skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm thinking:
- Air based, but near the ground
- The vehicle is concord shaped
- Vehicle is launched into the air via rail gun (like a fighter jet on a ship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launch...)
- Lots of boosting strips a few KMs apart.
- Based on the rail gun concept, the same "boosting" strip could also slow down or speed up a vehicle
- It removes the need for anything between the stations except open space.
- Minimal on-vehicle propulsion - otherwise I imagine the constant accelerate/decelerate would be a little unbearable for human flight
- Failure mode of the vehicle is to glide to a landing (though could magnetic eddy currents be used for breaking in a rail gun with minimal/no current?)
- The loop could refer to the idea of a continual loop of boosters, in opposite directions, removing the need for large "turn around" stations at either end
Prior Art: Basically the life work of Professor Steve Mann ("EyeTap").
The architect at my company is by far the most talented programmer I know, and his position as architect is more often "programming the cross-functional, low and high level pieces that touch across multiple stacks and helping implement the first stages of large projects" than "sitting around and designing things". I have tons of respect for him and his grasp of subjects across many aspects of programming is profound.

So along with that, I resent the idea that an architect must be some neckbeard who spends his days conjecturing and drafting and doesn't contribute. I know the cool thing now is to have flat-hierarchy companies consisting entirely of coders, but then again Google is a very young. I'd bet in the next five years you'll see people moving into architecture positions much like the one I describe.
> Do you support using other people's creative endeavors without their permission?

Wrong question.

Current international copyright laws already allow this for all except a few very specific interpretations of the words "using" and "permission".

Add to that the European Pirate Parties are pushing for copyright reform making that question and any potential answer to it pretty meaningless.

If you think that is avoiding the issue, then you severely underestimate the complexity of the matter of intellectual property rights in the 21st century.
>No. It's that criminals think twice about robbing or raping someone if they know they are armed.

Then wouldn't a more appropriate aphorism be "An armed society is a safe society"?
Black Friday Pick – New “Control-Alt-Hack” Card Game
I'm a developer and have only marginal interest in the business side of things, but give credit where credit is due. Without the financial infrastructure to fund research and R&D, none of modern computing is possible. Fabricating silicon chips or making even moderately complex software is basically a game of numbers with a huge up-front cost that only pays off when you can make (and sell) thousands of the things.

Without somebody selling this stuff computing would remain relegated to huge rooms in Universities.
Time lapse market simulator—deliberate practice for stock trading
Looks like the turkey is the computer of the 60s
Wasn't 1.5?

Martin's work was related to generics, which got introduced in 1.5.
I'm confused. So should that part of Bayes' Theorem be raised to the 1.5 power?
It's generally a good idea to never take advice from someone who answers with "I just read somewhere..."
> I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/688/

(Sorry, couldn't resist)
I was using province in the classical Roman sense. Ireland did not have self-determination.

Removing England from the tallies would be like removing members of the Chinese communist party from the population of China. You're basically making the tacit assumption that the oppressors had no right to the food and therefore the fact that they did not have a famine is irrelevant. There's an interesting argument there, but you're not actually making it, you're just manipulating the numbers to tell a specific story.
How is that odd?

Replacing a walled garden with a walled park does not improve the situation a lot for people who do not like walls at all.
Same that I thought about the hacking in Swordfish. Enough said.
It sounds like you'd prefer working at a smaller (<100) company.
There was a link making the rounds late last week about the "best" amperage to charge lithium ion batteries. Someone made the false remark that using a computers USB port to "slow charge" is better because it means you're staying under this value. However, that's not what the article said nor are wall changers actually above the stated value.

The better takeaway from the article is to keep Li batteries cooler than ~95F to extended their life.

There is also no need to condition Li batteries. Apple used to have you do a calibration step for new batteries, but that was to reset the circuitry that was used to estimate the charge left in a battery. The old replaceable batteries had this built into the battery (the little button you pushed to get the row of green lights.) In new MacBooks this is all factory calibrated.
No. Not all ethanol is made from corn or wheat - for instance, in Brazil it's made from the rejects of sugar cane, the other half goes for sugar.

The real problem is that you compete with food crops and water for fertile land, or destroy native forests.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe

It's interesting to note that "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade revealed her identity just a few days after the trial ended. She later became a high-profile pro-life activist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_McCorvey
I highly recommend this. Saves a lot of time and supports SASS.
Show HN: Get daily Japanese (or English) study reminders by email
"... what better cake to build than that of the Apple I that now
resides in the Smithsonian Institute?"

Source: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joystuff/apple1cake.htm...
Well. the luaJIT benchmark page does not contain any large benchmarks, while it does contain computer language shootout ones which are small. There might be many many legitimate reasons for that, but it does imply that LuaJIT cares for small stuff more, since all the public benchmarks are small.
Our Chief Architect is probably the biggest contributor of code, and I can't imagine it being any other way. He definitely leads by example. Some of our customers (Enterprise) have these 'architect' types that just draw pretty vizio pictures, and I can't see how they aren't just laughed out of the room when it comes time to make actual decisions. But I guess once you have 4+ layers of management and decision making it's easy to fall into crazy town.
Kevin here. No, it's not perfect and never will be. I definitely use a bayesian classifier in our process among other things.

That said, if you see mistakes, please flag them! My system does get smarter with more data, so when people flag mistakes for us to correct, it makes a difference both immediately and in the long run.

If you have any other thoughts/critiques/ideas please feel free to let me know :)
Here's a site for improving your ability to read an write Japanese (or English, if you're a native Japanese speaker).

It started as a hobby, to automatically send myself short study emails once a day, but then I thought to open it up to anyone, as a crowd-sourced (i.e., human) translation project for learning foreign languages.
And the app had to be sideloaded because Play said it was incompatible with my device.

Sigh, but we can laugh about it: https://plus.google.com/106913700595933476859/posts
The fact that Apple complained to the USB-IF about Palm's constant attempts to make the Pre sync with iTunes and that every update to iTunes after that broke the compatibility is enough to have a reasonable belief that Apple deliberately broke this functionality.

Apple had no obligation to let Palm sync with their software. Palm had no right to sync with their software. But Apple released three updates in a row that each conveniently broke compatibility with Palm's hardware. That's the extent of what I am saying. I'm not arguing that Apple had to support it, but rather that they explicitly disallow it, and will fight to keep it disallowed. Arguing that this was mere coincidence sounds like a violation of Occam's Razor. Possible, but unlikely.
Awesome stuff. I'm actually in exactly the same position on you - been making a game part time and funding it with contracting work.

Agreed on the fickle idea, as well as trying gameplay that a normal studio would never touch as it's not been proven. All I can say is keep up the effort - if its enjoyable and interesting then it will succeed. Looking forward to seeing the completed product, and I wish me, you and everyone else pushing out interesting Indi games massive luck!
A contractor (contract based, usually 3-6 month intervals, low paid) is a totally different thing to a freelancer (higher bill rate, hourly ad hoc projects usually) and a consultant (much higher bill rate, but project based instead fixed interval based).
Onion TED Talk On "Social Media Consultants"
500 days left until Windows XP end of support
Stray es and politicos
Somebody should help terrorists choose names for their organizations, then:

- PLO = Palestine Liberation Front

- ETA = Basque Homeland and Freedom

- IRA = Irish Republican Army

etc. I would call someone whose goal is killing a soldier or a murderer. IMO, the reason terrorists kill civilians is the same as why, in a dispute between two children of largely different strength, the one who is verbally weakest will start fighting, and the one who is physically weakest then will start fighting dirty (biting, nail scratching, hair pulling, etc)
Not only how many but who, and how often they go.
Some development tips and tricks
I actually didn't know the history, so I wasn't arguing from that perspective.
As long as they use the Linux kernel they don't have much other naming choiches.
I think it's time for one of these students to start a webpage which displays how much time each student spends in the restroom. Searchable, and indexed by a person's real first + last name.

If that doesn't make the school realize how appalling this violation of privacy is, then they're too far gone for anything!
Oh, jeez. Don't get me started on that Boost thing, comrade.
Subsidizes for corn based ethanol were cut in the US in FY12.
70 hour work weeks; fucking atrocious. Where do people find time for family and friends and hobbies? I can't imagine working long stints like that regularly, I would probably burn out and product shoddy work.
So what does this girl do when she grows up and wants to do things like get a job, use public transit, drive across a toll bridge, or get a passport? RFID is just part of the world now and it's not entirely clear why schools should be any different.
GetUserMedia on the server, with Sinatra and Say Cheese
The strange case of the inte1sat domain name
We have run into issues with VPC being tied to a specific zone and the availability in that zone.
Limo Service to JFK
Limo Service to JFK: Alexandra Limousine Provides Executive Car Service in Manhattan NY and Limo Service to JFK, LGA & EWR Airport. Airport Limo Service in East Brunswick NJ. Reserve Online or Call at (347) 256-5373 for Best Rates.
Be your own user
It's similar I suppose, but you'd have to be committing every 30 minutes or so (maybe your memory's better, but I find if you asked me to summarise what I did in the last 30 minutes I can fairly quickly; if you asked me to summarise my day, I'd forget half the stuff I did). And you'd have to be always working on the one code base (I've worked in places where you wouldn't have been doing that) or else you'd have entries scattered all over the place.

But yes, if you did those things, you could have that log in the commit logs, but it wouldn't be a fantastic resource - it's more useful to me to have that in a local file here, with just my entries (as opposed to having to extract my entries from the entire team's), in grep-able plaintext.

And you'd also be missing the notebook part of the picture; the stuff in there shouldn't be in commit logs (you're talking about notes from meetings, design notes, patent notes, paper notes, that sort of thing).
now only ZaReason UltraLap 430 loaded with Linux
Well, for one thing, the school is an arm of government, not a private party. We allow private parties to do all sorts of things we don't allow governments to do.
An awesome pack. Downloaded and waiting for the 2013 launch.
I do think that most hacking scenes in movies\tv shows and the language used in them is generally terrible. I'm not sure that hacking will ever make interesting viewing for the masses.

That said, I did like the futuristic looking GUI's actually. I didn't think they were completely rediculous but still looked pretty cool, I mean, the audience need something to look at. A man talking nonsense about polymorphic obfuscation probably isn't enough on its own.

Is it possible to even make GUI's like the ones in Skyfall and slap them on real applications? Can WPF make things look that good? I'd be interested to know what tools are needed to build GUI's that look like that.
So how did you build it? What programming language, what tools? Where hosted? This is a very impressive project for only one day of work, so give us the details.
I don't know if you've ever worked at a company that used ID badges, but I don't know anyone who's refused employment over the issue.
Nice icons indeed, but amazing? How is this more amazing than Linux, apache, node.js, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, python, .... And mane more. All this software is also free... Just take a look at the Debian/red hat/Ubuntu repository, it is practically a whole marketplace worth of free goods...
Here's previous discussion on HN that fleshes this out considerably: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693447
I laughed, although I might have seen it before.

Reminded me of the Weekend Web series on Something Awful, so I went there and watched a few. They're funny, but almost too crass for my taste (so I won't post a link here). I guess I'm getting old.

Jesus, the stuff I watched as a youngling!
I think these are among the the best resources for a beginner to learn programming, so I put together a quick table of them.
Good challenge - mixed results...

"Mixed findings: Birmingham 14 CCTV cameras in the city centre in the early 1990s failed to reduce overall crime levels. However, recorded crime statistics indicate that CCTV reduced robbery and theft from persons, whilst incidences of theft from vehicles rose. The CCTV system was not designed to target vehicle related crime and so was not installed in many car parks. There was some displacement of crime to surrounding areas. Surveys of the public before and after CCTV installation found little change in general feelings of safety for those using the city centre during the day. Nevertheless, for those using the city centre after dark there was an increase in feelings of safety amongst those aware of the CCTV cameras. It is not clear whether these effects were a direct result of CCTV as the area was also redeveloped at the same time."

from http://www.parliament.uk/post/pn175.pdf

The source cited in that summary in reference [3] is no longer available at the Web address given but is available from

http://library.npia.police.uk/docs/hopolicers/fcdps68.pdf

pages 40 to 57 of that second reference contain a detailed discussion of some statistics from 20 years ago in Birmingham city centre, a location I know well. Once sentence on page 50 seems to suggest displacement of street crime to car theft, only as a suggestion. However the whole section gives you an idea of how hard it is to be definite about displacement or reduction in a city centre subject to shifting building patterns and traffic routing.
Building an extensible news feed reader for Android
"tech community is cleverer than this yes, but the consumers aren't "

I think consumers "can" be smarter. Given a chance. Right now they (we) are inundated with marketing. It's everywhere. So much so, that's hard to make an informed decision (this is especially true in politics).

Corporations (and many politicians) aren't interested in "truth". They're interested in making the sale. And the best way to do that is emphasized the good of the product and ignore the bad.

Every "product" in the world does this. From Coke to a credit cards.
That makes more sense. But we still pay a premium for energy in a high-density, liquid form that we can pump into vehicles. Of course, that's changing as battery technology improves.
A new kind of Humble Bundle
40% off The Pragmatic Bookshelf with the coupon 'turkey'
It's more about a matter of trust than having sex with someone that isn't your spouse. So, it's not really the affair but more about keeping a secret about the affair.
A trip to Mars at modern speeds is about 7-8 months, but this is quite variable. You could get there in about 2 months if you went really fast, but no such propulsion system currently exists to my knowledge. However, we are talking about propulsion systems as they will exist in 15-20 years, so perhaps something like 4-6 months is a reasonable estimate of trip duration.

Edit: There's that famous "40 days to Mars" study from a while ago about theoretical new rockets: http://www.space.com/8009-rocket-engine-reach-mars-40-days.h...
Here: https://plus.google.com/106913700595933476859/posts
Startrek has huge resources, but not infinite. We (in western Europe and north America) reached a point of sufficient resources around 1970. Yet we still have homeless starving on our streets while the 1% who own 90% of the resources cruise around in their super yachts. If we continue this broken system then by the 24th century a typical 1%er might own 30 planets, a fleet of starships and a dilithium crystal mine, but I don't see why he would be anymore willing to share this hoarded wealth with the rest of humanity than the 1%ers of today are.
Let me be clear here, advertising your device as another manufacturers is a BAD precedent be setting. For any company.

It also violates the agreement companies agree to to be usb certified. What Apple did afterwards to ensure only their devices were being advertised is their own business. But lets be clear. Palm was in the wrong here. It doesn't absolve Apples decisions, but I can see why they did what they did.

It also likely explains why Apple started doing drm-like authentication to its devices.
Life after Facebook
I think you've missed the point of my commentary, if you think that's key here. Neither you nor I have access to that information; the school board, teachers, government workers, and parent representatives do, and they made a combined choice to implement this.

They could be wrong (and they have been before, of course) - but this family isn't arguing that. They are arguing on religious and privacy grounds.

Reductio in absurdum: take the "I won't do it because it's the mark of the beast" to it's next level (hacker news comments, library membership, news articles, theaters), and you have a dysfunctional society.
Until they have their own gkernel.
Judge Whitehead must have never stepped into an office building in the last 10 years. RFID-enabled ID badges are standard at offices around the world and schools are lagging behind if anything.
Falcon patch for ruby-1.9.3-p327 released
Desktop game controlled with your Smartphone/Tablet
Please. This is nothing compared to what the FBI did from their inception until the late 1970s. If this happens 40 years ago you might find out about it 5 to 7 years after it occurred.
Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret
What Double Fine is doing here is really clever. Publishers are notoriously risk-averse, and by demonstrating interest for a game concept, they can more easily fund innovative games.
About the last example, I think you meant :

super.say(string.toUpperCase());

See: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:maximally_mi...
Google would only search the discussion threads, and not the content on the website. What I'm pushing for, is we can easily extract a 'credible' subset of the web and only search that web. That subset is the set of links that HNers have posted to HN, sorted in priority by the number of votes they have returned.

Also, as danso mentioned, HNsearch could use some function of points and date, to rank the results.
Pedo bear approves...
"Charlie Wilson's War" is one of the more readable and entertaining introductions to US sponsorship of unsavory jihadists.
One Stop Selling with Avon
Oh that's easy to solve: simply insert a gene that makes biofuel corn toxic to humans, rendering them non-edible and solving the fictitious moral dilemma.
The long-term effects of zero or low gravity on human health are very serious - muscle, bone and eyesight loss and a host of other problems. Current mechanisms of dealing with the problem (exercise and special suits) do not cater adequately to long-term space journeys.
4 Cheap Android Tablets That Your Money Can Buy For Christmas
This is cool, I suppose. But there's a big missed opportunity here: I have no idea what or who Everlane is and there's not even a link to an About page there.
There are different types of biofuel research. He seems to ignore the whole sector that is bioengineering the plants to solve these problems. One example that comes to mind (and I can't find a link to on my phone) involves changing the color of the leaf to absorb more light.

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioene...
Music of the Sun: A solar-powered ambient music series
Yup, unfortunately EE is Band 3.
You don't need a smaller company, just a less stupid one. Any of your major tech companies has a fully technical career path and at least some managers with technical background.
Intrusiveness also isn't so good when you want the class logic to be independent of the memory management scheme in use. We experimented with language support for intrusive data structures in Rust (`@class` for an intrusive `shared_ptr`) and it turned out to be a lot of trouble, so we removed it.
Capitalism is built on cooperation - its foundation is mutually beneficial trades.
Markdown Here - a browser extension that lets you write email in Markdown
Yeah, but now we're both /want/ to know what or who the heck Everlane is. I found their about page. https://www.everlane.com/about - plus they have a Join link in the corner.
Call the Privacy Commissioner/Ministry of your country.
No. Peter Norvig found a particular instance where a formula motivated by Bayes' theorem worked even better when the formula was changed. The altered formula doesn't have a theoretical basis, but it seems to work.
They're doing 6-12 month missions on the ISS these days, which would be roughly similar to a Mars transit.
Usually it is techdirt that is aggregator/hype spam, but in this case it is boing boing aggregation of a good techdirt article. Actual source is http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121121/23451821121/so-lon...
Looks like they sell designer items at low cost:
https://www.everlane.com/about
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7ko53zcxv1qmsrb7.gif
Can't they do what my employers have always done? Make you swipe in at the door. That would earn their revenue from the state while not creating a panopticon.
Here is a free alternative, would be interesting to hear if anyone compared the two.
http://css3ps.com/
Some people are not able to keep up with the security patching required to host their own server.

Some people are not able to keep up with best current practice to ensure that email from their server is deliverable.

Running your own email server is for many people a sub-optimal solution. Sure, for a small number of people it's a great idea.
Elon Musk, in the Q&A section of his recent talk at Oxford (download here: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211) also said he believes all biofuels are useless.

His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the efficiency to solar.