skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. But in the DRM conversation, anyone having one means they can use their digital freedom to bypass DRM, the product of which could be consumed even on the hypothetical majority's closed devices.
One that someone is using to accept mail.
The speech thing will be key I think. I'd be happy to be able to ask my virtual assistance to make calls for me like that.
You claimed I said "that you cant rely on the results".

Please show where I said that, or admit that you are putting words into my mouth.
Windows 8 adoption reportedly growing more slowly than Windows 7
What about the Oberon system, has anyone brought it to Raspberry Pi yet?
GitLab: An alternative to GitHub
but without subsidizing all the bundled crap. I have zero interest in ESPN, Disney and "reality" television.

You think that you are subsidizing all those shows, when you only want your shows.

But to another household, your shows are the noise that they are subsidizing to be able to watch their shows.

To a first approximation, if everyone could order exactly the channels they wanted, they would all be paying the exact same, just with fewer channels to flip through, and with more expensive bookkeeping.
Now, take your Raspberry Pi running Plan9, and start setting up Inferno OS on all of your other machines. Let your imagination run wild.
What you quoted was "valid user's email address", not "valid email address". While "valid email address" is arguable, a "valid user"'s email address is more clearly about whether it accepts mail. :)
I realize that reliability is important; GitHub should improve here.

However, my experience was that avoiding dependencies on an external server was the natural way of working with Git-based deploys. Our deploy scripts pushed the current branch from the local repository to the servers directly. This meant that the version tested locally, whether a hotfix on a developers box or the last synced/tested version on the CI server, was the exact version deployed. Granted, the scripts could have specified the exact revision to fetch from an external server, but since the deploy source and target were already communicating, why not just `git push` and a commit hook rather than various `ssh git ...` steps? It won't scale to hundreds of boxes, but by that point you surely have a local dist source for much more than just Git repositories.
Not really surprising, considering that Windows 8 is not a desktop-oriented OS. Existing non-touchscreen desktops and laptops have little motivation to upgrade. Windows 7 was a new generation OS that was friendlier than the previous attempt (Vista).
This is probably not a popular view around here either, but if you're examining the contents of the string to avoid XSS or SQL injection attacks, you're doing it wrong.
I guess, what stops me from going to a site like this: http://www.routingnumbers.org/

Finding a routing number for my appropriate zip code, and inputting a valid account number?
Baddges.com - Please help us get noticed.
The future of GPS
It wasn't accidentally sold. It was developed as a side project. I believe Bell Labs was required by a court ruling to license it for free, which aided in the initial growth in popularity.

If I had to guess why Plan 9 stayed a research OS- well, Plan 9 was first released to universities in 1992. Linux was first released in 1991, 386BSD was launched in 1992, FreeBSD and NetBSD forked in 1993.
Soon? They already are. That article is from August 8th.
High Leverage Individuals
Do you work with people? General people 'get' computers as much as they did in the 90's and they've been using them the whole time.
This is a discussion forum, not a court of law. I'm not about to trawl through 5 or 6 years of reddit and hacker news comments to find an exact quote.

If you believe the shootout results can reliably show that one language is faster than another, say so. Otherwise, de facto you are saying you cant rely on the results.
Ouya dev units shipping on time
Looks like it uses stereo cameras[1]
and it appears to live up to its accuracy claims [2]
and devkits in the wild seem to be just as capable [3]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY3Ya__6BHw#t=183s
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQkKyOOyLSs#t=29s
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoiwL0SK3jA#t=57s
Stop me if I'm wrong, I haven't had cable for a long time. We only watched Discovery and Food Network, and not even very much of those. We now get more Mythbusters and more cheesy cartoon series from Netflix or Denver Public Library.

ESPN is a sports network, right? "Game of Thrones" is a swords-and-sorcery type thing with a lot of sex, right (I've only read 20 pages of the first book). I don't see how that makes it "manifestly not moronic" to bundle the two. I personally might take a look a GoT, but you'd have to pay me to watch the manifest stupidity of ESPN. So, I personally don't see the immoronicity of bundling ESPN and "Game of Thrones".

But that was my point with socks and cheese: market places don't take into account whatever imaginary linkage I might assign or what Immoral MegaCorp assigns to bundling HBO and ESPN. What vone person values as "manifestly moronic" another sees as "manifestly awesome".

As near as I can tell, you're trying to argue that legislating some linkage via DRM makes that linkage valuable to the free market, when in fact, it does not, any more than my linking socks to cheese makes that linkage valuable.
Name Your Price for Gadgets on New 'Priceline for Tech' Site
Beta Testing a Hardware Startup
Valve announced this today: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/30/valves-first-non-game-...

I think the submitter got confused.
Awesome, so it sounds reasonably credible for a number of tasks. The twist is an interesting 'feature' in terms of using it structurally. Depending on feature size a killer app with 'true color' is to create a prototype consumer device at scale with the appearance of the actual device. That can certainly inform things like pocket usability, grip flexibility, finger kinematics, etc.

The demo video made it also look like it would be awesome for architectural visualization (buildings) and city planning.
> You can try and use a government fiat to legislate the market to behave a certain way, but at the end of the day, if those are at odds with the fundamental laws of economics and reality (ie, one's ability to copy information "for free"), you're playing a losing game from the start.

How do you quantify "for free"?

If we mean "at no cost to the taker," then it's equal to theft, which is obviously not much of a position to take. I'm guessing this isn't what you mean.

But if we mean "at no cost to the original holder," then that is not really true. There is no marginal cost for copying information, but he has already incurred a potentially very high fixed cost. Excluding that cost from our analysis of the situation leads to a distorted view of economics and reality.
"DRM is an attempt to force rivalry and excludability onto information"

And here I thought DRM was trying to make difficult the non-permitted sharing of the results of someone's hard work, for example music an artist created, or books an author wrote, or the years of work a team of actors, cinematographers, move score writers, directors, producers, makeup artists, animators, janitors and all other people that go into making a movie.

The result (the movie) may be easy to reproduce, without these protections, but the artists/etc deserve the money for their trade.

That said, DRM generally gets way the heck too much in the way of everything, and I would much rather a generally honest society where people want to support the artist so that they can continue doing what they love and continue entertaining. I think we live in a society like that in general, and the people that choose not to support the artist's work are just a tragedy of the commons biproduct that we'll never be able to stop -- nor should we try to, because efforts to the contrary just make it harder for paying customers.

But meh. Sorry, my nitpick is with "DRM is an attempt to force [...] onto information." because while technically accurate ('data is just a really big number'!) it's the idea behind the data that gives it worth
Looks like light of some kind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY3Ya__6BHw#t=183s
>Unfortunately, multipart upload is nearly impossible to implement as a web app

I am right now writing a library to do just that. I already have a prototype working, and we'll probably open source our library once it's reasonably tested. But perhaps you know something I dont... is there anything in particular that makes it "nearly impossible"?
When choosing an email address to use and entering it in a form, you should be conservative. When accepting an address you should be liberal.
What techniques would you suggest for determining that percentage ahead of time?
Ah, that's more interesting.
> And full screen mode for apps is much better than expanding a window to fit the screen.

Which doesn't work the way you expect if you have multiple monitors.
UltraViolet is supposed to be fixing this. Many Blu-rays that I buy now come with UV licenses.
How I proposed using a Chrome extension
If you're trying to optimize a registration process, you want to minimize the number of people you lose at each step. If someone gives you a bad email address, and then you try to send the activation link there, you've lost that registration. If you catch it when they submit the form then you've got a better shot at getting a complete registration from that user.
Deal With It: Attitude for Coders
I don't see much use for MULTICS but plan9 is a pretty neat OS and it would be nice to see more of its ideas incorporated into mainstream unix.

Especially its consistency is something worth having.
Amazon has been doing this for a few years in the US.

Bufferbox is actually only in Canada.

It's not a service I need, and definitely not one I'd pay extra for. I live in an apartment. The apartment office signs for and stores my packages.

If I lived in a house, in an area where people would steal the package left on my doorstep, then I might use something like this. It would have to be really convenient though.
While a useful feature, it's only remotely similar in that it keeps an incremental history of selected user folders, whereas Time Machine backups all files and gives you a 1:1 (file-level, as opposed to block-level, like dd/carbon-copy-cloner/ghost) image of your computer, including the OS.
You sound like a lazy developer who doesn't want to learn the proper way to protect against XSS and SQL injection. If you have this mentality, your code probably has similar vulnerabilities in pieces of data other than the email address.
Thanks @poof131 - I'd like to go deeper into algorithms / data manipulation / social network analysis (for my job), and also web programming using python (weekend reading).

I'm currently reading Python for Data Analysis but feel like I can read about how to use a library but it's hard to retain specific syntax use cases if I'm not using those libraries immediately / frequently.

One book I really like is Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do), which has some good examples on social network analysis.
Source code that powers Spaun the virtual brain
Just because people are used to something doesn't mean that the something is optimal, that no improvements can be made, or that a simplification isn't useful.
Thanks @tordf!
Everything you say is true, however I have my doubts that Treacherous Computing is the future.

Apple succeeded because (1) they practically created new markets and had no competition initially, (2) people treat these devices as appliances but only because they don't realize what these devices are able to do and (3) initially iOS was not a platform, so developers took it as a gift when it happened.

In the meantime however Android came and quickly surged in popularity. On most Android devices you can get root privileges really easy, by installing an app or something similar. It allows third-party sources for apps, it allows apps in Google Play that are banned in iTunes (e.g. call and sms blockers, battery savers), apps that work without avoiding your warranty, it doesn't need permissions from the careers to do tethering, it gives you access to the APN settings and Firefox is allowed, not to mention that it can be forked, being more open than Windows ever was.

The number one complaint I hear from people that own iPads is that iPads are more limited than PCs. And take for instance calls and sms blockers ... people with iPhones don't bitch about the lack of such functionality because they don't realize it is possible. I also remember fondly the day Apple banned Google Voice because it duplicated existing functionality.

People like to claim that Android is more popular because of the support it gets from careers. That's only half the story. The other half is that Android phones are more capable, simply because iOS is defective by design.

As always, the market will decide the future of computing. But Android versus iOS is like the PC versus Gaming Consoles. And if you remember, PCs won for gaming by a wide margin, pushing consoles like the Playstations into forever small niches.

You should also not underestimate the people's need for piracy. They don't need to pirate stuff on their iPads, because their iPads are treated as dumb devices. But take that capability away from their PCs and you'll see real voting with wallets. After all, the Internet was built for pirating porn ;-)
Google Testing New Google Image Search Design
Who said it was forbidden? Or that you hurt anyone's feelings? Your argument is less effective due to the words you used. That is what I said.
Yes, I understand that well. That doesn't conflict with anything I said unless you think that the crucial insight of the German packstation was to share boxes.
Yeah, only the dangerous part (remote attestation) died.
I have been involved in some ways with this as part of a large company and smaller ones since 1998, overhead and management of the process is a lot of time and money. Unless you are already setup to handle a lot of paperwork etc it is just more work than a startup can dedicate time to. I don't remember the number of man hours to do it, but it is significant, and as some others have already pointed out, the delay to get the person moving is generally pretty significant.

My 2 cents, until you are pretty well established it is a distraction from what a startup should be focused on, customers and revenue.
my experience w/stripe just adds to the pile of awesome. on a couple of occasions, i was in their support chatroom trading code snippets w/their engineers who were incredibly smart, responsive, and friendly.
One thing BufferBox does that this wouldn't cover is that they sign for your package if required.
To me the usability has suffered quite a bit with the update. Everything is a little further away in terms of how many clicks it takes to get to it. Until you show the sidebar that is. I'm glad to see the side bar now has color. But why is it off by default? Just for the sake of change? And why is the keyboard shortcut/menu item the only way to show it (i.e. UI is not discoverable)?

And why is the iTunes icon a musical note? iTunes is more about everything else but music. It's apps/books/video/podcasts/radio/TV/device syncing/music. Something like this would be much more appropriate:

http://wakaba556.deviantart.com/art/iTunes-replacement-icon-...
Ask HN: Google I'm feeling lucky button, how to click it?
Hi guys, i was wondering how to use i'm feeling lucky button on new google homepage where results are shown while you are typing ? :) :)
It's not necessarily installed by default, though. If your Linux system can read the battery with acpi, it will show up in /sys. Although the 'acpi' program is convenient, it adds another dependency. Also, if you run 'acpi' under strace, you'll see that it just opens up /sys/class/power_supply and parses files under that.
LoJack has you beat. According to Wikipedia, it was founded in 1978. :) However, magicJack (2007) might explain the recent popularity of the name.
That's the one thing keeping me off bitbucket is the fact that nobody else is there. Admittedly their pricing is better (especially wrt. private repos, something i'm still not ready to shell out cash for), but the interface seems to be a Github ripoff.

Github is quickly becoming the social network for coding - there's no reason to use an also-ran copycat who lacks the "social" part. (And this isn't to disparage Atlassian, they're one of my favorite companies!)
Thank you so much for the PDF, I still can't access the website for some reason. You've honestly made my day, thank you so much :)
Terrific news! Congratulations to the team. When I heard you present at YC alumni day, the concept and quality of execution was clearly among the best. Not surprised by this at all!
Chill Direct: A Farm System For Video Distribution
I'm going to have a blog post going through how to migrate sometime next week. You should subscribe ;)

PS I'm the author of this post.
Amazon and Bufferbox did the sensible thing from the start: one time use access codes.
> We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet.

I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me that SaaS is a business model that directly addresses the situation. Take a look at 37signals' apps, the current #1 video game League of Legends, GitHub, etc. None of them require DRM — they just don't give you anything you can meaningfully "steal." It's an extremely resilient business model, and I will bet you any sum of money you like that the industry will continue heading in the direction of services.
How does a github outtage cause you to go 'dead in the water'. You're still using git.
If you need to share code among devs, you could always use git-daemon[1].

[1]: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.h...
The paper: "Energy Efﬁcient GPS Sensing with Cloud Ofﬂoading"

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/172624/SenSys147-co-gps.p...
> How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability?

Used to be very unreliable. It's gotten better, but there are still issues once in a while. There was a big downtime mid-september (a good 3h of nothing): http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/09/19/post-mortem-on-our-avai... and there were a few issues e.g. yesterday due to a screwy deploy.

edit: checking the recent twitter stream, a few issues on the 28th, degraded performances on the 16th, broken newsfeeds on the 11th, brief network blip on the 5th, maintenance on September 29th, severe crash on September 19th, deploy issue on September 17th. Not sure you'll get much more reliability out of it compared to github. Though you could use one as a backup for the other one.
1.5 years of continuous GPS tracking with just 2AA batteries - opens up some scary possibilities.
Where exactly do you find a 'child face in sliced red onion' stock photo?
I dont like all the new fancy-schmancy stuff. These cities are going to end up looking like any other modern/western city anywhere. No character left. Is anyone looking out for historically significant buildings ?
Call for comments - RethinkDB wire protocol
Well yes, but I would consider that only a variation of option 1.
Ask HN:  Any Angels/VCs interested in a board gaming tech startup?
Over the summer I decided that it was time to try bootstrapping a company. It was slow going at first: designing the product, building the team, etc... But, over the past three months things have been accelerating quickly.

This week, out of the blue, we received an acquisition offer.

It's a good one, but, we're pre-launch and we really want to see what we can do outside of the confines of a more established company. If we're going to continue, it might be time to start exploring funding options.

We have a fantastic team composed of programmers, designers, and writers/videographers with strong ties to our industry.

Our tech team is already open sourcing parts of our framework and our media team has an audience of close to 100,000 for their board game review show/blog.

Does anyone know of an Angel or VC with a soft spot for modern board games?

Could you ask them to get in touch?

investingincardboard(a)gmail(dot)com
What problems do these ideas solve?

I suppose working with mentors could help students be better prepared to join the workforce, but students can already do that on their own by getting internships.

Classes could be self-paced, but then likely many students would lose the motivation to learn. People are strongly driven by competition and deadlines, two things schools excel at providing.

There already are internationally recognized assessments -- standardized tests. Though they are typically useless without a degree. It would be difficult to change this, but if you could then you might make colleges obsolete. Many people would not spend 4 years and $50,000 on a college degree if they could study for 6 months, take a test, and get the same job. But I don't think this could work. For example, even though we already have the GMAT, GRE, and MCAT, it's unlikely you will ever convince medical schools to let in students with an MCAT and no undergraduate degree. And if an employer is choosing between someone with a perfect GMAT and no undergrad, and a Stanford graduate with a mediocre GMAT, the choice will likely be in favor of the Stanford grad. I don't think this would change even if you made the test more comprehensive and difficult.

Not being graded: this may increase students' intrinsic motivation to learn, but it also may decrease their motivation, since there would be no penalty for not learning the material. But if you maintain that students must take an internationally recognized test at the end, then test-taking abilities will still be measured, so you're just playing with motivation here and not really changing much.

These ideas are interesting, but even if schools enacted them, what great improvements would they bring to our society?
I played it through a couple times and then decompiled the flash using the free demo of Sothink. The secret word is (spoiler, use ROT13) "FABJ". Unfortunately, it's just a treasure not a substitute for getting all the parchments...
The Germans are the leading industrial nation of the world, so it's not surprising that for a startup in this field US is the copy-cat.

P.S. I'm defining industrial as 'the manipulation and enrichment of physical goods' for the purpose of this comment.
I agree that Germany is not all about copycats. Thanks to the Samwers and others this perception was created. If you visit places like Silicon Valley and say you're from Germany you can be sure to find someone who will "make a joke" about Germany and startup copycats.

What irritates me is that nobody seems to point out these reverse cases, where others copy German innovation/ideas.

Also I'm wondering why these positive German examples didn't really scale internationally? Why didn't DHL roll out Packstation in the US? (Big company policies and lack of innovation?) Why has Mitfahrgelegenheit/Carpooling needed almost 8 years to launch in Europe? Why hasn't it launched in the US?

Just really wondering about the different perception and mindsets of US and German startups...
One of Ars' editors, Aurich, is a serious photoshop wizard. He's known for some pretty witty headline images.
just happens to also be used for preserving privacy

As if there were no correlation between that and the use of the service for distributing CP. I'm sorry, but I find it hard to get exercised about the invasion of privacy aspect, considering much greater invasions of both person and privacy that take place in the manufacture of child pornography. Liberty does not subsist in the oppression of others.
Tradition is why it's still called iTunes and still has a music note for an icon, which is surprising given how Apple is pretty unsentimental about all of its products.