skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps people who are financially set want to just try out new things. The author here rips on the facebook CTO, because whatever else he is doing will not be as successful? If he's the CTO of facebook, I'm sure money almost doesn't even enter the picture here, he's set for life, and wants to see if he can create his own baby. No problem with that.
Businesses reverting to microwave over fiber for data transfer
> renewables produce HUGE amounts of pollution compared to nuclear. It's not even close.

There is hardly anything as destructively polluting as nuclear waste. It's not a even race indeed.

And yes, I know how "little" waste nuclear produces, they drive it around on rails every couple of years.

> We don't have to solve the storage problem. What we will eventually do is burn the waste, and gain energy from it.

Sure, I'd totally bet on that. When do you think that will happen?

> Horrifying? Really?

Yes. Really.[1]

> Do you realize how little uranium you need?

Again, yes.

> Compared to just mining iron, (never mind coal, or oil, or natural gas) the amount is a rounding error globally.

Ah great, relativism, always enjoy that coming up.

> Everything you do has consequences, the idea is to pick the best one.

Yup, and I'd rather NOT pick the one were we put money into a dead-end technology that has the potential of devastating pollution at worst and hardly solvable storage problems at best and instead invest that money in technology that will actually be of use in the future and for the rest of mankind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Health_risks_of_...
The analogy I was making was to the city of San Francisco.

If you want to make an analogy to a place of learning, consider a college campus. People are encouraged to do things there beyond studying. Areas are set aside just for having fun. That kind of community bonding doesn't take away from education; it enhances and supports it.

Also, nobody here is arguing that SO should be a place of pure entertainment. As far as I can tell, that's a straw man. Or perhaps more accurately, the imaginary bogeyman SO is fleeing.
> The only way I can mentally justify something like an ipad falling under the law would be if the point was to keep the Iranian government from legally buying 10000 of them to make some kind of supercomputer. Which seems pretty unlikely as I type it out.

I think the way these laws are designed, they cover a swathe of computing devices that could potentially be used to aid the military. IIRC around 10 years back, when India and Pakistan decided to test nukes, the apple G5 was one of the things that got banned from export to those countries.

> But under than scenario, a few escaping here and there is tolerable, but it would be worth preventing massive numbers of them being sold to a foreign nation.

The key of course is how lenient DHS or whoever would be in this situation. If the act of coming into contact with an iPad/Any such device is an export control violation, how on earth does one hire Iranian citizens in tech (I know a large number of Iranian citizens come here to the US to study and work) for say iPad app development. Also, what happens in the situation that I want to sell my used iPad on eBay/CL?
The Microsoft Surface Killer Feature:  It's open.
Just got a chance to view the presentation here:

http://cdn-smooth.ms-studiosmedia.com/news/mp4_mq/06182012_Surface_750k.mp4

This could be a very telling probe into what consumers want. There is not disputing the fact that the Windows ecosystem dwarfs anything else out there. If I heard the numbers correctly, more Windows computers are shipped in a single year than the entire installed based of Macs. Not a put-down, just a fact.

As an iOS software and hardware developer one of the things that I continue to clash with is the nearly despotic hold Apple has on, well, everything. Developing hardware for any iOS device can be a very expensive and painful experience. For example, you can't develop a universal serial cable. Yes, there's a serial port on that connector but Apple will not let you use it without a decryption chip and you only get authorization to make a cable for a specific app. To think that in 2012 you can't get unencumbered API access to a serial and a USB port is just, well, unreal.

Microsoft Surface is, by definition, open. I will be able to run any and all Windows software on this device the minute it becomes available. That, again, dwarfs the Mac/iOS ecosystem. I will be able to run Solidworks on a tablet. How cool is that?

It'll be interesting to see how consumers react to this reality. I have a feeling that, if pricing is right, adoption will be swift.

Of course, we'll continue to work with and produce products for the iOS landscape, but it'd sure be very interesting to have an open option out there where you could experiment and offer things that Apple simply will not let you approach. It's about creativity, not technology.

EDIT: Apple is, of course, entitled to rule their own ecosystem as they wish. No issues there. Their toys. Their rules. Not complaining. Just presenting facts.
Deciding on Treadmill vs Elliptical
Debating between two different types of workout machines can be difficult. This article is packed with information which will help with the decision.
That's some marvelous hyperbole.

Honestly though, I don't understand the excitement about this tablet. Is it really just because another company seems to have put a lot of effort into the industrial design of a product?

If this was the surface tablet of a few years ago (decade?), where you could place a camera on it and the images would immediately transfer, I'd be impressed. Instead its just a very nice looking Windows 8 tablet/laptop?

The original surface stuff looked incredible, and it would still be incredible today. Unfortunately I'm not seeing any of it in this new device.
Zune was released in November 2006. Claiming the iPhone caused its failure (because no one wanted a PMP anymore) is rewriting history. The best year for iPod sales was 2008. Well after the June 2007 availability of the iPhone.

Zune failed because it was late to market and was saddled with a corporate owner that lacked credibility in that particular marketplace.

Sources for the above dates and stats are Wikipedia
Sorry. Farsi is low class and only hipsters and rich people are allowed to buy iPads.

Edit: Jesus christ the amount of Apple apologetics in this thread. I'm out of here.
> It's linguistic profiling, and it's the only reasonable way to enforce the export law.

BS. I'd say it's more reasonable to check a billing address. Speaking the language of a country that we have export restrictions on is not a reasonable filter.

The responsibility is to not sell merchandise in Iran, not to refuse sale of merchandise in America based on nationality. Apple isn't playing the role of an exporter here.
Why not Argentina? He could take advantage of their antipathy toward the UK. Too transparent?
For those that do much public speaking there's an interesting article on rhetoric here http://www.european-rhetoric.com/rhetoric-101/modes-persuasi...

In a nutshell For communicating a message Pathos(emotive "Be Excited") is more important then logos(the words). Ethos(Ethics, character) is more important then Pathos.

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.
-Aristotle 1356a 2,3
> Though I back his politics 100%, he has every responsibility to face his accusers in a fair trial.

With Sweden's looney toons laws, I strongly disagree.
Whatever comes out of the Microsoft tablet effort, one simple thing really matters: competition = good.

What wouldn't be good is for Apple to just sit atop the tablet industry, forever unchallenged.

Whether it's Amazon or Samsung or Microsoft taking their shot at the crown, it's great for the space to be hyper competitive.
Paper on Prisoner's Dilema Suggests Optimal Extortionist Strategy
Agreed, or it would be much harder to buy a laptop with encryption on it at your local Best Buy.
Nope, there is no charge, they just want to question him.
He's not charged with sexual assault (not yet, anyway). The warrant is to return him for questioning.
Yes, and as a long-time LastPass premium customer, I'm troubled. There are much more respectable avenues to monetization open to them.
Do you think it's practical to ship the pieces from china to the u.s. or europe ?
And presumably the autistic community knows about ASL, and the children who can learn it, do—it'd be greatly preferable to carrying around a multi-thousand-dollar device. I think we can assume that this child's problems leave her unable to learn ASL.
Surprisingly modest comment from Mark Zuckerberg in this article about Viacom, especially at such a young age. Really interesting.
Of those sales, how many were the iPod Touch and how many were the iPod Shuffle (two markets where Zune never competed)?

I stand by my argument that Zune entered into the market just as that market died. Your point about the credibility is another part of the whole package.
It will be awesome if your dad had a book on what happened in those 5 to 6 years.

Of course I am in no position to provide as useful an advice, since I am still a student and the toughest audience I presented against are themselves students. However, I find the preparing by replaying the presentation to yourself a little daunting. I used to do that and there always seems to be something that goes wrong, especially that I am supposed to have memorized the presentation. I don't really trust my memory that much, so what I started doing is knowing the topic very well, have some general enough guidelines, and just talk to the audience. It's classic improvising and it worked for me up to now.
This makes a lot of sense to me. If the responsibility doesn't fall on a business to not sell the technology does it fall on customs agents then to prevent the guests from leaving the country with the items? Would the guests be happier being able to purchase the tech to only be prevented from leaving the country with it? I seriously doubt it.

[edit] IMHO this has nothing to do with racial profiling, its unpleasant, but what aspect of the relationship between the US and Iran isn't?
It would be racial profiling if you treated brown people speaking Farsi and white people speaking Farsi differently, right?

So what do you think would happen to a white person who was speaking Farsi while shopping at an Apple store?
He has not (yet) been charged. It says this in the article.
Knowledge vs. Applied Skills: Can't Have One Without the Other
It's tougher to be a solid public speaker than it looks. I've given talks to big rooms, gyms and moderately sized conference rooms. I rarely get nervous but occasionally it hits us all. I do have some notes on watching great speakers in person and learning from my own mistakes.

1. Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. Even some practiced speakers do this. They think that it engages the audience, but it is a crutch, an attempt to turn the focus away from the speaker onto the audience. It's always clumsy and delays the audience from hearing the content. Some speakers claim that they want to know more about the audience before they proceed. We all know that's not true. Are you really going to completely modify your speech, dropping that five minutes of solid material just because not enough hands were raised when you asked about it? Of course not.

2. Note cards are not 'bad'. I had to learn this one the hard way. If you are professional orator, you will eventually get to the point where you can pontificate the same speech verbatim without a single note. But for the rest of us, a note card of bullet-point topics can keep us on track. Just don't have a ream of pages and stare down at them, reading monotonously without looking up.

3. Everyone hits that middle 'death valley' at some point. It's the point of a talk where you are very aware of your own voice, and you aren't getting any perceived feedback from the audience. This is the hard slog where you have to know that while time has slowed to a crawl for you, it hasn't changed for the audience. Remember how you feel when the situation is reversed - how often have you ever seen a speaker so bad that you actually noticed it and remembered it? Not often, if ever. Boring speakers are forgotten - bad speakers are ignored - great speakers MIGHT be remembered. So just keep going, and the worst that could happen is that you are boring, which no one will remember anyway.
You can tell how much the writer doesn't believe a single Goddamn word he says. Vagary, exaggerated emotion, all for what? Some device I can't even find one cool thing about. This was written for a boss, not for you and me.
Using Stack Overflow as your official support platform
Internet through SMS
He's wanted in Sweden. Is there an extradition treaty between Ecuador and Sweden?
The US has a long history of doing things like going to full fledged war over dropping a few bombs or planes on our soil. If I had run Wikileaks, I wouldn't want to be extradited to the US either. However, the statement on the page references the UK and Sweden, not the US. So that may not really be a factor.
Sweden is part of the EU, so yes.
The Knowledge Graph is growing quite quickly as we add more and more data sources. Freebase is one of those sources but there are obviously others that make up the full 500M entities.

The rate at which we add entities to the Knowledge Graph is different from the rate at which those entities appear in search. What you see in search now is just part of the Knowledge Graph but we're continuously increasing the coverage while making sure that the quality of the data remains extremely high. I guess that's what you would call the "visible GKG"; to us, its all one big graph.
It's not a reasonable assumption to make. What if I'm a first generation American and speak Farsi at home?
He's not even charged in Sweden. It's fairly obvious the Swedish angle is being used to get him in a country from which he can be extradicted to the US.
Ok, thanks. I didn't realize people were working around limitations of the Nvidia driver etc.
But you can pay by cash at an Apple Store so not sure how checking the billing address would work.
I live in the U.S., and I've never heard "populist" used pejoratively. Where are you from and what does it connote when used pejoratively in your country?
This is getting really tired now.

Assange and his legal team have tried every possible angle. Sweden has very different laws to say the US. This is not unexpected. The English courts have determined that Sweden's justice system is fair and balanced. Assange attempted to avoid extradition by arguing Sweden didn't have the right to issue an arrest warrant, not that he was going to get an unfair trial.

This is an act of total desperation. It does nothing to further his innocence. If the US wanted him they would have extradited him from the UK already - Britain has a long history of being more than happy to comply with US extradition requests. It's why Roman Polanski refuses to visit the UK from France.

This is all about accusations of sexual assault and rape which Assange is totally unwilling to face.
I agree that the definitions are different.

However, look at what you're saying. You've divided the world into us and them. It's you, the defender of the one true definition, versus the ignorant outsider fools. It's utterly close-minded.

It's your bat and ball, naturally, so you're welcome to keep on driving off the people who have different views. But don't go around saying you listen to your users when you talk like this.
Cloud ops lessons you should learn before your next outage
The first lines speaks volumes. NVIDIA PR Responds. I would think Linus deserves at least a rebuttal from their CEO.
Thanks for the correction - I doubted if such a relatively simple device could be universal (see comment below), but it's fascinating to learn that it is! :-)
Not everyone thinks in a language. Language is extremely helpful for conscious thought, but not because language itself has some inherent magical control over our thoughts, but because language embodies certain kinds of cognitive technology. The keystone paper for that point of view is "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" (http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers/FEFG-cognition.pdf). Having words for colors makes it easier to remember the specific shades that you have words for, because it's easier to remember the abstract symbol, which you can use to access the concept later, than it is to remember the actual experience of that color. Same with numerical quantities, or anything else for which your language has labels and categories.
The title is a little misleading: they do tell you all these things and more if you don't rely on blog posts that will unavoidably focus on a couple of things and go for a good book.
A) I live in that country and I can tell you that we're quite OK with it.

B) Still don't like your oversimplification in terms of CO2 - and we "send around CO2" all the time. I simply don't think it matters.

C) Again, solar power isn't far enough ahead right now, most of the money is in wind development. Oh, and then there are, you know, a lot of other renewable energy sources that you ignore as you're a little to taken with how well you think you can bash solar.

D) Well, that's certainly a reason to buy into the argument, then, I guess.

E) Oh look, solar again. I sure hope the person you were replying to was rather directly indicating that it's not the only thing to talk about or this would make you seem quite overzealous by now.

F) Again, it's an investment and a sound one at that, based on the history of how technology develops in that area. A walking where the ball will be, not where it is right now (coal and, indeed, nuclear) kind of situation.

I'm curious, though - what's your assessment on how much further nuclear energy has gotten in dealing with its toxic waste problem in the half a century it has been around?
My bias wants to make some remark about unions and/or regulations inhibiting construction innovation in the US, but I have no idea if that's actually true... is there progress being made in the US (faster construction? more prefab? etc) or does China's progress simply come with quality sacrifices that are pretty unacceptable in the US?
Ask HN: What are some excellent blogs by *technical founders*?
I'm compiling a list of the x best blogs by technical founders (I want to follow up afterwards with biz/growth hacker founders and startups).

If you have any suggestions I'd be glad to hear them. I'll publish a follow-up post with the list.
It's not the UK that wants him - it's Sweden.
Note the press release doesn't address an important part of Linus' rant: that Nvidia is a huge PITA to deal with.

I hope that folks at Nvidia took note of this, at least.
1966 UN Outer Space Treaty
The expensive Surface is open. The cheaper one isn't.
How do they do that? I've driven from the US to Canada dozens of times, and at every port I've been to the road goes directly past US customs up to Canadian customs. US customs has no opportunity to stop me coming into Canada, unless there are CBT officers in the Canadian customs booth?
That's probably a bit different. Anyone who writes or manages "fairly complex VBA macros" (and I have consulted for a company that did) is well aware there are many ways to skin that cat. That's not a definition of necessity. That's a definition of percieved cost of change.
An airline denied me boarding a flight because I had a turban on.
Microsoft's new tablet: the great copier surfaces again
My guess is "location." How do you go to a separate app to search the content of your email, fb, etc... It is counter-intuitive. Greplin, IMO, should have a browser plugin and wherever you searched, be it Google, Email, FB it would give you its results on a sidebar. Heck,give me an additional search button right next to Google's: "SEARCH GREPLIN," or "GREP IT."
A Short Tutorial on Bitcoin Mining
From your excerpt: "This deemed export rule does not apply to persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States and does not apply to persons who are protected individuals under the Immigration and Naturalization Act (8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3))."

They should have just asked for proof of permanent residence or citizenship and informed the customer that this is US export law.
I second itsprofitbaron's suggestion that a focus on product is definitely the path you want to take. Don't let competition deter you from an opportunity you believe is there. However, you should at least take the time to play around with what your competitors have to see what they're missing and get inspiration on what you can do to make a better product.
You could do better than a "crude" guidance system with a lot of computers less sophisticated than a PS3. I'd imagine netbooks and barebones Atom PCs are way more practical in terms of running code and more than powerful enough to do the job. But either way, Iran doesn't need to buy technology from the US, considering they can just buy anything they want from China.
> I think the site is fine

Oh, I do too. The site is fine, you're right. But for a company with the amount of resources yours has, and for a product launch as important as this is, fine is not good enough. It needs to be exemplary. This isn't—it's just OK.
I would be interested in this too.
pennies on the dolla®
My understanding, from a cursory perusal, is that this isn't serving web content to the phone's existing browser, but rather packing up your html and javascript with a (thin, one hopes) custom browser to display them, which also exposes more native functionality than does the regular browser. So you aren't writing a web app, you're writing a native app with web technologies, sort of.

Someone please correct me if I'm off base.
At the risk of repeating:

1. Depending on your locality, set 30% aside for taxes. Unless you make a ton of money, have almost no deductions and/or don't have a very good accountant, you won't pay anywhere near that, probably much closer to 10-15% of your gross pay.

2. Get an accountant.

3. Get a lawyer.

4. Decide right now which you'd rather do - compete with outsourced labor and college kids on sites like oDesk and Elance for $15-20/hr, or bill $80-150/hr for a few clients. I went the second route and while it was a lot harder to get work, I didn't need to spend 40 hours a week just writing proposals.

5. It doesn't matter if it's a $150 job for your best friend from HS or a $25,000 for a national corporation, have a contract signed with a deposit check (usually 50%, can be smaller for larger jobs) before you do any work outside of a proposal. I usually did 50% unless the job was over $10k, then I might go as low as 20% if it was still enough to sustain me through to the next milestone & 20% payment.
Facebook Adds Subscription Billing For App Developers
Exactly. This is all about Assange not wanting to be questioned about sexual assault.

All this posturing about how the US wants him is a smoke screen - Ecuador has an extradition treaty with the US. Assange may be completely innocent: trying to desperately avoid being questioned about the alleged offences doesn't paint a great picture.
It should be noted that the RDF endpoint isn't the only way of getting data out of Freebase.

Freebase provides complete weekly data dumps (http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Data_dumps) and has instructions for post-processing them; presumably this is exactly what PaulHoule is doing. As chintan pointed out, it could still be a worthwhile service for you.
You can download the original VisiCalc executable here: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm

It runs nicely under dosemu - here in a terminal on my Ubuntu 12.04 pc: http://i.imgur.com/CjcYt.png
And, why is that a problem?