skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surgeons remove sword from Chinese boy's head
Back in 1992 we used to stream music over the network of Sun machines at St. Andrews university[1].

The way we did it was pretty trivial: just piping into rsh from and to /dev/audio. However it was certainly streaming of music by anyone's definition.

[1] Making the admins of said network mighty pissed off in the process -- I believe the whole campus was on 10 Mbps at the time.
Bluetooth, the Internet, Smartphones, Twitter, Facebook.

All were technologies that had to incubate quite some time, some for a decade or more, before they were widely usable.

It concerns me when a tech writer looks at something and says "it will never be useful within 6 months" when there is a ton of infrastructure involved.

It's not about the immediate payoff, it's about the future.
Breakdown of US smartphone market share by hardware and software
Right... but the actual court case will cost money. Filing a lawsuit might be cheap but following through surely can't be.
Grub can boot just about anything... Windows included.
They just opened their first battery switching station in Denmark, of 20 they plan to open there in the next year.
Traffic Empires Review
Traffic Empires Review
HN gets slower over time; when it finally becomes unbearable pg fixes it. It may get worse before it gets better, though.
Minecraft.Print()
Unless things have changed GRUB can boot other operating systems.
Unfortunately, you'll have to wait (until Java 8).
But the question "What's the best way to teach children?" is very relevant, so I'm inclined to allow it even if it does meander into political questions on occasion.
I am not in any way an official voice around here, but I am a longtime reader. Having a look at the articles on that site, I don't think it's the kind of submission that is appreciated around here. My guess is that it was killed by an editor.

If your next reply is "why not let people vote and decide for themselves," then the answer is that it doesn't work like that. People see that this site involves a lot of voting, then assume that it's a democracy, controlled by the readers. Nothing could be further from the truth. pg and the editors have the final word on everything. They kill a whole lot of submissions and comments for a variety of reasons: off-topic, spamming, inflammatory, insensitive, and so on. If they didn't do this, the site would have dissolved into anarchy long ago.
Even if a user can utilize the maximum bandwidth provided by a wireless network, it still doesn't necessarily follow that the resulting data transmission rate would also be capable of overwhelming the information processing capacity of some server.
The "in multiple categories" part is pretty key here. What he's talking about is being able to combine the results from multiple queries, not simply returning more results in a page for a given query.
I have two of those sticks. Do you know if you can expand the partition to arbitrary sizes?
ClojureScript gets a REPL that drives the browser
I think the energy economics are different for planes and cars, though. There's no equivalent of regenerative braking, or for that matter stop-and-go traffic, for planes.

And adding weight to a car doesn't make it use more energy at high speeds, which is how an old van can get 15 miles per gallon while a fully loaded semi truck gets 10 miles per gallon. Adding weight to a plane does make it use more energy. The effect of adding weight is relevant because batteries weigh almost 500 times as much per joule as fuel does.
The major difference is between scripts which are representative of value and not traded vs an attempted representation of real, tradable currency.
Clickable link: http://www.overlap.me
Why is it not possible to directly boot from an iso? It doesn't seem that hard, technically, although I'm sure there are good reasons against it, or someone would have done it by now.

It would be great if we could install unetbootin (or something equivalent) on a flash disk, select which iso to boot, and have it boot.

I know this is possible for linux-based images, but I'm talking about something generic.
Exposing the weird and wonderful uses of Pusher
I thought of this, too. (I'm taking it as a given that this technology works as advertised at low speeds.)

At higher speeds, low frequency/long wavelengths ought to work better because the constructively interfering areas will be larger for any single receiver than they would be with a shorter wavelength. Also, when the receiver is traveling at constant velocity, it is very easy to predict where the receiver will be in the next frame. This covers a lot of cases (people on planes, cars, trains).

In fact, I can't think of a place where an average person (e.g., not someone flying a fighter aircraft) would be moving rapidly and unpredictably.
> If they wanted market share, they would have just led with the "budget" phone.

But Apple has a luxury brand, and a "budget" device would detract from that (even the lowly iPod shuffle fills a niche for well-off folks: it's small and sleek).

Budget in this context means pre-paid (as per the last earnings ). And I bet that iPhone will not be compatible with a post-paid plan (or vice-versa)... it will be interesting to see how Apple navigates this as they've been very deft at positioning new products in terms of their existing product lines.
Even though they didn't test FaceCash, here's our general response to the "mobile payments are useless" argument:

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Paying-With-Your-Phone-...
I could say the same things (in general) about guys who are deeply interested in science and tech:

Toddler/Preschool: Gifts of balls, sports cards, action figures, etc.

School/Teenager: Come on bro, get off the computer and play some sportsball! Don't be a nerd! Come on bro, lets watch football and drink beer!

Even on TV, when they show engineers and scientists, they are almost never cool or desirable.

Basically, I seriously doubt that anyone becomes an engineer because it's the "cool" thing to do, or in any way socially optimal; it seems to be based more on a child's innate proclivities, and a lot to do with the type of parents they have. To me, this seems to be the same problem that has many asking "Why aren't there more black engineers?" Well, in many cases, it's simply because the parents of kids who would become engineers don't have the resource, interest, or knowledge of how to foster these abilities.

I applaud you on encouraging your daughter's interests. With more parents like you, we'll surely see the a more diverse field in the future.
It's an interesting point that you make, but I think the analogy is generally flawed for most people.

Most people don't carry around a significant amount of personal information of others (I have an electronic address book, but I don't have my friend's credit card/banking/social security numbers).

This rings rather personally to me, and I do consider it an absolutely jerk move. Of course, being irresponsible with other peoples' information is also a jerk move. In 1999, an HR rep copied into Excel the entire contents of the employee database (something he knew was not acceptable practice). A disgruntled support tech discovered this while rummaging through his computer and posted all of that data on a public, searchable web site. At the time (and this may still be the case) it was not illegal to post the information that he did, which included social security numbers, mother's maiden names, birthdays and a bunch of other details. It took a few years to get the site properly shut down, to catch the guy, and to prosecute him for the theft of the data. It's been a fun decade closely monitoring and correcting my credit reports.
Super Google Email Software Scraper Available For Free
Many people have come to the internet marketing world looking for a way to make some money. The guru list buster allows you to collect names of targeted emails for whichever market your apart of. Amazing!
Netflix client has been out on Android phone OS for awhile and is quite popular.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobilebroadband/?page=pla...

Default data plan for smart phone is $30/mo, capped at 2Gb/mo, on a 4G network.

Their maximum cap is 10Gb/mo for an outrageous price of $80/mo.

It is evident that the whole point of 4G network for Verizon is to bring their customer to the monthly cap at a blazing speed and start over-charging them by $10/Gb as soon as they can.
Google can instantly solve this problem by providing users the ability to select different avatars/names for different circles.
Nail on the head. We have been back in Boston for about year and a half, got a bunch of free office space (MC, CM). One of the best responses from a VC- "You can
clearly do well... but not within the revenue of >$200M which we would hope to see in a potential investment (happy if you prove us wrong though!)"
We run into problems not only with the established educators, but I think also from parents. A lot of people tend to get really edgy when you're discussing changing things like curriculum or pedagogy, because they're very risk averse when it comes to their children. Not all parents are like this, but a lot of them are. They're also generally bad at properly evaluating their kids' strengths and weaknesses since they tend to have a positive bias.
The point is that today we don't hit the caps, but metaphorical-tomorrow, we will hit them and it will be too late to change the precedents set today.
> the thing that's attractive to me about Pump is how exceedingly simple it is

The problem with that is that "your simple" != "everyone else's simple". Maybe my "simple" is to have the ability to yield chunks of data as it gets generated using chunked transfer. It is a simple thing, WSGI can handle but Pump can't.

Pump is trying to replace WSGI but WSGI is a standard, if it tries to replace a standard API it has to prove that it can do all the things WSGI can do, so WSGI can be kicked to the side and everyone can switch to Pump.

So to summarize, it is ok if Pump just claimed to be a simple HTTP interface but as soon as it claims to be a better, less complex WSGI, then it starts to play the "standard" game and it show how the author doesn't really understand what WSGI is and how it got to be that way.
Yes that's his point I believe. It's ok for us wealthy nations full of meat lovers. But a billion starving people say otherwise. (At least that's my understanding of the debate).
I watch HD streams using the Justin.tv app all the time, although I'm grandfathered in on a unlimited plan.
From the patent app:
"As such, in one embodiment of the invention, the channel characterization matrix 616 at the Base Station is continually updated. In one embodiment, the Base Station 600 periodically (e.g., every 250 milliseconds) sends out a new training signal to each Client Device, and each Client Device continually transmits its channel characterization vector back to the Base Station 600 to ensure that the channel characterization remains accurate (e.g. if the environment changes so as to affect the channel or if a Client Device moves). In one embodiment, the training signal is interleaved within the actual data signal sent to each client device. Typically, the training signals are much lower throughput than the data signals, so this would have little impact on the overall throughput of the system. Accordingly, in this embodiment, the channel characterization matrix 616 may be updated continuously as the Base Station actively communicates with each Client Device, thereby maintaining an accurate channel characterization as the Client Devices move from one location to the next or if the environment changes so as to affect the channel. "
Not only can the be another Gmail, but there's also a huge need for it. Gmail lags quite a lot (even on fast connections), and the price you have to pay to get it for free is the fact that Google builds a huge database on your person/interests, and that American authorities have easy access to your data because of the Patriot Act.

I'd much rather pay a small sum of money to a provider in Europe ( = better privacy laws).
FWIW I am aware of:

Grinberg, Reuben, Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency (April 21, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1817857

But I do not think it answers this question very well and I have some other problems with using it as a creditable reference work on the matter.
If you have a patent, you MUST have a product or be working on a product using the technology in question or you cannot litigate others using your idea.

That doesn't help in the case where non-innovative patents are used in an anti-competitive manner. Such as the patents Apple is asserting against HTC.
I suppose bitcoin is supposed to be a currency rather than commodity; so you would not buy 10 btc, but you'd trade other forms of currency for it, or buy/sell goods using it. I think it's only a conceptual difference, because it's all just trade.
First, I agree that human beings often make wrong decisions. However, it is completely wrong to blame that on emotion.

"By attempting to short-circuit the decision-making process, by putting the emotional cart before the rational horse, the ads you describe are fundamentally deceptive. That ads like that exist, that they are paid for by people with skin in the game, and that they work, are all testament to the fundamental irrationality of market players on both an individual and aggregate level. Namely, they can be swayed by a manufactured emotional response before even having gone through the rational decision-making process."

What makes an emotional response any less worthy than a rational response? Plato's ideas on rationality are just plain wrong- the cart before the horse is a poor metaphor. If you look at any neuroscience research in the area, you soon see that that good decision making is completely impossible without both, together. I highly recommend Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" as a highly readable book on the subject.

Following emotional cues is not "short-circuiting the decision-making process", and is not in any way "fundamentally deceptive".

EDIT: Not to mention that intangible value is still value. If marketing makes an item higher status, and you value items based on the status they confer on you, then that marketing is creating enormous value. Branding literally makes a product more valuable in a consumer eye, and that is the only measure of value that matters.
Facebook Files Lanham Act Lawsuit
The Supreme Court Should Invalidate Software Patents
It is nice that we can have magnet schools in urban areas. What about deeply surban or rural areas?

Well, in a small-to-medium-sized town that can only support one school, you can nonetheless segregate students by ability. A town of eight thousand should have about one hundred students in each year, so you segregate 'em into five classes (alpha through epsilon?) and teach 'em separately, at a pace suitable for each.

The US is actually pretty densely populated, so the number of folks living outside commuting distance of eight thousand other people is pretty low.

The real problem with this is that nobody wants their precious snowflake to be classified as an epsilon, or even a delta or gamma. Bad luck, drones!
Thanks for clarifying, I should look into it more but it's sometimes difficult to follow these legal things.

I know it's not unusual, that's my basic question. I can't imagine anyone reading the patent excerpt in that article and going "oh yeah, Spotify definitely ripped that off." Why are these vague and general patents getting approved?
I think if Boston's VCs would have had their stuff together, its very possible that YC might not have abandoned Boston in the first place.

Also, many of the VCs are heavily invested in Biotech and other heavy-capital industries. Dollar for dollar they invest a great deal, but it doesn't generally go to consumer tech startups.

Now if you want to see an area with actual little high dollar investment happening, come visit me in Ohio sometime...
It depends. If there's a large relationship between the degrees, then a lot of the classes you're taking are going to be similar (or the same class), and you only have to do the liberal arts and entry level stuff once.
> If software patents are done away with, I think we just throw the pendulum in the opposite direction and now everyone with money and strong development teams steamroll the competition.

Historically, the alternative to patents is trade secrets. For example, you have Coca-Cola's closely-protected formula. In the example you gave, it's just as likely that Skype would instead protect its technology as a trade secret, and reverse-engineering it would fall under current laws.

It might be possible to consider the rapid development cycle in the software industry and simply shorten the period of protection granted by a patent on software to something like 2 years, which seems long looking forward but is pretty short in retrospect. Companies like Lodsys would be forced to spend a lot more money acquiring new patents on a regular basis -- enough extra to continue their litigious cancer on the industry -- but wouldn't manage to substantially halt development or production in the software industry.

Even then, I think I'd still prefer to see patents abolished altogether for non-mechanical and non-chemical inventions.
Evil Oracle says Java 7 will not support VMware and Microsoft Hypervisor
Between "scripts?"

Microsoft points are traded and I still do not understand what the legal ramifications are if something is or is not "traded." What is your definition of traded?
Yeah, I kind of agree on this.

That said, the guy is a mechanical engineer at ANL, so I wouldn't take it as a sanctioned response from ANL. Claiming that the other corn isn't used in food production is disingenuous by the guy, since it is being used, but just via animals.

If you look at the lab biofuels splash page (http://biofuels.es.anl.gov/), you'll see they're working on things like water, nutrients and algal biofuels to improve the process.

There's a lot of work going into making 2nd generation biofuels actually viable, using cellulosic biomass and crops that can grow on marginal land. People are even working on producing fuel molecules that aren't ethanol (e.g. butanol).

We have a saying at work: Ethanol is for drinking, not for driving.
I don't believe you've read his book. This isn't his argument at all, not even close. I'm not sure who you're attacking here, but it's not Aubrey or SENS.
In the US, cable companies are often monopolies in providing broadband internet. They get away with offering mediocre product and poor service simply because there are no alternatives.

I've had the backwards situation where it was cheaper to buy basic cable TV + cable internet than stand alone cable internet.

It would be foolish of them to offer a cheaper, limited cable internet plan when they can make everybody pay more for their standard, unlimited (that is not unlimited) plan.
From what I can tell reading the patent, what you describe would not be prior art.

Two things would need to be present -- DRM of some sort. And music metadata.

These are two things that I suspect Spotify makes use of. I suspect you probably didn't at St Andrews for your streaming, but let me know if you did.
I think they just need to get someone. Doesn't really matter who. Find some random gullable 13 year old wanna-be-hacker kid that ran LOIC for a while. Parade him in front of the media and judges, send him off to juvie, handshakes and bonuses for everyone involved... Police, prosecutors, media, all get to pat theselves on the back. That is what this is really about.
As a longtime Massachusetts / Boston resident, the culture of the city may have something to do with it.

Boston is, at its heart, a Puritan settlement. This has been used as a sleight against Boston, but I don't mean it that way. But it is a word that captures the essence of what I mean.

A superficial example shows itself to visitors immediately. Most people who visit Boston come away thinking the people are cold and unfriendly, especially if traveling from a very outgoing culture like you find in, say, California.

Having lived here, I can say, this is often true, Bostonians are not known for being welcoming of outsiders. But they are extremely loyal, honest, and dependable as a rule as well. If a Bostonian tells you they will be at your party next weekend, they probably will! I had some trouble adjusting to the fact that this isn't really assumed in other places (California...)

Another is the work ethic. Bostonians (as a rule) abhor flash and glamour. They prefer good old fashioned hard work. Leave the get rich quick schemes to New York, we will get rich slow.

I think that Boston needs to adjust to the pace that the tech world works at, and I think it will take some time. But, then again, the tech world will probably also benefit greatly when the deliberate wisdom of Boston again rises in the tech world.

And it will. Eventually.

To be fair, Cambridge, where I really live, has a culture of its own, and is often more reminiscent of Berkeley than Boston. But when you're talking about money, for the large part, you're also talking about Boston. Also, even in Cambridge, the focus is still definitely much more on academic achievement than entrepreneurial achievement.
...I don't know how to put this more clearly than uncr3ative already did, but both of the responses to that post have basically demonstrated exactly why we feel the way we do when we walk into a classroom dominated by men.

It's not embarrassment. It's the fact that you walk in and you are already seen as the "other", different from them. The fact that they can be talking about you as if you're an The fact that they will be talking about their interests which might not coincide with yours (but oftentimes coincide with you and people of your sex), and so you're not sure how to broach conversation with them. The fact that you feel like an intruder, unwanted or invisible, because you're not in ~the clique~ and therefore shouldn't be there.

The fact that somebody would respond to this, and put quotes around "obstacle", because how could any of those things be an obstacle at all?

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.
The patent may be expired, but an enhancement to it might be granted a new patent, and your implementation might inadvertently infringe on the enhancement. There may also be cases where two patents cover the same algorithm. Be careful about assuming a patent has expired, terms have changed in the past and you have to consider foreign patents as well.
Sure, but that just means you aren't price sensitive. By the same rationale, some people might use enough gasoline that they don't care whether food prices go up because it's more important to keep gas prices low. I spend 1/10 as much on gas as on food, so I'm the other way.

The problem with the food price argument is that it's usually put in terms of the poor people starving because food prices go up. And if that's your argument, you have several worse problems that should be fixed first.
This is substantially what AT&T has done for the iPhone data plans.

200MB - $15/month
2GB - $25/month

Albeit without the higher speeds.