skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As others have pointed out, it's the noisiness of the compass sensor itself that's the real problem - this isn't something that can be fixed in UI.

Assuming you're pointing the device in the direction of travel, you can move forwards and combine the new position information to reduce this noise - I believe Google Maps does this on Android.

One could possibly envisage also using data from the phone's camera and corresponding it to street view images which (presumably) all have a known direction. There would be issues with the amount of data being sent up to Google to do this and the experience would be a bit wacky as you'd have to point your phone up (or at least horizontally, assuming you weren't surrounded by pedestrians etc) and maybe scan it around a bit...

You've got me thinking about Google Maps in general though. A feature I'd love to see is a map layer for mobile network coverage. I'm taking a trip this weekend somewhere quite rural and would like to try out the turn-by-turn directions, and it would be good to know ahead of time if some cruicial point in the route simply isn't covered by a signal - you never know until it's too late! They could perhaps combine this with the routing algorithm to offer you an alternate route where you don't have to make a turn in a no-reception area. When caching is implemented further down the line this could be used to provide a sensible 'minimal caching' option that just stores the bits you won't be able to receive on the road.
I wouldn't go that far, my ex's 3GS struggled when upgraded to iOS 5, and complaints about that were widespread.
Some of these issues seem like they could be addressed by in-house people at Reddit better than people on the outside - and I'm pretty sure they're already doing some stuff. One could identify clusters of users who 1) usually only vote for one another's stuff, 2) Vote up things most users vote down, and 3) Link mostly to 'bad' domains and rarely comment. These users could then be screened by hand, and hellbanned. This is the sort of thing that I would start with aberrant voting data though - and that is probably not public for the malicious bots.
The winner-take-all effect is not stronger than ever. I challenge you to prove to me that somebody has access to all the information and I don't. I grew up in the middle of nowhere and I know the world is at my doorstep now.

Moreover, I can actually find them and communicate with them now - growing up, I simply couldn't. I was a science-fiction fan and didn't even know there was such a thing as fandom. Now, almost automatically, I'm a Facebook friend with one of my early favorite authors (becoming an actual friend with time), I talk to publishers and fellow fans on a regular basis - they exist. They are part of my community. There is no winner-take-all effect at all, and in fact, I think I probably don't even know what you mean by it.

The income disparity simply won't matter. Money won't matter (much). Clearly it'll matter if you want to travel, for example, or buy something you can't get locally - but there will be a whole lot more available locally.
Both! Any and all contributions are more than welcome. I don't know what the eff I'm doing. This works great for me, but if I can make it better for everyone else I'm all about that. I'll continue to work hard on this until it's the best it can be.
The new Google Maps app for iOS is also vector-based.
Does Amazon even really want to sell the Kindle Fire? Bezos admitted that they make little to nothing on the hardware sales. It's just a window into their ecosystem; one that I'd be happy to patronize if it were completely platform agnostic.
I still think it's by far the best "here's a band, give me more like it" music suggester. Some how it understands the essence of the band I love and finds lots of bands that are just as good. And many of those bands are so obscure I don't know how I would have found them otherwise.
Why does it 11 paragraphs repeating himself about how important this idea is? I thought this was some set-up for a joke in which he never tells us about the thermostat.
Yup. I was very confused for a minute there.
Yeah. Although the thing that model warns is that even if everybody was perfect on merit - smart, educated, adaptable, personable, hard working and lucky - only the same percentage of them will rise. All merit gives you in this rat race is first call on the opportunity to rise.

Of course this is an over-simplified model. In real life the stratification of society is a bit flexible. A great many people could rise to CEO without saturating the demand. But by no means everybody.
In the past I've worked on a number of mobile projects for very large organizations (e.g., major sports organizations) that have restricted certain video streams based on the screen size of the device.

In most of these cases, it was due to contracts that were made 5-10+ years ago that gave some company the exclusive rights to their video on various size screens (e.g., 'screens less than 5" diagonally'), or even TV/'Not TV'. Sometimes it was even split up between companies across 3 or 4 different ranges of screen sizes.

In some cases, we had to build the apps to use Company A video streams on iPhones, and Company B streams on iPads. To make things worse (at least for the consumer), sometimes the app was allowed to AirPlay from the iPad but not from the iPhone, or even not at all, because of these contracts.
I think this is the end part of the "Emergency Egress System" which included a slide-wire basket from the top of the vehicle support structure/gantry.

Some of the images at http://history.nasa.gov/ap10fj/as10-image-library.htm do look a lot like the arched solid concrete room entrances, and there are a few of the wire system as well.

I recall (on HN I think) a while back there was an article about the slide part of the system and the crazy specifications required to attain some level of plausible survivability.

Edit: some more images at http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum40/HTML/000164.html including the armoured personnel carrier as a last hope contingency.

Edit 2: Found it! http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/how_t...
> money is of secondary or tertiary importance here

no, the CEO has a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders to increase the market value of the company. If that is through implementing better features then fine, but don't think for a second they would do it for the "greater good" or some principled and un-business like reason.

Things evolve over time, you have to give it a bit of running room to see how things shape up before you simply label it a failure. Besides, competition breeds innovation and innovation is great for the consumers.
1/9801 - Look the decimal
That's great. Focusing on specific MSFT technologies or frameworks is a waste of time. For one, they're not very good. And two, you never know how soon it'll be deprecated.

On the other hand, C# the language is not terrible.
I guess this article shows that if you introduce a subtly-wrong axiom (copyright law) into a formal system (USA law) you can logically get any two propositions to imply each other.
Didn't you read anything about how the British are imitating the Americans and installing microphones and cameras in EVERY lamp post? Google around.
Thanks!

PacktLib is their online repository of titles, similar to Safari Books Online - http://packtlib.packtpub.com/
Skynet is the name of a military (leased by them, anyway) satellite communications network used (amongst other things, I believe) to remotely control drones around the world. A naming choice that shows its owners, whilst being engaged in a deadly serious business, aren't completely without a sense of humour...
For sure. I do work mainly on backend dev, and the roots-rails and roots-express plugins help me out a decent amount. Roots specifically is targeted to front-end though. If you have any suggestions on how to tie this together nicely with backend stuff I'd be more than happy to hear it though!

My biggest thing right now is getting the livereload to work with rails, specifically through pow. I'm sure there's a way to do it, just have to figure it out...
4chan, like HN, is also plagued by spammy posts, just something to note about those numbers.
Free testing accounts for Open Source Projects
Ask HN: How do I stop spam registrations?
Hi All,

For the last few days, I have had an increased number of spam registrations at my website domcop.com. Registrations are being made with fake email addresses. I use Google Apps SMTP to send email from the server and all these emails have bounced back with the error "rejected by the recipient domain". They all come from unique ip addresses and are being submitted manually. I can't figure out why someone would do this. They don't get access to the site without confirmation of the email addresses.

Anyone else out there have this issue. Is there anything I can do to stop them? I can't quite figure out how this benefits anyone - even my competition. Am I missing something?

Thank you for your time
The odds that you've read the text of the NDAA based on this comment: zero.
I was not aware, but I think this is ok. This roots is a vastly different tool that will appeal to a very different audience : )
Okay, we're going to test this tomorrow
I will add to that - use FB ads just for retargeting, because it is relatively cheaper, and you know these are interested users.
There is a cool YC startup https://www.perfectaudience.com/ that does just that.
I would be interested to see the author's thoughts on Lua.js, translating Lua into semi-equivalent JavaScript:

https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js

Or is this more of an educational than practical workshop?
From your second link:

On February 2, warning lights on a radiation warning system failed due to
previous software modifications to the fail-safe system. It was discovered
that no records of the revisions to the software were ever required or
maintained, so the direct cause of the malfunction was unclear.

I have no words.
What Fred Wilson and the VCs don’t get about advertising
I'm saying that the local police in China can, on a whim, send you to a labor camp for 1-3 years, and that even after "reforms", the hearings that spring you from labor camps take longer than 1-3 years.

And I'm saying that the police in the US can't.

Equating civil liberties in the US with those of China make you, prima facie, a nutjob.
Thanks!

Mimosa seems less opinionated, supports everything. Has modules. Ugly website.

Brunch seems less opinionated, supports everything. Has skeletons, plugin API. Nice website.

Grunt seems like the roll-your-own option and is probably more well supported than the others...?
I would happily carry a candy bar-sized object that connects wirelessly to the map app on my phone and haptically let's me know when it's pointed in the right direction. This would mean that: 1) A better compass can be used and 2) I don't have to look down at my phone.
Single Page Web Applications, Javascript and the Proliferation of APIs
I had assumed people just went to U Chicago for the naked parties.
Funding startups that rely on advertising
You really do enjoy having lots of people watch your sex tapes, or know about your financial situation or about how you and your parents haven't been talking for so many years or knowing that your girlfriend/wife dated and slept with crowd of men before meeting you, huh?
The British have been a surveillance society with cameras everywhere, but it's nothing they copied from America.
And so would their most valuable revenue streams. Until more people cut the cable there's just not going to be a way for any service to approach TPB's breadth.
Reads sort of like one of those intentionally contrarian Slate articles.
This is fantastic! This tool is actually perfect for someone like me who doesn't feel nearly as comfortable with front-end development. I always have to do a lot of playing around with HTML and CSS. Now I can finally give my F5 key a break.
"Like I said, it would take someone incredibly egotistical [...] to suggest artificial intelligence isn't possible..."

There is a difference between a strong AI position and the statement that such an intelligence would be qualitatively different than currently operating, natural intelligence, and a further one between that and the statement that such an intelligence would be quantitatively better (whatever that means), which is the "singularity" as far as I can tell.
I imagine it is the problem endemic to the culture of some languages, where tons of clunky boilerplate is built around a task which can be done much simpler, so that most of the code is about some contentious, cargo-cult methodology or dogma rather than the problem that is being solved.

If you were writing a virtual guestbook for a company which has many factories, you would have an excellent reason for having objects with names like FactoryVisitor.
I agree that goverment funding things can be effective.

I have more of a problem with direct muddling like saving firm A or B, implementing ristrictions on trade, telling people what they can buy and what they cant buy. These things do not have to be discarded because of econmic reasing, these things have to be discard since the are plainly just goverment helping some people on the cost of others or just restring what people would want to do and are rational enougth to do.

I have some things I want to add to what you said. First and most importend is that you dont know what would have been devloped if people where taxed X% less instead of the goverment investing it. Second I think meassure what R&D is in a economy is very hard to say. Many thing just get evolutionarly better and that does not have to happen in R&D.

Third I would say that goverment funding universitys and things like that is something diffrent from a goverment burocracy. The universitys have other insentive to prudce good results, so do the comanys competing for grants. So I do think that goverment spending on reasearch is one of the best things goverments does.
If you have $500/month to spend you could also get equivalent managed PHP hosting (that's all this is) from many other providers like RackSpace Cloud, etc. with spare money left over for an update service like ManageWP.
Don't postal workers have a significant union, government-grade pension and benefits, and so forth?

I would wager that this worker was earning much more than minimum wage, as well as overtime for >8h days.
A tv is also for consumption only, and costs about the same. I prefer the content available for consumption on the Internet to the content available on tv, so this makes it easier to justify the purchase of a tablet than a tv...
The Man Looking to Turn Samsung into a Silicon Valley Trendsetter
The vital small print from the article: "they are expected to meet again early Thursday morning (local time), and will need to have the resolution finalized, if they decide to go further, before the conference concludes on Friday."

So it will be interesting how this resolution voting process develops.
You're right, but I was more using Hayek as an example.

A better example would be the proposed increase on capital gains/investment tax. Almost all economists, regardless of ideology, would agree that this will certainly be detrimental. And yet we continue to see "Professors" and "Analysts" explain how sticking it to the rich will solve everyones problems... through science!
Yeah I posted the link. (shameless self plug) the desk in that room is admittedly pretty small, but we have better desk space for about 8 people to work at throughout the living room and side room (although the city will only let us have up to 5 ppl).
I will admit that this is a rather opinionated framework. I'm kind of shooting for the apple philosophy - reduce flexibility for a lighter and more beautiful product. I've worked with a lot of compiled languages and for me, these are the cleanest and easiest to work with. I did try to build in a bit of flex though with the plugin interface and the fact that it compiles html, css, js, and ejs in addition out of the box.
We are losing the Internet as we know it
I've seen an APK for Amazon Instant Videos floating around the XDA forums. It's too buggy to be truly usable on anything but a Kindle Fire but it's definitely a stand-alone app. If you've rooted your Fire, you'll see it sits in your app drawer like any other app.
I disagree, Google's long term play isn't to "own" a platform and have everyone live in it (a la apple/microsoft). Google is an internet company and it's overall strategy is to have everyone on the internet. Because if you are on the internet, chances are you will use a Google product (by choice).

Google doesn't care about iphone vs android. Google only cares that you are using the internet. An iphone/ipad is an expensive device for well off people. Androids don't have to be and less expensive products broadens the market. A market which when broader, is going to be owned by Google.

Making google maps a iOS product only encourages more people to use the internet and thus google.
I was thinking about a similar idea today, why isn't navigation done in Street View??? So many times I've driven past a turning because I've not been sure if that's the right one.

If Street View was used for directions, then this guys problems would be solved because he could pick out the landmarks
Something that seems counter-intuitive given the usual headlines is that, since the end of the Great African War, we now live in the most peaceful time in all of human history. There are no major wars in the entire world. That is pretty remarkable.
I'd recommend Xenophon's Anabasis.
Since they're the ones that control the taxis, I don't see why they wouldn't have a say in the matter.
Some people just can't stand the truth and downvote...
With the Israel attacks and this maybe the person of the year should be "Anonymous"
You lost me on this one...

The amazing breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of the world’s escalating population from one billion to seven billion over the last two centuries we live in an age of energy abundance.

Well hell let's all go buy Hummers and crank up the heat!
Open Sauce: Free unlimited testing for open source projects
By the same token, stating that Apple will never catch them is pretty weak too. in fact this whole line of thinking is pretty weak. It really is a school yard "my dad is bigger than your dad..." style of reasoning.
I've driven thousands of miles via android TbT navigation and surely for many of those i was out of signal. But because of the way it gets a complete direction list at the beginning it seems to never run out of things to say. I think this is an issue that's already been solved for most people's use cases.
It's probably less bad than burning massive amounts of coal. In the same way that moderate poverty is less bad than extreme poverty and dying from cancer is less bad than dying from childhood AIDS, this represents a form of progress.
The onscreen keyboard? Yes, if you want to create textual content on the iPad you really do need to use a bluetooth keyboard.

Whether you prefer an iPad + keyboard to an all-in-one MacBook Air is a different matter, of course!
Exactly my dilemma. And Roku doesn't play YouTube.
Really? I'm not sure I buy that. B-tree traversal in real world cases is virtually always going to be I/O or memory bandwidth bound. That's just not going to be sensitive to the handful of cycles you save except in the case of tiny directories that are already in L1/L2 cache. But there, you're paying the up-front cost of hashing the input file name as "extra" and it's not even clear to me you'd save anything overall.

Basically, this just smells like a premature optimization to me. If it were my project and lacked the hashing feature, and someone wanted to add it, I'd really want to see some numbers before accepting it.
Ah yes, black comedy then. I'm referring to the general feeling of futility from someone who has no ability to change the situation from afar.

Even still, most jokes from 4Chan or South Park are probably not the best examples of what I'm trying to convey, lazy snark when some consciousness and concern is required for the usage I'm suggesting.
Who knows for how long that will be true though: http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294569/exclusive-amazon-ph...
I have no idea if the author describes "friedman's thermostat" correctly, but to say that Economists are unaware of the phenomenon he describes is beyond absurd (disclosure: I'm an Economist!).

There's another way to find the relationship between the gas pedal, slope, and speed that the author did not mention (but is somewhat related to some of his suggestions): write down a model of the driver that assumes he or she uses the gas pedal to try to keep speed constant:

E_{t-1} speed(gas_t, slope_t, parameters) = const (eq1)

where E_{t-1} is the conditional expectation of the period-t term, given the information available in period t-1. Maybe speed should be nonparametric, but that will introduce some new problems in estimation; maybe you know enough about physics to write down a parametric formula for speed; whatever, the exact details of speed(.,.) are kind of beside the point for the author's argument.

Now,

speed(gas_t, slope_t, parameters) - E_{t-1} speed(gas_t, slope_t, parameters) (eq2)

is a martingale difference sequence when "parameters" is set to their true value, so the sequence equals zero in expectation for all t, assuming the model is true, and that can be the basis for estimation through, say, Generalized Method of Moments. Because combining (eq1) and (eq2) gives us

E speed(gas_t, slope_t, parameters) = const,

so you can estimate the parameters as

\hat parameters = argmin (average_over_t speed(gas_t, slope_t, parameters) - const)^2

Everything I laid out is an extreme simplification of the DOMINANT STRATEGY in applied macro (with, in all likelihood, some errors due to sloppiness). Now, for any realistic economy, it's going to be hard as hell to write down a sensible formula for "speed(.,.,.)" and since there aren't that many years since WWII (which is kind of seen as the beginning of the "modern" economy) there isn't a lot of data to estimate the model, but neither of those issues have anything to do with the author's "critique" and are basically the direction of almost all research in macro.
Tisch: Think You'll Find Great Developers on Craigslist? Think Again.
Find your product's "Goldilock's Price"
I'm on an iPhone 4, and panning around is stuttering quite a lot. I'm looking at the downtown Seattle area in particular, if that matters. I'm wondering if the network speed has anything to do with it. I'm using 3G in a heavy urban area, so maybe it's hanging when fetching server data due to network congestion.
(psst: might want to have your sarcasm detector recalibrated, it appears to be giving erroneous readings)
Netflix does allow AirPlay in the US.
Unexpected Controversy Erupts at UN Internet Conference
Watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPANKRHL9HU
because at a glance its very noisy and confusing. The maps are simple and indeed part of the map system is to remove detail that you dont need. On google maps nav on android it does bring up streetview when you get to your destination.

Perhaps they could have a button on screen to flip to a streetview view.
H.264 playback added to window Firefox nightly
Using Java as a language to teach about data structures and algorithms is one thing, centering the curriculum on a bunch of J2EE crap is entirely another.

You can make a case for using Java to teach about data structures, and if your alternative is C++, that case is pretty solid. If your alternative is C or Python, both sides can be argued.

Teaching J2EE at uni isn't CS education, it's poorly-aimed vocational education.
>No, if you are giving Gamestop $60 to hold on to until a product is shipped, and you do this with a credit card, this is in violation of their agreements with companies like Visa.

Then these agreements are utterly meaningless. Preordering via credit card is hardly a new concept.