skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't know whether this fits, but here's something I'd like from the power system: Automated battery maintenance. I'm plugged in, a lot, and I forget to / blow off periodically cycling my battery. (Admittedly, maybe I'm unusual / an edge case, in this, and my thoughts here are of little general value.)

I'd like a power system that can be made to periodically and contextually select to run from battery, even while plugged in, so that the battery can be cycled in a manner that maintains its capacity.

So, when, every some weeks, I do need to run from battery, it's still in decent shape. Without my having to manually ensure this on an ongoing basis.

I doubt its' a priority for Bunnie, but what the heck, I'll throw the idea out there. When else do I have even a chance of having any input into a laptop's design?

Oh, and thank goodness for an(other) open alternative to "secure boot" (maybe nice in principle, but very potentially malicious in current execution).
New front gearbox design for bicycle
More info: http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/crank-based-gearbox-in-development-35979/

http://www.efneo.com/how-efneo-gearbox-works/
I imagine that Facebook messenger will be the go-to for communication soon. They have email, free instant messaging, and VOIP is in the pipeline. There's a lot of switches for voip_p2p in their internal Gating system.

From Messenger.app:

"%@ is calling|Message notifying of an incoming call. First parameter is the name of the caller" = "%1$@ is calling";

"%@ is in another call|End call message notifying caller that callee is unavailable. First parameter is the name of the callee" = "%1$@ is in another call";

I found this the most interesting, suggesting they'll allow free or paid calls to traditional phone numbers over their VOIP service:

"Call %@|action sheet option for calling a phone number" = "Call %1$@";
I think (note: I am not a cutting-edge theoretical physicist) that the brain would work fine against both of these effects.

First, I'm not sure it's possible for the brain to be half-way across an event horizon. When an in-falling object nears the event horizon, the horizon "dimples" in response to the changing gravitational field caused by the object's mass.

Second, once inside the horizon, it is true that messages cannot be sent opposite the direction of the singularity. However, your entire brain is moving toward the singularity, and therefore neural communication does not require messages to be sent away from the singularity.

>Things past the event horizon should be able to travel in the direction of it, though they will always turn back before actually crossing it.

According to the best of my understanding, if you're inside the event horizon, every direction you look leads to singularity. There are no paths away from the singularity.
If Hacker News stays the same, it may be a contender in a few years. It's starting to look like the Craigslist of social news sites.
Just for the record, French laws about "droits d'auteurs" and quotations allow you to quote any text under "droits d'auteur" as long as it remains a quotation (the definition of which is vague, and varies from one case of "jurisprudence" to another, but 300 words is generally considered reasonable)

This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".
A letter to YouTube
Google to tweak practices to end search probe
Yet throwing money at sth does not make him an expert. Neuroscience is growing by leaps and bounds, ask any neuroscientist you know. It is indeed peculiar that he has a pessimistic view of it, but i would bet the best neuroscientists do not share that view.
Patio11, what percent conversion optimization do you think you could gain them with a few strategic A/B tests?
Another article about that system: http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/crank-based-gearbox-in...
Whether it's interesting or not to someone - is their choice. It's interesting for me as a historical example.
For some reason I like this page of a local group of the german party SPD: http://www.spd-engenhahn.de/
I'm driven the desire to be the best at what I do. I get this drive from my dad, who owned a plumbing company. He always told me that he obviously didn't originate the concept of plumbing, so he can't take pride in inventing it, but he took a lot of pride in being the best.

The service that I'm offering is only a tiny bit unique but I take pride in my execution. I don't think that I could feel this level of satisfaction while working for a boss.
I was wondering this - I 've been following this blog but have been lazy at reading up on his background. I found his posts on the manufacturing/electronics culture/subculture around Shenzhen fascinating...

not to mention the regular posts on odd circuit boards....
Walmart puts the iPhone 5 on sale at $127. Does this mean sales are slowing?
Odd choice of categorization. Subscription implies that if you're not paying you don't get access, in contrast to (recurring) donations where it's optional and more of a charity.
Roger Ebert on how the press reports mass killings
Perhaps, but then it was written by the owner of the company. She would probably consider my attempts to identify and cut fabric just as poor :)
OK it's not up to professional standards, but perhaps the target audience doesn't care?
Not all your brain would be the same distance from the singularity. So when trying to send a signal from a nearer part to a farther part, you are prevented. The brain cannot function.
You're right, there are very real barriers to this happening, and I agree that the author of the article may not have considered them all, but barriers aren't always insurmountable.

(1) basically reduces to having the user install client software (which would handle key management, etc). Not easy (and complicated by the fact that existing software sucks) but not impossible.

(2) is probably the biggest challenge. The solution requires a server which can manage keys without being able to read them. It does reduce the strength of the system to a strong passphrase or series of passphrases (and there are ways of making the UX for this less horrible than it currently is in most places) but that's still way better than anything we have right now--it essentially reduces the attack vectors available to someone with root access to the server to those available to everyone on the internet for any other service right now (ie. brute force).

(3) I agree, no one will ever convince Google to encrypt Gmail. Search would still work for meta information though (to/from/subject lines) which is good enough for most situations. The client would be able to perform deeper searches within a particular date range by decrypting messages in that range should it be necessary.

So yeah, the world of encrypted email already exists but it sucks. Yes, making it easier involves reducing security somewhat (not even close to "rendering it useless") but it also provides a level of privacy that should have been expected from the get-go. Nobody should be able to run a search on every word I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me. The fact that nobody outside the crypto-nerd community uses existing client-side encryption has more to do with the poor usability of existing solutions and general (changing) assumptions about the privacy of email than anything to do with police warrants.
> Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, because their incentives lie with advertisers rather than with users.

Also I'm pretty sure search would suck with encryption, which is easily the primary draw of GMail for many people.
Looks like RMS is very close to being able to upgrade his laptop.
Another alternative is FTCoreText ( https://github.com/FuerteInternational/FTCoreText ), which I've had good experience with. Like AttributedMarkdown or Slash, you define NSAttributedString text styles in code. But there are (I believe) two differences which might be significant advantages in some cases.

First, FTCoreText doesn't predefine the tag vocabulary. You just associate your styles with tag names you define, and write your text in a pseudo-XML syntax using those tags. This is good for defining tags with semantics suited to your particular domain.

Second, FTCoreText doesn't use UIKit's NSAttributedString attributes. It uses the more powerful CoreText NSAttributedString attributes, which have been present since iOS5 at least. They are more powerful in one important way: only the CoreText string attributes support defining tab stops. This might seem like an irrelevant corner case, except that (as far as I know) this is the only way to properly define correct text indentation of text in bulleted list items.
Unbelievable, especially considering that it is going to be short lived. Similar but more elaborate - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga5s_qYgJS8 They destroy it at the end :(
My first question is how much does this cost? I would make an effort to have very clear pricing.

Perhaps if you had a standard sized bag that you provided: 1 bag = $X, wash, dry, iron, fold. Dry cleaning extra.
You couldn't search for the answer?

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

It was recently announced that Ray Kurzweil will be joining Google and this is where the discussions stem from.
Just for reference, there's an example of CPython compiled to JavaScript using Emscripten running in the browser at http://syntensity.com/static/python.html
No. You can imagine the fabric of space being dragged into the black hole faster than the speed of light. Since nothing within spacetime can move faster than that, no signals can ever leave the event horizon.

It's like a swimmer going over a waterfall. The water is like spacetime being dragged towards the black hole, and the swimmer is an object moving within spacetime. If the waterfall is falling faster than the person can possibly swim, the person can never get back up the waterfall.

For more info on this "river model" of spacetime, see:

http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/waterfall.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0411060

Relatedly: Since spacetime can "flow" faster than the speed of light, you might think this allows FTL travel. Indeed, this idea is called the "Alcubierre drive".
Someone needs to invent a Firefox or Chrome addon that solves this problem.

Here's how I see it working. You get a message on Gmail, and it looks like this:

This message is encrypted with FooAddon.
To view it, copy and paste the encrypted message
to a FooAddon tab.

----FOOADDON MESSAGE START
...a bunch of base64-encoded binary data...
----FOOADDON MESSAGE END

You paste that into the addon's tab and it uses your private key to decrypt and show the message.

To send, you select the recipient's public key in a FooAddon tab and type your message there, then click Encrypt. It gives you something like the above which you then copy and paste back into Gmail.

Clumsy, yes, but you'd have a working proof-of-concept that would allow you to send and receive encrypted messages through any website with a text field without leaving the browser.

The security implications of being able to type a secure message directly in Gmail and be sure Google isn't reading it with JavaScript are no doubt much more complicated.
At Thumbtack we have 2 main repositories, our PHP repo and our Python repo. Our python repo was built from the group up and we use it for lots of things, in fact I think it is larger than our PHP repo. However, our core website is written in PHP, and will always be written in PHP for the reason that is always has been. Had I been a co-founder and been a part of making that decision I might have made a different one, but I wasn't and it doesn't matter. Pragmatic decision making is the name of the game.

I admit that PHP doesn't have the best internal interfaces, however convenience functions with a whatever interface you want go a long way.

I like sets in python, well we have tt_set() in PHP with exactly the same interface.

I like defaultdicts in python, we have tt_default_dict() with the same interface.

I like list.get() in python, we have tt_array_get() in PHP.

I like namedtuples() in python, we have a NamedTuple() class in PHP which provides similar functionality (this one is not perfect though, a little more verbose to instantiate in PHP).

I like string.startswith(), string.endswith(), and string slicing in python, we have tt_str_startswith(), tt_str_endswith(), tt_str_slice().

I like csv.DictReader() in python, we have CsvUtils/DictReader() in PHP.

At the end of the day though, PHP is much more similar to Python than it is different, regardless of any of these convenience functions and wrappers. Potentially investing a significant amount of effort to switch something from one to the other strikes me as a very poor investment.
> Complete ignorant question: there is always the discussion of "falling" in to a black hole, but could it be possible to "hang" something from outside the event horizont?(given an infinitely strong and quite long wire).

It's a good question, because it exposes some subtle assumptions being made.

The string breaks, because you cannot have an infinitely strong wire in a universe that allows black holes. If we could have such a wire, black holes would not be formed, since the wire's material would be able to resist being crushed into a black hole. Therefore collapsing stars would compress into this material rather than into black holes, and there would be no black holes.

Once inside the event horizon, every path leads to the singularity. You cannot get further away from it, and you cannot orbit it (or otherwise keep distance constant).
There of tons of PC games that with a bit of porting (and adding controller support) can be re-released and re-sold to the console gamers.

This isn't really true, either on the porting end or the sell-to-console-gamers end. Porting most PC games to Linux is a nontrivial undertaking (because, yeah, most big developers still use Direct3D and rewrite for the PS3 using PSGL--the PS3 gets half-assed and it usually shows).

Then you have to take into account the nearly-guaranteed hardware problem: for it to be competitive with the next generation of consoles it's going to end up specced around or worse than the XBox Next or the PS4 (and we already know what those look like.
What's the difference between this and the multitude of services already on the web, such as:

http://crackstation.net/

and many more?
Obligatory "not always an option" response to your obligatory "PHP sucks, use something else" response.
Again, I really recommend that you read The Singularity is Near before arguing against it (actually not sure if you are arguing against it anymore). But one of the topics there is a long argument on how the pace of change is increasing.

(Eg compare the difference in life between someone born in the 13th century to someone born in the 14th century - not much of a difference. But compare how life have changed in just the last 50 years).
> PHP is much more similar to Python than it is different

Can you elaborate on this? Compared to what?
Wine has a pretty good DirectX to OpenGL translation layer. It could be leveraged to provide this. Many games on Steam run quite well on top of Wine, and some of the OSX games available on Steam already use it.
Automatic decryption would require uploading a copy of the recipient's private key to Gmail, which rather defeats the purpose of end-to-end encryption.

For protecting mail in transit, SMTP TLS is just as secure and much easier to deploy.
A loud, messy, expensive, most likely traceable gun would be the worst way to kill someone.
> Not all your brain would be the same distance from the singularity.

True, but you are not standing still. You are moving. Accelerating, in fact. No messages need to be sent away from the event horizon for the brain to work.
Exchange truly and completely blows GMail out of the water in enterprise-quality mail services. Let's not kid ourselves. Gmail is good for consumers, but it has nowhere near the enterprise-level configuration and management options needed to compete even slightly with Exchange on a big, enterprise scale.
Don't quite understand why Google drafts would be thought safer than Google email (between Google addresses). Aren't both sent via (technically unsafe) https and stored on some google disk somewhere?
MVLP - Minimum Viable Landing Page
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/enigmail/
I agree that search is pretty nice to have, but most of the time I find myself searching for "messages from so-and-so" or "that email I wrote about X" which is still searchable after encryption (subject fields remain unencrypted, and you obviously also have to/from/date/time). For deeper searches, a client could decrypt and search a smaller time span (messages to X last week containing Y).

It's still a trade-off, but I don't think it's a deal-breaker at all. I also think we overestimate how much non-geeks know about search features in GMail.
Thanks to all for the feedback - massive spike in traffic, and over 100 users signed up in the couple of hours since we pushed the site update :-)

More to come soon, and you can follow us @writelatex for the latest.
Design feedback:

- Drop the wood texture. A flat (or very subtle gradient) white or blue might go better here.
- That inset drop shadow needs to go or be made much more subtle.
- Never add hover states to text blocks that aren't linked.
- Request an invite is apparently a button, but isn't styled like one. The horizontal padding should only be 2 to 4 times the vertical padding.
- Drop the blue horizontal bar under the header/menu
- Add an about page. Why should I give my email address to spammers (who else would be harvesting email addresses anonymously?)

I know you did this half-assed just to offload some of the risk to your potential customers (if time is wasted by this thing not taking off, at least it was their time wasted and not yours), but that's bullshit silicon valley MVP wankery and won't get you ahead of the curve.

This business WILL take off. There IS demand for it. However, you won't be the one making the money if you don't put everything into it now. First impressions count.
I don't think that post makes the argument you're objecting to. The author was just noting that advocacy for the GPL's version of "software freedom" has been attacked in the past by Microsoft and in the present by Canonical using oddly symmetrical language.
It might be easier to just have the add-on work with the on-screen HTML directly.
I use EditPlus and Alt Tab to a cmd window. Certainly not an IDE, but close enough for me. For C++ I either use CodeBlocks or VC10. Much of my class code is generated from document/specification by a Perl script. This works nicely for either IDE given the necessary command line switches.
For software engineering, the "job offers" part still holds up.
If I send you an e-mail, it exists in at least two places on Google's servers, and on whatever devices you've used to read and send the message.
Not strictly how it is. Here's what I saw: They were preparing the specifications before the government action. I worked for an organisation which was working with them at the time and they were pushing drafts of their documentation to us - the same ones you see on the Open Specification Promise.

To be honest, the government action halted this process because they had to get a shit load of legal people involved.

I think Microsoft has two camps inside. Those who really are technology focused and the marketing and management team. The latter are the ones doing all the damage. The technology people I genuinely feel sorry for.
I want the chance to do things right. So I guess "autonomy", but it's more than that. Dare I call it "revenge"?

My career started with six years in a legacy development ghetto. I started looking for work in the tail end of the dot-com crash, and the only thing I found after months of searching was a position doing Pick database development. It was a mistake to take that job, but I really wanted to get out of my parents' house. Pick developers are an interesting breed, like a cross between mainframe die-hards and ravenous DBAs. And here I was, using things like "functions" and "templates" in my code like some young thing who just wants to jump on the latest trends.

One shop had an middleware app that put a web-based GUI on top of the Pick database. I got called into my boss's office and told to stop putting &nbsp; in my pages because it confused the other developers. At another job, the sysadmin refused to install risky open source things like CURL or wget on the server, and Pick had sockets by then but no HTTP library, so had to write my own HTTP client in PickBASIC so we could talk to a partner's API. It was like being stuck in the 60s, only without the drugs. I was writing green-screen apps...in 2005!

Anyway, the point of all this is that my resume was tainted at that point. I could quote Stroustrup with my eyes closed, but nobody would bring me in for an interview for anything other than Pick because that's all my "professional experience" entailed. That changed when I put $1000 of my own money on the line and got Java certified.

My first Java job quickly morphed into a PHP job, and now I've been in that world for seven years. There's lots of cowboy coders slinging PHP, you know. Don't know if anyone's ever pointed that out on HN at all. Version control, classes, prepared queries, frameworks...I've been fighting uphill battles over those for years. Yes, prepared queries were controversial because they're "slow"!

Now that my wife is out of school, I finally have the chance to go & do things my way. I'm giving freelancing a try. I set up my own Git server the other day. I do commits every time I'm done implementing a feature, and it's so damn satisfying -- almost orgasmic after nagging my co-workers for years. I develop on my laptop, not on the production server. I write clean, well-documented code. I use templates to keep HTML out of my code. I'm branching out into Ruby on Rails for a side project and probably some of my client work.

It's stressful as hell, but at least I'm making things I can be proud of, and the product of my work reflects well on me as a developer. I'm actually enjoying programming again.
Fred Wilson explains in his blog post,

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/11/mba-mondays-the-revenue-mode...

that he wanted this "final" version to be edited by invitation only and wasn't sure how to make the change to the original version.
Since you missed it, the key point of my proposal was that it works:

> through any website with a text field

> without leaving the browser
Solo, Piano: a short film about a piano awaiting its fate.
Only what you're suggesting isn't actually battery maintenance. In fact, it will decrease the capacity of your battery (by as much as a normal drain-recharge cycle of course).

Cycling the battery will however appear to improve the capacity by recalibrating the internal circuitry. That's still somewhat useful to a user, but much less than battery maintenance would be.

PS: From what I understand this only applies to modern Li-Ion batteries, if you're using different battery technology your mileage may vary. Some battery technologies do benefit from being periodically cycled.
Leveraging the GPU to accelerate the Linux kernel