skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "appeals to authority" fallacy applies when I'm citing non-experts (like if I'm citing Chomsky for an economics issue). CATO is overwhelmingly filled with PhDs in Economics, and with my economics background, I think it's safe to assume the above article is not controversial at all among economists across the aisle and none of them would term it "purely political propaganda".

You state that CATO is "purely political propaganda" without substantiating that claim with any specifics whatsoever. Where is your data?

American public schools, with few exceptions, don't compete with each other for resources and students. Therefore, it's a form of monopoly. For instance, an American student within a designated area can only attend a certain public school. Geographically-disadvantaged residents can still choose supermarkets outside their areas if they find more utility doing so (or a competitor can start up their own supermarket and take market share from the lazy incumbent), so supermarkets do exist in a competitive market. Public school students rarely have the option to choose new suppliers.
A dead link by Canopy below says:

"WebPagetest is not run by Google."

and points to their about page. Apparently, he's right.
How to add Snooze button to Gmail?
I think there might be two things happening. When students work in groups they not only share ideas (which help solidify concepts), but you also share answers. In my experience (in physics), most students worked together and when you get stuck on a problem you go and ask someone else how to do it. Obviously you end up doing better on the homework (because you complete all of it), and you also understand how to do the problems a little better, so the end result is you get a better grade in the class.

The better solution is to do it all yourself. But often that's not possible (because you simply don't know how to do some problems) or you simply don't have to time. So in a per-hour-spent sense, working together and copying solutions probably makes you learn faster, and it definitely gets you better grades on the homework (and consequently in the class).

Also, it's much easier to work 14 hours with some friends, then 8 hours in solitude.
"You could have asked any semi-competent engineer how would you build a digital music streaming service, and you would have received a similar general explanation."

The question I had after reading that was "who thought to ask about building a digital music streaming service in 1995?"

I was a little disappointed the post didn't cover that.

Statements like that remind me of the often cited "I could have done that" when people talk about art.
But what about the uploads from user devices to access points ?... according to the explanation provided, this seem to be optimized for data transfer from access point to user devices..
So you need 150 different operation systems on your usb and computer ? I'm just fine with creating usb stick with most recent version of os when i need. And i think most people feels the same way...

If i can solve my problem with software and ordinary (=cheap) hardware, why should i pay 10 times more ?
So invokedynamic is already wired into JRuby? I can just install the Java 7 runtime and see significant performance improvements?
As a Canadian who went through the debate here, I can say that caps and rate hikes aren't the same thing. The psychological impact on the average internet user is very different, and so online behaviour will be impacted in a different way.

Paying 40$ a month instead of 30$ for an unlimited or very high amount of data means you'll grumble a bit, but you'll still do whatever you did before.

Going from a very high cap or unlimited to a very low cap + expensive additional data means you'll very probably try to restrict your data transfers and do whatever you can not to exceed your cap.

You don't have a sunken cost like with a normal rate hike..
You really don't know or care that you're using BDB; it works (to the user) just like SQLite. (Behind the scenes, it's using BDB for the tables/indexes, and so would do various full- or partial- table scans much like SQLite's native on-disk format.)
Did they always have this clause in the Java license, or is it new to Oracle's release?

"These Supplemental License Terms add to or modify the terms of the Binary Code License Agreement....

A. COMMERCIAL FEATURES. You may not use the Commercial Features for running Programs, Java applets or applications in your internal business operations or for any commercial or production purpose, or for any purpose other than as set forth in Sections B, C, D and E of these Supplemental Terms. If You want to use the Commercial Features for any purpose other than as permitted in this Agreement, You must obtain a separate license from Oracle."

Sections mentioned are:
B. SOFTWARE INTERNAL USE FOR DEVELOPMENT LICENSE GRANT. ...
Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce internally and use internally the Software complete and unmodified for the purpose of designing, developing, and testing your Programs.

C. LICENSE TO DISTRIBUTE SOFTWARE.
...
Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce and distribute the Software, provided that (i) you distribute the Software complete and unmodified and only bundled as part of, and for the sole purpose of running, your Programs, (ii) the Programs add significant and primary functionality to the Software, (iii) you do not distribute additional software intended to replace any component(s) of the Software, (iv) you do not remove or alter any proprietary legends or notices contained in the Software, (v) you only distribute the Software subject to a license agreement that: (a) is a complete, unmodified reproduction of this Agreement; or (b) protects Oracle's interests consistent with the terms contained in this Agreement and that includes the notice ...

D. LICENSE TO DISTRIBUTE REDISTRIBUTABLES.
...
Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce and distribute those files specifically identified as redistributable in the README File ("Redistributables") ...

E. DISTRIBUTION BY PUBLISHERS. This section pertains to your distribution of the JavaTM SE Development Kit Software with your printed book or magazine ....

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, because of the Android lawsuit?
Because they will require tuning? I guess this is one benefit of the cat requirement for cars, the lambda sensor takes care of that problem.
The article and its implications is worth reading in its entirety. Corn-based ethanol is a farm subsidy, an inefficient energy solution, and it's bad for the environment (corn is grown as a monoculture) and its growth takes up a lot of water. Corn just grown for ethanol (with 10% in our gas) takes up 115,800 square miles -- or more than the entire state of Arizona! Imagine other things we could do with that land. With talk of increasing it from 10% to 15%, that's another half a state of Arizona dedicated to corn. It increases the cost of land. Growing corn involves adding nitrogen fertilizer, tractors, transportation, and the net yield of energy is barely more than the energy put into growing it. And yet our dysfunctional country can't seem to get enough of this terrible idea. How do we stop it?
As far as I can tell yes, basically its phased-array wi-fi where the system solves for creating channels to individual points rather than beam energy.

If you are familiar with phased array RADAR (as used on AEGIS and other platforms) the system computes on the fly the necessary set of signals from an array of antenna which will constructively interfere to put a 'beam' on the target. AEGIS can track hundreds of targets simultaneously (I believe the actual upper limit is classified)

I recall a startup in the bay area that was doing something like that with WiFi access points to provide both range and better signal integrity (you could exceed the power limits on non-license use going into the antenna as measured output was still within spec), I thought they had been acquired by Atheros but I'll have to dig a bit deeper to find out for sure.
Just playing devil's advocate here... Is the wireless cap really a bad thing? I have a 2GB cap right now. I still stream music, surf and watch the occasional YouTube video. I haven't gotten close to the cap yet. I pay about as much as I did for "unlimited" and the biggest impact is that I now keep track of how much data I'm using. Yeah, it's annoying. It's easier to have unlimited and not have to think about it. But I also don't want a wireless internet experience that's as slow as molasses because everyone is walking around streaming Netflix day and night or some cheapskate has decided to use his smartphone as his home internet connection. I can deal with caps as long as they are reasonable and periodically adjusted to account for increasing demands of mobile apps and sites.
That was the reason. Cleaver to think of that.
Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production
Not only that, but, Matlab? Seriously? I don't know the internals, but I'm fairly sure that there's going to be some switching between the CPU and GPU for Matlab to be able to run code there.

If you want something to run fast on the GPU, you code it in a language that can run entirely on the GPU. Not Matlab.
I would wager that is phased array in reverse (phased array broadcasting). Constructs a 4d data space unique to all users, probably can't in this version handle moving receivers.

Think of it like this, if a phased array receiver can reconstruct the signal at any point, why can't a phased array broadcaster emit signals that recreate any signal at any point in space.

Wrong?
Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You
Blogger Teaches His Million Dollar Method Making a Living On Internet
Vic Hutchinson is the top internet marketer in the United States and has been sharing his methods with those in the 2011 Millionaire Class. Learn recession proofs ways to acquire income from home!
Your last part is exceedingly true. Boston and Cambridge feel more than 364.4 Smoots apart quite often culturally.
I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production.

I agree, but I actually thought the article was pretty careful about specifying that it was ethanol produced from corn and sugarcane that they were talking about.
The real topiary is not going to reappear if they've arrested the wrong guy

He might. Why? For the lulz, of course.
Kind of my point. But it's only ok for wealthy nations if you don't care about oil consumption, either due to energy security or CO2 concerns.
This is a bit off. Consider it rather like this: you can transmit a sine wave of varying phase and/or amplitude. With a single transmitter and no multi-path interference, each receiver sees the exact wave, plus some noise. Shannon's paper defines the limits on what you can transfer.

Now consider when you have multiple coordinated transmitters transmitting with different phases and amplitudes. Each receiver receives the sum of these functions at a relative offset equal to the varying distances, so will decode as a different symbol.

Visual aid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two_sources_interference.g...

That's the simplest interference pattern you'll see. It's obvious to see that the wave a receiver gets will be dependent on location (e.g. notice the bands of 180 degree flipped phase). As a thought experiment you could imagine varying the phase and amplitude of the two transmitters such that receivers in 2 different places would see either similar, or different waveforms. There is almost certainly a limit to how many users you could support with N transmitters, but with good enough math and feedback, it's potentially fairly high, which is what these guys claim they can do.
"The company went through massive changes" might work as an _explanation_, and perhaps absolve particular individuals of responsibility, but it doesn't change the reality. Programming doesn't just wait for Sun/Oracle/Java or any other company/language to get its act together any more than any other industry holds steady until one of the participants wakes up.
Perhaps "groupthink"?
I think your analogy refers to data limits in a single channel. According to the article, dido creates different channels for users so that data rate in each channel isn't affected.
Which itself achieves a positive outcome, by communicating to the next gullible 13-year-old who might be thinking about doing something stupid to someone else's computer that there might be real-world consequences to it.
Amazon in 2011 is where Walmart was in 1991
Sure:

Colaab - http://colaab.com/Home.mvc/Home
Notable App - http://www.notableapp.com/
Prevue - http://prevue.it/
Onotate - http://onotate.com/
I've got the basics of how base-station -> mobile works, but how about the reverse? Is upstream still shared bandwidth?
You presume that you are prejudged, and that's bad, and then come out with something like this?

> I'm sorry that your level of privilege has never allowed you to savor the harsh taste of true intimidation at some point in your life.

Seriously?
How do we stop it?

If oil prices reflected the true cost of using it, it would disappear by itself. Without cheap oil it's not cost efficient.
Gmail Man - Microsoft Ad
Note that 100 miles is the ideal range under ideal conditions. Consumer Reports did some preliminary driving tests [1] of the Nissan Leaf and found in extreme cold they barely got 8 miles of range on a full charge in 10 degree (F) weather. Typically they were seeing an average of 65 miles in 20-30 degree (F) weather. This is probably why the 2012 model will come with a built-in battery heater that keeps it warm while charging.

So I would definitely not recommend the Leaf unless you live in Hawaii or California. I believe range is also compromised in extreme heat as well. Basically, you've got to live in paradise to expect a 100 mile range year-round from the Leaf.

[1] http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/01/second-drive-20...
I don't think this article is worthy of any up-votes myself, because it doesn't say much.

And if political leanings have corrupted this article, it is in phrasing the solution to the problem in terms of "market competition" and "monopolies"--i.e. the terms of capitalism--rather than in terms of freedom.

In the name of providing an informed citizenry, the educationists have demanded the power to shape American life(how many years of your formative life did you spend in school?), and in too many cases have misshaped it--for their own purposes, good and bad--into a clumsy mess. And still demand that we provide the clay. For evidence, read what the NEA and the AFT say about home-schooling and charter schools.

And to paraphrase Nietzsche, take care in decrying against "political propaganda", lest you become a propagandist yourself.
It's really disappointing that none of the developers of these systems thought to add anonymity as a feature.

It’s also sad that early adopters--who tend to be hackers/geeks--aren’t demanding anonymous transactions. It could even be limited anonymity, like being untraceable except by sender or recipient.

Yeah, we don’t need anonymity to buy coffee (not usually, but see note), but we certainly won’t get it later on for transactions where it is needed if it doesn’t get built in from the beginning.

(note) Who were you meeting when you got that coffee? Oh never mind, I can see in the centralized records who bought a coffee immediately before and immediately after you, and also who you reimbursed when you bought two coffees.
Some previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2735832
"Each client device continually transmits its channel characterization vector..."

Sounds like the scheme is going to wreak havoc on the battery life of a typical mobile device.
As a software developer who works with teachers on a regular basis (and one of my parents is one), the issue of becoming "too advanced" is a legitimate problem. Its the same reason why Einstein supposedly got Fs throughout school - he was bored with the curriculum, he was too smart for class.

Teachers have to work within the framework and structure of the current education system. Let me assure you that in education the tallest blades of grass are the first to get cut. I don't really blame them, its just self-preservation.

If you look at the current structure of grouping kids by age, then the teacher's issues are perfectly reasonable. How are they going to keep the 15% of really smart kids from being bored, goofing off, and raising a ruckus while the teacher tries to run around and help the average or behind kids with the exercises. A child could legitimately be 3-4 months ahead in school work if they're brilliant learners. So what do we do, let me out in March if he has mastered all the material for the school year? Let him start on next year's material?

If we start grouping by ability to learn and knowledge level, that has problems too. I was great at math but only a good reader and poor at spelling/grammar. Do I get put in an advanced class and lag the other students in areas where I wasn't as strong? Does elementary school look like high school with different classes throughout the day, and how does that impact students in non-knowledge areas?

The rates at which children learn is not steady across all subjects. The rates at which children learn aren't even steady throughout childhood - they could start slow and speed up at a certain age. Self-paced education would be ideal for every student if we were all self-starters and bright, KA will be great for home-schoolers and tutors. Even kids who need remedial help over the summer, give them an iPad and the Khan Academy app and let them catch up over the summer. But letting a bright, ultra-focused kid master an entire grade level over the summer and then the kid will be a hellraiser in school for the next 9.
I agree that it's unfair to say "so-and-so already does X", since innovating often just takes the form of making something slightly less crappy than it was before.

Unfortunately, my experience with Twitter, and especially automated Twitbots, is that Twitter is the crappy experience that needs to be improved upon. People push data into it because it's easy to do, not because it adds any real value.

Let's take the weather example: Auto-tweeting weather vanes are too noisy to include in your normal stream, so you unfollow them. Then, if you do want that information you have to use a search client, or build some kind of special client/consumer that compiles that info for you. At that point, surely it's easier to use one of the other services. Getting the data out of Twitter in a usable fashion is simply more work than getting it otherwise.
Syncany: open-source cloud storage and file-sharing alternative to Dropbox
I'd love it if pg chimed in and explained why, after citing Cambridge as the best city in the world, they pulled up tent stakes. Did the author capture it fully?
I believe you still run your own servers and Google will fetch your content from them and distribute it through its CDN.
I appreciate your boisterous rejoinder to my comment.

I think you are mistaken in your understanding of rationality. Emotion is part of rationality, not separate from it. To make a rational decision, a rational person ought to consider his/her emotional response as input to the decision function, not throw it away.

Also, different individuals have different utility functions, and not all are practical, far-looking, mature, or wise.

Your view of humanity seems rather grim if you think that people are so easily misled by advertising. While dishonest claims in ads are a bad thing, those fall under the category of "dishonesty" and not "advertising". An ad touting an inaccurate gas mileage for a car is no more abhorrent than a window sticker or owner's manual stating inaccurate gas mileage figures, and of course laws exist to discourage companies from engaging in either practice.

If anything, advertising omits negative facts about a product or service. But in a competitive marketplace firms have an incentive to publicize negative aspects of competing products (note the Velveeta ad claiming "Cheddar's lumpy, cheddar's oily..."). So the complaint about ommitted negatives is actually a complaint about an insufficiently competitive marketplace.
Want to know the wait times for medical procedures in Canada (Alberta)?
> There's no equivalent of regenerative braking

Point the nose down with the power off?
This is not limited to public schools. I experienced something similar after transferring from a private university, taking six full semesters of a computer engineering curriculum, only to be required to attend community college to take intro to computers, among others, before I was allowed to enroll in a public university.

So, six years of fulltime classes for an undergraduate degree is my experience.
I love how easy it is to use conflicting versions of packages. Haven't needed it in practice, yet, but I'm sure it'll only be time.
Related: Where is HN hosted? My best guess is EC2.
Thanks for the encouragement.

I know in my head that it will work, and I do plan on continuing...I guess I just thought things would have picked up sooner.
> Those are the kind of features that are sorely lacking in Java, and that means huge, bloated code bases.

No, it doesn't. If you can't write concise Java, you're doing something wrong. And if you can't read code well, go practice some more.

Disclaimer: I'm an outlier. I rarely use 3rd party libs, rarely write with anyone else, etc.
One gripe: his partner isn't giving him cover when he says he will. That could have been fatal.
Separate to the whole GPU issue: when timing code in Matlab it's best to use a more careful routine than tic/toc, like timeit.m (by a Mathworks employee): http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18798
otherwise companies will continue to migrate to faster
evolving languages

That still use the patent-encumbered JVM.
Like Ohashi said, the type of job you are looking for is usually better suiyed for face-to-face interactions. Have you considered writing a blog, or a set of youtube tutorials? You sound like a knowledgable young person, and you might be able to make some ad money teaching people how to take care pf their computers.
UK health service adopts startup’s self-help site for patients
Please see my above post on persuasion as a rebuttal, it also applies in part to this post.
Lots of these team sports require development leagues. And then decades of improvement.
Maybe. I don't have sufficient background in psychology or whatnot to say.
I lived in Oxford until 6 weeks ago, and while I rarely noticed electric cars (I didn't honestly spend much time paying attention to what was driving around), what was noticeable was that carparks around the city had got electric "pumps", for people to recharge at. Not that I ever saw one being used, mind.
Not really. Firstly because not every invention can so easily be produced. What if I patent something to do with space travel? What if it's something that isn't simply a software paradigm? And if it is just something that can be done in software, why not create some semi-working version to prove it's in production? Or are you going to add that it has to sell? Or be appealing? What if you say you have a version for sale but it's a million dollars a unit?

That law is so simple I'm sure there are even more ways to get around it than there are real inventors who will be shafted by it just because they don't own the facilities to produce it enough to satisfy you.
Are they implying Gmail is a sentient entity?
A potentially serious problem with ethanol is that it can be incompatible with older rubber compounds. Also in higher concentrations it can cause corrosion to steel and aluminum that is a part of older motorcycle fuel systems.