skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trenching a conduit is multiple times more expensive than laying fiber direct. More than likely using conduit would not be cost effective.

With a conduit you have to: (i) purchase the conduit, which is more expensive than the fibre cable itself, (ii) install the conduit, (iii) blow the fiber cable into the conduit and (iv) install all the support infrastructure required for a conduit system, such as manholes and cable wells.

Furthermore access points have to be installed at close enough intervalls to make air blowing or water jetting possible. In rural settings this might well be far more often than otherwise needed for a direct burial network. In all the steps along the way, a conduit based network drives up the cost, resulting in a multiple on the buildout cost.

Protection, diagnostics, additional capacity and other media. None of the aforementioned are necessary any better or easier in a ducted network. A duct does not protect against backhoe fade any better than a proper direct burial cable. Diagnostics are done the same way in a ducted and a direct buried network. However direct burial cables with metallic streng members are easier to find than a non-metallic ducted cable. Adding more cables to a small diameter duct is not always easy, feasible or straightforward, especially if the duct was not properly or professionally installed. As to other media, such as metallic cables, the whole point of installing a fiber network is to only need to maintain one outdoor plant, not multiple legacy networks.

In addition to the extra cost, there is a lot of fun and games to be had if you install ducts in regions with subzero temperatures. Water is going to get into the ducts and then you are going to have giant icicles with cable in the middle and duct on the outside.

Walking on a proper direct burial fiber optic cable is not even going to register. Anything less than a backhoe is unlikely to even leave a mark. On the other hand if you even look funny at a ducted cable, you might have problems.

Repairing a ducted network or a direct burial network is basically the same. You excavate the problem area and you replace the faulty parts. The main difference is that in a ducted network, you are going to spend most of your time fiddling and fixing the ducts, less time with fixing the fiber optic part.

Now, what a ducted network gives you, is flexibility, but at a greater cost. If properly built that is. A ducted network means you might not have to retrench later, but this might not be an issue in a rural setting.
does it keep me permanently at Inbox Five Or Fewer, and make my email client a happy place to be? Of course it doesn’t

Then, urr, it's not working. My inbox is at zero within 30 minutes of starting work each day and within 10 minutes of finishing lunch.

This is the worst email management advice I've ever read.
It's even more efficient to wait until the next day to write the reply, since you might not need to reply at all. A large percentage of the people who ask me questions at work manage to figure out the answer for themselves if I don't reply for a couple of hours (and they might even learn something by finding the answer on their own).
Is there any specific kind of DVD drive I need to image the disc, or will the one in my MacBook Pro be able to read it?
From the dialogue, it sounds like a promotionally-minded Kickstarter might provide some early incremental awareness and money, or might fizzle.

That's not a strong case against trying it... just against relying too much on it, to the exclusion of other customer-acquisition efforts.
Why Goodreads Gave Up on Amazon
There is US Federal criminal law, and then there are the criminal laws of each of the 50 US States. Federal crimes are usually more serious (like espionage), but sometimes are just a matter of federal courts being the most appropriate venue (like copyright).

There are some standards that are widely applied across the states (like the MPC, some model jury instructions), and obviously the legal issues are very similar, but there are definitely major important differences between the states; for instance, groping a 17 year old in Alabama might be an aggravated sexual battery crime, but doing the same thing in Oregon might be a basic sexual assault.
Is it really a bet if there's no clearly-defined winning or losing conditions? What dates would you use to calculate the prices of the things mentioned? What "stock market", DJI? NASDAQ? FTSE? Something more exotic? Do bitcoins have to outperform "the stock market" and those commodities individually, or some kind of average?

Seems like more of a publicity stunt by someone who knows that nobody with $10k to throw around is foolish enough to agree to such ill-defined terms.
Specialization is good but so is basic aptitude.

Your car can "break down" for reasons as simple as blown fuses or low fluids. Having a working knowledge of basic auto mechanics can help you determine whether something is or is not a problem. Furthermore if the problem is simple you can fix it yourself instead of waiting for a tow, getting a taxi home and waiting for the repair shop to open in the morning.
but this isn't the password for gmail. This is the password for the password manager account. So you need to know the password manager they are using and the username to match with the password. They have to find this out within the time that we've realised we have lost our wallet and are changing the password.

Obviously this is still less secure than no password in the wallet at all, but I don't think it's "very vulnerable" as you are claiming.
While "crowdsourced" reporting is kind of cool, this report strikes me as an example of that idea gone awry. It took some googling to find a reasonable account, from the Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press[0]. This would, if anything, be biased toward Mr. Mueller, but it put the above article in an entirely different light.

1) As others have pointed out, he's on trial for allegedly recording three telephone calls to the police, a school principal, and a school secretary, without the consent of all parties, then made them publicly available. This is a felony under NH law. The iReport article implies, via quotations from multiple sources, that Mr. Mueller is on trial for filming police brutality. In fact, it appears that he called these parties for comment, so this doesn't even seem to be an issue of the right to record your arrest, or interested interactions with the state.

2) CopBlock.org and other "citizen watch" type sites might be a great idea, but performances like Mr. Mueller's, who apparently insists on the court calling him "Ademo Freeman", says things like "Bring on the Circus", and represents himself in a criminal case just paint these movements in a bad light. Police brutality, over-reaching state authority, etc. might be big problems; this kind of misguided moral crusade does not help.

3) I can understand the frustration supporters might find with inconsistent applications of wiretapping laws: I am not sure the state would care if a random citizen made three phone calls public, if no one pressed charges or there weren't some other reason. This article in no way communicates any of these issues and instead implements a tirade of misdirection and indignation.

Finally, I'd like to say something in defense of professional journalists. I know they often get a bad rap as being either extensions of the state vying for "influence" or sensationalists chasing controversy in every corner, but reports like this make me appreciate journalists who:

- call for comment
- search for credible sources, preferably ones with opposing viewpoints
- read or link to actual court documents

EDIT: You can find the video where he publishes the recordings here: http://youtu.be/sEhFwI6IyMU . Both the principal and the police officer made it reasonably clear they did not wish to discuss the matter. While the principal did respond to Mueller's questions, it seems unlikely she implied any consent to record.

[0]http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/nh-blogg...
Prepaid services vary widely depending on the country you're in. In some places, the credit is valid for a quite short amount of time. In France, the validity of my credit depends on the amount I charge. So I had to make some crazy calculations to choose between putting around $10 that will be valid 15 days, or $25 valid one month, etc.

On the other hand, I'm in Sweden now. My phone bill for the whole year has been below $100 (I don't phone much, but I use internet a lot). So, "pre-paid" can mean a lot of different things.
I didn't realize how good prepaid could be until I started traveling frequently to London (and eventually moving here). I had bought a Nexus One and more recently a Galaxy Nexus direct from Google so I wouldn't have to deal with unlocking hassles.

The first place I walked into in Paddington station 2 years ago was Vodafone. For a £10 top-up I get 500MB of data that's good for 30 days, and the credit is generally enough to last me for that period as well (it's less than 100 mins I think, but I tend to use Skype for long conversations). My wife pays slightly more for unlimited data and 300 mins/3000 texts since she talks more. It's a very minor hassle to top up every month, but it's crazy to think how much more we were paying in the states. Saving well over a $1000 a year.

I didn't realize prepaid plans were available in the states. I thought it was basically just the prepaid feature phones they sell in gas stations. I'll definitely be looking for a better deal when I get back.
>What he is being charged for is calling police officials and others on the phone after this, and recording the conversations without getting the other parties permission to record the phone call... Then posting those recordings online.
>This is how 95% of these stories are. Facts are hidden, what happened is misrepresented; stories to fit narratives are made up.

Even so, the idea that someone can be given 21 years for recording a phone conversation with a public official is insane.
From the article:

> Once Bitcoin use is wide spread, the people in favor of the wars will no longer be able to force the people against the wars to pay for them.

Yes they can. First of all, nobody keeps all of their assets in fiat currency. Most people have houses, cars, and other valuable property that could be physically seized to pay taxes due.

Second, the government can use "rubber-hose cryptanalysis" [1] -- if you refuse to pay, threaten to prosecute and jail you (or for more oppressive governments, torture and kill you). Nonpayment of taxes is certainly something that can send people to jail in the US. (In practice, if you're delinquent, AFAIK usually they just let you get away with paying back taxes, interest and penalties, and have a procedure where you can set up a payment plan if you can't afford to pay when they're due; prosecution is reserved for more outrageous cases like deliberate fraud.)

Third, even if you have no non-Bitcoin assets and you're willing to go to jail for your anti-tax stance, you still presumably economically interact with others, who might not be willing to go to those extremes. In the US, for example, I believe "backup withholding" is a procedure the tax authorities can use to make an employer send a portion of a tax delinquent's paycheck directly to the government for unpaid taxes. (By default, in the US most people's paychecks have regular withholding, which I believe is voluntary, but if you reduce it or turn it off then you're supposed to make payments manually during the year. Most people go with the automatic system as the path of least resistance.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
How would you know what his chances are? You don't. No one does. It's a crap shoot (and a rediculous charge).
Yes the first time takes a while if you don't know what your doing but mechanical aptitude is higly transferrable and the investment in time pays off everytime you take on a household project. The first time you change a toilet valve it will only take 20 minutes.
The site still calls it a prediction:

http://longbets.org/predictions/
I don't know much about this area. I know that there are vacuum tubes that operate in this frequency range.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_wave_oscillator
http://apl.aip.org/applab/v93/i14/p141108_s1?isAuthorized=no
http://www.sron.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=art...

It looks like the existing receivers at this frequency range are of the heterodyne type, possibly without any RF gain. A heterodyne receiver mixes the RF signal with a local RF oscillator, which results in a lower frequency IF signal which is easier to work with.

At these frequencies, it looks like the local oscillator is a "backward wave oscillator" or a "quantum cascade laser", and the mixer is some kind of esoteric non-linear device like a "hot electron bolometric mixer", whatever that means.

The highest frequency amplifier I know of is the "traveling-wave tube" amplifier, which goes up to something like 50 GHz. It's a crazy vacuum tube device and it's found on satellite transmitters. Making these things solid-state would be awesome because the tubes take up so much space and power on the satellites.

Summary: There are vacuum tubes that operate in this range, and there are receivers without gain in this range.
It takes <1 hour to write a Firefox extension that modifies its UI in a trivial way, and that Firefox extension can be distributed easily. You can do almost anything by modifying the XUL and/or CSS, and there is a good framework and good documentation for doing so. The default Firefox UI is just a default. There are many extensions and themes out there that make it easy for even non-programmers to modify Firefox to look and behave the way they want it to.

While it's possible to modify Chromium's UI by changing the source, it's far more difficult, and, unless your changes are accepted upstream, you have to maintain and distribute a whole new set of binaries yourself. If you want to do something like make the tabs square, make the tab bar scroll, or replace the download bar with a panel or a separate window, you're gonna have a bad time. Chrome's "themes" are really just different title bar and tab backgrounds. If you're a non-programmer, you can't really change the Chromium UI at all. The UI defaults are not just defaults; they're the only option unless you want to write a shitton of code.

Safari and IE are closed source, so it's extremely difficult to modify their UIs at all beyond the meager options provided to you in the preferences, even if you're a rockstar programmer.
No? I don't? I listen to Wilco, and their music is being used in Sprint commercials. Do they need "defending"?
I think that certain realities take over when you get as big as facebook is. It's not the little start-up that could anymore, it's now the 800 lb Gorilla that churns though staff. While you might be able to have the smartest people around at your beck and call you'll want to keep the system accessible to as many of them as possible so your options are always open and there are always going to be more C++ programmers around than Erlang programmers.
The original metaphor, of 1 + 1 = 3, was by Edward Tufte. I find it apt
Arstechnica had a recent article on this: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/prepaid-mobile-phone...

I switched to Straight Talk on an iPhone 4 (AT&T GSM) right after my contract expired, with basically no problems. I'm a light data user (web/twitter/email/maps, no streaming music/video), so $45/month is a decent bargain for "unlimited" everything.

Now, if there was only a decent prepaid data-only plan for tethering. What I want is to buy a few gigs of transfer that doesn't expire (for at least a few months) and is tied to a USB stick. Nobody appears to sell this.
Use GMail's priority inbox. Train it according to your personal subjective notion of importance. It will eventually become as good at separating the wheat from the chaff as it is at separating spam from your real email.
Writing enjoyably superficial pop-psych pieces for The New Yorker isn't unethical.
Missions to Mars: Remembrance of probes past
I saw that other article about fasting and decided to give it a try yesterday. I made it about six hours before I realized my concentration was way off and my emotional balance was out of whack.

Granted I was also working a freelance job. Which in retrospective was probably a bad idea. However I did learn something about myself. And next time I try fasting I'll make sure that I don't have anything pressing due the same day.
We do use okws for the whole website. It's more work to use than a framework like, say, Rails but it's well-designed and has some great features.

For instance, it includes a templating language called Pub. A typical request hits a handler in C++-land which collects the data the page'll need into a top-level Pub object. Then it invokes a Pub template which renders the page. All of this enforces separation between your back-end logic and the design of a page.

It would be awesome to see more frameworks with fresh ideas in this area, though.
You're correct that the facts in this story have been distorted and the guy sounds like he's antagonizing authorities to some degree, but that being said there really should be outrage about this case. Facing a possible 21 years for recording conversations with public officials is not something one would normally associate with a free country. It's highly unlikely he'd be facing these charges if he wasn't an activist that embarrassed the police.
I have an Optimus V on Virgin Mobile.

$25 a month for 300 voice minutes and unlimited data (after a few gigabytes this usage is throttled, but still remains relatively fast for a phone data connection when you aren't constantly watching streaming netflix or whatever, which I never do with my phone anyway).

As a full-on Google Voice/VOIP user, the fact that I have "only" 300 minutes is pretty much meaningless, I consume almost entirely "data". As an Android fanboy/Cynaogenmod user my phone is running Ice Cream Sandwich even though the Optimus V is old enough to ship with Froyo standard. I use the tethering features available in CM/Android daily.

Granted, I'm not saying my setup would work for everyone, you have to be fairly technical to take advantage of unofficial ROM upgrades and I'm probably bending if not breaking terms of usage with my tethering usage (even though I only use it for basic web browsing and stuff, I'm not running torrents or anything goofy like that), but my current deal is the best I've ever seen for a smartphone.

The phone cost $150 no-contract and I've been paying $25 a month for the past year and a half or so. The phone's hardware pales in comparison to the latest iPhone or high-end Android phone, but it does everything I need including the full Google Nav GPS experience, pocket browser, pocket tethering modem, etc.

Sadly they upped the monthly rate to $35 (still a great deal!) but as long as I stay on my Optimus I'm "grandfathered" in at the old rate, which is pretty cool considering I'm not on any contract to start with.
We'd have to look at the actual court documents to see the details of which phone recodrings are being used to charge him. Aside from the posted police and school offical call, there could also be other non-published calls.

The "State of NH" vs Adam Mueller

http://www.scribd.com/collections/3735171/The-State-of-NH-vs...

> Basically an officer assaults a student and another student recorded it.

I've watched the video, and it looks to me like the kid tries to resist the officer in some way, it escalates, and when he gets turned around his chest goes down on the table. I wouldn't call this a clear-cut example of an assult.
An alternative: you can do this verbatim with Zapier https://zapier.com/zapbook/twitter/webhook/179/post-twitter-...
It's more about context. GP could be saying "I wish I hadn't worked as much on this startup because it failed and the time was wasted" or "I wish I hadn't worked as much on this startup because it was a huge success and would have been successful even if I worked less".
First I would point out I'm not seeing testing frameworks being mentioned as part of these platforms ;)

I like Node.js + Mocha

* Development in Node is super fast

* Mocha makes TDD or its variants really fun

* Node feels natural for webapps (the Hello World example is an HTTP server)

* JavaScript is a really flexible and elegant language if you get past its minor quirks

* The community is fantastic

* The built-in package manager is fantastic

* The open-source libraries are fantastic (pick the right DB for the job, there are good drivers for all of them)

There's lots to say about Node. No language is perfect for every task.

EDIT: fixed spacing
Just buy a hundred dollars worth of bitcoins, and short ten thousand dollars worth of gold, and there you have your bet, at whatever multiple you like. No need for someone to take you up on a "wager" as the market allows it already. And good luck with that.
Virgin Mobile (Sprint reseller) and T-Mobile prepaid, during my experimentation, did not roam. Outside of your carrier's direct coverage area, you got nothing. This is a huge deal if you ever leave a major metropolitan area and your carrier is not Verizon.

At least for me, that's why.
Woz Buys $2 Bills in Sheets from the Treasury
Could you please throw in a couple more details? I.e. what platform - or any, and maybe a good book/website as a starting point? Thanks.
Just for the record, the transplant extension [1] seems to be how you do cherry picking in Mercurial.

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/TransplantExtension
You're right, of course, but you presuppose that the purpose of the "bet" is financial. It's actually a donation to the Long Now Foundation. Plus, it gets your name on their website, which is kind of cool.
The widely accepted definition of a successful startup assumes rapid growth followed by a liquidity event.

Lifestyle business aka "living dead"/zombie company is one of the negative outcomes for a startup- maybe the most negative.
Per-pixel synchronization makes sense on systems writing pixels directly to the CRT, like the case of Atari 2600, which has no framebuffer at all, and required accurate CPU timing for writing to the DAC (Atari 2600 TIA).

In case of the SNES, or any tile-based 8 and 16 bit console, IMO, the only accurate synchronization required is per-line (HSYNC) and per-frame (VSYNC), in most cases. If a SNES game, for perfect emulation, requires higher than per-line synchronization, it was not properly written (complex multiprocessors systems with CPUs, coprocessors, DMA, rely on interrupts for synchronization, although some per-cycle heterogeneous memory access thing was used as anti-copy protection, timer handling, etc.).
Context matters. Words can have different meanings in different contexts.
The web community needed a word and that one was chosen I guess. I am more than happy to change the post to refer to the thing with a different name but I could not find one.
Free in France is now selling a monthly subscription you can quit anytime (no contract, no subvention for the phone, just like the typical prepaid stuff) that gives you both unlimited voice calls and unlimited data and sms for only 20 euros. 16 euros instead of 20 if you're also subscribed to their ISP.

And for those who don't really have a need for cell phones beyond the basics, they have an offer at 2 euros a month for 1 hour of voice time and 60 SMS. Even better, it's free as in beer (0 euros) if you have chosen Free as your ISP.
http://www.free.fr/adsl/index.html

You'd really have to be bad at math to chose an expensive contract nowadays over paying in full for your own phone and getting that kind of plan.
Not CNN. CNN iReport, which is citizen journalism; no editorial oversight or factchecking by CNN, just random Internet people posting stories.
eBay, Amazon, Buy.com are all in a competitive struggle for marketplace dollars (Sears and Newegg are a smaller, but real, part of this). These innovations are a cool result of this.