skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Managing a Child’s Allowance, the Online Version
I do right index finger on G, left index on I, right middle on T.

Oh, I'm a dvorak user, by the way. :)
The speedtest result posted in the blog post is really bad. 91.58 Mbps down and 35.01 Mbps up add up to "127 Mbps" in terms of your comparison. Of course, Google Fiber is much faster than that.

For the record, I'm currently paying $30/month (normal price $62/month) for 25/2 DSL in Vancouver, BC. If you live in a wired-up building, you can get 25/10 for $38/month, 50/10 for $62, 100/10 for $83, and 300/15 for $113 from a boutique ISP.
>"No the sums don't add up. Tax payers will subsidise some of the costs and Google will undoubtedly analyse the traffic to deliver yet even more personalised advertising. The local government will subsidise parts of the installation and make it legally as smooth as possible."

As much as I agree with you, this quote highlights something that cycles through my mind whenever I read about Google's ambitions. Basically, Google is doing and motivating people to do what our government should (and as we read, apparently somewhat can in some ways) do to improve our communications infrastructure. It annoys me to think that we could simply be building a new (potentially more neutral) fiber "highway" across the country with a similar model, run by the government. If only people weren't so afraid of government and hell bent on handing things off to private sector instead of the public sector. It's disappointing, and I feel in the very long run it could very well backfire on all of us if google succeeds and becomes the next AT&T.
I don't know if grandparent post has been edited but it says "rest of the developed world" now.
Is there a biography of Elon Musk? I saw a few on amazon, but they don't seem to be well reviewed?

I know he's still young, but given his influence and intrigue, I would buy a solid biography of his in a second.
Here's the preprint: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.0034.pdf
I remember an article, way back, which claimed that YouTube was running at a loss, based on a dramatic over-estimation of its costs. This looks like the same thing again: unsupported assertion that Google's costs are going to be huge (because other telcos, which are very wasteful in ways that Google isn't, have huge costs).

I also think this article may be understating the upside, from Google's perspective. It looks like Google wants to displace cable companies not just as ISPs, but also as television distributors, replacing them with YouTube. That'd be worth a lot of money, and it's something they could reasonably achieve - but they need something like Google Fiber to put them in a good bargaining position with the content producers.
Do you mean "anarchy" in the sense of "chaos" or "absence of government"?
> Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch an hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my head.

I also like manufacturing porn, so I made a playlist you might like:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0EB93E6E02E5CF17&...
You're opening mail addressed to someone else and you know you're doing it. It's not legal to start opening other people's mail because it's lying in the same hallway as yours. This is exactly the same thing.

No it isn't, because the mail is in a closed envelope whereas unencrypted activity over wifi is equivalent to a public conversation that can easily be overheard. The steps required to sniff open traffic are hardly extraordinary.

Why they don't just do a bit of street theatre like 'Here is a letter addressed to the judge. Because of the way the postal system works I got it as well. I am now opening it and reading it. Is this ok? No. Of course not. It's not for me. This is exactly what they deliberately did but it's just digital.'

Well, no. If traffic is not encrypted then it is public in the same manner as a postcard. It's illegal to open people's mail, but you can't practically prevent people reading what's written on a postcard.
We don't have a blanket law against reading other people's messages. The law on intercepting postal mail sent through the postal service does not apply to internet packets in radio transmissions. The judge can't extract the intent of that law and apply it to a different domain. If that was how our legal system worked, you could be stripped of your drivers license for playing a racing video game in your living room while drunk.

You have an argument for why intercepting others' wifi messages might be unethical, but not why it's illegal.
"To get that in writing, that’s 91.58 Mbps down and 35.01 Mbps up. For basically the same price, I’m lucky if I can get 9 Mbps down from Comcast here in Seattle. And that’s probably the fastest residential I’ve had in my life."

I use Comcast in Seattle. I pay $109 a month (for Business Class). Right now, I get 55mbps down, 35mbps up.
I went through this as well, but it turns out that an outside perspective is all that is required to noticing that something is unusual or not right.

Don't underestimate what you may consider to be normal or obvious, as it may not be to others.
Speaking of retinal scanners, I've heard of a high-res scanning camera that can acquire a retina (or maybe it was iris) every ~1.2s IIRC, from people just wandering around. I'd like one in my home, but not in public.
I hypothesize that it's because design is expensive, and the other manufacturers are unwilling to pay to design "low-end" cars.
A shock, to me, as I had no idea he had cancer. And very sad indeed. I didn't know him well, but I was a Zmacs user from the early days. (I still miss Zmacs in some ways.)

Dan was a great hacker.
I don't even bother sending in a CV despite having a desire to work there

I am reminded of the story retold on (e.g.) this page:

http://emmalarkins.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html

There's a famous anecdote about the famous science fiction editor John Campbell meeting a fan of his magazine. When the fan mentioned that he'd written some stories, Campbell remarked that he didn't recall seeing any submissions under this fan's name. "Oh, no," the fan remarked. "I haven't submitted them to you because they're nowhere near good enough for that." That's when Campbell exploded and said, "How dare you reject stories for my magazine! You submit the stories to me and I'll decide whether they're good or not."

Even if you don't want to apply and endure the ignominy of being bounced, (though you should just grit your teeth and get bounced; you'll get over it, and "getting over it" is a skill worth practicing!) I'd encourage you to take a current or former employee of Valve out for coffee some day and ask what it would take for you to get a job there. Have a five-minute chat. You might learn something, and you might even be surprised. One of the points that the OP makes is that it's really easy to make a mistake in evaluating your own depth of skill.
What really is the difference between a FLIR gun and a wifi card in promiscuous mode?
Both do nothing more than pick up non-visible light and are widely available, but both are still magic to the layman.

If the layman is competent to setup a WAP then it's not exactly magic. I have unpleasant memories of doing so from the Unix command line back int he bad old days, but the average person using a consumer operating system will be asked by a friendly wizard whether they with their WAP to be public or private. This isn't difficult, and the public signal can be intercepted with the same sort of technology that is used to broadcast it in the first place.

A FLIR gun, on the other hand, provides the user with a superior sensing ability to that of the subject, who is unable to estimate the IR signature of anything or anyone except by touch or close approach.
Yeah, the problem is that software projects always take 10x as long as you expect them to, so when you think you are 90% of the way there, it's more like you're 9%. If you know that you are only 9% of the way there, you will develop in a very different way than if you think you are 90% there, preferring long-term code health over quick hacks. (This in turn might shorten the total project so that you're 20% of the way there, but you can't count on that, because if you start assuming it you'll get careless and lose the benefit of long-term thinking.)
mixing RTL and LTR is a pain in unix-like tools (gnu, os x).

What I usually (not always) found out diring my experiments woth Persian is that the gnu tools themselves deal with it quite fine - but the terminal application shows them at pretty random places. If there is both LTR and RTL in one file, havoc usually ensues.

(persian also has this funny "invisible space", but it causes only small annoyances)
I know Google mentions a "gigabit internet" but in the article they measured "91.58 Mbps down and 35.01 Mbps up".
> Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless.

Besides, in the technology/coding oriented subreddits, comments aren't that bad, either.
Show HN: My first HTML5 game using processing.js
The main takeaway I got from this article is don't mix data structures and application logic. This matches my experience; complex data structures work fine if all the operations performed on them are in one place where they can be unit tested (or at least carefully inspected), but it works very badly if they're scattered or mixed with other things.
Kevin has come a long way in terms of interviewing since his interview with Trent Reznor. Nice job Kevin.
It's not good writing. There is no authority on language, so "permissible" has nothing to do with it. Writing guidelines are drawn from what makes the communication effective and pleasing to the reader; often this amounts to "everyone else does it this way," which is where the "rules" you learn in elementary school come from. That said, misuse of commas can be very distracting as they can convey a variety of syntactical operations which readers must parse. They are the most distracting punctuation when used in an unexpected manner. In this case the author would do better to use "Every. Single. Day."

/pedantry (few threads seem more appropriate for it)
Link to source code: https://github.com/clockwork189/Impossibru-Ping-Pong
I don't have a citation for this (maybe someone else can help out there), but apparently there's ancient Egyptian scriptures with people writing about the youth those days were going to be the end of society, or something like that.
your background image is 1.4 mb. this one is 100 kb, no noticeable pixelation or artifacts: http://i.imgur.com/7bcsJ.jpg
Maybe to give people a reason to buy high-end cars?
What amazes me the most is how good the quality is. These photos are better than those from my smartphone, and they're over a century old!

I do wonder how well he was able to view his own photos.

One thing that struck me was how much "nature" there is. The cities seems quite a bit smaller and more contained than they do today.
Ignoring the article's contents for a second, let's look at how clearly doctored the image is to make PG look insidious.

Before: http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/paul-grah...

After: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/pg-lowball.jp...
Mike Arrington: Turning the drama down on Y Combinator v. Google Ventures
(I posted this in another thread, but nobody read that person's submission so I'm reproducing it here. The BBC article made this much more sensationalistic than it was, implying the Uncertainty Principle had been overthrown):

Nobody has cast doubt on anything in modern quantum mechanics. The abstract makes this much clearer than the BBC article does:

"While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it must create. Although this latter relationship is not rigorously proven, it is commonly believed (and taught) as an aspect of the broader uncertainty principle. Here, we experimentally observe a violation of Heisenberg’s “measurement-disturbance relationship”, using weak measurements to characterize a quantum system before and after it interacts with a measurement apparatus. Our experiment implements a 2010 proposal of Lund and Wiseman to confirm a revised measurement-disturbance relationship derived by Ozawa in 2003. Its results have broad implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for practical issues in quantum measurement."

In other words, Heisenberg originally thought that the inability to measure two incompatible observables (like momentum and position) was because of something that is now called the "observer effect": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) The observer effect applies even to classical systems without quantum mechanics! You just can't measure something without affecting it in some way [1].

The modern version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says nothing about measurement disturbing the system. It instead says that there is an inherent uncertainty to the system. I've been seeking clarification on what exactly this means for a long time and have never really gotten a satisfactory answer. I've tried Physics Stack Exchange, my QM professor, even Hacker News and most people either confuse HUP with the observer effect or they reply in illy-defined terms that don't help me any.

The best that I can figure out on my own -- the true HUP -- is thus: You can prepare a system in a certain state. You then take a position measurement and a momentum measurement at the same time. You get two real numbers. Now, you repeat the experiment. Create a system just like you did before and take measurements of r and p. After multiple repetitions of the same experiment over and over, you'll get two long lists of position and momentum measurements. Take the standard deviation of the position measurements, multiply that value by the standard deviation of the momentum measurements, and HUP guarantees that the resulting real number will be ≥ ħ/2 (reduced Planck's constant over 2).

[1] Well, there's a few loopholes if anyone is curious.
> - Apple in glowing terms

Not really. People on both sides are just repeating the same discussion over and over again. Somewhat guilty of that myself, too. (disclaimer: generally not on Apple's side)

(also, maybe I'm reading it wrong but is the Steve Jobs remark not a little bit in bad taste? no matter your thoughts of him or Apple... )
I might be wrong but I don't think you can access your Github repo's analytics. The only reason I can think off other than the one you mentioned is that if the link gets reposted to forums/blogs, he knows the source of it as HN.
What were the least problematic drives in your experience?
"No one suggests that unsecured wireless networks are set up with the goal that everyone on the network would be free to read the private communications of others,"

Talk about begging the question. Kerr often makes that kind of argument, and it's a crappy one. I assume at least some unsecured networks are set up with exactly that goal, and that one has no expectation of privacy for the communications one conducts across such a channel.
I think that there's also a chance that charging karma for a comment could also alter the quality of discussion here on HN. Although it may reduce comment "spam", commenters would have a stronger incentive to follow popular opinion to ensure that the cost of posting a comment is recouped. This could potentially reduce the number of dissenting (yet still intellectually provoking) comments.

This hivemind mentality is a major problem in many online communities, but I do think that the hiding a karma on is definitely a step in the right direction.
Really interesting read. He mentioned that he'd talk more about the pathing in another post. I hope it will explain something I've always wondered about which is why the dragoon pathing/AI was not so good compared to other units.
I agree, I could easier skim through the comments by first reading the higher-voted ones.
AOL/Time Warner, part deux?
In what ways is Chile much more friendly to business? Aside from the free $20K? :)
Playing the actual devil here, who doesn't?

Everybody needs you, low maintenance + reasonable income space on the Monopoly board.
It's true. There's no use replying to a comment that's a few days old, because I won't expect even the commenter to page that far back on their comments page, so likely nobody will even read it (given that it's far enough down the page).
Friday Funnies - Apple rejects app with the word Android all over
yeah were trying to grow! glad you found something! haven't heard of artcards, took a peek and saw what they did. We do all art events like you said.
thanks for the kind comments!
> I also think VentureBeat should fully disclose any other issues they have that might be affecting their judgement about Y Combinator, but I’ll leave it at that.

Strong hint that there is more to this.
re:

"It seems many Kansas City taxpayers will be paying for Google Fiber whether they sign up or not. It also seems that Google has a LOT of free and unregulated access in the city. Kansas City could become a testbed for many a Google project."

[because] 'Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives.' [quoted within article.]

Yeah. Google got regulatory concessions not available to the 99%. Is that a surprise? This is how "business" is done with local governments across the country. Big businesses routinely get special deals in return for major investment.

Many times, these "investments" don't pan out. Local governments frequently fail to include clawback provisions for those occasions when Scam, Inc., takes the money and runs. It's a bet every time.

As to whether Kansas City taxpayers will pay: the fact is, they have already paid for the infrastructure. (Or they're still paying, via bonds.) So what? Google getting access to rights-of-way sounds like a bet that's better than average.

Proof is in the numbers. (Nice download speeds and the end user costs.) I hope the City Council of New Orleans, LA can get as good a deal.
I'm sure he was able to view them well using a projector. Displays like that were the initial purpose of photography like this. Positives of these would have overlapped to make up the same images you see here.

By the way, I think it's sort of a shame to even compare smartphone digital photos to film photography. Of course they look better.
The difference is that radio communication is well defined in the US code, as are the conditions that exempt the interception of radio communications from being prohibited.

FLIR guns do not fall under these definitions and so are covered by different codes.

As is discussed by dangrossman above, laws are not constructed in the fashion that you are attempting:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491872
> Of course they look better.

Why?
What's most interesting to me, personally, is the water in these photos. Because the water is constantly moving, capturing the filtered images repeatedly won't work -- you end up capturing different images for RGB. That's what gives you that really neat rainbow effect; it looks like oil in a rainpuddle.

Edit: You can see some of this in photo 18 where the stems of the flowers were presumably moving very slightly: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_c...

Edit #2: I just realized that I've used the same exact "effect" in demo code. I had a function in a shader that would generate a pixel color given a time value; I ran it three times for each pixel with a slightly different time value and then grabbed an R/G/B from each of them. You ended up with the same exact rainbow effect that was subtle when motion was limited and extreme when high speed motion was occurring. Not that that adds a ton to this thread, but I got a kick out of it.
What the people nearby are saying is incidental to the thing you're actually recording, though. It's the same thing as, or very similar to taking a video while you're on vacation: the police aren't going to bust down your door and haul you away because your camcorder's mic happened to pick up a conversation between the people standing three feet away from you. When you break out a parabolic mic and start recording conversations from 30 meters away — without the knowledge or consent of the people having that conversation — however, you're doing something that's at best creepy, and probably also illegal.

EDIT: It would also probably be illegal to, in the course of taking your vacation video of whales breaching or whatever, instead start specifically recording a conversation happening nearby. IANAL, but I think the distinction has more to do with what you intend to record than what you happen to record. You don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public, but you do have a "reasonable expectation" of not being deliberately and specifically recorded by some random creeper while out in public.

EDIT 2: Further, with as often as it happens, and pursuant to the DoJ's own statements on the subject, the police don't have a "reasonable expectation" of not being recorded when they're going about their jobs — particularly when, in the course of executing said job, they end up beating someone into unconsciousness...
About a year and a half ago I commented on a blog post he has made (it was a rather minor point in regards to consistency in distributed databases, I think). Dan replied to me via email with a follow up question and we had some correspondence about distributed systems, databases, and (naturally) Lisp. He ended up helping me edit a rough draft of a blog post, which ended up being very well received.

Several things struck me. First, expertise went across many disciplines of CS (from programming languages, to hardware, to databases) and beyond. He could have easily had fame as "Lisp guy", or "object oriented databases guy", or "CPU design guy" but he went above and beyond.

Finally, despite his repute, not only was he approachable (as evidenced by many stories here of folks carrying on correspondence with Dan), but he was curious and interested in learning from others, e.g., he noticed I listed OCaml on my LinkedIn profile and asked a question related to an article Erik Meijer's wrote about Linq and F#.

He will be sorely missed.
Do you happen to have any insight into the processing of the film? I'm very curious as to how you'd process the plates into the specific colors needed for this to get anything close to life-like representations. I imagine these representations of the photos were taken from the raw negatives.
There's something ironic about combination of "Mike Arrington" and "turning the drama down".
DroidParts - DI, ORM, JSON, more for Android
"etc" is not read "etk" but read as "ee-tee-see".

I call /etc/passwd "etsy password".
It displays correctly in the Firefox content and UI (17.0a2, yes I am behind), but incorrectly in the OSX title bar.
No one is smiling. Not even the kids. Maybe the woman in #20 is, who knows? I know in general 'old time' photos didn't have people smiling much - very posed pictures and stoic expressions. I wonder if they had any idea how much this would color our impression of them 100+ years later?
It's very difficult to hold a smile very, very precisely. Any movement would've meant the colors would smudge. Not necessarily the reason why they're not smiling, but it's a possibility, I believe.
Arrington hinted in his post that there is more to this story than is being revealed:

> I also think VentureBeat should fully disclose any other issues they have that might be affecting their judgement about Y Combinator, but I’ll leave it at that.

from: http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down-on-y...

this is starting to become so weird that I believe there must be more to it

edit: that post has a HN thread that was just submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894