skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think its a hoax (I commented in the previous thread, initially skeptical but we worked out the math)

It may not be as useful as someone might like, which is to say you won't get a lot of light out of it. But unlike the candle example all of the light will be going roughly one direction. Think 'keychain LED flashlight' kind of light.

So in a place that literally has no light, it will be helpful. That last door in the dungeon, your village storage hut 30 miles from the nearest town on moonless nights. If you don't mind running the generator faster you can get brighter light for less time.

I took apart one of these [1]: http://www.amazon.com/FR160B-Microlink-Self-Powered-Weather-... which is Grundig crank powered radio/siren/flashlight. Its pretty bright, and you can power the LED off the internal generator directly. In fact if you were handy with some shop tools you could probably build your own version of this light with just this radio thing and mechanical connection between the crank and the weight. (You would leave the flashlight set to 'on') You wouldn't get 30 minutes of light, more like 2 minutes. But conceptually the idea is the same.

I like the design ethos of the 'clock' style energy source (I've got a grandfather clock that you wind by pulling up the weights on it).

I expect in a nominally lit urban environment it will provide little benefit. But that doesn't mean I believe it will be useless in all environments.

[1] I've now received 3 of these for 'free' (one as a conference giveaway, one came in a kit of earthquake supplies, and one was added into a garage sale purchase of other stuff. They kinda suck, in that they break pretty easily and once they do they don't work (internal wiring breaks). So finding a broken one shouldn't be all that hard if you're looking to experiment.
Would a plain old bombing really do those trillions of dollars of damage? A hijacking is what has the potential to cause massively disproportionate damage, and that is a solved problem (Not solved by the TSA though...).

Even so, let us imagine some alternate universe where non-TSA security adaptations have not solved hijackings... The measures the TSA has taken to prevent hijackings would not. Why don't they work? Well, what happens to you if the TSA finds the pairing knife you accidentally left in your carry on? They take it, throw it in a bin, and wave you through. The only thing a prospective terrorists is out is a knife and a plane ticket. Given their abysmal false negative rate, he will eventually succeed.

The TSA pretends to make us safe from yesterday's ploy. In reality they don't even do that. (To be clear, we are safe, but with no thanks to them.)
Crap, you caught me on that one. I thought it was a 2000's era language.
For specifics see my other comment.

Also, I do believe that those who like Android honestly do. I'm just saying that it's a mystery for me personally. That's all. For me the experience was rage inducing and I was shocked by that because I expected Android to be great.
This is awesome, can't wait to see how the api works for Java and JavaScript integration
@patio11: Stupid question time, and this may be from hyperink more than you. You state:

You can buy it here (Kindle, iPad, Nook, PDF) or on Amazon (Kindle).

Does that mean I would get an ePub version? Device-specific is great for non-technical people, but I have a Kobo (ePub/PDF) and it's not in the list, so I'm not sure what formats I'm being given (Hyperink's FAQ doesn't answer this either).
Theoretically, entrepreneurs would look through lists of patents for something to produce, and than license and produce it.

The patent absurdity of that idea, shows how badly broken the system is. Still, IV prefers to pretend that the system is indeed working like that.
You should even be able to complain about being assaulted by people who are law enforcement without fear of fatal retribution.
One big issue here (solvable, but something to think about): this would make messages a source for money laundering, which I'd bet fb would like to avoid.

Then again, they already deal with this with fb credits, so maybe this wouldn't be too taxing to deal with.
>x86 has had to be fast because most of the applications you will run on a daily basis are likely not really optimized, profiled or threaded anything above a couple compiler switches. They have to be fast because the code is so slow. Now with Android and IOS the language, libraries and sand-boxing improves the underlying mechanisms to the degree that most of the code that matters is optimized by Apple and Google where the equivalent Microsoft Windows libraries are not as optimized and in many cases so specialized that it gives a look and feel of a Wordpad type app rather than what you are really after.

This is so wrong, I actually don't know where to begin.

1. It's true that most code isn't optimized for x86. But most code isn't optimized, period. Optimization is freaking hard. Android and iOS aren't necessarily better optimized than Windows. And Linux, especially RHEL, is screaming fast on the new Intel chips. Windows isn't that terrible, either.

2. Sandboxing actually hurts performance, because it requires an additional layer between the OS and userland to make sure that the code the user is executing is correct.

3. None of this actually matters for chip architecture, since #1 is true of code in general, and #2 doesn't have any special architecture-based support.

4. x86 isn't just Windows. It's Linux, too.
> it's impossible to match certain thin font weights from photoshop designs

Why do you care how your users are choosing to view your text?
YouTube strips Universal and Sony of 2 billion fake views
ScrollAppend.js: Endless Scroll that doesn't Push the Footer
Who uses the Formalyzer script on the web?
I’m So Ashamed Of TechCrunch Today
More like Agda or Coq?
>a gallon of kerosine is a significant fraction of their monthly income

It's not just that, it's also extremely polluting (both for the immediate and greater environments) and dangerous. The kerosene isn't the most expensive part, it's buying a good quality lamp that won't tip over or leak toxic gases.

http://flexiwaysolar.com/kerosene-lamps-the-problem/fire-ris...
Go: software engineering at Google is too inefficient.
Agda: programming is math but other languages (even haskell) make that unnecessarily hard to see

FTFY
Beyond sexting, I don't really know.

All the college aged girls I know love Snapchat. Not sure why, but I guess it's just fun.
In a previous discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907609 it was noted that the 'formalyzer' script was a likely culprit in divulging information about you to other web sites. We did a quick grep a Blekko and these are the top 100 results.
Thank you for sharing the experience of the blog-to-book transformation, it's an idea that I've been interested in for a while. Good to know that Hyperink worked so well for you.
That's probably more Coq.
I really hope, Qt5 will become the same native cross-platform solution for mobile platforms which it became for desktop applications.
As mentioned bitbucket has free private reos, and it's great to have more competition.

On a side note, the main reason I moved was because of github username policies.

You can have your username given to another person organization for a ambiguous policy of 'not being active'. This occurs at the discretion of the github admin on hand. I logged in probably every 4-5 months to peruse other repos, but that was not enough. I even got a 'password' change request that I ignored because I didn't request it. I assume that shortly after that my account was given away.

Sure usernames are part vanity and part pride, but they also identify you among your communities. Being an early adopter of github in august 2008, you would also hope they would give you a little more respect.

What about asking me to pay $ cause I would have. Oh well, I'm on bitbucket and enjoy it.

From a strategic standpoint, I would suggest bitbucket start asking major projects to move their repos over.
Common Lisp: There are N dialects of Lisp, and N is too many. Now there are N+1 dialects of Lisp.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4954972 for an update
Highlights from the Meteor Stack Overflow-athon
Or rather: C++ & friends suck, Python & friends are too slow. Quoting from the Go FAQ:

>Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming [...]

>Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing.
Totally agree. You really have to work with a 10x programmer to understand that it is not about the flow or work methods.

It's kind of funny that everybody in Hacker News knows that they themselves are easily 10x more productive than the bad programmers they have encountered in their careers, but still can't imagine that there can be a similar gap between them and the best.

Just think about experience alone (which is just one aspect of the 10x difference) and you can easily spot tasks where 10x-50x productivity differences are possible even between smart people. E.g. Imagine that you are faced with a task that essentially requires you to write a small compiler, but that is not obvious from the outset. If you are a smart and productive web dev, but you have never studied or written compilers, you can easily spend a few weeks with the task until you realize that you need to study compiler tech and write one to solve problem well. You can easily spend a few months with the whole endeavor. On the otherhand, an experienced 10x dev who has written many mini-compilers for DSLs in his career, can spot the need immediately and implement it in a few days. And on the otherhand, a less gifted individual can spend two years with the problem in his safe corporate job and never solve the problem. Here you already have infinite difference in the productivity between the best and the worst and easily 25x productivity between smart web dev and the experienced guy.

Now, you can argue that was just one specific problem, but one commonality of 10x programmers is that they have done a lot of different kind of programming, which makes them faster to try even more stuff so their experience is accumulating even faster.
ig1, while there are established forums for narrow technology policy hot points---IP, net neutrality, piracy---there is no contingent representing the tech. enterprise sector. Most current groups are motivated more by libertarian philosophical values than by the need to represent the business interests of the sector.

I believe there is space---and need---for a business lobby that represents our interests.
It comes already built with a "once it's popular, I don't like it anymore" feature!
PHP: I wanna create a goddamn webpage, like right fucking now.
This could, in principle start a war similar to the ones Microsoft has been fighting for years, although Chrome's faster update system might help Google win.

In principle, given Chrome is often installed as the current user, there is nothing to stop any other user program from changing Chrome in any way it sees fit, simply adding an extension and marking it "user accepted" in whatever way.

Microsoft has had trouble with this kind of thing for years, as I say.
I'd love to see that post and the research behind it. Where were you when did this research?
Just today? Talk about linkbait.
What I think would be more interesting is a proxy that only uses the first 1k, 100k, 1m sites.

I might be wrong, but it might be an easy way to keep users on the "bright streets" of the Internet instead of wandering down malware-ridden alleys.
It is not possible to stop this in the general case. All user-level software on legacy (e.g., Windows, OS X, Linux, etc) operating systems effectively has the same permissions to persistent storage. There's no application-level isolation, so Chrome cannot protect its own data files from other applications. In the limit, Chrome cannot tell whether a user installed an extension or some rogue software did.

Because of this, stopping sideloading is all about delicate balancing of incentives. "Carrots and sticks" so to speak.

We want to make it easy and effective for people to do the good thing (carrots), and hard and dangerous enough to dissuade them from doing bad things (sticks).

Previously our approach was to provide easy APIs [1] to install extensions into Chrome that we controlled. The result was that the Chrome team could monitor usage and see if it got out of hand.

Unfortunately, as Chrome became more popular, it did in fact get out of hand. So what you see here is us basically adding a few sticks, trying to reduce overall bad behavior. (We're also working on other things in other areas so that we don't just push the bad behavior into harder to monitor channels).

[1] http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/external_extensions.h...
PHP: Your language is trying too hard.
Your post doesn't fully convey what they're doing here either.

According to the article, it is still possible to package extensions with a software installer, but now when the user runs their browser they will be asked to confirm that they want the extensions to be added.

So it isn't really blocking those extensions, which I think is a good thing.
You infer a perpetual motion machine, they say it is 'powered by gravity'.
Which side needs fixing? IE looks better for headlines (lots of pixels to play with) but with normal type it is far worse. This all started around mid-2000s when the WPF team decided subpixel accuracy was more important than clarity, and it's spread to other teams since. Chrome's decent font rendering, using ClearType like the OS specifies, is one of the reasons I still use it and can't stand IE.

Maybe if high-DPI mode worked and laptops had high res screens it'd be better, but that's not the case for a while.
I wonder when we'll start seeing apps running on ARM capable of matching current x86 based content creation apps?

2 years? 3?

Intel will catch up with power consumption. The biggest thing going for ARM is price, and because of price their user base is blowing up much faster than Intel, on more types of devices, and in more parts of the world. Most of the developing world's contact with computing is/will be ARM phones and tablets, and the number of people developing software for ARM will skyrocket
you can also disable plugins from being loaded from the local machine's registry by setting "plugin.scan.plid.all" = false in about:config. especially useful for portable installs.
Agreed! Please launch this! My favorite Foursquare app is called Checkie, it's basically a one-click checkin app. https://github.com/tijoinc/Checkie
Hey Paul... whenever certain CSS3 transition/animations run, custom fonts (typekit or google fonts... maybe others) will switch from the default subpixel aa to -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased style aa for the duration, then switch back. From that second link, it's probably an OS X specific bug.
Perl can handle Japanese just fine nowadays. Back in 1995, though, Unicode support was... iffy at best.

Now, Ruby must be differentiated by other things.
This Is How Facebook Tried to Make Money Off You
Isnt't Apple a hardware company that writes its own software ?
Sexting is a pretty big use, to be painfully honest.
So 2 of these probably aren't even codes, just gibberish.

So what if false positives are created? We can just brute-force the analysis of those to find the right one. Are you forgetting the sheer magnitude of quantum, digital, & human-analog computing power we have available today?
I am sorry if I am too direct here, but the font color is simply painful to look at.
Why did you actually decide to style your copy text in such a distracting color?
I thought their article on the NRA was pretty poorly done too today: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/the-nra-blames-video-games-...

Among many issues I had with the article, they link to a guy making a joke tweet saying: "Sorry guys, but I just played Mortal Kombat and I've already ripped out two hearts, harpooned somebody, and turned a ninja into a baby." I always found those kinds of tweets in very poor taste after a little girl was killed by two teens imitating mortal kombat.

Lines like "Maybe more guns would help, maybe they wouldn’t. But, the NRA wasn’t exactly a pillar of thoughtfulness today." don't exactly make for great journalism either.
Let me clarify.

When you program for Android/IOS how much of the logic you write is referenced from optimized libraries and how much is your own craft? Now look at the entire Market Place / App Store and figure how many of those apps entirely rely on Android / IOS optimized libraries.

While it may be true that some may wander off the beaten path and write their Apps in OpenGL ES directly and maybe even C/C++ most rely on frameworks and libraries already built in (which are indeed optimized).
Ask HN: Android dev blogs?
I'm primarily a web developer but have been moving slowly into Android over the last year. I have some great Java and Android resources -- they're readily available -- and follow a few blogs, like the official Google Android dev blog, but I think it'd be great to find some more Android app- or game-centric resources.

Do you follow any active Android-specific bloggers? Are there watering holes frequented by these mythical beasts? Are you in fact an Android?

I've read and revere O'Reilly's Programming Android and love Mario Zechner's Beginning Android Games as a reference on all sorts of game-related topics including efficiency and GC avoidance. The indie game dev scene is awesome, but I seem to be missing out on the part that concentrates on Android... am I just a failure at the internet, or is this a segment that keeps to itself?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Admittedly, my knowledge is a little bit out of date, but that is one chip out of several that I know over the last 7 years. You used the word "typically," and as you can imagine, the telcos have a preference for treating the SIM as the secure element because they control it; in the US the telcos dirve the majority of mobile sales.

This is a slightly sore subject as I worked for a startup that is now a zombie, having attempted to wait out the fight over who would control NFC payments (telco vs. credit card company).

Look at the just announced chip from Broadcom which supports "multiple secure elements to ensure all payment business models are supported for today's market.":
http://seekingalpha.com/news-article/5050981-broadcom-launch...
What percentage of all iOS users do you think even use the app folder function? I'd guess it's very, very low.
the weight is on a string. That string is connected to a crank that turns a generator as it falls.
The nook format is usually ePub.
I have no idea why you'd think that would stop them given how they've been involved with it off and on since at least 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_spe...
Check the "technical" tab on the FAQ page:
http://www.hyperink.com/faq

It has an entry: "How do I get my .epub eBook onto my iPad?"
"I’m so ashamed. This would have never happened in the old days."

Says the man who traded the dignity of the company he founded for $25 million dollars.
I bet $10 the POP charger is getting cancelled anyway. Those guys really felt like they were just looking for a reason to cancel their kickstarter.
Why an ebook is available in Brazil (where I am) and not in UK is beyond my understanding.
You're still running on the blind assumption that Apple and Google are magically better at optimization than everyone else. I would not make that assumption, because, as I said before, optimization is hard. There's a billion variables that goes into your code's performance, and tiny changes can completely ruin performance-or make it awesome.

Look at Android(as an example). For the first few years of existence, the OS was plagued with issues of bad battery life due to poorly optimized code and bugs. Android 3.0 was basically scrapped as an OS due to bad performance.

iOS 5.0 had absolutely horrible battery life due to a bug. The Nitro Javascript engine isn't available outside of Safari, too.
People are saying they can't see the difference. So here's some screen shots taken from Google Chrome (Version 23.0.1271.101) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard on a 2009(?) 13" MacBook Pro.

(http://imgur.com/XDgGC)

I prefer light on dark, but hate white on black. All of these are uncomfortable to read for me.
Of course, they would be rivaling Apple/Samsung if they would just produce enough of the Nexus 4 and market it better. But that just seems TOO EASY I guess.
We can brute force all possible ciphers. Then brute force all of the outcomes that are 100% dictionary words. If those all fail, then we go back to the ones with a few dictionary words missed, and brute-force those. For computers and humans, this is just pattern matching, and brute-force means we have unlimited time and resources to map the entire patternspace find the correct pattern.

You're going to have to quantify "smartly" into something more objective before you can use it in this argument.
My favorite way of expressing the same thing: "Anyone can design a bridge that will stand up. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that will barely stand up."

Not sure where this came from -- Douglas Adams, maybe?
A pedal generator would probably cost more than $5, though.
Oh, I know how it works :-) ...it just doesn't any more. I don't know of any legality blocking such a call but I can assure you no matter how many times I trigger the verification process I get nothing but an error message and no call or text from Mr Google.
The Skype extension also significantly slows down page renders. It needs to die in a fire.
Txt2regex: A Regular Expression Wizard that converts human sentences to regex
Personally I'd probably leave. I think there is a point where its healthy to try to change the system but it sounds like you are fighting a current that is too strong to encourage the way you want to work.

I believe you when you say your efforts are needed - the problem is management very frequently has a hard time being able to understand that there is an upfront cost that will eventually pay off. They are looking at spreadsheets and just want to see that profit column keep on going up - you essentially are proposing that the profit column should go down a bit (development costs) with the promise that it will eventually go up much faster.

I've found that software companies either qet the necessity of quality/process or don't (also some types of businesses do not really need much software quality). Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not. By the hiring practices you listed Im guessing they don't get how software quality and process impacts the bottom line.

My pessimistic view is that very little will change with the exception of burning yourself out - sorry for the dire prediction Ive just been there myself.
I'm surprised that they still publish what he writes on TechCrunch. It's an odd relationship.
What if we try every possible combination of one-time pads? This is like sculpting with Michelangelo - the correct pattern exists, we just have to remove all of the incorrect patterns from the patternspace.
I hope these guys http://edisonjunior.com/about.html know what they are doing with lithium batteries, and POP is made out of fire-resistant materials and includes proper battery management system.
What a great reply! Yes, we actually have gotten quite engaged with Spore.

You should consider pasting this into a blog post or somewhere that's slightly less ephemeral than an HN thread.
Yeah, isn't it cool Apple did this? Even though the kickstarter project totally screwed the pooch by not asking Apple before hand if it was good?