skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IBM do invest in pure science with the expectation that something out there bring a totally new field or technology, Apple does not.

The transistor was invented in one of those large R&D units, Bell Labs from AT&T, maybe it did not brought money as the Mac or the iPhone but it was real innovation, you could always argue that it was all about people but I think without AT&T money it would have appeared much later in history.

EDIT: deleted some unnecessary words.
Rumors
Gossip offends our own intelligence.
From poverty and jail to being one of Britain's richest entrepreneurs [video]
No you don't and I believe we both are. Hope the rest of your evening goes better.
I'm inclined to share your skepticism. It's virtually impossible to write a truly good book in three days.

That being said, I give him a lot of credit. I give him credit because the hardest part of writing a book is writing a freakin' book. Anyone who's ever seriously attempted the exercise knows that much. You have to overcome ten million types of personal inertia to get started, and ten million types of friction and resistance in order to keep at it. There may be no shortage of bad books out there, but there's a substantially larger number of unfinished books. The latter problem dwarfs the former.

While I haven't read his book, and I can't say for certain what his thesis may be, it seems to follow the "move fast and break things" philosophy. If that's the case, then it seems fitting he put his money where his mouth is, and wrote the book in the spirit it is intended to convey.

We'll see if it's actually worth reading. But even if it's not, hey, at least he did something. He may have succeeded, or he may have failed, but he got started. I hope he's got more books where this came from, and that each one gets better as he progresses.
Awesome! I've just posted this to HN in case it's interesting to anyone else.
Visualizing the 2012 election
Fair enough. You say that batteries are "too heavy"; I pointed out that they are getting steadily lighter, which is true. It's also true that they are plenty light, right now, to make the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla. To me, it's self-evident that batteries are therefore not "too heavy" to make a viable product.

Part of EV infrastructure is already built, too, and you know this. Yes, we do have to build 9 megashitloads of charging stations, over time. But we may see a model where lots of that charging occurs at home, and the consumer upgrades their own infrastructure, or the power companies offer a free or cheap charging station in return for selling lots more electricity to the customer. I don't see this as an insurmountable issue at all.

Yes, the cost is currently higher, but the obvious point is that it's coming down rapidly per unit of vehicle range. Shelf life of the Prius batteries has proven very very good so far, although that's a hybrid and not a pure electric.

Yes, power is down to an extent not seen since the 19th century. But gas deliveries are affected in a major way, too. Anecdotally, I have tons of friends telling me how hard it is to find gas.

The use case for charging at night already encompasses most drivers in most situations. And with a range of 250-300mi with one-hour recharge at free Tesla stations for longer trips...the use case is getting broader all the time.

What's the deal? Did you buy $1M of Hummer stock and lose your Charles Schwab password? This tech is clearly valid right now and getting more attractive by the year.
Ask HN: How Many Email Addresses Do You Have?
Hey HN! I am just curious how many email addresses do you have?
Out of curiosity, at which Alexa rank range do you take new sites serious? 100,000? 50,000?

From a little bit of research it looks like piccys.com has 30 million page views with an Alexa rank of 8518, and weheartit.com has 850 million page views with a rank of 1367. So the top 10,000 seem difficult to get into as a newcomer.
Wow, I guess my family have some handy mutations here...my mom and dad were both born to mothers older than 36, and my mom gave birth to me and my brother at 39 and 42, respectively.

As fertility technology improves, don't you think that such experiences will become more common?
I suggest that rather than limiting effects of patents, it is easier to exclude obvious ideas. By this, if two identical ideas are submitted as patents within a designated time frame, then the patent is not novel enough.

This has several advantages:

1. The number of educated people have risen considerably that we are filing more patents in a decade than the past 100 years. Even if there weren't patent protection, ideas will still continue to be created. By getting rid of the first past the post problem, we are effectively saying we will not grant an exclusive patent for something that someone else could have invented.

2. This scheme does not impact on the R&D that requires long term investment. e.g. pharmaceuticals.

3. It makes "idea patents" easy to invalidate. e.g. using a phone to play music.
Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
This article is about why it's great to work in tech, _especially_ as a girl. Be prepared for some "omg why didn't someone tell me earlier....!!!" facts.
We are waiving our service fees, but we're also asking our hosts in affected areas to lower pricing on their listings.

The goal is for both Airbnb and the Airbnb community to come together to help those impacted. It's not just waiving the fees that will help, but also hosts opening up their homes to those displaced.
I liked the remote mines a lot more. You could go hide in the vent in facility and look at other people's screens to see where they were. When they got to the right place, bam, you detonated the mine.

God that was a great game.
That may also have had something to do with long distance charges that, in today's dollars, were roughly five thousand dollars a minute (to hear my parents talk about calling my friends in the next town, anyway).
Anyone else thought of Shen in League of Legends when this was posted? :)
hmm, thanks.
I'm glad you are skilled at being snarky and rude, but it has no place here on Hacker News (or really anywhere).

Now onto your post:
Writing off something as DOA because of current technologies is not a good argument at all. People made similar arguments about electric cars just a few years back (as shown in 'Who Killed the Electric Car'). A long time ago, no one ever thought computing would be cheap enough to be inside consumers' homes. There is always the possibility of a break-through technology, of a reduction in cost, increase in efficiency, etc.

The quote above cherry-picks some statements in 2008 regarding GM and Toyota's views at the time on fuel-cell vehicles. However, there is a long list of companies who have publicly talked about their investment (and upcoming production vehicles as well) in the fuel-cell space just this year (2012!). A quick search through fuel-cell news this year brought up the following: Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz aka Daimler, Audi aka VW, Toyota, GM, BMW. There are probably others as well, but that already covers the vast majority of vehicle manufacturers.

Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu reversed his view on fuel-cell cars and noted recently (mentioned towards the end of your quoted text as well) that there may be a higher feasibility for fuel-cell-based vehicles now.

There is ample proof that fuel-cells deserve more attention and research before closing the discussion. It is worth investigating this space if only to have alternatives - electric vehicles have some issues (range, cold weather performance, environmental impact of producing batteries) that perhaps other technologies could address.
Gmail barely beats Hotmail as top email service according to new data
Tweet Live visualization
Ruby 2.0.0-preview1 is out
I'm currently in the middle of a crappy situation with PayPal. Anecdotal as that may be, I don't think they're ever going to "get better." Besides how they operate their business, their developer API is the work of 10+ years of legacy, cruft, and no innovation.
Why schools in the UK are failing the programmers of tomorrow
Sure, you should be polite to the Mafia, too - that's an awful nice shop you have here. But in this case, I was polite.

I don't need to be added to their do not call list. Indiana and the United States have do not call lists that it is illegal to violate, and I was on both. They were breaking the law with utter impunity.

But the point I really wanted to make was they were breaking the law stupidly. It was obvious they'd never make a dime off me - so making me suffer at their own expense was stupid. I detest stupidity, which, arguably, makes me a very unhappy man most of the time.
China’s Newest Stealth Fighter Takes Flight
Cheap Fitflop Fiorella
What I see every time I see an article like this is that it understates the real time investment, whether intentionally or because people get over-excited about learning how quickly they could do it.

He did not "write a book in 3 days" in anything but the purely mechanical sense that he put the words of the final version down in 3 days.

Usually these articles on "How to do X in Y days" boil down to:

- Prepare upfront (in this case 5 days on the draft that he threw away + time spent learning the subject by doing + time spent talking about the idea with someone).

- Divide and conquer.

- Don't do more than necessary (in this case, make the book only as long as need to convey your message; adding more words to make the word count longer does not improve quality)

- You'll be a lot faster at pretty much anything you already know well enough to talk about at length.

If you have a decent amount of practice formulating yourself, putting the words down is not the hard part of writing a book.

Learning to understand the subject, and then structuring the material is.

In this case, by the time he'd learned about the subject and invested the time in figuring out how to communicate it, actually writing the final version was not a huge investment in time, and that is the real takeaway.

Still a big accomplishment and something most people will never do, so good on him for doing it.
Is a GPU "special-purpose hardware" when used for graphics, but general purpose when used for GPGPU functions?
HN wasn't designed to minimize development effort. It was written to exercise an experimental programming language whose implementation is not (to put it mildly) optimized for performance. Considering its origins, it's surprising this site even has the performance it does.
I think that there are different types of learning, which I think are correlated with different brain areas.

For example, learning to ride a bike likely involves the cerebellum (the chunk way in the back, bottom). The cerebellum is involved in balance and coordination. (People who have damage to their cerebellum still have normal consciousness, but they become very un-coordinated and clumsy.) It's likely that you cannot just read a book and "download" that knowledge into the cerebellum. So skills requiring balance and coordination (riding a bicycle, swimming, sky-diving) must be learned by doing.

Compare that to knowledge that exists in our conscious minds. This knowledge likely exists in the neocortex. If we are conscious of the knowledge, then we likely can read a book and incorporate that knowledge into our own thoughts.

I suppose there are some professions that require a mix of skills. maeon3 brought up brain surgery. Surgeons read a lot of books, but they also practice their cutting skills on cadavers.

But overall, I agree with the concept behind studentrnd.org. "Doing things for yourself" is often a better way to learn. Plus, one of the points they make in this article: the first person to do something (invent the lightbulb, etc) didn't have anyone to learn from; they had to figure things out for themselves.

(Plus, I have my own personal biases: I'm sick of all the hand-holding that goes on in the modern world. Everyone has to take a class for anything, and time is always scheduled... whatever happened to just living your own life and trying things out for yourself? Build your own desk even though you could just buy one from the store... simply because it's fun to just do things for yourself... many people enjoy cooking their own food, etc...)
Some people are elitist snobs. Get over it.
Yeah, moving out of state right now is not really an option. We are 2 years into our mortgage and have one of those "you gotta live there 5 years or pay penalties" situations, have a new son (six months old now, so complications with that) and parents getting ready to move 2,200 miles here to help watch and experience their first grandchild.

Granted, all "excuses" but while I have meager pay and bad benefits, my wife makes enough that we don't have any financial problems (just ego ones on my part, lol - she makes 2x my income).

Anyway, we live in the Seattle Metro area, and I'm willing to commute some distance so my opportunities aren't severely limited (I think).
Uken Games in downtown Toronto

Uken is looking for talented developers to help us build amazing mobile games.

We are a profitable startup (~45 employees) experiencing massive growth. Some of our challenges include:
- pushing whats possible in a browser (check out Mighty Monsters on iOS... yes its html5!)
- scaling our infrastructure to support millions of players across dozens of cross-platform games
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More info at http://uken.com/jobs
Best Windows 8 Apps
Fantastic app! Add a preload of pics and a real slide effect! Contact me, I had a similar idea with different content and we could build it together.
Oh please, is Apple any less secure because we're able to get the parts of an iPhone months before it's announced?
> Often when there's a lack of vision a company (Microsoft is a great example) will produce a plethora of solutions in search of a problem and patent the shit out of everything along the way.

What sort of patents has MS exercised in this fashion? They've shown some amazing tech demos over the past 4-5 years and a lot of them have materialized in to actual products. Even perhaps the biggest 'demo noshow' has been used: Surface (i.e., the surface of 4 years ago).
+1 for Geckoboard. Great product and an excellent way to get metrics and analytics in front of our team and company.
Maybe the solution is making native (non-java) development on Android a first-class citizen.
Oh I definitely can agree with the notion of renting a car for the edge case. Others have also suggested that families could have two cars, one electric for daily use and the other gasoline-powered for road trips or tasks that require more utility perhaps.

But my point simply was that purely electric technologies cannot satisfy all needs (yet?) and that the range capabilities of electric vehicles is not on part with fossil-fuel vehicles (which is what was seemingly claimed by the parent post). And yes, this might mean that fossil-fuel vehicles don't disappear entirely, but simply play a smaller role in our future society.
I wonder how flexible you are in deciding what card you want their physical card to charge to? Do you log in and toggle the current card it's a proxy for? Or can you log in later that night and tell google wallet "charge that latte on the mastercard, charge that toy on the amex?". I'd be really excited if I could get one google card to replace some other cards, but one of the reasons I have multiple cards is to separate personal activity from my small business activity. It'd be really important for me to have those separate.
It is a common pattern in "mythbusting":

Myth: A is true

Fact: In fact, B is true, and even though A is true too, it is because C, D, and E, and in case where conditions X, Y and Z are imposed, the effect of A being true can be reduced significantly. Also, it is unfair to say that A is true because A was also true many times before and M is also true sometimes which is better than A not being true.

How it is "busting" any "myths" is a mystery to me, but journalists seem to love this pattern. Most use it gets in politics, especially near the elections, but popular journals on any topic love it too. Now Mozilla joins this venerable tradition.
I'm not going to lie, I had a good laugh thanks to this post. Not that I fault the method being used to combat memory leaks. Depending on how much (of pg's) time a restart takes, this may be the most efficient way of handling it, but the idea that the site where we all discuss the finer points of multi-region-zone-datacenter replication redundancy just gets restarted when something isn't working correctly humors me.
This program is both ruby and C
I agree with the statement that electric cars are not the future, but for a slightly different set of reasons.

My MSc thesis / project was studying future engines and fuels - long story short:

- IC engines have efficiencies of anywhere from 70% to 5%; depending on a huge range of factors and types (rotax at 3000rpm on diesel vs v12 carb at 8000rpm on 98-ron, outside temp and pressure etc).

- Over 100 years of research has gone in to them.

- Almost the same time has been spent on building up our infrastructure around the production of fuel for IC engines.

- They can run on anything from ethanol to vegetable oil to human waste (after a certain amount of refining of course).

- Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Not to mention the lightest. It just so happens to be incredibly flammable/volatile too.

My solution? Replace petrol with Hydrogen for internal combustion - much alike the conversions we already do for LPG.

I spent roughly half a year on the theory behind it, and then another couple of months actually in the lab with an old FI 500cc motorcycle parallel twin engine (they're tough as hell). I converted it to LPG, replaced all the tubings, modified the injectors and started pumping in various blends of fuel (5% ethanol, 80% 91-Ron, 10% LPG, 5% Hydrogen etc). On some blends it ran smoother, on others there was horrible knocking, one some it just kept cutting out.

Unfortunately I was only allocated a year and never got a chance to finish - the amount of trial and error involved day in day out was gruelling. Not to mention at least once a week I'd have to rebuild the whole engine.

The future for me isn't electric cars, not at all. They'll hit the same constraints of raw materials that you mention, and it's wether they hit that constraint just as the technology is getting to a point where mass adaption is possible. Not to mention the charge time, the life cycle of a battery etc etc. It is hydrogen powered cars - wether that would be fuel cells or IC engines I don't know, but I'm leaning towards IC engines.
CogSci PhD student here, I'm no fan of Chomsky but I'd still say his contributions were a lot more useful than Freud's. Freudian Psychology is mostly abandoned by practitioners at this point; the Chomsky hierarchy is still canon in CS.
I apologize, I was being dismissive. I wasn't trying to say that weightlifting/bodybuilding/etc lacked meaning or were inferior, just that the motivations are different, and for me personally the intrinsic motivation of them (this muscle needs to be worked out, then this one, etc...) doesn't work as well for me as the extrinsic motivation (I'm going to finish this problem today) of climbing.
I don't understand what Shen brings to the table that other functional languages don't. Is there a concise imperative of why to learn Shen?
How does answering an interview question violate/infringe any patent (valid or invalid).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement

states
"
The definition of patent infringement may vary by jurisdiction, but it typically includes using or selling the patented invention. In many countries, a use is required to be commercial (or to have a commercial purpose) to constitute patent infringement.[citation needed]
"
I think the take away is, "Look at my linkbait headline and click!" That's the only possible thing I can think of. I'm with you - it's a hurridly-written "book" and the headline screams "hey look at me I wrote a book in 3 days" (like you said). Linkbait.
New CNET.com Redesign
I got the impression this is a lot like that iPhone writeable card -- i.e., you load in all your cards and then you can choose which card your Google Card represents. Lets you ditch all your cards and Google gets you to use wallet (which means they can push you in to using it as an actual payment wallet). And by getting you using Google Wallet, it'll encourage NFC adoption.
It'd be interesting to see what you would do differently with your version of a site as simple as HN.

Do you have the code on github or somewhere?
So a big part of the problem seems to be that sellers can no longer give buyers bad feedback when it is appropriate. Does anyone know the motivation for this rule change? I can't think of a type of fraud that this would prevent, but it seems like they must have been targeting something when making this change.
> implies they're trying to hide it.
IndexedDB polyfill - now with sourcemaps
I would like to see Wallet Card act as a wrapper of all my cards and automatically figure out best card to use to charge ultimately based on balances, reward points and may be split charges between cards if required. But with this change in Google Wallet, NFC adoption among merchants will become even harder.
haha, I def remember having a "no oddjob" rule. And if you did pick oddjob, lord have mercy, cuz everyone was comin after your ass and nobody else! For whatever reason, I would irrationally target anyone playing as boris as well...
The "problem" with remote mines was that you could throw a mine and press A+B at the same time while it was still in mid-air. BOOM! Instant detonation! So you'd be able to just insta-kill people who weren't expecting it.

Eventually it balanced out because everyone would be a lot more careful about getting close and going around corners, but ... let's just say that raegquits are a lot more fun in-person :)
It has an absolutely myopic and absurd license.

http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html

The strange part is "no derivatives that don't comply with the spec, even if you rename it." It is not free software.

Unfortunately this is something I have to mention every time Shen is mentioned, because I'm irate that, in spite of my interest in it, that both it (and its predecessor Qi) insist on doing something so strange with no apparent legitimate purpose (some kind of bogeyman of fragmentation killing the project).
Site looks good, but you might want to hold off "launching" until you've got a few more themes up there. As is, I'm assuming the HN audience is your desired customer base? First impressions are big, and if everyone sees a barren wasteland of a themes market, you're probably not going to be first on their mind when they're looking to spend money. My suggestion is to find as many bootstrap developers as you can, let them know about your site and it's payout split. Try relaunching with 20+ themes. Keep up the good work!
Listening to a podcast. Unplug my headphones, podcast stops. Yay. Receive a call. Hang up call. Podcast starts playing again. Annoying.
>There's this vague sense of regret much like you're describing, except inverted...

Let me tell you a little joke, it is a running joke in our family. A young man goes to his father for advice: "Should I get married to my girlfriend Jenny or stay single?" Father replies "Son...My dear, dear son... whatever you do, you'll end up regretting it."

But when we are not joking, the advice we give each other is usually "well... whatever you do, things should turn out okay". And that is in fact how it has been.

So, IMHO:

>Really, people should stop worrying about any of this shit

is exactly right.
haha, license to kill, with power weapons, just spray with the rcp90, and you were good to go! Those were the days...