skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently switched from contract to prepaid. Last year I took the plunge with an Android smart phone. I was curious to know what internet in my pocket really meant. My plan was a 5GB 4G plan with t-mobile.

I downloaded and compiled 1 year of usage into a spreadsheet. One year later and the results are in.

* My monthly usage never went over 300MB. Most of the traffic was offloaded to local wi-fi between my office and home.
* Average of 125 text messages per month
* Average of 900 minutes (TOTAL) used per month

I was a little shocked to see the hard data. As it turns out, and I only speak for myself, internet in my pocket did not mean very much. I could save a lot more money by switching away from a smart phone and back into a trusty Nokia 3310.

Even after breaking the contract ($200 fee) I will be saving $70 per month which offsets the penalty in 3 months.

I now have my Nokia 3310 with 1500 minutes and text for $35/month. Other benefits include:

* charging the phone once a week
* better reception
* [sarcasm]texting and driving is way safer now (love t9)[/sarcasm]

edit: added sarcasm tags
Can't understand the inbox zero (or in this case, inbox ten) crowd. What's so hard about letting the useless sludge fall off the bottom of your screen, neither read nor deleted? My "Inbox" at work has 65,580 unread items at this moment. This does not cause me any kind of stress or burden.
Haha, I wonder if they could use Bitcoin as their prevailing currency and avoid that problem altogether.
This makes much more sense. Still... I should be able to record my own phone calls, right? I think by picking up a phone you should be ready to be recorded especially as a police officer/prominent public figure.
What happened to realtime meaning "guaranteed time to success or failure"?
Or he didn't accept them. Apparently LongBets lets you decline a challenger: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3263807
Yes, Metra is to the "L" as Caltrain is to BART. But Metra has 488 miles of track versus Caltrain's 78 miles of track. It carries 300,000 riders per weekday versus Caltrain's 42,000 riders per weekday. Chicagoland is bigger than the SF Bay, but not dramatically so. 10 million people versus 7 million people, at roughly the same density.

Caltrain map: http://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html

Metra map: http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_m...
"But this is not a science driver, it is an engineering driver."

Fair point.
How can I contact you? Email?
So recording a phone call (without consent) is a reason for locking someone up for 21 years?
Stop Stealing Dreams (What Is School For?)
You text and drive at the same time? Isn't that illegal in most countries and states?
Home Remedies For White Skin – 3 Best Recipes To Get Natural White Skin
Did you notice tag "Crazy Ivans" below the article? That's pretty offensive...
One observation and one question.

First... this guy is gonna be a hero with a capital H if they send him to prison for recording the cops. Hero with the left and the libertarian right. Hero with the other prisoners... probably beyond that whole black-white gang thing. He will be untouchable.

Anyway...

I would also like to try to get an idea of the reasoning behind making it illegal to record the police, or indeed ANY public servant, in the execution of their duties. Suppose I make a phone call to, let's say, a public school. During this call I inquire about something erroneous that they may have been telling my child... as I understand this, it is illegal for me to record that call to use as documentary evidence of the challenges the child may face in that school.

I am wondering why that is the case? There must be some 'bad' way that can be used, so they don't allow it. I just can't see what 'bad' thing it s the government is worried about. Any lawyers out there able to address that quickly?
It is interesting because in France some operators are fighting to get subsidized phones considered as a consumer credit (you just pay the phone over time instead of up front, like a credit).

Since consumer credit is much more heavily regulated, if they win, people will be more likely to consider prepaid plans and non-subsidized phones.
It varies by state law if you need to inform the other party of the recording being made, and what you can do with it afterwards...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws
It's something of a relic of early-20th-c debates on wiretapping. Some states came to the conclusion that it's "wiretapping" unless both sides of a conversation agree, which has a certain privacy-law type feel to it. In other states, it's only wiretapping if you're doing it unbeknownst to both participants, which is closer to the normal definition of wiretapping, looking more at the "sneaking onto a phone line you don't belong on" aspect rather than privacy concerns.

It can produce some oddities in companies as well. It's now assumed that a corporation can read employees' email, for example, or record their internet or IM traffic. But in a two-party-consent state, it would be illegal for your employer to record telephone calls made from your office phone, unless they get the consent of each person you talk to.
Mod me down all you want. It won't get rid of the stench from all those corpses.
The iPad Put A Fork In Personal Computing
I'll give that a shot. I think I tried an option like that, but it just made things super-choppy (and still somewhat slomo). My system's somewhat underpowered anyways, so I'm not too surprised or upset by the issues emulating.
Since this story is being told by a NASA employee and not by the grad student, it's not the grad student making assumptions about why he wasn't credited.

See also this follow-up comment that lends some credibility to this anecdote:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xove1/iama_97_year_old...
Late Bloomer, Not a Loser
If a human is in the loop and you need to call in to verify - this could get quite difficult unless you use the "pronounceable" option in password generation.
"where people aren't routinely bankrupted"

You haven't been following the latest economic developments in the Eurozone, I see.
We are both in the room, I'm claiming there's a monster and you say there's nothing. The point is, neither of us really has a coherent argument with facts until the lights are turned on.

This blog needs a high level of transparency. If you can't imagine how Groklaw might be abused you are a fool.
IFTTT Needs Webhooks, Stat
The judge was even more scathing in the judgement on this particular point but I can't seem to Google up the PDF where he says it.
For the curious, I believe these are the videos in question: http://www.copblock.org/8754/manchh/

(Second video is the phone calls, third video is the high school recording)
I have a pre-paid Telstra device here in Australia. I hardly use my phone so it makes sense, right? I cannot buy credit less than $20, which I'm OK with however, this credit "expires" if I don't use it within a certain time frame. As if pre-paid credit goes stale... If I've run out of credit and I haven't topped up my account within a certain amount time, I will receive and SMS that they're going to cancel my account.
I wish this article was written by an actual journalist. Seems to be very one-sided.
If you have a state machine with several mutually recursive states, you can end up with a dangerously deeply nested call stack* . (Particularly if the state machine is reacting to an infinite stream of data and never actually returns.) One way around this is moving as much of the logic as is feasible into one large function and use gotos instead of function calls, managing the accumulated data yourself. (In a language with tail-call optimization, you can just use function calls. Much better.) This is usually a bit cumbersome to manage by hand, but a good strategy when generating C code from a DSL. (Look at the output from lex, for example.) This is also common when implementing a virtual machine in C.

* Especially on embedded hardware, which may only have a few KB for the stack.

Another use case for gotos is handling cleanup on error, when writing code that has to be fault-tolerant. Here's a rough example, generalized from a VM I'm working on:

typedef struct thing {
int id; /* object ID */
int buf_sz; /* current size of the buffer */
char *buf; /* internal buffer */
foo *f; /* some other thing that needs alloc / init */
} thing;

thing *thing_new(int id, int buffer_size) {
thing *t = malloc(sizeof(*t));
foo *f = NULL;
char *buf = NULL;
if (t == NULL) goto cleanup;
buf = malloc(buffer_size);
if (buf == NULL) goto cleanup;
t->buf = buf;
f = foo_new();
if (f == NULL) goto cleanup;
t->f = f;
return t;

cleanup:
/* Avoid leaking memory if any part failed. */
if (f) foo_free(f);
if (buf) free(buf);
if (t) free(t);
return NULL;
}

I don't tend to use goto by hand much outside of that particular idiom, but it's common enough that it should be recognized, and the equivalent with ifs and multiple returns would be much worse: "if not B, free A; if not C, free A and B; if not D, free A, B, and C; if not E, ...".
Paper and speaking based programming?
Has anyone tried creating a paper or speaking based programming environment?

Basically

- handwriting/diagram -> text code

or

- audio speech -> text code

The above could be done solely with machine learning or a combination of machine learning and crowdsourcing (mech turk).
This bet is a self serving purpose - it brings attention to Bitcoins with outlandish claims which will get media coverage. This brings more people to the table to drive the value up as they purchase BTC on speculation only.
Wow, to put this into perspective if you kill someone in Australia you're looking at a sentence of about 15 years in comparison to recording someone without their permission and getting 21 years... This is seriously a joke and given the outrage being generated by almost everyone you know he'll walk free. The fact CNN is writing about this and by the language used in the article they agree he shouldn't be jailed it'll be interesting to see what comes of all of this.
Not to mention pretty dangerous.
There's should and there's the law. More relevant here, is 21 years for recording a phone call a just sentence?
Well, right now, the article only mentions a receiver. So you're half-way there, you just need to build a transmitter.
Why rely on memory when the truth is two Wikipedia searches away? PS2 graphics chip comes nowhere close to any modern GPU. GPUs have progressed a great deal in the last 12 years.

Also, rating GPUs based on their pixel fill rate stopped making sense around a decade ago.
They just started not having crappy phones in June, so it will take some time for perceptions to change. Heck I have a virgin mobile phone and this is the first I have heard of it(iPhone any way, in June they announced getting the EVO 3d with android 4 on it).
I couldn't find a good one so I posted the link to CNN, I am with you on needing a better source
All these arguments are because Bitcoin is the only cryptographic currency thats widely used. What happens when another cryptographic currency replaces it?
> I should be able to record my own phone calls, right?

In most states, only one person needs to be aware that the conversation is being recorded. His conduct would have been completely legal in the majority of the US. [1]

It seems like 21 years is a very harsh sentence for conduct that isn't physically dangerous and isn't even illegal in the majority of the US.

I seem to remember reading or hearing somewhere that police departments actually like the rule used by most states, "recording is legal as long as at least one participant in the conversation knows about it." This makes gathering evidence in investigations a lot easier because you can record everything without a warrant. If we suppose the world consists of "criminals," "informants," and "police," and police and informants always know about their own recording devices, then criminal-to-criminal calls are the only case that needs a warrant in a state with one-party notification. Informant-to-criminal and police-to-criminal can legally be recorded without a warrant, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or any basis whatsoever in such states.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#Unite...
Yes, if you have a circuit that can operate at .85Thz you can modulate it between say .84 and .845 Thz. It is fairly straight forward to build a circuit to detect the frequency of a signal by sampling 10 cycles of that signal. Further the difference between .84Thz and .845Thz is 5Ghz. That is a pretty big difference so easy to detect. 10 cycles per 'baud' would yield a baudrate of 84Gbs or with 8b/10b encoding 8.4GB/s. That's 120 DVDs per minute :-) The Shannon limit is 10x that.

It would have to be line of sight of course, its not going to reflect off much.
I think the implication is that the felony wiretapping charges will be one of the things on trial, due to the efforts towards jury nullification.

But, yes, that is a horrible sentence.
An oscillator with a loose wire [1] is a transmitter :-)

[1] http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio/am_transmitter.htm...
There is a way for doing same day, or even same hour shipping everywhere. Combine pre-ordering with gps.

A website where people can express they want to purchase something at a certain maximum delivery charge. As soon as enough people want to purchase things in a certain geographic area (based on a calculation of delivery route), they service kicks in - someone picks out all the goods (this would most likely be a grocery store) and then drives and delivers it on that route.
I would be curious to know where they got it from as well. Some preliminary searching doesn't turn up any solid info, but does turn up that the one person they quote by name, Jean-Marc Landry, previously worked on a project to reduce conflicts between shepherds and the reintroduction of wolves (http://www.kora.ch/en/proj/cdpnews/cdpnews001.htm#Landry), so it's plausible he'd be working on something like this.
It definitely stresses me the hell out.

More pragmatically, its a lot easier to know from a glance what happens when your inbox grows from 0 to 30 rather than 65,580 to 65,610.

In all honesty, though, its mainly the irrational stress -- but irrational stress is still stress.
Well, in Canada all criminal prosecutions happen at the provincial level -- the Federal government defines the criminal law, but the Provincial governments are responsible for the "administration of justice".

Which can make things interesting when the governments don't agree on whether something should be illegal or not...
Elsevier is a monopoly in this space. Monopolies do this kind of thing because they can, which is why they should be broken up or legislated to enforce fair behaviour.
if you're really concerned about time, it's faster to pull some epoxy out of your drawer and slap it on the pipe than it is to call up the plumber, schedule a time, spend a vacation day so you can wait around at home for the plumber to show up in the estimated time window of "noon to five", answer the door for him, stare down his ass crack while he works so he doesn't steal anything, and negotiate a price when he's finished (money is time).
I recently bought a domain name from a premium domain seller and I asked the same question. The original post can be found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4278380

Don't make the first offer. They'll probably give you a price higher than what you offer and they just want to see how much money you're willing to spend. You contacted them about buying some of their domains. Ask them how much they are willing to accept for the domains.

I was able to cut the price of the original quote almost in half when buying my domain because they gave me the price first and I responded with a final offer at a much lower price and said that's all I had in my budget for the domain name. It was a polite "take it or leave it" offer and they took it.
Learning to build startups
In T-Mobile US's case, pre-paid services like the pay-as-you-go or Monthly4G plans do not have access to the full set of towers that the contracted plans do. Per a sales rep I talked to yesterday, the non-contracted plans exclude domestic "partner carriers". This comes up if T-Mobile is poor in an area and they contract with AT&T for coverage.
Fixing laptops is all good and yes, i too think you should take broken things apart and at least try to repair them and i do it regularly..

Opening the very 17" MacBook Pro i'm writing this comment from has been a satisfying experience when i've replaced my harddisk - it's really beautiful and well-designed from the inside.

However, that whole fix-something-yourself-when-it's-broken may very well become a thing of the past - especially with MacBooks which always prided themselves of being upgradeable and even mentioning the needed steps in the manuals.

You just won't have that opportunity with the new Retina one as most of its internals are directly soldered to the logicboard :(

I sincerely hope that this trend won't continue with newer models.
I agree, I bet there are a ton of Apple users for whom going to an Apple store could be a real pain. However, they could make it an optional account security feature. (Then they just have to handle "you got hacked? Well, that's your fault for turning down our free enhanced security feature!")
"Social game" is a bit of a misnomer and refers specifically to the mechanic of leveraging social networks to gain more users through explicit in-game benefits of doing so. It doesn't really have anything to do with "being social"; it's just iterated word misuse.
Yes they did. I think it seems like an awfully minor thing to complain about, then again that's easy for me to say as since 2010 I've always used an extension to hide the menu bar :)
I am learning the basics. This is an attempt to compile the things I am learning. Hope I wont be ashamed of it after a few years :).
And do please show how to build an 0.85 THz oscillator...
Here is the post that this is all about:

http://www.copblock.org/8754/manchh/

The first video has a recording of him interviewing police in public, standing out on the street.

The second video shows him calling the police department and asking them for commentary about the police-slamming-kids-head slamming video. The call is about 15 seconds long, the police have no comment and hang up. He then has a 2 minute call there with the school principal.

The third video is the slamming the head video. Basically an officer assaults a student and another student recorded it.
1+1 = a prototype picture of a tie-fighter from Star Wars.

It's also 11, 4, sex, 0 or many other answears depending upon how you look at it.

The choice you make only add's to the complexity when you try to explain your version of the 1+1 event in a way that others will understand.
Texting while driving is never safe. Please stop doing it.
It's been trough a huge rewrite, and tere are a large number of plugins now. The hosted version of it comes with a VM, so you can run any server side thing you normally would.

If you haven't tried it lately, how it a go. If you have, and it is still slow, open up a bug ticket and help make it better.
Seems this isn't true, from the other comments - it does seem that the guy who sent the email just copied the wrong link.
Yep...there are a lot of questionable kickstarter projects...even ones that have done incredibly well despite having no real product to show. The bigger problem, in my view, is how your actions affect the rest of the Kickstarter community. As soon as people start failing on delivering and running out of money (which has already happened), people will begin to lose faith in Kickstarter, and this hurts people who want to launch legitimate, rational, and honest fund-raising efforts.
Android development for beginners; where to start?
I have a few weeks until school starts and I want to spend most of my time learning mobile app development.I have some experience with Python and just like everyone else, experience with web design.

After looking for various methods of learning, I realized nothing that I was looking into was quite like the iOS Stanford class.

Do any of you know a good, solid path to learning Android development? Something that is sort of like the Stanford iOS class, but for Android? Also, if it could be free, that is a bonus.

EDIT: I'm currently going the the mybringback video series. It's helpful but I do want a video series that will teach me the basics for Android app development with one of the more recent SDKs (preferably 4.0+). All help is appreciated.
The main improvement to me is it just feels much faster and more responsive and solid (at least on my setup). VS2008 and 2010 were pretty bad in this regard.
Another crybaby blog post by someone that wishes it were still 1997.

If git syntax is that hard, then programming might not be the correct vocation.
All of the reasons are silly, but in order of most to least reasonable:

* Recording officers creates a permanent record of their identity which causes problems for undercover operations.

* Bystanders who record the police frequently interfere (directly, physically) with police actions and can put themselves or others in danger.

* Recorded video is frequently edited to create misleading narratives and spurs nuisance claims against the police.

* The police are themselves required to jump through all sorts of due process hoops to surveil people, so they should benefit from the same protections while on the job.

(Incidentally: all these reasons are probably true; they're just wildly insufficient to restrict video recording).
"...will instead be instant-on and resumable from anywhere."

Haven't OnLive and Gaikai already accomplished this? The main criticism of those services is lag, but for future mainstream games, social and otherwise, the player probably wouldn't notice.
Welcome to the police state. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
He hasn't been sentenced, nor is there any real chance that he faces a year in prison, let alone 21.
In Portugal most people have prepaid cellphones, you can get the same kinds (all the recent high end smartphones etc) as with a contract and most prepaid credit plans don't expire.
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Posting my comment here as well:

We're definitely interested in powering the internet of things and webhooks will definitely play a part of that. It remains to be seen if we need to have a generic hook channel to make that possible. I suspect there's one at some point in the future, but I think there are some better ways to address the same problems in the short term that appeal to a broader audience.

As far as getting developers on board goes: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/ifttt-adds-box-and-plans-ne...

And I can confirm that there is indeed a list of channels we want to build and that a webhook channel is on it.
> But in a two-party-consent state, it would be illegal for your employer to record telephone calls made from your office phone, unless they get the consent of each person you talk to.

My understanding is that the most restrictive state applies, so you don't even have to be in a two-party state, you just need to be calling one.

In any case, this is why every call center you talk to says "this call may be recorded" when you first connect. It's not just a courtesy!
Yes, time is valuable. Changing wheels and doing basic maintanance to your car by yourself is not only cheaper but way quicker, so better do it yourself.