skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's ample precedent for this, as newer improvements become the norm. You won't often hear someone saying "color TV" or "unleaded gasoline" or "touch-tone phone" anymore. They became the standard, and we began to use modifiers to describe the older, rarer products.
> In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit.

I don't understand this claim. You state it like it's well-known fact. In what (evidenced) ways is headcount advantageous in government and not in business? Using headcount as a proxy for importance/value when rewarding middle managers is common in many organizations.
That's right, it isn't theft, it's copyright infringement. There is a difference.
Scaliak: a Scala Client for Riak
Meanwhile, in Europe, it's common to have between 4-7 weeks vacation per year, and it's seen as a bit weird not to use all of it. The social pressure around vacation goes in the completely opposite direction compared to the US.

Funny. I wonder why.
Ask HN: What if usernames were only visible after you have voted on a comment?
Recently, it feels like HN discussions are dominated by a minority of commenters. I am worried that comment threads are less valuable when they are dominated by a few voices. People begin to up/down vote comments based on who's saying them, and not on the merits of the ideas being presented.

What if our usernames were obscured, at least until our votes have been cast?
I really doubt they were users of Facebook's mobile photo sharing feature...
FB is probably going to trade at $100 billion day one, maybe a get 20% jump on excitement and I think they will keep that way for quite a few quarters as they ramp up monetization. IMO, they should not trade at $100 billion to begin with but then they have almost a billion people glued to their network. When you take China out, kids and truly old people and you're talking an insane % of the world's online population.
Am I reading this wrong, or there's generally a negative attitude towards this news?

It seems that people are upset that a 27 year-old, who's worth ~30Bn on paper, could buy a 1Bn dollar company for breakfast without any adult supervision.

The negativity weirds me out. Aside for the personality traits, why doesn't everyone want to be where Zuck's at?

In my opinion, no one should be asking "why Zuck was able to do it", but rather ask "what should I do to be in the position to do the same?"
Say Hello to Stratolaunch, the World's Largest Plane
I meant a mobile app. Web apps are a different beast, and already have a well established monetization ecosystem.
I Quit My Passion And Took A Boring Job
The typical asteroid mining plan involves a multi-year approach where you send out large spaceships to slightly alter the orbit of the target asteroid. Without "much" effort, you can bring it to an orbit that passes closer to Earth by gravitationally tugging it, shortening the distance required do to the harvesting. The trip back is likely just hopping off the asteroid into a lower Earth orbit - not too tough.
Locate lost phone or people through GPS
Los Angeles is an Apple town. Much higher proportional use of Apple products than other cities. iPads are status markers here. I suspect San Francisco is the same.

While they may not compete directly, if people already have iPads for other reasons, it seems they'd be less likely to buy a kindle.
I find the 'keep them off Google+' another credible line of reasoning on the valuation as well. If Google could monetize them at a $10 CPM and a 75% daily engagement (30M views a day) that is 100M/yr in revenue. So 1B is a 10x multiplier on revenue.

One thing is clear, a year from now some will say 'see I told you' and some will say 'wow I didn't expect that' and a few will be able to decide if its a net positive or not on their resume :-)
Node doesn't let you write a single app that automatically gets split between server and client, afaik. Opa's killer feature, if it works, is automatically determining the data boundary, splitting code to client-run and server-run portions, and generating the appropriate AJAX calls to communicate between them.
Inside Foxconn: Exclusive look at how an iPad is made
Trains in Europe aren't private, but the companies that make the trains are. And in fact all the trains in Japan (even the Tokyo subway!) are private.

I very much agree that we ought to get away from promoting cars so much, but lets not kid ourselves. The problem isn't developers, but middle class Americans who like their cars.
Who uses Stripe?
I wonder how much of Etsy's enlightened attitude is because CEO Chad Dickerson was until recently the CTO.
When I say campaigns can be smaller, I mean that most VCs can't afford to do small deals. Their partners are too expensive. 10k projects are common on Kickstarter, though.

Your 50% number seems meaningless to me. Not everybody has to do the full research. Even with VC investments not everybody does full due diligence; as long as there's a lead investor willing to do the work many are much more casual. The larger a Kickstarter grows, the more likely it is to be scrutinized, both by funders and by outside participants. In this case, there was plenty of info available to evaluate the team.

Also, pointing out one failure like Diaspora is worse than meaningless. For every Kickstarter failure you find, I'm sure we can come up with 20 VC ones. Failure isn't the problem; failure is the point. Reward requires risk. Risk means some failures. As long as they continue to be, like Diaspora, interesting failures, then we're doing fine.
Yes. According to a NASA study [1], Falcon 9 development would cost $1.3B as Cost Plus Fee ("traditional NASA") or $443M Firm Fixed Price ("more commercial approach"). Compare to SpaceX actual of "about $300M".

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

Edit: NASA originally came up with the $4B/$1.7B estimates that InclinedPlane mentioned. They visited SpaceX, saw how they actually operated, and revised the estimated downward.
NASA did a study on this actually. Using traditional NASA procurement methods it would have cost at least $4 billion to develop the Falcon 9.

Also keep in mind that the $800 million amount is for developing the Falcon I, Falcon 9 ($390 million total) and the Dragon spacecraft (about $400 million). Even had NASA used more commercial oriented procurement methods they estimate it still would have cost at least $1.7 billion to develop.
It really depends on what your goals are and who is setting them.

If your employer is expecting you to work >40hr/week to accomplish their goals, and that violates your personal boundaries and goals (e.g. I want to make sure I'm home for supper with my family every night), then there IS a problem. It's not necessarily your employer's problem, and it's not necessarily your problem, but there's a definite mismatch between expectations that needs to be addressed.

If your goal is to become an exceptionally good developer, and your employer is expecting you to be spending all of the 40hr/wk doing work (instead of learning), then you've got the same problem. There's a mismatch of expectations. You're expecting some portion of your time during the week to be on self-improvement, and your employer is not.

But, there are equally situations here where there isn't a problem at all!

If your employer is expecting >40hr/wk, all working, and you're more than happy to collect the overtime, then that's totally fine! There's a match!

Likewise, if you're a decent developer (I'm hesitant to use the word "average", only because North American society tends to cast that word in a negative light), and you're happy working 40hr/wk and staying at roughly the same level, then where's the problem? You're happy where you are, your employer is happy with the work you're doing, all is well.

And, if you're passionate developer whose goal is to become exceptional, and you go home immediately after work and hack away on open source stuff/your own projects/whatever, then that's fine too!

There's a few really important things that everyone should be asking:

* What are my personal goals? What are my priorities?
* Are my current employer's expectations well-matched to my own personal goals?
* If not, what do I do about it?
Space robot startup Arkyd to unveil plans April 24
Huh, I've used nearly this example for years, except my two worst are "var" and "var3" - with no var2, leaving the reader to wonder what happened to it.
Top 5 Best Storage Devices Of The Week
Storage is a key priority for the computer literate.
Nice phrase, I'll have to keep that in mind - at least when talking to hackers.

Re: replacement of Facebook, I don't think it's realistic for someone to develop an actually decent federated replacement for a true social network. The difficulty of doing some of the stuff that Facebook users like, but trying to make it work when all of the nodes are on different networks with different constraints, seems to be very high.

I'm not so much in the "Facebook shouldn't have my data" camp... more like the "I want control of my all data TOO" camp.

Our concept for people writing apps that leverage TheMux doesn't require them to actually load data live from their user's instance of TheMux (because that's crazy, a single point of failure, and probably very inefficient) but that there is simply the agreement to interchange data.

To steal your phrase - we want to make the data symmetric.

So that no matter where I create or update my data, the systems involved makes a best-effort to return that data to my MuxDB, and then my MuxDB will make a best-effort to get that data out to the sites I've authorized and who need the data to do what I've signed up for.

Obviously, we're still in the early stages, but it's been an exciting and challenging journey so far.
This is great. IMO the venture will fail (to mine asteroids) but will gain lots of knowledge while "failing."

Great way for the mega-rich to make a mark, Paul Allen supported a lot of space projects too.
> The reason Google hasn't built a walled garden around the internet because they simply don't yet have the power to do that.

Google has more power than many others who have built walled gardens in the past.
Rather than design a whole new site, just create a userscript or plugin design overlay for Hacker News.

Example of a design overlay for Google Reader:
http://helvetireader.com/

Example of a design plugin for Google Reader:
http://reederforchrome.tumblr.com/
Cybercrime loss estimates use 'absurdly bad statistical methods'
>In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit.

Can be said for the private sector as well. Unless you think the private sector is growth averse.

>In industry it is a cost.

Governmental employees are not free.

You also made other points as well such as the #1 goal of the Space Shuttle program was to keep bureaucrats employed & that the private sector is more efficient regarding the value it creates per employee.
It would be very interesting if you could write a blog post and an example project illustrating how to do this. I think many could benefit from this knowledge.
That's a good point. If in the scope of the variable, you're only concerned with calculating its hash (or some similar function that is qualitatively indifferent to it), and not testing or parsing it or making any specific use out of it, then 'data' makes sense (though I'm guessing 'file' is arguably a better descriptor of the data in this example, if indeed that's what you're hoping to find in NSData, I get your point, and 'foo' might do just as well). That has to be a fairly unusual case, though.
Evacuated Tube Transport could take you around the world in just 6 hours
I've played with toy versions I've hacked up, and I think the idea is promising, but the analysis is difficult. The idea is that you should be able to write, say, an HTML canvas game as if you were running code on one machine, writing to a 2d framebuffer. But then how do you deploy it? If the clients are powerful enough (and there are no dependencies on server-side state), you can run it all client-side, as JS that implements the game and writes to the canvas.

Alternately, you can run everything server-side, except every time a framebuffer update is needed, you generate an AJAX call which triggers the appropriate canvas update, treating the client as just a remote framebuffer. But that can be way too high-latency, and not run enough on the client side. So instead you might want to put the data boundary somewhere between those two extremes. Ideally the compiler would figure out where, based on some kind of analysis (either static or from profiling data, or both) that tries to minimize latency problems and/or data transfer, and takes into account capabilities of the client and server.
How did you get such a high eCPM? Care to share any more info on the matter? :)
We've just got to hope there aren't any major catastrophes involving life early on. Personal space travel could easily go the way of Concorde and commercial supersonic travel if companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic don't get it spot on first time.
You've not met many European governments, have you? In England Elon'd still be waiting planning permission from his local council to build a launch site...
Sepeda Motor Injeksi Irit Harga Terbaik Cuma Honda
Who posted is often relevant to judging the response, e.g. PG in an "Ask PG" thread, grellas on a question of legal organization etc.

It's not that I don't sympathize with the sentiment behind the suggestion. I just don't think that increased anonymity would be an improvement to HN.

Everyone has an opinion, but everyone's opinions aren't equally grounded in knowledge and experience.
Clojure-Py and Distributed Concurrency
NASA also has fair amount more research going on unrelated to "build rockets" as well so direct numerical comparison isn't exactly valid.
You're right about that first version was a bit sensitive. Some backend goodies are part of this version so false positive rates should've gone down. Try the new version and see if you feel any improvements.

Also, yes, camera is on all the time but you can turn of camera by clicking on Flutter icon and picking that option.

Lastly, this app runs entirely on local machine. It does not record or stream video data - it detects gestures locally in real time, so no video data ever leaves your machine.

Hope it helps!! :)
on youtube for free
I've never seen a corporation with "full employment" as an actual, stated, strategic goal.

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/legislation-and-...

"Building Britain’s Recovery: Achieving Full Employment", published on 15 December 2009, restates the Government’s response to the recession and signals the start of the programme to return to full employment.
Right, the Facebook number should be change in worth per year for a proper comparison. Which is lower taken over the entire company's lifetime, but higher if you just include the last year.
Seeing how Elon Musk did not start out as American, I believe all his pro-USA rhetoric in this speech is designed to sway or convince some government people, just not sure to what end.
NASA is more than just lifting some stuff in space. They have staff they can't just fire, researchers, building and equipment that must be maintained, future projects and much more.

Hint: Fighter jets cost a lot more because parts have to made in many Congressional districts.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/a-quick-note-on-...

Is the BPP index faked as well? Is krugman dishonest or mislead, or maybe incompetent?

This can also be a difference of opinion, that we can settle with lot's time. But I still dislike your original implication that people asserting a different number for inflation are dishonest.
an astute article. One thing not addressed here is the failure of the Smantic Web paradigm to really take off; I don't know whether this is because of a lack of critical mass in the quantity of semantically coded data or the immaturity of ontology frameworks or something else - my best guess being that the browser is no more suitable to traversal of the semantic web than FTP/ Archie/ Veronica/ Gopher were suitable browsing tools for hyperterxt - although each solved 'part of the puzzle.'
People are working on healthcare, education, and other problems like that. It's just they aren't all paying much attention to the audience you're paying attention to. These types of startups also aren't focused on being bought, but actually solving real problems. And this takes time, and energy.

Don't assume that just because you don't read about us on TechCrunch we aren't out there trying to solve real problems.
Feeding [60]Fullerenes (aka Bucky Balls) doubles lifespan in rats
Hologram of Apple’s Steve Jobs To Appear At iPhone 5 Keynote?
I think I agree with you--and I don't really have an answer either. It's hard business all around. :(
I'd argue that the economy was richer by two text messages, each valued at $10M by the recipients. Measuring the strength of an economy is a fundamentally hard thing to do because value itself is quite arbitrary.
I think it's more that everyone previously had the same helper function/macro in their code base with a different name. If everyone needs the exact same thing, the standard library is a better place for it.
VenueSeen Launches Photo Monitoring Platform for Brands
Beamdog: No Baldur's Gate for Wii U, bad Nintendo experience to blame
Not yet HN ready and I wanted to post this later .
I have been working on a HTML 5 implementation , If you want to try the tasks mentioned.

http://alpha.brainturk.com

the chein task can be found here
http://alpha.brainturk.com/chein

Please let me know your suggestions on how to improve this
. I need to make a few more changes for this to be played on ipad but for now works with the keyboard
Live the Zombie Experience at a mall in Manchester England
Wonder I they will go after the family of the hackers they catch ...
Great questions. It works the best from 1-6 feet, so no you don't have to be right in-front of your comp.

The latest version has improved false positive rate where we got one every few hours.

Kinect is overkill for accuracy at this point, so that will not matter.

Lastly, yes camera is on, but app runs locally so no video data ever leaves your computer. Only server component is usual analytics logging.
No I'm saying that if Nasa had been told - get cargo to orbit cheaply it could (perhaps) have done so.

Instead Nasa was told - get a man to the moon before the decade is out. But it was also told build something in Houston to keep senator X happy; stick a few $Billion to Boeing they are having a hard time; keep a few SR-71s flying in case we have another war in the gulf; make sure the Shuttle can get to a polar orbit from Edwards without overflying foreign territory; buy the mirror from P-E because we need to keep Keyhole alive till the next funding cycle. And a hundred other 'tasks'

And that's before the inevitable internal bureaucracy kicks in
Nanomaterials offer hope for cerebral palsy
We start by assuming everyone uses OSX.
As always this looks like very useful information for people looking for office space!
Assuming honest research can achieve any of this in the foreseeable future, does anyone expect DHS to conduct or oversee research honestly and competently?
> not that I would want them to be

If you don't want them to be patented, why would you do this? Just publish them if you want to dedicate them to the public.
Animal-style is people?
As a member of the Opa team, I can think of at least three problems that Opa solves for you compared to Node.js frameworks.

1) Asynchronous (a.k.a. event driven) programming.
Lightweight threads are a very efficient paradigm but dealing with callbacks manually is cumbersome and is sometimes very difficult to get right. (Exercise: try to code a solver for the "Tower of Hanoi" in Node.js that is really non blocking :-))

The Opa compiler cuts your code into chunks and makes it non-blocking by managing all the callbacks for you. (Technically, Opa compiles functions using a continuation-passing style.)

2) Consistency between code and data (using static types).
Opa features a static type checker with (almost complete) type inference. Programmers can also declare typed MongoDB collections and build typesafe DB queries in the Opa syntax. In the end, consistency between code and data is statically ensured in the entire application (client code, server code, and database queries).

Needless to say, there exist no such things as script code or database code injections in Opa programs :)

3) Transparent protection against XSS attacks.
Most frameworks are based on a templating system that sees XHTML values as a "flat string with holes". In this setup, the problem of choosing the right escaping function at insertion points is called "context sensitivity" and is generally considered very difficult to solve without hints from the programmer.
In Opa (as in Scala) XHTML and XML values are first class tree-based data structures. Inserting a string into a XHTML value will generate an automatic typecast and trigger the proper escaping function by default in a very predictable way.

In the end, I believe that Opa has the potential to be for V8+NodeJS what Scala+(Lift or Play) are to the JVM -- Opa being at the same time arguably simpler to use.

How does this all sound to you?
This looks very familiar... (CV in the style of Pirate Bay)
Will These Startups Change The Way We Learn?
aliexpress,taobao,ebay,amazon-stores,paypal button,bitcoin,square in a busy location. lots of competition on the ad-hoc sale tip. tightly coupling this with a particular kind of item is not my cup of tea either
"The company that can add useful overlays to existing broadcasts..."

Try Chumby NeTV:

http://www.theverge.com/2011/9/8/2412828/chumby-netv-smart-t...

And you can buy a developer kit today from Adafruit, unlike the RPi.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/609
What's next for LivingSocial
2 Ways Facebook Messages for Fan Pages Can Ruin a Geek Girl’s Day
I agree with you. In addition, compared to the price of living in a city like New York or LA, a Kindle is quite cheap and almost disposable. It makes sense to me that less New Yorkers would be trying to sell their old Kindles.
Oh come on! No-one stands the remotest chance of getting viable amounts of rock down from space for another two generations. We don't have any mechanism to get the rocks down (a space anchor - not even remotely close to necessary material strength / weight ratio), let alone the ability to survive journeys to closest rocks.

Give it 20 years of people living on the moon or Mars and solving the supply, radiation and working problems, then I will believe we might risk throwing a megatonne of iridium at Earth orbit.

But great way for rich dreamers to hob nob with other rich dreamers. Enjoy it folks. Just don't invest.
What exactly is the problem you are referring to as unsolvable?
That would be very annoying. Whether comment threads are valuable or not has less to do with the diversity of the commenters than the quality. A hundred random responses are far less valuable than two well-informed and well-written responses.

I would stop reading HN if we could no longer see who said what — as it is, a lot of my reading is through HackerFollow. I get more out of the site that way. To be blunt, some commenters are better than others.
"Taking a copy of computer code isn't theft by that 1996 law because it's not goods" is what they ruled.
The interesting thing to me is that, by the time we need it, we likely will not be able to do it. That's why it's important to take the long view.
Skype's first employee starts TransferWise; raises $1.3 million
I only plug my phone into my computer when it needs an update that can't be done OTA. With Zune Pass and Skydrive, my music gets to the phone wirelessly and my videos and pictures get to my computer wirelessly. I think the phone has only been plugged into my computer twice, once to do a backup before I installed the SD card and once for Mango.
CloudSpring | FlexiScale utility computing on demand