skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comparing to arduino:

* Teensy has a native USB, much faster than the USB/serial bridge of an Arduino. I also find the discrete transaction nature of USB easier for communication, though good old fashioned serial is easier for many people to integrate on the host side.

* Arduino has analog inputs, the chip in Teensy does not. If you need analog you can either add an analog converter chip, or go ghetto and use a digital pin, a resistor, and a capacitor and time how long it takes to recharge after you flush the charge. Drawbacks abound.

* Arduino is a complete environment tailored to easy uptake. This is the most important point of Arduino. You can take someone who does not know what a compiler is, and in minutes they can be in control of hardware. The brilliance of Arduino does not show in the bullet list, it is brilliance by omission.
That is mindfulness meditation, and yes, it is quite difficult.

Actually, any type of meditation is difficult. (The other general type of meditation I know of is where you focus on a specific sound (or mantra) and repeat it over and over, either out loud or in your mind.)
It's true. I've never seen a NASA. Has anyone? I'm inclined to believe that they don't exist.
I'm unclear what point Jeff had in mind...

A micro-summary to illustrate:

1. I love strings.

2. You don't want to concatenate strings in (large) loops.

3. You already knew that, at least if you're a decent programmer.

4. Analysis of various methods of concatenating strings in loops.

5. Reveal that the methods don't matter.

6. It's bad to worry about micro-optimizations like the best way to concatenate strings in a loop.

7. Just avoid obvious mistakes like concatenating strings in loops.

8. Otherwise, don't worry about micro-optimization. Instead, focus on your real goal: writing better code.

Maybe it's me, but this article felt disjointed.
you assume evolution = getting better when in fact high intelligence is linked with a lower incidence of childbirth making intelligence a dead end.
First of all, the diesel fuel distribution problem is now a non-issue in the US. We have been using ultra-low sulphur diesel for more than a year now.

Diesel fuel has a higher energy content because it is heavier, this requires a higher ignition temp/pressure that leads to the NOx problems others have mentioned.

Modern diesel engines to not produce less smog than a gasoline engine, they produce more. Diesel engines have two problems that gasoline engines lack: they produce more NOx (due to previously mentioned higher combustion temps) and they produce more soot particulates. There are technologies like particulate filters, exhaust catalysts, and exhaust gas recirculation that can partially solve some of these problems, but they are neither cheap nor widespread at the moment.

You are correct about Bosch introducing GDI to autos though.
I fondly recall playing in the dirt under a bush with my Star Wars action figures for hours and days in aggregate, lost in an environment of my creation. I observe my over-stimulated (as in classes for music/art and prior to that, Baby Einstein) nephew and wonder if he's missing out on the pleasures of just unscheduled, imaginative play. I think he is; however, I don't think he knows that. I wonder if parents who grew up playing on their own, with their own imaginations have been peer-pressured into the Baby Einstein way of child attention occupation.
You must add a loop to find any nodes that have not been visited at all: the graph might not be fully connected.
This is always the case in a directed acyclic graph.
You can find cheap pocket translators or pocket calendars on walmart these days.

Not far from solar-powered pocket netbooks, like old calculators, I say.
Companies need to do a better job of talking to their early adopters
Upon re-reading before submission, this is too long. I remind you of Pascal's lament. My apologies. It's also slightly rambly, and shows that it's been edited lots of times. Again, sorry. I don't have time now to take it out and write it more coherently.

I wrote: Color me skeptical, but the only reason the auto-manufacturers are doing this is because if they don't, they will lose out to the hybrid and electric markets.

gravitycop wrote: You are skeptical of GDI's effectiveness (to help competitiveness), based on your perception that it is in fact effective?

No - you appear to have misunderstood my point. GDI is certainly effective at reducing fuel consumption. I don't exactly know all of the technological ins and outs, but I have seen reports that engines in Europe have had very similar technology for a long time. Certainly I get over 40mpg in my petrol car, and my wife gets over 60mpg in her diesel. I'm pretty sure it does work.

My point is that manufacturers haven't bothered seriously investigating things like this, because the market forces have not previously been sufficiently strong.

I wrote: Without the hybrid and electric markets, they wouldn't bother.

gravitycop asked: There are no other market pressures to improve gasoline engine efficiency and performance? What about:

Direct competition from other gasoline-engine makers.
Fuel cost.
Market-distorting legislation (CAFE, etc.).

I'm not claiming there are no other market forces. I do, however, believe that it is only since the wider availability of hybrid/electric vehicles that the petroleum-based engines in the USA have started to improve significantly. I do not have scientific evidence, but I do not believe this to be a coincidence. It is my opinion. It may be wrong.

I'm not particularly an advocate of either petrol of diesel, and my comment was not intended to indicate a preference. I simply believe that fuel efficiency has not been of primary concern to manufacturers. Secondary, yes. Primary, no.

This is probably not the place to have an extended onversation about the topic, but, in short, I believe that the petroleum-based engine manufacturers in the USA are only now starting to take seriously the problem of producing efficient engines. I believe that engines in Europe are generally more efficient, and the USA manufacturers are starting to use similar technology and trumpet it as "all new and improved!!"

Whether my opinions on this are relevant to HN is doubtful. For completeness, I also believe their change of heart is primarily driven by the advent of affordable alternatives. Without the hybrid/electric alternative I believe they won't bother too much about fuel efficiency. I don't think the market forces even now would be strong enough. With the hybrid/electric alternative, they are. Hence the dilemma I tried to raise, probably badly.

I hope that makes my position clearer. It's also probably entirely irrelevant, and adds little value. I shan't reply again unless I think it will.
Right, and this sweet little chip already has the PWM output and the analog comparator, and you can get a wakeup interrupt from the comparator. And then there's the VFC/VCO approach someone else suggested. But I think you can get a higher sample rate with a dedicated ADC. How fast can you do the PWM/comparator trick on a device like this?
http://friendfeed.com/brlewis/likes?service=blog
He's just drinking part of the coffee, not the whole thing.
I find the maths articles on Wikipedia to be absolute and utter rubbish. This is because I can only understand them if I already understand the underlying material. But of course I am not going to be reading an article about something I already know, I'm going to want to read about something I (as yet) don't know.

The maths articles on Wikiepedia are -- in my experience -- useless at teaching people maths stuff.
Austin Gets Its Own Startup Incubator
Harder the me just listing them, but you can take a look through my Google Reader shared items:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/10530692481246922106

The most frequent ones are:

* Schneier on Security ( http://www.schneier.com/blog/ )

* Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science ( http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/ )

I also follow a bunch of significant python people and the artima weblogs.
Dell asks for help gaming Google
>> 3. Modern diesel engines produce way less smog and noise than the average US car or pickup engine.

> Modern diesel engines to not produce less smog than a gasoline engine, they produce more.

I think bdfh42 was referring to the existing fleet (including old vehicles) of registered gasoline-powered vehicles. An important point, though, is that newer vehicles tend to be driven more. To wit: the average new passenger vehicle is driven ~15,000 miles per year, whereas the average registered passenger vehicle in general (new+used) is only driven ~12,000 miles per year. The more a vehicle is driven, the more pollution it emits, so it is important for new vehicles to be cleaner than old vehicles.
Great, thanks! I wonder if there's a free-software approach too.
Totally agree. I wonder, with a market of a billion users, does a set of software apps that are not back-compatible with our bloated legacy become plausible?

You could use old Windows or Unix apps. Or DOS apps. Or even old Apple ][ apps. Or, you could write an entirely new set of apps - a fresh start, in a fresh market, on fresh hardware. Doesn't that have a certain appeal?

Freed from back-compatibility with bloated software, does a $10 laptop become plausible?

Maybe something like the hp200lx: DOS, 24x80 LCD screen with incredible battery life (2 AA batteries), came with lotus 123 spreadsheet etc. Or, even lower specs than that.
Add "pwn" before youtube in the url of any youtube video to download it
Fantastic implementation.
Yes, it was to point out that it is not possible to drink 100 cups of coffee in a day but it is entertaining nonethless.

However, some drinking world records are beyond the realm of health and sanity:

"As the plane arrived in London, Walters raised his 44th can to his lips and drained it as thought it were his fourth. From all accounts, he wasn’t in bad shape. not if you consider he’d had 44 beers at high altitude and a couple of unofficial palate cleansers during the stopovers. He was all right just says O’Keeffe. He was lighting cigarettes filter-first. I guess that’s all right. You can do that sober."

http://www.thefanatics.com/content.php?id=330
Linus Torvald's Blog: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/

Paul Graham Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/

Coding Horror: http://www.codinghorror.com

JoelOnSoftware: http://www.joelonsoftware.com

Bryan Cantrill's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/

Rich Burridge's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/richb/
Doh, I'm sorry; that's what I get for not watching the whole thing.
The problem is that having those capabilities in your hardware changes informed users' negotiating position with Microsoft from "I don't have any way to prove to you that I'm not running under SoftICE" to "I don't want to prove to you that I'm not running under SoftICE".

To answer your earlier question, I don't do any work with TCG standards, in part because I don't want to make the situation any worse and in part because I find modern computer security in general extremely depressing.
I am responsible for some aspects of power and datacenter design where I work. What they're doing is really admirable (and hard), but they're going to do a lot more than many other, particularly smaller, datacenters simply because of their scale. From http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/measuring.... :

Figure 1 (chart showing aggregate 1.19 PUE, some as low as 1.1) summarizes the PUE results from all Google-designed data centers with an IT load of at least 5MW and time-in-operation of at least 6 months.

5MW is quite a bit of power. At a PUE of 2.0 that's 25000 amps (@100v), or about 8000-12000 idle servers. In Seattle, the breakover for the largest tier of power is 3MW, making 5MW about $194,000/mo (tariff 40) -> $0.053192 * (24365.25/12) 5000 = $194,283.

Obviously at these power levels being green is truly a matter of saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. It's a considerably tougher sell to justify high-efficiency construction in a small 100-200KW center, especially when colocating where cooling prices are obscured in the contracts under $/sq/ft instead of $/watt.
Top Crossword Solver Throws Down Geeky Challenge
And this applies not just to transactions with the government, but to any (U.S.) transactions whatsoever. You can see evidence of this on every dollar bill: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private [emphasis added]". It's illegal to refuse dollars, even for private debts.

Threatening people with imprisonment to force them to accept dollars should seem fishy, though, and it's a hint that there's something rotten about fiat currency. Unlike commodity money, whose supply is limited by physical scarcity, fiat money can be expanded without limit, and the result is both sad and predictable. Consider: (1) monetary expansion benefits debtors, who can repay debt in inflated dollars; (2) U.S. monetary policy is set by the Federal Reserve, whose officials are appointed by the U.S. Federal Government; (3) the U.S. Federal Government is the world's largest debtor. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what is going to happen in this scenario.
There is some research out that says that the Dual n Back test can increase fluid intelligence.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-back_task So that's another way to increase your brainpower. Cognitive fun has a good free version. http://cognitivefun.net/test/8
That night with Martin was hilarious! What a way to meet!
There is a huuuuge potential for a paypal competitor in latin america adapted to the multicurrency nature of the region.

I've been cooking the idea for a long time but lack of time and resources are holding me back.

I am talking about trillions here.
In fact, I have an old Toshiba laptop with initially 256MB of RAM. It had both Windows XP and FreeBSD+KDE in dual boot. Windows XP takes forever to boot and runs like a snail. On the other hand FreeBSD was pretty usable.

But one day, some part of the RAM stopped to run stripping
it down to 68MB. Even FreeBSD+KDE wasn't usable anymore.
So I decided to use Enlightenment as a window manager instead. Installing only the strict necessary: xmms for listening to music, vlc for videos, emacs as a text editor and for coding, xpdf as a pdf viewer, feh as image viewer.

The performance is pretty correct. It doesn't have an internet connexion because I found out I'm more productive
without it when coding. So I use it more than I expected to
get things done.
I have seen reports that engines in Europe have had very similar technology for a long time. Certainly I get over 40mpg in my petrol car

http://www.google.com/search?q=imperial+gallons+to+us+gallon...

1 Imperial gallon = 1.20095042 US gallons

http://www.google.com/search?q=40+us+gallons+to+imperial+gal...

40 US gallons = 33.3069536 Imperial gallons

If you haven't corrected, you are achieving over 33.3 miles per U.S. gallon when driving your high-smog-pollution (i.e. European liberal smog-emission standard, which allows ceteris paribus for higher fuel economy) gasoline-powered car. [EDIT] If you have corrected, your results are still not comparable, since they were achieve in a high-smog, and therefore illegal for the U.S. market, car.
Since your reply may possibly reshape the way in which "epic" is used on the internet, affecting a large number of people over a long period of time, would you consider it to be an "epic reply"? And if so, does that imply we're currently in an "epic debate"?
I put together a list of hundreds of blogs written by successful entrepreneurs, executives, investors, venture capitalists and other top people:

http://www.bigwinner.org/successful-people/

I don't read them all regularly, but I love getting advice and information from successful people.
That is extremely interesting. I would also like to see a graph of the percentage of APIs implemented and some kind of metric for the amount of testing for each API.

Thanks for the link.
Part of the problem with math in general is that it requires work to gain understanding. Describing something does not give you the intuition needed to work with the concepts.

Reading any article on math and expecting to understand the ideas is like reading a description of a language syntax and expecting to gain a feel for it. That simply doesn't work. Python, Lisp, OCaml, Haskell, they all require that you write something serious before you start to grok the language fully. The syntax is trivial, and the gains from understanding only that, likewise.

All articles on math need to be studied, not read. You need to work exercise, solve problems, use the material.

Otherwise all you have is a description, not understanding.

You can't read math like a novel.
Beats me, I've never used Rails. I did qualify it with "I've used" and "hardly any". I've used a number, but nobody's come even close to using them all.
In some industries, e.g. life science, publicly funded academic research forms the vast majority of the R part of R&D. The models for commercializing this research need some work, but with the risks associated, long time spans and the sheer diversity of researchers required, it will be very difficult for commercial companies to actually do the basic research. They are much better placed to take a promising project or two and then drill down.

One more point - I am not sure just volume of papers is a good measure. In the ideal situation, that should be going down if we manage to somehow ween ourselves away from the publish or perish model.
I think that is his point. Since he just concatenates a handfull of strings, the difference between the methods are neglible, even if he runs it 100000 times.
Sorry for not specifying, but I've already corrected for that. I don't deny that the diesel car probably wouldn't meet the emission standards in the USA (which bit? Hmm) but that's not my point.

And I don't really care. I wish I hadn't bothered to comment. What happens to your replies if I delete my submissions/comments?
Rock Out With Your Dock Out
O'Reilly releases official iPhone SDK app dev book
That's right and a big part of is the much higher gasoline taxes in Europe.

Interestingly, I can't recall where I read this, but allegedly particles big enough to cause smog are easily filtered by the human body.
Where as particles so small they don't cause smog tend to be absorbed more easily.

And so some clean air regulations might have actually made things worse.
Rupert Murdoch - The Boyer Lectures "A Golden Age of Freedom"
Ze Frank on Executing Ideas Vs. "Brain Crack"
Please look at the picture before downvoting josefresco.
Brilliant! My wife sometimes shows Youtube clips in her psych classes, but the classroom internet is unreliable. She tries to use tubesock to nab them, but that fails more than it works.

To be clear, the url should be something like //www.pwnyoutube.com/....
"but if you're this stubborn about something you're obviously wrong about"

Look, we just established on a separate thread that the system I described was secure (Barring memory dumps or torture of the operator). That's not being wrong.

As you suggested, yes you could go all out and encrypt, but that would have practical limitations which would make it less desirable.

Perhaps I was wrong to start a discussion about security at all.
> What sort of virtual goods could they sell in their game?

The Taxi Mogul game already offers "items" that speed the game up (pay $5 or wait 5 hours). They could also sell faster taxis, better drivers, etc. Really doesn't matter.

> And how do they prevent people buying virtual goods from feeling as if they're "cheating"?

I hear this asked -all the time-. Two things.

(1) It's much less of an issue in games that aren't PvP. "You beat me in one-on-one combat because you paid" is completely different than "You have a higher score/advanced faster than I did because you paid". The "cheating" feeling doesn't go away, but it's much, much less pronounced.

(2) Allow players with time to trade with players with money. The simplest, turnkey solution to this is a dual currency model. Simply put, players with time get credits and players with money get tokens. Players can trade credits and tokens on the free market. This allows market forces to determine the cash value of credits, instead of you pegging a pricepoint to it. I cannot stress how important dual-currency models are for games dealing with virtual goods.

> but it seems that for social status to work players have to feel invested in the community

Absolutely right. Social status virtual goods only work when there's high community interaction and visibility. A lot less people would care about achievements on Xbox 360 if it weren't for Xbox Live.
The Beauty of Lisp-1
I believe that engines in Europe are generally more efficient, and the USA manufacturers are starting to use similar technology and trumpet it as "all new and improved!!"

The fact that European car manufacturers are unable to export their cars unaltered to the United States is due to the fact that European cars fail to meet U.S. smog-emission standards. Manufacturers do not, and cannot because of U.S. smog-emission laws, use European engine technologies in cars for the U.S. market. They have to come up with "new and improved", as you say, technologies that meet U.S. smog-emission standards while achieving whatever other goals they have in mind (fuel-economy, performance, reliability, smoothness, driveability, quietness, etc.).
Yes, it should be a paid iPhone app. And/or charge for per-query REST API access to a hosted Everyblock data access API.

Bonus points for the iPhone if we can do simple GIS mashups on the fly like 'Show all the schools in the area' or even better allow filters and drill-downs 'Show all the schools with a graduation rate greater than X%"
In line with HN's previous discussion on "Taming Perfectionism" by coffeemug

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452341
I guess a laptop like that (if it ever gets made) would probably run some lightweight Unix-like OS. And it would be more like an appliance, where you can only run the programs that come bundled with it.

So, no installing random Windows software in it.

I disagree with the OP about wireless: I think nowadays Wi-Fi and maybe even cellphone connectivity would be a must for such a device.
From the article:

"Children learn to be fair and take turns—they cannot always demand to be the fairy queen, or soon they have no playmates. “They want this thing to keep going, so they’re willing to go the extra mile” to accommodate others’ desires, he explains.

HA! As the father of two children under five years of age, I reject the idea that children will teach themselves how to share or play fair. Perhaps if I let her, my four year old would eventually feel sorry for bullying her brother away from her keyboard, but I am not going to wait on some evolutionary time scale for that to happen (I personally don't think it will).
I don't deny that the diesel car probably wouldn't meet the emission standards in the USA

Both the diesel and gasoline (petrol) cars, if made for the European market, do not meet U.S. smog-emission standards and therefore are not directly comparable in terms of fuel-economy.
If you defined 'many people' I'd be much obliged.

(Not challenging the assertion, just curious who.)
Generationally-speaking, I think the role of TV in children's lives has increased greatly since I was young (I am 27 now, with a 1 yr old son and 4 yr old daughter). So many people are growing up now believing that TV is the nanny, educator, entertainer, informer, you name it. Sesame Street was just being invented during the Gen-X days of growing up. There weren't as many options. Now, new parents are bombarded with media, and most of them believe what they're told.

Take away the TV and see what the child does. And see what the parents do. Fascinating.
our list was:

Google Apps Premier Edition for mail/calendar/docs
Google Analytics
Godaddy as registrar
Slicehost
Callcentric for VOIP + Snom phones
Flow Jamaica for internet (15 Mbps cable) + local phones
Yousendit (paid)
Constant Contact