skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, sort of expanding on cstross' point, real-world military technology is also rapidly advancing well past what Star Trek has ever considered. The 1960s heritage shines through here too. In the original series, hooking up a Big Honking Computer that gives the Enterprise some sort of drone-like control possibility was a Big Deal, the focus of an entire episode. And they had to actually bring in new hardware, it wasn't just a software patch.

I've seen a moderately serious treatment that suggests that in a fight between our modern military and the Enterprise, the modern military might very well win. The Enterprise does have the ability to slag its choice of ground target, and we'd have a hard time retaliating as long as it stayed in orbit, but that is pretty much all they could do. It seems it would be trivial to block their transporter, shuttles may be shielded but they seem to be slow and one imagine we could wear them down even with conventional weaponry, and Federation ground troops are laughably incompetent by real military doctrine standards, armed with a single line-of-vision ray weapon that immediately gives away their position every time they use it, somehow no air support, and their use of this weapon is also incompetent. Any modern military would chew them up on the ground, to say nothing of the elite ones.

Also it seems like any ol' script kiddie from real modern Earth would be able to penetrate their computer security by accident. The Federation seems to be incapable of writing a login screen without a cross-site scripting arbitrary code execution attack built right in and easily accessible in seconds from the keyboard.
As commented above, yes, it is possibly illegal under UK law. For example:

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he: (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_harassment,_alarm_o...
Foursquare CEO on What He's Learning From Twitter and What's Next
VoIP and Social Media - Are They Connected
BlockAid - Redefining the internet (P2P dns)
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy an article I wrote:

http://www.writemoretests.com/2011/09/agile-scrum-delivering...
That's not true. As a topical example: In the US, you have a right to anonymously donate money to Super PACs, and donating money anonymously for political causes is considered protected under free speech.
A mid-range home EV charger (like the GE WattStation), is spec'ed for 30A at 240V, which is 7.2kW, not 20kW.

You might be confused because a typical battery in an EV is around 20+kWh, which is why it takes a few hours for the wall charger to charge it!

For comparison, a 20kW load would draw 83A at 240V. A smallish pole mounted utility transformer may supply 20kW.

Of course, none of it detracts from your point that petroleum is very energy dense :)
Kenny's initial implementation of the validation on a sample 50,000 node data graph and a specific ontology took four seconds.

The goal of Kenny's project was to get a working DSL and prototype of the validation algorithm. We don't really have much performance data to compare it to either at this point. As we gather that data by using the system, we'll make it faster as necessary. (Nathan Marz's "suffering-oriented programming" post is a perfect description of this development process http://nathanmarz.com/blog/suffering-oriented-programming.ht...)
is there any performance penalty?
Going to extreme lengths they could have examined the heat shield by repurposing spy satellites. But there was very little they could have done about it anyway.
"You can't get 5-to-1 leverage on stocks or other such passive investments."

You can get much more than that. For one example: buy the 30 Year Treasury Bond Future. A single futures contract is for a value of $100,000 but will cost you margin of $4,185. That's nearly 24 to 1! See here:

http://www.ccstrade.com/futures/US/margin/
What "true subsidies" are you referring to? The link you cite to doesn't really mention any. The three biggest fossil fuel subsidies listed are:

Foreign tax credit ($15.3 billion), the Credit for production of non-conventional fuels ($14.1 billion), and the Oil and Gas exploration and development expensing ($7.1 billion).

The first and third are deductions just about every global corporation gets. The second one appears to be subsidizing alternative fuels, not fossil fuels at all.
Any thoughts on 37 Signals's brochure vs. jekyll?

https://github.com/sstephenson/brochure

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll
I took a professional ethics class in college, and the professor was a personal friend of Roger. The whole class was about Challenger, and the incredible failure of judgement around it's demise. Roger came into one of our classes and spoke to us late in the semester.

After listening to tapes of the trials, interviews, reading transcripts, and reading articles it was very apparent to me that this was a failure of management. The lead engineer, during the discussions of whether to launch the night before, was arguing that the engineering evidence did not support a launch under the temperature conditions projected for the following morning. He was told by Morton-Thiokol business reps to "take off your engineer hat, and put on your manager hat".

Evidence points to this failure happening because NASA needed a PR boost for funding, and M.T. wanted to continue doing business with them delivering solid-state boosters.

Because Roger Boisjoly spoke to Congress during the hearings he was black-listed from his industry. At no point during the decisions leading up to that disaster did good engineering practices that could have prevented this destruction come into play.
Tool to cross-browser test websites locally
No, the mortgage broker did a google search on me, my wife, and my corporation. They found NotifyWire.com where I released the details of the Cease and Desist letter sent by Craigslist.

Since my income comes from my company (though mostly from consulting activities) the broker thought the underwriters might think my income future was in jeopardy.

He told me mortgage underwriters are doing web searches on applicants, which is the scary part.
Dreamweaver still requires non-technical people to understand what a <div> is or a ftp. That is not in the realm of possibilities.
I'd say that the LK project has -

(a) A formalized well-functioning hierarchy. There are people responsible for each part of the project - networking, vm, file systems, etc.

(b) Highly skilled C developers. The language appear to have a big influence on how one carries himself in the community. C++ devs tend to be opinionated know-it-alls, Java devs - the same way but friendlier if a bit more condescending, etc. The C crowd is the humbliest by far and this makes the most pleasant to be in, so from this follows...

(c) An established culture of mutual respect between the peers. If someone says something dumb, there's always a chance that it is not and you are simply not getting it.

As with any community it could've gone in any direction, but in the end it all comes down to the leader. Linus is a witty opinionated, but inherently friendly and polite person, and so is the community in general.
NGINX Launches Commercial Support for Open-Source Web Server
Can you expand about what is neat with HTML(5) on ios? personally the only thing I saw was desolation and poor performance. I rarely saw anything neat cool and fun in html5 for ios..

I surely missed something I guess. I think it's a shame we are not going to have flash on android tablets, it's somewhere it could have perform well.
Intel's Haswell to support Transactional Synchronization Extensions
Have the highest respect for the folks at 37signals, but this is definitely not a HN frontpage worthy post. I'm beginning to see almost every blog post by them on HN front page. No offense but it doesn't kindle the hacker's knowledge in any way.
Got it. I think we ironically tend to underestimate our ability to estimate. I normally :set nonumber, and like secoif, I've impressed myself on numerous occasions with how well I'm able to estimate line counts and character counts. Give it a try -- you're likely to impress yourself too.
This is really cool, but it is intensely consuming the 80% of my cpu resource (osx 10.7.3 intel dual core & 8gb ram).
What I really don't like about solutions like this (and other "software as a service" sites) is that that the solution provider has access to my private information and data.

I'd much prefer using a standalone app that runs on my own computer and does everything from there.

No business has a need to know about which other businesses or people I contact in my job hunt, or really anything about me or my jobhunt, unless I'm applying for a job directly with them, and even then what they need to know is limited to my employment history and such, not about who else I've talked to during my jobhunt, much less the content of the conversations I've had with them.

I agree with RMS in that I think sites like impressar (and Facebook and Gmail, etc..) are really just spyware.

They might be worth using if they somehow managed to convince me my data would be completely private (ie. if even they didn't know what I was doing, saying, or who I'm talking to, etc). But that's a very tall order, and until they've got it together I am going to steer far clear of sites like these.
And just like that, you determined my experience on this site :) Confirmed to occur in firefox as well.

I actually don't know anything about pot.js now except that this bug scares me.
Gas has an incredible amount of energy density. You can do a fun calculation as follows:

If you believe this calculator, it takes 2419kJ to go 20km while cycling. (http://www.tribology-abc.com/calculators/cycling.htm)

A gallon of gas contains about 114,000BTU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent). Note that the Exxon diagram is 'per fillup' not per gallon.

So... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281%2F%28%282419kJ%2F2... yields 617MPG while biking.

It's approximate, but good to know that biking is roughly an order of magnitude more efficient than cars.
Yep, actually driving the car yourself becomes a purely vanity activity.

Except when you build shelves in your garage rather than buying cheap ones at the store, you could actually build better shelves than reasonable money can buy. But it's hard to imagine even the most talented and dedicated hobby driver outracing a computer.

Future car games will have to be set either in the past (horses are very important if cars have not been invented yet) or in some kind of special human drivers only scenario.

We still have equestrian events in the Olympics, so F1 as a human drivers only future equivalent of antiquated transportation based competition?
On the other hand, I've never been able to drive above 45 mph on my normal commute, I'm only able to do so when I go on holidays.

Some cities are just not planned for cars (European cities like Vienna for example, where you cannot enter the downtown, or some South American cities like Montevideo).

I used to have a Maruti car and it was plenty for 99% of the time, and I'd buy a low-range electric/hydrogen/whatever car if it was cheap and offered me a better mileage equivalent.
why didn't they use a some sort of steam probe? Or heated probe?
Anything that uses ASCII art in code, let alone interactively wins my heart the moment I set eyes on it. Big thumbs up! :)
As someone who works with both Flash and HTML5, this news makes me sad.

Flash just works for much better. There are no cross-browser issues (except those that don't support it at all -- thanks, Apple). And ActionScript is a better language for building complex apps than JavaScript.
Looks like the script was made by this guy http://nerget.com/
Minimalist, sexy, and original. Very nice, very nice.
This is simply amazing. It seems like a beautiful work of art in some strange new genre.
Agreed – this is very cool. Probably using so much CPU because it actually updates a paragraph tag in the DOM with all of those characters. I bet a canvas tag with text fills would solve the speed problem. But then, the page would not be SEO friendly ;)
Doesnt' jekyll do precompilation? Brochure, being an actual rack app will do dynamic rendering of the templates.
i find a similar but very much better book is "the millionaire next door" which shows the traits of an average millionaire
They look very much like the original Mac OS icon/face.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/81/Mac_OS_Logo_wi...
Hey, not 100% sure what we are doing about contributors yet, but feel to shoot me an email at myusername@pycoders.com.
Written essays
Written essays are not shady as exciting writers work downright with kingly serves and writers as-a-rule get taught corollaries securely.
Somebody just submitted one hell of a job application. If I was AirBnB, I'd take note and action.
Oil power stations are around 33% efficient[1]. Electric drives have up to 80% efficiency[2].

Given those rough figures, even when powered by oil stations battery-powered cars can theoretically be more efficient at using oil than a car with an ICE.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_power_plant#Heat_into_mecha...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Energy_efficiency
At the risk of being downvoted, there's a big herd of 37signal followers on HN. Every article they post get a lot of points...

Anyway I agree with your TL;DR, not much to see here!
For the curious, I ran into an excellent document which is an excerpt from an after the fact risk assessment of the Shuttle System over time: http://traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/NASAShuttleRiskRevie...

It's quite fascinating and pretty eye opening.
This is very, very cool! However, are you willing to share the source code or otherwise clarify how it's implemented? I love this and think it's a great idea, but I would not feel comfortable using it extensively unless I knew how it worked, what its limitations are, etc.
Nice comment. As an engineer, I enjoyed reading the Columbia accident report also. It's available free at:

http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html

It's detailed, but well-written and the quality of the analysis is extraordinary. If you want a preview, take a glance at the debris analysis on page 40. If you like understated drama, start at the comm transcript on page 42. ("Lock the doors.")

Everyone at NASA got a hard copy of this report.
Super. So now on top of all the other junk people are putting into their sites without thinking we'll have just one more addition. Soon we'll have websites, if we don't already, that will import more junk than is actually in the website.

All to make a gradient.
I'm not sure what your point is. Would it bother you less if they were all contractors? You live in New York, the 3rd most populous state in the country, so it follows that you would have a lot of civil servants compared to say, Alaska. Nothing in your statement provides any evidence that civil service salaries are rising beyond inflation.
I guess my orginal point was that RPython has lots of hooks (eg the decorators that you mentioned) which allow the JIT to effectively trace the interpreted program. You would probably have to extend LuaJIT with similar hooks in order to use it in the same way. As tomp pointed out, the interpreter loop itself is not a good candidate for tracing. The JIT needs to at least know about the interpreters program counter to be able to identify loops in the interpreted program. You're right that referring to these as optimizations is inaccurate.
My own manifesto of a shipper
This is my public statement and declaration of shipper & nomad life.
How we used free + open source tools to build a face recognition app
Yes I absolutely would make the same argument. The moment you begin to moderate your medium, you accept responsibility for it. I’m not saying anything in this discussion about whether FB is right or wrong to allow hate material, just that they cannot hide behind “We abhor it but believe we should not censor discussion.”

UPDATE: I have no idea, but I am curious: Can you write porn on FB? Soft-core? Hard-core? As suggested by another respondent, I’m pretty sure you can post a picture of yourself with skinhead tattoos. Can you post a hateful picture? Is this just words vs. pictures? Or is it ideas vs. so-called porn?
25 bucks from Google for your search data
Kenny's work is a language for describing the schema of a graph (e.g. "this graph is a bipartite graph"). We want our non-programmers to be able to write graph schemas, hence the DSL. I imagine one could use the Gremlin language to specify a graph schema, but I think it would be a bit obtuse as Gremlin is a query language.

We're actually using the Blueprints model under the hood to implement the validation algorithm.
Tinkerbell and Tampax
they claim that they could not generate the electricity needed for those.
The main problem with Flash is that it's completely proprietary, and therefore, as 4chan would say, OH EXPLOITABLE.

Worse is the fact that Adobe has been sitting with their thumbs wedged in their arses for months, in some cases, while known vulnerabilities were being exploited in the wild.

It's hard to imagine a better argument for moving away from closed technologies like this.
I could not disagree more. I love posts like this. They took a very common idiom and re-imagined it in a fun and creative way. The insight into the process was interesting and really useful as a reference point for my own work.

More just like this please.
"I'd wager that people are just as safe on a Galaxy-class vessel as they are in San Francisco."

No, definitely not. Over the course of TNG I think the Galaxy-class death rate was at least 33% in ~10 years. There weren't that many deployed at the time, and we see several of them blow up, and the carcasses of a couple of others.
It's definitely possible to do better than that. Hit me up sometime if you want to discuss it.
Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress - 30,000 Drones "protecting" you by 2020
My current car weighs 0.8 tons and has a 50 miles per gallon consumption (Renault Twingo), and the one I had before weighed 0.7 tons and could archieve up to 115 miles per gallon (according to an article) though something like 60 or 70 mpg was more normal.

http://www.aftermarketleads.com/2011/12/maruti-alto-delivers...

I suspect the problem is partly American attitude towards small cars. Japanese, Europeans and South Americans have much more efficient cars for daily commute.
> Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating it.

Right. No one wants the cameras to follow Kirk as he gets a worried look on his face, sticks a copy of Space Sports Illustrated under his arm and runs for the head after eating a bad batch of Rigelian Sarklon worms. Presumably, however, it does happen from time to time.
> all you need to do is identify a few very effective and very well-paid CEOs to argue that this is false

No. If there's no correlation between CEO-pay and performance/market cap, finding a few interesting counter-cases doesn't further your argument. Inherent randomness and lack of accounting for other factors are far more likely to be the culprits here than market efficiency.

EDIT: Further, zero correlation isn't a "middle-ground" between positive and negative correlation. If it implies anything it's that one variable (performance/market cap) doesn't depend on another. If there's no correlation, CEOs can still be overpaid, they just can't do worse for their companies as pay increases.
Thanks, I always get frustrated doing full screen hops.
I wasn't calling him a douche. I realized halfway through reading his post that he was being ironic.
Well how much energy is lost? 50%? 80%? Assuming it is 50%, then the answer would be you could charge the iPhone for 10 years instead of 20 years. Still interesting.
Especially considering that the article's key complaint is that Wikipedia wasn't sufficiently up-front about editorial bias.

Seems to me the pot is calling the Pyrex vessel black.
The upside is they can devalue their currency to address trade balance and solvency issues. Something Ireland, Greece, and Spain can't do. It beats the pants off trying to lower wages.
perhaps the culture change because of the challenger disaster...nothing like having the shuttle blow up, to make you reevaluate your priorities for safety
Google Chrome para Android
I find it also depends on what profession you're in. It's tough to be content if you're a programmer and a non-entrepreneur vs being a teacher/non-entrepreneur, or social network, or nurse.
So maybe it's a photo/text distinction. Is anyone posting Nazi/skinhead photos on FB? Are they getting blocked?
GoSquared launches new dashboard for real-time analytics
When visiting family in SC and FL I usually gag when I see people driving around (even running errands) in golf carts. Maybe I should give them a high-five instead.
Killing Hollywood: Iron Sky. Hybrid of traditional film-making and crowdsourcing
The formula that makes a video go viral
heh

I think we are talking past each other.

I am talking about the problem in general.
A massive percentage of the internet's video consumption (YouTube and related sites) is already served by HTML5.
Not all android devices are shipped with locked bootloaders.
The problem with enforcing secure boot is it is too broad requirement applied to all ARM-based hardware.

edit: "applied to ARM-based hardware certified to run or running Microsoft windows". per wikipedia it looks like it is applicable to hw certified to run windows.
Well if you're shy enough it will stymie your social life.
Also it has nothing to do with introversion.

But I think the OP's point is that "introvert" now means anyone who could be either, shy, or socially anxious, or any number of other things.

I remember not that long ago the on-line geeky community embraced Asperger syndrome as an excuse for lacking social skills, or being socially anxious, or forever alone, etc. People who clearly did not have it claimed they had a "light" version of it. Other people called them on it, fortunately that meme did not sick.

But the all my social awkwardness is due to me being an introvert (when in fact you could very well be an social super awkward extrovert) meme is sticking.

That's too bad for those who are not socially awkward at all, but are introverts. But oh well. We just need to invent a new term which will not be co-opted by every shy and socially rough extrovert who thinks she's an introvert because he doesn't have enough friends or enough recognition at work.
Canvas actually gave me disappointing results, believe it or not. The text rendering wasn't as fast or as pleasantly rendered compared to just using the DOM. It didn't seem worth it to me to try and optimize a canvas rendering routine, although I could have been overly naive with my initial tests.
Switching the background-color to black and the text color to green results in a really cool looking display.
How many times more efficient is a gas power plant than the average use of a car?
It's pretty amazing that we pay ~$90 a month to Verizon but only ~$13 a month to Apple. Intuitively it feels that Apple is the one creating most of the value.
Really impressed with the new design and tools provided by Version 4. Just keeps getting better and better!
r00k, thanks and keep them coming. The tagline at the top "Detailed Vim content...." seems to target the site at more experienced users, whereas most of your content (so far) is focused on the first-week vim user.
But how long before they outfit these things with the nano-quadrotors?
Can you tell that 37 Signals is gearing up to a new product launch?!