skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fear.

Put your cellphone near your FM radio. Listen in amazement as the digital chatter between your phone and some remote tower causes interference in your radio reception and affects your listening pleasure. Now imagine that same thing happening to the digital signals in the airplane's electronics while attempting to operate the craft. Catastrophe, chaos, etc. ad nauseum.

Realistic? Doubtful for many reasons. But that's the fear the bureaucrats, pilots, and passengers possess.
Well, the more knowledge an individual has in an area, the more likely they are to realise their shortcomings.
1. When so much is at stake to err on the side of caution seems reasonable. 2. I have not been in a plane for a while - so can't quite visualize what it looks like - but in the event of an emergency abort on take off, or a landing that goes wrong - having all loose items stored is a head start in ensuring ones iPad does not become an iGuillotine. Just a thought.
I wish that the FAA would admit that this is the reason, if it is true. It certainly makes sense.

Personally, I don't mind the switch-off since it keeps obnoxious people from yakking on their phones (now, if only the airlines would offer infant-free flights...).
Germany's economic collapse seems to be inevitable
Yes, it was disappointing that the the article conflated stimulates like Adderall with non-stimulate based nootropics like Provigil/modafinil.

It's unclear if the author understands the difference at all - for example, modafinil is supposed to let you do without sleep, and yet fall asleep when you choose. That's an important distinction compared to stimulates like Adderall, but doesn't seem to be mentioned.
Has any airline or other relevant authority ever claimed that this was the reason? It seems like they'd state this if that were the case.
It's funny that suddenly we say the market is full of "REAL" tablets in the $199 range, when just a month or three ago everyone was excited about the Fire because there 'were no "REAL" $199 tablets'
I guess this is kind of what is happening in the browser at the moment.
There are two sides to this:

EMC is black magic and airplane safety is another and thus nobody is willing to say that using random RF devices onboard of plane is safe - for one reason it's almost impossible to test. By the way owner's manual for my new car contains paragraph that explicitly disallows usage of any RF transmitter inside the car that does not have external antenna (and I would assume that most car manufacturers include similar paragraph in their manuals and also that everybody ignores them).

Cellular networks and cell phones are not designed for relative speeds and RF propagation modes of high flying commercial aircraft. Most access methods of digital wireless networks depend on precise timing where propagation delays are significant and thus need to compensate for relative movement of phone and base station and there are pretty low limits of how fast movement can be compensated (it's almost practical to drive car faster than speed limit of GSM1800). Also higher levels of cellular protocol stacks are not exactly prepared for situation when phone sees large number of accessible cells with quite strong signal and this set changes very quickly.
Upvote to all of you. I hadn't realized this until today when I returned to this story and noticed that hardly anyone had responded to it. The story (and its comments) have basically died since it is off the "new" and "frontpage" sections of the site. However, if the story could somehow be found in a section on the HN site, I wonder if it would get more response and show some life. Just a thought...
The NSA cared a lot about FORTRAN. Did I just learn something about the nature of code breaking, given FORTRAN's affinities?

"Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
Based on my own personal opinion and experiences? Fischer random creates a lot of uncertainty in my mind when I play. Regardless of what obscure opening is played in a traditional game I still have a sense of what spaces are likely to be controlled by rooks, where I can anticipate a knight showing up and so forth.

As far as your statement regarding branching factor increase can you point me to some references? Its not that I do not believe you I'm curious at what point the complexity begins to take off.
This was extracted from computer scientists and created by one, otherwise PHP would be numer one the stament: "Is so easy to get things done with this language". Right now its 10 staments are all negative (not even one neutral)
I was puzzled by that too, but from what I've read there's a tag defined in the Mobipocket format that specifies whether something is a "book" or a "doc". Previous Kindles (and, apparently, a lot of ebook generation software) ignore this, but the Kindle Fire does not (possibly "doc" is the default if the tag is not present -- unclear on this). You can supposedly fix the tag using Calibre, but I haven't bothered. Now that I know where they are, it doesn't really bother me.

I don't think the criticism wrt AVI is appropriate, either. I wouldn't have expected it to play AVI, and in fact am somewhat surprised that anyone is still using that as a distribution format. As a format for editing, it's somewhat understandable, but it's not the best choice for media distribution/consumption and hasn't been for quite a long time. Why would you expect a random Android device to play an obsolete/obsolescent proprietary Microsoft format?

I like the Fire, personally. It's not going to replace my iPad or eInk Kindle, but it sure is handy for reading in bed.
As the author of the piece, I have to disagree with you. First, the F.A.A. never used this as a reason when I spoke with them for my story. Second, if that were the case, then why are people allowed to read books, magazines, and play crossword puzzles on paper? Reading a book on a Kindle will not cause more distraction during an emergency than reading one on paper. Thanks, Nick Bilton.
It can also create a false sense of understanding...“A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
To be honest, I was surprised to see Amen so low on the list of results. I mean, seriously -- it makes much less sense than Groupon.
Shrekahnth Interview, Part 2 of 3
The wikipedia article is more interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft

This sums it up pretty well:
"The regulatory agencies and aviation industry take the position that any increased risk is unacceptable if it is avoidable."

There's some technical channel sharing problems where phones have access to more towers than designed on land. The FCC can't predict what would happen if phones were allowed to stay on in regards to cell roaming. They also don't know the effects on the avionics.

It looks like they're developing 'picocells' to have an on-board tower, but there are struggles with the different cellular bands. Though, there are some European carriers that have been successful with just letting people keep their phones on.

That said - I think if your device doesn't have a radio on it, it should be allowed to stay on. Which probably won't fly given the 'if it's avoidable' rationale.
If you get fifteen times as many people downloading as otherwise would have, and 90% of the people who download haven't paid for it (yet), you still come out ahead. There's nothing awful about a business model like that, period. Never judge a business model by a single metric without context like "90+% of people download but not buy".
Photography as a Non-Technical Hobby
The context of viewing is everything. Instagram is good enough for the situations it is mostly viewed in - iPad iPhone without pinch to zoom. Also, the photos are not heavily scrutinized. They're one-glance, quick-bursts of diary like slithers from people's lives, slightly enhanced the way a good story is.
The coder who runs this as a weekend project for $20 a month and a VPS may be able to create a similar product, but a version of Instagram with few other users, that is otherwise equivalent or better, is much less compelling.

There is a strong social aspect to Instagram. If it were just a place to post photos that you can tweet a link to, it would have gone the way of twitpic, yfrog, lockerz, and a dozen other services that are still used, but get a lot less attention. In this way it’s different from a successful bootstrapped service like, say, Pinboard, which can become more popular through word of mouth but was still very useful when they had just one user. Gmail is another example of a service that’s still useful with just one user.

So to be (as) useful, Instagram must have a lot of users, and must somehow attract them. A big marketing budget can help, although I don’t think Instagram has ever spent large sums on marketing. Simply being free, and good, helps a lot too though, and having enough servers to handle millions of non-paying users and developers talented enough to make it scale that well costs money.

You are right that eventually they will need to make money for all this to make sense. It seems to me that they could eventually introduce ads or offer charge for more features. But assuming that ads or premium features could eventually make business sense for Instagram, I don’t think it’s completely nuts to have a phase of rapid VC-funded growth.
Also, it sounds like "Takes a hit of crack just before servicing a client".
Groupons stock crumbles - Pretend to look surprised
Subcultures
It's because everyone hates each other while flying anyway, and if people had to fly 5 hours with some dumbass yelling on his cell phone the entire time there would be a lot more incidents of "air rage".
Easily the most annoying part of flying for me, particularly when doing a quick flight from SFO to LAX is the insistence that I turn off my Kindle while we are lining up for the runway.

* People reading newspapers, and books - both of which are larger, heavier, and just as distracting, and in the case of newspapers, a greater obstacle - are not told to put away their reading material - so the argument that "people need to pay attention on takeoff/landing" is not consistent.

* RF engineers haven't been able to prove that a kindle in airplane mode has a negligible likelihood of impacting the flight systems of an airplane. Really?

One solution, albeit a slightly annoying one, is to have a distinctively colored LED or indicator that is visible from the walkway of the airplane to a stewardess, but not annoying to the reader, which indicates whether a device has been placed in airplane mode.

The new motto then would be "Everyone please place their FAA certified equipment into airplane safety mode. All other electronics, iPads, kindles, laptops, gameboys, iPhones, iPods, must now be put away"

People, being people, would likely start putting the fake LEDs on their electronics to simulate the FAA approved one, unfortunately, not sure what to do about that.
The article comes close but does not mention one interesting piece of trivia. The frequency hopping device was made using (and inspired by) a pianoroll for an autopiano. An instrument that Lamarr and her collaborator, composer Antheil would have been familiar with. In their scheme of things, the torpedo and the sub would play the same "song" and jump frequencies in sync. Their patent lay ignored till fairly recently

EDIT: here is an Atlantic article that has more detail:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/celebr...
That's a fault of the article, not the research. There is adequate evidence that some drugs help the performance of some tasks associated with intelligence:

a two week regimen of piracetam was found to enhance verbal memory in healthy college students in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study [1]

Another study of fighter pilots showed that modafinil given in three divided 100 mg doses sustained the flight control accuracy of sleep-deprived F-117 pilots to within about 27 percent of baseline levels for 37 hours, without any considerable side effects.[2]

Modafinil selectively improves neuropsychological task performance in healthy volunteers, possibly through improved inhibitory control.[3]

Modafinil significantly enhanced performance on tests of digit span, visual pattern recognition memory, spatial planning and stop-signal reaction time.[4]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Military_and_astronau...

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15121488

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12417966
Yes I don't like micro-payments myself either. Freemium is my current plan.

I had also considered the GitHub model. I will be making portions free-software as the whole thing is built off it anyway.

If nothing else I will be going free for quite a while as I believe that there should be a code search repository available online.

For the record it will live at http://searchco.de/ I was in the middle of pushing out my second release when Google made its announcement so its looking a little worn at the moment.
Wow, you're really taking 10x the recommended dosage [0]. You're in fact, very close to overdosing or according to some studies, already overdosing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Recommendations
Music Droid
Show HN: Incremental chained MapReduce indexes with subscriptions
Perhaps if you were able to leverage it into performing tasks that the specific data structure excels at where other things don't.

I'm kind of thinking along the lines of google's BigTable and Mapreduce but that isn't exactly the same.
What are the consequences for simply refusing to obey a crew member's instruction to power down your Kindle? Sort of like willfully ignoring the distinction between the first-class and economy security lines---something I wish more people would do.
Actually, bubble sort has very nice access locality characteristics which mean it can be a great solution in some circumstances...
I wouldn't worry about people putting fake LEDs on their devices. It's not like a handful of devices being improperly turned on will do anything bad anyway. Do you think all 200+ people on a plane remember to turn off your cell phones? Fat chance. If consumer RF equipment could bring down a plane when used in small numbers, airliners would be raining from the skies.
Show HN: signal -- a community link blog
My weekend hack project was to put together a small web app for sharing links in the spirit of memepool.com. It uses a bookmarklet to let people clip interesting articles to share while reading and uses a subset of markdown to add links and blockquotes to posts. It also uses oEmbed to pull in content from popular sites (youtube, slideshare, vimeo, etc) and API integrations to show tweets.

It was fun to build - I'd love feedback. Thanks!

http://findsignal.com
Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history.
OT: For some reason the Recollect bar that slides in from the top when I scroll down the page is very distracting. It seems to violate the expectation that, when scrolling downward, page content should only be moving upward. It also feels like it's robbing me of readable screen area. I suspect I'd be much less bothered by a position: fixed header that was always present.
Amazon made it very clear from the beginning that the Fire was designed first and foremost for consuming Amazon content, and it does that very well. I do not regret spending the $200 on it.

It was never advertised as a tablet or a competitor to the iPad, so I don't understand all of the backlash from the people who wanted to use it that way.
Airborne cellphones and electronics are more of a risk than you think - IEEE
The last time I flew, most of the people around me didn't know the difference between "airplane mode", "standby", and "off". I'd bet that at least 80% of the phones on that flight were full on despite the efforts of the crew and the device's owners.

Everyone turning off everything successfully before takeoff is pure fiction.
> I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.

I think that in other conditions where pirates never go on to buy something they've pirated (gawd, "pirate" is such an awful term for this -- there are no eyepatches and cutlasses involved), they just wouldn't fucking buy it in the first place if they couldn't pirate it.

> But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.

That's a bad business model, and in no way contradicts the notion that people who pirate would like to buy later a lot of the time. Reduce the friction in the purchase process, and you'll make more money. It's almost tautological. Keeping the hurdles to purchase high then blaming the results on piracy is completely asinine.
If they actually aren't willing to test whether cell phones interfere with their equipment, they shouldn't be allowing cell phones on the plane at all. Relying on people's compliance (or even just their attention) to ensure the plane doesn't explode is absurd.
Yes, absolutely turn off all devices. We know with certainty that ANY transmitter can cause terrible havoc with the plane's electronics.

Unless you're paying the ripoff $10 fee for in-flight Wifi, then the dangers are magically avoided.
The Fabric of the Cosmos
Maybe the question is not why you have to pay for your car, but why you _do not_ have to pay to view information via a website, store a copy of this in RAM and/or save a copy using secondary storage. Why is it typically "free" for you to do that?
National Defense Authorization Act - Turning US into a Battlefield
IEEE - Unsafe At Any Airspeed: Cellphones and other electronics are more of a risk than you think:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-ai...
I'd also like to mention that "exactly like normal chess in complexity" is false. How can you say that there are the same number of possible first moves in a standard game versus a fischer random game?
Gratitude As A Business Strategy
"This is a lame argument, akin to complaining that people using computers for fun are reducing the supply for people using computers for work."

The DEA limits how much of these drugs are allowed to be made. Companies have to petition to make more. The DEA says there's enough, yet people with prescriptions sometimes have to get the drugs illegally themselves.

"CONAN: Well, I was interested in your piece to hear the DEA say there is no shortage.

KNOX: Yes, I was - I was surprised, too, because the FDA says there is. And, you know, they have a website on the FDA that lists all the drugs in shortage, and there are a lot of them these days. And I've - one thing that caused me to do the story is I found that methylphenidate, the Ritalin-type drugs, popped up on that list a week or two ago."

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142661880/adhd-sufferers-fear-...

If you think that's lame, maybe you could tell the DEA that we need more, so casual users won't cut into legitimate users' supply.
Don't you ever get tired of being reasonable and/or logical, Nick?
Here's what I don't understand, and admittedly I have very little knowledge of the industry.

There seems to be some sort of approval process for electronics to be vetted during takeoff and landing. Several in-chair entertainment systems seem to have this rating/designation and are allowed during takeoff/landing.

So, is there no dollar amount that could be paid to properly test a particular product? Let's say the Kindle or iPod. It may be millions of dollars, but wouldn't there be a huge word-of-mouth and marketing upside if you could get approved for such a thing?
> Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

Absolutely. When I was in the security group for eBay/PayPal, we had a consultant come in for about a month, and at the end he gave us a list of projects to keep us busy for at least a year that made tangible improvements to our security.
I created this prototype over Thanksgiving week to scratch an itch. CouchDB has incremental MapReduce, but no chaining of views. Riak has chained MapReduce, but doesn't natively support incremental indexing. Also, I haven't seen any index where an app can be notified if a particular reduced value changes.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.
FACT: the risk of my mobile phone igniting vapourised fuel in a gas station forecourt is almost exactly equivalent to the probability that my ipod nano will tangle with an airplane's cockpit electronics.

It's all myth and fud spread by a) people with ulterior motives (see above) b) people who are too uneducated or too stupid to make their own judgement. Like air hostesses, petrol attendants.
Given that the success of Rybka can't be entirely attributed to copying an open source engine this does not seem like a smart decision on the part of the author. The similarities are nothing that couldn't have been re-implemented, even if fruit's architecture was superior. I don't think that Rbyka is just a tuned version of fruit in any case. It is obvious that a lot of work went into the design and development. The report is quite damning, however.

The interview itself is tremendously unconvincing IMHO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQshTNJ4pSM
Fun tidbit for gamers: in Half Life 2, the headcrab that causes the portal mixup is named Lamarr, after Hedy. Get it?
Iceberg features
A couple of relevant articles (old but good):
Why it's so hard to pay attention:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124018463826033223.html?mod=...

Is LSD the geek's wonder drug?
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015
#7 Issue (October 2011) of HITB Magazine
And the O(N) is against your entire keyset, and not just the keys you're erasing. Which makes it even worse.
Opportunity in the Adderall drought
Can 2011 Audi R8 Will Make Your Dating Dreams Come True?
Thoughts on the Kindle DX which is on sale for $259? The original Kindle screen always seemed too small to me and the DX always seemed too expensive, but now...
I don't find this plausible. Is there any evidence to suggest that, during an emergency condition requiring cooperation, people continue to text and make calls? To quote Mitch Hedberg, "If you're flammable and have legs, you're never blocking a fire exit."