skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are plain wrong. Any space program takes years and starts with satellite launches. Look at the Chinese program for example. There is no reason to think US blockade somehow harmed the progress of the program there. And it does not matter much since USSR is known to launch anything they wanted before the modern globalized economics that made blockades possible even existed.

Your comment about hobbysts is plain misleading to. How many hobbysts launch pets into suborbital and orbital flights and get those back in one piece? How many hobbysts can launch a satellite, anyway? Using their own rocket? You can pimp SpaceX to defend your misleading statement, but they are not in any sense hobbysts and their work would not be possible without NASA and it took them long years anyway.

So please stop disregarding other people's achivements. This is just lame.
Is it because Pakistan needed it badly a few decades before Iran felt any need?
Great to hear. We in Israel are also planning on sending a person to the moon soon: http://www.spaceil.com Innovation in the Middle East is much needed.
I've seen this too often to ignore, but I have to ask, and I am sorry if it comes across a bit rude. It's just a curios question.

Do you mean specie (as opposed as to what you stated: 'race')?
This is misinformation. If this behavior is observed it was probably because a separate update was performed at the same time which updated system files.
Map of 284 the Drone Strikes in Pakistan
The problem is that the 'fluff' category is subjective. Obviously the upvoters didn't think it was fluff - or they wouldn't have upvoted it. If we had the doesn't-belong flag I can guarantee that we'd rapidly see different flagging cliques like:

* anything apple related

* anything microsoft related

* anything not related to coding

* anything not related to startups

* ... and so on ...

Take the MS Surface reviews for example (bias disclaimer: I'm a Linux/OS X guy). I personally found the pro- and anti-reviews that made it to the front page both interesting, but I'm guessing you'd class either or both reviews as fluff.

Not because though either class of review was 'right' - but because of what they revealed about the product related to the reviewer's values. In the same way that I can read Roger Ebert one star film review and know that I'm going to love it (or a four star that I'm going to hate). Reading different reviews from people with different perspectives is interesting to me - not fluff.

I, personally, think the surface is going to be a huge success since MS seem to have been bright enough to make a tablet that's not aimed straight at the iPad, but with some strong design values that are going to meet the needs of a certain chunk of the market much better than the iPad does.

That - to me - is an interesting conversation. I've been chatting to folk on these topics elsewhere. But not here since it's filled with the equivalent of "You're a fanboy", "No - you're a fanboy"...

Which is sort of sad.
The Chinese gave them one!
It's not just the failure itself, but the follow through of the sequence of everything else operating perfectly well in unexpected circumstances.
"I aimed to show that all claims like yours were unsuitable for a proof of the Collatz conjecture, because either they could not be iterated or they could not show a decrease for all inputs."

I'm not sure I addressed your criticism fully. Earlier you noted:

"For starters, that would only work if your argument applied to the entire set of outputs that you'd feed back in again as inputs."

That is precisely the case I am describing. I begin with a universal property of any sequence, then proceed to show that all sequences beginning with an even terminate. I then note that the earlier property requires that all sequences beginning with odd numbers immediately follow this pattern after at most one iteration. A sequence that terminates after a finite number of steps + 1 still terminates after a finite number of steps. I have summarized this in a post above.

The abmiguity you describe in the set of proofs you are disqualifying is not present in my arguement. I begin at the first value for all sequences (evens, and then odds, which is exhaustive of inputs, and outputs, as you note is necessary) and that is exhaustive of sequences.

Is it a variation on the most naive approach that pretty much everyone would start with? Sure, and that's reason enough to be skeptical. But, does it work? It seems to...
Very cool idea. I've been discussing different ways race data could be visualized with a friend as we watch the race, checked HN during a commercial break and found this. Thanks.
Hmm, there's something wrong with Macbooks' performance. My lenovo laptop running Linux with a very modest cpu (AMD E-450 APU) gives out 1 sec / 0.17s.

Then again, perhaps the browser technology matters more than anything else: I'm running it on latest stable chromium.
couple of points:

in english usage 'human race' generally equates to 'human species'

the singular is 'species' with an 's'. if you look it up you will find that 'specie' means something quite different (it has to do with money).
Agreed, this guy is putting his job on the line. I appreciate his contribution to the discussion, but would hate to see a guy lose his job over a HN comment.
That's not what I meant of course. What I meant is that apps on Windows tend to be a lot more "bloated"/full of features/graphics compared to the much leaner mobile apps.

Also, most devs probably build for the average performance, so say something like an old Core 2 Duo laptop, and if their app there has a 10% CPU utilization, it might have 30% CPU utilization on Atom, or more, which means on ARM chips, especially the mid-end to low-end ones, the same app will use the CPU a lot more. Apps designed for mobile are meant to use 5-10% of those ARM CPU's from day one.
Hi ing33k, I'm the creator of Bountify. Thanks for trying it out! In response to your comment, solutions are versioned, and there is now a Timeline feature for each Bounty, where you can see each edit made to each solution in order of creation. You can also see diffs for each solution. Let me know if you have any other suggestions!
XSS attack on Koolkart.com
As an obligatory plug: when we show SnowPlow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow) to startups who've rolled their own analytics setup, they often say "I wish this had existed when we decided to roll our own"...
I am a jerk-off. I communicate well, but I do not pretend it is one of my core competencies. And, yet, I have made millions of dollars being little more than a cog in the machine.

I do not pretend that I have great insight beyond "be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing." And I have managed to get hell-banned for differentiating this from the "reach for the stars and hit your dreams" snake oil of, since it no longer matters, Paul Graham.
One of the things this comes down to is whether our measures of wealth are sensible.

A country hot enough to require air conditioning will have an increased GDP, but this GDP is really just for bringing it to the norm of another country that doesn't require aircon. And should we count the extra economic activity generated from creating a new demand where there previously was none? [1]

If we optimise for the wrong thing, we end up with bad outcomes.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/convincing-w...
Use this instead (free):

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
12 Best Tools To Create Bootable USB For Windows And Linux.
Software / tools to create bootable Windows or Linux from USB flash drive to boot from USB. Tools will help you to make USB drive a bootable drive and install and try new operating systems.
Windows 8 irony (image)
Sure, but that really hits on the "big thing" about the moon Mercury/Apollo missions. They had a funding model that allowed them to spend incredible amounts of money with absolutely no expectation of return on that investment.

If you put 10000 really smart people to the task of solving big problems while giving them nearly unlimited resources, they could get a lot done.

Of course that's not how entrepreneurial funding actually works. For better or for worse it takes a really unique financier (like the government) to make that happen. The moon landing was the product of a really unique time in our history, I wish we'd stop using it as an example I guess.
At SnowPlow we break home-grown analytics down into five stages:

Track -> Collect -> ETL -> Store -> Analyse

SnowPlow straddles all five stages - and the data is in non-proprietary formats throughout.

Have a look at https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow if you want to find out more...
I actually renamed the furl project into faup, for 'Finally An Url Parser' ;-) That should solve the problem. API and command line tool will follow.
Who told you Iran is developing a nuke?
We looked at Splunk and liked the architecture, but it doesn't really have customer-focused analytics in its DNA, and it's not open source - which is why we released SnowPlow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)
Spot on.

These civilizational sustainability benefits are much of why I'm starting an augmented/virtual reality glasses company ( http://vergencelabs.com ). The other reasons are related to education and to transhumanism.

But I don't think we need any invasive interfaces to achieve fully realistic immersion. Optics will suffice. We still want computer vision to do AR/VR and bio as well, but we don't have to wait for transhumanism to succeed before we can start obsoleting physical goods, monuments, commuting, etc using just wearable displays and haptics.
The Perfect Desktop - Xubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)
You will need a USB OTG cable to use USB peripherals. This is mentioned in the wiki.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/UsingTheDevice
Short and Tweet
Are you sure the "rubber banding" isn't just normal race behavior? In circuit racing, the cars tend to follow each other at pretty stable intervals. In other words, the time between two race cars stays constant. As the speed of the cars ranges from 50mph to 200mph+, the distance between two cars changes a lot as the time between the cars is relatively constant.

So in slow corners, the cars pack close to each other (feet or sometimes even inches) and as they accelerate out of the corners at 2g+ the distance can increase to tens or hundreds of feet.
We could use Zheng He or Christopher Columbus instead, I guess? Though one has the disadvantage of no one having a clue who he was and the other is problematic to anyone who is bothered by the stuff he did.

But why was it unique? Why couldn't it be duplicated? Why shouldn't it?
But there's also a place for big science. Manhattan project, Apollo program, Soviet industrialization.
Yes, this is not normal race behavior, it is rubber-banding in places where the cars would never be accelerating and decelerating.
We did think about adding 'fastboot oem unlock' to our installer script, but decided against for UX reasons. Asking the user to do some ugly looking terminal commands hopefully scared away the folks who least understood what they might have been getting into, as it is explicitly intended to be a developer build.

As for the various blog headlines, we obviously don't have control over those.

[edit] Oops, I see you might have been referring to the wiki. Thanks, I cleaned up the wording a bit to say "graphical installer" instead of "one-click installer". Thanks.
No matter what I try I only get the demo race. Guess something's playing silly buggers on my network :/
Interesting point about privacy. Does anyone else have similar concerns?

I am of the opinion that life is too short to worry, plus people generally aren't able to steal ideas. Execution is always very different. Look at the Xerox-Apple-Microsoft implementations of GUIs... All very different.

My ideas start on napkins or Notes on the iPhone, get translated to Workflowy and then fully drafted and edited into a blog post: http://rayhano.com

The hope is others take the ideas and use them with their own. Ideas should be free, only then can society benefit.
Unless the phone was first bought overseas. This may have big implications for second-hand markets like ebay as you can not really be sure where a good sold on ebay was manufactured, which countries it was authorized to import and who has the authority to authorize that. In fact, with such decision, each foreign item becomes potentially a problem for the buyer unless he has a proven certificate from original manufacturer authorizing import into the country the buyer is resident in. This of course would be a huge boon for these manufacturers as they would be able to charge extra for such certificates and suppress secondary markets. But it would not be as good for the consumers.
(Historical) Harry Porter's Relay Computer
Lobbying for some change that's necessary to avoid a global scale catastrophe implies "the end justifies the means", thus should be rejected?
I'm surprised, that you are glad to hear, that a country with relatively unstable government is making progress toward having ballistic missile capabilities. Actually scratch that. It is progress toward ICBMs, not just ballistic missiles.

Here's a reference to the current state of the program:
http://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/irans-ballistic-missile-...

And a bit more recent update: http://www.iranwatch.org/wmd/wmd-iranmissileessay.htm
I think that may be it. My i5 win7 runs it in approximately the same time, also on the latest chromium.
The reason that Iran has no nukes is by self choice. They have always wanted the Japan model, to reach the technological threshold of having nukes without physically building them. This they reached years ago.
I said it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4707344
12 hours ago in a direct reply to your question.
China's short-term growth objectives are hard to criticise given that a good ~10% of its population remain below the poverty line. Its economic modernisation has already reduced this figure by several hundred million head. Capitalism feeds.

This 'degrowth' ideology seems to be moreso redirecting growth towards things that are more real, necessary and sustainable. Growth is fairly natural and should be expected in any healthy and free economy - not just in our modern 'advanced' juggernauts.
I really dislike GDP as a measure, for this and other reasons.

Ultimately, GDP isn't what matters. We should care about wealth creation, about efficient use of resources (including labor), about happiness and enjoyment.

An inevitable consequence of abandoning GDP as a measure of economic progress (as we will, inevitably do) will be coming to terms with the fact that rampant consumerism and gross inefficiencies do not constitute 'growth'
"Are you sure the "rubber banding" isn't just normal race behavior?"

Yes (I'm sure it isn't), zoom in on the bottom right hand corner of the track (turn 4), in reality the cars go from 320kph to 100kph in the breaking zone of this corner, on the page they're doing that almost instantly as they hit that point.
This has been submitted a few times before, but I came across it again today and thought I'd re-submit it. There's not been much discussion, but it's a fascinating machine. Here's a link to the technical details and description:

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/

Here are earlier HN submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150788

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116921

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452778

Here's a search:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=harry+relay...

I'm also reminded of "From NAND to Tetris", which is around here somewhere.

It's clearly possible to learn to program and to produce amazing things without knowing how a computer works, but sometimes I wonder if there are kids who would become interested in computers if there was more information about how they work at a more steam-punk level. Building a machine from relays, then getting it to do simple sums, then building a machine from NAND gates, understanding they are effectively the same thing, and thence to Tetris. Finally, seeing a more modern machine and what that can do, and understanding that it's a simple, but lengthy progression.

Are there kids who would be inspired by this?

Would they become good programmers?
The same way France has always defended itself.
If you have that original hard disk, have you thought of using recovery software to see if fragments of your file still exist?
I think so.

On a several decades/century scale it's worthwhile to funnel at least a few percent of GDP into basic science research[1]. But, in any given quarter/year, it's almost certainly a net loss. The trick being that every few decades, you'll get nuclear power, the transistor, etc[2].

Or, as a 'local' example: non-trivial number theory had basically no benefit for centuries but humanity kept 'investing' resources into it - which a short term optimizer wouldn't. Then, cryptography came along and it suddenly 'paid' for the entire field a dozen times over.

[1]: Research is sort of like early stage VC - but with funds that pay out over 70 years instead of ~7.

[2]: I would love to write about many more examples in much more depth, but will omit for the sake of brevity. I roughly feel like the newtonian mechanics was directly responsible for the industrial revolution, relativistic physics for the nuclear age, quantum mechanics for the computer age (with similar analogues in the biological sciences).
Pakistan was originally signed up to a civilian programme, but after war with India and Indian nuclear testing decided they needed nuclear weapons following a predominently second strike doctrine. However, Pakistan's position is that in the event of invasion they will respond immediately with nuclear weapons[1].

They received substantial help from the Chinese, and had nuclear reactors at the time the programme started in the 70s (under the codename Project 706[2]). They're not signed up to the NPT or CTBT either (choosing to sign neither until India do).

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_de...

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project-706
On Win7 Firefox only gives me 0.19 whereas Chrome does 0.03.

So I guess it's the browser that matters a lot here.
"What material to use in making a transistor".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Silicon_transist...
No but Copenhagen Suborbitals are hobbiests. And they expect to launch a suborbital rocket with a human onboard.

And their combined budget is properly less than what NASA use on toilets.
A little OT, but using HTTPS Everywhere has shown me how badly SSL is configured on many sites. Default certs for root domain being used on subdomains, scripts and styles loaded over HTTP (and hence blocked by Chrome - by far the most common and most annoying), HTTPS port listened on but no site served, default certs for completely unrelated sites showing up, etc.
There are huge risks that nick bostrom talks about http://www.nickbostrom.com/

The only difference is between that and the cold war is that people don't give them due attention because they are non-anthropomorphic (a fight with nature instead of against other humans). If it was the soviets who were behind the asteroid threat, and they were causing old age and cancer, and they were behind worldwide poverty, the US government would be mobilizing trillions of dollars to tackle those problems.
Pakistan has operated nuclear reactors since the 1950s and they undertook a nuclear weapons development program starting in the 1970s and reaching fruition in the late 80s. They already had plentiful sources of weapons grade Plutonium and through what should properly be called espionage they gained access to advanced technologies in nuclear fuel reprocessing, Uranium isotope separation, and nuclear weapon design.
I think you're diminishing the role of a big "good" vision in the process of innovation.

What's the guiding vision of the internet community ? as far as i can tell is mostly there's no valuable guiding vision. It's all about rapid trial and error to appeal to as many people as possible with whatever idea that will work.

So we end with most of the web development community working on creating junk-food sites, optimizing ads and new ways to sell stuff. This way you get McDonalds and TV advertising invented. Big inventions indeed , mostly with negative value.

Of course there are some clusters of the web with a big guiding vision: collaborative consumption, using the power of the web to reduce prices, better ways to share important knowledge, new labor marketplaces, democratizing innovation.

And you see a qualitative difference between both sorts of companies.
Focused growth. Instead of factories churning out designer handbags and pet food, have them churn out biotech experiments for brain-computer interfaces.
Personally I don't know the difference between a chipset and a plate of chips, but even with my limited knowledge I can tell instantly that a tremendous amount of work went in to building this. Kudos to your dad.
10 X=1
20 FOR Y=1 TO X
30 PRINT " ";
40 NEXT Y
50 PRINT "HELLO"
60 IF X=34 THEN LEFT=1
70 IF X=0 THEN LEFT=0
80 IF LEFT=1 THEN X=X-1
90 IF LEFT=0 THEN X=X+1
100 GOTO 20

RUN

Notes: Use ^C to stop it. Type LIST to see the program you wrote. If you screw up a line, just type the line number and hit <return> to delete that line.
My father had one and somehow it's the only Apple product I have ever really used :)

IIRC (and as the emulation does apparently) the games started themselves at boot, so I don't think I have ever typed any command on it !
Also the rivalry is often more at the level of the company above them and not the individual developers.
6 Best Free Electronic Design Automation Tools
Steve Ballmer’s Dilemma
Ok, a while back, pg said he wanted to kill Hollywood - and I never got the meaning. You would still need actors, cameramen, producers even, etc etc. And netflix is hardly disruptive

Now I can glimpse it.

This is fantastic. Watching F1 is boring on the TV - mostly because you either cannot get a feel for the real speed or you lose track of the race.

With gps in the cars, ability to stream from the cockpit mounted cameras - F1 could become the first mass audience sport to use different feeds really well.
To kill some time many years back we wrote a 32-player "chess" game. We had some slightly modified rules, most notably anyone can move themselves whenever they want to and "killing" the king was a matter of checking him for a specified amount of time (say, 10-15 seconds). It was still black vs white.

The game turned out to be very fast paced, to the point where we had to add measures to slow it down. :)

As I recall, it was written with the "board" as a separate entity from the pieces. The board contained the game-rules, for instance whether it was turn-based or not. Now, this is what got me thinking... The platform we used, allow for live recompiling and upgrading of objects -- so we indeed did go in and change the rules even as a game was running (which was kind of fun, just to mess with peoples heads). But I do think perhaps that could be a nice twist to have as a "service" as well -- the ability for people to design their own chess-rules by giving them a framework (like, standard board, standard knight, pawn etc). Naturally saved online, for public scrutiny. :)

It would be be fun to see what people came up with. The target group for this may be somewhat limited. :-)

A friend has a version of what we made hosted on his personal site, but I'm afraid to link to it because it'll probably bring down his server. Throw me a mail if you want the link.
Charge ofc. .:) Waste management as its best
Not sure if you're being funny?

France has one of the highest rates of productivity per capita [0] and is the 5th highest military spender in the world [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
The open source nature of this all is really awesome, especially combined with the community ideas site. Very encouraging to dive in and write a plugin. Great job guys :)