skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The long-range (passive) RFID hardware is documented here:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/pr2_rfid

http://www.ros.org/wiki/hrl_rfid

Probably not too interesting, but a start. It looks like the old robot power supply boards and force-torque sensor boards reside on my old lab's "internal" wiki. That's no good! I'll have to ask 'em about moving the files over to the public one. The latest designs (FPGA software defined radio) are being tested, so they've got a while before they'll be released. ;-)
Titanic Struck By Berg but Passengers Saved, Disabled Liner in Tow
once upon a time i signed an NDA about an NDA, it was probably the second most stupid thing i ever signed (the first one was a "unternehmensgründerförderungsvereinbarung").

nowadays i only sign NDAs that are shorter than one page, prohibit one or two specific actions and have a fixed expiration date (not to far in the future).
I clicked to post exactly this. I live on the Chesapeake Bay, and it seems like half the boats in the local Craigslist are of the unsinkable variety.

I think what the article is really getting at is whether or not it's possible to build an indestructible ship, and of course, the answer to that is no.

It's possible to make a ship that is much stronger than the people it carries -- most ships are, but that doesn't make the people any less fragile or more susceptible to death, injury or drowning.

Submarines are perhaps a superior design for this, on paper, but generally speaking, a submarine isn't where you want to be if the submarine is in any danger whatsoever.

So yeah, unsinkable boat? Check. Unsinkable passengers? No check.
I've removed the jQuery dependency and submitted a pull request (https://github.com/milanvrekic/JS-humanize/pull/1).
Packet switching in Stockholm's waste vacuum system
Reminded me of something Jaron Lanier wrote... found it:

"For instance, there is the idea of the computer file, which was debated up until the early 80s. There was an active contingent that thought that the idea of the file wasn't a good thing and we should instead have a massive distributed data base with a micro-structure of some sort. The first (unreleased) version of the Macintosh did not have files. But Unix jumped the fence from the academic to the business world and it had files, and Macintosh ultimately came out with files, and the Microsoft world had files, and basically everything has files. At this point, when we teach undergraduates computer science, we do not talk about the file as an invention, but speak of it as if it were a photon, because it in effect is more likely to still be around in 50 years than the photon."[1]

http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_lanier.html
There are many materials that are stronger than steel and lighter than water.

It's all about costs, not about technology.
If one of the key ideas behind Science is thorough peer review, and the code that your paper relies on is essentially unreviewable and untestable, how is it any different from just not releasing it?
You've misunderstood the two key requirements of a hashing function.

The first is to be secure. It should produce irreversible, unpredictable changes to at least half of the bits in the output string if one bit of input is changed.

The second is to be fast. Hash functions are typically used to produce authentication of various pieces of original data. Each such unit of data might be small; hashes should not add an unacceptable overhead to communications, for example.

By contrast, key-derivation functions should be slow, because they have a different threat profile. Using a hash function for key-derivation purposes is a mistake.
if the goal is scientific understanding, he is going to have to improve the portrayal of the size of the sun relative to the size of the earth.
Interesting to see:

1) How the company tried to manage the news cycle and put out that the ship's design held up well and saved lives.

2) The attempt to blame new technology (wireless) for the lack of accurate information.

3) Focus on the business personalities on board.

The WSJ story the following day focused on the value of assets lost and insurance coverage.
Paulinho
Labor is by far the largest cost here.

I have a pretty fair knowledge of the Google car and the Stanford cars that came before it. The equipment at scale isn't really that expensive and can be fairly easily retrofitted onto existing cars.

Even if it ends up costing 50k and an extra 20k per year in maintenance (which is probably too high for a computer and a few actuators and sensors) taking driver labor out of the equation results will result in vast cost savings as a percentage of total operation costs.

>theft insurance will likely be higher

Theft will be nearly impossible for an average criminal. Remove human controls and you've instantly defeated 99% of car thieves.
Good point. The Instagram acquisition is only worth $1b is Facebook stock is $1b.
I picked up Life of Pi which had 20 19 18, and Slaughterhouse-Five which had just 20.
Two Things About Semicolons
This might need some internationalization support...
I have a minor quibble with this article. We have a pretty good reason why they didn't either extend the watertight compartments or use a double hull in the construction.

Extending the watertight compartments up into the ship makes passenger movement much harder; a killer for a ship built around luxury.

The double hull would have added a lot of weight to the ship. Titanic's sister ship Britannic required a bigger engine to maintain the same speed and was less economical as a result. Titanic was expected to perform weekly Atlantic crossing over a very long lifetime and the cost would have been substantial.
WordPress: Extracting Posts by Date, Category or Count
2d in a series covering basics of the WordPress loop. This article covers displaying posts by date, count or category. Includes code examples.
I wonder if KickStarter and similar projects could disrupt YC and TechStars.

For example, I could see DropBox raising a sizable seed round on KickStarter if it was an option when they launched. (Free 250gb plan for a year with a donation of $50.)
Where can I find a list of these amazing multi-media programming environments that I've never heard of before, but which look so awesome?
Google using Street View house numbers in reCAPTCHAs
A comparison chart would be nice. I watched the demo and and couldn't what Light Table does that IntelliJ doesn't do.
Wonderful counter-exhortation, I applaud you.
So I'm guessing you don't have conversations with passengers then and stay completely silent in the car.
My brain stated the same thing. Someone is not going about money management properly, if $99/month is true for only a $1000 investment plus freelance budget.
No, "optional" means you can skip it, period, full stop.

False advertising plus module patterns plus concatenation equals big enough trouble for people to be outraged about the false advertising. Better to tell the truth, from the title down.

If you are using your brain fully, perhaps you can avoid firing the footgun. Is this the best use of your brain? I am not so sure.
Maybe there is a model for a version 2 of self published works?

Self publish first, if it gets a following, do the copy-editing/polishing/revising for a different "cut" of the same book. Maybe even throw an extra chapter in to give the dedicated fans a reason to buy the new one.
This is actually quite timely, as I'm looking for something more library independent to plug in to Meteor that doesn't carry all the other weight that Backbone does -- and also something to convert to a smart package.

Looks amazing.
You could try to give them all a well-defined task and see how long it takes to deliver a working solution. Then mix it up, and send them a copy of someone else's code and have each one extend it to do a second well-defined task. Repeat until you get a strong pattern which matches what you want to see in the real world.

If you're lucky, this will show you who's capable of delivering working code, who's capable of turning in work in a reasonable amount of time, who writes maintainable code, and who can deal with maintaining code from other people. You might also rig things to see how they do at documentation, support, or other "meta" stuff, but that requires more rounds and more testing.

Basically, create a fake programming team and throw some stuff at them, and then cull the ones who don't seem to be working out. If you can set it up so you make more money back than this costs you, then you win.
John Murray,

I'm sorry to hear that you have had a horrible year last year. I'm even sorry to hear that you have only had mostly encounters with fake people online.

When the telephone was invented, nobody thought that the phone was eventually going to become the end to face-to-face meeting. Nothing will replace meeting IRL. The internet and social media is just like the telephone, it is one tool out of many.

I also don't know where you find all these perfect people with perfect lives as your facebook friends. I have few facebook friends (less than 300) but they are all genuine and legitimate friends and I do interact with them and they do (all) provide some value to me by having this online connection. And no, their lives are not perfect.

I have a friend who works on an oil rig. I can't just call him up and ask if I could pop over. But we have lots of things to talk about. I like his photography and he likes some articles that I post. We can email each other but MANY other people enjoy his photos and my curation.

My family lives in 5 different time zones. We almost never get to have a 5 way video skype at the same time. Cellphones, texting, social media provides with the closest to real-time updates of my family. Once in a blue moon, we hit jackpot and get everybody to conference together. That rarely happens. We have individual emails but it's so much easier to share photos, videos and stuff like that on social media. Not just to share all the good stuff that happens, but also the not so good stuff.

I like to travel and make new friends (in real life), and we used to write emails to each other but you don't write emails to each other every day/week. And its so hard to like write your life summary once every few months especially when events already passed. My Greek friends are NOT having perfect lives at all. They keep me updated with the protests and riots that happen around Athens, about the economy and politics over there. This is not merely news from the media, these are genuine legitimate friends of mine.

Another friend of mine is a young Chicago native who quit his corporate job to travel and is currently volunteering in Nepal. He builds schools and libraries for kids. Recently he met a boy who needed heart surgery but his family could not afford it, so he used his connections via social media, to ask his own friends to help raise some money for this boy. We're not just internet friends, we're friends in real life, we know him and trust him. So now this boy got his heart surgery did.

In closing, I concur with your last statement. Facebook can be the beginning but don't let it become the end. Certainly! I can't wait to be reunited with my family and friends from all over the world and hear all about everything in more details. Facebook serves as little bookmarks to keep tabs on everyone until I get a chance to. As long as you don't add a bunch of random people, having lots of legit friends on social media is certainly not going to 'kill' you.

Best wishes
It's illegal to sell below the cost of materials, I believe. Cost of assembly does not factor in.
>And, of course, there's no guarantee that any savings in operation would be passed on to the consumer (see electronic publishing).

In this case it's likely that they would be. Book publishing is a rather unique case in that it's a million natural monopolies; if you want to read The Hunger Games, you're not going to be satisfied with a close substitute. Taxi services are fairly commoditized- excluding medallions, pretty much any automated taxi to show up at your door and bring you where you need to go is going to be acceptable. Thus you've got a much higher elasticity of demand thanks to this substitutability, so consumers capture more of the surplus. There's a low barrier to entry, so consumers can and will just switch to any cheaper option that comes along.
"We can follow the United States into a more postindustrial economy, or we can follow Germany into high-end manufacturing, but we shouldn’t be trying to compete with China in mass production."

ouch

In other words, "Do we want to compete with America or Germany?"

Maybe they need to find another option.
>As far as I know, nobody has successfully driven a driverless car in snow, for example.

Snow is really the last technological problem left. Rain is fine, but heavy snow completely blocks almost all visual indicators.

That being said, it's not an insurmountable problem and there are plenty of places where snow is almost never a problem.

If you look at the DARPA grand challenge. In 2004 the farthest anyone got was 7 miles. Yet one year later 5 vehicles successfully completed the 150 mile course, and all but one of the 23 finalists surpassed the 7 mile best from the previous year.

If California said that beginning in 2015 it would be legal for private citizens to own and operate a self driving car, I have no doubt there would be several companies with commercial products the first day they were legal.

The obstacles are almost totally political at this point.
Google's Brin Bashes Hollywood, China, Facebook as Enemies of Internet Freedom
A friend of mine has built the largest homemade submarine in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC3_Nautilus) and they're clearly dangerous vessels, exactly because of what you're saying: If something goes wrong you're under 100 feet of water with no way of getting out. Even though UC3 Nautilus has a lot of built-in safety there have been a few situations that I would consider much more dangerous than sailing a dinghy across the bay of Biscay in a force gale 12 storm.
The actual link to the code is not working, but the github link is - https://github.com/Yuffster/Eve.js
Between this and the SOPA/PIPA/etc. pushes, you can tell the US Government WANTS SO BADLY to dictate the boundaries of the free Internet. It brings up the old bit, "you can tell you're free because this is what freedom looks like."
Yep, something is wrong here.

Connected to 37signals.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /svn/posts/3159-testing-like-the-tsa HTTP/1.1
Host: 37signals.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:06:21 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/plain

10f6
HTTP/1.1 0Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:06:22 GMT
[...]
Poor aerodynamics would make the difference smaller, not larger.

Whoops, you're right, that is a silly mistake on my part.
I think Brin confuses "closed" and "mature". Internet in 2012 is more accessible than in 1998 in spite of all these extra regulations, because there is so much more information available and tools are so much better.
The guys at Los Alamos were talking about "codes" (programs) before you touched a computer (and yes, I looked at your profile, I know you've been doing software for 25 years, but there's more to the world of software than mass-market applications)
Software and robotics.

Software engineers and designers are already in high demand. Robotics are getting close to having wider industrial/consumer applications. Once Korea and China's factory wages go up high enough and the price of automation lowers, they'll start to invest heavily in robotics (ala Foxconn).
The timeline is never:

Day 1: Disruptive company is formed.
Day 2: Disrupted industry in flames, disruptive company wins!

It's a cowpath today, but I think there's every reason to believe this one can and will be paved.
This is just my opinion, but the word quality is a "generic" term. But if you had to judge, a number of things that may be good to look at, is:

1) Are they commenting their code?

2) Formatting structure of code

3) Are there redundancies in logic, that over complicate a simple idea.

4) Are they using "common" best practices while developing the code?

5) How long is it taking them to create/implement base elements like functions, classes, variables, etc.

These are just some ideas to look at. A lot of programmers are really great at what they do, but lack organization of what they build. Some programmers are great at organization, but over complicate simple ideas. It's variable based on what your "expecting" with the end product.

Do you want, just get it done, and it works code?

Do you want clean, efficient, and best practices code?
Javascript and Clojure? Seems like, a'hem, Python support might be of interest to some of us ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746692

(...but imagine it's probably just a matter of time.)
I'm sorry, this is off-topic, but why did no one tell me how impressive Code Mirror is. Every limitation I can think of in a browser-based text editor is accommodated in the usage examples. Honestly, I couldn't believe he was going browser-based with this. Will be cool to see.
I have never played Eve Online - but I played Homeworld I and II and I loved the music... they are quite old - but maybe they pioneered that music style thus my nostalgia for it, while you might find it grating...
My gut feeling is that Microsoft has turned a blind eye toward piracy by individuals for many years. Almost everyone I know who began doing system administration during the late 90's learned NT4 by pirating it.
Why do you want so much domain-specific kruft in your mail?

Use OmniFocus for task management, with a script or rule to move messages to Task status. Add a new iCal/vCard style micro format to specify tasks that you wish to delegate to me. No protocol needed, it is just a request after all. The protocol in delegation resides at the human layer, not the technology layer.

Priority etc in email makes it sound like you want to use the one piece of software to write correspondence while simultaneously managing your projects and to-do lists. Use a to-do list manager for managing tasks, use project management software for managing projects.

There are ways to link the lot together, but using the IMAP server as your go-to resource for everything is not the answer.

But I agree with you on the encryption thing.
How To Preserve Idioms In Ruby Subclassing
Mock the two proposed alternatives, provide no alternatives yourself? That's helpful.
Argh, I want to vote puppies but I see "loading" :-( Me want puppies!
Dust Bunny: The Adventure
Pandora works great for me. I rarely listen to my own library any more.
Software and robotics.

Software's an uphill battle with the culture they have- although perhaps embracing advanced robotics, and the accompanying sophisticated software demands, might help change that.
Generally people do obnoxious things like this for three reasons.

1. They are a bunch of jerks.
1a. Legal counsel within the organization is too strong.
2. Their counsel advised them to seek the most advantageous terms for the company possible.
3. It's something to haggle over that isn't money.

IP is a murky area from a litigation perspective. Its difficult to distinguish intellectual things created outside vs. inside, so the "solution" from a lawyers pov is to buy all of your intellectual property. (ie the lawyer version of "Kill them all, let God sort them out.") Since employers have a lot of leverage, and employees who aren't collectivelly bargaining are usually scared/too lazy to negotiate, it usually works out.
this looks cool. Danny (one of the devs in the video) is an old friend of mine and a cool guy.
Ideas are shit, execution's the game.
How to play all kinds of video on Galaxy Tablet HD displaying
Best Samsung Galaxy tablet video Converter enables you sync all kinds of videos from website to Samsung MP4, WMV for cool HD playing.
depending on how we do on the funding route, python and ruby would be my next choices. JS is the next easiest one to build this for I think (though it's far more difficult than Clojure).

Either way, even if we don't end up building it, I certainly believe it will materialize :)
Isn't a better question: Is it possible to build a ship that ensures passenger survival even if the boat is partially destroyed?
First, Sergey is one of the coolest people alive today, maybe ever.

That said I feel that Facebook/Apple have built their "walled gardens" through the free-market, and therefore are entitled to such. If people don't like it, they are free to leave. This is totally different than China, Saudi Arabia (or if SOPA had passed, the USA), where governments (basically at the point of a gun) decide who gets to see what.

But I agree with him that IF walled gardens exist, then governments' are likely to try and control them, which is a problem.
How is a non-programmer supposed to understand best practices, redundancies in code, or time to implement a complex class?

I've been programming my entire life and I still wouldn't be able to tell you if a Python class follows best practices simply because I don't know enough python.

The problem is that a non-programmer can't quantify what makes a good programmer any more than a non-mathematician can tell who writes the best topology proofs.

I suppose anyone can get a feel for who "gets shit done" and who doesn't, but then you're measuring something much less tangible than "programming".
Please please please support parenscript for customization (this means you write a parenscript API that looks a lot like elisp).

Plenty of editors think "emacs bindings" means C-n, C-p, and C-v, and hardcode C-space to something intellisense-ish. And forget about the kill ring or infinite undo.

These are the heart of emacs. If you don't have them, emacs users will never be able to switch.
An NDA should also be dependent upon the signer being compensated in some non-trivial way, as in a condition of being hired or part of terms of a sale. Requiring one prior to that is highly suspect, and signing one, I say, is highly inappropriate.

Great point.

Had an odd variant: One of my students, enamored of some idea involving the then-new iPad, wanted me involved I his idea but would not give any hints until I signed an NDA. Not one to make spontaneous commitments, I said I'd look over the NDA and get back to him next class about it. He never came back to class. Point: if you're not even going to bother passing my class (much less assuring serious compensation for signing an NDA blind), no I won't sign.
I wish you the best of luck.

With that said, most of these ideas have been in one demo or another for quite a while. As soon as you leave toy problems behind and try to visualize loops, objects, and deep recursion it's next to impossible to visualize flow and your back to inspecting breakpoints. But, if you want something you could probably implement and get people to use I would suggest something like XSL-FO. It's a pure functional language so you don't need to worry about loops, objects, or changing state just deep recursion. Unlike Lisp, C#, or even Java there is no great IDE's out there and your rarely dealing with multi megabyte's of code. You can even start with XPath, XSL-FO, and then try and get a more complex functional language working.
Nice idea. I look forward to seeing the kind of cookies you will provide and the price of the subscription.
Can anyone confirm/deny Grouse's comment from the article?

"It's unlikely that a single set of metal plates would survive multiple printings. They wear out pretty fast. Instead, this would be used on the film negative used to expose the photosensitive plates. Of course, now people are printing directly to the plates instead, skipping the film step."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/04/10/20657...
I personally do not want my FB or any semi-private account indexed by Google and shown with tens of of "Is he a child molester, do a background check" type ads. It sucks for Google but that's life. A lot of FB /Apple data is searchable, by visiting Facebook and Apple. If I want it on the open, I'll post it on a blog