls bring to court are very similar to each other. If you check the court summons they are almost all the same, they just change the name of the company and some little details.
South Korea Blaims China for Stealing Personal Data from 35 Million+
> 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.

The absolute biggest bottleneck when doing anything with the GPU is the cost of transferring between the CPU and GPU. Thus, the more you do on the GPU at a time, the better off you are. Obviously, there are many things to optimize on the GPU side (e.g. taking advantage of locality), but if you just keep in mind that the more you do, the faster things are, you're going to be in a good place.
I don't understand why ISPs aren't offering some benefit to their users when they introduce these transfer caps. Why not add caps to the lower plans and lower the price as well? If it's true that the vast majority of users don't get anywhere near the caps, then this would be beneficial to most users.

For heavier users, offer a plan with no cap (or, say, a cap 10x larger) and higher speed, and charge more for it. I think power users would be much more accepting of a price increase along with higher speeds than a simple addition of caps to all plans with no price change.
I think this more a function of all subjects in one classroom and one teacher model of grade 1-7. If this was a grade 8 13 year old, he would be just taking Math 11 classes and English 8 classes in his schedule. If they put their primary school schedule in bands (all classes teach math from 1-2, teach english from 2-3, etc) advanced kids can move to another classroom during that band.
It wasn't just a 'content aggregator'. There was actually an article there, explaining it. I found it to be useful beyond just the kickstarter site, so I have no problem with them linking to it instead.
Yumi uses GRUB directly for the boot, so I believe it's limited to Linux only (AFAIK, Grub can't direct boot an iso)
Why Wall Street Doesn't Get Startups
I appreciate your response but I'm not really sure it made anything clearer for me. It just created four more questions:)

1. Backed by a physical entity? In this context I always thought backed by a physical entity meant backed by gold/silver/wampum.

2. I appreciate the "something from a company" versus p2p however this seems like a conceptual difference. I am interested in the legal ramifications of this conceptual difference.

3. MS points are traded on secondary markets (10th prestige lobby anyone?).

4. In regards to trading/selling what is the difference between buying a 2000 ms point card on amazon and buying 10 btc on mtgox/tradehill/ruxum/campbx?
Perlman also gave a talk at Columbia in June where he discussed this a bit (if only superficially): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QxrQnJCXKo

It's around the 55:13 mark.
The Problem with Patent Trolls (pro-patent perspective)
It pretends to be an optical drive, allowing you to boot on systems that will boot from a USB CD Drive, but not a USB stick.
Nielsen: Android Takes Top OS Spot, Apple Tops Manufacturers
If they were like shopify they would take a % of the doc's gross revenue. And fail to support basic features like having a customer/patient account on launch.
Judges don't grant patents. The US Patent Office does that. Patents this broad are not at all unusual.
Dropbox: another startup that got away
It's very hard to come up with genuine instances of software patents protecting small developers from larger competitors. The little guy usually can't afford the money and time to patent things, much less enforce them. But even disregarding that, assuming your patent isn't overly broad (in which case it should definitely not be valid), your competitors can just work around it and then steamroll you with their money and strong development teams.

Essentially, a competitor that could steamroll you without a patent would be able to steamroll you with a patent.

The one case I can think of where it would be reasonable for a patent to protect you is if a company offers to buy your product, looks at the code, and then has its developers create a knock-off based on your code. And even then copyright law is probably sufficient (analogous situations arise in other industries where copyright is the only law).
One other great feature in JDK8 will be defender methods which will allow interfaces to carry default behavior for methods. This will be the mechanism for adding default behavior in the collection libraries without breaking classes that extend them. It will also have a lot of great use cases in new library development.
Heh. I live within walking distance of an Avis and a Hertz, so perhaps my perspective is different.

Most rental places will let you drop the car off after hours, though, for what that's worth.
> New language features are all fun, but unless they actually result in faster execution, or allow you to do things you could not do before, they're only use is to make some developers happy, which I don't think is particularly important.

I think you don't appreciate how some language features can help you reduce the size and complexity of your code. Those are the kind of features that are sorely lacking in Java, and that means huge, bloated code bases.

I'm tired of visually parsing 20 lines of a Java method and filtering out all the boilerplate iteration junk just to find the one or two lines that actually do something. Often this kind of thing can be reduced to a few simple, relevant lines when you have closures, for example.
But since the patent has been done and expired, the actual algorithm is no longer patentable again, right?
Best 404 "page" ever
I'd say PayPal is "Better than checks" for the payer, but not for the payee. Transaction costs are a multiple higher.

I notice Interac E-mail Transfer is not listed. I've used that before. A bit of a pain to set up, but fees are lower than PayPal.
the 2-5 GB caps are for wireless networks, aka 3G. How often do you download HD movies onto your phone? In the very next sentence it mentions 250 GB for desktop connections.
Clearly your anecdotal evidence provides incontrovertible proof--proof enough to declare this "bullshit."
"If you ask me, is the man they arrested in the Shetland Islands is Topiary, another hacker (either working in league with Anonymous/LulzSec or opposing them), or entirely innocent.. my simple answer is I don't know."

Should have put that at the top to save me a lot of time reading that drivel.
I thought unetbootin was targeted towards single partition drives? The main advantage of what I've written is you get a nice FAT32 partition with syslinux, and secondary partitions on your USB drive for the actual OS; thus Windows (dunno about Mac) can use the drive normally, and it doubles as a bootable drive. Unforutnately unetbootin's "how it works" page is extremely sparse on detail. http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/howitworks
[fossil-users] Merge two repositories
rated various women. From my experience women rate other women even more so then we do (so you are different in this manner), and most women I talk to know shit more about sports than I ever will. Awkwardness isn't an obstacle, it's an inconvenience. You are here, so other women can do the same.
The GMail Man
Canadian Groupon clone raises $7 Million round
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.

Given the fact that the US is a country of over 300 million people, and you have heard only a few stories of shootings, I find this comment extremely hyperbolic.

I went to private and public schools in 3 different states. The public schools I attended were extremely safe, but the private schools provided more structure and discipline (that someone like me was helped by when just a clueless kid).

EDIT: Also note that my best friend went to the well-accredited, local public school, and was valedictorian (eventually graduated from Emory Law). I went to a non-profit, private school where my roommate was on a full-ride, and went on to go full-ride to Carnegie Mellon. I blew off college and became a ski bumb/river-guide/waiter for six years.
If he's really from Shetland he wouldn't sound British. He might sound Swedish though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetlandic
Maybe, but the material needed for multiple bachelors' degrees is vast.

I suppose if you took (essentially) the same courses at four different universities simultaneously, you could get four for the "price" of one. And I mean only the intellectual price, not the actual price, which would be huge and pointless.
Node NPM rocks
"the kind who insists that buyers in a market are rational in some individual or even collective sense, that they somehow optimize their own happiness or utility function."

This is my core point as well, thanks for taking the time to lay out a better case than I did. It's rather shocking once you realize that the human brain is not rational in the way we often think it is. I find this fact to completely destroy most libertarian principles.
Making a Running Map from Scratch with all open-source tools
Did anyone else notice that the ISOs have to be stored on a FAT32 partition? Doesn't this limit you to maximum 4GB ISOs? The OS X Snow Leopard ISO (at least last time I checked) is about 8GB. Seems pretty limiting to use Fat32. If it's a self contained system, why not use a better filesystem?