skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mr. Stallman's proposed solution is both simple and elegant: take all software that runs on a general purpose machine and legislate a "safe harbor" from patent claims for software falling in that category. This essentially would return the state of the law to what it was through the early 1990s, recognizing that software patents are fine when tied to specialized hardware or when they pertain to a special-purpose machine but not otherwise. Such a proposal is "radical" in dealing with the problem once and for all but is also remarkably conservative in only singling out for elimination the one category of patents most vulnerable to the potent objection that its retention does little or nothing to further the progress of science and hence doesn't warrant the monopoly protections afforded by the patent laws. The logic here should enable Congress to support it if it chose to reexamine the issues purely from a social and legal perspective.

Still, the practical issues remain daunting. What becomes of existing software patents, for example? Purists may say these are not "property" but massive dollars have been paid for the rights to own them and there will be huge resistance, not to mention constitutional objections, over any idea that these suddenly should be rendered worthless by legislative action. If these stay intact for the next 20+ years, what good does a safe harbor do in applying only prospectively? More important, those with a stake in the game - even relatively benign players such as Google - want to hedge and trim on the issues in order to protect their investments, and this means that inordinate pressure will be put on Congress not to single out software patents for elimination, emphasizing instead more limited measures to help fight trolls and so on.

With so much resistance, and with an apathetic public, how to build sufficient momentum to push Congress toward a true solution? Developers might lead this charge but I wonder. Founders are mostly not directly affected by software patents and neither are employees at bigger companies who are conscripted to keep churning them out. And those most directly hit in the patent wars resist reform to protect their own investments.

So Mr. Stallman finds himself alone in his position at this conference: not because his solution is bad but because of inordinately difficult practical barriers. At least we see in this conference that persons of influence in this area are finally willing to begin seeking incremental reform. If the worst of the abuses can be fixed (e.g., the troll issue), that at least is a start. And, who knows, maybe radical changes can occur after initial progress is made. Time will tell.
I agree with flights that involve multiple places. But there are also lots of RTW trip options. I've done a RTW trip myself with 5 destinations, and even then the options were a bit mind-boggling.

It was my first RTW trip so I spent a few hours looking up different RTW tickets, as well as figuring out what destinations to go to, how many stops were available, etc.. I ended up researching online, and then going to see a travel agent twice. I even brought an atlas with me the second time to see the agent! I also spoke to a couple of friends that have done RTW trips to get their perspective. Then you have to consider frequent flyer miles and what destinations, seasonality etc...
We're focusing on anything international and/or complex. Online travel sites like Kayak and Hipmunk have already done a good job for simple and domestic travel.
Interesting, may I ask how much did you pay out as the finders fee?

I see lots of promise in these types of crowd sourced activities and I'd like to compare the cost to self described "experts" who do this type of trip planning as a side business.

Also I'm curious did you consider a RTW ticket?
Yep that is correct. For simple trips you can just use Kayak, but as soon as you start to deal with multi-hop, points purchase and all sort of crazy tricks, you need a service like FlightFox.
Here's a link to the post Bowei wrote when we started the contest which lists the prizes: http://flightfox.com/blog/world-startup-report
Because of the historical accident of paper being white and ink being dark. The human eye is somewhat better at reading light-on-dark, but most people aren't used to it.
Finders fee was $500, but I added a few bonus prizes for fun you can read about it here: http://flightfox.com/contest/36810

Yes, I considered doing a RTW ticket. It was way more expensive ($20k min vs. $7500 cheapest itinerary from the experts). The price differences were astonishing.
37yo male here. Both Obama or Bush would be fun to hang around, for different reasons. Would love to see them in a bar together. Bush wasn't a great president, but he definitely had the charisma for it. Romney never had that, this is why I knew in my gut he couldn't win.
Facebook Launches Conversion Measurement Tool
> The reason most sites are blue is because the human eye is better able to distinguish shades of blue.

Than what other shades? I thought humans were good at shades of green? Anyway, do you have any sources?
Sid Roth Rapture
Has the future been written in advance? Sid Roth has spent 25 years researching the strange world of the supernatural. Sid Roth tv programs Join Sid on this edition of Sid Roth It’s Supernatural. Sid Roth Rapture
Step 0: Spend $3.6 trillion dollars on $2.3 trillion in revenue.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258
Download Skype for Android
"On the second point. Our cargo rail system is crap. Nowhere in my write-up am I proposing that we unload 100,000 cargo ships per year and load these containers onto diesel trucks or the current train system. That would be incredibly dumb, inefficient, more harmful to the environment and, well, actually impossible."

The US freight rail system is the best in the world.[1] We move 10x more than Europe most years on a tons times distance basis. The running gear may look antiquated, but the fundamental numbers are staggering.

"No, the idea is that a new highly-efficient, all-electric, highly-automated and cargo-only transportation system be built with the express purpose of moving container-based cargo from coast to coast (and port to port) at the highest possible speed and lowest possible power consumption."

There is very little demand for raising the speed of freight rail in the US. Speed generally compounds inefficiencies.

Freight handling is by and large already automated and container based in the US rail network.

Existing electric designs preclude the use of double stacked container flat cars, one of the keys of US freight efficiency. Perhaps you have an innovation here?

Building an entirely new high speed electric rail network for freight is an absurd idea. I don't think you've even begun to model the economic realities, particularly the capex of building a new rail network radius'd and graded for high speed, with all above grade crossings.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/node/16636101
The Coming KDE — New approach to managing change and the changes coming up
Use redshift or flu.x or so.
same here, i tried many apps and web apps a few months ago and i ended up saving ihackernews.com on the springboard. It is perfect (except that you can't see the older posts).
Sorry, that's a little Verilog. [4:9] means indeces [4][5][6][7][8][9], in other words, "martin".

The camry example was just an illustration of the power relationship of something moving through water. Nothing more than that.

The comparison of a container ship with 5,000 TEU (2,500 40 foot containers) vs. a train is, of course, different. And, of course, it isn't as simple as looking at cross-sectional area. That would be a gross oversimplification. Sometimes you have to assume that a cow is a uniform sphere of milk just to start to have some numbers to talk about.

Imagine a train design to carry containers at 200 miles per hour. Single file. So, now, the cross sectional area is that of a single container, which is very small. If the train is designed to minimize parasitic drag and all of the frictional components of the rolling system it could be incredibly efficient when compared to a ship pushing some 4000 square feet (400 square meters) of cross sectional area of water at 20 miles per hour.

And, as I have said multiple times, this isn't really solely about pure energy efficiency as much as a forward looking idea to that hopes to deal with the grotesque level of environmental pollution these ships produce as well as what might happen over the next 100 or 200 years with fossil fuels. One really has to start looking in at least a 50 to 100 year time scale to understand that what we are doing today is not sustainable in any way at all. To some extent, arguing the finer points of how much one displaces vs. the other and whether one solution is a few percent more efficient than the other is to miss the point.

I'll go ahead and send you a link to the data.
Sure. But it also means a lot of people who are looking at her future projects will pause and think twice.
Very cool! I haven't "officially" released Telescope (a.k.a the big HN post) yet because of a couple remaining bugs, but once I do I'll be sure to include a link to Leakmap to show what kind of things you can do with it :)
Well, there's that, but most corporations don't really get IT right, IT is a cost center that should be held at arm's length. Obama's IT formula came from Google and Facebook, where IT is front and center.
Thanks for your feedback. I see what you're saying about a shorter summary but I'd consider your sentence more of a tease than a summary.

Our goal is to give the reader a good understanding of the topic while leaving out the unnecessary details and redundant information. The original had 465 words. That means that the Skim That summary cut the story down by over 50% while still giving you a strong overview of the story.
Flightfox is neat, but the thing that wasn't super clear and I found out later, after paying a finder's fee, is that you have to go through hoops to book your tickets.

This isn't just -- they put it together and you click a button and suddenly you have your tickets.

This is "now you have to spend hours on the phone, attempting to book these tickets, and you don't have enough information to really do it -- nor enough confidence to pull it off".

So I love Flightfox and I hope they succeed, but I'm hoping to save time -- and Flightfox definitely doesn't. It saves you money at the cost of adding a lot of extra time to your booking process, but that's not a tradeoff that is apparent from the start, IMO.
> The reason most sites are blue is because the human eye is better able to distinguish shades of blue.

Huh? It's shades of yellow/green that we are best able to distinguish. We're not good at blue.
Having tried to read patents to gain insight into how something worked, I'm confident that if Stradivarius had written valid patents for his methods we still wouldn't be able to reproduce it.
Pretty interesting service! I'm always surprised that human experts can challenge algorithms in setting up travel itineraries. I wonder how much time an average expert spends putting these proposals together?
Most likely it's Motorola Solutions providing the hardware, although there's probably some 8A business playing middleman to collect their guaranteed contracting dollars.

Everyone likes to bag on the big contractors, and not without reason, but if you really want to raise your blood pressure, look at the rules, laws, and entitlements regarding 8A contracting. We've had to deal with middlemen that took 10% simply to get a fax from the gov't, and pass it on to the hardware vendor (also on the GSA schedule), who then shipped directly to the gov't. 10% of a quarter million dollar order for receiving a fax, and faxing it onward, because as a small business who meets all the contracting requirements, they're guaranteed a certain amount of federal payola, simply for existing.

There was a lot of joking about forming our own businesses, BOFH style (translation: our fax machine and office is co-located at the local pub), to cash in on that gravy train.
How much do milspec radios cost?

I was pretty surprised to find out what "high end" walkie-talkies go for. This year at burning man, a couple of DPW girls were hanging out in our dome and one my my camp-mates started oggling their radios.

"Oh! Wow, I sell radios and those things are like $2000!" or something like that.

This is what a bunch of dirty hippies are using to talk to each other in the desert. I'd imagine what the Department of Homeland Security uses is probably even more expensive.
I get weird lines after reading light-on-dark for a while.
People have built systems called Atmospheric Railways that could be closed to Elon's vision than an evacuated tunnel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_railway
Seems reasonable.

Flight hacks and getting the most out of my frequent flyer miles is somewhat of a hobby of mine, I'd bet there is a high correlation between flightfox experts and people on flyertalk.com
In the article's first photo: two people sitting on an orange leather IKEA Klippan couch. Stylish for not a lot of money, but does anyone in the world find those things at all comfortable? (I say this as the owner of a blue one.) Form over function vs. form follows function?
One of our ad networks (big name) screwed up.

Removed the ads, sorry for in convenience.
100% agreed - that's what I learned to do in high school journalism class as well. But there's lots of stuff on the web, even that's considered news, that doesn't follow this format. Here's some first sentences from other Times articles:

"The flesh is weak but the spirit of commerce is willing." (op-ed)

"Last weekend, my family and I packed our car full of supplies and drove to a fire station in New Jersey to deliver goods to an area that had been hit hard by Hurricane Sandy." (small business)

"Last April 28, a splendid spring Saturday that fairly begged you to be outdoors, I spent all afternoon in front of my living-room TV, anxiously watching the last day of the annual N.F.L. draft, live from Radio City Music Hall. " (NY Times Magazine)

"The relocation of Albert C. Barnes’s great polyglot art collection to central Philadelphia was opposed by many and dreaded by most." (A&E)

I guess my point is that journalism styles vary even within a publication. Therefore, any automated attempt to simply use the first paragraph as a summary is bound to be wrong a lot of the time. It would however be interesting to use a human-generated summary dataset as the training data for a "buries the lead" classifier. I'll bet you could do it with a bag-of-words feature pretty easily, and that the most important words would be personal pronouns.
> Would BSD and Apache have caught on if Stallman hadn't been there? I don't know, but BSD at least predates GNU.

Would _open source_ have caught on if Stallman (and GNU) hadn't been there? That's an interesting question.
Autism-like behaviors reversed in mice
I use redshift religiously.

Hint: install it during the day. Not having it will hurt after a few days.
>>The lower order teams get called "pit dodgers" (behind their backs). External companies know that statistically these teams don't finish so many races, and the attention to detail in the design and finish for these teams is much less than those premium teams receive.
==

Not true. I have worked for several lower rug F1 teams (purely by chance - I live in Oxfordshire and I am not interested in relocating to Marnello). Suppliers love lower order teams - and its because they punch above their weight. Take for example the Saubers - low budget (~USD80 million?), high skill engineers. Also, suppliers provide standard components - they do not affect the race outcome - they are standardized - take for example CF brakes. An F1 race outcome depends on car balance w.r.t aero maps. Nothing more.

>>It is sadly a vicious circle. Statistically, they will have worse drivers, who are more likely to crash or damage the cars early in the race, so often the cars in the lower order teams don't have the required staying power for the entire race.
==

Not true. Statistically, all the best drivers have come from lower order teams. Hamilton is probably the only exception. Just look at history.
Why Punching the Clock Is Bad
> Can you imagine 123,000 people all trying to converse on one common channel?

Yeah, I can imagine AlohaNet and WiFi. ;)
That isn't true. Obama was the more charismatic candidate before we knew he would won. Romney always really came off as disconnected and aloof. I don't think a majority of republicans would agree otherwise, they just hated Obama and only had to make due with Romney, not many of them were happy with that!

Bush and Clinton were charismatic in ways that both sides of the aisle could easily acknowledge. Charisma is a pre-req to being president, and is not conveyed on victory.

If Gore would have won in 2000, that would have been very interesting, since he really wasn't at the level of Bush on likability, he would have been the least charismatic president since...Johnson, Nixon, or the way Carter actually turned out.
I would really only call the city centre [0] an "urban area" i.e. somewhere you could find a decent bar etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_City_Centre
Your idea seems reasonable. It made me think of when the 4 minute mile was broken. Once it was, people began doing it on a regular basis.

Elon promotes this idea and people believe it to be possible, then suddenly it becomes possible. It makes me wonder how many breakthrough ideas are out there, that are undiscovered.

Clearly Elon is a genius. How much more of a genius would he be if he knew this principle of human nature, and used it to find the solution to a problem that he hasn't figured out. He would use the collective intelligence of the world to solve the problem.

He probably has a reasonable idea that this can be done, but what if he were to use this power he has to essentially scale his genius by harnessing the imaginations of people like you around the world?
HN bookmarklet: sort frontpage stories by points
This seems very unnatural. Step outside on a sunny day and tell me we're not built (as a species) to function optimally in bright light.

I'd even go so far as to say that several hundred thousand years of evolution would back me up. Otherwise, why can't we see perfectly in the dark?

EDIT: typo.
From my quick survey, it took them between 20-30 hours of work to build my itineraries for me.

So by a rough estimate, I saved hundreds of hours by running this contest rather than doing everything myself.

Pretty amazing stuff, I think I will make Tim Ferris proud.
I'm dealing with something similar, but the forms come from the government, and they seem to have intentionally made it so one has to print the forms out and fill them in by hand (form data is not savable),

Since these forms are only published once per year, I've taken to altering them with Adobe LiveCycle Designer so that the form fields are fillable programmatically. So, just like you are doing I can take html form input and fill out multiple forms at once as there is lots of redundant data.

I don't have this working perfectly yet, but I am using this project[1] used in tax form filing as a basis (which relies on PDFtk and node.js).

[1] https://github.com/codehero/OpenTaxFormFiller
Actually, Mitt Romney and Al Gore (and Bob Dole to a lesser extent) were accused of being very wooden. Comedians frequently joked that they were robots.

Sad as it may sound, the quality of our politicians is so low that seeming human would be an upgrade for many of them.
Step 3: erode enough support from the other option to make up for your own eroded support.
Thanks for the feedback, we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself.

For others it has been an easy process to book as we have some verified travel agents on board. Other times when your trip is super complex, you may have to book on different websites. We're definitely aware that it's a friction point though so we're trying to fix it asap.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to turn down your brightness.

Also, see my reply to DustinCalim's comment.
I'm not sure, China is a big place and many local factors apply.

Natural resources in the west and northwest dominate, which is why there are ghost boom towns (people looking to do something with that money). Shanghai/Guangzhou are financial centers and become incredibly expensive, Beijing is the center of government but will always trail Shanghai. The south is dense but not that much arable land (compared to say India, China is mostly mountains). Yunnan (out west) has great weather and ethnic diversity; you'd think Kunming could eventually become China's San Francisco but capital and skillz are all concentrated in the east.

You could probably pick a city or region and analyze it to death.
There the cost structure is reversed: most of us can't afford to insource our representation -- that costs millions of dollars in campaign funds.
Also anything that's not your normal trip. I.e. travelling with pets or surfboards, help using frequent flyer miles, help getting frequent flyer status, or just going to a new country that you've never been before.
Who buys that level of new equipment/technology without user training, just silly. Whoever sold it also probably should of sold training or bundled something in beyond the manual.

Now we don't know all the facts and probably what happened was they did put a tender for the radios and training to use those radios. One way or another be it budgets or somebody doing a cheaper training bid though starting later after the radios are delivered or whatever permutation of events. They ended up with radios there users are unable to use. Why they are unable to use them again is not detailed and I can imagine many on here who would love that challenge to work out how to use a new peace of technology.

There is also the prospect that they got training and it was either not very good or clearly not targeted at the level of customer understanding.

With all that if these chaps landed planes then it would get rather dangerous too fly. Worrying thought perhaps.
Tips on How to A/B Test
I'm greatly enjoying this entire debate, but I'd just like to point out one thing: Elon said he doesn't know for sure how to do it yet or if it's even feasible (although he thinks it is). This means

a) It's possible that not all of the statements he ever made about the Hyperloop will be true for the final design (if any). I'd be especially cautious about the comment about right of way issues. This might as well just mean that he found an unused railroad track or something. And

b) Nobody knows if it can be done. Keep that in mind when debating the ideas. As far as I'm concerned, all ideas are constructive at this point.

I'm not a physicist and it's very likely that this solution is completely impossible, but let me ask anyway. If you just had a 1200 mile long train and you somehow got the mass going in a circle at 1200 mp/h, how much energy would you need to keep that momentum going? Could you cover that with solar panels covering the 1200 miles of track?
The thing that bothers me here is the same as with 99Designs. You pay an award fee but that only goes to the winner, right?

After using 99Designs a couple of times, I'm happy with the results, but probably won't use such a system again; it just feels a bit exploitative. I know, people elect to enroll in the system and compete so it's "fair" that way, but it just feels sorta icky to know I had X people spending so much time on my project and they get no compensation at all.

Maybe on FlightFox trips are usually shorter, easier, and less money, so it's not as bad - is that the case?
This is great advice. We are very grateful to you for taking the time. If there are any suggestions the cross your mind from time-to-time, please do share. Thank You very much again!
Reasons To Involve Developers In The Design Process
Microsoft Sends Rep Out to Personally Dis the iPhone, Android
I, too, enjoy giving exceptions that prove the rule. Thanks!