skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
INTERVIEWER: You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.

GIBSON: There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.
Space-Chase Billionaires
Blossom v1.0 released today (SproutCore apps rejoice)
Sarcasm aside, commercial game sandboxes are designed to get you to do tedious repetitive crap in order to get enough in-game resources to be able to do interesting things.

The interesting parts of EVE are not the problem. The problem is the tedious parts. Either you end up grinding in-game to get isk (in-game money), or you pay real money to buy GTCs and sell them in-game to get isk.

Once you understand all the aspects of the game, Only PVP remains interesting. The ratio of game tedium (flying around, maintaining any resources you control, finding people to fight, etc) to actual fighting (or market manipulation if you're a trader) is unacceptably high.

Let me try to elaborate.

In order to get to the point where you can do most things in EVE, you need isk and you need a character ("toon") with a lot of skillpoints. You can convert real money into isk and use isk to buy other people's toons, but you end up spending a significant amount of money one way or another to get a good character.

A moderately capable toon might have 50M skillpoints, and might have ten or twenty billion ISK. If $35 60-day GTCs are worth about 500mil (I haven't checked recently, but it's the right order of magnitude), and that toon costs 8 billion, that's $560 worth of GTCs for the toon, and another $700-$1500 in liquid assets for the toon, on top of the $12-$20/mo you pay for the subscription.

Or, you can plod along with your own character which will take years to get that much experience. (Toon prices very roughly track the cumulative subscription cost for the time it takes to accumulate that many skillpoints.)

When you gain an understanding of most of the game, either you quit, or you keep your subscription going because you think you might want to play again some day though you probably won't, or you get addicted to the corp logistics or PVE grinding aspects of the game, and you mistake that for a fun distraction.

Regarding game architecture, although the initial design with stackless python was clever and scaled pretty well into the range of 10s of thousands of users, their overall architecture is horrid. It's stackless python around a small core implemented in C, a MS SQL database that crashes frequently, and a one-solar-system-per-process model that created so many performance problems for fleet fights that they've resorted to "time dilation" (read: slow down fights so the servers can handle it). For the longest time, their SQL database would crash, and their response was "we're failing over to the backup database, it'll be back up in xx minutes", clearly indicating they have no idea what failover or redundancy actually means.

Also, be warned that if you do anything even remotely against CCP's interests, you can get banned. That includes downloading leaked EVE "source code", talking about vulnerabilities publicly, or similar kinds of things. They don't tolerate criticism very well.
To be a true bridge you need to be bidirectional: to do that you'd need IMAP, not SMTP. IMAP is a bit of a stateful mess of a protocol, unfortunately.
The link exactly describes (for it is) Google Wave.
Machines will never possess original creativity.
I can't prove this to you. We'll just have to wait and see. But there certainly aren't any counterexamples to be found yet.

True, but this is again the logical fallacy I was warning against: there was no machine faster than a horse, therefore there never can be.
Right, so, "signed" in the same sense that a chain of git commits are signed. In other words, resiliency not trust, and full history instead of whatever Track Changes provides.
People who care about nightlife go to cities that have it.
Interesting. It's seem to be the issue with capturing mouse events. If you move the mouse out of the image quickly, it'll lose it and the resize will stop. But if you move the mouse slowly so that it always stays over the image, it'll resize it. It's a workaround to use for now (but sure, it's a problem with the implementation).
I think you need to make a convincing argument that vandalism will be a problem. Paraphrasing from The Information, pg 144, there was also that concern when Morse and Vail set up their wires wrapped in yarn on 20-foot posts. Morse told Congress they could transmit 30 characters per minute and he also told them that the lines had "remained undisturbed from the wantonness or evil disposition of any one." There is even more ample opportunity for domestic terrorism and destruction of things in the US today yet things seem okay.

Of course if the UAVs did start getting destroyed, it's not a stretch of imagination to think about how they could be protected...
Is there ANY chance that this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot?

I can envision a scenario where this "backdoor" is actually part of the designed-in security features of the chip designed to prevent an unauthorized party from reading out the FPGA "programming" as it were. As such, it's conceivable that there might be multiple keys or even a series of "transport" or "default" keys that are similar to those found on ISO smartcards. What we might be looking at is a "feature" as opposed to a "backdoor."

In any case, this sort of thing only becomes a critical security breach if the application you're using the chip in depends on periodic (or boot-time) reprogramming of the FPGA. In either case, either the physical security or the trust chain of your firmware loads is broken. As we all know, key management and side channel attacks are the hardest part of implementing a secure crypto system, so is this really news?
While I share your point of view, being a bit pedatic, I would like to note that most JVM and .NET languages are also compiled.
Note that while the exploit is in the PDF, the vulnerability is in the PDF reader. In practice, Adobe's software is the only attack surface anyone ever exploits, so you can read exploit-laden PDFs worry-free by using a less popular alternative. The same is true with Word/Excel files, etc.

You should still have some kind of comprehensive security solution in place, particularly for a business environment, but use of non-standard software is an effective fail-safe for when your "real" security craps out on you (as it inevitably will).
Well, that is embarrassing. Currently tethered to an EDGE connection and didn't click for fear of a ginormous page on the other end. Serves me right!
http://www.sourcefeed.us/?p=238 link that works
didn't load for me, are there any screenshot?
Thanks for the feedback! Since we were experimenting with density here, it is fairly extreme. The verdict is out on whether the extra density is valuable when user are in real shopping scenarios.. That's what we'll be testing with different categories and tweaks.
NASA Wanted Astronauts to View Venus Up-Close
West New York Mayor Arrested for Hacking
>Never are you given an explanation of where the quadratic formula comes from //

That's not [exclusively] how I was taught the quadratic equation and it's solutions, in high school in the UK, either.

I wish people would remember to provide geographical context on HN. The article is about Australian middle school so should I assume that's what everyone is referring to with their generalised statements of "this is what 'math' is like"?

>I simply re-derived it //

This is why I did well at maths. Practically no memorisation required; you can start with something you know and derive what you need to answer the question.
Also please add a link to your homepage somewhere in the blog's header. Too many company blogs omit this most important link!
We hadn't thought of releasing the icon, but we're quite happy to do that for the community to use. We'll try and do that shortly.
It's a fantastic tutorial and I hope everyone will start testing their code at least with selenium. But.. it's still not unit-testing (and not TDD) at all. And in things like this, when you break something at the bottom, tons and tons of tests will break.

In unit-testing tests are glanular, units are small, and you build a pyramid small step after small step.
Check out how easy it was to do this now that CloudStack has added an awesome browser based console with it's new Template & Instance building wizards.
US authorities have detained and interrogated multiple Europeans about Assange
I expected something of low quality, but these are actually very good! Impressive piece of work. Was this funded through kickstarter?
This gives member states a bit of extra freedom - some implement the laws in stricter or looser manner than the european parlament may have intended.

Some countries even refuse to implement them, as the Swedish goverment did with the Data Retention Directive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive). See

http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&j...

(scroll down to implementation) for a while. Then they complied.
Gould's home piano was a Chickering, but the GVs were played on Steinways in both the '55 and '81 recordings. The "condemned" CD318 he preferred was very like his Chickering, with a lot of lateral play. After it was fixed and brought to spec, it was just another piano.

I would love to have had the tech available to have him record his '81 remotely. The rhythmic continuity may have given it a less-than-traditional presentation, but I found the whole to make an engaging, coherent piece. But there was no getting around his voice by that point. Perhaps there could be a dynamically identical reperformance made some day (like the Zenph rendition of the '55 with a good deal more accuracy). Until then, I can put up with the sing-along, I guess. But I find I have trouble with traditional pacings now.

Both the DVD (in which the '81 is put together, largely in post) and the interview in the combined box set are well worth a listen.
Not until you can spell "drop out" correctly.
The demo is down.
Using web.py and loving it! http://webpy.org/
google enterprise has a subscription fee, and therefore live support.
The simple way to solve that is the same way human drivers are taught to solve this: by following at a safe distance. I was taught to follow at my own stopping distance, so that if the leading car were to hit a brick wall and stop immediately, I would still have time to stop myself.
It's just as ridiculous, all of them are based in truth but taken as far as possible. Better streaming would kill off the pirates but who do it as nothing better exists, but that's still not all of them.
I think arithmetic has a lot of merit in the teaching process, and shouldn't be dismissed. Maybe it's overemphasized, but it does have value.

Arithmetic can help show some deep mathematical concepts that might not be obvious if you study theory alone. For example, the advantages of arabic numerals over roman numerals. There are important mathematical distinctions between the two representations, but without actually using them both, it's hard to understand why arabic numerals are so much more useful for so many purposes.

I think it's best to switch between concepts and practical applications. I also don't think there is a problem with memorization. In any field, to exercise good judgement or gain deep insight, logic and reason are not enough. You need a collection of facts to guide you as well as other people's ideas to draw from.
The sensors are very easy to spot. They are small, white/pale-grey boxes about 4 inches square by 2 inches deep. They're usually placed on stop light struts or on free-standing poles by themselves. They're easy to mistake for emergency vehicle "light changer" systems, but the difference is these are on roads where there are no stop lights. Also, I've seen clusters of 3 or 4 of them attached to the same pole that a camera is attached to -- presumably the camera automatically pans and zooms in on the area as soon as a shot is heard.
Flame virus infects Iranian government
If you're interested in Django e-commerce solutions you should also check out django-oscar, which is developed by Tangent Labs in the UK. I used Oscar as a base for my startup's shop (www.dolbeau.ca). It is somewhat more barebones than LFS at the moment but it is designed to be extended in every way.

http://tangentlabs.github.com/django-oscar/
Just to expand on kijin's reply...

In HTML5, <i> and <b> now have the deliberately vague semantic definitions of "alternate voice" and "stylistically offset" – this could cover emphasis, book/film names, key words, foreign phrases, etc. Incorrect use of the more specific semantic tags (eg. generating <em> when the user sets a film title to "italic") is worse than a lack of semantic detail.

HTML5 was designed with the understanding that not all web content can be authored by someone who knows the correct use of semantic HTML tags like <cite>, <em>, <strong>, <mark>, etc. Application-level copy can use those tags, but a rich text editor (for normal people) can't know which one is appropriate, so it should always default to the vague ones, <b> and <i>.
Let’s be clear about what we’re discussing here. The author of the original article suggested that efficiency was a problem because it threatened employment. I believe this claim to be false because, as I’ve written in earlier comments, when improved efficiency allows fewer humans to produce the same value as before, the humans who are no longer needed to produce that “old” value are freed to create new value. This will always be so.

To see why, imagine the opposite: that at some point in time there are displaced masses who are cut off from society because they cannot create new value. But don’t those masses need and want? Don’t those masses have the ability to do things for one another? Of course, they do. So, in this imaginary future, what’s preventing them from creating new value within their own cut-off society?

It’s not efficiency.

It’s people. It’s people who have written the game’s rules, perhaps unknowingly, to prevent the displaced masses from creating their own value. It’s the displaced masses, themselves, who demand that society turn back the clocks. And this future is easy to imagine, for this future is already here.

Which brings me to your question about the auto industry and today’s long-term unemployed. Efficiency isn’t what’s keeping these people out of work. It’s people: politicians and union bosses who sing sweet lies, the unemployed themselves who believe the lies, and executives who drain value from companies for personal gain. These are real problems that keep people out of work.

But efficiency isn’t among them. It’s an imaginary problem.

(It does, however, make for a good distraction.)
My point was that DrCatbox was implying that Python as a language forces that user to jump through all of these hoops for deployment. This also implies that there are other languages where deployment is a moot point. Deployment is not a moot point just because there are services that will make it easy, and I wouldn't say that the existence (or not) of a service that makes deployment easy is a strength (or failing) or Python as a language. It's like saying that a hammer is lacking because no one has invented toolboxes yet.
Show HN: I made a graph to help determine which health insurance is cheapest.
There's a whole hell of a lot more to nightlife than alcohol, but you'd never know it living in the USA.

I hardly ever drink, and not very much when I do.
I'll go with the underdogs (i.e. people)
I agree with you that this may not be revolutionary, but with some relatively realistic numbers (1300 kg lead car, a giant 1500 kg moose, 80kph road speed, 6m following distance, 7m/s^2 max decel of following vehicles), it looks like you'd only have the first two or three cars collide, and probably not hard enough to cause life threatening injuries in the second car. I'd think that tuning the following distance to the road speed (and, possibly more morbidly, the mass of the lead car relative to the foreseeable obstacles, which I'm not entirely sure that Volvo wasn't tacitly doing in the test) would be adequate to come up with a safe following distance well shorter than 2 seconds, where fuel economy gains obviously kick in as well.

The practical reaction time for mid-cruise humans is pretty terrifyingly slow sometimes. Pair that with suboptimal panic behavior and I believe that there's some significant efficiency and maybe even safety gains to be made. Granted, there is a limit.
It's a noble idea, but doing big science is really expensive (take the LHC or the Manhattan project for example). Stuff like software development of mathematical research is nice because you have pretty much 0 material cost, but it is really the exception and not the rule.

How would you go about doing brain cancer research without conducting the many and necessarily costly experiments (not to mention the oversight and legal support required)?

Frankly, I've yet to hear a credible answer to these issues. It seems that the best you can really do is try to raise awareness (nebulous and often ineffective as that is) and try to support existing research teams. Or if you are extremely wealthy, you can just fund your own lab to work on whatever you think is important...
This reminds me of the BadAstronomy writeup about Jobs and the resolution of the iPhone 4: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...
I made it for myself but I thought others might be interested in seeing it as well. If anyone has any feedback (other than site design :)), let me know. I tried running this by as many people as I could before posting it here to try to see if my thought process in picking insurance made sense.
Thanks. It seems up right now, but with this many users it's taking a while to complete the queries to get started. Sorry about that!
Thanks for the info. I made an acquaintance of a concert pianist maybe 8 years ago, and started reading about Gould, different pianos. My friend has a mental catalog of all the pianos she's performed on, the hall acoustics, and the tuners (she told me there's a tuner around Santa Cruz, CA who's a magician).

Gould also purchased a Yamaha, i remember, I was surprised since it has a very different action, starting with 10mm key dip (vs. 3/8" on most European concert grands).

regarding singing: Keith Jarrett's older solo recordings feature humalongs, along with moans and groans too. It would be a pity to avoid those 2 artists because of that
Just quit. It ain't worth it.
If they're not being paid to work on it, why would you expect them to prioritize things they're not interested in working on or not going to use?
The tl;dr should go at the top!
At Google One Minute Equals Six Hundred and Nine Seconds
Smart Pebble Robots Will Let You Duplicate Objects on the Fly
Ok, I'll bite. From the article:

Now let's see how combinators (which we discussed in the previous blog
posting) might make doing some of these computations easier.

So, how are they defined in the previous blog posting?

A combinator is an atomic operation on a cell of a database that is
associative and preferably commutative.

No, it's not. A combinator is a function with no free variables. Even the example is wrong:

"Add(n)" is an example of a simple combinator; it adds n to whatever
number is in the cell.

If "Add" was a combinator, the cell would have to be one of the parameters of "Add". Otherwise, the cell is a free variable.

To be clear, I'm just complaining about the misuse of the term "combinator", since it's a word with a strict mathematical definition and no other common-language interpretation (like "function" or "operation" have). I'm not commenting on the actual content of the article.
>no getting around his voice

Are you referring to his vocal musings heard on the recording? To me, this is what makes these so very special - it is as if he is in the same room with me, humming away as if playing to himself with no-one listening. On that note, I'm listening to Kimiko's recording at the moment and she's playing with a distinct Gould influence yet it's almost too clean for me - a piece so exquisitely structured as the Variations can cope with a little less precision in terms of the rhythmic attenuation. I also think it's fair to say that Gould brought so much to this piece that we can't play it anymore without reference to him.

OP: you may find the Rachmaninov piano roll recordings interesting, my personal favourite the Prelude No.10: http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=650
"email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling."

I'm in the minority, but Facebook literally depresses me (and by literally, I literally mean literally), and I quit long ago. All these words, and no communication. It's like I'm in a crowd, and the only thing I know about the other people in the crowd is what their Tshirts say.

I communicate by email with most of the people I knew on Facebook, and I'm very happy with that communication channel. Because it's actual communication, rather than mere display.

This is also why HN is my preferred news source. Besides the focused yet eclectic aggregation, the comments are actual communication, not just "regulars" on a typical newspaper's comment forum insulting each other. It's been said many times, but I get as much or more from the comments as I do from the articles, not least because I have to engage my brain to comment.
Apple TV In Production At Foxxcon
A nice little mash-up
"messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols."

That's a bingo.
Except the last time when 20MB was "large" was in the early 1990s. Today, even if someone goes to clean out their harddrive, a 20MB file is unlikely to even appear on the radar.
I was one of the few that raved about and loved Google Wave. :(
Apple has acknowledged their issues with discoverability with their purchase of Chomp. And again the issue of the 80% of apps aren't good argument is that your definition of 'good' differs from everyone else.

Especially the massive number of young kids buying apps courtesy of the iPod touch.
There's also the great Free Software project "TuxMath":

http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxmath/

TuxMath is part of the "Tix4Kids" project which provides similar software for other topics:

http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/
@nerd_in_rage -- we originally started with purely text as an approach. You can see one of our older blog posts here where we talk about the simplicity and clarity afforded by "Just use text":
http://blog.cleartrip.com/2007/03/10/a-picture-says-a-thousa...

Over time, however, we changed our minds a little bit. And we were driven, in no small part, by the rapid shift to web consumption on post-PC devices. We explained our thinking in another blog post:

http://blog.cleartrip.com/2011/01/20/testing-an-all-new-navi...
$40,000-$60,000 per year per square mile. How many gunshots per capita per year per square mile do need for that price to make sense as a way to spend tax dollars?

It seems expensive.
the original article isn't fresh in my mind anymore, but I enjoyed this one and found myself agreeing more. :)

FWIW, my opinion is it is very similar to how things are done on appengine. You want to schedule a task? you make a form post to an end point thats setup to be monitored by their service. you want to talk to a backend instance? post to it. maybe their rpcs work the same way (serialize to protocol buffer, post to endpoint, get response, deserialize protocol buffer).

it feels low tech and un-sexy, but it works and it's easy to understand.