skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure, the mob refraining from killing and attacking scientists is good.

What? Are your reading what I'm posting? There was no mob, there was an all-powerful Church. It was the Church, not the public, who objected to what Galileo had to say and who put him on trial.

> But the credit still goes to Galileo for his insight, not the common man ...

You completely missed the point of this history lesson. The reason Galileo didn't share Bruno's fate wasn't Galileo, it was the common man. Times and perceptions had changed. Galileo and the common man both benefited. Everyone moved ahead except the Church.

The Church wasn't reluctant to burn Galileo at the stake because of his discoveries. Quite the contrary -- he was prosecuted for precisely those insights and the degree to which they contradicted Church dogma. But they could only go so far, because of public relations and changing times.

> IOW, who you have decided to credit is morally perverse.

Since I did no such thing, I don't have to defend it.

It's clear from what you're posting that you have no clue about this historical period, so ...

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galile...
Group-Funding Platform Crowdtilt Opens To Non-Profits
Several comments mentioned freight transport below, but not in this context. The loop you've described requires some "density" of carriages to maintain the "group inertia". One obvious way to fill gaps that are too big is to put freight cars into the loop to fill them.

Very nice article.
Recommended article: [1], with an extensive discussion in HN [2].

[1] http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/07/19/hope9talk.html

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4266626
Keeping it open would be one way to differentiate against iOS and Windows Mobile? And I can't see what they gain from keeping it closed, really. Perhaps it is fear of fragmentation ?
The same way advertising a product is different from giving it away.
On the first day. But then, a couple of years later, you are smarter and you know that before the tax was canceled, your boss was willing to pay 13,000 SEK to employ you. So the next time you negotiate (possibly with another employer), you know you are worth 13,000 SEK, so that's what you'll demand, and that's what you'll get.

The specific line item in which this expense is listed with the employer, whether "employment tax" or "salary", makes no difference to them, and shouldn't to you.

This is really basic economics.
Still playing around with the format, want to make this as agile as possible. Glad you like it. The next teaser is gonna be shorter, didn't want to trim this interview to much this time.
Oracle's Ellison Vindicated by HP's $8.8 Billion Autonomy Writedown
It seems hard to quantify. If everybody were using the BSD or Apache license instead of the GPL, would society be substantially different? My guess leans toward "A little different, but maybe not that much." Would BSD and Apache have caught on if Stallman hadn't been there? I don't know, but BSD at least predates GNU. Any answer would have to delve into the realm of historical fiction.
Right now, I'm the CTO of a small startup in NYC. I'm probably 80% development, 30% other.

When I've been on bigger teams, it's probably more like 10-15% coding, 120% other.

I find that it's beneficial for me to always be in the code even as the team grows - even just a little bit. But, I usually take on small "nice to haves" (or small bugs) that no one relies upon and isn't critical to the product. So when it takes me a month to write it, no one cares.

In the least, it forces me to understand how to keep the system up and running on my machine and answer/demo general purpose stuff to other folks without looking like an idiot.

If you're a technical manager, I think dropping to 0% coding is a bad thing. It's way too easy to get out of touch.
Homeland Security spent $430M on radios its employees don’t know how to use
This is a better example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfweZ-mVjQE&feature=plcp
Well, if you're willing to pay for it, you could probably poach engineers by offering better salaries. I've noticed job listings outside of the Chicagoland area that are easily 15-25K less than what I could get in Chicago... and Chicago is low compared to NYC, Boston, SF, etc.
Your tax dollars at work. Not.
http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html
That'll happen when people understand the actual definition of "theory" :)
A random quick note.

The first public discussion of the Hyperloop was in http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/12/pandomonthly-presents-a-fir... starting about 43 minutes in. A revealing bit of the conversation a minute later went like this:

Elon: I have a name for it, the Hyperloop.

Interviewer: Is that like a Jetson's tunnel?

Elon: Something like that, yeah.

Interviewer: You just get in, it whisks you?

Elon: Um, yeah. Yeah.

He later on said, You're guessing in the right direction.

This suggests to me VERY STRONGLY that his technology proposal MUST be a tube of some sort. He also said that it could store enough energy to run 24x7 without using batteries. That implies that he's got a lot of material going very, very fast.

Interestingly this is the time that he made his 30 minutes downtown to downtown comment, and his solar panel comment, but said nothing indicating no right of way issues. Later on he said that he came up with a way to make it much cheaper, and to get rid of right of way issues, but hasn't been repeating the other comments that I know of.

This suggests to me that in July he might not have had right of way figured out, and suggests to me that getting rid of the right of way issues by putting it in the ocean might not be a bad guess as to the insight he had over the summer that dramatically reduces costs.

My proposal may not be on the right track. But I think it is safe to conclude from what Elon has said that it is a tube. It has a lot of mass moving. And I don't think it infeasible that he would be thinking about putting this in the ocean to solve the rights issue.
What you say might be true on the day this tax is canceled, but if you like a few years later, you realize:

a) it was worth 13,000 SEK for your employer to employ you

b) you're only getting 10,000 SEK.

c) you ask for a 3,000 SEK raise, and get it.

So, not immediately, but after a while it will reach the steady state that I described.

The bottom line is: it's arithmetics; It doesn't matter to the employer which line item the 3,000 SEK are listed under, whether "employment tax" or "salary"; it comes out of their pocket either way. It shouldn't matter to you either in the grand scheme of thing. Employment is a reasonably efficient market in the time frame of a few years, and you will realize, and then demand, and get, a salary of 13,000 SEK.

The transient is going to be weird. But in the steady state - it doesn't matter which lines appear in your pay stub and which do not.
Are you sure you can do an intro to Larry ;)
He would be great!
How to invent in an age of information overload
Amazon Analytics - Understand the impact of your marketing efforts on Amazon
Tubes in the ocean, whether sunken or floating, seems like a nightmare when you consider ships. Ships snagging fiber cables with their anchors is one thing, but something with people in it? Great care would probably have to be taken with this sort of thing.
Yep, sorry stinos. Bad phrasing on my part.
> I'd appreciate it if you put the same thought into the proposal that you did into throwing out criticisms that it already addresses.

I'm pretty sure you did not address my criticisms in your proposal.

> If you run this with cars only, the mass of cars that you'd need to accelerate/decelerate is much higher.

If you run this with cars only, you probably wouldn't make them weigh 70 tons, and then your acceleration costs drop dramatically.

> Also the heat issues that the cars need to deal with is also much higher. Separating plungers and cars means you accelerate/decelerate much less mass, and have far fewer heat issues to deal with. The plungers themselves will get too hot for humans, but that's OK because humans are insulated from them.

You only have heat issues because you're trying to push a big column of air for no reason. What is the value of this column of air? The air itself is just creating friction. The passengers can't breath it, because it's too hot for them to survive, and it's not enough to sustain life in the event of a failure, because most of this hypothetical tunnel is a vacuum.

> And I already said how to deal with the heat in the cars.

You proposed adding enough cold thermal mass to offset the heat they'd absorb (literally a block of ice). You're just adding a bunch of extra mass that you have to accelerate, and a bunch of mass you need to re-cool after every trip.

> If the flaps work as proposed, the air pressure directly in front of the plunger will significantly exceed the air pressure in the rest of the tunnel. The cars sit in a bubble of air maintained by that shockwave. I have not tried to do fluid dynamics calculations to estimate friction, but it is going to be many times less than with Jacques' idea. I can believe it could be low enough to make this system work.

If the flaps work as proposed, then you have all the problems of an evacuated tunnel and most of the problems of Mattheij's idea, as I said. You have an inhospitable environment, need to deal with the pressure differential (throughout most of the tunnel at least), tons of energy lost to friction (or else it wouldn't be too hot for humans), etc. Even if your idea was technically possible, it seems to have no advantages over an evacuated tunnel except that you can say that it's not an evacuated tunnel.

> I suspect that Elon plans to avoid right of way issues by building it in the ocean. If he doesn't do that, then it is very difficult to see how he can do anything like a “ground based Concorde” (his words) and still avoid right of way issues.

If you build far enough underwater to avoid right of way issues (aka, no boats can get past), you're looking at worse engineering issues than an evacuated tunnel anyway. At just 10m below the surface, you're already at 2 atmospheres of pressure.

I'm also not sure that "underwater" counts as "ground based".
This might be the first case of biomimicry on the front page :). This was one of the entries in our 2011 Biomimicry Student Design Challenge [1]. It's pretty exciting to see how far they've taken it from concept to funding [2] in a short amount of time.

[1] http://2011.biomimicrydesignchallenge.com/gallery (#38 -- 5 rows from bottom in center)

[2] http://ben.biomimicry.net/uni/2012/biomimicry-design-wins-bo...
Turducken Code
> A process that is incredibly fast and decisive in order to get double digits done per day.

Because, y'know, having officials crank through tons of difficult decisions per day is such a supremely effective[1] and corruption-free way to create a social process. It's worked so very well for the patent system, why not for law and jursiprudence?

[1] cf. "decision fatigue": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fr...
I am amazed at how many people have your response. If you are looking at a timescale of days, you are right. If you are looking at a timescale of just a few years, you are dead wrong.

The employer down the road was profitable paying 13,000 SEK for an employee like you just yesterday. They know you're still getting 10,000 SEK. When they need an employee, they'll offer you 11,000 SEK. Many people will happily switch job for a 10% raise. Later, rinse, repeat: It will eventually converge to how much the employer was willing to pay before. Not more, of course - but why would YOU settle for less than you did before?

The time it takes salaries in high-tech to converge in active economic times is 2-4 years.

I'm talking about the steady state, the transient is short lived and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

It really is basic economics.
Show HN: The easiest way to sell downloadable goods online
also thoughts are welcome
Am I missing something, or isn't 1.6 * 2^-4 = 1.6 / 16 = 0.1? Seems exact to me.
Hewlett Packard and Autonomy: how you could have spotted it beforehand
I just tried to access the site and got a Heroku error page. Looks like you guys are under some significant load? This is an excellent idea.

I'm left to wonder how well this idea would transplant to a country like the United States. Everyone has varying degrees on Obama's healthcare act depending on where you fall on the political spectrum - but wouldn't it make the entire conversation moot if the private sector were able to fund stuff like this?

What about directly funding and putting a face to the efforts of someone who is homeless finding a job? Plenty of people give to organizations like Goodwill and United Way, but you very rarely get to have a picture put with where your dollars are going. There would be a lot of details to work out, and the idea is certainly ambitious - but if Watsi is able to succeed this much then hey, someone should give it a shot.

So much good is happening here. You guys are brilliant, and I'm thankful for people like you. Cheers.
This might be an issue of demographic then. I like talking to somewhat intellectual people who appeal to current 20-somethings.
Psy Reveals Picture with Justin Bieber, 'Famous Connections'  
World star' Psy revealed his picture with Justin Bieber online.
Yesterday, Psy posted on his twitter, "I saw Justin Bieber dancing to 'Gangnam Style' perfectly," along with a picture.
I haven't actually tried Arch on UEFI, but their wiki page seems fairly extensive on the topic. Ubuntu documentation also shows UEFI support, but their documentation is bit vague.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firm...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI_Bootloaders

Of course I wouldn't be terribly surprised if your UEFI has some bug that prevents Linux from booting.
D3 really is a powerful way to visualize data on the web. Check out the gold standard of d3 charts, created by Mike Bostock: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock.
Bill & Melinda Gates want to avoid the foundation spending money and energy staying alive. So the rule is that all the money has to be spent 50 years after they die.
Love this idea. We're going to implement a "general fund" profile soon which is essentially what you described above. Email idea is also great.
Megaupload Assisted FBI vs NinjaVideo, But Evidence Then Used Against Them
We are definitely working on calling it out better in an update to the app. Thanks for the feedback!
> Refutations of philosophical ideas happen all the time.

On the contrary, this never happens -- not among philosophers, anyway. Philosophy isn't about reality-testing, that's reserved to science, and it's why science is a branch of knowledge separate from philosophy. The term "natural philosopher" was once used to describe what we now call a scientist, but the problems with an association with philosophy became obvious to all and the name was changed.

> Besides all that, you can prove negatives at least some of the time ...

No, false. You're thinking of a positive proof that a proposition is false. Let's say I claim there is a largest prime number. If I take this position, Euclid's theorem of the infinity of primes positively disproves my claim -- positively proves it to be false:

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

> Sometimes they come up negative ...

First, your reference (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DecisionProblem.html) flatly contradicts your claim -- it says that there is no algorithm that can decide whether a given theorem does or does not have a proof, and this fact has been positively proven.

Second, you're confusing a positive proof of the falsehood of a claim, with proof of a negative. To understand the difference, read this:

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

A quote: "Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God."
My argument is that many times the salient portion is written in such a way that it's continuing a point from a previous part of the article. So, when you remove it from the complete context of the article, the sentence seems like it's out of place even if it has an important detail.
I can't wait to hear what you'll have to say when someone will call themselves a "computer scientist" ;)
How about this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DfDOlUXEBo

It's chinese concept of a train that doesn't stop - you have the main body in constant motion (going around in a loop), and the passenger cars just attach to it and detach from it via magnetic forces. No need to stop the big train, you can catch on at any time, and this likely could work with - properly outfitted - cars.
Your lungs are probably at least as efficient at pulling those pollutants out of the air and sending them straight into your bloodstream.

Any air that distills out water that was worse to drink than what was available locally would probably kill you to breathe just as quickly.
This is what I use for this:

http://www.reportmill.com

We have one server setup to do all the grinding and it runs as a service. Programs can submit the template key with a dictionary of data to render on the form.
The point is that if you can deal with many atmospheres of pressure, you would just do a proper evacuated tunnel and get the benefits of lower friction, etc., instead of trying to find a way to make it work with air still in the tunnel.

The Chunnel also cost about $17 billion in today's dollars and is only 31 miles long (including the above-ground parts). I don't think this is a feasible model for long-distance transit, especially when Musk claimed a cost of $6 billion for SF to LA.
This sounds extremely similar to the Mitt Romney formula.
Check out giveforward.com for a US version of this.
I have only been programming for about 2 years, but already in that time I have noticed an incredible amount of changes when I look back at my old code. Some of the things that I did back then were so dumb I'm not sure how it ever worked. In general though every time I look back at my old code I realize how far I have come and it encourages me to keep pushing myself to write better code with good style. It also really is, as the article says, a humbling experience. Even though I am still relatively new to coding it shows that I still have a lot more to learn and that I wasn't quite as good as I thought I was back then.
Author: Search for "pleasuraigh".
So by that reasoning, we should call it Linux when it runs an Android or Sailfish userland as well? Or does Android "make more sense" because it has stronger branding? Is it still Android if it's a fork?

GNU runs fine on top of Solaris, freebsd and to a certain extent (certain definitions of fine :) Microsoft Windows and OS X.

Linux runs fine without GNU (as eg: "Android").

I understand that for a lot of people the distinction seems trivial -- I guess I appreciate the GNU part a lot more after being exposed to Solaris 8 and ancient *BSD installs.
Entirely fix it? It can't. Limit it? Certainly.

When they have a law that seems on first reading to say what the employer says it does, then the employer can show it to the employee to gain credence and the law itself will confuse any employee who does a little research without going further.

More than that, the employer may not realize they are misrepresenting it when the law seems to say something. They may be misusing the law in good faith. Something that will happen less often with clearly written laws that are not heavily interpreted in the common law.
Would pressure differences throughout the tube caused by differences in altitude be something to worry about? I'm not sure how, if at all, that would effect the hydrodynamics.

Also, I would be concerned that with that much fluid moving through it that fast, a possible failure mode could be "temporarily turns into a horizontal launch loop". (which would be awesome ;)
John McAfee Wiki Timeline
"Grassroots." A whole bunch of people built the second bridge based on their needs. The community.

The parable in that article is not about one person iterating based on user feedback. It's about users taking action and building upon existing works. Which is awesome if everyone has similar needs. But what happens when that group-made bridge hangs too low and interferes with river traffic? Or if I think it should be redone with steel but you don't want to have it closed for a year while that happens? What if I think it helps my competitors too much, so I burn it and start a new bridge closer to where I want it?

This is why we plan things. So everyone has a stake in the process and we can try to make good decisions that fit everyone's needs. Top-down planning isn't the only way to go, for sure, but this article is idiotic as far as making a point that community development is always the way to go.

This is a simple parable that offers next-to-nothing as far as real world solutions except to say that, yes, we should make sure what we're building is useful. Which: No shit.
Facebook Is Launching a Numberless “Social Calling” Service
Did you read the post on crowdstrike in detail? I suggest you do, your script will not work because

- rootkit re-adds itself to the /etc/rc.local

- it patches the filesystem functions to hide itself when you read the file, so I am not convined grep will pick it up anyway

- you do not unload the actual kernel module if it is running, nor destroy the rootkit kernel module

- did you test it by installing the rootkit in a vm, and confirm that your code will detect and remove it? if not, i do not think you should publish such code just to give people a false sense of security when they run it and says "rootkit not present"

http://blog.crowdstrike.com/2012/11/http-iframe-injecting-li...
Umano wants to tell you the news, literally
* Failure would look Awesome

Always a winning bullet point.
The issue is not with the promotion itself, since the marketplace handles that and drives the customers to you. When a new theme is released, if it's good/attractive enough, it'll get many many sales. Then, you should provide ongoing support to your items. When you have 1-2 themes that's good, but having 6 or 7 themes, all of them with ongoing support turns out quite hard to maintain.

Eventually, the themes stop selling, unless you've created some sort of product that sells like hotcakes all the time (there are a few). But, most of the themes sell for a few weeks/months then you have to start working on a brand new product again, to keep up with the competition, and to promote your previously released products.

I had issues scaling the business since I was not able to cope with the amount of work that needed to be done (and also because I couldn't find anybody competent enough to provide support / fixes). That is, provide support on the forums, bug fixes, stability & compatibility updates, and releasing new themes. Not to mention having 0% time to work on side projects.

It's not a fire and forget scheme, each product has its own ongoing support service that has to be provided. There are people that purchase the theme just because of your support, not mainly because it looks good enough. For a single person (doing everything) becomes quite a lot to handle, even if the profits are quite lucrative.

If all you ever want to do in your life is sell themes, then the marketplace is great for you. I'm aiming at a more self-managed project, such as a SaaS product, or my own startup, not planning to live out of the themes business, which was one of the reasons why I've decided to stop.
Show HN: Say Cheese - a cross-browser compatible webcam API