skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just awesome, there's definitely a gap in the market for easy to use Knowledgebase systems. Sometimes wikis just seem like overkill :)
You are using false dichotomy here. Intelligence agencies, of course, perform clandestine activities. That does not mean these activities are in the form your favorite conspiracy theory describes. E.g., they probably watch persons of interest, but no, they probably are not in the least interested in your facebook updates, unless you happened to maintain active email correspondence with Usama Bin-Laden circles.
Likewise.. the amount of time spent looking for various emulators (and yes, roms) is something I remember somewhat fondly from those days.

For me, the game to beat was Star Ocean on the SNES, came out 1/1/2003.. the last translation that DeJap ever did.
Yeah, but it's not really that much of a problem compared to dealing with goddamn Verizon. $50/month for unlimited everything is pretty decent.

Admittedly, the instant I move from Massachusetts to Haifa this September I'll be heading off to a mall to find a new phone plan. The entire bleeding country over there basically runs on no-contract SIM plans, so the competition has dragged prices way down. Their equivalent of my current T-Mobile plan costs about $22/month (including VAT, as far as I know) and includes unlimited international calling (to either North America alone or North America+Europe et al depending on when you want your data throttled).
But prepaid? That tends to relegate you to "inferior" networks in the US.

Both AT&T and Verizon have competitive prepaid plans, roaming included.
It's significant, because historically its been difficult for electronic devices to deal with electromagnetic radiation in the THz range. The announced device is a significant step in fixing this.

As devices have improved over the years, the radio frequencies devices can process have increased. DC to 60GHz is the current practical limit in consumer electronics. Above that is the domain of specialised (and expensive) transceivers.

At the other end, devices can process optical signal relatively easily. Red light is 400THz and the useful range of optical devices might extend down to 10THz or so.

In between there is a gap, in the region about 1THz: The THz gap. These are frequencies whose wavelength is too long for optical devices, but whose frequency is too high for RF devices. Being able to easily access these frequencies offers the promise of all sorts of useful imaging and communications devices. Think of the THz band as being the virgin "wild west" of the EM spectrum.
Exactly Bitcoin is the equivalent of a pyramid scheme. It rewards the early adopters and needs new users for the whole scheme to succeed.

This 'bet' is nothing more than a publicity stunt to convince people that Bitcoin is a no-brainer investment.
Perhaps it was written by woz. ;)
Yes, I do. What CIA would do with so many lolcats? Unless they found a way to make lolcat-powered drones, in which case it is really scary.

Seriously, though, what CIA would do with such amount of useless data? I could in principle believe Facebook cooperates with targeted surveillance requests (though doing something secret on facebook is incredibly stupid, but there are stupid terrorists too), sending all their data to CIA would be pretty useless.
It's on the top page of HN right now, and following the link gets me "Error establishing a database connection." So all I know about the article as I'm writing this is the title; it's pretty accurate :)
I watched the video too and didn't see that. It looked to me like he jerked the kid up, was shaking him around and talking to him, then slams him down (apparently after the kid says something back). Either way, agree it's not clear cut as the cell phone camera work made it tough to see clearly.
Startups that Hacked Early Growth
I think programmers frequently underestimate the kinds of performance gains that can be achieved via memory layout and access pattern optimizations. I do a lot of high-performance algorithm design and have frequently seen the case that what looks like a trivial and logically neutral algorithm implementation tweak doubles performance by virtue of having better memory access behaviors. For heavy duty memory access optimization, 10x is not unachievable in some cases.

In my experience designing high-performance algorithms on modern processors, I'd estimate 80% of all performance optimizations are actually memory behavior hacks. Designing better algorithms is another 10% and is harder to do (most software engineers have never designed a genuinely original algorithm). The last 10% is everything else, such as redesigning the code to get closer to saturating all 3 ALUs available on modern cores. (Code hacks to force ALU saturation sounds like it shouldn't do much but I've seen 2x performance gains for some algorithms where the "obvious" implementation tended to serialize over one ALU if you analyze them.)

For high-performance code junkies, memory access optimization is the bread and butter for integer factor performance gains.
I just thought of an awful analogy:

A builder is suing another builder in the next state over for stealing his plans and constructing a house following them.

Used by Oracle as evidence is that someone swung a hammer three times in the garage in a row in the same way someone else swung a hammer three times in a row, which produced two nails hammered in in exactly the same way.
Lots and lots of observations. Just a few:

The list of who's involved is sorted alphabetically by last name. TBL is third on this list. Humility. http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/P...

"Resource discovery" is identified as a problem. And a possible solution is proposed: By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know because there isn't yet an indexer which runs over the web directly. Now, if there was only some money in that ...

In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches.

TBL's first hypertext work was in 1980. Good ideas take time to come to fruition (there was also much parallel work on similar concepts).
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/F...
Good job, both in getting him to talk and really listening to what he said.
To avoid exactly this, I'm working on Instabot: http://instabot.stochastictechnologies.com/

It's a hosted bot, similar to hubot, and you'll be able to just go to the site, specify your channel and have Instabot join, without the hassle of setting it up or maintaining it. Of course, it will support all the useful commands, like convenience functions or webhooks.

For early access to the alpha, email me at stavros@stochastictechnologies.com.
Google cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4S2qmnR...
Real-time Curiosity Simulator with Landing Preview
You can buy un-cut US currency here: http://www.moneyfactorystore.gov/uncutcurrency.aspx

The $2 is currently out of stock :-(
Prepaid is not cheaper if you are smart about your plan. With prepaid, you cannot

1) Get the "standard" 20% corporate/education discount that most phone companies offer

2) Get a family plan which can be much cheaper

3) Get data for cheap (t-mobile offers 200mb data for $10/month)

4) Get free nighttime and weekend minutes

5) Get free calling within the phone network

Most people on prepaid could get a better deal without prepaid if they shopped around a bit.

I would love it if people stopped the misconception that "prepaid is cheaper" and instead realized that different plans are better for different phone usage habits.

Update: formatting, changed one instance of the word "on contract" to "without prepaid"
It became very accurate for me within three days.
I'm on TESCO Mobile, I buy a £5 500MB data bundle each month. Works great. I can still SMS and call when I need to, but I don't most of the time.
Of Tech Writers and Backup Strategies
Personally I'd call both startups for the first 2-3 years of business.
>3) 200mb for $10/month

That's pretty expensive. Here in the UK on Tesco mobile (uses O2's (Telefonica) network) prepaid/pay as you go, £5 gets me 500mb for a month.

I guess data must be more pricey in the states.
I was about to mention that. If anyone wants more detail, what's happening is that is Free Mobile (new player on the market) is suing SFR (one of the three major players) for unfair competition. Here is a source (in French): http://www.capital.fr/a-la-une/actualites/exclusif-free-port...
Thanks for posting this! I've had this problem for a while and was convinced I was hypoglycemic but when I measured my blood sugar level, even at the peak of the symptoms, it was always perfectly normal. I had the blood glucose meter (and paranoia) because my sister is diabetic and I was afraid I might be too. It's somehow very comforting to be able to put a label on this and to know that it's not uncommon and (presumably) not dangerous.
> Shannon's law tells us that higher frequencies are capable of more bandwidth than the lower frequencies, which means high-frequency RF could transfer a lot more information than low-frequency RF systems [4].

Almost: Shannon's law sets a limit on the amount of information that can be transmitted through a channel with a given signal-to-noise ratio and a given BANDWIDTH (it's bandwidth * log(s/n) ). Now, it happens to be the case that systems operating at higher frequencies often (nay, usually) do have higher bandwidth for a number of reasons, but Shannon's law doesn't care what carrier frequency your channel uses.
This is weird though because erlang is way easier to wrap your head around than C++. A C++ programmer should be able learn erlang in a a couple weeks max. If they can't do that then I probably don't want them doing C++ code for me either. Now if they rewrote it in java, because java programmers are easier to find, that might be less weird but C++?
Stream-statistics for nodejs
Example of one of those organs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUlx0LVzeP0

not really an organ

Now that I think about it, it's not really useless either... just not the best design.
It's not a pyramid scheme. Although it does reward early adopters for taking a risk, eventually price should stabilize at a real world value (as opposed to a dollar value. As long as we keep printing dollars, the real world value of a dollar will decrease. The value of a bitcoin should always increase relative to the dollar).
The problem here is that BART is not a metro service - MUNI is supposed to be, but doesn't do a particularly good job of it, so BART has been co-opted over the years by residents in some neighborhoods to pick up the pieces.

San Francisco first needs to figure out what BART is - if its future is as a rapid transit municipal system (that's tied together with other municipalities), or if it should be strictly a commuter and inter-city transport system.

The current operating model is not a bad one assuming what you want is a regional commuter rail system, it fails utterly at being municipal transport.

I'd suggest that the "failures" of BART are really the extension of the massive, completely unmitigated clusterfuck that is MUNI. Looking at the recent history of MUNI is like watching a really bad slapstick act - it'd be funny if it weren't so damned sad. MUNI is broken, its system of governance is broken, and the propensity for California/Bay Area to engage in hyper-democracy is keeping it broken (ballot measure ALL the things!)

San Francisco holds 800K people in 47 square miles of land - the argument that this is insufficient density for a proper rapid transit and municipal transport system is IMO complete bunk.
Nexmo tends to be cheaper than Twilio
I've got one of his bills, it is disconcerting to see a bill with a perforated edge.
"lower-quality handsets"?

Not really. The good-quality handsets are just more expensive.
Yes, but 3GHz of a modern OooE CPU (with at least 3 instruction per clock, capable of massive SIMD)? Come on. Also, from desktop snapshot, in task manager it showed 4 CPUs, with 3 of them at almost 100% (!). It reminds me the comparison between Git and Monotone made by Linus Torvalds. I find no reason in the Earth for perfect SNES emulation with just one core of a modern OooE CPU and 1-1.5GHz (with GPU assistance for stretch and filtering/postprocess), even written in C, with no SIMD assembly at all (SNES 65816 CPU was running at maximum speed of 3.58 MHz, being its coprocessors even slower).
This is ok as it is what is deemed exception handerling. Though personaly I like to handle as many known exceptions individualy. I also like to have all functions to return a status code and with that you can cleanup any possible exception and still have all your error handerling code in one place and allowing graceful handerling of any exception. It's a little bit more effort, but when you need that level of assurance you pay for it one way or another.
Start marketing yourself right now. Your best bet would be to continue doing .NET stuff, since there is a lot of demand for that, and you know it. Go ahead and network with people and lt them know your plans. Whatever you do, just talk to people about it and listen.
Looks like it's a recurring tag for Wired: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/crazy-ivans/

I guess somebody at Wired thinks they're being funny. IMO they're being stupid.
Typical "unlimited" data plans are $30/month. Considering that I use my data freely, and I never use 200mb, I wouldn't benefit from an increase in limit. But you're right that £5 is a little less than $10.
SPDY on Rails
Prepaid used to cost a fortune if you used your phone more than about 10 minutes a month; it's only recently that it started to come down in price.
Pupcake, a PHP 5.3+ application framework
The early stage efforts to bring php-uv functionalities into Pupcake PHP Microframework.
I also use prepaid in the UK. They are definitely the best deals, unless you want the very latest. That simply isn't available PAYG and if it is, it's a ridiculously expensive package so you just don't do it.

I've spent less than 200 pounds in two years in the service, and another 200 in terminals (I use 2, a Blackberry Curve 3G and a Xperia Arc S upgraded to ICS). I won't get another terminal in a year or two, so my average expense per month is less than 15 quid, and when I'm abroad I spend even less.
Well the truth is most people are pretty stupid in that regard.

- they don't want to pay $500-$600 upfront, so they rather go with a contract, even though in the end they pay more.

- they can't be bothered to buy a phone separate and do the research to find the right plan for them.

- they just want to go in a store and leave with a nice phone, without thinking and paying too much.
A friend of mine in college would buy 100 $2 bills from the bank (for $2), then paint the edge with adhesive, turning them into a tear-off notepad of $2 bills. At the time, turnpike tolls were $2, so it was very convenient -- this was before fastrak or ez-pass or other transponder based toll systems.
I think the issue is people think they pay $50 for an older version instead of $300 for the latest, thus saving massive 80% or so. In reality, it's $1,970 vs. $2,220 (assuming $80/mo for two years). The difference is only 11%. If people realized that, many could reconsider accepting significantly outdated hardware for 11% savings over 2-year period.
The GoPro Army
Now that we're seeing lots of cores on the machines of ordinary people, what would be really nice is if languages like Erlang, which are by design better for parallel computing, could efficiently target JavaScript while taking advantage of web workers.

As more and more application development becomes web based, it's really a shame to see almost-always-idle core after almost-always-idle core added to user end CPUs.
The information is garbage - it's no longer referenced by the current state of the repository. "git gc" just delays collection in order to give users an opportunity to restore recently-unreferenced commits they decide they wanted after all. Also, the man page for "git gc" on my system describes exactly how long commits are kept around after they're no longer referenced, what this depends on, and how to change the default settings.
The brilliant thing about bsnes (the "crazy" emulator you're referring to) is that the author has worked with researchers to reverse-engineer all of the secondary chips that SNES carts used - even an ARM3 chip.
I find it funny that our culture is so combatative that such a good encounter is characterised as an ass kicking.
Apple reportedly in talks to buy The Fancy
AFAIK, an oscillator is necessary for building a receiver. In other words, this is apparently a solved problem.
Your time is only wasted if you get no enjoyment or satisfaction out of changing your own faucet or fixing your own leaky pipe.
Well, Woz has a very interesting sense of "humor", that's for sure.
I totally agree that Clojure and Noir are a great choice. In dev mode with automatic code reloading, you have a fluid setup.

I am starting to rebel a bit against really fat JavaScript/CoffeeScript/ClojureScript clients as the default implementation strategy. For many apps, using old fashioned forms, render on the server, and after you have functionality convert bits to AJAX as needed to make the web app nicer to use. It is an economic decision: is the cost of a slick fat client justified for a given project?
The first meaning: if you’ve conceived something in your
mind, decide to do it, and are willing to put in the work
– nothing can stop you.

Pfft. What if I conceive to build a perpetual motion machine, or conceive to disprove Special Relativity?
University of Edinburgh joins Coursera
Does Always online work with SSL static sites?
Fictional keynote suggests things are not that bad
Ben Hutchins writes this fictional blog attributed to "Benjamin Stark", successor to Iron man's Tony Stark. Here's a "keynote" address that tells us things aren't that bad, and the "future's already here"

"I believe - and I have reason to think a lot of you believe - that we're living in the best time this old world has yet produced."
You're off. I'm doing the non-contract t-mobile thing in the US. I have the exact 200MB/$10/mo thing you mentioned, as well as the free nighttime/weekend minutes and free in-tmobile calling. Just ask them and they'll give it to you.
They're just plain DVDs, SuperDrive is fine.
I thought (in the US anyway) that most carriers had unlimited talk/text now. Data is where the tiered pricing is.
It's easy to see why they aren't popular. There aren't a lot of Prepaid phone stores, I see Verizon and AT&T stores everywhere. And you can't get the Newest Phone^(TM) from them. If the iPhone 5 was released right this instant it wouldn't hit somewhere like Virgin Mobile for at least a year, probably longer. (They just recently got the iPhone 4...)
2.5x the data for about $2 less. But not in the same country :)
I think these laws were enacted solely to protect deeply corrupt systems, but I might be biased because I live in Illinois. With laws like this, administration-connected people can be openly corrupt, because the collection of evidence against them is in itself evidence of a crime.

No one is prosecuted for corruption in Illinois unless they become a roadblock in some way to someone with more clout (after which they resign and charges are quietly dropped), or the Feds come to town.
I should have used the word "non-prepaid" instead of "contract". The non-contract t-mobile thing is not a prepaid plan.
I agree that one area where rails could improve is in the string serialization/ERB component (e.g. includes shouldn't materialize a string then write, but should concat to the current output for example) but ruby strings are pretty damned fast in my experience. I believe that's an implementation detail that could be addressed without going to C++.
I understand your point, but I think 'significant outdated hardware' is a misnomer; with the exception of things like Retina Display breaking backwards compatability, its pretty rare that the difference between two phone generations is that important for non-power users.
The saving algorithm happens near-instantly, yes - but what's being referred to is the "versions" that are user-visible. Each time you hit Save, Close, or leave an edited document open for an hour, a "version" made that can be reverted to/seen in Time Machine.
Exactly, but as you say the reason is that there's an easier and less risky (although it depends on the quality of the ID) way to get/steal money.

But that doesn't prove that requiring a physical ID is a safer method, just that there is a better workaround.
Your Macbook should be fine, I'd probably use Disc Utility to dump the disc to an ISO if you have the space.
"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..."

According to Article 22 of the New Hampshire constitution, "free speech ... [is] to be inviolably preserved". It is difficult to reconcile this "wiretapping" law with the constitution.
T9 is better than using those micro sized keyboards though.
How I Built A WebGL Canvas Visualization With No Graphics Knowledge
> Last night, I needed a way to be notified each time I posted a new tweet.

Mind. Blown.
Agreed. Poor headline for such an interesting encounter.
Do Android and iOS as they're currently making up the majority of the market (800 million devices) and they're the 2 most requested platforms.

For Android I used Marakana's Android Bootcamp Screencast Series. You can find it on YouTube or Marakana.com, it's excellent.

For iOS I used "Creating Your First iOS App" on Apple.com, got me started with everything I needed to know.
Wouldn't it be great if Russell Kirsch went from coffee shop to coffee shop having similar conversations? Kinda like the hacker version of that scene in the movie Soapdish where Sally Fields and Whoopi Goldberg go to the mall and Whoopi pretends to recognize Sally. In the movie, the result was a flock of women crowding around her. In Russell's version, each encounter would end with an inspirational blog post or tweet.
Ask HN: Alternatives to a password manager?
With the recent post about getting hacked, I was wondering about how everyone on HN manages their passwords. I searched HN history and there have been a few threads on this topic, but with very few comments.

It seems that one of these types of post surfaces every month or so, reminding us of the dangers and security issues surrounding passwords/backups/dependence on cloud sites and what happens when things go wrong.

The classic tradeoff with passwords is one between security and convenience. I used to use a password manager briefly, but it was too inconvenient (mobile access + access on other computers).

Who uses a password manager? If you don't use a password manager how many passwords to you keep? Does anyone use a scheme for keeping passwords?--for example, given the website you can figure out what your password is based on some rule.

I'm thinking of switching to that last one--are there any strong reasons not to, or better ways to keep passwords if I don't want to use a password manager?
http://www.vogella.com/articles/Android/article.html#tutoria...
As long as we keep printing dollars, the real world value of a dollar will decrease.

Assuming no corresponding productivity gains occur.
Hubot is an IRC/campfire bot designed to give some character to your team's channel. It has various commands for inserting photos in your chat, fetching stuff, and, indeed, running pre-configured commands.

As I said on another comment (excuse the plug), http://instabot.stochastictechnologies.com is designed to be a hosted version of hubot.
Startup Guild seems to have attracted mostly micropreneurs, check it out: http://startupguild.net/