skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As another South Australian I have to say this article makes me a little concerned about further price rises of mains power to make up for the shortfall. Although the long term benefits of Solar are amazing the short term situation for power infrastructure here could be a problem.

*Edit: I can see a flatter usage profile should probably mean cheaper power, but still I think there is some justifiable paranoia in worrying about power prices increasing in South Australia again.
Hackers Lay Claim to Saudi Aramco Cyberattack
It was easy even then. PCR and Sanger sequencing have been in wide use for a long time. Yes, Myriad did do a lot of streamlining and optimizing, but everything they did was with preexisting technologies. There's nothing novel or innovative at all—they developed a very efficient analysis pipeline, but that's not something anyone should ever be awarded a patent for.
I guess you're not the only person to take a wrong turn at "Albuqoike"

Sorry. Look at my handle; I couldn't resist :-)
hey folks - this really was not about open-source or open-source hardware, but did start some great conversations. it was about a self described "clone" and "knock-off" fund-my-business asking for $500k on kickstarter. there was some open source hardware discussion shrapnel, it's good that it's being talked about regardless.

everyone who does open-source knows a copy of your design/code is going to happen, and it's encouraged.

1) the tangibot kickstarter when launched used the makerbot name dozens and dozens of times and said specifically it was the same quality because it was clone. you can say it's like-something, but not lean that hard on someone's trademarked name and brand for a $500k kickstarter. open-source hardware is great, copy it! just don't use someone's trademarked name as a way to assure quality and support. at least ship or show something and prove you're comparable.

2) the tangibot kickstarter at first said it was to fund a business, that's against rule #1 of kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines

rule #1 on kickstarter:
"A project is not open-ended. Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project." (they also say "No "fund my life" projects.).

tangibot has since completely changed the kickstarter and it's $500k better than it was when it was launched.

if kickstarter had viewable revision changes that would be helpful right about now.
This is not about marijuana. It's about the government ignoring high-signatory-count petitions. Stop with the red herring, please.
Here in the UK, the Government Digital Service [1] are doing much the same thing. They're building a single site for all government services and publishing all their code on GitHub.

[1] http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
Finally I can sass the whitehouse using github issues!

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/issues/2
I've read it and found myself nodding a lot while I dug through it. However, I felt like his points were scattered and, what am I trying to say here, a bit instinctual. I found myself instinctively agreeing but thought that his points were mostly assertions without basis.
How Bobby Fischer (Briefly) Changed America
Not to worry, someone has created an issue for this bug: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/issues/2
This year's update already has as much as last year's did so yeah that possibility should probably be discarded.
Microsoft Debuts With New Logo, First Signs Were In First Surface Video
Government ≠ Politics
High-signatory-count petitions?

0.024% of the US signed that one, and it wasn't ignored. A response was given. Not liking the response isn't the same as it being ignored.
This is brilliant idea and one that is perfectly executed. I would love to contribute whichever way I can and the way it brings down the barrier to contribute is remarkable. I would love to contribute in a personalized way than to donate to an organization where I don't have any clue what happened to the money.
Wish you all the success!
Get hands on with Invention Kit - Makey Makey and more
I had this on my PalmPilot in 1998 but from a different company. It was written by a friend who worked at a company with all kinds of patents for it, but they never released the Palm version publicly. Only a few dozen people had it in the world. It was amazing and it changed the utility of the PalmPilot significantly.

You had to put a sticker with the qwerty layout over the silkscreen area and then you just tapped away madly with the stylus. It was so good.

This is very, very close. Most of the mistakes it makes are due to the fact that it seemingly doesn't look at your address book for completion options, so when you try to type in people's names you know it picks a different word and doesn't even have proper names as an option. Fails on stuff like my name (Pinstein) or well-known things like "MacBook".

But it's still awesome! I've been waiting 10 years to have this on my handheld again!
I largely agree, but to me it raises the question of where the inventive step is when your "isolated DNA sequence" is simply mechanically or trivially derived from something existing in nature through a systematic process. Can a venture fund now submit a patent for all 20,000 human genes and own the whole human genome? If not, why not?

What I find hard to understand is that if Myriad has patented but one transformation of the DNA (and this being part of the justification for why it is patentable), then surely there must be many other transformations that enable the same test to be carried out, and people should be freely and easily working around this. But they don't seem to be; it seems through patenting one specific transformation Myriad have secured a monopoly on any kind of testing of the gene. I don't understand how they are having their cake and eating it too here.
You assume that I don't like the response.

You also skipped over the part where the response given was bullshit boilerplate and amounted to ignoring it.

At that point, why have petitions at all? It's just handwaving.
makerbot has never said "LEGO clone" or "LEGO knock-off". the tangibot did say "same quality as makerbot because it's a clone", "makerbot clone" and "makerbot knock-off". stating a fact like it's the same plastic is different than saying a complex machine is the same quality because it's a clone, the tangibot did not demonstrate that.

keep in mind, this was before the tangibot creator updated the kickstarter and also was asked by kickstarter to make it clear it's not violating rule # of kickstarter:

"A project is not open-ended. Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project." (they also say "No "fund my life" projects.).

just to be clear, open-source hardware makers, at least every single one of them i know and work with don't have any issues with someone making their design and making it more low-cost.

if kickstarter had viewable revision changes i think this conversation would not be about people saying open-source doesn't want to be open-source.
"How on earth are they going to fill the time?"

What time are they trying to fill? The event ends when they're done showing what they want to show. If that's 90 minutes, that's "the time". If it's 30 minutes, that's "the time".

What did they introduce besides iphone/ios 5 at the 4S release event? [strike]Oh right[/strike] nothing else.
I second the concerns raised by
alexanderh. Perhaps directing unallocated funds strictly on a needs basis would go some way towards addressing such concerns?

Such a scheme would also address the question of whether a patient should be expected to sacrifice their privacy in order to obtain funding.
I believe that the Google apps on Android are good, but my experience with Google apps on iOS have been mostly bad. Have there been good ones?
>Back in February, MG Siegler, among others, noted a remarkable milestone:

>Last quarter, Microsoft brought in $20.89 billion in revenue. Apple brought in $46.33 billion.

>Put another way: Apple’s iPhone business alone is larger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined.

That is because the OEMs sell the hardware for Microsoft. If you include the OEMs revenue, the math will be very different. It's that Apple moves a lot of hardware through its accounting books, because it sells the hardware directly after buying it from Samsung, Foxconn etc. Whereas MS tries to get only the profit and leave the revenues(with a tiny margin) to Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus etc. etc.

Therefore, profit is a better metric to compare rather than revenue since it takes moving hardware out of the picture. Anyone have those details?

On a side note, anyone else really tired of the Gruber-Siegler-Asymco blog mesh trying to project Apple's competitors like Android and MS in bad light by taking a very slanted look at numbers and other things? Granted, Apple's great and is unquestionably the most valuable company in the world.

I know that Apple fans like these blogs and HN consists of a lot of them, but it kind of gets tiring after the nth time of them getting featured on the HN front page and it's same old predictable kind of posts boosting Apple and bashing Google/Android/MS.

A side note to the side note, very ironic and funny that Paul Thurrotts' Winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN. Shows what a section of HN is willing to stoop to, to push their convictions and agenda on everyone.
moving across the country to a state I’d never been to and a city in which I knew nobody

As someone who did just this, but in kinda the opposite direction: from the East Coast to Minneapolis, I hope it works out for you as well as it has for me. I basically rebuilt myself here. I love MN!
This.

So there is this story of Fry's electronics.

Back in 1985 there were a half dozen electronics stores in the Bay Area, Quest, JDR, Quemont, Jade, Sunnyvale Electronics, just to name the ones I remember well. And along came Fry's and said "Gee we can sell electronics like groceries, buy them in bulk, sell them for a few % margin, and then put a lot of high margin items in around that to make up the difference. And it was a huge success (for them) and soon people would just go to Fry's to get their electronic components and tools because they had everything and it was cheaper besides. All the electronics stores went out of business, unable to compete at the margins Fry's charged.

Then Frys decided it was too much trouble to sell components, and moved toward more high end stuff. That completely destroyed the eco-system in the Bay Area for parts. Sure you could go to a surplus place and get a part if they happened to have it, but if they didn't they didn't and it wasn't like they would restock. The surplus places are at the whim of a manufacturer dumping their leftovers.

Radio Shack had also moved on so here we were, engineers in the Bay Area ordering resistors from a company in Minnesota (Digikey) with a turnaround time of days rather than minutes.

Of all the things one can hate Fry's for, this for me is the top one. They came in, destroyed a market that had been around for decades and then left behind the burned rubble.

One of the survivors was Jameco, they have been coming back now that Fry's has left the market. And even Radio Shack (which is also selling OSHW in the form of Seeed Studio stuff btw). But man it sucked during the down time.
This is sad because any people who take them up on this offer will contribute increased taxes to the USA which will then use that money to implement things like PATRIOT and a bunch of unnecessary foreign wars.

Try again somewhere that doesn't use most of its government revenue in destructive ways, and maybe this would be worthwhile.

Seriously, it's time to leave the USA. If you want to encourage migration and innovation, do it somewhere outside of the borders. The world is a big place and not all of it is insane like the USA.
True, but it's hard to disentangle the product from the thing that produced it. If Apple open sourced a product, I would fully expect to see criticism of their policies (probably around openness and and transparency, rather than labour) in any collective reaction.
So you want to subsidise the purchase of expensive cars to the point where it is financially a good deal. This magic money no doubt comes from other taxpayers.

The proposal isn't a subsidy. It's a straight market payment for an economic benefit - the difference in cost between off-peak and peak electricity is real, and this means that storing off-peak electricity and releasing it at peak is an activity that's worth money.

I'm not sure I agree that the economics work out exactly as described, though - if it would be worth paying for everyone's lithium car battery packs to do this, then it would be even more profitable to build a giant lithium storage battery in a central location.
Let's say you were a web developer hired to design some part of Apple's website, and by some miracle Apple let you open source your code. You, as a web developer, have no special way to contact or pass information on to Tim Cook, or any other top Apple executive. Would you appreciate sassy comments about Foxconn in your repository's pull requests?
How did they fill the time last time? It's not like they've never had an iPhone-only event before.
How is this different from cloning (for example) open source licensed software?

There is plenty of OS philosophy that says that even people who clone and close-source the technology bring ancillary benefits to the project - for example by driving market adoption of a similar platform (and thereby attracting users looking for the similar-but-free option).

Presumably MakerBot chose their license with eyes wide open. That the project has been successful enough to spawn TangiBot is purely a sign of MarkerBot's success, not of dirty dealings on Matt Strong's part.
Having been involved in something like web development around 99-2001, then living under a rock for some years, then coming back around the time mozilla "phoenix" thing started rolling, i remember how odd it sounded that people would hate IE and love the others, it was exactly the opposite of my expectations...
the makerbot name is not open-source and kickstarter is not allowed to be used to fund a business, see their rule #1 - tangibot changed the entire kickstarter, and kickstart had them make it clear that tangibot was the deliverable -- not a business to make tangibots.

it's not fair to say a tangibot is equal quality (yet).

lower prices are good, everyone agrees with that though!
I'm pretty excited at the prospect of a FUSE implementation of /dev/null-as-a-service.

But seriously, what'd you expect? The financial industry lost its place as the American poster boy, so the politicians needed something new with which to pretend they're relevant.

Besides, don't be such a buzz kill. Everyone gets laid at the Whitehouse. Everyone.
not sure if you're an obj-c dev but for me the surprise was that it even needed to be mentioned since it's extremely easy and common place to do processing outside of the main thread in current apps.
Are we serious with this on, HN? Commentary on pop culture?
In Japan, Mobile Startups Take Gaming To Next Level
Why the unwarranted douchey ending in your reply?
Yes, indeed. Dark backgrounds aren't good on your eyes, when everything else has a light background. Besides that, great post! (The article by Jake.)
+1 the first version of the kickstarter is completely different than what's there now.

i'm a backer of the tangibot, but you can't view the revisions.
I'm not a web developer, but can't you do that with Javascript?

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp

http://www.onlineaspect.com/2007/06/08/auto-detect-a-time-zo...
This article gives me hope. I've been at a megacorp soul sucking job (I realize not all are soul crushing) for the past three years after my comp. sci. degree.

I'm going to make the jump as soon as possible. HN has really been both an inspiration and a great place for sage advice.
OK, have a few SF stories on here, and would love to get some ideas on how to fix my "startup":

http://www.a1161.com

Seriously - trying to come up with a creative way to promote writing and reintroduce the "serial", and it seems like I must have missed the boat somewhere?
For median, I would recommend this article: http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/middle-class
Hmm. I already built something similar at chatfor.us

I used tornado load balanced by haproxy for the Web servers instead of Django. Backend is mongodb and I use a small tornado driven zeromq to manage passing updates between the front ends real time. That router also does all the db writes.

I built it in my spare time (and it shows) just to have a place to take twitter conversation to get around the 140 character limit

Not sure why you would need to seek funding to open source something like this. Today's frameworks make it pretty easy. Is there really enough need for another chat server? One motivation for me was to play with zeromq and tornado together. There are already other more robust and stable chat solutions out there. I never even considered there would be enough interest in it to open source my app.
How I read it, the author's point was that it's surprising to see this at the top of K-pop charts, and Western folks watching it really aren't getting the true message; they're just laughing at him acting wacky.
Well, being that I would probably agree wholeheartedly with the sassy comment, I wouldn't mind someone using the release as a platform for their political expression. But that's me.

In this case the POINT of the software was supposed to be political expression, so it doesn't seem that out of place to me.
food and beer @ 6:47pm?
Monads Made Easy
> I'm curious as to whether you think users want, need, benefit, or care about whether Facebook can deploy rapid changes via a "consistent cross platform experience".

It's not about me; your statement was about what Facebook's values were (valuing their own expediency over their users). I just don't think your statement about their values was fair, especially in the light of history (do you remember Steve Jobs walking out on stage and telling everybody how the iPhone didn't need apps because the browser was so awesome?).

> In my experience, users want a consistent platform experience -- one that fits in with the platform that they're using

Well we're not that far apart then. You consider iOS the platform, I consider Facebook the platform. You can hardly blame Facebook for considering Facebook to be the platform.

I general I don't think there's a single answer to this. If lots of new features delivered rapidly are what your users need then it seems obvious that only writing code once and delivering it to lots of platforms can get them those features fast. If features are slowing and quality of experience is more important then native code is a better option. I'd posit that Facebook is actually transitioning from it's rapid-development-new-feature phase into a more mature, stable platform where quality of experience is more important, and this transition is just natural and even optimal for them rather than the kind of "mistake corrected" that people are making it out to be.
"You assume that I don't like the response"

"the response given was bullshit boilerplate"

Well I guess he assumed correctly.
This is why HN is such an amazing place. So much helpful feedback, all over. Unbiased. Informative.
yes,I do.
Email: zouna214@yahoo.com.cn (c#\Java\oracle\javascript\...)
Now you're just being pedantic - displaying the number of days since a picture was taken is not worse than not being able to differentiate past 12 moths.
One potential solution is grid-scale liquid metal batteries:

http://lmbcorporation.com/

http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...
The trendy idea that startups should stay in stealth mode until their UX is completely perfect is a very Apple-y idea which throws away many years of hard-earned knowledge about iterative development processes. Apple can do it since they make hardware and that people will buy whatever they put out, highly competitive web companies, not so much.
What's your budget? I'm looking to rent this place 100% furnished... I can give you a discount if you need it monthly or need to rent it for a year....

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/654790
Did anyone really go 'wow' for the iPad? It seemed like the next logical step. It's definitely a computing device in a form-factor that people have been wanting for a while.
Robot learns to recognise itself in mirror
If the water utilities are smart they'll increase the fixed "connection charge" component of their bills to cover more of the fixed infrastructure costs.
After Apple publishes a new version of your app, your users must notice the update and choose download it--my guesstimation includes that. If you'd prefer to use 8 days, that is still a lot longer than the next HTTP request, which is how long it takes users to get a new version of a web app.
Kind of like how Moby Dick is obvious to anyone familiar with the maritime whale oil industry and New England politics in the 19th century?
Bugs: Typos
Upgrades: Sequels
Java appointment/event scheduling components
Now? Yes. In the 1990's? Not so much.
this is true, but they have felt increasingly thiner on content over time. I understand John's reasoning behind having an iPhone only event, but my concern is that there's simply too little material - we have the 6th generation of a device where the highlight feature is likely to be a new (usb3 and/or thunderbolt) connector. Everything else will be slightly more of what we've all seen before

Edit: After a bit more thought (not too much, getting kids out the door for school atm) here's what I see:

From the sounds of things, there's 3 (possibly 4) new product launches expected before the end of the year - iPhone, iPods (+iTunes?), iPad jr and possibly new ATV content. It also looke like there's only 2 events expected - one on the 12th Sept and the other early Oct. If the iPad jr rumour has any basis, then I'd think that's be the device that gets the stage to itself.

So, here's my revised guess: Sept - iPhone + iPod Touch + iPod Nano + (hopefully) iTunes. Oct - 7" iPad + new atv content
> Well we're not that far apart then. You consider iOS the platform, I consider Facebook the platform.

That's actually worlds apart.

There's a tendency for everyone to think that their platform is the platform. For users, that's not the case.
The cost of this demand type is attention. People will keep paying attention because they are invested personally (or they believe other people are invested personally and they want access to the peoplemarket).

You can measure the elasticity by adding anything detracting from user experience (i.e. wasting your user's time when you could automate solutions (e.g. cragislist spam apartment listings you spend 20 hours sorting through manually) or speed up your site (e.g. social website slowness/downtime/high variance in page load times)). You've found some elastic jumps when users start leaving because you're wasting more and more of their time.

People only have so many minutes of focusable attention every day. It's precious and irreplaceable. Don't waste your user's limiting waking attention with errors, manual aggregations, confusions, slowness, or "oops this failed try again and it may work or it may not work and you'll have to try again and it still won't work."
India’s SMS Hoax Panic: Could It Happen In The U.S.?
When Does Your Startup Need a Business Card?